pynchon-l-digest V2 #7241

Wed Nov 4 15:18:12 CST 2009

Apropos of the CIA, I recommend Legacy of Ashes, by Tim Weiner, a
history of the agency.  Rather than describe it myself, let me borrow
from the NYT review (by Evan Thomas:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/books/review/Thomas-t.html):

America’s foes and rivals have long overrated the Central Intelligence
Agency. When Henry Kissinger traveled to China in 1971, Prime Minister
Chou En-lai asked about C.I.A. subversion. Kissinger told Chou that he
“vastly overestimates the competence of the C.I.A.” Chou persisted
that “whenever something happens in the world they are always thought
of.” Kissinger acknowledged, “That is true, and it flatters them, but
they don’t deserve it.”

A few years later, in 1979, Iranian revolutionaries seized the
American embassy in Tehran. They captured a C.I.A. case officer named
William Daugherty and accused him of running the agency’s entire
Middle Eastern spy network while plotting to assassinate Ayatollah
Khomeini. Daugherty, who had been in the C.I.A. for only nine months,
tried to explain that he didn’t even speak the native tongue, Persian.
The Iranians seemed offended that the Americans would send such an
inexperienced spy. It was “beyond insult,” Daugherty later recalled,
“for that officer not to speak the language or know the customs,
culture and history of their country.”

The C.I.A. never did have much luck operating inside Communist China,
and it failed to predict the Iranian revolution of 1979. “We were just
plain asleep,” said the former C.I.A. director Adm. Stansfield Turner.
The agency also did not foresee the explosion of an atom bomb by the
Soviet Union in 1949, the invasion of South Korea in 1950, the popular
uprisings in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, the installation of Soviet
missiles in Cuba in 1962, the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1989, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the explosion of an atom bomb
by India in 1998 — the list goes on and on, culminating in the
agency’s wrong call on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in 2002-3.

Tim Weiner’s engrossing, comprehensive “Legacy of Ashes” is a litany
of failure, from the C.I.A.’s early days, when hundreds of agents were
dropped behind the Iron Curtain to be killed or doubled (almost
without exception), to more recent humiliations, like George Tenet’s
now infamous “slam dunk” line. Over the years, the agency threw around
a lot of money and adopted a certain swagger. “We went all over the
world and we did what we wanted,” said Al Ulmer, the C.I.A.’s Far East
division chief in the 1950s. “God, we had fun.” But even their
successes turned out to be failures. In 1963, the C.I.A. backed a coup
to install the Baath Party in Iraq. “We came to power on a C.I.A.
train,” said Ali Saleh Saadi, the Baath Party interior minister. One
of the train’s passengers, Weiner notes, was a young assassin named
Saddam Hussein. Weiner quotes Donald Gregg, a former C.I.A. station
chief in South Korea, later the national security adviser to Vice
President George H. W. Bush: “The record in Europe was bad. The record
in Asia was bad. The agency had a terrible record in its early days —
a great reputation and a terrible record.”

And yet the myth of the C.I.A. as an all-knowing, all-powerful spy
agency persisted for years, not just in the minds of America’s enemies
but in the imagination of many American television-watchers and
moviegoers. Among those fooled, at least initially, were most modern
presidents of the United States. The promise of a secret intelligence
organization that could not only spy on America’s enemies but also
influence events abroad, by sleight of hand and at relatively low
cost, was just too alluring.

When presidents finally faced the reality that the agency was
bumbling, they could be bitter. Reviewing the C.I.A.’s record after
his two terms in office, Dwight Eisenhower told the director, Allen
Dulles, “I have suffered an eight-year defeat on this.” He would
“leave a legacy of ashes” for his successor. A fan of Ian Fleming’s
spy stories, John F. Kennedy was shocked to be introduced to the man
described by C.I.A. higher-ups as their James Bond — the fat,
alcoholic, unstable William Harvey, who ran a botched attempt to
eliminate Fidel Castro by hiring the Mafia. Ronald Reagan went along
with the desire of his C.I.A. director, William Casey, to bring back
the mythical glory days by “unleashing” the agency — and his
presidency was badly undermined by the Iran-contra affair.

In Weiner’s telling, a president trying to use the C.I.A. resembles
Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. The role of Lucy is played
by scheming or inept directors. Dulles is particularly egregious, a
lazy, vain con artist who watches baseball games on television while
half-listening to top-secret briefings (he assesses written briefings
by their weight). Casey mumbles and lies and may have been almost mad
from a brain tumor by the end. Even the more honorable directors, like
Richard Helms, can’t resist telling presidents what they want to hear.
To fit the policy needs of the Nixon White House in 1969, Helms
doctored a C.I.A. estimate of Soviet nuclear forces. In a draft of the
report, analysts had doubted the Soviet will or capacity to launch a
nuclear strike. Helms erased this crucial passage — and for years
thereafter, until the end of the cold war, the C.I.A. overstated the
rate at which the Soviets were modernizing their arsenal. The C.I.A.’s
bogus intelligence on Iraq in 2002-3, based on the deceits of dubious
sources like the one known as Curveball, was hardly unprecedented. To
justify the Johnson administration’s desire for a pro-war
Congressional resolution on Vietnam in 1964, the intelligence
community manufactured evidence of a Communist attack on American
destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Weiner, a reporter for The Times who has covered intelligence for many
years, has a good eye for embarrassing detail. High-ranking officials,
it appears, were often the last to know. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in
August 1990, Robert M. Gates, who is now the secretary of defense but
at the time was the first President Bush’s deputy national security
adviser, was at a family picnic. A friend of his wife’s joined the
picnic and asked him, “What are you doing here?” Gates asked, “What
are you talking about?” “The invasion,” she said. “What invasion?” he
asked. A year earlier, when the Berlin Wall fell, Milt Bearden, the
leader of the C.I.A.’s Soviet division, was reduced to watching CNN
and deflecting urgent calls from White House officials who wanted to
know what the agency’s spies were saying. “It was hard to confess that
there were no Soviet spies worth a damn — they all had been rounded up
and killed, and no one at the C.I.A. knew why,” Weiner writes. (The
American agents in Moscow had been betrayed by the C.I.A. mole Aldrich
Ames.)

Weiner is not the first reporter to see that the C.I.A.’s golden era
was an illusion. After the 1975 Church Committee hearings exposed the
agency as “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” various authors
began to deconstruct the myth of the C.I.A., most notably Thomas
Powers in “The Man Who Kept the Secrets.” But by using tens of
thousands of declassified documents and on-the-record recollections of
dozens of chagrined spymasters, Weiner paints what may be the most
disturbing picture yet of C.I.A. ineptitude. . . .

On 11/2/09, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> Mark wrote:
> > So, as the revsionist historians like Monte are always saying, it (might always) have been so.
> >
>
> as Mr Natural said:
>
> http://bp1.blogger.com/_K44CMeToWsA/SH-aT-y5kSI/AAAAAAAAAH4/dzzCK92tEOo/s1600-h/Twas_Ever_Thus.jpg
>