Intelligence (Government/Secret) – Page 48

Not Enough on Spies, Plenty on State-Level Corruption and FBI Idiocy,

January 27, 2005

I. C. Smith

I bought this book in an airport for two reasons: because I knew the man, and because the FBI does not produce enough good authors. Although I was disappointed by finding that only 20% of the book covers spies and lies, while 80% covers bureaucratic bungling and leadership failures with in the FBI, overall I put it down fully satisfied.

We all know now that Al Qaeda was never operating in secret, and even today, is not operating in secret. We are simply incompetent at looking at open sources in foreign languages. IC Smith conveys this perfectly early on in his book, on page 7, when he repeats something he said that was published in the media, to wit “These guys were not superhuman, but they were playing in a system that was more inept than they were.” I share IC's anger over the FBI's failure to translate and exploit the many boxes of documents in Arabic that were captured in the Philippines and after the first World Trade Center attack, the botched car bombing.

If there is one word that summarizes this book's message, beyond incompetency, it is “corruption.” IC Smith tells it like it is when he discusses Congressional corruption, refusing to fix known problems in the Intelligence Community; Presidential corruption in abusing power and covering up those abuses; state-level corruption across Arkansas; intelligence community management corruption and malfeasance–some would even say treason, although IC avoids this word.

On a very practical level, IC Smith is probably the foremost authority to come forward and denounce the practice of having prosecuting attorneys manage investigations. The book has many examples of where trained investigators were not allowed to do their job, and prosecutors botched or blocked investigations that would have otherwise been timely and successful.

In passing, he skewers the staff at the FBI Academy, almost none of whom have actual street experience (nor do most FBI managers at the wood-paneled office level), and it is clear that while America has many dedicated Americans serving within the FBI, they are badly trained and badly led.

In addition to this book I recommend Michael Levine's Deep Cover: The Inside Story of How DEA Infighting, Incompetence and Subterfuge Lost Us the Biggest Battle of the Drug War (on the Drug Enforcement Agency), and Mark Riebling's Wedge: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11–How the Secret War between the FBI and CIA Has Endangered National Security (on the FBI-CIA wars that continue to this day), as well as George Allen's book None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam (on the continuing ability of the White House–regardless of occupation–and the Intelligence Community–to lie to themselves, to Congress, and to the American people).

IC is a straight shooter. I'm glad he made it to retirement without being shot by a crook or stabbed in the back (fatally) by one of the suits in Washington that pretend to serve the people while serving only themselves.

Links added 20 Dec 07:
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush
Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'
See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism
On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World

2004/12/262009/12/04

Review: “Armed and Dangerous”–My Undercover Struggle Against Apartheid

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Censorship & Denial of Access, Consciousness & Social IQ, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Undercover in Rebellion, Now Minister for Intelligence,

December 26, 2004

Ronnie Kasrils

I have just spent two days absorbing his book. Some highlights:

1) The big fights, the important fights, take 25 years or more. The transformative fights, the nation-wide or trans-regional transformations, take 25-50 years.

2) When any government seeks to repress discontent by suspending the due process of law, stand by for a revolution.

3) Fighting this revolution, without a friendly country adjacent to South Africa, and with South African mercenaries and forces all too able to strike at will across Africa, was very very hard. Bomb-making, communications, all hard.

4) Camaraderie should not be allowed to undermine operational security and counterintelligence. From day one, misplaced faith and lax checking of backgrounds was very costly, and the ANC was riddled with informers, many of them passed through the US and UK.

5) The Russians, East Germans, and Cubans all provided aid with no strings attached–indeed, the West's excessive propaganda against communism actually inspired interest in communism. This book is one of the best references I have found, as a US intelligence professional, with respect to the good done by the so-called “main enemy” in the specific case of South Africa.

6) I believe the author when he recounts discussions with Russians focusing on the defense nature of their military investments, and their longer-term strategic focus on beating US capitalism in a straight-up economic competition with socialism. I had to think as I worked through this section: if Ronnie Kasrils could have these discussions, how could CIA get it so wrong all those years?

7) Across the entire book is a full range of clandestine technique. These guys knew how to use newspaper ads, codes, changes in times and dates, pre-arranged blind meetings, brush passes, dead drops, the whole nine yards. They lived it–and unlike US spies, who get sent home, if they failed at undercover operations they paid with their lives or spent years–sometimes decades–in prison.

8) The United Kingdom gets high marks for its balanced reception of ANC officers, and Scotland Yard gets the best marks of all.

9) Key elements of the ANC victory, apart for the grotesque self-destructive nature of apartheid, were persistence, propaganda, infrastructure, and training. Their leadership was clever, strategic, and focused. The ANC also understood that politics was as important as tactical and technical training–the moral is to the material as 10:1 and all that good stuff.

10) Training as well as solidarity were well balanced with sports, music, and art.

11) The East Germans taught them how to do Vietnamese tunnels (see my review of the “Tunnels of Cu Chi.”) My first thought was Colombia and drugs–I suspect the Americans have no idea what's under the ground in the Andes.

12) They were not ready for air attacks, especially air attacks streaking in on them from South Africa within other nominally sovereign countries.

13) A major contributor to their eventual success was the over-all trend in the region, with victories in Angola and Zimbabwe chief among the contributing factors.

14) The revolution went through a mutinous and discouraging phase. I was reminded of Bill Moyer's “Doing Democracy” where he quotes Tom Atlee in saying that Stage 5 in any long-term movement toward democracy is inevitably the stage where there is a perception of failure.

15) In the final stages before victory, one of their biggest problems was quality control over incoming recruits and over captured informants and traitors.

16) Chapter 16 is a lovely discussion of their use of open sources of intelligence. He says: “The greatest proportion of intelligence comes from published material. Since South Africa is a modern, industrial country, we were able to acquire information covering almost its entire infrastructure. This included everything from road, rail and power networks to national key points and strategic objectives. Pretoria's predilection for propaganda provided rich pickings from a range of military and police literature.”

17) These guys ran a marvelous early warning system that got citizen conscripts, when called up, to call in to telephone answering machines.

18) They pioneered the integration of maps, telephone books, index cards, and brain power in charting all the unoccupied farms across the country, ultimately plotting routes from the border all the way to Pretoria.

19) When De Klerk legalized the ANC, they were initially taken in and got sloppy with security. The author does a fine job of showing that De Klerk, while bowing to the inevitable in the end, was much more duplicitous and hostile to the ANC after starting the reconciliation process, than most in the West realize.

20) The author (who is now the Minister for Intelligence Services after having been the Deputy Minister of Defense) appears to be skilled at understanding the value of the media, and the importance of detecting and fighting disinformation early on.

21) His chapter on his tenure at the Ministry of Defence could teach us something about transformation and how to accelerate it.

In the end, and over-all, I am left with four impressions:

a) Morality really does matter, as does mass. A mass of people with morality is more powerful than an elite with guns.

b) Torture and murder by minions can be forgiven and understood–it is their political masters who must be held accountable.

c) Women are the best. the most steadfast revolutionaries–and their men could not survive decades of hardship without the steadfast commitment of their companions.

d) South Africa is ready (he quotes Thabo Mbeki) to make its own history.

For myself, I am quite certain that Ronnie Kasrils is going to lead South Africa's intelligence community in a way that no other national intelligence leader could possibly understand: in the service of the people, harnessing and inspiring their collective intelligence, placing intelligence in the service of the people.

This is an exceptional person…the real deal.

2004/09/132009/12/04

Review: Intelligence Matters

5 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

One of Top Five Books on Topic, But Has Some Gaps,

September 13, 2004

Bob Graham

Edit of 20 Dec 07 to add links.

The negative reviews on this book are by people that have not read the book carefully (one appears to have not read it all, having only seen the author on television). I am comfortable, on the basis of my career in intelligence, my three published books on intelligence (two with forewords by Senators, one Democratic, one Republican), and my 1100+ reviews on non-fiction about national security issues, is saying that this book is easily one of the top five books on the topic that most Americans should consider reading. The other four are the Webster Tarpley's book 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Fourth Edition which displaced the utterly imcompetent and unethical 9-11 Commission Report, the Aspin-Brown Commission Report (1996), Jim Bamford's book, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies and George Allen's book on the failure of intelligence in Viet-Nam, None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam There are many others, but for 9-11 and the urgently needed reforms to intelligence after 9-11 (three years ago, still no reforms of note), these are the five.

The book is most important as an unclassified record of what can be known about our failures–in both intelligence and in policy–as understood by the then serving Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI). It does have gaps–it is much less detailed than the 9-11 Commission Report, harder to read than Jim Bamford's book, and suffers from considerable gaps in both what went wrong and what needs to be fixed, as covered by my own books as well as the many other intelligence reform books that I have reviewed in their own Amazon spaces. That does not diminish its relative value as a “touchstone” for all Americans.

There are, in my view, three compelling bottom lines in this book that cannot be ignored:

1) Senator Graham recognizes better than most that in the absence of public pressure for reform, there is little incentive for Congress or the Executive to take action. As one Member is reported to have told Amy Zegart “America still does not get it–it will take another 5,000 body bags.” It is my view that the combination of intelligence community leadership misrepresentation (“its all better now, no need to make major changes” and the White House denial that there was an intelligence failure at all, which defies understanding, have led the country to fall asleep again–a point that “Anonymous” makes in Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror.

2) Page 243 covers both of the other two points. The first is that the Department of State has become a neglected orphan in US intelligence and US policy making about global threats, and this needs to change. It is worthy of note that the Department of State got it right on Iraq despite its small numbers and tiny budget, and I agree completely with Senator Graham–State has to get back in the business of being America's *primary* foreign and national security policy strategist. I put together THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest but State leadership at this time is intellectually and morally challenged (2007).

3) Although disappointing in its brevity, especially since both the Aspin-Brown Commission and the 9-11 Commission found cause to note the importance of open sources of information, Senator Graham also notes on page 243 that a primary corrective measure to the failure of the intelligence community to “connect the dots” and related “incestuous amplification” lies in combining a renewed primary by the Department of State with greatly increased investments in Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) such as Congressman Rob Simmons (R-CT-02) is planning to put into the House Armed Services Committee legislation addressing 9-11 deficiencies.

Senator Graham joins Dick Clarke (whose book, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror I strongly recommend) in condemning both Saudi Arabian sponsorship of terrorism, and the bi-partisan Clinton-Bush pandering to the Saudi's, accepting despicable sustained actions by the government of Saudi Arabia against the government and people of the United States of America, for the sake of cheap oil (see also the book by Michael Klare, and by Robert Baer). While I distinguish to an extent between Saudi intelligence, which sponsors terrorism, and Saudi royalty, which tried to deny its roots in Arabia, the bottom line is that both governments knew that Bin Laden was being nurtured by Saudi intelligence, and both chose to ignore the danger.

Senator Graham ends his book by lamenting the lack of accountability in both intelligence and policy. He is completely correct. George Tenet failed to resurrect the clandestine service in the seven years he served as Director of Central Intelligence, and then had the audacity to tell the 9-11 Commission that he needed seven more years to do this, now that he realized it was broken. No way, Jose. It is time to fire all the losers that have been testifying to Congress on how they would do things differently, and bring in the people who resigned their commissions in order to go public from 1985-2001. It is noteworthy that both the House and the Senate have failed to ask the latter to testify–virtually all of the witnesses on 9-11 are from the crowd that allowed 9-11 to happen in the first place.

Intelligence matters, indeed. It is clear from this book that the public does not yet grasp this, and it is not clear from this book that Congress ever will. The current legislative proposals are still in lip-service, cosmetic mode. The Members are still too reliant on ignorant staff and still too prone to substitute press conferences for deep discussions with the top 15 practitioner-authors who know what is needed.

There *will* be another 9-11, and there *will* be a “nuclear hell-storm” in America, courtesy of Al Qaeda. You cannot have smart spies in the context of a dumb Nation…..

2004/07/082012/10/27

2004 IJIC 17/2 Information Peacekeeping & The Future of Intelligence

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

Click Here to Subscribe To or Buy Articles From IJIC

2004/07/062012/10/28

2004 Department of Homeland Security (November)

Briefings & Lectures, Civil Society, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Crime (Organized, Transnational), Democracy, Disaster Relief, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public)

2004/06/272009/12/04

Review: A Pretext for War–9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies

4 Star, 9-11 Truth Books & DVDs, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Iraq, Misinformation & Propaganda, Power (Pathologies & Utilization)

The one book to read if only one, not a substitute for many,

June 27, 2004

James Bamford

I know Jim Bamford personally, and consider him to be one of the most capable of researchers and most objective of writers on intelligence matters. His deep personal relationships across the U.S. Intelligence Community make him the best possible reporter.For those of us steeped in the literature, that routinely read both the daily reporting and the regular books, much of what Jim has put together here will be repetitive. This is, however, the very best book to read if you only have the time for one book on the topic of 9-11, the failure of U.S. intelligence, and the corruption of U.S. policy in using 9-11 as a pretext for invading Iraq and giving Bin Laden the best possible (i.e. most stupid) strategic response to 9-11.

This is the ideal book for any citizen who wants a professional “once over” tour of the various intelligence and policy pieces that broke down and allowed 9-11 to happen, and then allowed the entire “balance of powers” construct from our Founding Fathers to fly out the window. If you want to go deeper, see my thirteen Lists and 479+ other reviews of national security non-fiction.

The book is especially strong on the Rendon Group being used to illegally propagandize American citizens with U.S. taxpayer funds, on the abject failure of George Tenet in revitalizing U.S. clandestine operations, on the failure (treated more kindly) of Mike Hayden to bring the National Security Agency into the 21st Century, and on the very unhealthy merger of the U.S. neoconservatives that captured the White House, and well-funded Zionists in both America and Israel who essentially bought themselves an invasion of Iraq–a remarkable coincidence of interests: Jews paying to invade Iraq, Iranians using Chalabi to feed lies to the neo-cons so they would be deceived into thinking Iraq would be a cake-walk, and Bin Laden never daring to dream the entire U.S. population and all arms of government–including a passive media–would “sleep walk” into what this book suggests is one of the dumbest and most costly strategic errors in the national security history of the USA.

This book is not, despite some of the ideologically-motivated reviews below, an attack of George Bush Junior, as much as it is an appalled and informed review of how a complex government collapsed in the face of 9-11, and a handful of ostensibly patriotic and very myopic individuals were able to abuse their personal power because all of the professional counter-forces: the diplomats, the spies, the military professionals, the Congress, the media–every single one was not sufficiently competent nor sufficiently motivated to mandate a more balanced policy process that could understand the many global threats (terrorism and Iraq are actually two of the lesser ones), devise a comprehensive long-term strategy, and execute that strategy using *all* of the instruments of national power, including strong global alliances that lead all governments to fight all gangs in the most effective fashion possible.

We let kids play with matches, and they burned down the house.

2004/05/152009/12/04

Review: Piercing the Veil of Secrecy–Litigation Against U.S. Intelligence

5 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Justice (Failure, Reform), Misinformation & Propaganda

John 8:32, Ye Shall Know the TRUTH…,

May 15, 2004

Janine M. Brookner

Disclosure: I knew and served with Janine Brookner as a case officer overseas. I liked her then and I like her now even through I have not heard from her since we ran into one another in the halls near SOG Maritime in the late 1980's. She deserved to win her case against the white-boy wanna-be-preppy bubbas that are destroying the Directorate of Operations today, and now, with the modest sum she got after paying her lawyer, she has–after law school and substantive experience taking on US Intelligence Community lawyers–*nailed it* with a book that is both a lawyer's dream and every intelligence professional's awakening.

I have myself had experience with security morons (these are the guys that got to their high ranks after twenty years of checking safes at night), and I have also had experience with the very high quality people that CIA has in the Office of the General Counsel and in some positions in security. Interestingly, when I had my problem with morons, the Deputy Director of Security was a woman, she got it, and she fixed it. On balance, from experience, I give CIA as a whole and the US Intelligence Community over-all, very very high marks for being good to its people and bending over backwards to avoid harassment. If anything, as the Ames case showed, the Agency has been too tolerant of aberrant behavior (alcoholism, adultery, divorce, and suicide are too high in the DO, although this has improved in the past ten years). I also have to give the Agency's publications review process an A+. Tough love critic of the CIA/IC that I am, I have *never* felt abused by the righteous and correct process that I signed a lifetime deal on.

There are, however, with the above as context, two major problems that this book addresses, and Janine Brookner has earned my “beyond five stars” for the service she renders with her methodical and documented endeavor. This book is an instant classic and reference manual in two ways:

1) When “management” decides to railroad someone, they have unlimited power to do so, and most people cannot fight back. I was myself rail-roaded by a man named Ted Price, a real mediocrity, a small man with a Napoleon complex, and it took me years to get the system to clean up the mess he made. I was not smart enough to fight back legally. This book empowers the many people who have been set to “Fitness for Duty” physicals (emphasis on showing them to be nuts, or scaring them into resigning for fear of being officially classified as nuts and barred from further federal employment). I know several such people, both analysts and operators, and in every single case it was management that was nuts or derelict in its duty, not the officers. The officers were all out-spoken, deeply in love with their profession and proud of their work, and loath to see the system break down as it has (and as we all knew it would from about 1985 onwards). Had the “nuts” been listened to in the 1980's and 1990's, 9-11 would not have happened and George Tenet would not be making excuses for having faired to unscrew the Directorate of Operations in the past seven years. Now he needs another five years, with the same fools in charge? Please.

2) The other area where this book is vital is in outlining in terms that any Senator or Representative (most of them lawyers) can understand–there needs to be a legal section in the National Security Act that is inevitably making its way toward passage. I used to think that a FISA Court Ombudsman–someone we all trust, like Ken Bass, one of the twelve masters of the court, or Janine Brookner herself, was the solution. What this book had demonstrated to me is that there are both too many problems (and more remedies than I realized), and someone has to codify a body of law that remediates the dysfunctionality of personnel protections within an archipelago of secret fiefdoms.

This book is relevant to both the lawyers and the serving professionals in each of the seven tribes of intelligent work: national, military, law enforcement, business, academia, NGO-investigative journalism, and citizen-labor-religions, because all organizations in the last ten years have been moving toward what one early critic of the CIA called “the cult of secrecy.” Credit card companies and other vendors are including binding arbitration on their terms as a condition of the sale, and those not reading the fine print are trapped into giving up all of their existing rights under due process law, including rights to a jury trial. Secrecy goes hand in hand with corruption and bad practices that desires concealment, so this book is relevant as a guide to what happens when secrecy and corruption are taken to their nth degree.

Category: Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Review: Inside–A Top G-Man Exposes Spies, Lies, and Bureaucratic Bungling in the FBI