Countrycontestants,
Again, a moment or two of rueful retrospection engendered by the brief rise and unexpected collapse of the CIA career of General David Petraeus, victim of a few misdirected e-mails and a round of raging chick business in Tampa funneled through a starchy minor FBI agent. Tabloid fodder, except with bewildering national-security implications.
The fact is, at least since David was undone by Bathsheba, or Samson by Delilah, spies have been expected to accomplish their purposes below -- often in -- the fold, to misappropriate a standard term of newspaper jargon. Sex has been the weapon of choice, and many an otherwise staunch patriot has gone down -- so to speak -- seduced and too often abandoned by the seducer -- or seductress -- of the moment.
When I was delving into the personal histories that formed the basis of my group biography The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA I would rarely have to interview and research very deeply before I became aware that most of the individuals who operated as bad boys and girls in the nation's behalf remained bad boys and girls in every aspect of their private lives. Misbehavior testified to their necessary deviousness. Wild Bill Donovan, who created the Office of Strategic Services, the first American intelligence-gathering and covert action entity, was a notorious hound. The lawyer who pushed operations into the CIA's mandate and himself came to epitomize the "classic era" of Agency machinations around the world, CIA Director Allen Dulles, cut a sensational swath through the bedrooms of Bern and Georgetown. If you require details, check out the memoir by one of his more articulate conquests, Mary Bancroft. Allen's anguished sister Eleanor took time to quote me chapter and verse as regarded Allen's antics over many decades.
Secondary personalities were equally active. Donovan's deputy, that highly regarded diplomat David Bruce, once wrote me a letter explaining in surprising detail how and why he had abandoned his marriage to Ailsa, Paul Mellon's sister, while on station after the Blitz in London and how he had taken up with the divine Evangeline.
Flagrant misbehavior was not necessarily heterosexual. The rather ominous fixer who virtually controlled U.S. policy toward the East Bloc during the Eisenhower years, Carmel Offie, made very little effort to hide his homosexual preferences. When I once asked Jim Angleton, founder of counterintelligence at CIA, why Offie -- who was in all probability on the KGB's payroll -- why CIA never investigated Offie's proclivities and contacts, Angleton said that Offie was simply too powerful -- he had too many influential friends. The Soviets would remain impenetrable -- see The Old Boys.
Insiders were quite open about a lot of this. I once went to the Watergate apartment of a top CIA official to confirm some information. Before long he appeared with another top Agency officer; both middle-aged men emerged from the bedroom in matching Japanese kimonos. Neither of them bothered with an explanation.
Evidently, those were more worldly times. People kept their jobs based on how they did their jobs. We are subject to the tabloids today, and we are paying the price.
Best of the season to all of you.
Burton Hersh
are all available in a highly affordable electronic format at treefarmbooks.com
Showing posts with label CIA surveillance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CIA surveillance. Show all posts
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Sunday, November 11, 2012
Spies in the Bedroom
Countrykrusadors,
Perhaps it's the continuous seepage of the Women's Movement into our rotting culture, or perhaps its the afterecho of Rick Santorum, who warned us that we had better get ahold of ourselves. Whatever, the abrupt resignation of General David Petraeus as Director of the CIA puts us on notice that the times they are a'changing, the clandestine balances and restraints inside our swollen National Security bureaucracy have collapsed, and matters regarded as venial by our more sophisticated forebears seem to be more than enough to break careers overnight and set the government itself wobbling.
It happens that I myself spent ten years poking around Langley and interviewing, ultimately, more than a hundred top serving and recently retired functionaries in the CIA while preparing to write The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA. Once attacked by propagandists for the Agency, this book is today on virtually every desk around CIA headquarters. Lively reading still, controversial in many places, The Old Boys serves as the Agency's widely acknowledged secret institutional history.
I suspect that if the founders of the CIA came back to life they would be astonished that the threat of exposure for having had a lady friend or two on the side seemed to be grounds for forcing out an otherwise exemplary director. They would be even more astounded that another co-equal bureaucracy in the government, in this case the FBI, took it upon itself to comb out the CIA Director's e-mails and seemed to threaten to expose the liaison it had surfaced. Amazing!
Powerful men have assumed the perogative of acquiring a romantic interest on the side at least since King David's reign. Ask Thomas Jefferson or Ben Franklin. Grover Cleveland was elected twice in spite of the fact that the superPACs of the era ran a slogan against him pointing up his bastard child : "Ma, ma, where's pa? He's in the White House, ha, ha, ha." FDR appreciated the occasional interlude of female companionship, especially when Eleanor wasn't around. As for JFK or Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton? In every case the occasional indiscretion leaked, but our leaders kept their jobs. There were a lot more important considerations, even around the Bible Belt.
To start with, there were matters of war and peace. I remember sitting in the office of the Deputy Director at the Agency, Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, when the warhawks around Ronald Reagan were manipulating the press and instigating incidents on the ground -- Iran-Contra ultimately -- in hopes of starting a war with Nicaragua. He was about to leave, Inman assured me. Himself a far more experienced intelligence officer than the Director, William Casey, a Wall Street sharpie with a few months of World War II service in London with the OSS, Inman had served as director of the much larger and more important NSA and hated the direction the warhawks were headed under the clueless Reagan. "I"ve got to leave before they drag me out of this place by the ankles, kicking and screaming," he confided to me. Weeks later he was gone. In those days policy issues, not the irrevelancies of anybody's private life, decided who kept his or her job.
Agree with him or disagree, David Petraeus is without a doubt a valuable, seasoned leader, one we will miss. Does his flirtation with his knockout of a biographer, Paula Broadwell, really compromise his effectiveness? Is Paula in league with the Chinese Commies or Iran or the Soviet Union -- a historical memory, except to Mitt Romney -- or anybody else we might not like this week? Where is Missus Grundy going to take us all?
Answer me that, troopers.
Cheers,
Burton Hersh
Perhaps it's the continuous seepage of the Women's Movement into our rotting culture, or perhaps its the afterecho of Rick Santorum, who warned us that we had better get ahold of ourselves. Whatever, the abrupt resignation of General David Petraeus as Director of the CIA puts us on notice that the times they are a'changing, the clandestine balances and restraints inside our swollen National Security bureaucracy have collapsed, and matters regarded as venial by our more sophisticated forebears seem to be more than enough to break careers overnight and set the government itself wobbling.
It happens that I myself spent ten years poking around Langley and interviewing, ultimately, more than a hundred top serving and recently retired functionaries in the CIA while preparing to write The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA. Once attacked by propagandists for the Agency, this book is today on virtually every desk around CIA headquarters. Lively reading still, controversial in many places, The Old Boys serves as the Agency's widely acknowledged secret institutional history.
I suspect that if the founders of the CIA came back to life they would be astonished that the threat of exposure for having had a lady friend or two on the side seemed to be grounds for forcing out an otherwise exemplary director. They would be even more astounded that another co-equal bureaucracy in the government, in this case the FBI, took it upon itself to comb out the CIA Director's e-mails and seemed to threaten to expose the liaison it had surfaced. Amazing!
Powerful men have assumed the perogative of acquiring a romantic interest on the side at least since King David's reign. Ask Thomas Jefferson or Ben Franklin. Grover Cleveland was elected twice in spite of the fact that the superPACs of the era ran a slogan against him pointing up his bastard child : "Ma, ma, where's pa? He's in the White House, ha, ha, ha." FDR appreciated the occasional interlude of female companionship, especially when Eleanor wasn't around. As for JFK or Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton? In every case the occasional indiscretion leaked, but our leaders kept their jobs. There were a lot more important considerations, even around the Bible Belt.
To start with, there were matters of war and peace. I remember sitting in the office of the Deputy Director at the Agency, Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, when the warhawks around Ronald Reagan were manipulating the press and instigating incidents on the ground -- Iran-Contra ultimately -- in hopes of starting a war with Nicaragua. He was about to leave, Inman assured me. Himself a far more experienced intelligence officer than the Director, William Casey, a Wall Street sharpie with a few months of World War II service in London with the OSS, Inman had served as director of the much larger and more important NSA and hated the direction the warhawks were headed under the clueless Reagan. "I"ve got to leave before they drag me out of this place by the ankles, kicking and screaming," he confided to me. Weeks later he was gone. In those days policy issues, not the irrevelancies of anybody's private life, decided who kept his or her job.
Agree with him or disagree, David Petraeus is without a doubt a valuable, seasoned leader, one we will miss. Does his flirtation with his knockout of a biographer, Paula Broadwell, really compromise his effectiveness? Is Paula in league with the Chinese Commies or Iran or the Soviet Union -- a historical memory, except to Mitt Romney -- or anybody else we might not like this week? Where is Missus Grundy going to take us all?
Answer me that, troopers.
Cheers,
Burton Hersh
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
How We Stumble into Wars #2
Countryvarmints,
E-mails have poured in after last week's blog, when I attempted to lift the doormat before all the facts that induced the Kennedy administration to risk its reputation over Cuba could scurry out of sight. This week I intend to point up factors that tempted Jack Kennedy to light the fuse on what had been a minor CIA advisory presence in Saigon. My friend Nick Natsios served as the Agency station chief there during the Eisenhower years, so I had access to many of the details.
The sequence of events that actually led us into the quagmire of Viet Nam is laid out in Chapter 21 of my book Bobby and J. Edgar, and follows the narrative developed by Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, who served as Kennedy's head of special operations -- active spookery -- for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As Prouty saw it, Kennedy was under heavy pressure to support the million or so Viet Namese Catholics who with U.S. help fled Ho Chi Minh and had been forced into leadership positions in the villages of South Vietnam by the Diem regime. Diem himself was a family friend of the Kennedys during the years he awaited his moment in a monastery in Maryland and a protege of Cardinal Spellman. Once the indigenous Buddhists began to revolt, President Kennedy ordered the 16,000 helicopter troops into South Viet Nam and our national nightmare was upon us. Vatican politics, never really acknowledged.
What we had done was to attempt to force our will on one element of what began as a civil war. We have been attempting a similar form of intervention periodically ever since, playing favorites among the clans and tribes of the Middle East, and we have lost every time. By that I mean -- we as a nation. We as interested corporations -- Brown and Root, which built Cam Ranh Bay, to become Halliburton, to morph into KBR, which built billions and billions of dollar's-worth of airfields and dependent-housing-quarters that we are abandoning now in Iraq -- we as corporations made out beautifully. Our surviving children and grandchildren can deal with the costs.
My pal and patron of many decades, John Fry, the godfather of the modern ski movement in America, responded to last week's blog with a hard-headed appraisal of what we have taken on in an e-mail that begins: "..the Pentagon currently owns or rents 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries and has another 6000 bases in the United States...." according to the 2003 Base Status Report. This itemization omits installations such as Camp Bondsteel on Kosovo, built and maintained by Kellogg, Brown and Root, as well as "bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan."
All this while Medicaid benefits are about to be cut back and class sizes in the ghettos are ballooning.
All the best, as always,
Burton Hersh
E-mails have poured in after last week's blog, when I attempted to lift the doormat before all the facts that induced the Kennedy administration to risk its reputation over Cuba could scurry out of sight. This week I intend to point up factors that tempted Jack Kennedy to light the fuse on what had been a minor CIA advisory presence in Saigon. My friend Nick Natsios served as the Agency station chief there during the Eisenhower years, so I had access to many of the details.
The sequence of events that actually led us into the quagmire of Viet Nam is laid out in Chapter 21 of my book Bobby and J. Edgar, and follows the narrative developed by Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, who served as Kennedy's head of special operations -- active spookery -- for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As Prouty saw it, Kennedy was under heavy pressure to support the million or so Viet Namese Catholics who with U.S. help fled Ho Chi Minh and had been forced into leadership positions in the villages of South Vietnam by the Diem regime. Diem himself was a family friend of the Kennedys during the years he awaited his moment in a monastery in Maryland and a protege of Cardinal Spellman. Once the indigenous Buddhists began to revolt, President Kennedy ordered the 16,000 helicopter troops into South Viet Nam and our national nightmare was upon us. Vatican politics, never really acknowledged.
What we had done was to attempt to force our will on one element of what began as a civil war. We have been attempting a similar form of intervention periodically ever since, playing favorites among the clans and tribes of the Middle East, and we have lost every time. By that I mean -- we as a nation. We as interested corporations -- Brown and Root, which built Cam Ranh Bay, to become Halliburton, to morph into KBR, which built billions and billions of dollar's-worth of airfields and dependent-housing-quarters that we are abandoning now in Iraq -- we as corporations made out beautifully. Our surviving children and grandchildren can deal with the costs.
My pal and patron of many decades, John Fry, the godfather of the modern ski movement in America, responded to last week's blog with a hard-headed appraisal of what we have taken on in an e-mail that begins: "..the Pentagon currently owns or rents 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries and has another 6000 bases in the United States...." according to the 2003 Base Status Report. This itemization omits installations such as Camp Bondsteel on Kosovo, built and maintained by Kellogg, Brown and Root, as well as "bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan."
All this while Medicaid benefits are about to be cut back and class sizes in the ghettos are ballooning.
All the best, as always,
Burton Hersh
Saturday, August 27, 2011
How We Stumble Into -- And Out Of -- Wars
Countrypeople,
This week I hope to provide a few sidelights on what exactly triggers our decisions to make war and make peace and how we deal with the consequences. This approach was suggested by a piece by Robert Dallek in the current Newsweek, The Untold Story of the Bay of Pigs. The demons at The National Security Archive recently managed to tug loose part of the Agency's own treatment of this grotesque debacle. When I was interviewing preparatory to writing The Old Boys I talked at length to Lyman Kirkpatrick, ex-CIA Inspector General, whose private and extremely scathing analysis of this historic debacle had started to leak. I was already putting in dozens of hours overall with Richard Bissell, ex-CIA Chief of Operations and the primary planner of this historic setback, and he was unstinting when it came to blaming himself. See Chapter Twenty-One, The Last True Blowoff, in The Old Boys.
What I did not know, and would not pick up on until I was deep into the research and interviewing behind my controversial treatment of the back-door Kennedy administration, Bobby and J. Edgar, was the extent to which the interests and prejudices of the Kennedy family itself contributed to its obsession with Cuba. Once, queried as to his hesitation to support Jack Kennedy as a presidential candidate -- was it his Catholicism? -- , Harry Truman cracked: "It ain't the Pope, it's the Pop!"
He meant, of course, Joseph P. Kennedy, whose gangland affiliations and propensity to put his pocketbook first -- as Ambassador to Great Britain Joe had speculated against the wavering Czech currency while England was trembling and Hitler's armies were marching into Prague -- were notorious in political circles. Before Castro came into power Joe Kennedy reportedly maintained serious holdings in Cuba, from the Casino at the Hotel Nacional to the Coca Cola franchise for Havana. During the runup to The Bay of Pigs, Joe had gotten involved personally in helping secure bases around the Caribbean at which the ill-fated 2506 Brigade could train, at one point hosting General Anastasia Somoza, the brother of the dictator in Nicaragua, in his Manhattan offices.
Even after the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs the administration's determination, at any cost, that Communism would not survive "ninety miles from our shore" inspired one foolish gamble after the next. Mafia bigwigs were paid off to murder Castro. A fruitless campaign of sabotage and propaganda against the island directed personally by Robert Kennedy, Operation Mongoose, ultimately came to nothing, although at great expense. The Soviets moved their missiles in as our threats turned defeaning. The Kennedys were apparently preparing another assault by disenchanted Cubans, "C-Day," when JFK was gunned down, two developments not unconnected. Perhaps when the Agency finally releases the last volume of its institutional workup of the Bay of Pigs we'll know our own history better. It's only been fifty years.
Many years later, at a series of dinners in Moscow with several of the top generals in the KGB, I would discover how dangerous that game had become. These officers were on the planning staff that was gaming the Soviet response if -- as our Joint Chiefs urged Kennedy -- we had simply obliterated the Soviet missile launching pads in Cuba. The Russians all assured me that their military was under orders to take out all the cities of our East Coast with their Bison Bombers and atomic weaponry should we attack Cuba. Perhaps Jack Kennedy -- and Robert Kennedy -- performed their most enduring service in office by standing up to Curtis LeMay and the Strategic Air Command.
A lot of the pressure on the Kennedy brothers came out of the anti-Communist hysteria of the time. The Republican Right, whipped up by treacherous blowhards like Senator Joseph McCarthy -- a protege of Joe Kennedy and a suitor for a time of his daughter Eunice -- had continued to castigate the Truman Administration for "Losing China." Nobody wanted to "lose Cuba" or, shortly, Viet Nam. Yet what seems most remarkable about these costly and pointless adventures is how fast our ruling circles -- and almost all our citizens -- forget. Fifty years have passed, and Castro's delapidated regime is still in place, largely ignored here. Viet Nam -- Communist Viet Nam -- is one of our most valued trading partners.
Again: Why are we in Afghanistan?
This week I hope to provide a few sidelights on what exactly triggers our decisions to make war and make peace and how we deal with the consequences. This approach was suggested by a piece by Robert Dallek in the current Newsweek, The Untold Story of the Bay of Pigs. The demons at The National Security Archive recently managed to tug loose part of the Agency's own treatment of this grotesque debacle. When I was interviewing preparatory to writing The Old Boys I talked at length to Lyman Kirkpatrick, ex-CIA Inspector General, whose private and extremely scathing analysis of this historic debacle had started to leak. I was already putting in dozens of hours overall with Richard Bissell, ex-CIA Chief of Operations and the primary planner of this historic setback, and he was unstinting when it came to blaming himself. See Chapter Twenty-One, The Last True Blowoff, in The Old Boys.
What I did not know, and would not pick up on until I was deep into the research and interviewing behind my controversial treatment of the back-door Kennedy administration, Bobby and J. Edgar, was the extent to which the interests and prejudices of the Kennedy family itself contributed to its obsession with Cuba. Once, queried as to his hesitation to support Jack Kennedy as a presidential candidate -- was it his Catholicism? -- , Harry Truman cracked: "It ain't the Pope, it's the Pop!"
He meant, of course, Joseph P. Kennedy, whose gangland affiliations and propensity to put his pocketbook first -- as Ambassador to Great Britain Joe had speculated against the wavering Czech currency while England was trembling and Hitler's armies were marching into Prague -- were notorious in political circles. Before Castro came into power Joe Kennedy reportedly maintained serious holdings in Cuba, from the Casino at the Hotel Nacional to the Coca Cola franchise for Havana. During the runup to The Bay of Pigs, Joe had gotten involved personally in helping secure bases around the Caribbean at which the ill-fated 2506 Brigade could train, at one point hosting General Anastasia Somoza, the brother of the dictator in Nicaragua, in his Manhattan offices.
Even after the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs the administration's determination, at any cost, that Communism would not survive "ninety miles from our shore" inspired one foolish gamble after the next. Mafia bigwigs were paid off to murder Castro. A fruitless campaign of sabotage and propaganda against the island directed personally by Robert Kennedy, Operation Mongoose, ultimately came to nothing, although at great expense. The Soviets moved their missiles in as our threats turned defeaning. The Kennedys were apparently preparing another assault by disenchanted Cubans, "C-Day," when JFK was gunned down, two developments not unconnected. Perhaps when the Agency finally releases the last volume of its institutional workup of the Bay of Pigs we'll know our own history better. It's only been fifty years.
Many years later, at a series of dinners in Moscow with several of the top generals in the KGB, I would discover how dangerous that game had become. These officers were on the planning staff that was gaming the Soviet response if -- as our Joint Chiefs urged Kennedy -- we had simply obliterated the Soviet missile launching pads in Cuba. The Russians all assured me that their military was under orders to take out all the cities of our East Coast with their Bison Bombers and atomic weaponry should we attack Cuba. Perhaps Jack Kennedy -- and Robert Kennedy -- performed their most enduring service in office by standing up to Curtis LeMay and the Strategic Air Command.
A lot of the pressure on the Kennedy brothers came out of the anti-Communist hysteria of the time. The Republican Right, whipped up by treacherous blowhards like Senator Joseph McCarthy -- a protege of Joe Kennedy and a suitor for a time of his daughter Eunice -- had continued to castigate the Truman Administration for "Losing China." Nobody wanted to "lose Cuba" or, shortly, Viet Nam. Yet what seems most remarkable about these costly and pointless adventures is how fast our ruling circles -- and almost all our citizens -- forget. Fifty years have passed, and Castro's delapidated regime is still in place, largely ignored here. Viet Nam -- Communist Viet Nam -- is one of our most valued trading partners.
Again: Why are we in Afghanistan?
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
On Embedding and Coopting
Countrypatriots,
It had been my intention to fire one of these things into the blogosphere no more often than every week or ten days, tops. Also, I hope to deal in subjects, ideas, not personalities. I focused in one blog not long ago on the distinguished and courageous journalist Dexter Filkins not to defame him in any way, but rather to suggest that his years as an "embedded" reporter for The New York Times prevented him from asking the large questions -- especially about the economics underlying our occupation of Iraq -- which might have helped his readership (and his editors) better comprehend the rationale behind our involvement. Free of The Times, Filkins judges our involvement in the area as a disaster of "mismanagement."
That is certainly a start. Even now the motivations that pushed us into that feckless project are becoming clear enough -- we went into Iraq because it looked like easy pickins on the ground, because important players in our military-industrial complex were running out of work and needed a secure base in the Middle East, and because there was all that oil.
If that sounds like leftie talk to students of this blog, what can I say? A couple of times recently Steve Mumford has dressed me down for impugning the integrity of our brave journalists. Mr. Mumford, I discover on Google, was himself an embedded artist in Iraq, a painter of recruiting-poster-style renditions of street scenes and battle tableaux during our years of embroilment. Having been himself embedded, Mr. Mumford is no doubt qualified to speak for others on whom such unavoidable limitations have been imposed. I welcome his input.
But to dismiss my observations as the sputterings of a "leftie" suggests that Mumford has skipped his homework. I have been an independent writer and journalist my entire professional life. Independent politically and independent intellectually. I've been under attack from the left for going after the Kennedy family in Bobby and J. Edgar by suggesting that they cherished Joe McCarthy (Eunice almost married him) and going "soft on Hoover" (David Corn in the Times). Right-wing commentators -- and the Agency itself -- were infuriated by my insistence in The Old Boys that the Eisenhower-era CIA was duped unceasingly by the KGB, which planted virtually every scrap of information about the Sovier Union on which the Agency based its appraisals. In fact, Dick Helms was my source for a lot of that, and James Jesus Angleton remained a friend until the day he died.
Mumford suggests that I am "surprisingly thin-skinned" about "the term 'leftie'; I didn't call you a commie after all.'" I suppose; I didn't call Mumford a Nazi, which no doubt covers me with glory. As far as I am concerned, that is not the point. Mistakes are mistakes, on every level. At the recent Republican candidates' debate almost every participant pushed to get out of Afghanistan, faster. Ron Paul -- who has the credentials -- wanted to clear out yesterday. This is about initiatives, not labels.
Good luck to all of you in August,
Burton
It had been my intention to fire one of these things into the blogosphere no more often than every week or ten days, tops. Also, I hope to deal in subjects, ideas, not personalities. I focused in one blog not long ago on the distinguished and courageous journalist Dexter Filkins not to defame him in any way, but rather to suggest that his years as an "embedded" reporter for The New York Times prevented him from asking the large questions -- especially about the economics underlying our occupation of Iraq -- which might have helped his readership (and his editors) better comprehend the rationale behind our involvement. Free of The Times, Filkins judges our involvement in the area as a disaster of "mismanagement."
That is certainly a start. Even now the motivations that pushed us into that feckless project are becoming clear enough -- we went into Iraq because it looked like easy pickins on the ground, because important players in our military-industrial complex were running out of work and needed a secure base in the Middle East, and because there was all that oil.
If that sounds like leftie talk to students of this blog, what can I say? A couple of times recently Steve Mumford has dressed me down for impugning the integrity of our brave journalists. Mr. Mumford, I discover on Google, was himself an embedded artist in Iraq, a painter of recruiting-poster-style renditions of street scenes and battle tableaux during our years of embroilment. Having been himself embedded, Mr. Mumford is no doubt qualified to speak for others on whom such unavoidable limitations have been imposed. I welcome his input.
But to dismiss my observations as the sputterings of a "leftie" suggests that Mumford has skipped his homework. I have been an independent writer and journalist my entire professional life. Independent politically and independent intellectually. I've been under attack from the left for going after the Kennedy family in Bobby and J. Edgar by suggesting that they cherished Joe McCarthy (Eunice almost married him) and going "soft on Hoover" (David Corn in the Times). Right-wing commentators -- and the Agency itself -- were infuriated by my insistence in The Old Boys that the Eisenhower-era CIA was duped unceasingly by the KGB, which planted virtually every scrap of information about the Sovier Union on which the Agency based its appraisals. In fact, Dick Helms was my source for a lot of that, and James Jesus Angleton remained a friend until the day he died.
Mumford suggests that I am "surprisingly thin-skinned" about "the term 'leftie'; I didn't call you a commie after all.'" I suppose; I didn't call Mumford a Nazi, which no doubt covers me with glory. As far as I am concerned, that is not the point. Mistakes are mistakes, on every level. At the recent Republican candidates' debate almost every participant pushed to get out of Afghanistan, faster. Ron Paul -- who has the credentials -- wanted to clear out yesterday. This is about initiatives, not labels.
Good luck to all of you in August,
Burton
Monday, July 25, 2011
Why Are We In Afghanistan -- #2
Countryfolk,
Back at it. I am in what might very well turn out to be the last week of drafting a new novel, and so am a bit preoccupied with that. Still, a number of you have responded to my remarks about our involvement in Afghanistan and the reportage by the esteemed Dexter Filkins, so let's do another round. This is an important subject.
My St. Petersburg friend, the legendary educator Merle Allshouse, observes about my having remarked that Filkins avoided answering my questions about who profited from the oil liftings in Iraq throughout the war and who will inherit the fifteen or sixteen massive airports we are about to leave behind with the comment "Yes, and sometimes it takes a lot of courage and maturity to say 'I don't know....'" The point is, I wasn't questioning Filkins' courage. I was questioning his enterprise. After stumbling into a war which Vice President Cheney assured us we would be able to underwrite out of the proceeds from selling the oil in the region, it would seem to me that an alert reporter might wonder how that was panning out. Even if his editors in New York weren't asking.
As another of my correspondents, Bob Dardenne, points out, even "The NYT has shown itself to be quite capable of towing the party line -- the lead-up to the Iraq war, for example, biting, as did most mainstream media, on the WMD issue and later apologizing for it." Too true, and to be respected, except for the fact that all through the leadup to the invasion international inspectors were combing out Iraq and not finding the weaponry we preferred to imagine existed.there. My own CIA contacts certainly thought the WMD claims were bogus at the time. Where were the American media?
Another reader, Steve Mumford, opens cheerfully by asserting that "I think your reasoning is simplicistic, and I assume that you have never worked as an embedded journalist yourself." He feels that reporters cannot get it right "all the time." While I have never been "embedded," I did spend several years in the military running a mobile radio station in the tripwire system along the Czech border and translating NATO documents during the fiercest years of the Cold War. I worked with journalists and German functionaries regularly, and ultimately had a long career myself as a magazine journalist. To maintain that journalists are justified in avoiding asking embarrassing -- to Washington -- questions because the work is dangerous or because they can't be everywhere at once begs significant issues. Neither Ernie Pyle nor I.F. Stone were ubiquitous, yet both homed in on problems in such a way as to compel public solutions. Mr. Mumford concludes that he "tires of lefties casually dismissing the courageous and difficult work of reporters" as "morally compromised because they were embedded." Who said anything like that? To dismiss someone with whom one disagrees as a "leftie" is as telltale as dismissing a conservative critic as a "fascist." The term reveals all you need to know about the writer.
Another good friend, Richard Cummings, attributes our current embroilment to the fact that "After the Russians were forced to withdraw, America did nothing to help rebuild the country, which led to civil war." There is no doubt some truth to this. The larger question -- which the polls suggest Americans are now prepared to answer -- is whether any appropriate amount of military or "nation-building" effort in many, many parts of the third world is going to accomplish much more than bankrupt us and leave us with hundreds of thousands of terribly damaged youngsters to nurse at public expense through the rest of their lives. Can we afford this?
Best to y'all. Keep writing.
Burton
Back at it. I am in what might very well turn out to be the last week of drafting a new novel, and so am a bit preoccupied with that. Still, a number of you have responded to my remarks about our involvement in Afghanistan and the reportage by the esteemed Dexter Filkins, so let's do another round. This is an important subject.
My St. Petersburg friend, the legendary educator Merle Allshouse, observes about my having remarked that Filkins avoided answering my questions about who profited from the oil liftings in Iraq throughout the war and who will inherit the fifteen or sixteen massive airports we are about to leave behind with the comment "Yes, and sometimes it takes a lot of courage and maturity to say 'I don't know....'" The point is, I wasn't questioning Filkins' courage. I was questioning his enterprise. After stumbling into a war which Vice President Cheney assured us we would be able to underwrite out of the proceeds from selling the oil in the region, it would seem to me that an alert reporter might wonder how that was panning out. Even if his editors in New York weren't asking.
As another of my correspondents, Bob Dardenne, points out, even "The NYT has shown itself to be quite capable of towing the party line -- the lead-up to the Iraq war, for example, biting, as did most mainstream media, on the WMD issue and later apologizing for it." Too true, and to be respected, except for the fact that all through the leadup to the invasion international inspectors were combing out Iraq and not finding the weaponry we preferred to imagine existed.there. My own CIA contacts certainly thought the WMD claims were bogus at the time. Where were the American media?
Another reader, Steve Mumford, opens cheerfully by asserting that "I think your reasoning is simplicistic, and I assume that you have never worked as an embedded journalist yourself." He feels that reporters cannot get it right "all the time." While I have never been "embedded," I did spend several years in the military running a mobile radio station in the tripwire system along the Czech border and translating NATO documents during the fiercest years of the Cold War. I worked with journalists and German functionaries regularly, and ultimately had a long career myself as a magazine journalist. To maintain that journalists are justified in avoiding asking embarrassing -- to Washington -- questions because the work is dangerous or because they can't be everywhere at once begs significant issues. Neither Ernie Pyle nor I.F. Stone were ubiquitous, yet both homed in on problems in such a way as to compel public solutions. Mr. Mumford concludes that he "tires of lefties casually dismissing the courageous and difficult work of reporters" as "morally compromised because they were embedded." Who said anything like that? To dismiss someone with whom one disagrees as a "leftie" is as telltale as dismissing a conservative critic as a "fascist." The term reveals all you need to know about the writer.
Another good friend, Richard Cummings, attributes our current embroilment to the fact that "After the Russians were forced to withdraw, America did nothing to help rebuild the country, which led to civil war." There is no doubt some truth to this. The larger question -- which the polls suggest Americans are now prepared to answer -- is whether any appropriate amount of military or "nation-building" effort in many, many parts of the third world is going to accomplish much more than bankrupt us and leave us with hundreds of thousands of terribly damaged youngsters to nurse at public expense through the rest of their lives. Can we afford this?
Best to y'all. Keep writing.
Burton
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