Free Republic

Pollyannish,

Thank you.

You are an eloquent writer, and, if you will allow me to say so, rather mature for your age. I am 63, and no longer on active duty, so to speak. However, I watch events in Iraq and Crawford with a sense of dread.

Last April, it was thirty years -- thirty years -- since the USAF and USMC choppers lifted me and about 900 other Americans and many, many thousands of Vietnamese out of Saigon. Yet I can remember that nightmare as if it were yesterday.

It was a nightmare not so much because of the danger and confusion (although there was plenty of that), but because of the awful sinking feeling of defeat and betrayal. It still hurts and sticks in my gut thirty years later.

As I look at the outrageously distorted reporting from Iraq and Crawford, I say to myself, "this nightmare cannot be happening again."

As I said before, I hope this time will be different, but it is up to your generation to make it so.

Thanks again for your kind words.

Pollyannaish,

You've hit upon a brilliant insight into what is driving Cindy Sheehan; she is, as you say, "angry" at her son for turning away from her belief system. But she can't let herself think that, now can she?

So she has made a grossly dishonest turn against our president and our nation and allied herself with our enemies, foreign and domestic. It is a turn that requires her to lie to herself every single day. At some point, she will crack, the bark will come off, and the sickness within will be revealed.

As you say, what is truly sickening about all this is the way the hard Left and the National Hyena Media (NHM, for short) are exploiting her for their own evil purposes.

For me, it is hard to watch.

From 1954 to 1975, t e n members of my family served in Vietnam. My brother-in-law, a Vietnamese lieutenant, was KIA. I myself was evacuated on from Saigon by chopper on the last day of the war, April 29, 1975. We Americans went out of there like dogs with our tails between our legs. We betrayed, we sold out, the Vietnamese to whom we had promised "freedom and democracy," not to mention our own 58,214 KIA. The betrayal was aided and abetted in large measure by the same Media Hyenas that are barking and howling in Crawford today.

I don't think I can deal with our country betraying another nation to whom we have promised "freedom and democracy."

But I have hope that this time will be different because of the new media -- like Free Republic. Therefore we must all do our best to make sure our voices are heard.

Peter Collins aka Pajama Guy

Republic of Viet Nam

20 June 1971 -- 29 April 1979

Mr. Jorgensen,

Yes, I was astounded myself at the time, and I was inside the network. I can assure you, the story is 100% as it happened.

Peter Collins

One time I came out of his office in New York after a ten-minute audience and remarked to his secretary that he had been gracious. (He was generally so in private.)

She responded, "Oh, that's his noblesse oblige," a French phrase referring to the obligation of the aristocracy to be kind and lead the peasants.

He thought he was doing us a favor, you see.

“For the Bush administration and the Reagan administration before it, the [ABC News/Washington Post] poll hints at a simple truth: after years of trying to get rid of the Sandinistas, there is not much to show for their efforts.” –

World News Tonight, February 20, 1990, five days before the Sandinistas were voted out of power.

This quote is quite accurate, but it leaves out a preceding sentence from Jennings:

"“We begin tonight with a new ABC News poll in Nicaragua that suggests that President Daniel Ortega and his government will be re-elected comfortably in this Sunday’s elections.”

I know, because I happen to be the former ABC News Central America correspondent (1982-1991).

Imagine Peter’s shock when on Sunday the Nicaraguan people decisively rejected the Sandinistas by a margin of 59 to 41, in a vote that even Jimmy Carter (who was present) had to admit reflected reality.

(In fact, the Sandinistas tried but failed to rig the vote successfully. Even so, their efforts grossly distorted the real voter sentiment. In an unrigged election, the margin would have been 80 to 20 against the Sandinistas.)

Peter Jennings personally blocked my assignment to cover this election, even though I had been reporting from Nicaragua since 1981. Another reporter named John Martin was sent instead. I was ordered out of Nicaragua and parked in nearby El Salvador.

On Monday morning, when the results were in, Jennings’s handpicked Executive Producer of World News Tonight, Paul Friedman woke me up in my hotel room in San Salvador. He ordered me to get over to Managua on the next flight. It fell to me to explain on ABC World News that night why ABC’s own poll was wrong and why the Sandinistas lost.

(I did not report it that night because I did not know it, but the ABC News polling unit had subcontracted its Nicaragua poll to a Sandinista-controlled polling firm. Can you imagine?)

I later called up the head of the ABC polling unit and bitterly complained that we had been made to look like fools. He agreed and apologized.

Peter Collins, former ABC News Correspondent, 1982-1991, aka "Pajama Guy" and a lurker/poster on Free Republic since 1998.

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.

Mr. Farah's column hardly goes far enough. As a four-year veteran of Viet Nam who was evacuated from Saigon by helicopter, I can tell you the words and actions of men like Kerry not only demoralized our own forces but also our South Vietnamese allies, the ARVN.

Kerry's words and actions led directly to a Cardiff of American support for the South, which eventually led to the Communist victory. That, in turn led 1.5 million South Vietnamese "boat people" to risk their lives in small boats, rather live under Communism. Of those, several hundred thousand perished at sea.

If you'll notice, the Vietnamese community on America is strongly pro-Bush and anti-Kerry. So the word "traitor" only covers part of Kerry's crimes.

No serious Catholic can possibly vote for Kerry. We Catholics know that "Catholics" like Kerry, Kennedy, Daschle, and Pelosi, all of whom want the government to pay for abortions,are frauds and actually anti-Catholic.

Thanks for a wonderful, well-written insight into small-town Texas (and America).

Pajama people, Brokaw is cross with us. We have dared to suggest that broadcast news is less than the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Let us redouble our efforts to destroy the broadcast media. Long live pajama people! BTW, tonight I'm in a grey bathrobe, not PJs.

Please read this post and honor the memory of CPL Charles McMahon, Jr., USMC, and LCPL Darwn L. Judge, USMC, KIA, Tan Son Nhut, Republic of Viet Nam, 4/29/1975, the last day of the war.

This epic poem from David Brooks of the New York Times will make the paper's liberal readers squirm: it exposes the vast ... emptiness ... that is John Kerry.