To Sig, With Love

From the Salon.com interview with ex-CIA officer Larry Johnson, when asked about the state of the intelligence organization, Johnson had this to say:

Political pressures have always been there and will always be there. The key is for the intelligence agencies to maintain a focus on what their mission is, which is not to be politically popular downtown, but to be an honest broker. Being an honest broker means you have to bring bad news to the powerful....it's as bad in this administration as it was probably during the Johnson administration, where you had pressures to shade intelligence, to misrepresent intelligence. An overall politicization of it, with an agenda for going to war.

I've posted some excerpts from ex-CIA field officer Bob Baer's book See No Evil (published in 2002) previously when discussing certain items in the news. For this post, now that I have finished reading the book, I want to simply give you some other quotes that I think are relevant to our current political situation, and which I find very interesting.

My reading of Bob Baer is that he's from the "old school" - a belief in right and wrong, good and evil, and a belief that his country was, and should be, on the side of "good". I can't personally back him on that since I don't have strong beliefs about good and evil. But I can judge a person from their own standards, which I think is a good way to determine a person's character. And by his own standards, if he's telling the truth about his service in the CIA, I'd have to give him high marks for character, even if I don't agree with his position.

I say "if" he's telling the truth, because I simply don't know. He's something of a hot dog, and he is trained, after all, in covert activities. And, he's not going to write a book that makes himself out to be the bad guy. There's an internet article here that seems to discredit his truthfulness. I don't know.

Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, who headed the CIA's counterterrorism center in the mid-1980s, acknowledges that Baer could be seen as a cowboy. "It may be," he said, "but you need some of those — and I would argue you need a lot of them."  source

You can read Baer's books for yourself and draw your own conclusions. But here are some excerpts from See No Evil that I think are worth circulating as at least something to think about.

[Returning to the states to work in Washington...]For decades I had unpacked my bags in places like Tajikistan and the Sudan and begun learning the ins and outs of the local culture, and that's what I did now...To my wonder, I would see how committee hearings and press leaks can be almost as effective as suicide bombers in promoting narrow, parochial causes. To my dismay, I would find that the tentacles of big oil stretch from the Caspian Sea to the White House. And to my anger, indeed to my rage, I would also see how money, not lives or national security, skews so much of what takes place in the very places most charged with protecting us all.
p.219

[Azerbaijan president Heydar] Aliyev signed his first major oil contract on Septemer 20, 1994, granting Amoco, Pennzoil, UNOCAL, Ramco, Statoil, Delta, and BP drilling rights for three offshore Caspian fields...

"You know, gentlemen, I am ready to help the United States and its oil companies, but I expect you to live by your bargains."

It was clear no one knew what he was talking about. Aliyev filled us in. In March 1995 he had received a call from the State Department's undersecretary for economic affairs, Joan Spiro. She said she was speaking in the name of Secretary of State Warren Christopher. In unmistakable terms, Spiro threatened that if Azerbaijan wanted to maintain good relations with the U.S., Aliyev would have to give Exxon 5 percent. When Aliyev countered that he would face a lot of heat from Iran, Spiro brushed it off: "Don't worry, you'll get help." The next call was from Deputy Energy Secretary Bill White. White also insisted on Exxon's 5 percent. When Aliyev again mentioned Iran, White said, "We'll take care of it, just make sure Exxon gets its deal."

"So now that Exxon has its five percent, what are you going to do about Iran?" Aliyev asked. "I share a long, porous border with that country."

Listening to Aliyev, I found it hard to avoid the conclusion that the Clinton administration was pimping for Exxon. Naïf that I was in the ways of the White House, I had assumed that the job of the government was to back U.S. business in general but never a specific company, especially when other American oil companies...gladly would have taken the 5 percent and probably paid even more for it.

...But the issue ran to more than money. It was about this time that the Sudanese decided they had had enough of hosting Osama bin Laden and offered him to us on a platter. Maybe if the White House and National Security Council had been spending less time thinking about Exxon and Mobil and Amoco and more time thinking about the implications of letting a known venomous snake slither away to Afghanistan, we might have all been spared a lot of future misery.
pp. 240-241

I myself found how deep [Secretary of State Toby] Gati was into the oil business when I was called down to the NSC in December 1995 for an unscheduled emergency meeting on Georgia....

[Jennifer Sims, who worked for Toby Gati] didn't waste any time making her pitch: We absolutely had to give Georgia president Eduard Shevardnadze a Matador air-defense system to protect his planes and helicopters (The Matador detects things like radar lock-ons and approaching missiles.) Shevardnadze was the only Caucasus leader who had committed to the main oil-export pipeline; America could not afford to lose him.

I vaguely wondered why, if he was so important, the oil companies [themselves] didn't pay to protect his life. But I wasn't about to get into that one, and continued to doodle until Sims dropped her bomb: The money for the Matador would come from the CIA. At first I thought I'd fallen asleep and was dreaming. The State Department couldn't have forgotten already that after Fred Woodruff was murdered just outside of the Gerogian capital, Eduard Shevardnadze had stonewalled the investigation at every turn. Now the CIA was being asked to reward Shevardnadze for his complicity by ponying up $2 million plus to protect his life - all so Amoco, Exxon and Mobil could have some extra reserves for their yearly financial statement. Had the inmates finally taken complete control of the asylum?

At least I knew exactly how to drive a stake in this deal.

"Can't be done," I said, interrupting.

Everyone in the room stopped talking, surprised I'd said anything.

"Bob, what seems to be the problem?" [Rand Beers, head of NSC intelligence programs] said, bracing himself for the worst.

"The man Ms. Sims proposes turning the Matador system over to is a murderer....The head of the Georgian KGB - the head of Shevardnadze's security, the same man who is supposed to operate the Matador system - is a murderer. We have a video of him shooting six handcuffed prisoners in the back of the head. It's rather gruesome, but I'd be happy to go back to Langley and bring you back a copy. In any case, he's violated human rights. As much as we'd like to, there's nothing the CIA can do for you."

I wasn't making up the story, either - we really did have the video. No one asked to see it, and that was the last I heard about the Matador.
p. 243

As I looked at the evidence in front of me [on the U.S. embassy bombing in Beirut], the conclusion was unavoidable: The Islamic Republic of Iran had declared a secret war against the United States, and the United States had chosen to ignore it.

I had to be missing something, I felt, so I went to see an analyst who had followed Iran since the 1979 revolution. I'll call him Jim. Jim made a lot of people in the bureaucracy uncomfortable. He stuck to the facts and wouldn't budge no matter how hot it got. The only solution was to take him off a sensitive account like Iran, but like me, Jim kept his own files.

..."The IJO [Islamic Jihad Organization] is a fiction, meant only to hide the Iranian hand in its operations."

"I'd already more or less figured that out," I said. "But how long ago did the CIA know it?"

"I'm trying to tell you. Right from the beginning. It was there in black and white, at least if you looked at the evidence objectively."

..."Why didn't I know this when I was in Beirut?" I asked, my jaw slack.

"Because all the good stuff was squirreled away in the Hostage Task Force."

Made up of a half-dozen analysts who convened privately from time to time to discuss hostage issues, the Hostage Task Force kept no minutes, produced no disseminated assessments, and maintained no computer databases. Under normal circumstances, it would have prepared what is called a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the hostages and Iranian terrorism. But this didn't happen. The raw reporting on Iran was simply buried, all to keep it out of the hands of Congress and the press. Incidentally, the same thing happened with Saudi Arabia. The CIA was not allowed to produce an NIE on the growing fundamentalist threat there. Had it leaked, it would have offended the Saudi royal family.
pp. 264-265

Whether it was Osama bin Laden, Yasir Arafat, Iranian terrorism, Saddam Hussein, or any of the other evils that so threaten the world, the Clinton administration seemed determined to sweep them all under the carpet. Ronald Reagan and George Bush before Clinton were not much better. The mantra at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue seemed to be: Get through the term. Keep the bad news from the newspapers. Dump the naysayers. Gather money for the next election - gobs and gobs of it - and let some other administration down the line deal with it all.
p.266

Hello, Georgie.

It wasn't until three years later, in the early summer of 2001, that an associate of my [contact Saudi] prince, a military officer still working for his government, informed me he was aware of a spectacular operation about to occur. He also claimed to possess the name of Osama bin Laden operatives in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. He provided us with a computer record of hundreds of secret bin Laden operatives in the Gulf. In August 2001, at the military officer's request, I met with an aide to the Saudi defense minister, Prince Sultan bin'Abd-al-'Azia. The aide refused to look at the list or pass them on to Sultan. Apparently, Saudi Arabia was following the same see-no-evil operating manual the CIA uses.
p. 271

But there's one more thing I felt in the aftermath of the [WTC] attacks, as I watched the deaths unfold on TV and the horror mount both in New York and across the Potomac River in Virginia. If it weren't for personal commitments, I would have gotten the hell out of Dodge, and in a big hurry. The people who planned this attack are good. Very good. I'd found out too much about their capabilities, from sophisticated chemical warheads to portable nuclear weapons. I also knew they wouldn't be discouraged if Osama bin Laden were captured and paraded down the streets of Lower Manhattan in a cage or if Afghanistan were bombed back into the Stone Age.
pp. 268-269

And Sig, if you're watching, it'd be great to hear from you - you remember the count. Wherever you are, I hope you're catching the big fish.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.