February 5, 2010 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Annals of the Obama Administration, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Intelligence, International Affairs, Iran, Islam, National Security, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Presidents, Terrorism, War on Terror | 1 Comment
In the waning days of the 1980 presidential campaign, Republican nominee Ronald Reagan used his allotted time in the closing moments of his only debate with President Jimmy Carter to ask a question. It was one of the most effective rhetorical devices in American history.
“Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”
Because most Americans answered a resounding “No” that night, Mr. Reagan was able to pull the line out again four years later, this time as President and against Walter Mondale, who ran a quixotic campaign to oust him. And Americans answered by electing Reagan to a second term.
Over the years, the question about being “better off” has been used to great affect by many politicians, including later aspirants to the White House. It became, in effect, a rhetorical trump card.
Now there is another question in the room—one that was asked, in a manner of speaking, during several recent special elections and will be commonplace this November as all of us go to the polls in the “off-year” ritual. The question is: “Are you safer than you were four years ago?”
It is hard to find anything about President Barack Obama’s first term—at least anything of substance—that can be realistically characterized as successful. And by successful, I mean accomplishing one’s stated goals. Whether it was the healthcare bridge too far, cap-and-trade, or dramatically improving the economy, this administration has simply not delivered on what it promised. Of course, in the area of national security they have tried to make good on pledges, but have found the resistance to every move to be surprising strong.
And one gets the feeling that not only did they not see failure coming in the euphoria of those early halcyon days in charge—but they really don’t have a clue as to where to go from here. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of national security and dealing with the very real threat of Islamist terror. And nowhere are the stakes any higher.
The other day, Leon Panetta, Director of CIA, in concert with other leaders in the national security community, told Congress that a terror attack (the indication being that this would be an attempt of significant magnitude) is likely during the next three to six months. It was also suggested that this warning is based, at least in part, on information gleaned from the man who tried to blow up an American airplane en route to Detroit on Christmas Day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Presumably, this so-called “underwear-bomber” has been cooperating with authorities lately, following the intervention of some of his family from Nigeria, such intervention being prompted by FBI visits to that country.
With its too-sad-to-be-farcical “you-could-have-had-me-at-enemy-combatant” Miranda prolonged delay, this episode is in a real sense a window into the thinking—some would say, lack thereof—of the Obama administration on the whole issue of terror, Islamism, “detainees,” and national security. It seems that there is this naïve insistence on seeing and framing the issues as something nuanced—an almost “shirts versus skins” game—instead of a very grave matter of life and death.
A President is sworn to protect and defend the Constitution and by extension, therefore, those under its cover. The founders and framers did not fashion a document for global governance, nor did they seek to extend its protection beyond “we the people.” But these days we are witnessing the most ambitious attempt ever to broadly interpret its provisions.
On the domestic side, “we” the people is giving way to “for” the people, as those wiser-than-the-rest-of-us seek to “fundamentally transform” (to use Mr. Obama’s words) America. And when it comes to foreign policy and international issues, apparently now this new-improved understanding of our Constitution—one that makes Franklin Roosevelt look like a paleo-conservative in comparison—reads, “they” the people. It covers not only illegal aliens, but also non-U.S. citizen enemy combatants, giving them more rights than any of us would ever receive in some Islamist majority country.
“Are you safer than you were four years ago?”
Iran moves arrogantly and confidently forward to develop the materials and technology to soon become a nuclear power. Just the other day, its President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, talked of delivering a blow to “global arrogance” as that nation marks the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution on February 11.
Sure we protest, but words from a teleprompter don’t make much impact on a man who thinks he gets his ideas directly from Allah. And at any rate—the whole first year of Mr. Obama’s administration and its mea culpa “we like you” overtures to the Islamic world, notwithstanding—there is no evidence that anyone who hated us when George W. Bush was in town, hates us any less now.
In fact, someone in the White House should take a look at something else the mahdaviatist President of Iran said the other day in that same speech:
“If the Islamic Revolution had not occurred, liberalism and Marxism would have crushed all human dignity in their power-seeking and money-grubbing claws. Nothing would have remained of human and spiritual principles.”
Did you see that? The enemy is “liberalism and Marxism.” So as the current administration tries to pursue some kind of rapprochement with Iran and other Islamist nations, while at the same time trying orchestrate a decidedly more liberal agenda domestically—one that smacks of “Marxist” thinking at many turns—something ironic is happening. The new “good guys” who tell us that America is now going be loved more around the world because bad old George Bush and the cranky conservatives are gone, have missed a key plot-point: Islamists hate democratic liberalism—with its socialist vision—even more than they hate militaristic neo-conservatism.
Oops.
Of course, I hope and pray that we are spared any such terror attack this, or any, year. And I pray that there remains a sufficient remnant of discerning men and women in key areas of expertise and responsibility across the land, people who have not bowed the knee to the Baal of liberal statism and diplomatic naïveté, in place to forestall such a disaster.
But I must admit, there seems to be an inexplicable zeitgeist, combining lackadaisical apathy with arrogance that makes me feel anything but safe.
Someone talked to me recently about how, if we are attacked, people will rally around our new president like they did George W. Bush in 2001. I countered that I wasn’t so sure. That was a different time—before we really knew what terrorism meant on these shores. Post game analysis back then revealed so many areas of weakness leading to that dreadful day of terror on Sept. 11.
If such a thing, or anything similar, were to happen these days, I am not sure that those in charge now would get the kind of good will that translates into a political pass—or future.
January 8, 2010 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, History, Intelligence, International Affairs, Islam, National Security, Nixon Administration, Obama administration, Presidential libraries, Presidents, Terrorism, U.S. History, War on Terror, economy | 3 Comments
In the old West, when the boys played poker at the saloon, or wherever, along with the cards, chips, money, and various beverages, the table was also adorned with a knife–one with a buckhorn handle. The knife was moved from place to place, depending on the person dealing. If a player didn’t feel like dealing the cards, he could pass the responsibility to the next guy, along with the knife.
It was called “passing the buck.”
The phrase is, of course, most commonly associated with President Harry Truman–in fact, his desk on display at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, has a famous sign bearing the words: “The Buck Stops Here.” One of his aides, Fred Canfil, had seen the phrase on a desk in El Reno, Oklahoma, and had the sign made for his boss. Interestingly, and largely lost to the legend according to biographer David McCullough, the 33rd President only kept the sign on his Oval Office desk for a short time while in the White House.
But the metaphor stuck.
It has been used by leaders–particularly presidents–ever since as the ultimate way of saying: “I’m in charge, it’s my responsibility.” Most recently, the phrase was brought out of White House mothballs and used by President Barack Obama in remarks about the Christmas Day 2009 foiled Islamist terrorist attack.
It remains to be seen whether or not the latest pronouncement about the proverbial buck will be remembered as Truman-esque, or more like the nervous stammer of Alexander Haig the day President Reagan was shot. I believe the President said the right things the other day–but will he and his administration really follow through, taking steps, making the tough calls, and keeping the issue of Islamist terror on their political radar screen?
A good indicator would be the willingness to call it what it is. We are not just fighting Al Qaeda as some kind of generic syndicate of bad guys, as with The Man From Uncle and “THRUSH” or Maxwell Smart’s “KAOS.” There is no way for us to win over an ideology, while being afraid or hesitant to call it what it is: Islamism.
To my mind, Mr. Obama is still not comfortable in his role as Commander-in-Chief, with its implied responsibilities of protecting the nation from “all enemies, foreign and domestic.” He is now saying many of the right things, but I wonder if his vocabulary and America’s dictionary are in sync? He forms phrases now like “we are at war” – but I can’t help but get the feeling that this is based more on manufactured energy than real passion. Does the President view what happened on Christmas and the whole megilla of security, intelligence, and such as important as, say, the economy, healthcare, and jobs?
In fairness, most presidents bring dreams to the job. Lyndon Johnson wanted to build a Great Society and Richard Nixon wanted to focus on foreign affairs, but both had to contend more than they would have liked with their less-favored part of the domestic-international presidential paradigm. Bill Clinton wanted it all to be about “the economy, stupid.” But the first priority of any president is to keep us safe so we can actually have an economy.
A strong sense of national security is, in itself, a potent economic stimulus.
Only time will tell if the new-found-but-pretty-darn-late war-speak (better: war-whisper) will really be about the buck stopping with the President, or mere words.
After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, President Kennedy faced the press and talked about victory having many “fathers,” but defeat being an “orphan.” He also acknowledged that he was “the responsible officer” in the government. It was, as was Mr. Obama’s recent admission, a statement of the obvious.
But accepting responsibility as a leader does not abrogate systemic culpability.
The old 1970s sitcom, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, had a character named Lou Grant (played by Ed Asner)–an irascible man who ran a newsroom. Mary’s boss once said: “Leadership is the art of delegating blame.” Actually, good leadership is somewhere between taking full blame and delegating it all away. Where there are mistakes there is blame to be found. To miss this is to ignore a vital piece of the puzzle preventing something else bad from happening.
Frankly, what needs to happen throughout the government is for various leaders in key areas to think about letting the buck stay with them for a while. When a president has to say “The Buck Stops Here,” it is at least a tacit acknowledgement that the buck has been aggressively mobile.
I think the buck stops every bit as much with Attorney General Eric Holder, as it does with the President. After all, haven’t we been given the impression that the whole send-the-Gitmo-gangsters-to-New York idea is really his and the President is above it all? Or does that buck make its way to Mr. Obama’s desk, too?
And how about Dennis Blair, our Director of National Security (DNI–one of the dumbest ideas to come out of the Bush administration)? Following Mr. Obama’s speech on Thursday, he issued a statement saying, in part:
The Intelligence Community has made considerable progress in developing collection and analysis capabilities and improving collaboration, but we need to strengthen our ability to stop new tactics such as the efforts of individual suicide terrorists. The threat has evolved, and we need to anticipate new kinds of attacks and improve our ability to stay ahead of them and protect America.
We can and we must outthink, outwork and defeat the enemy’s new ideas. The Intelligence Community will do that as directed by the President, working closely with our nation’s entire national security team.
Really? What has the guy been working on up to now–health care reform?
One of two things has been happening, as clearly indicated by the foiled Christmas Day Islamist terror attack: either subordinates are keeping bad or inconvenient details from the President of the United States, or the information has not, until now, been marked or received with requisite urgency. Whatever the case, heads should roll. Blair’s words are akin to those uttered by an erudition-challenged player after a football game, “Well, we needed to score more points to win.” Duh.
There really is no buck to pass in the Obama administration when it comes to National Security, there is only a hot potato few want to deal with or even acknowledge. Attorney General Holder, Janet Napolitano, and so many others in key roles these days have regularly dismissed or minimized the danger of our times, while forging ahead with the even-more-now absurd sending of Gitmo detainees back to Yemen (6 on December 20th), and making sure that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (pronounced: Abdulmutallab) is told he has the right to remain silent and to the full protection of the American justice system, as opposed to being treated as he should be: as an enemy combatant.
Sure, the President of the United States made a speech and said many of the right things, but what we need to figure out is if what we are really bearing witness to is a dynamic described to reporters by Former Attorney John Mitchell, back in 1969: “Watch what we do, not what we say.”
January 1, 2010 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, History, Intelligence, International Affairs, Islam and the West, National Security, Terrorism, U.S. History, War on Terror | 2 Comments
On December 7, 1941, United States Senator Gerald Nye looked over his notes for a speech he was about to deliver to a packed house in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Nye was a Republican, but part of a progressive element in the GOP and he was no-doubt influenced by the politics of the late Robert M. La Follette. In other words, he was a fiscal liberal in domestic matters and a fierce isolationist when it came to foreign entanglements.
So speaking before a group known informally as the “America Firsters” (sponsored by the America First Committee, of which he was a member) was a piece of cake for him and he knew the lines that would draw the biggest applause. He only wished his hero could be there: Charles A. Lindbergh.
These men were part of a highly popular movement in those days, this success being reflected in Gallup Polls showing that less than a quarter of Americans favored entering the fires of war then engulfing much of the world. This group was largely anti-Semitic (and therefore, pro-German), and was joined by other luminaries of the day, including: flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker and movie actress, Lillian Gish.
During the first days of the last month of that tense year, their present preoccupation was the potential of war with Japan. To them, this was merely an excuse to enter the war in Europe through a back door. Therefore, the headline of their then-very-popular tabloid, the America First Bulletin, on December 6, 1941 was: “BLAME FOR RIFT WITH JAPAN RESTS ON ADMINISTRATION.”
After a glowing introduction, followed by furious applause, Nye, the Senator from North Dakota, plunged into his theme. But before he had gotten very far, he noticed someone in his peripheral vision approaching him from the stage wing bearing a piece of paper. He paused and read the note, which informed him of the breaking news about a Japanese attack on our fleet at Pearl Harbor.
Buzz kill.
After fumbling and hemming and hawing for a moment he mumbled: “I can’t somehow believe this…” – and then proceeded to finish his speech. Telling the crowd about what the note said, the Senator ventured his own take, which included the predictable: “We have been maneuvered into this by the President,” and the old reliable: “This was just what Britain had planned for us.”
A few days later, on December 11th, members of the America First Committee met in Chicago and decided to disband. Lindbergh didn’t attend, but sent a telegram begging them not to go out of business. He was now isolated himself, though – by his own ignorant bias.
Pearl Harbor was many things: an infamous attack, an example of unspeakable treachery, a telling moment of vulnerable denial, but ultimately it was the one thing the Japanese had not counted on – a wake-up call.
Literally overnight, opinions changed and so did the course of history, because in moments of great peril, it is foolish, immoral, and ignorant to hit the snooze button when the alarm rings.
September 11, 2001 was a wake-up call, one that kept us vigilant for a period of time roughly equivalent to the length of our involvement in World War II. We had been attacked, we knew who the enemy was, and we were resolved to find and annihilate him.
But that was then.
Some understandably suggest these days that we are in a “pre-Sept. 11” mindset. This is, of course, somewhat true, but the cliché doesn’t tell the whole story. Because before that dreadful day when the world changed forever – or as so many of us thought – there had been other ominous moments and indications of terror to come. The bombing of the USS Cole and attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, for example. However, these obvious acts of war were preceded by one on our very soil – the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. And the very mistakes we made following that attack (and those that followed before Sept. 11, 2001) we seem to be determined to make again.
History rhymes one more time.
The day after – September 12, 2001 – Daniel Pipes, director of The Middle East Forum, wrote passionately about how, though the moral blame for what happened fell upon those who planned and carried out the attacks, the tactical blame actually fell on the U.S. government, “which has grievously failed in its topmost duty to protect American citizens from harm.” His list of mistakes back then included:
• Seeing terrorism as a crime
• Relying too much on electronic intelligence
• Not understanding the hate-America mentality
• Ignoring the terrorist infrastructure in this country
Can anyone with a brain possible grade our efforts in these areas, now more than eight years later, as anything higher than, say, a D+? Bear in mind that self-given marks don’t count and in matters of life and death there is no grading on a curve. It’s the same principle that says “almost” only works in horseshoes or hand grenades.
We are not really just in a “Pre-Sept.11th” mindset, we are actually approaching current Islamism-driven horror in ways reminiscent of how we did things in the 1990s.
How’s that working for you?
December 24, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Afghanistan, Cold War, History, Intelligence, International Affairs, North Korea, Russia, U.S. History, Vietnam | 1 Comment
On Christmas day 20 years ago, Nicolae Ceausescu – long time dictator of Romania – was, along with his wife Elena, executed by firing squad just days after fleeing Bucharest, while his tyrannical regime unraveled before the eyes of a watching world. His demise and the surrounding events are etched in the memory of those of us who watched it all unfold via various news reports.
The look on the once strong-man’s face as a massive crowd began to boo during a speech on December 21st, was one of the defining moments of the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. The scene of his helicopter flying him out of the city and his preoccupation during the interim with looking at his watch (which had been equipped with a tracking device for his security people, the gadget – unbeknownst to him – having been disabled by his captors) – these events moved with breakneck speed two decades ago this week.
And while much of the world rekindled almost forgotten traditions of faith and family, due to fresh-found freedom that Christmas of 1989, many Americans celebrated with televisions left on (volume muted), so as not to miss a story that was so compelling.
The Cold War was, in fact, ending.
It was a fitting season of the year for yet another piece of compelling evidence that the schemes of Marx, Lenin, and so many others, were indeed bankrupt and bore the fruit not of promised utopia, but rather tyrannical horror. One reason for this calendar-driven appropriateness was the irony that so many important Cold War stories had Christmas season components.
The French, following a World War II exile from their imperial hegemony in Indochina, landed there once again just before Christmas in 1945. That didn’t work out so well for them in the long run. Come to think of it, it didn’t help us much either.
Just in time for Christmas in 1968, and as astronauts prepared to send a Biblical message of peace to all of us on “the good earth,” 82 Americans were rejoicing in their freedom, though with bodies still racked by torture-produced pain. They had been “guests” of the “Democratic” People’s Republic of Korea for about 11 months. The men of the USS Pueblo had been taken captive that previous January and were hostages to Cold War politics and diplomacy. I had a conversation a while back with Harry Iredale, whose cover on the Pueblo (an intelligence gathering vessel) was his work as an oceanographer. He talked to me in great detail about the seizure of the ship and their brutal treatment.
On Christmas Eve, 1979, the Soviets invaded a place called Afghanistan, to prop up a faltering Communist regime in that neighboring nation. That didn’t work out for them, either – or again for that matter – for us. Paraphrasing Mark Twain’s quote, history may not repeat itself, but it surely rhymes.
A couple of Christmases later, in 1981, the Polish government was enforcing martial law, trying to break the back of something called Solidarity. That movement was reminiscent of what had happened in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, and with the same result – a Soviet inspired crackdown. But there was something different about what was going on in Poland. Maybe, many thought, this was the beginning of something bigger, something that might morph into real freedom.
Eight years later, the Romanian despot was dead, the Berlin Wall was becoming a lengthy pile of stone-pocked dust, and the Soviet system was on the ropes, first trying to reinvent itself; then conceding defeat with barely a whimper. And on Christmas Day in 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as President of the USSR, and the hammer and sickle flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time.
Yes, there are a lot of Cold War stories that coincide with the season that speaks of peace on earth and good will toward men.
This Christmas there is another such story. Though the Cold War is now a too-distant memory in light of all that has transpired since in our ever-dangerous world, there is a vital effort underway to ensure that the period from 1945-1991 is never ignominiously relegated to the ash heap of history.
The Cold War Museum began many years ago with the vision of Gary Powers. You might recognize him through his full name: Francis Gary Powers, Jr. Of course, students of the Cold War, and certainly anyone who lived through it, remember that Gary’s father, Francis Gary Powers, was flying one of our U-2 Spy planes on May 1, 1960, only to be shot down over Soviet territory. He became a prisoner, sometimes pawn, and an iconic and brave figure from that era.
In a day and age when most Americans would think of U-2 as referring to an Irish rock band, there was a time when the men who piloted those magnificent planes played a vital role in national and international security. For example, we would have found out far too late in the game about missiles in Cuba in 1962, without the reconnaissance photos taken from a U-2 aircraft.
Founded in 1996, the Cold War Museum is a very real memorial to honor Cold War Veterans and preserve the period’s history. For years, a mobile exhibit has traveled around the country and world displaying historical artifacts (more than $3,000,000 worth), including some from the Berlin Airlift, U-2 Incident, Cuban Missile Crisis, USS Liberty, USS Pueblo, and Space Race. In addition, the museum has over $500,000 worth of Soviet, East German, and former Eastern Bloc flags, banners, and uniforms.
After many years of tireless effort and various offers and negotiations, Powers recently announced the acquisition of a permanent home for the Cold War Museum at Vint Hill in Northern Virginia. The significance of this site selection was highlighted by Mr. Edwin “Ike” Broaddus, Chairman for Vint Hill Economic Development Authority:
We are pleased to offer The Cold War Museum a home. It is highly appropriate for the museum to locate at Vint Hill, the former Vint Hill Farms Station used during the Cold War, by the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the US Army to safeguard the United States against a surprise nuclear attack.
Vint Hill is part of The Journey Through Hallowed Ground national heritage area and in close proximity to the Manassas National Battlefield Park, the National Museum of the Marine Corps and the historic towns of Leesburg, Manassas and Warrenton, Virginia, existing major tourist destinations.
The Cold War Museum is a 501c3 charity, a Smithsonian affiliate, and worthy recipient of any support the public may be inclined to offer during this season of giving. This new home for the museum is, indeed, a Christmas gift to our nation’s efforts to remind and remember.
The museum’s board of directors includes some storied names reminiscent of that period in history, for example: Sergei Khrushchev (son of Nikita Krushchev), David Eisenhower (grandson of the 34th President of the United States and son in law of the 37th President), and Thomas C. Reed (Former Secretary of the Air Force).
As for Gary, he has interesting plans for 2010, involving a trip to Russia marking the 50th anniversary of the shooting down of his father’s plane. In fact, he is organizing a tour for those who might be interested (May 1-9, 2010), complete with a visit to the prison where his father (who died in 1977) was held for 21 months until his release in exchange for Soviet spy, Rudolf Abel.
As for the end of 2009, it is worthy of note that this has also been the 60th anniversary of the writing of 1984, by George Orwell, as well as the 25th anniversary of the year in the once-ominous title, one that was supposed to be synonymous with totalitarian, “Big-Brother-is-watching” government.
November 21, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Cuba, Intelligence, National Security | Leave a Comment
Some weeks ago I wrote here about W. Kendall Myers, the State Department employee who, for nearly thirty years, spied for Cuban intelligence in this country, all the while appearing to his friends and neighbors (the latter including some retired “spooks”) to be no more than just another amiable, slightly scatterbrained scion of an old Washington family – in his case, the Grosvenors, some of whom played major roles in founding the National Geographical Society.
Yesterday, Myers, the great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell, appeared in Federal court and pleaded guilty to plotting to commit espionage and to wire fraud. At the same tim his wife Gwendolyn pleaded guilty to plotting to gather and transmit national defense information. Under the agreement reached between her attorneys and the prosecution, she will serve six to seven and a half years in prison.
The couple also agreed to be fully debriefed by investigators about the specifics of their spying, and Myers agreed to forfeit all of the $1.74 million he earned as a State Department employee. In lieu of that sum, the couple agreed to turn over all their financial assets to the government, including the 37-foot yacht, docked in Annapolis, in which they once hoped, one day, to sail off to Havana to spend their sunset years.
But W. Kendall Myers will not be enjoying the blissful sunshine of Cuban beaches, nor the occasional phone call from Fidel Castro (who was so appreciative of the Myers’s work that he cleared a few hours in his schedule to meet them when they made their way to Havana in the 1990s). Instead, for what he did, he will receive the mandatory sentence – life imprisonment. And since he is 72, it really is life – the penalty imposed for betraying the trust of a nation’s secrets.
September 26, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Cuba, Intelligence, National Security, News media | Leave a Comment
In early June of this year readers of Washington’s two dailies woke up to the news of the arrest of a much-liked, sophisticated, rather affluent local couple. W[alter] Kendall Myers, when FBI agents put the cuffs on him, was 72 years old; a great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell and scion of the Grosvenor family that guided National Geographic magazine for a century; and a former high official at the State Department and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University’s ultra-prestigious School of Advanced International Studies. His wife, Gwenolyn Steingraber Myers, was a 71-year-old South Dakotan who had come to Washington as an aide to Senator James Abourezk in the 1970s and, in recent years, had been working at Riggs Bank and at a bookstore in DC’s Cleveland Park neighborhood. The couple lived in an elegant co-op at the Westchester on Cathedral Avenue, and, in 2007, acquired a 37-foot, state-of-the-art yacht which they named Helene. Both had reached retirement age, and, like many well-off couples in their sunset years, were just counting down the days until they could board their boat and head south for good.
Except in their case, they weren’t planning to dock their yacht in Boca Raton or Jupiter, or even Key West, and go looking for a comfortable little house. They meant to go all the way to Havana, to the nation for whose spy agency they had worked for nearly thirty years. It was for espionage that they were arrested by the FBI this summer.
At the time of the Myerses’s arrest, the Washington Post and the Washington Times published lengthy articles. The Post’s writing about the couple noted that in the mid-1970s, not long before meeting his Gwen, Kendall Myers, who had recently divorced his first wife and had trouble making his child-support payments, had drunkenly slammed his car into another vehicle one Thanksgiving Eve and that a teenage girl, Susan Slattery, who was in the other vehicle, died as a result, for which he received three years’s unsupervised probation. The tone of the quotes from Myers’s friends suggested that this unfortunate incident had somehow unsettled an otherwise upstanding citizen and had sent him down the path to espionage.
Ah, if only Alger Hiss had friends like that – or, for that matter, could have used something like that for an excuse. The new issue of Washingtonian magazine features a lengthy article by Toby Harnden, the US correspondent for London’s Daily Telegraph, which presents by far the most complete picture of the Myerses and their misdeeds set down on paper or cyberspace to date. (At this point the article is not online, so readers are urged to proceed to their nearest bookstore and newsstand and look for the October Washingtonian among the “city” magazines.)
Like any well-written account of the spy world, the article is thoroughly fascinating, from beginning to end. Among its most remarkable passages is one describing the other residents of the Westchester. As it happens, several of the Myerses’s neighbors, according to one resident, were or are in the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency – and an upstairs neighbor is an FBI agent. Not one of these neighbors remotely guessed that the tall, bespectacled, well-mannered, bright but rather glib Foreign Service officer in their midst had actually spent decades, with his wife, hunched over a Sony radio purchased with Cuban money, carefully deciphering messages from those “numbers stations” that pop up around the shortwave dial. None of them knew that a man who once had angled to be George W. Bush’s special envoy to Northern Ireland had, in 1995, spent four full hours with a grateful Fidel Castro. None of them knew that two agents working to the detriment of American national security were walking, every day, down the hallways where a former Westchester resident, Barry Goldwater, had once walked.
Instead, it was up to diligent FBI agents to listen to the broadcasts, carefully narrow lists of suspects, and look for clues. How about this one: the Cubans’s code name for Kendall Myers was “Agent 202″ – the DC area code. How many Scoobysnacks would the Great Dane need to puzzle that one out? And Gwen Myers’s handle was “Agent 123.” Impressive, no?
Probably the most arresting passage in Harnden’s article is the one describing how the Myerses were recruited to work for Cuba. They were not approached in some distant land which has diplomatic relations with the Castro government. They were not approached by someone who’d managed to go under deep cover in Little Miami and make his or her way up north. Rather, they were approached by a Castro lieutenant of long standing, who’d fought in the mountains with Fidel, Raul and Che, by the name of Carlos Ciano – an operative at the UN’s Cuban mission in New York, who, thanks to the Carter Administration’s conciliatory attitude toward the island nation’s diplomats, was moving completely at will between Manhattan and Washington in the late 1970s, meeting and “greeting” leading policymakers at various informal brunches and parties sponsored by sympathetic Capitol Hill staffers and others. It was at one of these that Ciano met Kendall and Gwen Myers.
Gwen Myers, as explained in the article, had a thoroughly left-wing background – one of her sons, according to a South Dakota neighbor, made no bones about being, literally, a card-carrying Communist – and it apparently was through her that Kendall Myers took the fateful step from being a liberal State functionary, like thousands who never give a thought to betraying their country, to becoming an operative for Cuba.(The resemblance to the influence that Priscilla Hiss’s views had on Alger in the early years of their marriage, as described in such books as Allen Weinstein’s Perjury and Sam Tanenhaus’s Whittaker Chambers, is quite striking.) It’s difficult to overstate the implications of all this as the Obama White House and various Democrats on Capitol Hill assure us that it’s time to let old quarrels with Havana be patched up.
Harnden also looks into the auto accident which is said to have had such a troubling psychological effect on Kendall Myers. It turns out that, for a man of almost forty, he handled the whole matter as if he were a particularly spoiled seventeen-year-old. He sent Susan Slattery’s family a letter that, although missing an apology, concluded: “It is a tragedy for me too.” During a recess in the civil case brought against him by her family, he told her father: “You people can’t touch me.” Harnden then wryly quotes a character in a David Ignatius novel, a CIA psychiatrist: “Treason is the ultimate mid-life crisis.” Be that as it may, Kendall and Gwen Myers appear set to conclude their lives in prison.
The nuttiest quote in the article comes from James Abourezk. The former Senator was the first person Gwen Myers called after her arrest, and he states: “If we had ended the embargo years ago, there would have been no spying and none of this stuff would have happened. To me, if the Cubans are spying, it would be a defensive thing.” Really?
There’s a lot more of interest in the article – the description of Kendall Myers’s deep Anglophilia, especially his fascination with those model modern Englishmen Burgess, Maclean, and Philby; the fact that his PhD thesis was a contrarian defense of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy; and a lot more. All in all, this is a fine, must-read work of journalism. Don’t miss it.
September 11, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Healthcare, History, Intelligence, National Security, Terrorism, U.S. History, War on Terror | Leave a Comment
By the autumn of 1944, and in the wake of the very successful landings in Normandy the previous June, Allied troops and commanders in the field, and civilian authorities in Washington, D.C. and London, were confident of victory in Europe.
It was just a matter of time.
In fact, as our forces moved like a juggernaut across France and into Belgium en route to the Rhine and Germany itself, the Nazis were in full-scale retreat, ceding back territory they had aggressively devoured four years earlier. There was even some talk – and it was surely well received – that some of our boys might be home by Christmas. People had been crooning about it in a popular song for more than a year.
But all that changed when the Germans launched a massive, unexpected winter offensive that December, and a fierce conflict known famously to us as the Battle of the Bulge disabused the Allies of the notion of an expeditious victory. The war was by no means over and the enemy not at all vanquished. This brings to mind a musing from the mind of the great philosopher Yogi Berra, when he said: “It aint over til it’s over!”
You see, while many were prematurely preoccupied with postwar dreams, the good guys were given a brutal, bloody, and costly reminder that the ravages of war are ever possible until an enemy has actually been completely defeated. Eight years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, it was pretty easy for Americans to remember what had happened without fear, because the threat was no longer there.
Eight years after the attacks on Sept. 11th, we have no such luxury. We must remember with resolve. We must remember through vigilance.
Have you ever watched a movie where the bad guy gets away at the end or enough loose ends are left hanging that you just know the producers are going to make a sequel? Well, our enemies have been longing for just that. Whether or not they can do it, or will, is, of course, a fair and open question. But for anyone to suggest that such a thing can never happen again is not only ludicrous; it is perilous.
I certainly think that this eighth anniversary of that horrific day in 2001 should be remembered – but not as a long ago, of a different time and place, event. It must be remembered in the way a Marine on Guadalcanal would have remembered Pearl Harbor in late 1942, or as an Army Ranger would have while scaling the cliff at Ponte Du Hoc, two years later.
It’s a holy day in the sense of bearing witness to the terrible loss of life and the noble and heroic actions of so many in their diligent response. But there should be a fervency attached to it all. The armor of war should not be put away abroad, nor should the home front be lulled into ominous complacency by political distractions or naïve pronouncements.
The threat is still there. It will not go away by ignoring it anymore than a cancer in the body will. It will not go away by giving it a new name – or no name. It will not go away because we have smarter people in charge who supposedly never overreact to crises and keep their heads when all others are losing theirs.
The threat is still there in spite of the fact that there is a systematic undermining of our intelligence capacities in the nation, born of a petty and cynical desire for political gain. We are tying the hands of people who are charged with helping to keep us safe.
The chief role of government is to protect us and keep us free. Instead we live in a time when all the energy in the executive and legislative branches seems to be directed at creating a society of dependent sheep. We’ll be fed, burped, bandaged, and entertained – until we wake up one day and face the sad news that something bad has happened again via the hands of an enemy we have ignored for too long.
There is still a war on. It is a terror war, driven by Islamism – a pernicious ideology that uses religion as a pretext for world domination. There are very bad people out there – and here at home; people who despise us, our constitution, and our way of life. They must smile and roll their eyes as they watch us try to wrestle with issues such as healthcare reform; anything just as long as we don’t look too closely at what they’re doing.
But we hear less and less about it. Oh, occasionally a great communicator makes an offhand remark related to such a conflict, but usually only in the context of reminding us how sad it is to have wasted all that money “over there” when we could have used it to make everyone healthy and happy here at home.
In a time of war, you don’t make your side safe by marginalizing the conflict, minimizing the threat, or demoralizing those who are charged with crucial responsibilities.
In the century before the birth of Jesus Christ, a Syrian man named Publilius Syrus, who became popular in the days of Julius Caesar as a mime and actor, was known for his maxims and many survive to this day. Among the best is this:
“He is most free from danger, who, even when safe, is on his guard.”
In July of 1927, the New York Yankees were on the road and well on their way to one of the greatest seasons ever experienced by a baseball team. The biggest crowd drawn that month at their famous stadium, however, had nothing to do with baseball. It was the scene of a boxing match between two contenders for the heavyweight title: Jack Dempsey and Jack Sharkey.
Dempsey, of course, had already been a legendary champ, only beaten the year before by savvy boxer and bookworm, Gene Tunney – the smartest guy ever to hold the title. This fight was to see who would face Tunney next. And by all accounts Sharkey took the battle to Dempsey for several rounds, cutting him up and beating him to the punch.
So Dempsey went to work on the body and some of the punches strayed low – Okay several of the punches were south of the border. And at one point Sharkey turned to the referee to complain. At that moment, while Sharkey was looking at the official, Dempsey hit him with what he later referred to as the best punch he’d ever thrown.
It was over.
When in a fight, never drop your guard.
July 17, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, History, Intelligence, National Security, Presidents, Terrorism, U.S. History, War on Terror, economy | 4 Comments
The current climate of suspicion, accusation, and posturing surrounding the relationship between various entities in our intelligence communities and two of three branches of the federal government should be a source of grave concern to Americans. While games are being played, we must ask: Are we safer today than we were two years ago, or four, or eight?
There are many indications that good people, who have been doing good – though sometimes necessarily unseemly – work, are becoming increasingly frustrated with the politicization of their jobs and careers. It’s witch-hunting season on Capitol Hill.
A few weeks ago, former Central Intelligence Agency Director, General Michael V. Hayden, wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post entitled, Defenders At Risk. He decried a “troubling reality. A whole swath of intelligence professionals – the best we had, the ones we threw at the al-Qaeda challenge when the nation was in extremis – are suffering for their sacrifice, being held up to recrimination for many decisions that were never wholly theirs and about which there was little protest when we all believed we were in danger.”
That last phrase is haunting: “when we all believed we were in danger.”
Are we acting like a nation in danger? Well, when it comes to economics, yes we are. With a mind-boggling willingness to suspend rational thought and reason, not to mention our Constitution to fix things, we are all czared-up. The American economy is being reinvented and may one day soon become something even Fidel Castro could admire, should he live so long. Of course, the new super-important-political-potentates are virtually unaccountable to the same people who spend an inordinate amount of time these days insisting on knowing everything about everything from those who must, by the nature of their work, operate in the shadows.
But it’s the economy and yes, we are stupid.
In the 1930s, Josef Stalin conducted a paranoiac purge that impacted all segments of Soviet society, notably the military. Having killed off most of his best generals and military minds, he and his nation paid the price in the early years of World War II. He bought time with his pact with Hitler in 1939, but was still nearly defeated two years later at the beginning of the Nazi invasion of his country. Some of those dead, but smart and experienced generals might have helped old Uncle Joe.
Are we on the verge of a “soft” purge in our intelligence and national security communities? Are beginning to lose people – citizens who have sacrificed and served with excellence – people we would certainly need if, God forbid, we found ourselves dealing with a major terrorist offensive here at home?
The answer is yes.
When it comes to the economy we will do virtually anything to get “the best and the brightest” into key posts because they are indispensable. But are we playing by the same rules when it comes to national security? The answer to that one is no.
All indications are that morale is low – and understandably so – in the intelligence and national security communities. Why? Likely, it’s because we have allowed for the polarizing stigmatization of these patriots and their noble work, driven by misguided and malicious self-righteousness.
The heirs to “the best and the brightest” of the 1960s are now running things. The torch has been passed to a new generation of experts who want to remake America in their image. One result may be that the most competent and experienced people, those who have been in often-dangerous trenches keeping us safe and free, may be squeezed out feeling largely unappreciated and woefully disrespected.
Ironically, and largely overlooked by a nation increasingly disconnected from its history, the way our federal government is working these days with respect to the fundamental issues of the economy and national security is completely at odds with how things were done back at the beginning.
Early on, this nation was a place for people to fulfill dreams and live lives without a nanny-state. Our third president, Thomas Jefferson, articulated the spirit of that age during his first inaugural when he said: “A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned – this is the sum of good government.”
When it comes to national security however, more than two centuries ago men of vision understood the concept of danger. Why do you think it was that when those guys came up with oaths of office for various leadership roles they tended to talk about “all enemies, foreign and domestic?” It’s because there were then – as there are now – people who just don’t get us and who would really like to hurt us.
During the American Revolution, John Jay – later of Federalist Papers fame – wrote to Robert Morris (often referred to as “the financier of the revolution”): “Communicate no other intelligence to Congress at large than what may be necessary to promote the common weal [well-being], not to gratify the curiosity of individuals.”
In fact, in The Federalist, No. 64, Jay argued: “There are cases where the most useful intelligence may be obtained, if the persons possessing it can be relieved from apprehensions of discovery. Those apprehensions will operate on those persons whether they are actuated by mercenary or friendly motives; and there doubtless are many of both descriptions who would rely on the secrecy of the President, and would not confide in that of the Senate, and still less in that of a largely popular assembly.”
These days that last phrase might read: “a largely un-popular assembly.”
Now, I want to make an observation. I may be quite wrong on this, but stay with me anyway. While all the punching and counterpunching is going on between Congress and the intelligence communities, President Obama has been sending mixed signals. He certainly wants to please those who put him where he is, and his campaign promises with respect to national security issues were pretty clear.
But since taking office, his rhetoric has toned down, at least a bit. And there is no doubt that he has shown some willingness to act counter to what he said while running for office. Gitmo’s in; Gitmo’s out. We’ll release the photos; no we won’t. Shifting gears is part of par-for-the-course-political-speak in Washington, but logic suggests something else may be involved.
Why would a man who was elected on a platform that was decidedly critical of the outgoing president’s intelligence and national security record ever be tempted to change his mind and act contrary to the will of his core constituencies?
There is only one logical answer: Because he has since learned some things that have changed his mind. Things he didn’t know while he was running for office. Details he didn’t have.
Additional facts tend to influence subsequent behavior. There is no other conclusion to be drawn from Mr. Obama’s “softening” on some once-ridiculed Bush administration policies and practices. The man now knows what he did not know before. How he deals with the stuff he now knows and how he responds to political pressure from those who got him elected in the first place will define his presidency and impact us all.
It would be better for the economy and for our actual physical safety if those running the show these days would read their American history and learn from the founders. Let people live their lives in freedom without being tortured with excessive taxation and tyrannical statist intrusion. And let those who have been tasked with keeping America safe alone to do their honorable work – without having to have a lawyer on speed dial.
I write this from a conservative perspective, but even a liberal writer such as Evan Thomas, editor of Newsweek, can make the point. He said in February of 2004, on a local Washington, D.C. television show:
“I really fear these investigations, if they turn into witch-hunts. The worst things that can happen is a demoralized CIA that’s back on its heels, that thinks everybody is against them, that they have to hire lawyers [and] testify before Congress. If you’re constantly pulling up the flowers to see if they’re growing, you could do more harm than good.”
July 14, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Intelligence, National Archives | Leave a Comment
Liz Cheney vs. Eugene Robinson:
June 29, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Intelligence, International Affairs, Iran | 1 Comment
Gabriel Schoenfield writing at The Wall Street Journal wants the CIA to get back in the business of covert support and subsidies for parties who want to reduce tensions with the United States:
In the late 1940s through the late 1950s, the U.S. faced similar problems in various locales around the world. One of them was Italy, where there was a very real danger that the highly organized Italian Communist Party — benefiting from huge covert subsidies from the Kremlin — would come to power via the ballot box. Soviet funds had enabled that party to build a dense network of paid organizers that operated in every region and created front groups in every sector of society, from farmers to veterans to students.
The prospect of Italy becoming the first country in Europe to fall to Communism via subversion rather than direct force of Soviet arms was not, at the height of the Cold War, something the U.S. could abide. So the CIA was instructed, first by Harry Truman and then by Dwight Eisenhower, to stop it. It was the challenge presented by Italy’s vulnerability in its 1948 election that prompted the fledgling spy agency to create its Office of Policy Coordination. The banal-sounding name was a cover for what was an aggressive tool of covert political propaganda and paramilitary operations.
Over the course of the 1950s, the CIA secretly funneled money to forces in Italy’s political center. This enabled democratically oriented parties to match the Italian Communist Party activist for activist. When revealed years later, the policy was subjected to scathing criticism. But it had worked. Fragile Italy remained democratic in the 1950s and is a stable democracy today.
Harsh criticism of such operations — beginning in the 1970s when all the CIA’s secrets spilled out — is what prompted the U.S. to dismantle its capabilities in covert political action. Interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, legions of agency critics said, was both immoral and illegal.
As a matter of law, the critics are right. Such covert action is indeed illegal. But legality is beside the point. Espionage is by definition illegal and yet all countries engage in it. This is what the Soviet Union did in Italy, and it is what Iran, by organizing terrorist structures in the Middle East, Europe and elsewhere, has been doing intensively for 30 years.
As for the moral issues involved in covert operations, they are the standard ones of balancing means and ends. Self-defense is the basic right of every state; open warfare is certainly permitted to uphold it. Covert warfare, so long as it is similarly defensive, is no different. Yet throughout our history, a higher moralism has periodically come along and led us to shun intelligence operations, as when Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson famously declared that “gentlemen do not read other gentlemen’s mail.” Stimson then shuttered his department’s code-breaking operation just as terrible storms were beginning to gather across both the Atlantic and the Pacific.
Today, as a breaking point in the Islamic Republic appears to recede from view as a result of brutal violence, the U.S. appears utterly powerless to influence the course of events. Yet how much better off both Iran and the world would be if the CIA, operating covertly through local friendly forces, could have helped, say, to spark a general strike to topple the ruthless regime of the ayatollahs.
May 19, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Bush Administration, Congress, Domestic issues, Intelligence, National Security, Obama administration, War on Terror | Leave a Comment
James Kirchick’s provocative lede in his piece —“Is Nancy Pelosi a liar or a hypocrite?”— on today’s Politico pretty much tells the story that follows:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accomplished two unusual feats last week: She got the head of the CIA to call her a liar, and she implicated herself in what her left-wing base must, by dint of its own contrived logic, consider a war crime.
And today in “The Swamp,” Mark Silva reports a new CNN Opinion Research Corp. Poll that can’t have gone down too well in the Speaker’s Office:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has taken a fall in public opinion, according to a new CNN Opinion Research Corp. poll showing that nearly half of all Americans surveyed do not approve of the way the California Democrat is handling her job as speaker of the House.
The newest results come from a survey taken after the speaker accused the CIA of misleading her about the interrogation tactics that were being used on suspected terrorists several years ago. The CIA maintains that it briefed Pelosi on water-boarding and other tactics in September 2002, but the speaker maintains she was not told waterboarding was being used then. House Republican Leader John Boehner, siding with the CIA on the credibility question, accuses Pelosi of changing stories.
In the May 14-17 survey, just 39 percent said they approve of the job that Pelosi is performing as speaker and 48 percent said they disapprove. Only 12 percent voiced no view. In January, 51 percent had said they approved of the speaker’s performance and just 22 percent voiced disapproval.
And in his column today, Rich Lowry examines the tortuous logic of the Speaker’s position (or at least of one of her several positions) on this subject:
For Pelosi’s account to be accurate, the CIA must have engaged in one of the most baroque and ineffectual conspiracies in the history of Washington. Remember: Pelosi claims that the CIA lied to her in a September 2002 classified briefing and told her that it hadn’t waterboarded high-level al Qaeda detainee Abu Zubaydah. To support her version, Pelosi needs to stack implausibility on top of implausibility in a precarious Jenga tower of self-justification.
The CIA must have convinced Porter Goss, the Republican congressman (and subsequent CIA director) who was present at the 2002 briefing, to lie and pronounce himself “slack-jawed” at Pelosi’s account. It must have forged the “contemporaneous records” CIA Director Leon Panetta has cited that show Pelosi was told of the waterboarding. It must have either pulled the wool over Panetta’s eyes or enlisted the active engagement of the Obama nominee in a monstrous machinery of deception.
May 1, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Ethics, History, Intelligence, News media, Obama administration, Republican Party, Terrorism, UK Politics, War on Terror | 3 Comments
It was some enchanted event. While Dr. Seuss-like journalists lobbed sophomoric softballs President Obama’s way last Wednesday night, Mr. I-Never-Met-A-Teleprompter-I-Didn’t-Need managed to unintentionally juxtapose two polarizing issues in an ironic and upside down way. He was right about what he said. But answer “B” better fits question “A,” and vice versa.
After answering the predictable torture question: “I would not torture in a jail; I would not torture with a pail,” the president later was asked about the issue of abortion. He gave what could only be called a “tortured” response (pun intended). He spoke of how those on the pro-choice side of the issue “make a mistake when they – if they suggest – and I don’t want to create straw men here, but I think there are some who suggest that this is simply an issue about women’s freedom and there’s (sic) no other considerations.” He went on to describe the matter as “an issue people have to wrestle with” and that it is a “moral issue and an ethical issue.”
Or it might be called a case of selective righteousness.
He’s clear cut and dogmatic on the correctness of his view about not using “enhanced interrogation techniques” even in circumstances that might obtain life saving information from really, really bad people. But he’s “aw-shucks-it’s-a-real-toughie” about ending the life of the most innocent and precious.
He’s got his upside downs all mixed up.
As he talked about the torture issue, President Obama waxed reflective and cited an article he had recently read quoting Winston Churchill during the ferocity of the blitz as saying, “We don’t torture.” The president suggested that “Churchill understood – you start taking shortcuts, over time, that corrodes what’s – what’s best in people. It corrodes the character of a country.”
“Well” – as Ronald Reagan might say while flashing his contagious grin – “There you go again, Mr. President.” Articles and blogs can make good reading (this one, for example), but I suggest that Mr. Obama might be better off spending some time with an actual full-length biography of the rotund Briton. Presumably he’d have to dispatch an aid to a bookstore for such a volume. Likely all Churchill references in the White House during his predecessor’s administration have been sent back to London in a crate marked, “Churchill Bust and Books – Yes, We Don’t Need.”
You see, while Mr. Churchill may have uttered a choice opinion or two on torture, he was known to change his mind on occasion (even his party). He also could wrap the truth in a riddle or enigma. Bear in mind that he was the guy who said famously, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” The kind of war being waged in the 1940s was vastly different from our current experience. In other words, ticking time bomb analogies don’t really work when looking at back then. The bombs were always ticking – and falling. Duh.
Yet, there is evidence that, in fact, torture did go on as part of the British World War Two effort. There is the story, for example, of The London Cage, a special operation run by MI19 (they were tasked with getting vital information from prisoners of war), housed at the posh Kensington Palace Gardens. Written reports based on information in the National Archives across the pond tell of more than 3,500 men being “processed” through the highly secretive “torture center,” even while Churchill was opining against torture.
How intense were interrogations in the “cage?” One written complaint found in the archives – from a German journalist who had also spent sometime under Gestapo “supervision” – talked about how much better he was treated by the German police. Do the math.
What is interesting though, is that Winston Churchill was the consummate warrior who regularly expressed a willingness to do what was needed to win a battle or war. Another example of his “whatever it takes” approach was when he, filled with fear that the Germans were working on a biological weapon, tried to persuade Uncle Sam to develop an extensive germ warfare program in 1942.
Churchill also contemplated the idea of trying to bring the war to an end in 1944 via bombs that would release anthrax, only to be disabused of the notion by his generals. And, of course, there is the strange case of Rudolph Hess, Hitler’s crony, who jumped out of a plane over Scotland on a mysterious mission, only to be rebuffed by the Prime Minister who quipped, “Hess or no Hess, I’m going to watch the Marx Brothers.”
How cool was he?
Later though, Churchill – who desired to keep Hess’ presence and purpose away from a surprisingly powerful “peace party” – one that sought to oust him from 10 Downing Street – had Hess locked up for the duration of the war. Think: Gitmo for one.
Therefore, Mr. Obama quoting Winston Churchill to try to bolster his argument is akin to George W. Bush citing Ward Churchill to defend his record.
As Charles Krauthammer writes, the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” – while certainly something that makes all decent people uncomfortable – can and should be permissible under two narrowly specific circumstances: the proverbial “ticking bomb,” and to glean information that will save lives. To take this option off the table is at best naïve and at worst foolish. At any rate, whatever Churchill said about torture, does anyone at all acquainted with the history of those days really believe he meant it – or that his enemies believed him?
President Obama has it all backwards. The taking of innocent human life via abortion should be the black and white moral issue that helps define national righteousness. It’s torture that should be “rare, but legal.” This would make for a better and safer world.
January 16, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, Cuba, George W. Bush, Intelligence, Nixon Administration figures, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate | 4 Comments
The website of the Washington Post yesterday featured an online chat between assorted websurfers from around the world and an author trying to promote his new book. That, in itself, is unsurprising; the Post hosts such a chat once or twice nearly every week. However, it is downright startling when the earnest young author in question happens to be Russ Baker and the book is the newly published Family Of Secrets, his study of the Bush family that claims the outgoing President’s father, our 41st Chief Executive, was somehow involved in arcane ways in the JFK assassination and in Watergate.
And it’s downright stunning to find Baker chatting there when the same book also extensively cites Jim Hougan’s Secret Agenda and Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin’s Silent Coup in maintaining that Pulitzer-winning journalist Bob Woodward had, as a young Naval officer, all manner of intelligence contacts that somehow influenced his choice of career and choice of investigative subjects when he got out of the service. You have to wonder if this is the cue for Hougan or Colodny and Gettlin to issue updated editions of their books and see about using the Post’s cyberspace to present their meditations on the career of the author of The War Within.
But, having said all that, I have to inform TNN’s readers that the transcript of the chat does not have one reader after another asking about George de Mohrenschildt, Operation Zapata, the true origins of “Deep Throat,” the Townhouse mystery, or any of the other persons and things that enliven Family Of Secrets, though Baker, several times, refers to the numerous “revelations” in his book. Instead, a series of unexceptional questions about the highs and lows of the Bush era are asked, and Baker, usually, answers in quite workmanlike fashion.
I know that during these chats washingtonpost.com employs a moderator who screens questions submitted, to make sure that queries from cranks, the illiterate and/or muddled, and self-styled employees of African financial institutions do not turn up onscreen. The definition of what constitutes an “acceptable” question seems to be narrow sometimes.
Last year, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi turned up in the site’s discussions to talk about her new book. I used the occasion to send in a question about her reasons for urging then-Sen. Barack Obama, who had won the Democratic nomination partly on a platform of opposition to the Iraq war, to choose Rep. Chet Edwards, one of that war’s most steadfast supporters, as his running-mate. The Post’s moderator did not put it up, but opted instead to present queries on the order of: “How did you establish yourself as a woman who has both brains and a feminine side?”
I wonder if Russ Baker’s chat was similarly homogenized, and if so, who was doing the homogenizing. I keep having a mental picture of Bob Woodward himself hunched over the screen, making an expression familiar to Sunday-morning TV viewers and moving the mousepad to “delete” whenever a question comes up on the order of “What is your opinion of the claim of David Obst, the literary agent who sold All The President’s Men, that Deep Throat was a composite?”
And in yesterday’s Post proper, Nixon Library director Tim Naftali reviewed two recent books on the events of November 22, 1963: The Road To Dallas by David Kaiser and Brothers In Arms by Gus Russo and Stephen Molton. Though Tim, the author of the volume on George H.W. Bush in the American Presidents Series, does not mention Family Of Secrets in the review, my guess, based on his dissection of Kaiser, Russo and Molton’s conspiracist arguments, is that he would take a rather dim view of it. Tim advises those interested in the subject that, rather than the books under review, they’d do better to examine Reclaiming History (Vincent Bugliosi’s gigantic volume, the fruit of 20 years’s research, which was published two years ago to undeservedly poor sales), and also the work of Max Holland of WashingtonDecoded.com fame. (Here I should mention that earlier this week Max’s site posted a very informative and illuminating review of Brothers In Arms by Brian Latell, the author of After Fidel.)
January 11, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Intelligence, Richard Nixon | 3 Comments
In its “Secrecy News” e-newsletter, the Society of American Archivists engages with Russ Baker, whose conspiracy-minded Family Of Secrets has significant content on the Nixon Administration:
The Central Intelligence Agency did provide a copy of intelligence files relating to the Bay of Pigs to President Nixon in response to his request, an official of the National Archives and Records Administration said yesterday. He said that the statement to the contrary in Secrecy News on January 5, citing the new book “Family of Secrets,” was in error.
“The CIA did not refuse the Nixon administration’s request for records on the Bay of Pigs and other topics,” John Powers of the National Archives said. What happened, rather, is that “[Director of Central Intelligence Richard M.] Helms insisted that if the President wanted these records, he would only give them to the President himself.”
“There is a fascinating Oval Office taped conversation of this meeting in October 1971 that is publicly available. You can hear Helms putting the papers down on Nixon’s desk,” Mr. Powers said.
He identified the conversation as tape number 587-7 dated October 8, 1971. “Helms enters during [Ehrlichman's] briefing and they quickly change the topic, then get down to the issue of the papers.”
Mr. Powers added that the CIA papers provided by Mr. Helms to President Nixon are contained in Boxes 36 and 37 of the John D. Ehrlichman files at the Nixon Presidential Library.
Mr. Powers said that some of the material may have been declassified and released since he departed from the Nixon Project nearly two years ago. “But my recollection is that most of the two [Ehrlichman] boxes were still classified. They are awaiting a researcher to file a Mandatory Declassification Review request.”
January 9, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Barack Obama, Book Review, Cold War, Ethics, History, Intelligence, Obama administration, Terrorism, U.S. History, War on Terror | 1 Comment
This weekend, Jack Bauer returns to save all things great and small during the latest fictional crisis to be played out over one agonizingly long day. No doubt he will be the same old Jack, not a man known for subtlety or nuance. Bullets will fly, some bombs will explode, while others tick away, and the good guys will ultimately prevail.
In a strange and ironic juxtaposition, as faithful viewers begin another seasonal journey with 24, a real-life drama is unfolding, one that involves the appointment of someone who represents ideas as un-like Jack Bauer as possible. President-Elect Barack Obama is tapping old Washington hand Leon Panetta to head the Central Intelligence Agency.
Mr. Panetta is, by all accounts, an able manager and savvy politician – both qualities will certainly help him in this new role. But many have raised questions – serious ones (and not all by Republicans) – about his qualifications for this unique role. I hear the Secretary of Commerce position is open once again, wouldn’t a manager do well there? There is a difference between management and leadership.
It doesn’t take a mind reader to discern that Mr. Obama is determined to tame the CIA and bend it to his will and vision. Not all of his appointments have demonstrated the kind of change he campaigned about, but this one surely does. He is taking a cue from his hero, John F. Kennedy – specifically the JFK who tried to clean the spy house after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Goodbye, Allen Dulles the espionage expert, and hello, John McCone the efficient manager.
Panetta is the new McCone.
The only thing the Leon Panetta appointment and Jack Bauer have in common is the lack-of-subtlety thing. A signal is being sent to the nation and nations. A kinder-gentler sheriff is in town. No more ugly stuff – certainly no hint of torture. And GITMO? Well, we’re going to shut that bad place down and bring its residents to our mainland – maybe even a backyard near you.
Americans are decent people. We understandably flinch and recoil at violence. We deplore senseless killing. We cannot even begin to grasp the fanatical insanity of our Islamist enemies.
But the mistake often made is to assume that others – in places far away and vastly different – think and feel as we do. We regularly and all too predictably underestimate the wickedness and bloodthirsty nature of those who would just as soon wipe us off the face of the planet as look at us. Too many think that people are all basically reasonable and we just need to find some common ground.
Lyndon Johnson used to speculate that if only he could sit down with Ho Chi Minh and promise him some kind of Tennessee Valley Authority-like public works initiative for Vietnam that the communist leader would make peace. But LBJ missed the point that some people are wired differently – especially those who use actual wires tied to bombs.
It is a monumental mistake for anyone on our side to think for a moment that there is any point or place of accommodation that will bring peace, when those we are fighting have a ferocious and fanatical passion for our complete demise.
So – when we telegraph our punches (or better, pull the punch) by putting someone in charge of our major intelligence arm who has long indicated there are some things we will not do in this war, we need to understand that our enemies are not going to be impressed with our “humanity.” Instead, they will know that they have gained an important upper hand in their struggle.
Torture is an ugly word. It is unpleasant and decent people abhor the very idea of it. But, if it is permissible and considered as a necessary evil by a just society to kill terrorists, to bomb them, to send missiles their way, and to otherwise fight them with cruel might, why is torture, under certain circumstances, where we draw the “moral” line?
Years ago, when then heavyweight boxing champ, Muhammad Ali, refused the draft and was stripped of his title, comedian George Carlin (not yet famous) appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show and mocked the pugilist. He suggested, humorously, that there was some inconsistency in a case where a man was claiming to be a pacifist who regularly beat people up for a living.
We can’t have it both ways in this current international climate. We can’t profess to fight a war on terror – using violent means. We can’t target enemy leaders for death, launch missiles, or drop bombs to kill terrorists, but say at the same time that we won’t rough up a “detainee” to obtain vital life-saving information. The Panetta appointment is, in effect, a public indication that the new sheriff in town will – as Sean Connery put it in the movie, The Untouchables – be bringing a knife to a gun- fight.
Of course, intelligence work is a murky business. But it is a necessary evil in war. Many are drawing parallels between our times and 1929, when the wheels fell off the economy en route to the Great Depression. There is, however, another interesting comparison between then and now. That year, Henry Stimson – Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of State – shut down a spy operation while uttering the famous and naïve words: “Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail.”
It’s a pretty good thing we grew out of that notion – considering what unfolded during the ensuing decades. Stimson meant well, in trying to “civilize” a business that is inherently uncivilized – war. But the time for such tenderness is after the battle is won, not when guns are blazing.
Torture is certainly horrific. But is it at times necessary – in at least some forms? Henry Kissinger once said, “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”
It would seem that the important factor is context – in other words, a case-by-case approach is the best way to make such moral judgments. For example, no decent human being would consider torture for the sake of torture (getting sadistic pleasure from inflicting pain) to be morally acceptable under any circumstances. And, even in cases where authorities used torture to obtain a confession in a criminal proceeding – that would be inappropriate and of bounds.
But how about when a “detainee” is believed (strongly believed) to have important information – the kind that, if known, would save the lives of civilians or military personnel?
Former Chief of CIA Counterintelligence, James M. Olson, has written an excellent book about all of this – one every American concerned about this issue should read. In Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying, he traces the history of espionage back to the days of the Bible and beyond. With an intelligence career that included assignments in Moscow, Vienna, and Mexico City during the Cold War, he knew first hand of the challenges and issues of conscience spy work involves.
Now serving in a key academic post at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, he teaches about intelligence and national security issues.
In the book, Mr. Olson describes various scenarios – some involving the potential use of methods considered by some to be torturous. He has interviewed leaders from several walks of life – from intelligence agents, to clergymen, to professors, even someone from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals – and chronicles their opinions.
Torture is just one of many methodologies Olson analyzes – others include: journalism cover, homosexual blackmail, kidnapping, truth serum, missionary cover, feeding a drug habit, bogus websites and chat rooms, – even plagiarizing a Ph.D. Dissertation. For anyone interested in the moral implications of intelligence work in a dangerous world, Fair Play is a must-read (originally published in 2006, it is now out in paperback).
Olson concedes “spying is a dirty business,” but asks: “Should we put all our trust in overt sources of information, diplomacy, and the peaceful arts – and hope are enemies will not take advantage of us?”
At a time when a highly and fanatically motivated enemy is watching and waiting to strike at the heart of all we hold dear, Mr. Obama seems to be sending the clear, unmistakable, and potentially ominous signal that the CIA is an entity to be managed and tempered.
I am sure radical Islamists worldwide are going to be very impressed. But I find myself earnestly hoping that we keep a few guys like Jack Bauer around – just in case.
January 8, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Intelligence, International Affairs, Media, Obama administration, War on Terror | Leave a Comment
As if the week couldn’t get any more bizarre, word comes from Fashion Week Daily that “extremely insider rumors” have it that Vogue editor Anna Wintour is under consideration to be named ambassador to Britain or France. She is an American citizen now, and she did host fundraisers for Obama. She also worked for former Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione for two years, as an editor at his short-lived women’s magazine Viva.
When this tidbit was posted at Gawker, a commenter remarked that if it had any basis in fact, the President-elect was on the verge of losing all credibility, especially in the face of the nomination of Leon Panetta to head the CIA.
But how about switching this around – Panetta to go to the Court of St. James’s or 2 avenue Gabriel, and Wintour to head the CIA? Panetta, with his talent for consensus and amiable nature, would be a great diplomat. And this nation’s enemies abroad would tremble at the very mention of Langley if the person under that famous pageboy hairdo were calling the shots there. Not only that, everyone working at Langley would tremble – Ms. Wintour would make Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, previous holder of the Strictest CIA Director Ever title, look like an ambulant chocolate eclair.
January 7, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Bush Administration, Intelligence | 1 Comment
The Economist:
Morale is low after the organisation [sic; they're British] has lurched from failure to scandal in the past few years. Under George Tenet, the long-time director who was beloved by his staff, the CIA failed to spot the September 11th attacks in the works. Then came intelligence mistakes over weapons of mass destruction and Iraq, followed by controversy over the use of torture and harsh interrogation techniques, such as the “waterboarding” of suspected terrorists (making the detainee believe he is suffocating or drowning).
Another possible reason for low CIA morale: The failure of most in the media and politics to give the agency any credit for helping avert a catastrophic attack on U.S. soil since Sept. 11.
January 5, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Intelligence, Iraq War, National Security, Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Obama administration, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | Leave a Comment
The initial wire-service reports this afternoon of President-elect Obama’s appointment of Leon Panetta to become director of the CIA made mention of his work in the Clinton Administration’s first term as director of the Office of Management and Budget and as White House Chief of Staff from 1994 to 1997.
But it was not until several hours later that the AP filed a follow-up report (as did NPR and the New York Times) which referred to Panetta’s first experience in the Federal government’s executive branch back in 1969 and 1970. In those years, he served in the Nixon Administration as executive assistant to HEW Secretary Robert H. Finch, then as director of the HEW’s Office of Civil Rights until disagreements with Attorney General John Mitchell over the pace of implementing desegregation guidelines led Panetta to resign. He then wrote a book, Bring Us Together, criticizing White House policies in this area, before he changed his party registration to Democrat and began a career that took him to the House of Representatives for 18 years before he moved on to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
It was perhaps inevitable that the President-elect would decide on Panetta when it came time to follow the lead of most of his predecessors in the last 30 years in selecting a veteran of the Nixon White House for a major post in his administration. It’s rather less inevitable that Panetta would be put in charge of the CIA. As has already been pointed out, he handled a lot of intelligence-related material as Clinton’s Chief of Staff and as a member of the Iraq Study Group, but there’s a world of difference between such work and long-term hands-on experience with the nuts and bolts of Langley.
However, Panetta’s brief seems to be not so much to provide old-boy expertise of the William Casey variety as to undertake the sort of administrative overhaul of the agency that a decade’s worth of disgruntled intelligence vets have told us, in books and interviews, the CIA needs. But is he the right man for that job? We’ll see what the experts have to say.
January 5, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Intelligence, International Affairs, Obama administration | Leave a Comment
Today Pres-elect Barack Obama picked former California Congressman and Clinton Chief of Staff Leon Panetta as CIA Director. Perhaps Obama was thinking of Panetta’s documented position on the issue of ‘torture,’ since career intelligence officials could be potentially mired and linked to the controversy. The Atlantic Monthly cites a Panetta op-ed in early 2008 in The Washington Monthly:
We have preached these values to the world. We have made clear that there are certain lines Americans will not cross because we respect the dignity of every human being. That pledge was written into the oath of office given to every president, “to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.” It’s what is supposed to make our leaders different from every tyrant, dictator, or despot. We are sworn to govern by the rule of law, not by brute force.
We cannot simply suspend these beliefs in the name of national security. Those who support torture may believe that we can abuse captives in certain select circumstances and still be true to our values. But that is a false compromise. We either believe in the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, or we don’t. There is no middle ground.
We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances. We are better than that.
Also against torture, California Senator Dianne Feinstein appears irked by Obama’s pick:
“I was not informed about the selection of Leon Panetta to be the CIA Director. I know nothing about this, other than what I’ve read,” said Senator Feinstein, who will chair the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in the 111th Congress.
“My position has consistently been that I believe the Agency is best-served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time.”
Beggars can’t certainly be choosers, but she is certainly open to the more ambiguous “noncoercive standard to the greatest extent possible.”
December 29, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Intelligence, Watergate | Leave a Comment
At Strafor, the private intelligence firm, George Friedman offers a not-hagiographic view of W. Mark Felt, who illegally gave government secrets to the Washington Post. Friedman argues that Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and their editor, Ben Bradlee, were manipulated by a government police agency that was moving against an elected President:
Felt saw [L. Patrick] Gray’s selection [as acting FBI director] as an unwelcome politicization of the FBI (by placing it under direct presidential control), an assault on the traditions created by Hoover and an insult to his memory, and a massive personal disappointment. Felt was thus a disgruntled employee at the highest level. He was also a senior official in an organization that traditionally had protected its interests in predictable ways. (By then formally the No. 2 figure in FBI, Felt effectively controlled the agency given Gray’s inexperience and outsider status.) The FBI identified its enemies, then used its vast knowledge of its enemies’ wrongdoings in press leaks designed to be as devastating as possible. While carefully hiding the source of the information, it then watched the victim — who was usually guilty as sin — crumble. Felt, who himself was later convicted and pardoned for illegal wiretaps and break-ins, was not nearly as appalled by Nixon’s crimes as by Nixon’s decision to pass him over as head of the FBI. He merely set Hoover’s playbook in motion.
It wasn’t just Watergate, in Friedman’s view:
For Felt to have been able to guide and control the young reporters’ investigation, he needed to know a great deal of what the White House had done, going back quite far. He could not possibly have known all this simply through his personal investigations. His knowledge covered too many people, too many operations, and too much money in too many places simply to have been the product of one of his side hobbies. The only way Felt could have the knowledge he did was if the FBI had been systematically spying on the White House, on the Committee to Re-elect the President and on all of the other elements involved in Watergate. Felt was not simply feeding information to Woodward and Bernstein; he was using the intelligence product emanating from a section of the FBI to shape The Washington Post’s coverage.
Friedman’s no Nixon fan:
In our view, Nixon was as guilty as sin of more things than were ever proven. Nevertheless, there is another side to this story. The FBI was carrying out espionage against the president of the United States, not for any later prosecution of Nixon for a specific crime (the spying had to have been going on well before the break-in), but to increase the FBI’s control over Nixon. Woodward, Bernstein and above all, Bradlee, knew what was going on. Woodward and Bernstein might have been young and naive, but Bradlee was an old Washington hand who knew exactly who Felt was, knew the FBI playbook and understood that Felt could not have played the role he did without a focused FBI operation against the president. Bradlee knew perfectly well that Woodward and Bernstein were not breaking the story, but were having it spoon-fed to them by a master. He knew that the president of the United States, guilty or not, was being destroyed by Hoover’s jilted heir.
