Posted on 06/30/2004 11:24:30 AM PDT by Shermy
EVER SINCE THE Guardian of London revealed almost two weeks ago that "Anonymous," the author of the soon-to-be-published Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror (Brassey’s, Inc.), is a CIA figure "centrally involved in the hunt for Bin Laden," the American press has been playing catch-up — yet in a strangely coy sort of way.
Public interest in the book itself isn’t at all hard to understand: it’s not every day that an active US intelligence officer publishes a work that disputes the Bush administration’s assertions, holding that, among other things, bin Laden is not on the run; the invasion of Iraq has not made the United States safer; and that Islamists are in a campaign of insurgency, not terrorism, against the US because of US policies, not out of hatred for American values. But what’s a bit harder to grasp is exactly why the media seem so reflexively deferential to the idea that "Anonymous" must be anonymous — especially when critical details revealed in a June 23 New York Times story indicated that his real identity is well-known to at least a few denizens of the Washington press corps.
Indeed, the Times piece revealed that Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll knows more about Anonymous than most — enough to give him a first name and details of his career in Coll’s recently published and highly acclaimed book, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. While the Times identified "Mike" via Coll’s book as a 22-year CIA veteran who ran the Counterterrorist Center’s bin Laden station (code-named "Alec") from 1996 to 1999, the paper also reported that in spite of that revealing detail — and despite the fact that "Mike" is an overt CIA employee whose name is not a state secret — a "senior intelligence official" held that "Mike’s" full identity had to remain unknown because revelation of his full name "could make him a target of Al Qaeda."
FOR THE MOMENT, all the general public knows about the book comes from excerpts posted on a handful of Web sites, and a slew of brief television and radio interviews, where Anonymous has appeared in silhouette. He also published another anonymous book two years ago, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America, which analyzed the structure and motives of Al Qaeda. Anonymous is not squishy: both Hubris and Eyes seem sufficiently apocalyptic to warm the heart of someone as anti-Islamic and bloodthirsty as, say, Ann Coulter. So if liberals seem ecstatic that yet another career national-security official is blasting the Bush administration for unnecessarily invading Iraq and bungling the so-called war on terror, they’re also horrified by Anonymous’s apparent advocacy (largely rhetorical, actually) of a military campaign that includes "killing in large numbers" and "a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure" as part of "relentless, brutal and blood-soaked defensive military action until we have annihilated the Islamists who threaten us."
But at issue here is not just the book’s content, but why Anonymous is anonymous. After all, as the Times and others have reported, his situation is nothing like that of Valerie Plame, a covert operative whose ability to work active overseas cases was undermined when someone in the White House blew her cover to journalist Robert Novak in an apparent payback for an inconvenient weapons-of-mass-destruction intelligence report by her husband, Joseph Wilson. Anonymous, on the other hand, is, by the CIA’s own admission, a Langley-bound analyst whose identity has never required secrecy.
A Phoenix investigation has discovered that Anonymous does not, in fact, want to be anonymous at all — and that his anonymity is neither enforced nor voluntarily assumed out of fear for his safety, but rather compelled by an arcane set of classified regulations that are arguably being abused in an attempt to spare the CIA possible political inconvenience. In the Phoenix’s view, continued deference by the press to a bogus and unwanted standard of secrecy essentially amounts to colluding with the CIA in muzzling a civil servant — a standard made more ridiculous by the ubiquity of Anonymous’s name in both intelligence and journalistic circles.
When asked to confirm or deny his identity in an interview with the Phoenix last week, Anonymous declined to do either, and said, "I’ve given my word I’m not going to tell anyone who I am, as the organization that employs me has bound me by my word." His publisher, Brassey’s, likewise declined to comment. Nearly a dozen intelligence-community sources, however, say Anonymous is Michael Scheuer — and that his forced anonymity is both unprecedented and telling in the context of CIA history and modern politics.
"The requirement that someone publish anonymously is rare, almost unheard-of, particularly if the person is not in a covert position," says Jonathan Turley, a national-security-law expert at George Washington University Law School. "It seems pretty obvious that the requirement he remain anonymous is motivated solely by political concerns, and ones that have more to do with the CIA. While I’m sure some would argue that there’s some benefit to book sales in being anonymous because it’s mysterious and fuels speculation, the fact is that if his full name and history were known and on the book, it would get a lot more attention. It’s difficult for the media to cover an anonymous subject who has to abide by limits on what he can say about himself or anything that might reveal who he is."
Upon reviewing Scheuer’s manuscripts, the CIA could have done what national-security agencies have done in the past with employees’ works that were based on open (i.e., unclassified or publicly available) sources, but whose wide distribution might be problematic: stamp a "secret" or "top secret" classification on it so it never sees the light of day. Yet according to intelligence-community sources, this really wasn’t an option with Scheuer’s work, given the unusual origins of Through Our Enemies’ Eyes.
"That book actually started as an unclassified manual in 1999 for new counterterrorist officers working bin Laden and Sunni extremism," says one veteran CIA terrorism specialist. "Scheuer had written it at the request of his successor as Alec station chief, who specifically wanted it to be something that was drawn from open sources in the Arab and Islamic worlds for two reasons: one, so people could take it out of the building and digest it at their leisure, and two, because he wanted new officers to appreciate how much is actually out there that’s useful that isn’t classified, particularly if you have a context for it."
Given his in-house manual’s open-source-based, unclassified status, Scheuer figured it wouldn’t be much of a problem to cull more public material to recast the approximately 100 pages as a marketable academic manuscript — which he did over the course of late 1999 and early 2000, submitting the book to the CIA’s Publications Review Board (PRB) in the spring of 2000. According to Scheuer, the manuscript was at first denied release because the board took issue with the book’s brief favorable discussion of Samuel Huntington’s "clash of civilizations" theory, which posits that antagonism between Western and Islamic cultures (among others) will drive world conflict in the coming years. "They wrote back saying our Arab friends would be upset, and ‘his views of Huntington’s paradigm bring into question his ability to perform official duties,’" Scheuer says. "That came back, and I thought it was beyond the pale, so I appealed directly to the seventh floor [higher-ups]. And it took the better part of a year to get permission to submit it for publication. I believe it was because of 9/11 that they suddenly became less concerned with what they first considered ‘areas of sensitivity.’ But the condition was that I remain anonymous and that there be no mention of my employer on the cover or anywhere else."
Some have speculated that "Anonymous" has been publishing with at least a measure of blessing from a CIA so angered by certain White House and Pentagon elements that it has taken the unprecedented step of allowing an active intelligence officer to inveigh against the administration — and is enjoying the fact that it can unleash a critic protected by the vagaries of national-security protocols. But the fact of the matter — as interviews with other intelligence-community officials and CIA correspondence show — is that while there might be an element of truth to that now, the agency has only reluctantly approved Scheuer’s books for release because he shrewdly played by the rules. And the unique nature of CIA rules has forced him into an unhappy compromise where, even when confronted with his own name, he has to publicly deny his identity unless the agency changes its mind. (The CIA did not acknowledge a call from the Phoenix, and "declined to comment on [Imperial Hubris] or its author" to the Associated Press on Friday.)
According to several long-time intelligence officers familiar with Scheuer’s situation, there’s no question that the agency’s conditional permission was grudging. "Think back to 2002, and imagine what would have happened if a book had come out that said ‘by Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit’ on the cover — it would have been a bestseller overnight, reviewed and discussed all over the place," says one veteran spook. "But because it was ‘anonymous’ and didn’t even say what exactly he did, let alone what agency he worked for, it was destined to be what it’s become: a required read among people who work this stuff, but not much else. Ironically, it seems to be selling well in the agency gift shop at Langley, and everyone from the [National Security Agency] to [the Center for Strategic and International Studies] has had him over to lecture about it. But I don’t think it even got reviewed but a couple of places."
One doesn’t have to read the manuscript terribly closely to see how it provides some benefit to the CIA. Critical as Anonymous is of his own organization — as well as of the Bush and Clinton administrations — he absolutely blasts the FBI on pages 185 through 192. Many progressives may not cotton to the broad notion he advances here — namely, that the US should simply dispense with any sort of legalistic, law-enforcement approach to combating Al Qaeda and leave it entirely to the covert operators. But in the context of Washington’s political postmortems on 9/11-related intelligence failures, this is stuff that at least makes the FBI look worse than the CIA.
Among some in the intelligence community who have either obtained copies of the Imperial Hubris manuscript or heard about certain passages, the rough consensus is that a not-long-for-his-job George Tenet indicated to the PRB that the book’s publication should be allowed, as it might blunt or contextualize some of the scathing criticism likely to assail the agency in forthcoming 9/11 Commission and Senate Select Intelligence Committee reports — and also might aid the cause of intelligence reform. According to several intelligence-community sources, the manuscript was in limbo at least three months past the Review Board’s 30-day deadline earlier this year. Says one CIA veteran: "I think it’s possible that it got the approval around the time Tenet decided for himself that he was leaving."
WHATEVER THE PRB’s rationale, Scheuer — who in interviews with the Phoenix never explicitly said he works for the CIA, only an "intelligence agency" — says he’s agreed to the conditions because, regardless of any issues he may have with the agency, he truly enjoys what he does and has no desire to quit government service. "I could make more money if I left — I have contractors leave cards in my office and take me to lunch, and I have a marketable set of skills, and it would be better for the books if I could actually say who I was. But I really like working where I work and doing what I do. We do marvelous things and stupid things here, but this place is essential to the security of America, and I think we have been at the lead of making the country safer. I’m not disgruntled. If I was, I would have left already. I just want this information and perspective out there."
What he does not like, however, is the notion advanced by the agency that he’s agreed to be "Anonymous" based on safety concerns. According to Scheuer and his editor at Brassey’s, Christina Davidson, when Nightline wanted to interview Scheuer in 2003, the agency told the program that his anonymity was not compelled but his own choice — an assertion the agency also made in a 2002 note to Brassey’s. Davidson was so infuriated that she demanded the CIA state its actual position in writing, which it finally did in a May 25, 2004, fax signed by Paul-Noel Christian, chair of the agency’s PRB. The fax, obtained by the Phoenix, reads in part: "This letter is to confirm that it is the Agency, and not the author that insists that approval for the manuscript is predicated upon the author maintaining his anonymity and also that his association with the Agency is not disclosed."
In the wake of the June 23 New York Times story, Davidson sent a terse note to CIA spokesman Bill Harlow that has yet to receive a response. "To say that our author must be kept in the shadows because he has expressed fears about al Qaeda retaliation is patently false and impugns his courage," she wrote, adding the "respectful request that you cease and desist from spreading this falsehood and inform all members of your staff to do the same."
In an interview after the Times story came out last week, Scheuer sounded none too pleased. "I suppose there might be a knucklehead out there somewhere who might take offense and do something, but anonymity isn’t something I asked for, and not for that reason; it makes me sound like I’m hiding behind something, and I personally dislike thinking that anyone thinks I’m a coward. When I did the first book, I said it would be a more effective book if I used my name. And they said no."
Jason Vest is a contributing writer for the Boston Phoenix.
Ping.
Interesting read.
I read a lot of his first book. He uses "imperial hubris" there in a way different than Gore Vidal, and in a different way I think his initial interviewers expected. The "hubris" is not imperial, but in general a view among all political stripes to expect Arabs and such to think one way or another.
But he's got some quirks. He has the "they hate us for our foreign policy" angle that lefties love, but then goes on about cultural values and such and their fears about losing them. Also, his litany of foreign policy hatreds is bizarre. Sure, some nuts think "we" have helped India in Kashmir and Russia in Chechnya, but that's a very fringe opinion, I haven't seen any Pak jihadis make such a claim. And he doesn't question whether thee beliefs are true or not.
Another quirk, in his first book, is his expressed astonishment that AQ doesn't attack Israel - he even suggests why they should for PR sake. I take this fact as for what it is - evidence of Osama's world wide view and ambitions.
Interesting, nontheless.
He has some bombastic and overly gung-ho type ideas.
It sounds like an interesting book. The article says, however, that he must remain anonymous, and yet he more or less explicitly outs himself in this article.
Also, it sounds like to me the book was written at the behest of his employers, and on company time, perhaps?
Without seeing the book, its easy to see this as more politicization of the CIA, which sorely needs to be cleaned out. I wouldn't mind reading it though.
ping
So far, we have seen one after another of these anti-Bush Book fests fall flat, as facts that undermine their main contentions come out. Richard Clark turned out to be so confused and unreliable that he contradicts himself between his book, his previous public interviews, and his DNC orchestrated 9/11 Committee appearance and book tour. Now we hear that reason to believe that Iraq "tried" to purchase yellow-cake from Niger remains strong and corroborated. Scratch Wilson and his phony baloney "mint tea investigation". WMDs are being found, and more information hinting at Saddam's Syrian burial of the rest is coming out.
As of the 16th of this month, the 9/11 Commission has made the determination, buried in the staff report and unreported by the mainstream press, that Bush's policies have been very effective in degrading the effectiveness of Al Qaida, in multiple ways. So... Anonymous might be wise to remain Anonymous, to avoid the ultimate embarrassment of being proven wrong, ...again.
Another ClintonMole rips Bush Policy...whatta surprise!!
DemRATS did NOTHING to stop to growth in Islamic Terror, but they seem to know "what should be done"!!
SHEEEESH...MUD
It doesn't matter if he criticizes clinton and others. The only thing the media will report is that he bashes Bush. And the title itself, "Imperial Hubris," is very damaging.
I fail to see why this guy has not been fired.
This is utterly incredible, and only possible under the direction of a misfit like George Tenant. How many thousands of intelligence officers, both analysts and field types considered writing a book anonymously and then knew that their contract -- and the Agency itself -- would never permit it. It is time for a general housecleaning at the CIA, and the Republicans would be wise to check the Agency's hiring policies since 2001. It is axiomatic that lefties can only survive in a culture of lefties.
Ping.
JUNE 13, 2004 : (GOING PUBLIC : DMCC aka DIPLOMATS AND MILITARY COMMANDERS FOR CHANGE REARS ITS HEAD)
JUNE 2004 midmonth : (UNMOVIC REPORTS TO THE UN SECURITY COUNCIL THAT SOME OF IRAQ'S WMD WAS SMUGGLED OUT OF THE COUNTRY BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER THE WAR) In a report which might alternately be termed “stunning” or “terrifying”, United Nations weapons inspectors confirmed last week not merely that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but that he smuggled them out of his country, before, during and after the war.
Late last week, the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) briefed the Security Council on Saddam's lightning-fast dismantling of missile and WMD sites before and during the war. UNMOVIC executive chairman Demetrius Perricos detailed not only the export of thousands of tons of missile components, nuclear reactor vessels and fermenters for chemical and biological warheads, but also the discovery of many (but not most) of these items - with UN inspection tags still on them
-- as far afield as Jordan, Turkey and even Holland. -- "UN Confirms: WMDs Smuggled Out of Iraq," by Rod D. Martin, The Vanguard, June 18, 2004
JULY 13, 2004 : (PRESS REPORT REFERS TO SANDY BERGER AS A CHIEF FOREIGN POLICY ADVISOR TO JOHN KERRY) Sandy Berger On Kerry ForPol
The Hill has released portions of a Bisnow interview with key Kerry policy advisor and former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger. Here’s the plug:
In a wide-ranging and exclusive interview with Bisnow on Business, former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, now a chief foreign policy adviser to presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, says, in answer to a question about how long he can imagine a “substantial U.S. force presence” in Iraq: “I can certainly imagine us having a force there in three years. I hope it will be a smaller force.”
Berger answers what Kerry would do differently from what the Bush administration is doing in Iraq today; whether the premises for invading Iraq were valid; whether Berger thinks the U.S. is better off for having invaded Iraq; whether Iraq is winnable or whether the U.S. should just cut its losses; who is to blame for inaccurate information about the presence of weapons of mass destruction and the hope U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators; whether Saddam was really a threat to the U.S.; what diversion the war has caused of foreign policy attention and assets elsewhere; whether the U.S. is currently making progress in Iraq; how many additional troops may be needed; whether we need a draft; whether he would use the term “incompetence” in describing execution of post-war planning; and whether he thinks John Edwards has adequate national security experience.
JUNE 19, 2004 : (THE UK GUARDIAN REPORTS THAT "ANONYMOUS" IS ABOUT TO PUBLISH THE BOOK "IMPERIAL HUBRIS") A senior US intelligence official is about to publish a bitter condemnation of America's counter-terrorism policy, arguing that the west is losing the war against al-Qaida and that an "avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked" war in Iraq has played into Osama bin Laden's hands. Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, due out next month, dismisses two of the most frequent boasts of the Bush administration: that Bin Laden and al-Qaida are "on the run" and that the Iraq invasion has made America safer.
In an interview with the Guardian the official, who writes as "Anonymous", described al-Qaida as a much more proficient and focused organisation than it was in 2001, and predicted that it would "inevitably" acquire weapons of mass destruction and try to use them.
He said Bin Laden was probably "comfortable" commanding his organisation from the mountainous tribal lands along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
---- "Bush told he is playing into Bin Laden's hands(Yet another book)," Guardian ^ | 06/19/04 | Julian Borger
JUNE 27, 2004 : (APPROXIMATE 1,100 TONNE DISCREPENCY BETWEEN LIBYA'S URANIUM STASH AND THE RECORDS OF ITS MAIN SUPPLIER, NIGER, ON URANIUM TRADE, ACCORDING TO IAEA ) This may have been the method being used by Libya before it agreed last December to abandon its secret nuclear programme. According to the IAEA, there are 2,600 tonnes of refined uranium ore - "yellow cake" - in Libya. However, less than 1,500 tonnes of it is accounted for in Niger records, even though Niger was Libya's main supplier.
-- "Evidence of Niger uranium trade 'years before war'," by Mark Huband, FT, (Financial Times UK), Published: 06/27/04, Last Updated: June 27 2004 21:56, http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1087373295039&p=1012571727085
JUNE 27, 2004 (NEW YORK TIMES BURIES THE ARTICLE "INTELLIGENCE BACKS CLAIM IRAQ TRIED TO BUY URANIUM" IN ITS BUSINESS SECTION) ... European intelligence officials have for the first time confirmed that information provided by human intelligence sources during an operation mounted in Europe and Africa produced sufficient evidence for them to believe that Niger was the centre of a clandestine international trade in uranium.
----- See: http://www.nytimes.com/financialtimes/business/FT1087373295002.html
JULY 4, 2004 : ("ANONYMOUS'S" BOOK "IMPERIAL HUBRIS" IS DUE OUT)
JULY 20, 2004 : (ASSOCIATED PRESS' JOHN SOLOMON REPORTS ON KERRY ADVISOR AND FORMER CLINTON ADMIN OFFICIAL SANDY BERGER ) AP: Clinton Adviser Probed in Terror Memos [Sandy Berger, is the focus of a criminal investigation," John Solomon, AP via Yahoo, July 20, 2004
*John Solomon : AP reporter to whom the Berger story was first leaked. --- referring to the article "AP: Clinton Adviser Probed in Terror Memos [Sandy Berger, is the focus of a criminal investigation," John Solomon, AP via Yahoo, July 20, 2004
* John Solomon : Someone from the RNC needs to point out, RIGHT NOW, that John Solomon of the AP (who 'broke' this story) is Lanny Davis' favorite leakee, and that clearly they leaked it now, to prevent embarassment to Kerry. And the RNC should be demanding all correpondence between the Kerry Campaign,and the DNC, and from Bergers Lawyer to DOJ.
19 posted on 07/21/2004 10:00:47 AM PDT by hobbes1
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