Intelligence (Government/Secret) – Page 40

2007/06/212009/10/16

Review: Devil’s Game–How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (American Empire Project)

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Congress (Failure, Reform), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Iraq, Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Religion & Politics of Religion, Terrorism & Jihad, War & Face of Battle

Amazon Page

Complements Web of Deceit

June 21, 2007

Robert Dreyfuss

Robert Dreyfuss interviewed me once, for a piece in WIRED or Mother Jones, and I remember him as a serious, methodical person. It is no surprise to find him producing this meticulously documented and objectively constructed history, a perfect complement to Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush, on whose Amazon page I have a more detailed review of the overall topic.

The author captures the essence in his own introduction: the US was so focused on anti-communism and anti-Soviet campaigns that it deliberately chose to sponsor extreme rightist Islamic fundamentalists, fascists in their own way as the extreme right in America is today (see American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America).

The author is very specific in addressing how the US feared “nationalism, humanism, secularism, socialism” in its obsession with countering the Soviets, and so it chose to aid Islamic fundamentalists who opposed those more rational and publicly-oriented altneratives. In essence, the premise of the invasion of Iraq, that we are doing it to spread democracy, is yet another big lie–we have been denying democracy to the Arabs every since Roosevelt met with the Saudi king and formed a pact with the devil himself.

I totally agree with the author as he documents and sums up his own view that “A war on terrorism is precisely the wrong way to deal with the challenge posed by political Islam.”

The author offers four prescriptions for US action, and at the end here I list some relevant books that provide a broader context:

1) Remove the grievances–US troops in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, support for Israel's genocide against the Palestinians, support for Israel's plans to attack Iran

2) Abandon imperial pretentions in the Middle East

3) Refrain from seeking to impose preferences–political, economic, cultural, or religious, on the region

4) Stop making bellicose threats against Islamic nations from Iran to Sudan (and I would add, to Algeria, Morocco, Nigeria, and others)

I am reminded by this book of the common sense prescriptions in Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror. The raw fact is that the global literature is coming around to three points of view that are inter-related:

1) Bin Laden is largely right and on firm grounds in taking on both the debauched Saudi regime and the amoral unilaterally invasive US

2) Dick Cheney has committed so many high crimes and misdemeanors, with similar high crimes at the operational level (warrantless wiretapping on Americans, rendition and torture of all others) that America has lost all moral legitimacy both at home and abroad

3) We have the wrong global strategy, indeed we have no global strategy–we are trying to put out a forest fire with a hammer.

Some of the reviewers jump to conclusions, for example, the CIA was NOT really trying to ramp up the war in Afghanistan, until Congressman Charlie Wilson made it his personal vendetta. There is a much larger context within which American incompletence at world affairs can be judged, and it includes the shortcomings of the US educational system, the corruption of the US electoral system, and the grotesque dysfunctionality of the “winner take all” US system of governance. I hope some of the books below–or at least my reviews of them–will provide addtional context for this excellent work. See Web of Deceit for detailed comments I choose not to repeat here–the two books are a good combination with some overlap.

The American Empire Project has produced some really first-rate books on their chosen theme, and for this they are to be praised.

Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times
The Black Tulip: A Novel of War in Afghanistan
Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century
Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict With a New Introduction by the Author
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)

2007/06/182009/10/16

Review: Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush

5 Star, Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Iraq

The One Book No US Politician Will Read, That You SHOULD Read

June 18, 2007

Barry M. Lando

This is one of two books that I have read together, both documenting the decades of deceit by both the US and UK governments, and to a much lesser degree, by France, Germany, and Russia, among others.

The two compelling facts that stay with me as I put the book down, are two:

1) From Churchill to Kennedy to Bush (Cheney), all of our Presidents in the US, but most especially Reagan, Bush, Clinton (Brzezinski), and the current and failed crew of neo conservatives that use Bush Junior as a talking doll, have been complicit–let me spell that again–complicit in the mass murders, the massacres, the torture that we first condoned and now practice ourselves. The US White House denizens are all long overdue for formal indictment, at least by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The author documents, very ably, a long string of broken promises (e.g. to the Bedouin leader for a free Arab state in return for help in WWI, to the Kurds, etc.) and complicity in mass murder. In the author's views, the sanctions are a war crime against the children, women, and elderly of Iraq, a war crime that lasted thirteen years.

2) Salaam Hussein was a creature spawned in large part by the CIA. Although I have spent 30 years in the intelligence business, it was not until I embarked on my broad non-fiction reading program that I have been able to understand that the CIA specifically, but all the rest of the classified intelligence community, is complicit in mass murders, genocides, running cocaine into the US to wipe out poor communities now addicted to crack, made affordable by the CIA's drug runners, and made politically kosher because Wall Street demands drug money–laundered drug money–for its liquidity.

I join Lee Iacocca in asking, “Where is the outrage?” There is not a candidate for President today, not even Ron Paul, who can outline in chapter and verse, as I now can on the shoulders of the 900+ authors whose hard-earned insights I have absorbed these past six years, the evil that Lionel Tiger and others show is inherent in industrialization and the centralization of power. We need to destroy the current corrupt elections process, implement electoral reform across the board, and start putting bright honorable people in office, instead of these nakedly immoral and profoundly evil creatures who will inflict any sacrifice, impose any burden, on We the People so that they may profit.

A few of the many gems from this superb work:

1) All our Presidents in recent time have lied to us, and the most humiliating of all of these lies was not the weapons of mass destruction, but the abandonment of the Kurds and the refusal to listen when Iraqi generals approached Iraqi dissidents who in turn came to the Department of State only to be shunned away. Salaam Hussein promised to leave Kuwait, but US wanted to destroy his army, and refused to hold off on what proved to be 40 hours of pure slaughter. Gulf II was not only more lies, but the active suppression of facts and dissident views, not least of which were General Tony Zinni's views–he was called a traitor by Condolezza Rice, who appears to know nothing of honor, decency, and truthfulness.

2) CIA is creating more long-term havoc than it is worth. I am finally persuaded, with absolute certainty, that we need to get out of the covert action business. CIA should become the National Analysis Agency, and the small clandestine arm should be limited to multinational operations against transnational crime and terrorism, with an Inspector General in every Station.

3) Jimmy Carter, advised by Zbig Brzezinski, comes out of this book looking both more ignorant and more unscrupulous than Reagan or either of the Bushies. Brzezinski not only masterminded the tacit okay for Pakistani development of nuclear weapons in return for aid in Afghanistan, he also began the process of helping Salaam Hussein acquire, develop, and utilize weapons of mass destruction, and I hold Brzezinski directly accountable for the mass murder of Kurds, Iraqi Shiites, and Iranians.

There are many other notes from this book that I have, but rather than lay them out here I am going to simply say that this book moves to the top of my list of books on evaluating the Iraq misadventure that has given us a $2 trillion debt and 75,000 amputees whose lives are forever shattered ***for no good reason***

The betrayal of the public trust by both the Executive and Congress, by both politicians and senior civil servants and military flag officers, has been outrageous. The author uses the words ignorance, arrogance, incompetence, amorality, illegality, hypocrisy, and cynicism sparingly. This is not a vendetta book. This is a reasons indictment and joins a host of other books that demand the immediate impeachment not only of the sitting President and Vice President, but also of the Republican ***and*** Democratic leadership in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

I am ashamed of our Republic and what these amoral thieves have done “in our name.” I am disheartened by the knowledge that all of our brave troops have died, been disabled, and suffered for ***no good reason.*** This makes me very angry. Angry enough to begin speaking out, pleading with America to wake up and find within itself the means for a non-violent restoration of the Constitution and We the People as individuals with liberty for all, lest America be disgraced, and our children's' futures sacrificed, forevermore. Shame, shame, shame.

Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (American Empire Project) (American Empire Project)
Unintended Consequences: The United States at War
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System
Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Statecraft as Soulcraft
Why the Rest Hates the West: Understanding the Roots of Global Rage
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025

2007/06/182009/12/04

Review DVD: Breach (Widescreen Edition)

5 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Reviews (DVD Only)

Former Spy Rates This Movie Superb

June 18, 2007

Chris Cooper

I served as a spy for CIA on three clandestine tours, and one of my headquarters tours was in counterintelligence, where I got to know just how un-seriously CIA takes that topic. The dirty little secret at CIA is that Ames was not the only traitor, a brand new career trainee gave up ten or so of our Soviet agents in place, all killed. In this movie, the damage that Hansen did is severely over-stated, and the facts of the matter are not as they should be, but I still give this a five star rating because the movies is absolutely top notch on the personality details.

This movie is much superior to The Good Shepard. The only other spy movies that really come close are those featuring Alec Guiness as George Smiley.

The reviewers that cannot understand motive will never understand spys and traitors. One line in this movie really grabbed me–in it, Hansen talks about how “the US can be likened to a powerfully built but retarded child.” Throughout the movie, Hansen is cast as a devout even obsessive Catholic who cannot get people inside the FBI to realize how vulnerable they are, and ultimately I would conclude from the movie that the motivation may have started as a desire to prove a point, then a slow burn into addiction–making fools of those that would not listen.

The movie misrepresents the clerk as counter-spy. The FBI actually caught Hansen by going through his trash and finding the one note that he failed to destroy. Still and all the individual depictions, from the hardened solitary female senior special agent with no one in her life, not even a cat, to various others, are excellent. Especially meaningful to me is the depiction of the loving wife that becomes suspicious and then unloving because she confuses her husband's loyalty to duty and secrecy with inattention and being scorned, and of course that is rarely the case. Spies need loving trusting wives.

This and “The Falcon and the Snowman” are first rate. Anything with Alec Guiness as George Smiley is first rate. For amusement I like the more recent James Bond films, the Smiths, and True Lies.

Smiley's People (3pc) (Coll)
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
The Falcon and the Snowman
Mr. & Mrs. Smith (Widescreen Edition)
Casino Royale (Two-Disc Widescreen Edition)
True Lies

Wedge: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11–How the Secret War between the FBI and CIA Has Endangered National Security
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Deep Cover: The Inside Story of How DEA Infighting, Incompetence and Subterfuge Lost Us the Biggest Battle of the Drug War
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'

2007/06/122009/12/04

Review: Nation of Secrets–The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life

5 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

Our Era's Tom Paine on Common Sense, June 12, 2007

Ted Gup

As one of those who testified to the Moynihan Commission on Secrecy, and to earlier Presidential Commissions of excessive government classification, I consider this book to be a treasure. The reviewer that defends government secrecy to protect “sources and methods” knows nothing of them. I was a spy, I helped steal codebooks and program imagery satellites, and I stood up the Marine Corps Intelligence Command.

The author has rendered the Republic an extraordinary service, and from somewhere in heaven Daniel Patrick Moynihan is smiling upon this superb public service.

The author opens the book with an extraordinary snapshot of a single day, Thursday, February 2, 2006, and a stunning array of secret sessions and practices spanning the entire Nation and all of its domains (academic, business, government, law enforcement, religious).

This is a book of case studies, and a book with a constant theme that we must all note: secrecy breeds contempt and distrust, and secrecy blocks the collective intelligence of the people from playing a role in self-governance.

The author excels at discussion not just excessive national security secrecy, but how secrecy is now pervasive, from agricultural contamination and recalls being concealed from the public, to energy policy (Dick Cheney is the first in history to destroy all records of all his guests).

The author reminds us that Thomas Jefferson stated that “Information is the currency of democracy,” and in all that he writes, he shows how secrecy is pathologically altering the relationship between the government and the governed, as well as between all forms of organization and their clients, members, or adherents.

From the security clearance backlog to CIA abuses against its own employees to enlisted men being forbidden to discuss severe deficiencies in their body armor to the concealment of government negligence resulting in wrongful death to the concealment of corporate product deficiencies that kill to the silencing of valid *internal* critics of policies of torture and rendition to the obsessive *reclassification* of information long declassified, the author has written the definitive treatise on how the US Government and all elements of the US (academia, commerce) etc. have forsaken the principles and values of our Founding Fathers.

The author states that secrecy produces errors in judgment and frees government from the fear of being contradicted by the facts.

I admire this book, and this author, very much. This is a book that every citizen voter and citizen consumer should read. We must eradicate 90% of the secrecy in America, and we must redirect 75% of both the military and the intelligence budgets toward waging peace and open source intelligence, including free online and on demand education in 183 languages.

I can best support this author and this book by offering several quotes that he missed and that completely support his presentation:

Amilcar Cabral, African freedom fighter (1924-1973)

Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories. … Our experience has shown us that in the general framework of daily struggle, this battle against ourselves, this struggle against our own weaknesses … is the most difficult of all. [0}

Daniel Ellsberg speaking to Henry Kissinger:

The danger is, you'll become like a moron. You'll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours” [because of your blind faith in the value of your narrow and often incorrect secret information]. [1]

Rodney McDaniel speaking at Harvard University:

Everybody who's a real practitioner, and I'm sure you're not all naïve in this regard, realizes that there are two uses to which security classification is put: the legitimate desire to protect secrets, and the protection of bureaucratic turf. As a practitioner of the real world, it's about 90 bureaucratic turf; 10 legitimate protection of secrets as far as I am concerned. [2]

Ted Shackley in his Memoirs:

In short, the collapse of the communist system in Central Europe has created a new situation for intelligence collectors. I estimate, based in part on my commercial discussions since 1990 in East Germany, Poland, Albania, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, that 80 percent of what is on any intelligence agency's wish list for this area as of 1991 is now available overtly. [3]

General Tony Zinni speaking to a senior national security manager:

80% of what I needed to know as CINCENT I got from open sources rather than classified reporting. And within the remaining 20%, if I knew what to look for, I found another 16%. At the end of it all, classified intelligence provided me, at best, with 4% of my command knowledge. [4]

Robert Steele, in varied speeches and publications:

Do not send a spy where a schoolboy can go.

The problem with spies is they only know secrets.

OSINT changes the rules of the game by making everyone in the audience a player with a legitimate right to collect, produce, and consume public intelligence.

Today, U.S. “intelligence” is upside down and inside out. It is upside down because it relies on satellites in outer space rather than human eyes on the ground. It is inside out because it tries to divine intelligence unilaterally, without first asking anyone else what information they might provide. [5]

Footnotes:
[0] Received in email from an associate.
[1] Daniel Ellsberg, SECRETS: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (Viking, 2002).
[2] Rodney McDaniel, then Executive Secretary of the National Security Council, to a Harvard University seminar, as cited in Thomas P. Croakley (ed), C3I: Issues of Command and Control (National Defense University, 1991). Page 68.
[3] Ted Shackley, SPYMASTER: My Life in the CIA (Potomac, 2006). Page 282
[4] General Tony Zinni, USMC (Ret.), former Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Central Command (CINCCENT), as recounted to the author on 4 April 2006.
[5] Forbes.com, within “Blank Slate,” as Edited By David M. Ewalt and Michael Noer and published 04-18-06.

Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
C3I: Issues of Command and Control
Spymaster: My Life in the CIA
The Battle for Peace: A Frontline Vision of America's Power and Purpose
Battle Ready (Tom Clancy Commanders)
On Intelligence : Spies and Secrecy in an Open World
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption
Information Operations: All Information, All Languages, All the Time
THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest

See my comment for URL to 16 pages of testimony in 1993 on this topic.

2007/06/092015/04/26

Review: Dark Alliance–The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Crime (Government), Crime (Organized, Transnational), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

CIA Case Officer from Central American Era Validates This Book, June 9, 2007

Gary Webb

I am probably the only reviewer who was a clandestine case officer (three back to back tours), who participated in the Central American follies as both a field officer and a desk officer at CIA HQS, who is also very broadly read.

With great sadness, I must conclude that this book is truthful, accurate, and explosive.

The book lacks some context, for example, the liberal Saudi funding for the Contras that was provided to the National Security Council (NSC) as a back-door courtesy.

There are three core lessons in this book, supported by many books, some of which I list at the end of this review:

1) The US Government cannot be trusted by the people. The White House, the NSC, the CIA, even the Justice Department, and the Members of Congress associated with the Administration's party, are all liars. They use “national security” as a pretext for dealing drugs and screwing over the American people.

2) CIA has come to the end of its useful life. I remain proud to have been a clandestine case officer, but I see now that I was part of the “fake” CIA going through the motions, while extremely evil deeds were taking place in more limited channels.

3) In the eyes of the Nicaraguan, Guatemalan, and Honduran people, among many others, the US Government, as represented by the CIA and the dark side Ambassadors who are partisan appointees rather than true diplomats, is evil. It consorts with dictators, condones torture, helps loot the commonwealths of others, runs drugs, launders money, and is generally the bully on the block.

I have numerous notes on the book, and will list just a few here that are important “nuggets” from this great work:

1) The CIA connection to the crack pandemic could be the crime of the century. It certainly destroys the government's moral legitimacy in the eyes of the people.

2) The fact that entrepreneur Ricky Ross went to jail for life, while his supplier, Nicaraguan Blandon, was constantly protected by CIA and the Department of Justice, is a travesty.

3) Nicaragua, under Somoza, was the US Government's local enforcer, and CIA was his most important liaison element. As long as we consort with 44 dictators (see Ambassador Palmer's “The Real Axis of Evil,” we should expect to be reviled by the broader populations.

4) I believe that beginning with Henry Kissinger, the NSC and the CIA have had a “eugenics” policy that considers the low-income blacks to be “expendable” as well as a nuisance, and hence worthy of being targeted as a market for drugs to pull out what income they do have.

5) I believe that CIA was unwitting of the implications of crack, but that Congress was not. The book compellingly describes the testimony provided to Congress in 1979 and again in 1982, about the forthcoming implications of making a cocaine derivative affordable by the lowest income people in our Nation.

6) The Administration and Congress, in close partnership with the “mainstream media,” consistently lied, slandered witnesses to the truth, and generally made it impossible for the truth to be “heard.”

7) The ignorance of the CIA managers about the “ground truth” in Nicaragua and Honduras, and their willingness to carry out evil on command from the White House, without actually understanding the context, the true feelings of the people, or even the hugely detrimental strategic import of what they were about to do to Los Angeles, simply blow me away. We need to start court-martialling government employees for being stupid on the people's payroll.

8) CIA officers should not be allowed to issue visas. When they are under official cover they are assigned duty officer positions, and the duty officer traditionally has access to the visa stamp safe for emergencies (because the real visa officers are too lazy to be called in for an emergency).

9) I recently supported a movie on Ricky Ross, one that immediately won three awards in 2006 for best feature-length documentary, and I have to say, on the basis of this book, that Rick Ross was clearly not a gang member; was a tennis star and all-around good guy, was trying to make school grades; was disciplined, professional, and entrepreneurial. He did not create the cocaine, he did not smuggle it into the country, he simply acted on the opportunity presented to him by the US Government and its agent Blandon.

10) There is a connection between CIA, the private sector prison managers in the US, and prisoners. This needs a more careful look.

11) Clinton's bodyguards (many of whom have died mysteriously since then) were fully witting of Bill and Hillary Clinton's full engagement in drug smuggling into the US via Arkansas, and CIA's related nefarious activities.

12) CIA not only provided post-arrest white washes for its drug dealers, but they also orchestrated tip-offs on planned raids.

13) Both local police departments, especially in California, and the US Government, appear to have a standard “loot and release” program where drug dealers caught with very large amounts of cash (multiple millions) are instantly freed in return for a quit claim on the money.

14) CIA Operations Officers (clandestine case officers) lied not just to the FBI and Justice, but to their own CIA lawyers.

15) DEA in Costa Rica was dirtier than most, skimming cash and protecting drug transports.

The book ends with a revelation and an observation.

The revelation: just prior to both the Contra drug deals and the CIA's ramping up in Afghanistan, which now provides 80% of the world's heroin under US administration, the CIA and Justice concluded a Memorandum of Understanding that gave CIA carte blanche in the drug business.. The author says this smacked of premeditation, and I agree.

The observation: here is a quote from page 452: ” …the real danger the CIA has always presented–unbridled criminal stupidity, clouded in a blanked of national security.”

Shame on us all. It's time to clean house.

Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'
The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade
Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America, Updated edition
The Big White Lie: The Deep Cover Operation That Exposed the CIA Sabotage of the Drug War : An Undercover Odyssey
Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb
The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA
From BCCI to ISI: The Saga of Entrapment Continues
Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025
Fog Facts : Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin (Nation Books)

2007/05/052009/12/04

Review: At the Center of the Storm–My Years at the CIA

4 Star, Biography & Memoirs, Corruption, Crime (Government), Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Iraq, Justice (Failure, Reform), Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Security (Including Immigration), Terrorism & Jihad, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), War & Face of Battle

Deceptive Beginning, Vital Middle, Disappointing End,

May 5, 2007

George Tenet

This is a very good book. There are some extremely important nuggets in here that essentially put the final nail in Dick Cheney's coffin while certifying the importance of holding Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Cambone accountable for their high crimes and misdemeanors. Condi Rice continues to be depicted, in this book and others, as a zero in the sense of having been ignored, sidelined, or run over by Dick Cheney and his minions.

The book loses one star for a lack of prior context. George Tenet was Staff Director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) for many years, and then Intelligence Director for Bill Clinton. He avoids any mention of his long-standing role in helping dismantle the very IC he ended up leading, and he is terribly deceptive when he says he asked for more funding for anti-terrorism, but fails to mention his inability to redirect funds within the $35-40 billon he had at the time. Today the IC has $60-70B and we are no safer–these clowns cannot even put together a consolidated accurate terrorist watchlist five years after 9/11.

The bottom line on the author is that he is a big-hearted staffer, not a leader and not a strategic thinker. He was a place-holder in a job that two presidents saw fit to relegate to losers–a mouse, a pit-bull, and a turtle.

He takes credit for months of redesign dialog but fails to point out that there was no substantive contact with iconoclasts, published author-practitioners. I am especially angry that he placed Buzzy Krongard in as Executive Director. In my view, Krongard was there to look out for Wall Street interests and ensure Brown and Root did not get caught smuggling drugs into the USA through New Orleans and heavy equipment being returned to the USA “for repairs.” I've come to the conclusion, after thirty years in this business, that there are four CIA's: 1) White House sychophants; 2) Wall Street support via Carlyle Group and a small network of retired intermediaries; 3) the “front” of earnest people working out of official installations, incapable of actually doing serious spying (I was part of this group); and finally, a multinational “dirty deeds” arm that does terribly immoral and illegal things with Saudi money, Egyptian sodomy of children (photographed so as to force them to spy on their fathers), and so on.

In many ways, this book is a capstone account of the death of US secret intelligence. It's gone. The DNI, DCI and USDI are earnest men, but they will fail because they simply do not comprehend the “paradigms of failure” (essay online) and are not willing to contemplate a clean-sheet fresh-start. On page 26 the author confirms that “time and technology [have] passed us by.”

As fascinating as his claims are of ramping up on Bin Laden, I go with Michael Sheuer's damnation as published by the Washington Post. Condi Rice blew off warnings, Dick Cheney focused on energy conspiracies with Enron and Exxon, and the plain truth is that the CIA refused to read the book by Yossef Bodansky or view the PBS broadcast in 1994 by Steve Emerson. They closed themselves off from open sources (called “Open Sores” within the now near-moronic secret world).

The middle of the book is sensational. Chapter Thirteen on “The Threat Matrix” and the succeeding chapters in Part II of the book are superb and contain many nuggets that restored much of my respect for the author.

The author damns Cheney on page 138 for taking over the National Security Council and it is clear that if there is one person to be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, it is not the President, but rather the Vice President.

On page 317 he tells us that “Policy makers have a right to their own opinions but not their own set of facts.”

He slams Rumsfeld for blocking several 737's full of State people and language-qualified individuals specifically trained and organized to get the post-war reconstruction off to a good start. He does not mention Rumsfeld's idiocy in allowing Pakistan to evacuate 3,000 Taliban and Al Qaeda people from Tora Bora, but he does mention that General Tommy Franks refused to put the Rangers in Bin Laden's path, claiming he needed weeks to set it up (this is of course baloney, they could have been air-dropped in 24 hours with a 3-day resupply 24 hours after arrival).

He defends himself on the “slam dunk” as applying to the presentation plan for the UN, not the intelligence. I want to believe this, but the fact that he took imagery and other materials to the first NSC meeting, significantly on Iraq rather than terrorism, gives me pause. I certainly do believe that Dick Cheney hijacked the White House and closed out the entire policy process, but George Tenet, Colin Powell, and our generals all failed us by not resigning and screaming out at the top of their lungs against the high crimes and misdemeanors they witnessed Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Steve Cambone commit, day after day.

He lays bare Cheney's misbehavior in stating on 26 August 2002 that “there is no doubt” on Iraq's having weapons of mass deception but very strangely does not mention that both Hussein's son-in-law who defected to the US, and every one of the 25+ line crossers that Charlie Allen sent in, all said the same thing: kept the cook books, destroyed the stocks, bluffing for regional ego's sake.

He slams Paul Bremer for de-Bathification and confirms that “Iraq came at exactly the right time for Al Qaeda.”

The author avoids major criticism of Stephen Cambone, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, but he reveals the DoD operations against Iran. He tells us about Chalabi hoaxing DIA for millions, and that President Bush ordered Chalabi off the payroll.

He confirms Paul William's view on Al Qaeda having nuclear capabilities.

Pre 9/11 air travelers believed “be calm, see Cuba” when hijacked. Pre 9-11, and today still, our senior government executives are still confusing loyalty with integrity. We can do better. We need, right now, a “Smart Nation.”

On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World
Intelligence Failure: How Clinton's National Security Policy Set the Stage for 9/11
Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America
First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan
Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander
A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies
Osama's Revenge: THE NEXT 9/11 : What the Media and the Government Haven't Told You
The True Cost of Conflict/Seven Recent Wars and Their Effects on Society
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest

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2007/04/132009/12/04

Review DVD: The Good Shepherd (Widescreen Edition)

3 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Reviews (DVD Only)

Former Spy Rates This Kludge Production,

April 13, 2007

Alec Baldwin

Top names cannot overcome this kludge of a movie, which loses one star for kludge and one star for not remotely honoring what the original OSS and the CIA clandestine service really do. In fact, as a former spy who spent three touirs overseas including one chasing terrorists, this movie, while artsy and compelling in its mash-up of 50 years of mis-adventure, is very disappointing. They would have been better off sticking to Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which I enjoyed very much as a parody.

Until the 1980's, the chief characteristics of the Directorate of Operations of which I was a part, were alcoholism, adultery, divorce, and suicide. I count 18 suicides in my professional career, beginning with the instructor at the Farm that blew his brains out with a shot-gun, and more recently the Staff Director of the House Permanent Select Committee of Intelligence, and a much admired SES (flag) officer who tried to drum the “Langley Strangler” out of the agency. Now that's a movie I would be glad to help make. Today we simply have too many puppies and dilitantes.

There is one good aspect: the whole concept of not trusting anyone. There is another good aspect: enemy opposites can be friends. Indeed, I have found over the years that I like and trust my KGB and GRU counterparts more than I trust the drones in our own FBI (Agents IC Smith and Crowley excepted).

A sideline highlight was the depiction of the Yale fraternity Skull and Bones, to which both George Bush Junior and John Kerry belong. The overtones of homosexuality, men mud-wrestling naked, men in drag, is consistent with the public information undertones about some of its members.

The bad aspect is that this movie tries to represent 50 years of history including all the apects of James Angleton, Kim Philby, and so on, but it is a fantasy, a poor parody. You would be much better off reading my lists of intelligence and counterintelligence books. Recruiting people to be traitors, stealing diplomatic pouches, installing audio devices, managing covert action operations are all more interesting.

The entire theme of trying to interpret a video to identify the fan, the sounds, the voices, etc is over-hyped garbage, even with the revelation that the witness knows the video is of himself not so long ago. CIA throws money in the air, and whoever reaches for it is recruited as an agent. Let me be very specific: CIA is a global laughingstock, and does nothing for the Nation that is worth its cost. It consists of too many young white males, and no amount of diversity hiring is going to change the basic fact that working out of official installations, and unilaterally (or worse, relying on foreign liaison headquarters for second-hand lies) is going to turn CIA into a mature clandestine and analytic service.

The coldness of the business, and the distance between father and son, between husband and wife, is dated. That is how it was up to the 1970's. After that, wives were a part of the team and not only fully briefed, but used operationally on occasikon. Children generally are briefed when they reach their low teens.

Bottom line: this is a melange that melanges a bit too much. Great stars, interesting script, for a real look at the old CIA, see Allen Dulles, “The Craft of Intelligence”, and Miles Copeland, “Without Cloak or Dagger”. For the lies and politicization, see George Allen, “None So Blind” or Hiam's “Who the Hell are we Fighting.” For CIA at the top of its game, see “JAWBREAKER” and “First In.”

This is one instance where books are much better than any DVD. See my lists for many other recommendations, and also my list of “Serious DVDs.” This is not a serious DVD, not even close.

The Craft of Intelligence: America's Legendary Spy Master on the Fundamentals of Intelligence Gathering for a Free World
Without Cloak or Dagger
Wilderness of Mirrors: Intrigue, Deception, and the Secrets that Destroyed Two of the Cold War's Most Important Agents
None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam
Who the Hell Are We Fighting?: The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars
Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander
First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan
On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption

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