I had the pleasure,on the flight from Lubbock to Dallas, of sitting next to the wife of Senator Frist. I was not planning to comment on this book, but because the marital relationship is mentioned above, and because I love non-fiction books deeply, I just want to say that the author is a real person, a personable person, and this book should be bought on its merits.
It does not cover the negative father-daughter relationships, only the positive ones. If you are a father with daughters, buy this book for its example of what worked, what left lasting love in the hearts of daddy's daughters. The family, not the party, is the foundation of this Nation's greatness (and its current decline in broken and non-nuclear families in name only}, so I regard this book as one of the building blocks for getting us back on track.
Revisionist, Questionable, Valuable, and a Starting Point,
October 20, 2006
Mark Moyar
I write this in Lubbock, Texas where historian Mark Moyar presented his conclusions in very summary form to one of the most extraordinary collection of individuals to ever gather on the topic of “Intelligence in the Vietnam War,” an event co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Intelligence (Central Intelligence Agency) and the Vietnam Center (Texas Tech University).
While I came to hear authors like George Allen, whose 50 years of on-the-ground experience are presented in NONE SO BLIND, the definitive work on intelligence in the Viet-Nam war, and C. Michael Hiam, first time author who has done an utterly amazing job in describing, defending, and honoring Sam Adams in Who the Hell are We Fighting?, I have to credit this author, graduate of Harvard, student of Christopher Andrew the singular at Cambridge, with ripping me out of my chair and forcing me to think about the relative merits of documentation versus oral histories versus personal observation (I was there from August 1963 to late 1967).
Here are three bottom lines on the book:
1) It is some of the most erudite, earnest, well-intentioned, and potentially explosive revisionist history directly relevant to the intelligence-policy relationship as well as relations among nations.
2) It is lacking in an understanding of how the veterans of the war actually perceive it, taking both secondary sources and original documents from varied governments including China and Viet-Nam, at face value.
3) It merits the benefit of the doubt, a serious reading by those that were actually there, and inputs, in the form of oral histories, to the Oral History Project Head at the Vietnam Archive (Texas Tech University). If you have substantive comment to make on this book, don't stop here at Amazon–call them at 806.742.9010 and schedule a short telephone interview to add your oral history to the collection.
I read a lot and have had a fortunate life. I have always known that governments lie in the documents and their public statements, that secondary sources are all too happy to bend the truth to make a case, but it was not until this moment that I realized just how very urgent it is to dramatically increase our oral history and direct understanding of every aspect of the Viet-Nam debacle, one we repeat today in Iraq and Afghanistan, where those fighting have no memory of both the successes and failures of the past.
My gravest concern with this important and worthy book is that it plays to what the extremist unilateral militants–including the chicken hawks now serving–want to hear: that imperial adventurism can succeed if one just intervenes a little more harshly, a little sooner, with a bit more cleverness.
I have been an iconoclast, and I now find myself defending and praising an individual for having produced a work that conflicts sharply with my narrow understanding of the reality as I lived it, and that of the many others attending this conference.
I regard this book as a very courageous and intelligent offering, one that must be regarded as a work in progress, and one that will add substantially to our understanding once the author has a chance to write an epilogue that factors in the comments of those now living who were actually there.
Five stars for brave brains. This author must be reckoned with.
Brilliant Articulate Documentation of Rank Hypocrisy,
October 19, 2006
David Kuo
This book is a bright shining truth, and after absorbing every single word while flying across America, with copious notes, I have nothing but complete admiration for the author. As he sums it up, the promises made by the Bush-Cheney-Rove team to the evangelical right were a wild ride with a spectacular flame-out. Eight billion was promised for faith-based charities, $30 million was actually delivered. The White House, not Congress, took the tax cuts and tax credits for charity out of the legislation.
This is an extremely thoughtful and well-developed account. The first half of the book recounts the author's journey from Kennedy staffer to pro-life to evangelical Republican, and that first half of the book is essential to understanding the great good of the evangelical right, setting up a better understanding of the great bads that followed.
The author pulls no punches early on in the book in suggesting that the evangelical right punish Bush-Cheney-Rove (strangely, he never mentions Cheney, only Rove and Card) by “fasting” in the 2006 elections, i.e. not voiting.
I was seriously moved and impressed with his account of how and why he accepted Jesus in a pro-active manner, and how he then was able to move beyond lip service and taking Jesus for granted, and into a life of service. He gives Chuck Colson, Nixon's former hatchetman and resurrected evangelist, credit for his awakening.
The history of the Christian Coalition and the Family Research Council, and the manner in which they mobilzed at least ten million but closer to thirty million evangelicals one neighborhood at a time, bottom up and inside out, in less than three years, is both religious and political history at its finest. 40% of the Republican delegates in 2000 were in one way or another connected to “The Fellowship,” itself a fascinating social network.
The author impresses me with his maturity in understanding that faith is an innoculation against corruption, and in seeing the danger of confusing one's agenda with God's will.
The author was in at the creation of Empower America with Bennett, Kemp, and Kirkpatrick, and I found his core theme of the need for a cultural renewal of our values and who we are as a Nation, compelling. He discusses the social pathologies that are decomposing our society (see my review of “The Cheating Culture”).
I especially liked his balanced presentation of how Clinton agreed that we have gotten too secular, and would urge both left and right to read that superb book, “The Left Hand of God,” which is, with this one, a fundamental text for healing our Nation.
The author was with Team Ashcroft on the Hill, and recounts with distress how Gingrich blew off the Christian Coalition and social issues.
The book substantially improved my regard for George Bush as a person, and for John Ashcroft as a person and a politician. I was expecially taken with the author's sincere descriptions of Bush's genuineness, and of AZshcroft's integrity in not pushing his religion on others. The description of how George Bush stops, slows down, and connects to former addicts is alone worth the price of the book. He's been there and it is never far from his mind.
There is one inconsistency. The author claims that the evangelical right is at odds with the pro-business, pro-wealth rest of the Republican Party (actually, as a moderate Republican, I no longer consider these extremists to be real Republicans–more like carpetbaggers). However, while claiming to be anti-greed, they appear to have cut a deal with Wall Street to share power.
The book ends with a sad discussion of how the evangelical right is all too wiling to spend tens of millions trashing the Clintons, but not at all interested in donating $25,000 to a poverty program.
The author concludes that seduction leads to insularity and insularity leads to deceit. He concludes that politics is not the answer, and a return to bottom up neighborhood level faith-based charity might do what politics cannot.
I put the book down with a diagram on the title page, a triangle, with faith at the top, the wealth of knowledge on the lower right, and the poor on the lower left. An arrow from faith to knowledge is labeled with a dollar sign. Our religions must fund the distribution of free cell phones and knowledge, this creates intelligence and usable information for the poor (see my review of C. K. Prahalad, “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid”), and this in turn converts the poor into good souls of faith.
I hold this author in the highest esteem. He spoke truth to the President (Karl Rove did NOT want him speaking that truth), and in giving us all this book, he has given us a bright shinining light on the future. I see this so clearly because of his work: stop funding politicians, start funding the poor's access to knowledge, unleash their entrepreneurship, and harvest their souls.
This is an utterly sensational book, easily in the top rank of the 770+ books I have reviewed here at Amazon, and together with David Johnston's books on “Faith-Based Diplomacy” and the book “The Left Hand of God,” one of the top three non-fiction books I would recommend to every person of faith.
Good effort, interesting, but must less substance than expected,
October 9, 2006
Ann Finkbeiner
I do not regret buying or reading this book, but I am greatly disappointed by both the lack of detail and the lack of visualization that I was hoping for.
The JASONS (according to the author, this stands for the months from July through November when individual stars did most of their consulting) were a spin-off from the Manhattan Project. There were two branches: the JASONS were hired by government sparked by the Sputnik scare and funded by the Advanced Projects Research Agency of DoD (the same one that funded the Internet); and those that feared nuclear power founded the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) which exists to this day to expose unnecessary secrecy.
The original group met in 1958, 22 scientists meeting for 2 weeks at the National Defense University. On page 33, early on, the author denotes the importance of this group with the phrase “distinterested advice comes best from independent scientists.”
There was a major financial incentive: the summer consulting could double their 9-month academic salaries.
JASON became official on 1 January 1960, at first housed under the Institute of Defense Analysis (IDA), then under the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), and finally under MITRE, all in theory Federally Funded Research & Development Centers, but in the case of MITRE, often in real competition with legitimate businesses.
Missile defense is not new to the Bush-Cheney regime. It has been a mainstay of ARPA and the JASONS going back to Sputnik days, and generally consumed 50% of ARPA's budget (elsewhere we have speculated on the gains for mankind of having an ARPA for peace).
Early on the JASONS are described as “slightly flakey and almost bizarre,” but supremely intelligent with the arrogance to match it. Their task was partly to shoot down stupid ideas with high-ranking supporters, and partly to think out of the box on really touch problems, almost always, but not always, at a classified level.
DARPA fired the JASONS in 2000 when they refused to take on some of the lame scientists that DARPA recommended, but the happy result was their promotion to work directly for DARPA's boss, the Director of Defense Research & Development.
The author discusses throughout the book the conflict between the scientific imperative to discuss hypotheses and findings opening, and the demands for secrecy imposed on these brilliant minds.
Among the projects credited to the JASONS, with all too little detail, are missile defense, directed energy weapons, extremely low frequency (ELF) communications to reach submerged submarines, nuclear event detection, sensors and night vision for Viet-Nam.
The JASONS could not handle the sociology of insurgency. I find this fascinating. Technocrats simply cannot “compute” real world anger.
The Pentagon Papers outed the JASONS. Over time they added the Navy, Department of Energy, and the Intelligence Community as clients, but the also changed in fundamental ways, moving from an elite of physicists to a melange of all disciplines, including many members without clearances.
The JASONS did well with adaptive optics and STAR WARS.
Putting down the book I thought to myself:
1) The Defense Science Board (DSB) is probably the public adaptation of the JASON concept, and does very very good work that is also capable of being shared with the public on most occasions (see for instance, their superb reports on “Strategic Communication” and on “Transition to and from Hostilities”).
2) Is this all there is? I give the author good marks for investigation and diplomacy and elicitation, but very candidly, I could have done better with simple citation analysis from the Science Citation Index, and some dramatic visualizations of how the JASONs did or did not stand out from the crowd. It is possible today to detect secret programs as they black out, and overall I felt that what this book provided was one person's good efforts, without ANY of the modern tools of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT).
Superb Context Shows How Clinton & Neo-Cons BOTH Fueled Islamic Violence,
October 8, 2006
Peter Bergen
This is quite a superb composition of the statements of others about Bin Laden, interspersed with very credible observations and conclusion by Peter Bergen.
The book opens with a cast of characters and ends with a “where are they now” listing. It also provides a timeline, but a limitation of this book is that it focuses on Bin Laden alone.
I have a number of notes from this excellent book:
1) The 1967 war in which Israel won was vital in showing the Arabs that it was their own inept and corrupt regimes that were leaving the Zionists in power. Also this book, at the end, where the Sykes Picot 1916 agreement highlighted in the Lawrence of Arabia epic movie, is clearly identified by Bin Laden as the start of the current “crusade” against Islam.
2) Bin Laden was a shy and polite, very religious person with a good education–the classic revolutionary (contrary to conventional wisdom, the rebels are the smart ones that see through the facades).
3) The 1979 invasion by Saudi forces to recapture the Al Haram mosque radicalized Bin Laden, as did the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The writings of Egyptian Sayyid Qutb on Islam as a complete way of life, when COMBINED with the corrupt and often decadent lifestyles of the Saudi, Egyptian, and other Arab rules, were in tandem a foundation for the radicalization of youth across the region.
4) The Pakistani cleric Abdullah Azzam was a major influence and enabler for jihadists seeking to fight the Soviets by entering via Pakistan, and the clearly untold story, in this book or any other, is the deep and constant relations between the Pakistani intelligence service, the Taliban, and Bin Laden.
5) In Afghanistan the back story is Bin Laden the theocrat versus Massoud the tolerant secularist in the Northern Alliance.
6) Soviet invasion of Afghanistan produced 6 million refugees, half to Pakistan and half to Iran.
7) The open sources of information available on Bin Laden and anti-Israel and anti-us plans are legion, and the author is extremely effective in cataloging all of the overt information that the U.S. Intelligence Community simply ignored from 1988, when the Commandant of the Marine Corps and I first made terrorism, and the use of open sources to understand terrorism, a national issue.
8) In 1996 Jamal Al Fadl walked in to a US Embassy (probably Sudan) with plans for attacks on US by Bin Laden, and also in 1996 Bin Laden announced on CNN, ABC News and in Al Jazeera that he was declaring war on the US. My comment: in the US, only Steve Emerson (“American Jihad”) and Yossef Bodansky “Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America”) took the declaration seriously.
9) Clinton and Bush BOTH were happy to deal with the Taliban, and the Taliban understood that the Americans, regardless of party, wanted a pipeline from Caspian energy to Pakistan (rather naively assuming Pakistan would be able to protect it), as well as bases against China and Iran.
10) This book makes it clear that every time George W. Bush talks about them attacking us for our way of life he is simply demonstrating either his idiocy or his hypocrisy. Bin Laden, over and over and over again, has specified Israeli and US behaviors, actions, and policies as the basis for his challenge.
11) In 1998 US rebuked Taliban and Bin Laden raised the ante, also focusing on the jailed Sheikh Abdel Rahman, the only religious figure to have blessed Bin Laden's lay fatwa with a commanding fatwa of his own. This individual, in US custody, has inspired violence from 1981 onwards, and US appears to have not understood his potency.
12) Quote on page 211: Zawahiri was to Osama Bin Laden what Karl Rove is to the White House.”
13) Bin Laden explicitly cites Nagasaki and Hiroshima as justifications for targeting US civilians. While the author of this book discounts Bin Laden's having nuclear suitcase bombs, he acknowledges that nuclear waste is easily acquired.
14) On 10 June 1998 ABC aired an exclusive interview with Bin Laden and introduced him as the wan who had declared war on the US. No one noticed. (Steve Emerson's PBS broadcast in 1994 also got blown off).
15) The book toasts the Clinton Administration for both incompetence at getting Bin Laden (but then, the Saudis tried to assassinate Bin Laden several times and also failed), and for lionizing Bin Laden with the Tomahawk missile strike (which another book I have reviewed says included several that did not explode and enriched Bin Laden with $10 million from their sale to the Chinese).
16) The author recounts Bin Laden's illnesses witnessed by others as being Soviet gas impact on breathing, back pain, low blood pressure, foot wound, and NOT kidney failure.
17) Al Qaeda started looking for WMD after they noticed US beating that drum, and probably got their first chemicals from Uzbeckistan.
18) First references to airplanes attacking buildings were in Egyptian press 12 Aug 00.
19) Cheney and Franks both lied to US public about Bin Laden not being at Tora Bora (see my reviews of “JAWBREAKER” and “First In”).
20) Al Qaeda's general guidance to all is to first, cause the West pain, and second, seek to arouse all Muslims.
21) Iraq is teaching foreign fighters and Iraqis who will likely become foreign fighters elsewhere, how to use IEDs, suicide bombs, and urban warfare against the West elsewhere.
Bottom line: has we stayed in Afghanistan, and dropped Rangers on Bin Laden as he walked from Tora Bora to Pakistan, it would have been “game over,” and even if we had not caught him, he would have been marginalized. The author concludes that everything the US has done, both in the Clinton and the current Administrations, has served to empower Bin Laden and inspire millions of others to support terrorism as a tactic against the Israel, the US, the West, and the corrupt Arab regimes.
I would normally have given this book only three stars for its incompleteness and deception (outlined below), but Ted Shackley was arguably a giant in the clandestine world, and whatever his crimes of omission or commission might have been, I consider this a “must read” for anyone who wishes to move beyond the entry level in the clandestine service. I note with respect that B. Hugh Tovar, himself an accomplished officer, writes the Foreword.
Shackley's career covered all the hotspots, from attempting regime change in Cuba to Berlin Cold War operations to Laos where he excelled while killing tens of thousands, to Viet-Nam where he helped cook the books and ramp up the “report count” (the CIA equivalent of the body count), to Chile to Iran Contra in his afterlife. I pay particular deference to the author's discovery that the combination of US air power for surveillance, mobility, and fire support, with indigenous irregulars, constituted a new form of warfare, one CIA executed well in Afghanistan.
This personal account is grotesquely incomplete. The author has essentially provided a “CIA Lite” account that is not as much fun as Mile Copeland's “Without Cloak or Dagger,” not nearly as revelatory as “Blond Ghost” by David Corn, which clearly rankled the author and perhaps drove him to devise this account; and not nearly as detailed as any of the books on Viet-Nam including those by Snepp, De Forest, and of course Allen, whose “None So Blind” is the definitive work. There is no mention of Sam Adams or the author's acquiescence in false force reports demanded by General Westmoreland and the politically-motivated Ambassador. There is also no mention of his role as a recruiter and funder of Zbigniew Brzezinski when the latter was a student here in the USA and Shackley was a Polish-speaking case officer trolling for influentials. The book is yet to be written on the triangle between Shackley, Breziznski, and the mandarins of the extreme right like Dick Cheney, all of whom agreed that the capture of the Caspian Sea energy and the Eurasian region was a priority for the 21st Century.
This personal account is also extremely deceptive. The naive reader who is not widely read or is lacking in professional experience will not be familiar with the very deep literature on drug running and money laundering that was pioneered by CIA officers working out of Laos in the Viet-Nam era, and its subsequent evolution into the Nugen Hand and BCCI money laundering bank activities. Nor is there mention here of the Safari Club or other notorious alliances by select elements of the CIA with South Africa, Argentina, or Saudi Arabia. The account also ignores any reference to the alleged activities of Ted Shackley in running arms to the Contras and bringing drugs back into America via Southern Air Transport, going onwards to Europe to convert the drugs into money and the money into more arms for the Contras (against the will of Congress).
Within this book, the author is at pains to document that he forbade any drug activity to be associated with Air America or any of his operations in Laos, that he conducted spot checks, and on one occasion intercepted and then publicly burned a case of high-grade opium.
He concludes the book with some moderate recommendations for change, but most interestingly for me, as the international proponent for Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), he states on page 282 that the world has changed to such an extent (i.e. commercial access to Russia and China and other previously denied areas) that fully 80% of any secret wish list from 1991 can today be satisfied with overt means, including overt human legal travelers. We agree on this important point, which most of the U.S. Intelligence Community continues to deny.
I read this book with care, in part because as resident in Viet-Nam from 1963-1967, and as a clandestine case officer in Central America during very ugly times, I feel I have walked in this ghost's shadow.
I have three bottom lines:
1) By any standard, this was an extraordinary officer who performed at the very top of the profession as it was then defined. He earned the respect of his Laotian counterparts, and I have absolutely no doubt that those whom he was charged with impressing or serving, were impressed and served.
2) Much of what he did was covert action of questionable legality and value, such as the pin prick sabotage attacks against Cuba, but this was not his fault, it was the fault of an extraordinarily stupid political system in America (Bobby Kennedy exceeded Ollie North on the idiot standard in our world).
3) Finally, we have the question mark. I have no direct knowledge, but I venture to suggest that Ted Shackley, according to multiple accounts in the published literature, was at least indirectly if not directly associated with a number of criminal or extra-legal adventures. I do not believe he profited personally–I believe he felt that whatever he was doing was in the service of his government, but like so many others, I do wonder if he did not confuse loyalty to the system with integrity in preserving the Constitution.
Hence, I believe this book, and the author's life, were one third heroic, one third mundane, and one third highly questionable–not because he lacked honor, but because the system that he served lacked honor.
The ONLY “Before and After” Book on the Iraq Mis-Adventure,
October 7, 2006
James Fallows
James Fallows is unique for giving us the only “before and after” book on Iraq. This book, while it consists of a collection of articles published in the run-up to the war on Iraq, is exemplary for showing what was known before the war, and how a combination of ideological bias, bureaucratic timidity, confusion, and general incompetence actually allowed this Nation to be led to an elective war of devastating consequence and cost.
The author provides both an introduction and a conclusion to the book that are unique to the book and set the articles in harmony as a whole.
There are other books that excel as retrospective reconstruction and finger-pointing, among which I would include HUBRIS, Squandered Victory, The End of Iraq, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, and most recently, State of Denial, but this is the only book to focus on all that we knew prior to the war about the daunting difficulties facing us in making the peace, and why the political leadership of the Executive did not want us to think about that, and why the political leadership of the Congress refused to play its role as a co-equal branch with the power of both the purse and the declaration of war exclusive to it.
James Fallows documents how virtually every sensible element of the federal government, from the military to the diplomats to the commerce and treasury and agriculture and others, all KNEW that invading Iraq was going to open a Pandora's box of sectarian violence, ethic conflict over resources, a collapse of good order, the failure of infrastructure the US would not be able to repair quickly enough, and on and on and on and on!
Objective observers, including the British, considered the claims of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz with respect to the ease with which Iraq qould be liberated, to be the “ruminations of insane people.”
The author's bottom line is clear: the bureaucracy did its job and anticipated every single reason for not going to war, every single calamity that would befall us in Iraq. Where government failed was at the political level, with Dick Cheney closing out the policy process, spoon feeding the President lies from convicted thief and liar Chalabi, and with a full-court press backed by Wall Street and the media, to declare dissent to be treason–hence General Tony Zinni, former Commander in Chief for the Central Command, being called a traitor for sharing his knowledge.
The author and The Atlantic Monthly did not rely only on open sources. They sponsored a war game that came as close as possible to matching all that the US Government might be doing behind closed doors, using only open sources and overt experts, and here again, well in advance of the war, the conclusion was the same: don't do it!
The author concludes the book with several findings, all of which are completely consistent with the other non-fiction books I have read on Iraq and related blunders:
1) Corporations deciding on how to market a brand of toothpaste are vastly more meticulous and thoughtful that the political leadership in the Executive deciding to go to war on what proved to be whims, lies, and active mis-representation.
2) There was too little friction. The Administration got a “free ride” from the people, Congress, the media. Other than Senator Byrd, who shall long be my personal hero for his 80 speeches against the war (he alone among all the Senators stood fast on the matter of the Senate being equal to the Executive and having the right to question this idiocy–see my review of his book, Losing America), our Congress abdicated its responsibilities and failed the Nation. This was a bi-partisan failure, but the extremist Republican leaders were most to blame.
3) There has been no accountability. I remain shocked by the number of books and DVDs (see my list of Serious DVDs) that document the constant stream of lies and mis-representations from the political leadership and their tame uniformed members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (who should be fired for confusing loyalty with integrity). It is a sad commentary on the Nation that the pedophile charges against Congressman Foley seem to carry more weight with the public than our 65,000 amputees.
I like this book very much. It is important for all Americans to understand that good minds working only with open sources of information easily anticipated the reasons why an elective war on Iraq was not a good idea. It is important for all Americans to know that the good people in State, Defense, and elsewhere got it right, but Dick Cheney shut them down, shut them out, and alone, bears responsibility for leading a young President ignorant of national security matters, on a very irresponsible and costly course of action.
Dick Cheney has a great deal to answer for–none of the others could have achieved their ill without him.
