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Syria: Is It the Sunnis' or Shiites' Fault?
Posted By Thomas E. Ricks
Wednesday, November 25, 2009 - 6:56 PM
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I'm always struck by the tawdriness of the real world of intelligence, so unlike the glamour of many thriller novels. It turns out that a retired Israeli intelligence operative sold out to the KGB because he needed money to bail him out of some business failures. They worked him for seven years, during which he spilled as much as he could, including information about "American intelligence officers in contact with Israeli intelligence, including names, positions and specialties"-and received a grand total of $31,000. What a shmuck!
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Tom
It's an ugly and indeed tawdry world. I think last week you put up a great post from one of our Army's best intelligence operators - Stu Herrington and highlighted his book "Silence was a Weapon." However his other book "Traitors Among Us" is still required reading for intelligence officers involved in CI operations. The details of how FCA closed in on the Clyde Conrad espionage circle still has valuable lessons for anyone involved in clandestine ops against a foreign intel service or even an insurgent group (who often have robust CI efforts to weed out informers)...and as your Shin Bet story points out the game hasn't changed much.
Future blog hope --- COIN debate, DoD policy issues, Hasan and the Wars tend to rightly take up much of your blogospace, but today's LA Times article on MG Flynn points out some of the changing dynamics of intelligence operations in our force...might be an interesting follow-up blog on where people see DoD intel going and where it is falling short of expectation...The reporter could have dug deeper into the areas where DIA, JSOC and conventional force intel units are coming up short. Just a thought.
"Joshua son of Nun sent two spies out from Shittim secretly with orders to reconnoiter the country. The two men came to Jericho and went to the house of a prostitute named Rahab."
Spying isn't the world oldest profession, but it does have less morals than that first of oldest professions. : |
Spooks, Spies, Pros and Patriots
a spy is someone who betrays their country --- Hansen, Ames, Conrad, this Israeli Colonel, the list is long... they're scum, but there is no shortage of people who betray their country's secrets for money, sex, ego, revenge, or power. (Of course if they give those secrets to a reporter instead of an intelligence officer...then they're called a senior Pentagon Official)
Spying is not a profession. Intelligence is however, and it takes skilled people who see the world as it is with all of it's human frailness, ugliness and selfishness to succeed. Our military's PC, lily white, zero defect culture does little to identify and promote professional spooks who can succeed as intelligence professionals.
Finally, It's stupid and naive to dismiss the competition that all major countries engage in every day to gain advantage through intelligence and the use of spies. It is not something too immoral, tawdry and ugly for our country to be good at and we should focus our energies on improving our capability . The Chinese, Russians, Iranians, Saudis, Jordanians, North Koreans, French and Israelis have no illusions.
They all have illusions too. Strategic blindness can afflict even Sauron's unblinking eye.
But it is important to know why we (and the opposition) will go to such lengths to maintain our illusions. And why operators and analysts, like medics, are so often at risk of swallowing their own medicine.
The problem with security via obscurity is that it allows insider threats/traitors to prosper as well as the good guys. I have always wondered why spy agencies being the pragmatic organizations that they are, do not have financial counseling and generous loan deals available for employees in financial straits. Heck, outright gifts even would be worth the amount if $30,000, or even $100,000, given to an employee to pay off debts keeps that person from betraying secrets to an adversary. Such as program should be seen as a sort of insurance fund. It would also flag such a person as a vulnerability, if not a risk, if they failed to heed their counselors advice. This would not stop insider threats based on ideology or beliefs, but it would reduce the onerous ones where multi-million dollar secrets, and possibly lives, are compromised for sums totaling less than a year's pay. Why are spy agencies so cheap when it comes to their employees and the secrets they keep?
Altogether too innovative, though. I think that secrecy tends to decrease an organization's capacity to adapt, because there is less informed criticism from outsiders, and less requirement to respond to it.
Related to that: A lot of stuff I have seen that was classified tended to be kept secret mainly because disclosure would be embarassing, not because it would aid or abet a foe.
Best,
Tom
The second paragraph of your post is a real problem - the inability of these outfits (CIA, etc.) to police themselves and to disclose stuff that is "embarrassing" to them but was done with my (and your) money.
Which leads me to an important question: notwithstanding the necessity of having spies and intelligence operations, what do they really do for us? Most of their activities are "spy vs. spy" and don't entail intelligence gathering - they are counter intelligence or diversions or spoofs. Has anyone ever done a real cost-benefit analysis of what we spend on these operations compared to what we get?
It isn't much comfort to know that that the 9-11 guys communications were intercepted but not acted upon or missed, that the Ft. Hood guy was being watched but also ignored for whatever reason (seems to be that blaming it on "political correctness" is a huge cop-out). Sure, I know the usual excuses including:
- You never hear about the successes which are huge and regularly save yu and your way of life.
- They do it so we have to do it too.
- You are an unpatriotic commie America-hater for questioning the bravery and commitment of anyone who does anything dangerous for the government at any time.
- They were just following orders from the administration.
We aren't talking about grunts or Marines in Iraq or Afghanistan here - we are talking about spooks who over and over again have screwed up, broken the law, and/or spent zillions of our tax dollars without any oversight on projects that were either pie-in-the-sky, stupid (sneezing powder in Castro's oatmeal), or downright counter-productive (Phoenix in Vietnam, or blowing up lots of women and children in Afghanistan to get one Taliban guy maybe), or just plain old awful (kidnapping - oh yeah, it's called rendition) of the German-Arab guy in Bosnia and holding him for no reason at Bhagram for almost a year and torturing him). Not to discuss a bunch of Yank thugs chasing guys down street in Milan to try and throw then into an unmarked van to spirit them off (in that infamous Gulfstream no doubt) to some "black" site.
Sends shivers down my spine.
For all the talk about the commitment of the people who work there seems to be very little introspection or understanding of the blow-back that this stuff causes. My last example is particularly frightening. How many young men have moved over to the dark side because of stories like that one and many others that are rumored? These guys can always pass the buck to the pols who give the orders (Dick Chaney?) but where are the resignations? Where is the push-back if the people in these outfits are so thoughtful and understanding of the cause and effect their actions may create?
It IS tawdry, and not just because of guys who get flipped for a lousy $31,000. The Cofer Blacks and Jim Angletons of the world also have a lot to answer for.
OK, end of rant.
"The Cofer Blacks and Jim Angletons ... have a lot to answer for
I've no opinion on Mssrs. Black and Angleton, but Kermit Roosevelt Jr's 1953 coup against elected secular Iranian leader and Time Magazine 'Man of the Year' Mosseddeq has to go down as one cost-effective WASP f__kup. While those fair-minded Brits were nationalizing their industries, they were convincing us that national sovereignty in Iran was a commie plot.
Re the Israeli security apparatus, penetrations by the KGB and corruption by Russian and Georgian mafias seems inevitable in hindsight. The mission to make nuclear Israel safe from being 'pushed into the sea' by the PLO has to ring as hollow as the Red threat here.
Eventually, lying for the public good becomes license to steal. We traded our honest government birthright for security, and ended up with neither.
What you said.
And since 1979 the blow-back has cost the US taxpayer dearly.
Your point about the WASP thing with the OSS and early CIA is interesting too. It goes to the above comment about financial counseling so these guy will only sell out for ideological reasons; they'll be in good shape fiscally. But the early CIA was chock full of well-to-do Ivy League, Phillips Exeter/Choate types and those dudes didn't have to worry about humping the mortgage.
When you think about it I bet a lot of the S. American coups were pretty cheap too - those colonels down there didn't cost a lot and all the military aid was in the form of obsolete surplus WWII equipment, such as the General Belgrano. I seem to remember an almost humorous account of a CIA sponsored coup in Ecuador in a book by Phil Agee, the rogue CIA guy who named names in the 70s.
I don't know if anyone has done a serious study on it, but I would guess that close to 100% of the coups and other shenanigans we sponsored over the decades have had negative consequences for US interests in the long run. Another reason to question the cost-effectiveness, staffing, and tasking of US intelligence services.
As I'm sure you know Angleton drank himself to death 30 years ago. Black recently resigned from Blackwater or whatever it calls itself now in the wake of the recent Iraq bribery scandal.
Enabling banana republics and setting up criminal playgrounds might be regarded by TR's kids as a right of empire. The blowback from Cuba was pretty severe, and ongoing. The S. African model seems better than that dirty business in the Congo.
But US contractors cooking the books or tilting elections in Australia, Italy, Poland or Spain, to gin up int'l support our war policies? It makes me wonder if Bill Casey/Ollie North's self funding 'Freedom Inc.' hasn't been in play for a century now, in one form or another.
The colonels and their death squads don't cost the Bonesmen anything, when the contract is drawn up. I think the local peasants find that kind of security' to be high maintenance though. And a dime security premium on a supermarket banana does add up, to help pay for the effort at our end.
Bully for the School of the Americas.
Close to a century I think - they were a modest start-up operation in the 1920s, practicing with the USMC in Central America.
A great and honest (well - sort of honest) account of the election fixing in Italy in the 50s is related by Bill Colby - the former CEO of The Company who died mysteriously while fishing in the Maryland wetlands in 1996. The book - which are his memoirs is ironically titled Honorable Men. Colby may have been "turned" late in life - he married a Democratic foreign service officer.
He was in charge of funneling the requisite funds to the Italian CD before he was posted to Nam to run the highly successful Phoenix program that robbed the VC and NVA of its village leadership, leading to a complete success for the Vietnamization policy which led to total victory for the US and peace with honor for the US and it staunch ally to this very day, South Vietnam, with its president Nguyen Cao Ky Jr. and its foreign minister Nguyen "Little" Minh.
;-)
US election fixing in Southwest Europe
almost certainly restarted in this decade. Election fixing in Australia also probably didn't end with the Reagan era incident featured in "Falcon and the Snowman".
I'd forgotten about Mr. Colby's accidental shooting. I wonder if his spirit plays canasta with J. Edgar's buddy Clyde Tolson, who suffered a similar accidental bullet to the head, while hunting deer I think.
On the issue of spymaster corruption, J. Edgar is said to have had remarkably good luck playing the ponies, and avoiding scandal. The US national police working out of an HQ named after Hoover is odd in 2009, and goes a long way toward explaining the FBI's remarkable lack of introspection after Ruby Ridge, WTC-93, Waco, Atlanta-Centennial, 9/11...
The U.S. military regularly rejects security clearance applications based on financial indemnity and they won't hesitate to revoke said clearance if there is discovery of other financial problems, including but not limited to child support issues. Many a soldier has lost their clearnace, and many an officer has lost their commission because of inability to maintain a lowly "Secret" clearance due to financial matters.
So they simply take the pro-active stance of not letting you have access to the secrets if your inability to manage your money were to become a leverage point for a spy to turn an insider into a traitor.
But a putz! A schmendrick putz. A schmendrick is a guy who would steal candy from a baby - and get caught! As we all probably know, a putz is a schmuck but small.
Happy Yiddish Thanksgiving!
Echoes of the career of the owner of the Spartak Moscow elite women's basketball team (featuring Diana Taurasi and Sue Bird), whose recent gangland-style slaying may be giving NBA commish David Stern second thoughts about okaying the purchase of the NJ Nets by a Russian oligarch.
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