Results tagged “cold war” from SpyTalk

Former Senior CIA Officer Blasts Spy Agency, Preaches Accountability

By Jeff Stein | December 15, 2008 1:37 PM | | Comments (0)

The headline was boring, but not the material. 

"Intelligence Boosters,"  the headline read, at the bottom of page 11 of the Sunday New York Times' "Week in Review" section.

"This is the article I never intended to write," began Art Brown, a 25-year CIA veteran and head of the Asia division of the agency's clandestine service from 2003 to 2005.

But then Brown went on to excoriate his former employer's performance in its main mission: human intelligence.

"If the CIA's human spy arm was operating as a private business, it would be running at a loss. Think Detroit, not 007," Brown wrote.

"In my years in the agency, I cannot recall a single case where anyone was fired for failing to perform. I cannot even remember anyone being demoted. There is simply no job-threatening penalty for mediocrity."

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano suggested that Brown was out of touch with the agency.

"Because a constant drive for improvement is a defining feature of American intelligence," Gimigliano said by e-mail. "I wouldn't assume that Art's piece--drawn in part from his service here, which ended a few years ago--reflects what's going on at CIA today. Intelligence work can change quickly, and it has."

But Brown had anticipated the CIA would question the currency of his information about the agency's performance.

"How can I know this, three years out of touch with the secret stuff?" he asked in his piece. "The answer is rather simple: because Osama bin Laden is still the head of Al Qaeda. And no one has been held accountable for failing to catch him."

Brown also sprinkled the piece with a couple of embarrassing tidbits.

* "Despite their reputation as plugged-in experts on other countries, many C.I.A. officers do not even have Internet access at their desks. Worse yet, they don't think they need it."

* "C.I.A. spies reported on several occasions that Al Qaeda had plans to attack American military bases overseas -- in countries that a quick Web search would have shown had no such bases."

Brown's prescription for Obama's CIA? Get outside help.

"If you want to find answers to the hardest questions, why not reach broadly into the expertise of the country and assemble the best spy team possible?"

To analyze rogue nuclear programs, for example, "it would probably mean including a few engineers who build our own bombs. They could make sure you understand the missing parts of the puzzle and how those parts may be hidden."

Brown also suggested the CIA dust off some tools it had used during the Cold War (which came under harsh criticism when they were revealed by the left-wing muckraking Ramparts magazine in the 1970s).

"Good freelance reporters know how to find sources to fill in a hard story," Brown wrote. 

"The expertise of academia, where decades of insight often go untouched, could be balanced with a seasoned detective or tough prosecutor adept at turning a crook. The more military the topic, the more military folks you would want on its pursuit."

But for God's sake, don't hire these people, Brown advised. Make them temps. Otherwise, they'll just turn into more of the brown-nosing bureaucrats the agency is already infected with.

Tags: Art Brown, CIA, cold war, covert action, espionage, Humint, Osama Bin Laden;Obama, Paul Gimigliano, spies

Georgetown's Old Spies Shuffle to the Polls

By Jeff Stein | November 4, 2008 3:31 PM | | Comments (2)

The eyes are less steely, and the once strong chins now sag with flesh.  I recognized the faces of some of these old spies as they gathered to vote at Christ Church in Georgetown this morning.  

I did not know their names, but I'd seen a few at a gathering honoring the late uber-spy of the cold war, the late former CIA Director Richard M. Helms, at a Georgetown University gathering last year.

They are on their last legs, these men and women, who parachuted into occupied France, liberated Europe, and stayed on to help win the Cold War. 

Even with their walking canes and feeble hands, and without a lapel flag pin among them, they still look like a tough enough bunch.

Indeed  they, along with their past contemporaries from the State Department, make up a considerable, if fading, segment of the "Georgetown cocktail set" that Republican presidential candidates going back to Richard M. Nixon love to bash.

Ironically, Sen. John McCain drank again from that bitter well, even as he called for refashioning the CIA into something resembling the OSS, the World War Two spying and sabotage outfit that some of these very same Georgetowners served so well and honorably.

To be sure, there remains a recalcitrant bunch among some of the old hands. 

Last week some CIA old boys I know were circulating vitriolic, even racist comments and articles about Barrack Hussein Obama, one of which obsessed on the bloodlines of the likely next president of the United States.

"He has no real identity.  He is half-white, which he rejects," it said.

"The rest of him is mostly Arab, which he hides but is disclosed by his non-African Arabic surname and his Arabic first and middle names as a way to triply proclaim his Arabic parentage to people in Kenya.  Only a small part of him is African Black from his Luo grandmother, which he pretends he is exclusively.

"What he isn't, not a genetic drop of, is 'African-American,' the descendant of enslaved Africans brought to America chained in slave ships.  He hasn't a single ancestor who was a slave.  Instead, his Arab ancestors were slave owners.  Slave-trading was the main Arab business in East Africa for centuries until the British ended it.

"Let that sink in:  Obambi is not the descendant of slaves, he is the descendant of slave owners.  Thus he makes the perfect Liberal Messiah."

Another that made the rounds, from the mad-dog Opinion page of the Wall Street Journal, likened the huge, multiracial crowds that turned out for Obama to the "Arab street."

"We associate them with the temper of Third World societies," wrote Fouad Ajami, the frequent TV pundit and professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. 

"We think of places like Argentina and Egypt and Iran, of multitudes brought together by their zeal for a Peron or a Nasser or a Khomeini. In these kinds of societies, the crowd comes forth to affirm its faith in a redeemer: a man who would set the world right."

Much e-mailed chortling greeted that from among these former intelligence professionals, some of whom keep a hand in training the current generation of spies.

One dissenting voice finally piped up, from a retired CIA station chief  who had served the spy agency for 24 years, in such cold war cockpits as Prague, Berlin, Beirut, and Tehran. He also served in high CIA managerial posts. I'm not identifying him because it's a private list.

"I do see a yearning among thoughtful people in this nation for something other than the same old crap we always get from the Republicans and the Democrats alike," he wrote, "and I see Obama as the sort of person who might attract that yearning.  

"Much as I admire Fouad Ajami, he, too, should stick to foreign affairs - in the Middle East!!  What he doesn't understand is that there is absolutely no parallel between an American crowd and the 'Arab street.'  They differ in literally every conceivable respect except numbers! The only thing [equivalent] we have here in America is a large pool of devout racists, some of whom, under sufficient, intemperate incitement, might decide to take this matter into their own hands."

And that's something the CIA's old boys know something about. 

As they shuffled toward the polling lines outside Christ Church in Georgetown Tuesday morning, I thought I could see it in their eyes. 

Tags: Barrack Obama, CIA, cold war, elections, John McCain, OSS, racists, voting