Replies

This letter from former spooks points up a vexing problem for conservative administrations trying to manage foreign policy: both the CIA and State Departments have sizable left-liberal factions.

This has a long history going to World War II, and the OSS under "Wild Bill" Donovan that led to the post-war CIA. In those days, the CIA was very much a gentleman's enterprise, with many if not most agency operatives coming out of Ivy League colleges. Working in "the company" was considered a glamorous and patriotic thing to do. The same goes for the State Department.

Vietnam changed all of that. Hundreds of CIA officers were sent there, and many went reluctantly. Over time, the VC/NVA thoroughly penetrated the Saigon station, using low-level Vietnamese like drivers, clerks, maids, and prostitutes. Every one in town knew the CIA residences on Cong Ly Street, and many, many officers enjoyed the sybaritic pleasures of the Pearl of the Orient. This led to some incompetent, corrupt officers hanging on to o long, and to disgust among others.

The huge CIA-directed "Phoenix Program," run by Saigon Station Chief Bill Colby, used local Vietnamese assassins to excecute somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 VC cadre, many of whom were no doubt killers themselves. Still, the program led to many guilty consciences within the CIA. (Imagine the stink if the CIA mounted such a program against "insurgents" today in Iraq.)

During and after the Vietnam, recruitment of Ivy League elites into "the company" evaporated, and has never resumed.

By the end of the war the CIA's station chief in Saigon--Tom Polgar--who was himself an East European, was outwitted by Polish and Hungarian operatives on the so-called International Commission of Control and Supervision. Intelligence leading up to the collapse of the Saigon regime in 1975 was disastrous.

Fast forward to the US Senate's "Church Committee" hearings in 1973 in which the agency's top secrets, the so-called "Crown Jewels" were publicly exposed. This severely damaged morale. Then came Jimmy Carter, and his disastrous choice for CIA Director, Admiral Stan Turner. Turner hated the swashbuckling operators of the Operations Directorate, the case officers (spy handlers who recruited and handle local agents) and fired hundreds of them. Turner turned the Agency toward reliance on "technical means," like signals intelligence and spy satellites like the revolutionary KH-11 satellite, which was itself later compromised. The result: the agency's ability to collect "humint" through clever case officers suffered greatly and has yet to recover, although there is a big push on to fix that problem. It takes years and years to acquire the required language skills and put case officers out into the field under non-official cover.

Then, in the 1980s came Central America, and the agency's often bungled handling of the "contra" war against the communist Sandinista in Nicaragua. The operations were sometimes ludicrously incompetent because the contract agents and case officers were second and third rate people who had not been washed out in earlier purges.

Larry Johnson, who wrote this letter we're talking about, was such an operator in Central America.

Bottom line: Most of the 11 former spooks who signed this letter are bitterly disillusioned people, some of them incompetents. Others less so, but still bitter that their advice was ignored.

Finally, a word about attitudes of State and CIA offices who serve in the Middle East. A retired senior officer tells me that--almost without exception--spooks and diplomats who serve in Arab countries and even in Israel come back "pro-Arab." This is because a) they develop sympathy for their downtrodden, hapless Arab clients, and b) they believe that Israel's powerful Washington lobby manipulates US policy in favor of the Jewish state. The phrase "neo-cons" is code for "the Jews" and for Israeli lobbyists. After a point, these diplomats and spooks develop emotional attachments to their Arab friends, in some cases are paid by them, so that they lose the capacity to stand back and look at the big picture. That is: after decades of sleeping with corrupt Arab regimes, we must now fix as best we can several Middle East countries, which is what Bush is trying to do, although it will take much blood, pain, money, and decades to do.

In short, these CIA rogues are in many ways complicit in their failures of analysis and intelligence disasters, yet they take out their frustrations on the man who is trying to fix the problem, George Bush.

Larry Johnson (CIA) and Joe Wilson (State) are both prime examples of incompetents who are doing this.

This is why Dubya has assigned Porter Goss to clean up the mess at CIA, and John Negroponte as National Intelligence Director to pull it all together. Both are very good men, and we should wish them success.

"Finally, a word about attitudes of State and CIA offices who serve in the Middle East. A retired senior officer tells me that--almost without exception--spooks and diplomats who serve in Arab countries and even in Israel come back "pro-Arab."

You can have sympathy for the legitimate concerns of the Arabs without being anti-Israel. Wouldn't heavy doses of tough "love" and straight talk do more to help the Arabs than taking on board their pathological lies about and hatred of the Jews and Israel?

Larry Johnson, who wrote this letter we're talking about, was such an operator in Central America.

Not only that, but he outed himself on his own website back in 2000 (it's still in the internet archive). His "private sector" experience also included a construction project in Argentina right when they were installing their Canadian nuclear plant. Right after that he "joined" the CIA. His current resume omits the Honduras and Argentina details.