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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (45849)	9/21/2002 3:45:42 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

I gather you love books on the intelligence community. Yes, I do. The problem I am having is that the most recent ones chronicle our failure on 9/11, and I get disgusted reading them. I find the ones on early days to be the most interesting. Our "Jedburgh" guys in WWII were real heroes. Bill Casey, Singlaub, and Colby were three of the best known. CB got pissed at me today for "ragging" on the Lawyers involved in these organizations. I guess it hit home. :^) I really don't blame any individual. The major problem is organizational, and it looks inescapable. The main "Secrets" they keep are the secrets of failure. The "Early Days" of the OSS were successful in large part because of lack of Bureaucracy and the Patriotism of the times. I glanced over the Powers piece and will spend some time this afternoon on it. Thanks for finding it. I am going to have to research all the "Online" pieces of the "NY Review of Books." Just too good to miss.

To: JohnM who wrote (45849)	9/21/2002 6:32:26 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 281500

I just read "Part II" of the Powers review. As you know, he used several books on the CIA and FBI to make his points. The Book, "See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism," by Robert Baer is one of my two favorites. The other one being "A Spy for all Seasons," by Clarridge. He ends the part of his article on Baer's book with this telling paragraph. >>>>Marching orders for the CIA have changed radically over the years: agency coup- plotters were praised in the 1950s for ridding President Eisenhower of inconvenient regimes in Guatemala and Iran, then pilloried in 1961 for trying the same in Cuba. Under President Reagan the CIA allegedly trained Nicaraguan guerrillas in how to assassinate Sandinista government officials; under President Clinton in 1995, embarrassed by a revelation that it had been routinely paying a Guatemalan colonel who had killed and tortured Americans, the agency embarked on an "asset scrub" to get criminals off the payroll. CIA officials insist that in the years since no potential spies have been rejected because they were beyond the pale, but the House committee vigorously demanded rescinding the 1995 rules anyway. But more significant than any single white-gloves-only rule has been the slow growth of a careerist caution in the agency and the FBI alike which some intelligence officers, by no means all, describe as a "risk-averse culture." What this means in practice is summed up by a sign which long hung over the desk of a CIA officer stationed in Rome: Big ops, big problems. Small ops, small problems. No ops, no problems. <<<<<