Public Intelligence Blog – Page 3989 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

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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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2007/04/102009/12/04

Review: Promises to Keep–The United States Since World War II

3 Star, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback

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Over-Priced, Publisher Needs Spanking,

April 10, 2007

Paul S. Boyer

I spend $5000 a year at Amazon. I also publish books and know that it costs a penny a page to publish a book with a hard copy jacket.

This is an important book, disgracefully priced beyond the reach of virtually everyone who actually needs to read it.

If and when the price drops to $35 or so, I will consider buying. If you agree, please join me in protest.

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2007/04/072009/12/04

Review: Seeing the Invisible–National Security Intelligence in an Uncertain Age

5 Star, Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public)

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First Rate Primer for New World of Open Policy-Intel Deliberations,

April 7, 2007

Thomas Quiggin

The publisher, who has an office in the US, has very foolishly listed this book as being available only from Singapore, so a $25 book at this time is only available for $60 from the one person willing to claim they can ship it who will in fact buy it only when they are paid double for it. I have encouraged the author to prevail on the publisher to distribute the book from their office in New Jersey, so that well-intentioned Americans who wish to heal their Republic may acquire this excellent work directly from Amazon.

It was my good fortune to receive a copy of the book in galley form, and below I offer the same remarks that appear on the back of the book. The book describes Singapore's success with the Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning (RAHS) program. I heard this program briefed in Canada by a Singapore Police Deputy Commissioner, and was enormously impressed. Singapore is doing everything right: emphasis on open sources of information, emphasis on open and inclusive analysis, emphasis on tools for processing instead of wasting billions on secretly collecting the 5% that is relevant, and so on. Here is what I was pleased to provide for the back jacket:

“This is one of the most original, broad-ranging, and indeed exciting books to emerge in the new era that juxtaposes asymmetric and non-traditional threats with distributed and innovative combinations of open sources and methods. Tom Quiggin fully understands that in the age of distributed infromation the concept of ‘central intelligence' is not only obsolete, but that effective intelligence cannot be achieved without the full cooperation of all organizations–governmental as well as non-governmental.

“This work is in my view the first major work in the new generation of intelligence and national security studies and will inform those who have to make the decisions and carry out the work, not only in government, but in the private and non-profit sectors where much of the innovation is occurring.

“With the author being most persuasive to the effect that ‘connecting the dots' for discrete event predictions is not within the capacity of the existing (secret) strategic intelligence community, anticipatory warning systems such as horizon scanning must not only be implemented for all forms of threat including communicable diseases, but they must be created with the full participations of all elements of society.”

The jacket identifies me as CEO of OSS.Net, Inc. but does not mention that I was the senior civilian responsible for creating the Marine Corps Intelligence Command in 1988, and served six tours in the clandestine service of the Central Intelligence Agency, including three overseas tours under cover, and three tours dealing with counterintelligence, advanced information processing, and future imagery and signals collection systems. I mention this because in my view the secret intelligence community as it now exists must be destroyed. We must start over working from outside in and rightside up. Instead of spending 99% of the funds on the 5% we can steal (but not process), we need to take the US intelligence budget of $60 billion a year, and break it into three parts:

1) Free online education in all languages available by the call to the five billion poor, who receive free cell phones as part of the deal.

2) Earth Intelligence Network done right (I have created the non-profit version of this together with Jim Turner's Transpartisan Policy Institute, as a stop gap pending a moral intelligent transpartisan Congress and Executive team being elected in the USA).

3) A mix of cladestine and technical secret intelligence collection, most done in collaboration with host governments and focused strictly on transnational crime including multinational corporate corruption, theft, and money launders, and on terrorism, with half the money spent on properly integrating all known information both open and secret.

The Game is ON. For those who wish to prosper in the newly-appreciated national security environment that this book by Thomas Quiggin addresses, I also recommend the books on Ecological Economics, Natural Capitalism, and Capitalism 3.0. If we all commit to informed democracy and moral capitalism, the future will be bright for all of us, including the five billion poor at the bottom of the pyramid, whom we must empower so that they can create wealth as C. K. Prahalad suggests in “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.”

Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons (BK Currents)
Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid

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2007/04/062009/09/06

Who’s Who in Peace Intelligence: Martin Rudner

Alpha Q-U, Peace Intelligence

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Martin Rudner is a Professor at The Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University, Ottawa, and founding Director of the Canadian Centre of Intelligence and Security Studies at Carleton. Born in Montreal,
Quebec, he was educated at McGill University, the University of Oxford, and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he received his doctorate. Professor Rudner taught at the Hebrew University, and was at the Australian
National University in Canberra before coming to Carleton. He is author of over sixty books and scholarly articles dealing with international affairs, including articles in Intelligence and National Security and International
Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. Professor Rudner is a commentator and analyst on international security affairs for Canadian and international electronic and print media. He is Past President of the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies (CASIS).

Canada, the UN, NATO, and Peacekeeping Intelligence

2007/04/032011/02/09

Reference: The Autocatalysis of Social Systems and the Emergence of Trust

Advanced Cyber/IO, Cultural Intelligence

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Core Quote: “Under the condition of double contingency, every self-commitment, however accidentally arisen or however calculated, will acquire information and connective value for the action of others. Precisely because such a system is formed in a closed and self-referential way — namely A is determined by B and B by A — every accident, every impulse, every error is productivec [of the social system]….Without ‘noise,' no system.” Citing Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, Writing Science (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 116.

Nine Page PDF

2007/04/012009/12/04

Review: Second Chance–Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower

4 Star, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Strategy

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Erudite, State-Centric, Useful Observations in Isolation,

April 1, 2007

Zbigniew Brzezinski

Edit of 30 Mar 08 to add links.

I struggled with this book. In the context of all the other books I have read, I was hoping for something a big more fullsome and balanced. This is an erudite state-centric report card on three President's that only a Washington insider would write, and and that most who are not Washington insiders will find daunting.

It is an essay without references. It is also a partisan work, one that recognizes the American political, economic, and social frameworks are broken, but one that assumes the Democrats will have a second chance in the aftermath of the atrocities and high crimes and misdemanors characteristic of the Bush-Cheney regime. In my view, the only thing worse for America than imperial Republicans is inept Democrats. The party “machines” have got to go. (Cf. Running On Empty: How The Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It; The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy); and Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders.

The book ends with a proposition for a joint legislative-executive global policy planning council, with a shared common staff. This is a variation of the strategic body General Tony Zinni discusses in his most recent book, The Battle for Peace: A Frontline Vision of America's Power and Purpose.

I put the book down feeling empty–indeed–with some dispair. Is this all there is? No big ideas such as the restoration of the US Information Agency and the creation of an Open Source Agency as called for on page 413 of the 9-11 Commission. No mention of a miniscule tax on every Federal Reserve transactiion, allowing the elimination of all individual income taxes. No mention of the 5 billion at the bottom of the pyramid, of the ten high-level threats, twelve policies, and eight other major players. No mention at all of the military-industrial complex and the heavy metal military that Presidents from both parties have been all too willing to go along with. No mention of the two trillion a year illicit economy (in the context of a 7-9 trillion total global economy), see Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy.

No mention of the fact that it was this author who gave the Pakistani's a bye on their nuclear plans, or the direct connection between Iranian funding of the Pakistani program, and their probable possession of a nuclear tipped Russian Sunburn missile (carrier killer, zig-zags at 2.2 Mach).

America needs a transpartisan government that ends the winner take all approach to leadership, and that starts with a balanced sustainable budget. The Comptroller General has declared the USA to be insolvent. It's going to take a lot more than high-sounding platitudes to get America back on track. There are 27 secessionist movements, Vermont's being the most powerful, for good reason: it is time to dissolve this government, and the two political “gangs” that share the spoils that are not theirs to give, in order to restore the Republic of, by, and for the people. The image I have loaded gives a sense of what I was hoping to see. Joe Nye comes closer with his Soft Power ideas. World War III is about two things: unleashing the innovative energy of the five billion in extreme poverty, and spreading the gospel of tolerance and diversity. Both demand $3 billion a year for a massive global free online educational network in all languages, accessible via low-cost cell phones.

If America gets a second chance, it will be from the bottom up. The existing political enterprise is worse than dead, it is a rotting carcass that needs to be burned. Brzezinski addresses the superficial outcomes of a grotesqley flawed and out-dated system (Kissinger did well on this in Does America Need a Foreign Policy? : Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century but then he's also done it wrong, see The Trial of Henry Kissinger. America and the world are too complicated to be run by one white man and his cronies, all controlled by corporations that internalize profit and externalize social cost. If we do not focus on a revolution in the minds and hearts of all humanity, neither our diplomats nor our warriors will be able to stop the immolation of the planet.

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2007/03/312009/09/06

Who’s Who in Peace Intelligence: Hugh Smith

Alpha Q-U, Peace Intelligence

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Hugh Smith is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics, University College (UNSW), Australian Defence Force Academy, New South Wales, and was the Founding Director of the Australian Defence Studies Centre at the Academy. His work below was a pioneering endeavor.

Intelligence and UN Peacekeeping