Sent to WS and Blog
OMNI CIA NEWSLETTER #1, January
1, 2013.
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace. (Revised)
My blog: War
Department/Peace Department
My Newsletters:
Index:
Peace, Justice, Ecology Birthdays
See OMNI’s Bulletin “Happening”
See INMOtion OMNI’s monthly newsletter.
Visit OMNI’s Library.
See ASSASSINATION, BUSH, DRONE, IMPERIALISM, MILITARISM, NATIONAL
SECURITY STATE, OBAMA, SECRECY, SURVEILLANCE, TORTURE, WAR CRIMES, WAR ON
TERROR, AND RELATED OMNI
NEWSLETTERS Referred to in Index.
Contents #1
No
Charges for Brutality
Weiner,
FBI History
Zepazauer,
CIA History
Scahill,
Petraeus and Militarized CIA
McCoy,
History of US Torture
Jaffer
and Wessler, Drone Killing Then PR
Engelhardt,
Assassin in Chief
Targeted
Killings Are War Crimes
Patriot
Act Abuses
Film:
Secrets of CIA
Kucinich,
CIA Killings Unaccountable
Hendricks,
CIA Kidnapping in Milan
Prouty,
Mistreatment of Arab-American in CIA
Soufan,
CIA Would Censor Agent on 9-11
CIA
Torture: Film Five Fingers
Call
for Arrest of CIA Legal Chief for Drone Killings
On
Gary Webb
CIA
Mind Control Experiments (several books)
Risen
fights Subpoena
Who
Runs CIA?
CIA
Illegal Domestic Operations
CIA
and Drug Trade
Melley,
Cultural Consequences of National
Security State
Bibliography
Here is the link to all OMNI newsletters: http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/ For a
knowledge-based peace, justice, and ecology movement and an informed citizenry
as the foundation for change.
August
30, 2012
No Charges Filed on Harsh Tactics Used by
the C.I.A.
By SCOTT SHANE
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.
announced Thursday that no one would be prosecuted for the deaths of a prisoner
in Afghanistan in 2002 and another in Iraq in 2003, eliminating the last
possibility that any criminal charges will be brought as a result of the brutal
interrogations carried out by the C.I.A.
Mr.
Holder had already ruled out any charges related to the use of waterboarding
and other methods that most human rights experts consider to be torture. His
announcement closes a contentious three-year investigation by the Justice
Department and brings to an end years of dispute over whether line intelligence
or military personnel or their superiors would be held accountable for the
abuse of prisoners in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The closing of the two cases means that the
Obama administration’s limited effort to scrutinize the counterterrorism
programs carried out under President George W. Bush has come to an end. Without
elaborating, Mr. Holder suggested that the end of the criminal investigation
should not be seen as a moral exoneration of those involved in the prisoners’
treatment and deaths. ......
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/us/holder-rules-out-prosecutions-in-cia-interrogations.html?_r=2&hp&pagewanted=print
REVIEW
OF WEINER’S A HISTORY OF THE FBI
Behind the Bureau: On the FBI
J. Edgar Hoover died forty years ago, at the reasonably ripe age of 77. The
timing of his death—a heart attack on May 1, 1972—turned out to be a blessing
and a curse for his historical legacy. Had he lived a few months longer, he
could have become mired in Watergate and been tarnished by the downfall of his
longtime ally Richard Nixon. A few years beyond that and he might have been
hauled before the Church Committee to answer for the civil liberties abuses
committed during his thirty-seven-year tenure at the FBI. His death spared him
the experience of seeing the bureau maligned, denounced and partially
dismantled in the 1970s. But it also made him a poster boy—often rightly,
sometimes wrongly—for all that had gone wrong in American intelligence policy
since the ugly days of the Palmer raids in the wake of World War I. In the four
decades since his death, Hoover
Enemies
A History of the FBI. By Tim Weiner. 2012
Buy this book.
A History of the FBI. By Tim Weiner. 2012
Buy this book.
At first glance, Tim Weiner’s Enemies
fits comfortably into the tradition of exposé. A longtime intelligence reporter,
Weiner is best known for Legacy of Ashes,
his award-winning 2007 indictment of the CIA’s secret operations since its
founding in the late 1940s. Enemies
promises revelations from never-before-seen FBI files and vows that the truth
about the bureau has—at last—come out. But the truth, it turns out, is rather
messy. Enemies suffers from
one-damned-thing-after-another syndrome, a common hazard with case-based
intelligence histories. The book covers a wide range of issues and contexts,
from the civil liberties violations committed in the bureau’s early years to
World War II espionage on up through the “war on terror.” Weiner seems
determined to judge each episode on its merits, and at its best Enemies is surprisingly evenhanded. But
at its worst, Enemies collapses
under the weight of its internal contradictions. Weiner describes his book as a
study of “a century of constant conflict over the conduct of secret
intelligence in an open democracy.” Unfortunately, Enemies often seems to embody rather than explain that
conflict.
Weiner begins with the founding of the Bureau of Investigation in 1908 and
traces its evolution from a tiny, incompetent band of misfits into the
Hoover-led powerhouse reorganized as the Federal Bureau of Investigation in
1935. From there, he offers a selective and often fascinating journey through
the FBI’s efforts to protect the nation from its alleged “enemies, foreign and
domestic.” Enemies does not
pretend to be an encyclopedic institutional history. Instead Weiner focuses on
the FBI’s intelligence work: ferreting out Russian spies, running American
agents against the Russians in turn, manipulating foreign governments,
investigating terrorism and keeping tabs on that dubious category of
malcontents known as “domestic subversives.” As Weiner notes, the FBI has long
been a hybrid agency: part police force, part secret intelligence bureau. And
we tend to know a lot more about one side of the story than the other. Enemies is an attempt to fill in some of
those gaps.
Weiner summons a blend of well-worn FBI scholarship and new revelations
from declassified intelligence files acquired through the Freedom of
Information Act. The first quarter of the book, which covers the period from
1908 to 1940, draws heavily on the work of such historians as Richard Gid
Powers and Athan Theoharis. During these early years, Weiner writes, the bureau
bounced in and out of secret intelligence work as public opinion, institutional
priorities and presidential directives seemed to demand. In the main, though,
it was a law enforcement agency—and not a terribly good one. The early bureau
failed to solve many of its biggest cases, including the 1920 Wall Street Hoover
* * *
The Palmer raids of 1919–20 turned out to be a disaster for the bureau.
With the Bolshevik Revolution stirring up fears among some Americans of a
similar revolt at home, the bureau helped round up thousands of alleged
communists, anarchists and other left-wingers, often ignoring the need for
warrants and failing to distinguish between resident aliens and homegrown
radicals. It also lacked the legal authority and the institutional know-how to
carry out a mass deportation effort. In response, the fledgling ACLU joined
forces with some of the nation’s most prominent attorneys to make the case that
the bureau was acting outside the limits of the law. Among those persuaded was
Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone, who shut down the bureau’s political
surveillance apparatus upon assuming office in 1924.
The Palmer scandal foreclosed serious domestic intelligence operations for
more than a decade, until Franklin Roosevelt gave the go-ahead for the FBI to
plunge back in. In telling this next chapter of the story, Enemies finally hits its mark. Roosevelt
was cagey with his orders at first, encouraging Hoover Poland and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor , the bureau doubled in size. It also
acquired jurisdiction over espionage, sabotage and “subversion” cases
throughout the Western Hemisphere . Today we
tend to think of the CIA (another product of World War II) as the foreign
intelligence wing, with the FBI mostly limited to domestic soil. During the
1940s, however, the FBI took charge of fully half the world—albeit the half
least engulfed in war.
The FBI’s activities abroad, especially during World War II, are perhaps
the least studied aspect of its history, and Weiner provides a valuable,
detailed and sometimes shocking account of what bureau agents were up to at
that time. Despite its glowing reputation in the 1930s, the FBI was not
particularly well prepared for the exigencies of wartime intelligence work. As
a result, agents assigned to the new Special Intelligence Service, the FBI’s South America division, faced a steep learning curve.
Weiner narrates the war as a series of desperate experiments in spying and
counterspying, with the FBI initially a laughingstock to the more established
diplomatic services. Things got so bad that Hoover
begged to get out of the South America work—one of the “few examples of Hoover Roosevelt refused the
request, eager to keep the intelligence services competing with (and often
undermining) one another. So the FBI adapted to the challenge as best it could,
creating a “legal attaché” position that allowed its agents to work with rather
than against the State Department and established a permanent infrastructure
for FBI activities abroad.
One of the dirty secrets of espionage work, Weiner explains, is that
success or failure often depends more on jurisdictional cooperation (or the
lack thereof) than on any given agency’s competence. In one of the book’s best
chapters, Weiner provides a sharp account of Hoover Hoover Hoover
MORE http://www.thenation.com/article/169498/behind-bureau-fbi
The CIAs Greatest Hits by Mark Zepezauer
Odonian Press, March 31, 2012
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA%20Hits/CIA_GreatestHits.html
In order to
survive, nations need strong intelligence services. But the idea that the CIA
is primarily an intelligence-gathering operation is itself one of the agency's
greatest propaganda triumphs.
Despite its
name, the Central Intelligence Agency's main purpose is, and has always been,
carrying out covert operations involving economic warfare, rigged elections,
assassinations and even genocide.
The CIA is
also expert at distorting intelligence to justify its own goals, and this
"disinformation" leads to dangerous illusions among our policymakers.
But covert operations are its life's blood.
The litany of
illegal, murderous CIA activity is enough to chill the bones of anyone who
cares about liberty and justice.
As long as the
CIA exists, our government can break any law it chooses in the name of national
security.
Anyone for
whom democracy is more than just a word should be working to abolish the CIA.
For some ideas on how to do that, send a SASE to Odonian Press at Box 32375 , Tucson
AZ 85751
Mark Zepezauer
The
Gehlen Org
Operation
Gladio
MK-ULTRA
Operation
CHAOS
Crooked
Banks
Drug
Trafficking
The
Mighty Wurlitzer -- the CIA's propaganda machine
"... what the Agency [CIA] does is ordered by the President and the NSC
[National Security Council]. The Agency neither makes decisions on policy nor
acts on its own account. It is an instrument of the President."
Philip Agee,
CIA Diary
Iran
Guatemala
Zaire
Bay of
Pigs
Vietnam
1945 - 1963
Dominican
Republic
"... Secret CIA
operations constitute the usually unseen efforts to shore up unjust, unpopular,
minority governments, always with the hope that overt military intervention ...
will not be necessary. The more successful CIA operations are, the more remote
overt intervention becomes, and the more remote become reforms. Latin America in the 1960s is all the proof one
needs."
Philip Agee, CIA Diary
Indonesia
Greece
Chile
Vietnam
1964-1975
Laos
Cambodia
"But what counter-insurgency really comes down to is the protection of
the capitalists back in America US
national security, as preached by US leaders, is the security of the capitalist
class in the US
Philip Agee, CIA Diary
Angola
Orlando
Letelier
Grenada
El
Salvador
Nicaragua
Afghanistan
"A considerable
proportion of the developed world's prosperity rests on paying the lowest possible
prices for the poor countries' primary products and on exporting high-cost
capital and finished goods to those countries. Continuation of this kind of
prosperity requires continuation of the relative gap between developed and
underdeveloped countries - it means keeping poor people poor.
Increasingly, the
impoverished masses are understanding that the prosperity of the developed
countries and of the privileged minorities in their own countries is founded on
their poverty."
Philip Agee, CIA Diary
South
Pacific
Panama
Iraq
Haiti
Yugoslavia
"American
capitalism, based as it is on exploitation of the poor, with its fundamental
motivation in personal greed, simply cannot survive without force - without a
secret police force.
Now, more than ever, each
of us is forced to make a conscious choice whether to support the system of
minority comfort and privilege with all its security apparatus and repression,
or whether to struggle for real equality of opportunity and fair distribution
of benefits for all of society, in the domestic as well as the international
order. It's harder now not to realize that there are two sides, harder not to
understand each, and harder not to recognize that like it or not we contribute
day in and day out either to the one side or to the other."
Philip Agee, CIA Diary
CIA
Index of Website
Home Page
NEW
EDITION MARCH 2012
·
Overview
The CIA's Greatest Hits details how the CIA:
* hired top Nazi war criminals, shielded them from justice and learned--and used--their techniques
* has been involved in assassinations, bombings, massacres, wars, death squads, drug trafficking, and rigged elections all over the world
* tortures children as young as 13 and adults as old as 89, resulting in forced "confessions" to all sorts of imaginary crimes (an innocent Kuwaiti was tortured for months to make him keep repeating his initial lies, and a supposed al-Qaeda leader was waterboarded 187 times in a single month without producing a speck of useful information)
* orchestrates the media--which one CIA deputy director liked to call "the mighty Wurlitzer"--and places its agents inside newspapers, magazines and book publishers
* and much more.
The CIA's crimes continue unabated, and unpunished. The day before General David Petraeus took over as the twentieth CIA director, federal prosecutors announced that they were dropping 99 investigations into the deaths of people in CIA custody, leaving just two active cases they're willing to pursue. |||This book is sold in theUS
by Sony Electronics Inc. |||This book is sold in Canada
* hired top Nazi war criminals, shielded them from justice and learned--and used--their techniques
* has been involved in assassinations, bombings, massacres, wars, death squads, drug trafficking, and rigged elections all over the world
* tortures children as young as 13 and adults as old as 89, resulting in forced "confessions" to all sorts of imaginary crimes (an innocent Kuwaiti was tortured for months to make him keep repeating his initial lies, and a supposed al-Qaeda leader was waterboarded 187 times in a single month without producing a speck of useful information)
* orchestrates the media--which one CIA deputy director liked to call "the mighty Wurlitzer"--and places its agents inside newspapers, magazines and book publishers
* and much more.
The CIA's crimes continue unabated, and unpunished. The day before General David Petraeus took over as the twentieth CIA director, federal prosecutors announced that they were dropping 99 investigations into the deaths of people in CIA custody, leaving just two active cases they're willing to pursue. |||This book is sold in the
The
Petraeus Legacy: A Paramilitary CIA?
Jeremy
Scahill November 14, 2012 | This article appeared in the December 3, 2012 edition of
The Nation.
AP Images
While much of the media focus on l’affaire Petraeus has centered on the CIA director’s sexual relationship with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, the scandal opens a window onto a different and more consequential relationship—that between the CIA and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command. In a behind-the-scenes turf war that has raged since 9/11, the two government bodies have fought for control of the expanding global wars waged by the United States—a turf war that JSOC has largely won. Petraeus, an instrumental player in this power struggle, leaves behind an agency that has strayed from intelligence to paramilitary-type activities. Though his legacy will be defined largely by the scandal that ended his career, to many within military and intelligence circles, Petraeus’s career trajectory, from commander of US military forces in
About
the Author
Jeremy
Scahill
Jeremy Scahill, a Puffin Foundation
Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute, is the author of the bestselling
Blackwater...
“I would not say that CIA has been taken over by the military,
but I would say that the CIA has become more militarized,” Philip Giraldi, a
retired career CIA case officer, told The Nation. “A considerable part of the
CIA budget is now no longer spying; it’s supporting paramilitaries who work
closely with JSOC to kill terrorists, and to run the drone program.” The CIA,
he added, “is a killing machine now.”
As head of US Central Command in 2009, Petraeus issued execute
orders that significantly broadened the ability of US forces to operate in a
variety of countries, including Yemen ,
where US Yemen ;
in his first month in office, he oversaw a series of strikes that killed three US Pakistan
One current State Department liaison who has also worked
extensively with JSOC describes the CIA
as becoming “a mini-Special Operations Command that purports to be an
intelligence agency.” For all the praise Petraeus won for his
counterinsurgency strategy and the “surge” in Iraq, he says, his real legacy is
as a “political tool,” an enabler of those within the national security
apparatus who want to see a continuation
of covert global mini-wars. Pointing to the “mystique that surrounds JSOC”
and Adm. William McRaven, commander of the Special Operations Command, the
liaison says, “Petraeus was trying to implement that kind of command climate at
the CIA.”
“Petraeus wanted to be McRaven, and now that window has closed,”
he said. “We are firmly in the age of McRaven. There is no other titular figure
with the confidence of the president that is able to articulate strategies and
hold their own in rooms where everyone else has the same or greater amount of
intellectual heft. McRaven is everything that Petraeus is not.”
Retired Army Col. W. Patrick Lang, a former senior defense
intelligence official, says that Petraeus’s arrogance—“smoothly concealed
beneath the appearance of the warrior scholar”—made him deeply unpopular among
the military’s high-ranking officers. Dismissing the media’s portrayal of
Petraeus as a “super soldier” and great military leader as “phony bullshit,”
Lang describes him as the product of a military promotion system that
encourages generals to think of themselves as “divinely selected.” “In fact, he
didn’t write the COIN manual, the surge was not the main thing in improving the
situation in Iraq Afghanistan
to apply the COIN doctrine in the same glorious way he did in Iraq
As for Petraeus’s future, the State Department liaison said,
“There will be a lot of profits to be made by him and his immediate circle of
advisers, as they’re given a soft landing, whether it’s in academia or within
the nexus of the military-industrial complex.”
Giraldi, the former senior CIA officer, expressed concern that
in these circumstances, the “CIA is going to forget how to spy.” He also noted
the “long-term consequence” of the militarization of the CIA: “every
bureaucracy in the world is best at protecting itself. So once the CIA becomes
a paramilitary organization, there’s going to be in-built pressure to keep
going in that direction. Because you’ll have people at the senior levels in the
organization who have come up that way and are protective of what they see as their
turf,” he told me. “That’s the big danger.”
Despite President Obama's opposition to messy, large-scale
military operations, the president is actually a “very careful hawk” when it
comes to military action, Jeremy Scahill argued, in an interview early this year with Francis Reynolds.
Why Is President Obama Keeping a
Journalist in Prison in Yemen? (US
Politics, World) After
supporters protested his “sham” trial, Abdulelah Haider Shaye would have been
pardoned. Then Obama intervened.
[Dick: see Imperialism
Militarism Newsletter.]
by Alfred W. McCoy. U of Wisconsin P, 2012
Critical Human Rights
Steve J. Stern and Scott Straus, Series Editors
“A masterful account of an appalling national drift toward accepting torture as part of our culture and polity.”
—Alex Gibney, director, Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side
Interview with Author on Democracy Now
Many Americans have condemned the “enhanced interrogation” techniques used in the War on Terror as a transgression of human rights. But the
During the Cold War, McCoy argues, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency covertly funded psychological experiments designed to weaken a subject’s resistance to interrogation. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the CIA revived these harsh methods, while
Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the For more information regarding publicity and reviews contact our publicity manager, phone: (608) 263-0734, email: publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu
First the
'targeted killing' campaign, then the targeted propaganda campaign
Officially,
the CIA insists its drone war is a state secret, yet we're now seeing a
concerted PR effort to sanitise its dubious legality
- Jameel Jaffer
and Nathan
Wessler
- guardian.co.uk,
Wednesday 6 June 2012 16.03 EDT
- Comments
(188)
President Obama
and CIA Director David Petraeus: the agency appears engaged in a carefully
planned campaign of leaks about its targeted killing drone campaign.
Photograph: Charles Dharapak/AP
A story
in last week's New York Times painted a remarkably detailed picture of the
US government's so-called "targeted killing" campaign, a campaign
that involves the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) to kill suspected
insurgents and terrorists and, it turns out, many, many others, as well. The
story, written by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, discussed the CIA's choice of munitions, its
efforts to avoid civilian casualties, and its method for calculating the number
of civilians killed in any given strike. The story also underscored the extent
to which President Obama himself is involved in overseeing the campaign – and
even in selecting its targets.The story has already received a great deal of coverage, but two aspects of it deserve more attention.
The first has to do with the targeted killing campaign itself. Long before the New York Times story was published, human rights organizations questioned the campaign's lawfulness. At the ACLU, we sued (pdf) over elements of the campaign two years ago, contending that the
But the New York Times story suggests the legal foundation of the targeted killing campaign is not simply shaky, but rotten. One problem is that the
Another problem, and perhaps an even deeper one, is in the government's approach towards individuals who are not targeted – not in the conventional sense of the word, anyway. According to the New York Times, the government "counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants … unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent".
If this is true, it is astounding. The government has an obligation under international law to distinguish combatants from noncombatants – and, as far as reasonably possible, to avoid causing noncombatants harm. Direct targeting of noncombatants is a war crime; indeed, it is the prototypical one. It surely need not be explained that the government's obligation is to distinguish combatants from noncombatants while they are still alive, not after they have been killed. A "shoot first, ask questions later" policy is entirely inconsistent with international law, not to mention morally grotesque.
The other aspect of the New York Times story that warrants more attention has to do with the way the story was assembled. Becker and Shane report that they interviewed "three dozen" of President Obama's current and former advisors. These advisors supplied them with granular detail about deliberations inside the White House, quoted (or paraphrased) conversations between the president and senior officials, and discussed tensions between various agencies – most notably, the State Department and the CIA.
That the advisors were so forthcoming would be remarkable in any circumstances, but it is particularly remarkable here because the US government's official position – a position it has set out in legal briefs and sworn affidavits (pdf) – is that the CIA's targeted killing campaign is a state secret. Indeed, the CIA's position in court is that the agency's mere acknowledgement of the campaign would cause grave and irreparable injury to the nation's security.
The truth, of course, is that the CIA has already acknowledged the campaign, and that dozens of government officials have spoken about it to Jo Becker and Scott Shane and many other reporters besides. The CIA's litigation position is not intended to protect the "secrecy" of the agency's killing program, but to protect the agency's ability to disclose only the information that it wants to disclose – information that invariably paints the CIA's practices as closely supervised, supremely effective, and absolutely necessary.
Later this month, in response to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, the CIA will have to file a legal brief explaining to a court in
Whether a court will compel the CIA to retire the increasingly untenable fiction that the targeted killing program is a secret remains to be seen. There is no doubt, though, that selective disclosures – and selective secrecy – about the program has distorted public debate. Last week's New York Times article serves as a reminder that our public debate about the government's bureaucratized killing program is based almost entirely on the government's own selective, self-serving, and unverifiable representations about it.
This surely puts far too much power in the hands of the CIA, and too little in the hands of ordinary citizens.
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Assassin-in-Chief
Posted by Tom Engelhardt at 7:51am,
June 5, 2012.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers:
Signed, personalized copies of Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare,
2001-2050, the new book Nick
Turse and I have co-authored, will soon be in the mail to the many of you who
contributed $75 or more to this site -- with our deepest thanks. (Copies
of my book The United States of Fear,
similarly signed, will similarly be off.) Those of you who still have the
urge to contribute, do check TD’s donation page for our offer on both books.
And as for the rest of you, remember to pick up your copy
of Terminator
Planet, either the ebook by clicking here or the paperback by clicking here,
and ensure that our little publishing venture is a success. News of
drones now seems to be everywhere, even in the comic strips,
so this couldn’t be more timely! To catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast
audio interview in which Engelhardt discusses drone warfare and the Obama
administration, click here or download it to your iPod here. Tom]
Be assured of
one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t
just electing a president of the United States
Thanks to a
long New York Times piece
by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s
Principles and Will,” we now know that the president has spent startling
amounts of time overseeing the “nomination” of terrorist suspects for
assassination via the remotely piloted drone program he inherited from President
George W. Bush and which he has expanded exponentially.
Moreover, that article was based largely on interviews with “three dozen of his
current and former advisers.” In other words, it was essentially an
administration-inspired piece -- columnist Robert Scheer calls it “planted” -- on a “secret” program the president
and those closest to him are quite proud of and want to brag about in an
election year.
The language of
the piece about our warrior president was generally sympathetic, even in places
soaring. It focused on the moral dilemmas of a man who -- we now know --
has personally approved and overseen the growth of a remarkably robust
assassination program in Yemen ,
Somalia , and Pakistan U.S.
drone strike in the Philippines that killed 15.) According to
Becker and Shane, President Obama has also been involved in the use of a fraudulent method of counting drone kills, one
that unrealistically deemphasizes civilian deaths.
Historically
speaking, this is all passing strange. The Times calls Obama’s role in the drone killing
machine “without precedent in presidential history.” And that’s accurate.
It’s not,
however, that American presidents have never had anything to do with or been in
any way involved in assassination programs. The state as assassin is
hardly unknown in our history. How could President John F. Kennedy, for
example, not know about CIA-inspired or -backed assassination plots against
Cuba’s Fidel Castro, the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, and South Vietnamese autocrat
(and ostensible ally) Ngo Dinh Diem? (Lumumba and Diem were successfully
murdered.) Similarly, during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, the CIA carried
out a massive assassination campaign in Vietnam
In previous
eras, however, presidents either stayed above the assassination fray or
practiced a kind of plausible deniability about the acts. We are surely
at a new stage in the history of the imperial presidency when a president (or
his election team) assembles his aides, advisors, and associates to foster a
story that’s meant to broadcast the group’s collective pride in the new
position of assassin-in-chief.
Here’s a
believe-it-or-not footnote to our American age. Who now remembers that,
in the early years of his presidency, George W. Bush kept what the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward called "his own personal scorecard for the war"
on terror? It took the form of photographs with brief biographies and
personality sketches of those judged to be the world's most dangerous
terrorists, each ready to be crossed out by Bush once captured or killed. That
scorecard was, Woodward added, always available in a desk drawer in the Oval
Office.
Such private
presidential recordkeeping now seems penny-ante indeed. The distance
we’ve traveled in a decade can be measured by the Times' description of the equivalent of that
“personal scorecard” today (and no desk drawer could hold it):
“It is the
strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of
the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video
teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to
the president who should be the next to die. This secret 'nominations' process
is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets
the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases, and life stories of suspected
members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen
or its allies in Somalia
In other words,
thanks to such meetings -- on what insiders have labeled “terror Tuesday” -- assassination has been thoroughly
institutionalized, normalized, and bureaucratized around the figure of the
president. Without the help of or any oversight from the American people
or their elected representatives, he alone is now responsible for regular
killings thousands of miles away, including those of civilians and even children. He is, in other words, if not a king,
at least the king of American assassinations. On that score, his power is
total and completely unchecked. He can prescribe death for anyone
“nominated,” choosing any of the “baseball cards” (PowerPoint bios) on that kill list and
then order the drones to take them (or others in the neighborhood) out.
He and he alone can decide that assassinating known individuals isn’t
enough and that the CIA’s drones can instead strike at suspicious “patterns of behavior” on the ground in Yemen or Pakistan.
He can stop any attack, any killing, but there is no one, nor any mechanism
that can stop him. An American global killing machine (quite literally
so, given that growing force of drones) is now at the beck and call of a
single, unaccountable individual. This is the nightmare the founding
fathers tried to protect us from.
In the process,
as Salon’s Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, the president has shredded the Fifth Amendment, guaranteeing Americans that they will not
“be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel produced a secret memo claiming that, while the Fifth Amendment’s
due process guarantee does apply to the drone assassination of an American
citizen in a land with which we are not at war, “it could be satisfied by
internal deliberations in the executive branch.” (That, writes Greenwald, is “the most
extremist government interpretation of the Bill of Rights I’ve heard in my
lifetime.”) In other words, the former Constitutional law professor has
been freed from the law of the land in cases in which he “nominates,” as he has, U.S.
There is,
however, another aspect to the institutionalizing of those “kill lists” and
assassination as presidential prerogatives that has gone unmentioned. If
the Times article --
which largely reflects how the Obama administration cares to see itself and its
actions -- is to be believed, the drone program is also in the process of being
sanctified and sacralized.
You get a sense
of this from the language of the piece itself. (“A parallel, more cloistered selection process at
the C.I.A. focuses largely on Pakistan St. Augustine
In the Times telling, the organization
of robotic killing had become the administration’s idée fixe, a kind of cult of death within the Oval
Office, with those involved in it being so many religious devotees. We
may be, that is, at the edge of a new state-directed, national-security-based
religion of killing grounded in the fact that we are in a “dangerous” world and
the “safety” of Americans is our preeminent value. In other words, the
president, his apostles, and his campaign acolytes are all, it seems, praying
at the Church of St. Drone
Of course,
thought about another way, that “terror Tuesday” scene might not be from a
monastery or a church synod, but from a Mafia council directly out of a Mario
Puzo novel, with the president as the Godfather, designating “hits” in a
rough-and-tumble world.
How far we’ve
come in just two presidencies! Assassination as a way of life has been
institutionalized in the Oval Office, thoroughly normalized, and is now being
offered to the rest of us as a reasonable solution to American global problems
and an issue on which to run a presidential campaign.
Downhill All the Way on Blowback Planet
After 5,719 inside-the-Beltway
(largely inside-the-Oval-Office) words, the Times
piece finally gets to this single outside-the-Beltway sentence: “Both Pakistan
and Yemen are arguably less stable and more hostile to the United States than
when Mr. Obama became president.”
Arguably,
indeed! For the few who made it that far, it was a brief reminder of just
how narrow, how confining the experience of worshiping at St. Drone actually
is. All those endless meetings, all those presidential hours that might
otherwise have been spent raising yet more money for campaign 2012, and the two
countries that have taken the brunt of the drone raids are more hostile, more
dangerous, and in worse shape than in 2009. (And one of them, keep in
mind, is a nuclear power.) News articles since have only emphasized how powerfully those drones have radicalized local populations -- however many “bad guys” (and children) they may also have wiped off the
face of the Earth.
And though the Times doesn’t mention this, it’s
not just bad news for Yemen
or Pakistan
What should
astound Americans -- but seldom seems to be noticed -- is just how into the
shadows, how thoroughly military-centric, and how unproductive has become Washington
Electing an
assassin-in-chief, no matter who you vote for, is worse. Pretending that
the Church of St. Drone
This represents
a breathtaking kind of rashness, especially from the leader of a country that,
perhaps more than any other, is dependent on computer systems, opening the U.S.
James Madison,
Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and the rest of them knew war, and yet
were not acolytes of the eighteenth century equivalents of St. Drone, nor of
presidents who might be left free to choose to turn the world into a killing
zone. They knew at least as well as anyone in our national security state
today that the world is always a dangerous place -- and that that’s no excuse
for investing war powers in a single individual. They didn’t think that a
state of permanent war, a state of permanent killing, or a president free to
plunge Americans into such states was a reasonable way for their new republic
to go. To them, it was by far the more dangerous way to exist in our
world.
The founding
fathers would surely have chosen republican democracy over safety. They
would never have believed that a man surrounded by advisors and lawyers, left
to his own devices, could protect them from what truly mattered. They
tried to guard against it. Now, we have a government and a presidency
dedicated to it, no matter who is elected in November.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project
and author of The United States of Fear as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick
Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare,
2001-2050. To listen to Timothy
MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Engelhardt discusses drone
warfare and the Obama administration, click here or download it to your iPod here.
Follow
TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook.
Copyright 2012
Tom Engelhardt
UN expert labels CIA tactic exposed by
Bureau 'a war crime'
Jack Serle, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism,
June 21st, 2012
http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/06/21/un-expert-labels-cia-tactic-exposed-by-bureau-a-war-crime/
The UN's expert on extrajudicial killings has
described a tactic used by the CIA and first exposed by a Bureau investigation
as 'a war crime'.
Earlier this year the Bureau and the Sunday Times
revealed the CIA was deliberately targeting rescuers and funeral-goers in its Pakistan
Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur, told a
meeting in Geneva
[...]
In a separate presentation to the Council, Heyns,
said that he was hopeful that the US US
But after a two-day Council debate, Heyns said the US
A number of other Geneva Switzerland
Senators terrified with abuse of
Patriot Act's secret laws
By RT
TV (about the author)
U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (AFP Photo / Chip Somodevilla)
U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (AFP Photo / Chip Somodevilla)
Horrified
with the way the US
Two US senators wrote the attorney general of the United States
In a
joint letter to Attorney General Eric Holder sent Thursday, Senators Ron Wyden
(D-Oregon) and Mark Udall (D-Colorado) plead with the government to provide the
American people with the facts behind what the Patriot Act can let America's
top investigators do. The lawmakers, who have rallied for disclosure of these
details for more than two years, say citizens would be "stunned"
to learn what the government believes it can get away with under the law.
The
controversial USA Patriot Act was hastily signed into legislation after the
September 11 al-Qaeda attacks under the guise of a being a necessity for
preventing future terrorist efforts, but for over a decade since the law has
become notorious for its ability to stick federal eyes into seemingly every
aspect of the American public in the name of counter-terrorism. Although the
government has gone on the record to downplay the constitutionally-damning
powers they are granted under the law, Senators Wyden and Udall say it is time
that the feds fulfill the demands of millions of concerned Americans and
discuss in detail what they can do under the act -- and what they've already
done.
Wydell
and Udall are specifically calling on Holder to provide information about how
the government has interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which grants
government officials with certain clearance to obtain "tangible
things" deemed "relevant" to issues of terrorism.
While that much is clear, write the senators, how the government goes about
abiding by it "has been the subject of secret legal
interpretations," which they add "are contained in
classified opinions" that are not made available to much of Congress,
let alone members of the general public.
"We believe most Americans would be
stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have
interpreted Section 215," add the senators . "As we
see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the
law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a
problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what
the law should say when they public doesn't know what its government thinks the
law says."
The
Justice Department has in their own defense said that disclosing details on
certain interpretations could be detrimental to national security, an issue to
which the senators acknowledge. "We believe that is entirely legitimate
for government agencies to keep certain information secret," write
the lawmakers.The argument being made by Wyden and Udall, however, is that the
government is letting itself perceive the law in a way which not only are
Americans completely oblivious to, but Americans are also under the false
impression that matters are marvelously different.
"In a democratic
society -- in which the government derives its powers from the consent of the
people -- citizens rightly expect that their government will not arbitrarily
keep information from them," reads the letter to Holder.
"Americans expect their
government to operate within the boundaries of publically-understood law, and
as voters they have a need and a right to know how the law is being
interpreted, so that they can ratify or reject decisions made on their behalf.
"Americans
know that the government will sometimes conduct secret operations, but they
don't think that government officials should be writing secret laws."
Wydell
and Udall add that this is not something that they've only recently been
pressing for. They claim to have gone after the president himself to declassify the interpretations of the
Patriot Act so that Congress can consider discussions on Capitol Hill, but say
that despite repeated attempts to appeal to
Holder and others in the past, no leeway whatsoever has been accomplished.
Now both the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times are trying
to get the truth through filing Freedom of Information Act requests, but the
feds are working overtime to make sure that the attempts at finding the facts
are ignored.
The
senators say they had a glimmer of hope in August 2009 when the Department of
Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced that
they would begin a new processes for reviewing and releasing details of
decisions from the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court -- the court that interprets the Patriot Act -- but "two
and a half years later, however, this 'process' had produced literally zero
results."
http://rt.com
rt.com is Russian television, which actually does a
great job reporting on US news too.
The
views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
ah,election time by liberalsrock on Sunday, Mar 18, 2012 at 1:00:09 PM
ah,election time by liberalsrock on Sunday, Mar 18, 2012 at 1:00:09 PM
The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center
How about your own
transparency, Wyden and Udall? by Joan Mootry
on Sunday, Mar 18, 2012 at 4:47:45 PM
SECRETS OF THE CIA Film
Secrets the CIA
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Dennis Kucinich: “Unaccountable, Immoral and, by Definition, Inhuman”
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 Dennis
Kucinich, Statement: “The use of
lethal force by the |
A Kidnapping in Milan
A book so compelling it deserves to become
one of the nonfiction classics of our time.
As
propulsively readable as the best “true crime,” A
Kidnapping in Milanis a potent reckoning with the realities of
counterterrorism. In a mesmerizing page-turner, Steve Hendricks gives us a
ground-level view of the birth and growth of international Islamist terrorist
networks and of counterterrorism in action in Europe .
He also provides an eloquent, eagle’s-eye perspective on the big questions of
justice and the rule of law.
“InMilan Milan
In an extraordinary tale of detective versus spy, Italian investigators under the leadership of prosecutor Armando Spataro unraveled in embarrassing detail the “covert” action in which Abu Omar had been kidnapped and sent to be tortured inEgypt U.S.
“In
In an extraordinary tale of detective versus spy, Italian investigators under the leadership of prosecutor Armando Spataro unraveled in embarrassing detail the “covert” action in which Abu Omar had been kidnapped and sent to be tortured in
Prouty, Nada. Uncompromised:
The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of an Arab-American Patriot in the CIA. Palgrave, 2011. This
tale of rampant trampling of citizen’s rights reminds us to be vigilant against
unaccountable government overreach.
CIA TRIES TO CENSOR BOOK
Ali Soufan, The
Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al Qaeda.
“CIA Seeks to Censor 9/11 Book”
Scott Shane, The New
York Times, August 27, 2011
Intro: "In what amounts to a fight over who gets to
write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath, the Central
Intelligence Agency is demanding extensive cuts from the memoir of a former FBI
agent who spent years near the center of the battle against Al Qaeda."
CIA TORTURE
May 2, 2006 –
(CBS)
Showbuzz's Judy Faber reviews the feature film "Five Fingers,"
which is screening at the Tribeca Film Festival. ...
As
you can tell from the plot summary above, Five Fingers isn't a pleasant movie . Films about torture rarely are. However, at
the same time, the film isn't ...
CIA DESTRUCTION OF TORTURE
TAPES EVIDENCE
NY Times
reports the destruction of video tapes of interrogations using torture by the
CIA. --Carl.
“Former CIA Legal Chief Wanted for Murder by Drone”
Peter Beaumont, Guardian UK
Intro: "Campaigners against US drone strikes in Pakistan
are calling for the CIA's former legal chief to be arrested and charged with
murder for approving attacks that killed hundreds of people."
GARY WEBB
AND REAL JOURNALISTS WHO TELL
THE TRUTH ARE EULOGIZED INSTEAD OF TARGETTED.
Gary Webb: A hero of authentic journalism
Anthony Lappé, GNN Gary Webb,
RIP
No thanks to the L.A.
Times
Marc Cooper, LA Weekly Trashed by the CIA's Claque
Gary Webb: a Great Reporter
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffery St. Clair, Counterpunch Why
They Hated Gary Webb
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffery St. Clair, Counterpunch How
Webb Saved My Ass from the FBI
Gary Webb was the Real Deal
Bill Conroy, Counterpunch I Knew It Was the Truth and That's
What Kept Me Going
My Last Talk with Gary Webb
Richard Thieme, Counterpunch A Giant Falls
Press accounts fail to mention his vindication by CIA
Inspector General reports and congressional investigations
Michael C. Ruppert, From the Wilderness The Pariah
“Two years ago, Gary Webb wrote a series of articles that
said some bad things about the CIA. The CIA denied the charges, and every major
paper in the country took the agency's word for it. Gary was ruined. Which is a shame, because he
was right.”
Charles Bowden, Esquire
BOOKS ON CIA//MIND CONTROL/HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS
From Sue Skidmore 6-20-11
Experiments in MIND-CONTROL on
Writers
From: missouripeacecoalition-owner@lists.riseup.net Sent:
Wednesday, July 20, 2011 7:51 AM
July 20, 2011
On this day in 1977, the Central Intelligence Agency
released 20,000 documents revealing that they had engaged in mind-control
experiments. They released the documents after a request under the Freedom of
Information Act, and the revelation triggered a Congressional hearing in August.
The program was named MK-ULTRA; it began in the early 1950s and ran at least
through the late 1960s.
MK-ULTRA had its roots in Operation Paperclip, a program to
recruit former Nazi scientists who had conducted studies on torture and
brainwashing. Operation Paperclip spawned several secret government programs
involving mind control, behavior modification, hypnosis, and the like. It's not
clear whether the CIA's real aim was to produce a "Manchurian
candidate" who could be brainwashed to carry out various tasks, or whether
these off-the-wall "operations" were a smoke screen to keep attention
away from their real mission: to come up with better torture and interrogation
techniques. The program received 6 percent of the CIA's operating budget without
oversight or accounting.
Since then-director Richard Helms ordered all the MK-ULTRA
documents destroyed in 1973, the investigation had to rely on sworn testimony
and the 20,000 remaining documents, which had escaped destruction because they
were stored in a different warehouse. The limited information that was
available at the Congressional hearings revealed that "chemical,
biological, and radiological" methods to achieve mind control were
studied. This involved, among other things, administering drugs like LSD, heroin,
amphetamines, and mescaline to people without their knowledge or consent; they
also used, according to the Congressional report, "aspects of magicians'
art." In one project, called Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA set up
brothels in San Francisco ,
gave patrons LSD, and filmed their responses through hidden cameras. They
figured that even if subjects got suspicious, they would be too embarrassed to
report anything to the authorities. In other experiments conducted at McGill University
in Montreal , subjects
— who had come to the institute thinking they were to be treated for anxiety or
post-partum depression — were put into drug-induced comas and exposed to tape
loops for weeks at a time; others were given electroconvulsive therapy at 30 to
40 times the normal dose. Many subjects suffered lasting damage.
The CIA had the assistance of nearly a hundred colleges and
universities, pharmaceutical companies, research foundations, hospitals, and
prisons in conducting the MK-ULTRA project. Some evidence suggests that
Unabomber Ted Kaczynski was one of the subjects; Ken Kesey, author of One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest, volunteered for the LSD tests at a Veterans
Administration hospital when he was a student at Stanford. The official CIA
position is that they no longer conduct mind-control experiments, although at
least one veteran of the agency has said that the tests continue.
A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the
CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments - H. P. Albarelli Jr.; Review'Gripping Cold War tale of the CIA frying
French brains. Tremendous.' -- Fortean Times April 2010. Following nearly a
decade of research, this account solves the mysterious death of biochemist Frank Olson, revealing the
identities of his murderers in shocking detail. It offers a unique and
unprecedented look into the backgrounds of many former CIA, FBI, and Federal
Narcotics Bureau officials—including several who actually oversaw the CIA’s
mind-control programs from the 1950s to the 1970s. In retracing these programs,
a frequently bizarre and always frightening world is introduced, colored, and
dominated by many factors—Cold War fears, the secret relationship between the
nation’s drug enforcement agencies and the CIA, and the government’s close
collaboration with the Mafia.See all Editorial Reviews
The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American
Psychiatrists - Colin A. Ross; The
C.I.A. Doctors, (Manitou Communications, 2006), uncovers the truth about
violations of human rights by American Psychiatrists in the twentieth century.
Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and cross-referenced
research published in leading medical journals expose the existence of mind
altering experiments on unwitting human subjects, paid for by the U.S. Guantanamo
The
Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the
World (Second Edition) - L. Fletcher Prouty; The book the CIA doesn't want
you to read—now with a new foreword by Jesse Ventura.The Secret Team, L. Fletcher
Prouty’s exposeì of the CIA’s brutal methods of maintaining national security
during the Cold War, was first published in the 1970s. However, virtually all
copies of the book disappeared upon distribution, having been purchased en
masse by shady “private buyers.” Certainly, Prouty’s allegations—such as how
the U-2 Crisis of 1960 was fixed to sabotage Eisenhower–Khrushchev talk—cannot
have pleased the CIA. The Secret Team appears once more with a new introduction
by Jesse Ventura. About the AuthorL. Fletcher Prouty (1917–2001), a retired
colonel of the U.S. Air Force, served as the chief of special operations for
the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy years. He was directly in charge
of the global system designed to provide military support for the clandestine
activities of the CIA. He was also the author of The Secret Team: The CIA and
Its Allies.
Jesse Ventura is the former
governor of Minnesota Ventura Minnesota and Mexico
Shadow Masters: An International Network of
Governments and Secret-Service Agencies Working Together with Drugs Dealers and
Terrorists for Mutual Benefit and Profit
- Daniel Estulin; This investigation examines how behind-the-scenes
collaboration between governments, intelligence services and drug traffickers
has lined the pockets of big business and Western banks. Beginning with a
last-minute request from ex-governor Jesse Ventura, the narrative winds between
the author's own story of covering "deep politics" and the facts he
has uncovered. The ongoing campaign against Victor Bout, the "Merchant of
Death," is revealed as "move/countermove" in a game of
geopolitics, set against the background of a crumbling Soviet Union, a nascent Russia Spain
The
Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control: The
Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences - John D. Marks; A comprehensive,
detailed and thoroughly readable account of the CIA safehouses, the
brainwashing experiments, the involvement of the universities. (Washington
Perhaps the most compelling,
well-researched, organized and well-written account of CIA operations ever.
(Progressive )
A serious effort to reconstruct
carefully the details of intelligence agency experiments with 'mind control.'
(American Political Science Review )
One of the most important
books of the year. . . . We see the CIA on the cutting edge of inquiry into
hypnosis, drugs, brainwashing, personality assessment, psychosurgery, electric
and radio stimulations of the brain, the creation of involuntary amnesia,
terminal shock therapy. (Playboy )
Fascinating reading. (Washington
A wonderful piece of
investigative reporting. The best account we'll ever get of one of the seamiest
episodes of American intelligence. (Seymour
Sue Skidmore to Dick
A Nation Betrayed: The Chilling True Story of Secret
Cold War Experiments Performed on our Children and Other Innocent People by Carol Rutz ...
www.whale.to/b/rutz_h.html - The
Want to Know site lists three books.
Carol Rutz was one of those books listed. The Want to Know site is about Mind Control
and other things….and is a project of several professionals.
http://www.wanttoknow.info/aboutus It
looks very legitimate to me. Carol Rutz
book is out at Amazon and can be ordered as above. Thanks, Sue
A survivor of SRA and
Government Mind Control experimentation is the author of A Nation Betrayed
which tells the true story of secret Cold War experiments performed on
children. With extensive research and testimony from survivors, she documents
experiments by the CIA to create a Manchurian Candidate. Book
A Nation Betrayed: The
Chilling True Story of Secret Cold War Experiments Performed on our Children
and Other Innocent People by Carol Rutz http://my.dmci.net/~casey/ Ritual Abuse - Shadow Government and Mount Pony
[2003] Carol Rutz's Lecture at Indiana University
[2001] Carol Rutz's Conference Presentation The Fourth
Annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control Conference -2001
JAMES RISEN FIGHTS SUBPOENA
NYT reporter is
fighting a grand jury subpoena (April 2010) seeking the identities of his
sources for portions of his book, State
of War
CIA
Who Runs the CIA?
Outsiders for Hire.
By R.J. Hillhouse/Washington Post, Sunday, July 8, 2007; B05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/06/AR2007070601993_pf.html
Red alert: Our national security is being outsourced.
The most intriguing secrets of the "war on terror"
have nothing to do with al-Qaeda
and its fellow travelers. They're about the mammoth private spying industry
that all but runs U.S.
intelligence operations today.
Surprised? No wonder. In April, Director of National
Intelligence Mike
McConnell was poised to publicize a year-long examination of outsourcing by
U.S.
intelligence agencies. But the report was inexplicably delayed -- and suddenly
classified a national secret. What McConnell
doesn't want you to know is that the private spy industry has succeeded where
no foreign government has: It has penetrated the CIA
and is running the show.
Over the past five years (some say almost a decade), there
has been a revolution in the intelligence community toward wide-scale outsourcing.
Private companies now perform key intelligence-agency functions, to the tune,
I'm told, of more than $42 billion a year. Intelligence professionals tell me
that more than 50 percent of the National Clandestine Service (NCS) -- the
heart, brains and soul of the CIA -- has been outsourced to private firms such
as Abraxas, Booz
Allen Hamilton, Lockheed
Martin and Raytheon.
These firms recruit spies, create non-official cover
identities and control the movements of CIA case officers. They also provide
case officers and watch officers at crisis centers and regional desk officers
who control clandestine operations worldwide. As the Los
Angeles Times first reported last October, more than half the workforce in
two key CIA stations in the fight against terrorism -- Baghdad
and Islamabad,
Pakistan
-- is made up of industrial contractors, or "green badgers," in CIA
parlance.
Intelligence insiders say that entire branches of the NCS
have been outsourced to private industry. These branches are still managed by U.S.
government employees ("blue badgers") who are accountable to the
agency's chain of command. But beneath them, insiders say, is a supervisory
structure that's controlled entirely by contractors; in some cases, green
badgers are managing green badgers from other corporations.
Sensing problems -- and possibly fearing congressional
action -- the CIA recently conducted a hasty review of all of its job
classifications to determine which perform "essential government
functions" that should not be outsourced. But it's highly doubtful that
such a short-term exercise can comprehensively identify the proper
"blue/green" mix, especially because contractors' work statements
have long been carefully formulated to blur the distinction between approvable
and debatable functions.
Although the contracting system is Byzantine, there's no
question that the private sector delivers high-quality professional
intelligence services. Outsourcing has provided solutions to
personnel-management problems that have always plagued the CIA's operations
side. Rather than tying agents up in the kind of office politics that
government employees have to engage in to advance their careers, outsourcing
permits them to focus on what they do best, which boosts morale and performance.
Privatization also immediately increased the number of trained, experienced
agents in the field after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Even though wide-scale outsourcing may not immediately
endanger national security, it's worrisome. The contractors in charge of
espionage are still chiefly CIA alumni who have absorbed its public service
values. But as the center of gravity shifts from the public sector to the
private, more than one independent intelligence firm has developed plans to
"raise" succeeding generations of officers within its own training
systems. These corporate-grown agents will be inculcated with corporate values
and ethics, not those of public service.
And the current piecemeal system has introduced some
vulnerabilities. Historically, the system offered members of the intelligence
community the kind of stability that ensured that they would keep its secrets.
That dynamic is now being eroded. Contracts come and go. So do workforces. The
spies of the past came of age professionally in a strong extended family, but
the spies of the future will be more like children raised in multiple foster
homes -- at risk.
Today, when Booz Allen Hamilton loses a contract to SAIC,
people rush from one to the other in a game of musical chairs, with not enough
chairs for all the workers who possess both the highest security clearances and
expertise in the art of espionage. Some inevitably lose out. Any good
counterintelligence officer knows what can happen next. Down-on-their-luck
spies begin to do what spies do best: spy. Other companies offer them jobs in
exchange for industry secrets. Foreign governments approach them. And some day,
terrorists will clue in to this potential workforce.
The director of national intelligence has put our security
at risk by classifying the study on outsourcing and keeping the truth about
this inadequately planned and managed system out of the light. Much of what has
been outsourced makes sense, but much of the structure doesn't, not for the
longer term. It's time for the public and Congress to demand the study's
release. More important, it's past time for the industry -- an industry
conceived of and run by some of the best and brightest the CIA has ever
produced -- to come up with the kind of innovative solutions it's legendary
for, before the damage goes too deep.
R.J. Hillhouse writes the national security blog the Spy
Who Billed Me and is the author of the espionage thriller
"Outsourced."
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Here is the National Security Archive website at
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/
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In the news
";CIA
to Air Decades of Its Dirty Laundry"
By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus June 22, 2007
";CIA
Kidnapping, Wiretapping of '60s, '70s Revealed"
Morning Edition (National Public Radio) June 22, 2007
";C.I.A.
to Release Documents on Decades-Old Misdeeds"
By Scott Shane New York Times June 22, 2007
Chronology of the CIA's record on
declassification
CIA Had Single Officer in Hungary
1956
October 31, 2006
CIA Claims the Right to Decide What
is News
June 14, 2006
Secret Understanding Between
National Archives and CIA Exposes Framework for Surreptitious Reclassification
Program
April 19, 2006
CIA Wins 2006 "Rosemary
Award" for Worst Freedom of Information Performance by a Federal Agency
March 13, 2006
Declassification in Reverse
February 21, 2006
PDB News - The President's Daily
Brief
January 27, 2006
Judge Refuses In Camera Review of CIA Estimate on Iraq
October 21, 2005
Professor Sues CIA for President's
Daily Briefs
December 23, 2004
Archive Calls on CIA and Congress
to Address Loophole Shielding CIA Records From the Freedom of Information Act
October 15, 2004
Dubious Secrets
May 21, 2003
The Secret CIA History of the Iran
Coup
November 29, 2000
Lawsuit calls CIA secrecy claims
"facially incredible"
August 2, 2000
Archive Sues CIA
May 13, 1999
";C.I.A., Breaking Promises,
Puts Off Release of Cold War Files"
By Tim Weiner New York Times (Select) July 15, 1998 |
For
more information contact:
Thomas Blanton - 202/994-7000
CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden announced today that the
Agency is declassifying the full 693-page file amassed on CIA's illegal
activities by order of then-CIA director James Schlesinger in 1973--the
so-called "family jewels." Only a few dozen heavily-censored pages
of this file have previously been declassified, although multiple Freedom of
Information Act requests have been filed over the years for the documents.
Gen. Hayden called the file "a glimpse of a very different time and a very
different Agency." The papers are scheduled for public release on
Monday, June 25.
"This is the first voluntary CIA declassification of
controversial material since George
Tenet in 1998 reneged on the 1990s promises of greater openness at the
Agency," commented Thomas Blanton, the Archive's director.
Hayden also announced the declassification of some 11,000
pages of the so-called CAESAR, POLO and ESAU papers--hard-target analyses of
Soviet and Chinese leadership internal politics and Sino-Soviet relations
from 1953-1973, a collection of intelligence on Warsaw Pact military
programs, and hundreds of pages on the A-12 spy plane.
The National Security Archive separately obtained (and
posted today) a six-page summary of the illegal CIA
activities, prepared by Justice Department lawyers after a CIA briefing in
December 1974, and the memorandum
of conversation when the CIA first briefed President
Gerald Ford on the scandal on January 3, 1975.
Then-CIA director Schlesinger commissioned the
"family jewels" compilation with a May 9, 1973 directive after
finding out that Watergate burglars E. Howard Hunt and James McCord (both
veteran CIA officers) had cooperation from the Agency as they carried out
"dirty tricks" for President Nixon. The Schlesinger directive,
drafted by deputy director for operations William Colby, commanded senior CIA
officials to report immediately on any current or past Agency matters that
might fall outside CIA authority. By the end of May, Colby had been named to
succeed Schlesinger as DCI, and his loose-leaf notebook of memos totaled 693
pages [see John
Prados, Lost Crusader: The Secret
Wars of CIA Director William Colby (Oxford University Press,
2003, pp. 259-260.]
Seymour Hersh broke the story of CIA's illegal domestic
operations with a front page story in the New
York Times on December 22, 1974 ("Huge C.I.A. Operation
Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon
Years"), writing that "a check of the CIA's domestic files ordered
last year… produced evidence of dozens of other illegal activities… beginning
in the nineteen fifties, including break-ins, wiretapping, and the
surreptitious inspection of mail."
On December 31, 1974, CIA director Colby and the CIA
general counsel John Warner met with the deputy attorney general,
Laurence Silberman, and his associate, James Wilderotter, to brief Justice
"in connection with the recent New
York Times articles" on CIA matters that "presented
legal questions." Colby's list included 18 specifics:
1. Confinement of a Russian defector that "might be
regarded as a violation of the kidnapping laws."
2. Wiretapping of two syndicated columnists, Robert Allen and Paul Scott. 3. Physical surveillance of muckraker Jack Anderson and his associates, including current Fox News anchor Brit Hume. 4. Physical surveillance of then Washington Post reporter Michael Getler. 5. Break-in at the home of a former CIA employee. 6. Break-in at the office of a former defector. 7. Warrantless entry into the apartment of a former CIA employee. 8. Mail opening from 1953 to 1973 of letters to and from the 9. Mail opening from 1969 to 1972 of letters to and from 10. Behavior modification experiments on "unwitting" 11. Assassination plots against Castro, Lumumba, and 12. Surveillance of dissident groups between 1967 and 1971. 13. Surveillance of a particular Latin American female and 14. Surveillance of a CIA critic and former officer, Victor Marchetti. 15. Amassing of files on 9,900-plus Americans related to the antiwar movement. 16. Polygraph experiments with the 17. Fake CIA identification documents that might violate state laws. 18. Testing of electronic equipment on
Read the Documents
Note: The following documents are in PDF format. You will need to download and install the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view.
Document
1: Summary of the Family Jewels
Memorandum for the File, "CIA Matters," by James A. Wilderotter, Associate Deputy Attorney General, 3 January 1975 Source: Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library
On New Years' eve, 1974, DCI Colby met with Justice
Department officials, including Deputy Attorney General Laurence H.
Silberman, to give them a full briefing of the "skeletons."
Document
2: Colby Briefs President Ford on the Family Jewels
Memorandum of Conversation, 3 January 1975 Source: Gerald R. Ford President Library
Ten days after the appearance of Hersh's New York Times story, DCI
William Colby tells President Ford how his predecessor James Schlesinger
(then serving as Secretary of Defense) ordered CIA staffers to compile the
"skeletons" in the Agency's closet, such as surveillance of student
radicals, illegal wiretaps, assassination plots, and the three year
confinement of a Soviet defector, Yuri Nosenko.
Document
3: Kissinger's Reaction
Memorandum of Conversation between President Ford and Secretary of State/National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, 4 January 1975 Source: Gerald R. Ford President Library
An apoplectic Kissinger argues that the unspilling of CIA
secrets is "worse than the days of McCarthyism" when the Wisconsin
Senator went after the State Department. Kissinger had met with former DCI
Richard Helms who told him that "these stories are just the tip of the
iceberg," citing as one example Robert F. Kennedy's role in
assassination planning. Ford wondered whether to fire Colby, but Kissinger
advised him to wait until after the investigations were complete when he
could "put in someone of towering integrity." The "Blue
Ribbon" announcement refers to the creation of a commission chaired by
then-vice president Nelson A. Rockefeller.
Document
4: Investigations Continue
Memorandum of Conversation between Kissinger, Schlesinger, Colby et al., "Investigations of Allegations of CIA Domestic Activities," 20 February 1975 Source: Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library
Cabinet and sub-cabinet level officials led by Kissinger
discuss ways and means to protect information sought by ongoing Senate
(Church Committee) and House (Pike Committee) investigations of intelligence
community abuses during the first decades of the Cold War. Worried about the
foreign governments that have cooperated with
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CIA
AND DRUGS
January 25, 2008
A CounterPunch Special Investigation
How the CIA Inflitrated the DEA: Operation Two-Fold
By DOUGLAS VALENTINE
The DEA and its predecessor federal drug law enforcement organizations have always been infiltrated and, to varying degrees, managed byAmerica
The glitch in the system is that while investigating traffickers, federal drug agents are always unearthing the Establishment's ties to organized crime and its proxy drug syndicates.US
They have other means at their disposal as well. In 1998, for example, in a series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News, reporter Gary Webb claimed that the CIA had facilitated the flow of crack cocaine to street gangs inLos Angeles
It's always been that way. Case in point: in 1960 MacMillan published Russ Koen's book TheChina US , "with the
full knowledge and connivance" of their government in Taiwan
Professor Al McCoy's seminal book The Politics of Heroin, published in 1972, is another example. The CIA knew about McCoy's research and approached his publisher, demanding that it suppress the book on grounds of national security. Harper Row refused, but agreed to allow the CIA to review the book prior to publication. When McCoy objected, Harper Row said it would not publish the book unless McCoy submitted.
Examples of federal drug law enforcement's complicity with the CIA also abound and many are recounted in my first book on the subject, The Strength of the Wolf: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics 1930-1968. In my new book, The Strength of the Pack: The Politics, Espionage Intrigues, and Personalities that Defined the DEA, I explain how the CIA infiltrated the DEA and how, under CIA direction, the war on drugs became a template for the war on terror. One example shall be presented in this essay.
The Merry Pranksters
My new book, Strength of the Pack, begins in April 1968, when, in the wake of a huge corruption scandal, the Johnson Administration folded the FBN into a new organization called the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD). Attorney General Ramsey Clark announced the appointment of thirty-eight year old John E. Ingersoll as the BNDD's director. In a letter to me Clark said that Ingersoll "offered a clean break with a past that had ended in corruption and, I hoped, a new progressive, scientific based approach to drug control in a time of deep social unrest."
Clark appointed Ingersoll while Johnson was president and after the elections, in an attempt to preempt the in-coming Nixon Administration,Clark held a news conference to proclaim the Johnson
Administration's success in cleansing the BNDD of any lingering corruption.
"32 Narcotics Agents Resign in Corruption Investigation Here," read
the headline in the 14 December 1968 New York Times. Clark
noted that five of the bad agents had been indicted, and that additional
prosecutions and resignations would soon be forthcoming.
The Democrats had lost the election, largely because the "law and order" candidate Richard Nixon had promised to win the war on drugs. Ironically, once he was elected president, this vow would pit Nixon against the CIA, which was aiding and abetting the major politicians and generals commandingAmerica 's allies
in Vietnam , Laos and Thailand
BNDD Director John Ingersoll was totally unprepared for the political tug-of-war he found himself in the midst of. He had joined theOakland Charlotte , North Carolina
As one agent explains, "Most were corrupted by the lure of the underworld. They thought they could check their morality at the door--go out and lie, cheat, and steal--then come back and retrieve it. But you can't. In fact, if you're successful because you can lie, cheat, and steal, those things become tools you use in the bureaucracy. You're talking about guys whose lives depended on their ability to be devious and who become very good at it. So these people became the bosses. Meanwhile the agents were losing their simplicity in subtle ways."
Ingersoll knew this, but he was also aware of the high priority Nixon placed on winning the war on drugs. Rather than generate a scandal, Ingersoll decided to go outside of the organization, to the CIA, for help in quietly rooting out corruption. The 1975 Rockefeller Commission Report On CIA Activities Within The United States stated that the joint CIA-BNDD anti-corruption program began when Ingersoll became "vitally" concerned that some of his employees might have been corrupted by drug traffickers. Lacking the necessary security apparatus to expunge these corrupt agents, Ingersoll in early 1970 asked the Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, for help building a "counter-intelligence" capacity. The request was "apparently" supported by President Nixon's Attorney General, John Mitchell.
The man Ingersoll appointed chief inspector of BNDD, Patrick Fuller, had served with IRS investigations for nearly 20 years inCalifornia
The principle recruiter was Jerry Soul, assisted by CIA officers John F Murnane, Joseph Cruciani, and Chick Barquin. Then a personnel officer at CIA headquarters, Soul had managed Cuban exiles during the Bay of Pigs invasion, and later directed the CIA's exile Cuban mercenary army and air force in theCongo
Apart from one exile Cuban, the CIA officers hired for Operation Twofold were, typically, Anglo paramilitary officers whose careers had stalled due to the gradual reduction of CIA forces inVietnam
and Laos US
Much of Twofold remains a mystery because, as the Rockefeller Commission reported, it "violated the 1947 Act which prohibits the CIA's participation in law enforcement activities."
No one was ever prosecuted.
Twofold Case Studies
Twofold was aimed at the BNDD's top managers. One target was Joseph J. Baca, the assistant Regional Director inLos
Angeles
Gutensohn had served with the Special Forces inSouth Vietnam Laos ,
one of the major drug transit points between the Golden Triangle and Saigon . He had drug experience and upon returning to the US , Gutensohn was given the choice of being the
CIA's liaison to the BNDD in Laos Vietnam
veteran, had joined the Twofold program six months earlier in Chicago
"After meeting with Jerry Soul," Gutensohn recalls, "I met Fuller at a hotel near Tyson's Corner. He said that when we communicated, I was to be known as Leo Adams, forLos
Angeles Washington , DC
Fuller recruited Gutensohn and the other CIA officers because they did not have to be trained in the "tradecraft skills" required for the job of spying on their bosses. But Gutensohn's cover was blown before he got to LA. As he recalls, "Someone at headquarters was talking and everyone knew. About a month after I arrived, one of the agents said to me, "I hear that Pat Fuller signed your credentials."
A similar situation occurred inMiami Laos Philippines Italy
Burke applied and was hired in December 1970. Fuller recruited him into the Twofold operation and assigned him to Pete Scrocca's group. But instead of spying on his new colleagues, Burke set about proving that he was tough and smart enough to work "undercover cases on bad guys with shotguns in motel rooms." Burke never sent any negative reports to Fuller, and Theisen and Scrocca eventually accepted him.
Gutensohn and Burke's experience was not unusual, and Twofold never resulted in a single dismissal of any corrupt BNDD agent. The astonishing reason for this is quite simple. Little did Ingersoll or Fuller know that the CIA never initiates a program unless it is deniable and has "intelligence potential." Twofold conformed to these criteria: it was deniable because it was, ostensibly, a BNDD program; and it had intelligence potential in so far as it was perfectly suited for Angletonian style "operations within operations."
As the BNDD's chief inspector Pat Fuller told me, "There was another operation even I didn't know about. Why don't you find out who set that one up, and why?"
Boxes Within Boxes
Well, I did find out about this operation. Quite by accident, while interviewing a DEA agent inMiami New
York City New
York
DiGennaro took the job and was sent to a CIA security officer to obtain the required clearances. That's when he was told that he and several other recruits were being "spun-off" from Fuller's inspection program into the CIA's unilateral "operational" program. He was told that he had been selected because he had a black belt in Karate and the uncanny ability to remember lists and faces. The background check took 14 months, during which time DiGennaro received intensive combat and tradecraft training. In October 1972 he was sent to BNDD regional headquarters inNew York
DiGennaro's special group was managed by the CIA's Special Operations Division (then under Evan Parker, first director of the CIA's Phoenix Program) in conjunction with the military, which provided assets within foreign military services to keep ex-filtration routes open. Ex-filtration routes were air corridors and roads. The military also cleared air space when captured suspects were brought into theUS Lebanon
Within the CIA's special anti-drug unit, which numbered about 40 men, were experts in printing, forgery, maritime operations, and telecommunications. The operatives knew one another by first name only. DiGennaro, however, was aware that other BNDD agents, including Joseph Salm and Paul Seema, were in the program. No one else in the BNDD, however, knew about the program. When the call to duty came, DiGennaro would check with Fuller and then take sick time or annual leave to go on missions. There were lots of missions. As his group leader inNew York
The job was tracking down, kidnapping, and if they resisted, killing drug dealers. The violence was the result of the "limited window of opportunity" needed to get the job done. Due to the need for plausible deniability, there was minimal contact with the American Embassy where the mission was conducted. DiGennaro had "a Guardian Angel" who "assembled intelligence, developed routines, and contacted informants." But the host country and its uniformed police and military services were rarely aware of his presence, and there was little coordination with the local BNDD outpost.
The operations were extremely dangerous. As DiGennaro recalls, "There was a case inColombia Colombia United States Miami
As one DEA Agent recalls, "We'd get a call that there was 'a present' waiting for us on the corner of116th St Argentina
Expendable operative DiGennaro did not see the management apparatus that was directing him. He never knew much about the people the CIA unit was snatching and snuffing either; only that people were prosecuted and that defendants screamed.
DiGennaro's last operation in 1977 involved the recovery of a satellite that had fallen into a drug dealer's hands. By then he had all the CIA tradecraft skills required to fly solo; he learned who owned satellite, negotiated for it in good faith, and purchased it back on the black market. Such was the extent of the "parallel mechanism" the CIA had with the BNDD; a mechanism the CIA obviously used not only for anti-drug purposes, but for counter-terror reasons as well.
Fallout
By 1977, some 125 "former" CIA officers had been infiltrated into the DEA at every level of the organization, especially in intelligence units, making everything possible--from black market arms exchanges, to negotiations with terrorists, to political assassination. It also put the CIA in total control of targeting.
However, as the CIA's influence became pervasive, more and more DEA agents felt its adverse impact on their cases. First the CIA demanded a list of all overseas DEA informants, as well as copies of all its intelligence reports. They got both. Next they began recruiting traffickers the DEA was working on. These recruits were subtracted from the DEA target list. InChile in 1973, for example, the CIA allowed five
drug traffickers to leave the soccer stadium in Santiago Colombia
where they helped form the cartel that would eventually supplied crack cocaine
to street gangs in Los Angles, through other CIA assets in Latin
America .
As one DEA agent puts it, "The relationship between the CIA and DEA was not as it was originally intended. The CIA does not belong in any type of law enforcement activity, unless it can result in a conviction. Which it rarely does. They should only be supportive, totally."
In February 1977, as he was about to resign in dismay, this agent and a group of other senior DEA officials felt compelled to document a litany of CIA misdeeds.
The CIA was causing so many problems that in early 1977, outgoing Assistant Administrator for Enforcement Dan Casey sent a three page, single-spaced memorandum to DEA Administrator Peter Bensinger expressing his concern "over the role presently being played by the CIA relative to the gathering of operational intelligence abroad." Signing off on the memo were six enforcement division chiefs. "All were unanimous in their belief that present CIA programs were likely to cause serious future problems for DEA, both foreign and domestic." Unilateral CIA programs in foreign countries were a "potential source of conflict and embarrassment and which may have a negative impact on the overallU.S. United States
Casey was especially upset that the CIA demanded that DEA provide telephone numbers for its operations. "This practice is most disturbing because, in effect, it puts DEA in the position of determining which violators will be granted a de facto immunity." Considering the seriousness of the problem, he recommended that "all DEA support for CIA electronic surveillance be suspended at once." He asked DDEA Administrator Peter Bensinger to insist that the CIA adhere to guidelines set by the Carte White House Domestic Council, which limited the CIA to gathering strategic intelligence. He advised that DEA personnel not request CIA support "which might end to prejudice the domestic prosecution of any drug trafficker."
Alas, Bensinger suffered the CIA at the expense of the DEA's integrity. He ignored Casey and his division chiefs. The Strength of the Pack features examples of how this accommodation with the CIA emasculated the DEA. One major example is the CIA's Contra Connection, as revealed by Gary Webb. There is also the fact that Manuel Noriega was a CIA asset and that his DEA file was destroyed by CIA infiltrators, paving the way for the invasion ofPanama
This huge crack in the CIA's protective shield led to the formation of the CIA'sCounter-Narcotics
Center
The Gacha and Escobar hits, and many more like them which the public knows little or nothing about, are extrapolations of those performed by Joey DiGennaro. And the beat goes on. Shortly after he resigned in 1993, DEA chief Robert Bonner revealed that the CIA in 1990 had shipped a ton of pure cocaine toMiami from its Counter
Narcotic Center
warehouse in Venezuela
With Bush's war on terror, the situation has only gotten worse. InAfghanistan
One can only wonder how deeplyAmerica
Douglas Valentine is the author of The Hotel Tacloban, The Phoenix Program, and TDY. His fourth book, The Strength of the Wolf: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1930-1968, which received the Choice Academic Excellence Award and is being published inRussia
CIA AND DRUG TRADE
The DEA and its predecessor federal drug law enforcement organizations have always been infiltrated and, to varying degrees, managed by
The glitch in the system is that while investigating traffickers, federal drug agents are always unearthing the Establishment's ties to organized crime and its proxy drug syndicates.
They have other means at their disposal as well. In 1998, for example, in a series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News, reporter Gary Webb claimed that the CIA had facilitated the flow of crack cocaine to street gangs in
It's always been that way. Case in point: in 1960 MacMillan published Russ Koen's book The
Professor Al McCoy's seminal book The Politics of Heroin, published in 1972, is another example. The CIA knew about McCoy's research and approached his publisher, demanding that it suppress the book on grounds of national security. Harper Row refused, but agreed to allow the CIA to review the book prior to publication. When McCoy objected, Harper Row said it would not publish the book unless McCoy submitted.
Examples of federal drug law enforcement's complicity with the CIA also abound and many are recounted in my first book on the subject, The Strength of the Wolf: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics 1930-1968. In my new book, The Strength of the Pack: The Politics, Espionage Intrigues, and Personalities that Defined the DEA, I explain how the CIA infiltrated the DEA and how, under CIA direction, the war on drugs became a template for the war on terror. One example shall be presented in this essay.
The Merry Pranksters
My new book, Strength of the Pack, begins in April 1968, when, in the wake of a huge corruption scandal, the Johnson Administration folded the FBN into a new organization called the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD). Attorney General Ramsey Clark announced the appointment of thirty-eight year old John E. Ingersoll as the BNDD's director. In a letter to me Clark said that Ingersoll "offered a clean break with a past that had ended in corruption and, I hoped, a new progressive, scientific based approach to drug control in a time of deep social unrest."
Clark appointed Ingersoll while Johnson was president and after the elections, in an attempt to preempt the in-coming Nixon Administration,
The Democrats had lost the election, largely because the "law and order" candidate Richard Nixon had promised to win the war on drugs. Ironically, once he was elected president, this vow would pit Nixon against the CIA, which was aiding and abetting the major politicians and generals commanding
BNDD Director John Ingersoll was totally unprepared for the political tug-of-war he found himself in the midst of. He had joined the
As one agent explains, "Most were corrupted by the lure of the underworld. They thought they could check their morality at the door--go out and lie, cheat, and steal--then come back and retrieve it. But you can't. In fact, if you're successful because you can lie, cheat, and steal, those things become tools you use in the bureaucracy. You're talking about guys whose lives depended on their ability to be devious and who become very good at it. So these people became the bosses. Meanwhile the agents were losing their simplicity in subtle ways."
Ingersoll knew this, but he was also aware of the high priority Nixon placed on winning the war on drugs. Rather than generate a scandal, Ingersoll decided to go outside of the organization, to the CIA, for help in quietly rooting out corruption. The 1975 Rockefeller Commission Report On CIA Activities Within The United States stated that the joint CIA-BNDD anti-corruption program began when Ingersoll became "vitally" concerned that some of his employees might have been corrupted by drug traffickers. Lacking the necessary security apparatus to expunge these corrupt agents, Ingersoll in early 1970 asked the Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, for help building a "counter-intelligence" capacity. The request was "apparently" supported by President Nixon's Attorney General, John Mitchell.
The man Ingersoll appointed chief inspector of BNDD, Patrick Fuller, had served with IRS investigations for nearly 20 years in
The principle recruiter was Jerry Soul, assisted by CIA officers John F Murnane, Joseph Cruciani, and Chick Barquin. Then a personnel officer at CIA headquarters, Soul had managed Cuban exiles during the Bay of Pigs invasion, and later directed the CIA's exile Cuban mercenary army and air force in the
Apart from one exile Cuban, the CIA officers hired for Operation Twofold were, typically, Anglo paramilitary officers whose careers had stalled due to the gradual reduction of CIA forces in
Much of Twofold remains a mystery because, as the Rockefeller Commission reported, it "violated the 1947 Act which prohibits the CIA's participation in law enforcement activities."
No one was ever prosecuted.
Twofold Case Studies
Twofold was aimed at the BNDD's top managers. One target was Joseph J. Baca, the assistant Regional Director in
Gutensohn had served with the Special Forces in
"After meeting with Jerry Soul," Gutensohn recalls, "I met Fuller at a hotel near Tyson's Corner. He said that when we communicated, I was to be known as Leo Adams, for
Fuller recruited Gutensohn and the other CIA officers because they did not have to be trained in the "tradecraft skills" required for the job of spying on their bosses. But Gutensohn's cover was blown before he got to LA. As he recalls, "Someone at headquarters was talking and everyone knew. About a month after I arrived, one of the agents said to me, "I hear that Pat Fuller signed your credentials."
A similar situation occurred in
Burke applied and was hired in December 1970. Fuller recruited him into the Twofold operation and assigned him to Pete Scrocca's group. But instead of spying on his new colleagues, Burke set about proving that he was tough and smart enough to work "undercover cases on bad guys with shotguns in motel rooms." Burke never sent any negative reports to Fuller, and Theisen and Scrocca eventually accepted him.
Gutensohn and Burke's experience was not unusual, and Twofold never resulted in a single dismissal of any corrupt BNDD agent. The astonishing reason for this is quite simple. Little did Ingersoll or Fuller know that the CIA never initiates a program unless it is deniable and has "intelligence potential." Twofold conformed to these criteria: it was deniable because it was, ostensibly, a BNDD program; and it had intelligence potential in so far as it was perfectly suited for Angletonian style "operations within operations."
As the BNDD's chief inspector Pat Fuller told me, "There was another operation even I didn't know about. Why don't you find out who set that one up, and why?"
Boxes Within Boxes
Well, I did find out about this operation. Quite by accident, while interviewing a DEA agent in
DiGennaro took the job and was sent to a CIA security officer to obtain the required clearances. That's when he was told that he and several other recruits were being "spun-off" from Fuller's inspection program into the CIA's unilateral "operational" program. He was told that he had been selected because he had a black belt in Karate and the uncanny ability to remember lists and faces. The background check took 14 months, during which time DiGennaro received intensive combat and tradecraft training. In October 1972 he was sent to BNDD regional headquarters in
DiGennaro's special group was managed by the CIA's Special Operations Division (then under Evan Parker, first director of the CIA's Phoenix Program) in conjunction with the military, which provided assets within foreign military services to keep ex-filtration routes open. Ex-filtration routes were air corridors and roads. The military also cleared air space when captured suspects were brought into the
Within the CIA's special anti-drug unit, which numbered about 40 men, were experts in printing, forgery, maritime operations, and telecommunications. The operatives knew one another by first name only. DiGennaro, however, was aware that other BNDD agents, including Joseph Salm and Paul Seema, were in the program. No one else in the BNDD, however, knew about the program. When the call to duty came, DiGennaro would check with Fuller and then take sick time or annual leave to go on missions. There were lots of missions. As his group leader in
The job was tracking down, kidnapping, and if they resisted, killing drug dealers. The violence was the result of the "limited window of opportunity" needed to get the job done. Due to the need for plausible deniability, there was minimal contact with the American Embassy where the mission was conducted. DiGennaro had "a Guardian Angel" who "assembled intelligence, developed routines, and contacted informants." But the host country and its uniformed police and military services were rarely aware of his presence, and there was little coordination with the local BNDD outpost.
The operations were extremely dangerous. As DiGennaro recalls, "There was a case in
As one DEA Agent recalls, "We'd get a call that there was 'a present' waiting for us on the corner of
Expendable operative DiGennaro did not see the management apparatus that was directing him. He never knew much about the people the CIA unit was snatching and snuffing either; only that people were prosecuted and that defendants screamed.
DiGennaro's last operation in 1977 involved the recovery of a satellite that had fallen into a drug dealer's hands. By then he had all the CIA tradecraft skills required to fly solo; he learned who owned satellite, negotiated for it in good faith, and purchased it back on the black market. Such was the extent of the "parallel mechanism" the CIA had with the BNDD; a mechanism the CIA obviously used not only for anti-drug purposes, but for counter-terror reasons as well.
Fallout
By 1977, some 125 "former" CIA officers had been infiltrated into the DEA at every level of the organization, especially in intelligence units, making everything possible--from black market arms exchanges, to negotiations with terrorists, to political assassination. It also put the CIA in total control of targeting.
However, as the CIA's influence became pervasive, more and more DEA agents felt its adverse impact on their cases. First the CIA demanded a list of all overseas DEA informants, as well as copies of all its intelligence reports. They got both. Next they began recruiting traffickers the DEA was working on. These recruits were subtracted from the DEA target list. In
As one DEA agent puts it, "The relationship between the CIA and DEA was not as it was originally intended. The CIA does not belong in any type of law enforcement activity, unless it can result in a conviction. Which it rarely does. They should only be supportive, totally."
In February 1977, as he was about to resign in dismay, this agent and a group of other senior DEA officials felt compelled to document a litany of CIA misdeeds.
The CIA was causing so many problems that in early 1977, outgoing Assistant Administrator for Enforcement Dan Casey sent a three page, single-spaced memorandum to DEA Administrator Peter Bensinger expressing his concern "over the role presently being played by the CIA relative to the gathering of operational intelligence abroad." Signing off on the memo were six enforcement division chiefs. "All were unanimous in their belief that present CIA programs were likely to cause serious future problems for DEA, both foreign and domestic." Unilateral CIA programs in foreign countries were a "potential source of conflict and embarrassment and which may have a negative impact on the overall
Casey was especially upset that the CIA demanded that DEA provide telephone numbers for its operations. "This practice is most disturbing because, in effect, it puts DEA in the position of determining which violators will be granted a de facto immunity." Considering the seriousness of the problem, he recommended that "all DEA support for CIA electronic surveillance be suspended at once." He asked DDEA Administrator Peter Bensinger to insist that the CIA adhere to guidelines set by the Carte White House Domestic Council, which limited the CIA to gathering strategic intelligence. He advised that DEA personnel not request CIA support "which might end to prejudice the domestic prosecution of any drug trafficker."
Alas, Bensinger suffered the CIA at the expense of the DEA's integrity. He ignored Casey and his division chiefs. The Strength of the Pack features examples of how this accommodation with the CIA emasculated the DEA. One major example is the CIA's Contra Connection, as revealed by Gary Webb. There is also the fact that Manuel Noriega was a CIA asset and that his DEA file was destroyed by CIA infiltrators, paving the way for the invasion of
This huge crack in the CIA's protective shield led to the formation of the CIA's
The Gacha and Escobar hits, and many more like them which the public knows little or nothing about, are extrapolations of those performed by Joey DiGennaro. And the beat goes on. Shortly after he resigned in 1993, DEA chief Robert Bonner revealed that the CIA in 1990 had shipped a ton of pure cocaine to
With Bush's war on terror, the situation has only gotten worse. In
One can only wonder how deeply
Douglas Valentine is the author of The Hotel Tacloban, The Phoenix Program, and TDY. His fourth book, The Strength of the Wolf: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1930-1968, which received the Choice Academic Excellence Award and is being published in
CIA AND DRUG TRADE
In 1991 our RSO, the Arkansas Committee, invited
Professor Al McCoy to visit us here and speak at GiffilLs in Old Main. He
spoke on the CIA controlled drug trade at the Mena, Arkansas airport. We filmed that event
and it is available upon your request in DVD format. Dr. McCoy's book is
available at:
http://www.amazon.com/Politics-Heroin-Complicity-Global-Trade/dp/1556524838/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268670378&sr=1-1
Dr. Kurzmarov of the University inTulsa
has invited Dr. McCoy to speak there and the poster announcing that is attached
for your information and action. Dr. Kuzmarov visited here two weeks ago
to discuss his new book "The Myth of the Addicted Army" and
connections to the CIA controlled drug trade worldwide.
See:
http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Addicted-Army-Vietnam-Politics/dp/1558497056/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268670208&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Politics-Heroin-Complicity-Global-Trade/dp/1556524838/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268670378&sr=1-1
Dr. Kurzmarov of the University in
See:
http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Addicted-Army-Vietnam-Politics/dp/1558497056/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268670208&sr=1-1
Suspicious
Minds: On Timothy Melley
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In 1994, the fiction writer Charles Baxter
published “Dysfunctional Narratives,” an essay in which he claims to have
uncovered “the greatest influence on American fiction for the last twenty
years.” His argument is an unorthodox one: Joyce, Woolf, Proust, Beckett,
Kafka, Hemingway and Faulkner aren’t mentioned at all, and the person in
question, it turns out, isn’t even a novelist, though he did write books (ones
full of sentences that are “leaden and dulling, juridical-minded to the last,
impersonal but not without savor,” and that “present the reader with camouflage
masked as objective thought”). This person’s influence on America fiction,
however, is traceable neither to his books nor their prose style, but rather to
his apparent addiction to deniability—that noxious brew of disavowal,
compartmentalization, structured ignorance and deception-as-policy through
which negative outcomes become all but impossible to blame on anyone in
particular. The person Baxter has in mind is none other than Richard Nixon, who
brought the rhetoric of deniability to the public stage as no one had before,
and who made its quintessential phrase—“mistakes were made”—a staple of
American discourse about decisions and their consequences.
The Covert Sphere
Secrecy, Fiction, and theNational Security
State
By Timothy Melley.
Buy this book
Secrecy, Fiction, and the
By Timothy Melley.
Buy this book
About
the Author
Peter C. Baker
Peter C. Baker lives in Chicago and Wilmington ,
North Carolina
Also
by the Author
W.G. Sebald’s Across
the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964–2001; Saturn's
Moons; Grant Gee’s Patience (After Sebald).
Institutionalized torture says not look what
we can do, but look what we disown, what only the bad apples among us require.
Baxter goes on to argue that widespread
narratives of disavowal “humiliate the act of storytelling”: “You can’t
reconstruct a story—you can’t even know what the story is—if everyone is
saying, ‘Mistakes were made.’ Who made them? Well, everybody made them and no
one did, and it’s history anyway, so we should forget about it.” Without
motives, agency or resolution, our national story becomes “dysfunctional.” So
too stories about the self, which attempt to address unhappiness but are
ill-equipped to do so, at least when unhappiness results from the actions of
governments, corporations or banks, all of which have become deniability experts.
Authors create characters who are unhappy, confused or trapped—and looking for
answers why. But because the misdeeds of banks, for example, are fiendishly
hard to understand (often by design) and not easily shoehorned into the
conventions of realist storytelling, novels are more likely to point the finger
at something close by and easily named. Family life works well as a cause of
unhappiness, and so does childhood trauma (even better if its memory has been
repressed and the narrative can trace its recovery). “That’s the whole story,”
Baxter writes glumly. “When blame has been assigned, the story is over.”
By his own description, Baxter is an author
committed to fiction where characters take actions and live with their effects.
“Mistakes and crimes tend to create narratives, however, and they have done so
from the time of the Greek tragedies,” he notes. Consequently, the “culture of
disavowals”—which Baxter sees everywhere, from talk shows to graduate fiction
workshops to the acclaimed novels of the day—strikes him as a defeat: the
domestication, in the most pejorative sense of the word, of life and literature
by the powers that be.
Timothy Melley, a professor at Miami
University, is also interested in how American fiction has been influenced by
institutionalized deception from on high, 
particularly with regard to the
covert sectors of government that came into being during and after World War
II. But his account—which he eventually frames in explicit opposition to
Baxter’s—locates the origins of deniability much earlier than Nixon. If
deniability has an author, Melley argues inThe
Covert Sphere, it is George Kennan, who in 1948 penned National
Security Council directive NSC-10/2, the document that changed the CIA, then
barely one year old, from a purely intelligence-gathering outfit into an agency
charged with “propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action, including
sabotage, anti-sabotage” and so on. Crucially, NSC-10/2 ordered that these
operations be implemented in such a way that, if discovered, “the US Government
can plausibly disclaim any responsibility.”
More than sixty years later, the American
covert sector is a thriving, many-tentacled monster of deniability funded by at
least $75 billion per year, consisting of at least forty-five government
agencies, 1,271 smaller government organizations and 1,391 private
corporations. Thanks to the occasional revelation by investigative journalists
or congressional committees, most Americans have a vague idea that the covert
sector exists, that it has a great deal of power, and that it has in the past
resorted to surveillance, kidnapping, torture and assassination in the name of
protecting American interests. But what people know best about the covert
sector is that it remains mostly unknowable by design: it lies, it keeps its
past and future plans secret, it spreads misinformation both abroad and at
home, and it shrouds its every move in a thick haze of overlapping cover
stories and disavowals. It is the massive “known unknown” of American life, the
supreme dysfunctional narrative, doing its business somewhere out of sight
while we eat breakfast, or sleep, or read about it in the news without learning
what it is. “Mistakes were made” implies a corollary, unspoken but I think
widely felt: more mistakes are being made right now, and will remain unknown
until long after the damage is done.
This is the sort of impotent half-knowledge
that Baxter bemoans in “Dysfunctional Narratives.” Melley agrees that repeated
exposure to lying-as-policy has been bad for everyone. Citizens have been
pushed into a state of “radical unknowing,” or knowing for certain only that
they really don’t know. But unlike Baxter, Melley thinks America’s writers, or
at least a few of them, have risen admirably to the challenge—not by
constructing narratives that Baxter would ever call functional, but by playing
dysfunction for all it’s worth, the better to pinpoint its effect on the
national and individual consciousness.
This is a familiar argument: radical new times
have rendered obsolete familiar literary modes and pleasures. Paeans to an art
that revels in its own instability, uncertainty or inconclusiveness—its
intentional, self-aware dysfunctionality—are as old as literature itself, as
are conservative laments such as Baxter’s. But Melley isn’t interested (or at
least not exclusively so) in cheerleading for the postmodern. What makes his
argument fascinating is his attention to the actual history of America
* * *
As the first-ever government agency with
deniability written into its charter, the CIA was from the beginning a
storytelling machine. It was no coincidence that in its early days the organization
was full of literature students and writers recruited by influential scholars
of English, or that for decades it operated as perhaps the most generous
literary patron in the West, funding scores of novels, translations and
literary journals. And so it is oddly apt that most Americans know most of what
they know about the covert sector—or, more accurately, half-know most of what
they half-know—not from fact-oriented discourses like journalism, history and
the law, but instead from novels, films, TV shows, comic books and narrative
video games: in other words, through fictions, some of them quite outlandish,
some chock-full of accurate information and insight, most somewhere in between,
and all of them more or less dismissible as “just fiction.”
Melley’s boldest suggestion is that fiction
about the covert activity assumes an outsize role not only for members of the
general public, but also for most individuals within the covert sector. This
is, he argues, a natural consequence of the secret government’s size and
“hypercompartmentalization,” itself a natural outcome of its foundational
obsession with deniability. The covert sector is so large, so fragmented into
agencies, subdivisions, private contractors and shell companies—often competing
with each other for funding and operational jurisdiction—that it can be
difficult, if not impossible, for any one of the beast’s many tentacles to know
what the rest have in their clutches. This is exacerbated by complex
classification schemes that parcel out information—even of a single
operation—piecemeal on a “need to know” basis, a process that can leave even
those with high-security clearances in the dark. Often, Melley claims, those at
the top of the totem pole are the most ignorant of all, because what is required
of them is not knowledge but its opposite: public expressions of shock when,
against the odds, this or that unsavory activity comes to light. Even if those
technically “inside” the covert state know a bit more than John Everyman, it is
certainly plausible that they hanker to know more—to view the monster from
above, and to see its many tentacles writhing at once. Like the rest of us,
some often have nowhere better to turn than fiction.
Such a proposition is difficult to prove, but
Melley attempts to marshal compelling evidence. In the 1960s, he notes, CIA
employees reportedly watched Mission Impossible each week in search of ideas for new
gadgets. JFK loved Ian Fleming novels and wanted America US Hollywood
screenwriter.
As has been more widely observed, the
television show 24—an eight-season ticking time bomb
scenario—has figured prominently in decidedly nonfictional decisions about the
treatment of Muslims in US
Melley devotes an entire chapter to the
notoriously muddled notion of “brainwashing,” a nonsensical term for a process
of total thought control that has never really existed outside of novels,
movies, and hysterical think-tank studies and news stories about the Communist
threat. Much of the hysteria about brainwashing was stirred up by government PR
specialists: Edward Hunter, the first journalist to use the term, was a former
employee of the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II forerunner of
the CIA. The propaganda affected not only the public but also the
compartmentalized covert sector itself. While one tentacle cooked up stories about
brainwashing—which inevitably seeped into thrillers like The
Manchurian Candidate—the other sank millions of dollars into the
search for its antidote, or better yet, a counterweapon. Again and again,
researchers were forced to conclude that there is no such thing as
brainwashing, just old-fashioned torture, most useful not for changing
someone’s mind or turning them into a sleeper agent, but for the age-old
purpose of making someone repeat whatever story you want (or, put otherwise,
for producing fiction under extreme duress).
The findings of this “Manhattan Project of the
mind,” as the historian Alfred McCoy has called it, were collected in the CIA’s
1963 KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual, used for years as the
basis for the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE)
training program. After 9/11, the KUBARK manual’s list of torture techniques
was mined no less assiduously than episodes of 24 for ideas about how to torture men
who, ironically, were often described by Western academics and journalists as
having turned to terrorism as the result of some unbelievably potent, almost
magical form of indoctrination. In 2004, a remake of The
Manchurian Candidatereplaced the Commie “hypnosis” of the original
with a suitably futuristic “nanochip” that makes Denzel Washington do whatever
his global overlords say.
* * *
When fact and fiction crossbreed this
promiscuously—especially within a powerful, weaponized bureaucracy—all manner
of disasters are possible. President Eisenhower was on to something when he
complained that intelligence briefings from Tehran
The literary stars of Melley’s account—the
authors he identifies as best understanding how the nature of the covert sector
creates a particularly “puzzling relation” between representation and
reality—are a familiar bunch. Mailer gets credit for stressing, in Harlot’s
Ghost, the deep
affinities between spycraft and literature, and for explicitly trumpeting
fiction’s unique virtues over journalism in his novelistic memoir Armies
of the Night. Denis Johnson is praised for recasting the Vietnam
War, in Tree of Smoke, as first and foremost a
series of propaganda fictions. Doctorow and Robert Coover receive high marks
for their perceptive novelistic treatments of the fiction-laced “spectacle of
secrecy” that was the Rosenberg
The more a work is, like our public sphere,
scarred by radical unknowing, the more Melley praises it. His favorite sections
of Don DeLillo’s Libra are
not the detailed reimaginings of Lee Harvey Oswald’s life (or even of his love
for James Bond), but instead the descriptions of Nicholas Branch, the
fictitious CIA analyst brought out of retirement to write the agency’s internal
report on the Kennedy assassination. Day after day Branch sits in his office,
paralyzed by the mounting stacks of papers around him. He has access to any
agency document he requests, but he also knows that a good deal of agency work
goes into destroying some documents and forging others; plus some of his
requests go unanswered. He should know
more than anyone else about the Kennedy assassination, but in an important
sense he knows less, having lost all ability to distinguish coincidence from
significance, real documents from forgeries, and actual forgeries from forged
forgeries—that is, forgeries deliberately designed to look like forgeries to an
analyst, and so send him down the wrong path.
Similarly, in each of Joan Didion’s three
novels about the security state (A Book of
Common Prayer, Democracyand The
Last Thing He Wanted), a narrator sets out to tell the story of a
citizen caught up in the workings of the covert sector and, inevitably,
“instead narrates her own failure to tell the story she meant to tell.” Like
Branch, Didion’s narrators fail in part because they don’t have access to
certain data, in part because they have access to more potentially relevant
data than they could ever sort, and no clue how even to begin telling the
story. The fear is that filling in the covert sector’s narrative gaps—writing a
speculative key to its coded maps—might only serve to obscure the truth. “I
still believe in history,” says the journalist-narrator of The
Last Thing He Wanted, then instantly doubles back. “Let me amend
that. I still believe in history to the extent I believe history to be made
exclusively and at random” by men shrouded in “entire layers of bureaucracy
dedicated to the principle that self-perpetuation depended on the ability not
to elucidate but obscure.” In the looking-glass world of the covert sector,
functional stories of cause and effect too easily become part of a cover-up
built on false understanding. The narrator ofDemocracy (one “Joan Didion”), surveying the
story she is in the middle of telling, puts it bluntly: ”I am resisting
narrative here.” Charles Baxter, we can assume, is not a fan.
For Melley, this mode finds its purest
expression in Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods. The main
character, John Wade, is a Vietnam Vietnam
* * *
I admire these books; indeed, some I love, in
part for the virtues Melley catalogs. And his account of their spawning
ground—the “known unknowns” of the covert sector—is fascinating. But his
response to Baxter’s argument in “Dysfunctional Narratives” is deeply
dissatisfying. Baxter’s essay explores how large dysfunctional systems might
influence fiction about subjects other than systems: how distortions of power
subtly discourage artists from writing about power in the first place, whether
or not their subject is explicitly political. To respond, as Melley does, by
noting that an extremely small handful of authors have successfully written
about systems is almost a non sequitur.
What Melley’s account reveals most about his
favorite books is how dismayingly similar they are—and not just in their
self-aware “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” approach to storytelling. Almost every
book he discusses has at its center a character drawn by circumstance into the
dysfunction of the covert sector. In The Last Thing He Wanted, the narrator
discovers that her father is an arms dealer. In Democracy,
the main character is having an affair with a CIA agent. Both main characters
in A Book of Common Prayer are
married to prominent players in the secret government. John Wade, the amnesiac
veteran from In the Lake of the Woods, is a direct
participant in a military atrocity and the cover-up. The principal narrator of
Coover’s The Public Burning is Vice President Richard Nixon
himself. DeLillo’s Nicholas Branch works in the belly of the CIA, and his Lee
Harvey Oswald is, well, Lee Harvey Oswald.
This relative uniformity of approach is
evidence of a shortcoming at least as significant as the type pinpointed by
Baxter. It may seem natural that fiction hoping to plumb the conceptual depths
of the covert sector should involve its biggest institutions. But one of
Melley’s central claims is that the nature of the covert sector has contributed
to postmodern shifts in the nature of all public knowledge—not just knowledge
about CIA coups, for example. The authors he spotlights are similarly obsessed
with the idea of the secret services as pockets of the national unconscious.
Here’s the narrator of DeLillo’s The Names, a man who works for the CIA
but doesn’t know it:
If America
is the world’s living myth, then the CIA is America
But doesn’t the unconscious find expression in
daily life? By which I mean: Shouldn’t it be possible to write an essentially
realistic novel that contains not a single secret government plot but
nonetheless makes contact with the scars those plots have left on the national
psyche? Other than a few halfhearted pages on John Barth’s Lost
in the Funhouse, this possibility merits no real consideration in The
Covert Sphere. In this regard, the book operates in ignorance of
one of its most important insights: that the work of the covert sector extends
far beyond the confines of the CIA’s offices and involves the uneasy acceptance
of radical unknowing, which comes in an ever-multiplying number of forms and is
a presence in all our lives—even if we’re not paranoiacs who work in the CIA
archives or write newsletters about how 9/11 was an inside job, even if our fathers
are not international arms dealers, even if we are knowing readers of
high-concept novels. Not only that, but Melley’s way of thinking about the
relationship between literature and politics leaves little room for the
possibility that the best novels about 9/11 or World War I or Vietnam could be
ones that do not mention or even bear direct traces of these conflicts.
* * *
There is a basic truth about the covert sector
that is remarkably easy to overlook: however unknowable and mysterious it may
be—however much it may seem to be a separate reality parallel to ours—it is not
literally another world. Remote military outposts, for example, are buildings
like any other, occupying space, requiring plumbing and electricity. Such banal
facts are at the center of fascinating work by Trevor Paglen, whom Melley
mentions only in passing, perhaps because Paglen doesn’t write fiction. His
work is part investigative journalism, part geography, part art photography.
Many of his projects have involved scrounging for information about where
exactly in the physical world the work of the covert state gets done: its
torture dungeons; the remote airports where planes shuttling from dungeon to
dungeon land for fuel; the spots in the night sky where surveillance satellites
lurk; the small offices in strip malls that house CIA shell companies. Then he
gets as close as he can and takes photographs, often using an extremely
high-powered lens. Paglen also trains his camera on smaller traces of covert
activity: leases and purchase orders signed by nonexistent people; uniform
patches for government programs mentioned in no congressional budget.
Encountering these images for the first time, I felt a dizzying sense of
revelation, all the more dizzying because I knew their central claim—that the
covert sector exists in physical space—was completely obvious. I was, I
suppose, metasurprised: surprised to find myself surprised.
There are many such moments in the British
filmmaker Patrick Keiller’s “Robinson” trilogy. Each of its installments consists
almost entirely of static shots of English cities and countryside accompanied
by voice-overs from an invisible narrator who relates the observations of a
London-obsessed loner named Robinson. Keiller’s camera captures lichen growing
on roadway signs; supermarkets, busy intersections and freeways; spiders
spinning cobwebs—and also the British covert sector, in the form of
restricted-access military bases, some still in use and hidden behind fences
and foliage, others deserted and weathered and beginning to be reclaimed by the
land. Keiller is implicitly convinced that it’s all connected, but less in the
manner of a DeLillo paranoiac and more like a nature writer describing a
physical journey through an ecosystem.
Keiller has professed his love for W.G. Sebald’s
1995 novel The Rings of Saturn, in which the
anonymous narrator (a man not unlike Keiller’s Robinson) describes his walking
tour along the southeast coast of England
Whether this meets Baxter’s standard for
functional narrative, I don’t know—but it’s surely at least a modest start. It
seems clear that American letters could use a small army of Paglens, Keillers
and Sebalds roaming our geographies of secrecy, pens and cameras in hand. In
fact, one of the best living describers of the American landscape, John McPhee,
published a fascinating book in 1984 called La Place de la Concorde Suisse, in which
he travels around Switzerland Switzerland
Also in this issue, Marcy Wheeler inquires into whether Congress can protect Americans
against the increasingly invasive security state.
CIA, FBI, Intelligence
Bibliography: Combined Bibliographic Resources for :CIA,
FBI, Intelligence, Terrorism and War on Terror Compiled by Dick Bennett mainly
2004-2007 (numbers refer to installments of Bibliography)
#24
CIA (see: Bush, Imperialism, Torture)
--Prados, John. Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the
CIA. Ivan Dee, 2006. Relates the inside stories of covert
operations and examines CIA’s relations with presidents and Congress.
--Schou,
Nick. Kill the Messenger. Nation
Books/Avalon, 2006. Rev. In These Times (Oct.
2006). Life and death of Gary Webb, Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist who revealed how the CIA turned a blind eye to drug
dealing in furth erance of its covert support for
the Nicaragua n
contras. For this report, Webb was
hounded out of journalism and eventually killed himself.
#23
CONTRA/CIA INVASION OF NICARAGUA
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne.
Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War. South End P, 2005. Vol. 3 of her account of the dirty US-backed
war against the people of Nicaragua .
#22
FBI (see: Secrecy)
May, Gary . The Informant: The FBI, the Ku Klux Klan,
and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo. Yale
UP, 2005. Broadly about secret
government and the misuse of secret agents in particular.
#20
FBI
MCCARTHYISM
Price, David. Threatening
Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist
Anthropologists. Duke UP, 2004.
Terrorism and War on Terror:
#25
TERRORISM WAR ON and BUSH ADMIN. MISUSE OF INTELLIGENCE
Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside
America's Pursuit of its Enemies since 9/11 (Simon & Schuster, 2007)
tells the story of how the Bush administration prepared to deal with threats,
both real and perhaps even imaginary. The title of this work comes from
Vice-President Dick Cheney's address to those assembled in the White House
Situation Room - a collection of the best intelligence officers in the
country:If there's a one-percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping
Al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty
in terms of our response. "It's not about our analysis, or finding a
preponderance of evidence. It's about our response." And there you have
it, in a nutshell. It was no longer about critical analysis, but about mere
suspicion, and fear mongering.
#24
TERROR, WAR ON
(see: Bush , Iraq
---Scheuer,
Michael. Imperial Hubris: Why the Wes t
Is Losing the War on Terror. Rev.
Bradley Gitz in ADG, his choice for
the worst book of 2005. “…the latest
evidence of the apparently irresistible urge that some of our citizens feel to
bow and scrape when attacked by savages.”
---The
One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind
In this troubling portrait of the war on terror, America
---Cher nus,
Ira. Mons
Chernus also wrote America
---Robert
Dreyfuss, DEVIL'S GAME : How the United
States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books,
2005).
---Ann Louise Bar dach, “Twilight of the Assasins” in Atlantic Monthly denounces the US for
harboring the terrorists Bosch and Posada, who blew up a Cuba na airplane, killing all aboard.
--Shore,
Zachary. Breeding Bin Ladens: America ,
Islam, and the Future of Europe . Johns Hopkins
#24
WAR
ON TERROR (see: Middle
East , Torture)
--Mr.
George Soros, a financier, is author of The
Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror (Public Affairs,
2006).
**--“Outlawed:
Extraordinary Rendition, Torture, and the Disappearances in the ‘War on
Terror.’” Gillian Caldwell, director and
producer. Another film documentary about
human rights abuses since 1992 by Witness, a Brooklyn ,
NY nonprofit. Interview of Cal dwell
#23
TERRORISM (see:
Imperialism, Islamic, Torture)
---Kunkel, Benjamin. “Dangerous Characters.” NYT Book Review (Sept. 11, 2005). Reviews many novels about “terrorism”; that is, individual and small group terrorism; omits state terrorism. Who are the novelists of state terrorism?
---UnderstandingAmerica US US U.S.
**---Gareau, Frederick. State Terrorism and theUnited
States
---Honderich, Ted. After the Terror. McGill-Queens UP, 2004. Praised highly by Chomsky.
---Kunkel, Benjamin. “Dangerous Characters.” NYT Book Review (Sept. 11, 2005). Reviews many novels about “terrorism”; that is, individual and small group terrorism; omits state terrorism. Who are the novelists of state terrorism?
---Understanding
**---Gareau, Frederick. State Terrorism and the
---Honderich, Ted. After the Terror. McGill-Queens UP, 2004. Praised highly by Chomsky.
#22
TERRORISM (see: Zarqawi)
Bloom, Mia. Dying
to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror. Columbia
UP, 2005
ZARQAWI
Brisard, Jean-Charles.
Zarqawi: The New Face of Al-Qaeda.
Norton, 2005. Traces his
career.
#20
WAR ON TERROR (see: Empire, Islam)
Friedman, George. America ’s Secret War: Inside the
Hidden Worldwide Struggle Between America
#20
ISLAM
These 5 books are reviewed in NYTimes
Book Rev. (Feb. 6, 2005): these books attempt “to make sense of…the global
interaction and conflict” of Islam and the Wes t,
the globalization of Islam.
Roy, Olivier. Globalized
Islam: The Search for a New Ummah. Columbia UP, 2005.
Kepel, Gilles. The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the Wes t. Harvard
UP, 2005.
Horowitz, David.
Unholy Alliance
Palmer, Monte, and Princess
Palmer. At the Heart of Terror:
Islam, Jihadists, and America
Abbas, Hassan. Pakistan’s
Drift Into Extremism: Allah, the Army, and America
October 30, 2002
WAR ON TERRORISM (see: 9-11)
Achcar, Gilbert. The
Clash of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of the New
World . Monthly Review P, 2002. Explores dynamics of U.S.
foreign policy in the ME.
Mahajan, Rahul. The
New Crusade: America
END
CIA (FBI) NEWSLETTER #1
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