Intelligence (Government/Secret) – Page 45

2006/06/142009/12/04

Review: Uncertain Shield–The U.S. Intelligence System in the Throes of Reform (Hoover Studies in Politics, Economics, and Society) (Hardcover)

4 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Amazon Page

Insider at Heart, Useful Critiques, Not the Whole Picture,

June 14, 2006

Richard A. Posner

This is the second of two books critical of the 9-11 Commission, both double-spaced, both approaching the issue of intelligence reform from a legalistic-organizational-economic point of view, right down to including arcane formulas incomprehensible to most people.

My reaction as I went through the foot-notes was that this was a bunch of old guys, many associated with the Hoover Institute or themselves failed insiders, talking to one another. There are however, sufficient side notes in the book to have been worthwhile, even though much of what the author discusses is “old hat” for those of us that have spent the last eighteen years being critical of the U.S. Intelligence Community.

The following points made it to my fly-leaf review:

1) Provides very strong critique of the WMD Commission as “critical overkill.” I would add to that that the WMD Commission displayed a conflict of interest in suggesting that CIA could handle open source collection and analysis after decades of abusive irrational prejudice against open sources.

2) The author is completely off track when he says early on that Congress is not to be blamed for intelligence failures. Perhaps he is unaware of the fact that the Boren-McCurdy National Security Act of 1992 was undermined by then Secretary of Defense Cheney, but totally derailed by Senator John Warner of Virginia, who first sidelined reform to the Aspin-Brown Commission, then opposed all the recommendations, encouraged several DCI's in succession to do the same, and continues to this day to demand that the Pentagon control 85% of the NATIONAL intelligence budget because both the Pentagon and the bulk of those agencies are in VIRGINIA.

3) He provides a short discussion of how the IC elements use secrecy as a way of asserting “intellectual property” and this is useful. It would be even more useful if he were familiar with past public statement of Rodney McDaniel and with the full report of the Secrecy Commission under Senator Moynihan.

4) On Iraq and WMD he blames CIA without knowing what he is talking about. Charlie Allen got 30+ line crossers and at the professional level (which is to say, not including George “Slam Dunk” Tenet) it was clearly understood between Ambassador Wilson's foray to Niger, the British confessing on the side that they were plagiarizing school papers, and Charlie Allen's work (see my review of James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration) that there were no WMD in Iraq–this was a fabrication by Dick Cheney, and perhaps understandable since he and Rumsfeld provided bio-chem to Sadaam Hussein and–as the joke goes–kept the receipts.

5) He returns to his earlier (first book) focus on the need for a domestic intelligence agency, but does not appear to grasp that 50% of the dots that prevent the next 9-11 are “bottom up” dots that have no place to go and would still not have a place to go with a DC-based domestic intelligence agency. We need fifty state intelligence centers with county-level collection networks including 119 and 114 numbers for citizen reporting to a sense-making LOCAL center that is tied in to a NATIONAL picture.

6) The chapter on “Automated Woes” is quite interesting, and like Chapter 4 in his earlier book, is one of the best parts of this one. He demonstrates a superior understanding of the many reasons why government is happy to continue with 1970's technology. He focuses on the value of Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) technology but does not appear, at least to where I could see it, to appreciate the value of open source software as a means of making a national intelligence network, with commercial levels of security, available to all 20,000 police forces, none of which can afford the brand of “secure” nonsense that the federal agencies are telling the states they need in order to receive the precious jewels of useless intelligence from “on high.”

7) Although he absolves Congress of blame in intelligence failure, he provides a truly excellent discussion of the limitations of Congressional oversight, as well as the pathologies of Congressional oversight, and offers some suggestions for remediation.

8) The book concludes with a discussion of the “intelligence dilemma” to wit that success demands sharing but sharing threatens secrecy. Like most insiders, he completely misses the point of the OSINT revolution: sharing is optimized by focusing on open source intelligence that can be shared with both state and local governments, and with foreign coalition and non-governmental partners.

9) Finally, he ends with comments on the need for metrics, concluding that this is in the too hard box, but that is simply because he is unfamiliar with the path-finding work of Marty Hurwitz in the 19990's, or the work of Thomas J. Berholtz (see my review of his Information Proficiency: Your Key to the Information Age (Industrial Engineering) The fact is that intelligence can be evaluated based on its outcomes in relation to investments of time, money, risk, and credibility.

See my lists on intelligence (short and long) for a wider range of readings more likely to result in long-term intelligence reform. Judge Posner certainly merits our respect and attention, but his views are rather narrowly formed.

2006/04/302009/12/04

Review: Prelude to Terror–the Rogue CIA, The Legacy of America’s Private Intelligence Network the Compromising of American Intelligence (Hardcover)

4 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Some Inconsistencies, But Best Synthesis of Bush-Mafia-Dictator-Privatized Intelligence Network,

April 30, 2006

Joseph J. Trento

This is not a perfect book. It has inconsistencies and errors but this book has helped connect many dots from the other 690+ books I have reviewed.

I had no idea while I was at CIA as a clandestine officer that there are really multiple CIA's and that there are three *external* CIAS: the “Safari Club” led by Saudi Arabia, with France, Egypt, Morocco and Iran (during the Shah's time, not since); the murder network (South Africa, Israel, South Korea, and probably also Chile and Argentina during their worst years); and a privatized CIA running drugs and arms, laundering money, and generally doing things that were “off the books and out of control” as the author titles one of his chapters.

According to the author, Allen Dulles has the first private intelligence service at 44 Wall Street, relying heavily on the recruitment of former Nazis. There is a direct path from the CIA's fascination with former Nazis to the presence of Karl Rove in the White House.

The author draws on good sources to document the long-time relationship between Wall Street and certain companies such as the house of Morgan and Brown that leads us right up to when Buzzy Kronguard, formerly of Alex Brown, was executive director of the CIA at no salary. Prescott Bush, farther of the first President Bush, features heavily in the corrupt relations between CIA and the Wall Street mafia. These people financed the Nazis and weapons that killed Americans.

Interestingly, the Dutch are known to have all the details on the Bush family ties to the Nazis, and I have personally heard from the Dutch that they also have full details from the Chinese on drunken teen-ager George W. Bush, of whom photos are said to exist while he is incoherent and perhaps posed in naked compromising positions with his male Chinese tennis teacher). All of this is inevitably going to be in the public consciousness–right now it falls into what one author calls “Fog Facts”–known openly but not “computed” by the public.

This entire book is a tale of the corruption of intelligence, caused in part by the abysmal failure of US intelligence in the early years, ranging from failing to predict the Korean invasion to trying to assassinate Chinese premier Chou En Lai.

The Viet-Nam era empowered people like Ted Shackley (who died in 2002 and whose memoirs are coming out shortly). CIA learned to run drugs and arms, launder money, start its own banks, and generally avoid Congressional funding limitations and Congressional oversight. Unfortunately, creating a rogue CIA further incapacitated “CIA proper” of which I was a part, and the author reasonably points out that the fall of the Shah of Iran, the failure to understand the 1975 concerns about Shiite terrorism training camps, the assassination of Sadat, the CIA coup plans that were pre-empted by Qadafi, the growth of Al Qaeda, the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban (which deprived Wall Street of its drug crops, now restored courtesy of the U.S. Army)–the list goes on.

According to the author's sources, the CIA opened the Far East to the US mafia, and helped develop pipelines for the drugs that included piggy-backing on US servicemen corpses coming back into Dover AFP. Fast forward to CIA using Special Operations Forces to protect transmitters that allowed hundreds of drug airplanes to land in Panama where drugs could be traded for money and arms.

The author centers the book on Ted Shackley as a bridge figure among many “external” intelligence activities, but Clark Clifford is also key in the founding of the BCCI bank and in asking the Saudis directly to fund an alternative CIA to be known as the Safari Club. BCCI had overtly good intentions–to attract terrorist and criminal funds, but at root it represented the complete “sale” of US intelligence to the Saudis.

The politicization of intelligence is the other major theme in this book, and the Bush family features very prominently.

Side notes:

Ted Shackley recruited Zbigniew Brzezinski as a young Polish-American student, and had full access to him later when he was National Security Advisor.

Don Rumsfeld, today Secretary of Defense, was instrumental in persuading President Ford not to appoint Eliot Richardson, a reformer of known integrity, to the DCI position, and instead got Kissinger to invite Bush from Beijing, all to ensure that Kissinger's role in subverting Chile would be concealed.

As DCI, Turner shut the Israeli's out, essentially forcing them to adopt Shackley as their “black CIA” partner, and then Bush as DCI turned CIA over to the Saudi government.

Shackley fought Inman for the soul of CIA, and the evidence suggests that Shackley won, in part by blackmailing Inman in collaboration with the Israel lobby.

CIA placed officers under cover on the Hill, notably in Senator Dan Quayle's office.

The book left me with three thoughts for reflection:

1) 9-11 was the culmination of decades of CIA corruption and politicization. Of course there are other factors, but from 1975 forward CIA “sold out” and it can be safely said that Viet-Nam killed CIA and opened the doors to the privatization of dirty tricks, murders, and generally very bad out of control covert foreign policy and a consequent subversion of national security.

2) Cheap oil resulting from our support of ruthless dictators set the stage for the radicalization of the Muslim world against America. People are not stupid–they see the link between the US situation, US support for dictators, and their own suffering and exclusion from the wealth.

3) One day, someday, I am going to fund an ABLE DANGER analysis of the history of secret intelligence, starting with Richard Secord, who is in charge of GRAY FOX (the successor to YELLOW FRUIT) and who is not killing terrorists, which is what he is supposed to be doing, but instead continuing the for-profit external CIA, and Ted Shackley.

This is an important book.

2006/04/272009/12/04

Review: Who the Hell Are We Fighting?–The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars (Hardcover)

6 Star Top 10%, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Military & Pentagon Power

Moving, Brilliant, Superb Nuance, Ethics of Intelligence,

April 27, 2006

C. Michael Hiam

Edit of 15 Jun 09 to add the following additional links:
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
On the Psychology of Military Incompetence
Pathology Of Power

There are other books on this issue of “cooking the books” and the strategic consequences of falsifying or prostituting intelligence, but this book by a first-time author, C. Michael Hiam, jumps to the head of the line. This is one of the most exciting and absorbing books on intelligence it has ever been my privilege to read. It is not a substitute for Sam Adams' own book, War of Numbers: An Intelligence Memoir nor for George Allen's None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam or Bruce Jones' War Without Windows or Jim Wirtz The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War (Stemme) or even Orin de Forest's book Slow Burn: The Rise and Bitter Fall of American Intelligence in Vietnam.

I am especially moved by this book because it treats Sam Adams, who was reviled as often as he was a hero, in a gentle fashion, and makes it clear that the bottom line was that Adams was right and Adams had integrity. The book is superb at explaining why General Westmoreland had to back down when he threatened CBS with libel because too many witnesses were prepared to say that it was Westmoreland who ordered that the number of “enemy combatants” never go above 300,000. The military officers who loyally but stupidly followed that order, and the CIA bureaucrats who unethically “folded” on this important issue of “who are we fighting and how many” are tarred and feathered by this book, and right so, as it applies to the run up to war in Iraq and the planned bombing of Iran.

There are other CIA heroes in this book, notably Ed Hauch who got it right on the first day–he and others who actually knew Ho Chi Minh knew him to be a nationalist and knew we could not win, but it would take us 10 years to figure that out. Same same Iraq only we did not have any CIA people with both the knowledge and the integrity to speak out, just George “slam dunk” Tenet, the world's greatest intelligence prostitute.

As we consider tactical nuclear weapons for Iran, it is instructive to read in this book that the military planned for nuclear missile batteries to be inserted into Da Nang and Nha Trang.

As we reflect on how the Army Chief of Staff was ignored when he spoke of the need for major land forces to stabilize Iraq, only to be ignored, it is instructive to read in this book that Walt Rostow and others knew full well the standard rule of thumb for insurgencies, the need for a 27:1 ratio.

McNamara was deceived by Westmoreland–fast forward to Iraq and we have on the one hand a prostitution of intelligence, and on the other a series of truthful wise Army generals whose advice was ignored by civilians.

The author has done a really first rate job of capturing the nuances of the CIA and the military. His discussion of the hours spent on chit-chat unrelated to work reminds me of the AIM system today, where CIA has discussion groups on everything from teen-age drivers to menopause–in my experience, most CIA headquarters people are actually working only half the time.

The author will be long admired for this book, and on page 122 he delivers the coup de grace in citing Sherman Kent, speaking to Sam Adams, and asking “Have we gone beyond the bounds of reasonable dishonesty?” What an incredibly good job the author has done with this book.

I have been energized by this book, which validates my long-standing fight to induce intelligence reform. I was called a lunatic in 1992 when General Al Gray and I gave up on four years of internal appeals and publicly brought up the need for emphasis on open source intelligence. 18 years later we finally have a few well-meaning but impotent individuals without a program, without money, without staff, and without a clue. We will march on, and the intelligence reform will be imposed now rather than induced. I anticipate legislation on an independent Open Source Agency soon–unlike secret intelligence, public intelligence cannot be manipulated nor ignored.

The book gave me new insights on Sam Adams and on the entire order of battle methodology. Those trying to understand the Global War on Terror and the issues of foreign fighters versus home guard insurgents would do well to read this superb volume.

The author points out that Tet was a huge military failure, one that could have been exploited by the US military had they not been so deficient in intelligence about small units and the guerrillas (immortal paraphrase: “here we are in a guerrilla war and no one is counting the guerrillas”). The author educated me on the work that Sam Adams did on the Khemer Rouge in Cambodia, and saddened me when he discussed how Sam Adams' next project was going to be Chinese strategy–now wouldn't that have been something?

For the Information Operations folks, the book briefly but ably covers the Viet Cong “Military Prothlesizing” corps that was responsible for POW conversions into agents, for running psychological operations against the Saigon regime, and for penetrating the South Vietnamese Army and government, with a success rate of 30,000 or 5%. When combined with what Jim Bamford tells us on Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency about North Vietnamese Signals Intelligence, we can only marvel as the manner in which they beat our ass in the intelligence war, in part because of our lack of ethics in both the military and at the highest levels of the CIA.

Viet-Nam unraveled the Johnson presidency; I fully expect Iraq and Iran to unravel the Bush presidency. This book could not have emerged at a better time, and I recommend it very strongly to all intelligence, military, and policy professionals.

2006/04/102009/12/04

Review: Spying on the Bomb–American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea (Hardcover)

5 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Best of Intentions, As Flawed as Its Subject,

April 10, 2006

Jeffrey T. Richelson

The author does good work, within the limits of what can be known, and I have to recognize his diligence with five stars, but this is one of those books that is maddening in three ways:

1) It documents how bureacratically pedestrian the U.S. Intelligence Community has been. Spying on the bomb has not been a “calling” it has been a routine job using pedestrian means, and with zero accountability for faliing to be successful.

2) The book is maddening in other ways. In 2004 the CIA gets a walk-in with a thousand pages on the Iranian nuclear program, and two years later they are still trying to determine if the documents are fake–or is it that they provided the documents in the first place (see my review of “State of War”) and are now confronted by their own returning paper?

3) Most maddening of all is the complete failure of this book, and its subject the US Intelligence Community, and the policy leadership of the USA, to come to grips with reality. The nuclear bomb or nuclear power in the hands of North Korea or Iran are about as great a threat to the USA as Fidel Castro deciding to invade Miami with 10,000 doctors. 1000 car bombs in the right places (most overseas, such as in Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela), 1000 det cords with C-4 around the right choke points (port cranes, bridge struts, railroad loading yard circles) are vastly more threatening to the US. A nuclear bomb might take out a city–an asymmetric attack by highly motivated suicidal terrorists will not only bypass all of our defenses, but it will take out our economy. Our wages are already back where they were in 1962 (sixty two). Hurricane Katrina had the force of a nuclear exploision and not only is the White House ignoring that disaster, but it has not impacted on the rest of the country. The USA has no strategy and no grasp of reality–our policies right now are a combination of ideological fantasy, deep insider corruption, and pedestrian bureaucratic “going through the motions.” Shame on all of us.

By way of example:
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security

Incidentally, terrorism is #9 on the list of high-level threats to humanity, poverty, infectious disease, and environmental degradation are 1-3, above war. Our government now resembles the DVD Idiocracy. The only good news is that CIA discovered its integrity on Iran and many of us appear to have stopped the lunatic intentions of Dick Cheney to carry on with the Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror.

2006/04/062009/12/04

Review: Strategic intelligence for American world policy (Unknown Binding)

5 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Seminal Work for the Middle Period of Intelligence,

April 6, 2006

Sherman Kent

he history of national intelligence in terms of spies, satellites, and secrets can be concisely separated into three eras: the era of secret wars, the era of strategic analysis, and the era of open source intelligence.

Sherman Kent was without question the dean and the prophet for the second era, and this gem of a book remains a standard in the field and required reading for any intelligence professional (collector, analyst, or other). He did not realize his vision because the clandestine service (of which I was a member) took over the CIA and subordinated the analysts, and because in so doing, the CIA lost touch with most of the open source world.

Today Kent is succeeded by Jack Davis, whose term “analytic tradecraft” can be used to find his collection of memos on the web, and by the CIA University. However, the secret world is now under attack by the emergent World Brain, in which Collective (Public) Intelligence utilizes open sources of information to create Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) that is better than secret information, cheaper than secret information, and more useful than secret information because it can be shared broadly.

Those whose sense of self is defined by the secret world will have difficulty adjusting to this, witness the continued references in the secret world to “Open Sources.” Max nix. The war is over, and Kent's vision will ultimately be realized in the third era, the era of open sources.

2006/03/082012/10/27

2006 IJIC 19/1 Intelligence Affairs: Evolution, Revolution, or Reactionary Collapse?”

Articles & Chapters, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public)

“Intelligence Affairs: Evolution, Revolution, or Reactionary Collapse?”

Click Here to Subscribe To or Buy Articles From IJIC

2006/01/302009/12/04

Review: Jawbreaker–The Attack on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA’s Key Field Commander (Hardcover)

5 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Bottom Line: CIA Managers and Reluctant Generals Let Bin Laden Fly,

January 30, 2006

Gary Berntsen

The bottom line in this book is quite clear: US forces on the ground, consisting of fully integrated clandestine case officers, special operations teams, and selected allied operations officers, were able to find Bin Laden's final lair and track him as he escaped over the course of several days toward the Waziristan sanctuary in Pakistan. Also clear is the reluctance of CIA managers to press the President to order the military to insert a Ranger battalion capable of blocking that escape, and the reluctance of the “all or nothing” US generals to commit troops “behind the lines.”

The book would normally lose one star for failing to be current with the varied sources pertinent to the story, including Sy Hersh's excellent story on how Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld gave the Pakistani's an air corridor with which they evacuated close to 3,000 Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders over the course of one night. I believe the author of this book when he says that Bin Laden was not among those so evacuated–Bin Laden's style would be to distrust a Pakistani offer of air evacuation, and to want to lead his men directly over ground to sanctuary.

Before detailing my extensive notes on this book, let me just note that it cannot be fully appreciated if you cannot read between the lines (for myself, as a former clandestine case officer, this is perhaps easier, but I find the whining about redaction from some reviewers to be naive–the redacted sections are veils, to be sure, but helpful in being shown). This book is also best appreciated if you have first read Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History; Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 and The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB as well as the book by the author's predecessor in field command, First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan I have reviewed all those books–if you don't want to buy and read them, at least read the reviews as preparation for a full appreciation of this book. If you can find it, a used copy of The Black Tulip: A Novel of War in Afghanistan is both fun read and provides atmosphere.

A few points really jump out at me and make my fly-leaf notes:

1) The author takes a reasonable shot at “First In” by pointing out that he led a team into the area in 2000 to deliver radio intercept training to the Northern Alliance.

2) He carefully documents that George Tenet's “declaration of war” was meaningless, and not backed up by either resources or management commitment. Tenet was a world-class posturer obsessed with pandering to the President and unwilling to actually lead the operators. The author provides what may be one of the best and most factual accounts of Directorate of Operations petty politics, backstabbing, and minor jealousies. The author specifically slams the Latin America Division Chief for being a chickens–t who ordered his officers to NOT volunteer after 9/11 even if they had relevant languages and experiences, and he accuses both Tenet and Jim Pavitt, then the nominal head of the Directorate of Operations (nominal because I never considered him to actually be competent) of panicking after 9/11 and as the Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) leadership pushed the envelope and did the right things. My impressions of Cofer Black and other CTC leaders jumped up several notches on the basis of this book, and for that alone it is very worthwhile.

3) The most important strategic observation made in this book is the author's documented denouncement of George Tenet's poor judgment in closing stations in Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, and Tajikistan, among others, leaving CIA blind and without localized resources in the most critical years leading up to and following 9/11. The author demonstrates that he is more than just a case officer with a superb quote on page 312 in which he not only calls for a global clandestine presence, but recognizes the value of having a national cadre of “trained experts who speak the languages and show sensitivity to native cultures” and also calls for a dramatic increase in “student, cultural, and scientific exchanges” with other societies. In this context, while glossing over the CIA's general lack of languages, he noted that the Special Forces people sent to help him had no languages skills at all (relevant to this battle).

4) The author and CTC leadership get huge face with me for having the brains to go out and recruit native language speakers without college degrees, giving them the GS-13 and GS-14 grades normally reserved for PhDs. I absolutely admire the author for taking on the CIA's personnel bureaucracy and telling them in essence, “the college degree can come later, right now we need the languages and the Muslim attributes.” Absolutely spot on, this is the kind of inspired *leadership* we need in clandestine operations.

5) A few minor notes that add to the scholarship in the area of clandestine intelligence and counter-terrorism:

a) CIA relied on Northern Alliance helicopters instead of having its own capable of providing more reliable transport. This was fixed later, but the bottom line is that both CIA and the US military are completely lacking in not having a squadron of mixed aircraft (helos, VSTOL, and gunships) optimized for high altitude operations (10,000 feet to 18,000 feet).

b) Clean fuel was the major safety hazard–this taught me that one of our first priorities needs to be setting up a Forward Area Refueling Point (FARP) and having a trained fuel master responsible for ensuring clean fuel is available to all of our clandestine and special operations flights in and out of denied areas.

c) The author slams Tenet and Deutch (and David Cohen) for putting intelligence analysts in charge of stations overseas. An analyst is no more capable of managing clandestine operations than a ballerina is of coaching a football team.

d) The author documents that the Nairobi Embassy bombing was tipped in advance, but the informant was blown off (as were the two who told FBI about 9/11 in advance).

e) The author knows that our compartmentation rules are stupid, and shared *everything* with his military counterparts in the field. This worked.

In Afghanistan, for this campaign, unlike in Somalia or Iraq, the clandestine service worked as advertised. Wish that it were so for the rest of the world.