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

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  
   

Countrymen

And Countrywomen.   And Countrydogs and Manatees and Cockatoos and anybody else interested.  I always use Countrymen as a generic term.  It means:  You All.

My subject for today is the working press, its importance to us all as well as its increasing vulnerability and sometimes its foibles.  I expect to focus here on one significant member of our Establisment of Scribblers, the much-celebrated newsman Dexter Filkins.

A little background first. For a number of years Filkins covered the Near East for The New York Times, especially the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a lot of what we were able to discover about what was actually going on in that tortured corner of the world we found out through Filkins.  A brave and comparatively independent-minded reporter, Filkins was regularly "embedded" with our forces in the region, and a great deal of his reporting dealt with the stresses and triumphs and repeated acts of bravery that characterized our grunts on the ground. Filkins was also able to find his way among wartorn Iraqi civilians, especially in the villages, and his best reporting offers dozens of vignettes full of snapshots of their lives, their gutted houses and destroyed careers and hopelessness about the future.  Many of his most astute observations made it into his very effective book of essays, "The Forever War."

While he was working for the Times, and needed Department of Defense accreditation to get anywhere near the action, the tone of Filkins' reporting was, for the most part, affirmative.  Upending Sadam Hussein was justifiable, our military on the ground and their commanders in the Pentagon knew what they were doing, this would be a long slog but no doubt a necessary one.  Embedded once more in Afghanistan, Filkins kept a sharp eye out but beat the mandatory drum. 

Now, liberated finally from the policy guidelines of the Times, Filkins has moved over and become a staff writer for the somewhat less establishment-obligated New Yorker.  Filkins wrote the opening bit in the recent July 4, 2011 Talk of the Town. Paragraph by paragraph his observations amount to a litany of the hopelessness of our predicament, summing up the rotten prospects of a hopeless enterprise and concluding by quoting Obama's statement that "These long wars will come to a responsible end."  "That's an appropriately tortured construction for two badly managed occupations," Filkins concludes.  "As a prediction for Afghanistan, though, it seems more like a prayer."

I lay this out not to emphasize particularly that Filkins has moved over from the boosters to the jackals but rather to suggest how the system seems to work.  To be embedded is to be closed off, obligated, expected to tow the propaganda line.  Moreover, it implies that the focus of one's reporting will remain on subjects and approaches satisfactory to the military-industrial propaganda mill.

I am reminded of all this reminiscing about my own two recent brushes with Filkins.  It happens that I am a member of the Tampa affiliate of the Council on Foreign Relations.  Filkins has a close friend in the Bay area, and twice -- in 2007, I believe, and 2010 -- he has been generous enough to address our group.  He is an off-the-cuff speaker, personable but inclined to stick to his subject.  After both presentations I had the chance to ask him questions.  In 2007, with the overall military situation in Iraq under control, there were reports that three million barrels of oil a day were being lifted in the southern oil fields there.  Who was doing the lifting, I asked, and where was the money -- oil was approaching the $100-a-barrel  price, which suggested a $300,000,000 daily gross for somebody -- where was all that money going?

He didn't really know, Filkins was free to admit.  That was not something his bosses in the Times newsroom had asked him to look into.

By 2010 Filkins was based in Afghanistan.  Iraq was winding down, we were pulling out.  Filkins was quite straightforward about decrying the shifting and increasingly treacherous deal-making that characterized the Karzai regime -- a reflection of State Department leaks to keep the pressure up on the Afghan president.  I asked about Iraq.  We had built, according to the papers, fifteen city-sized bases in Iraq with mile-long runways to accommodate the supertankers and heavy bombers the Pentagon seemed to think we would require in the region.  These installations cost the American taxpayer billions, probably hundreds of billions of dollars.  Once we had withdrawn, which individuals or government entities in Iraq were going to wind up with these enormously valuable properties?

Filkins didn't know.  That wasn't in the playbook either.

I am taking the opportunity to dig into all of this not to embarrass Filkins, who is one of the best of his breed, but to suggest how our system manages the news and accordingly invites terrible initiatives and reckless decisions every one of us has to pay for later. We don't ask the right questions until it is too late. 

Cheers,

Burton  

Why Are We In Afghanistan?

Countrymen.

President Obama's announcement last week that we would be drawing down perhaps 10,000 of our regular military in Afghanistan by the end of the year started me thinking back about how we got involved there in the first place.  Predictably, the Republican warhawks who see after the interests of the military-industrial complex were outraged that we would break and run like this and attacked the president who, after all, himself mandated the "surge." They had already forgotten that it was Obama who ramped up this war after taking office, adding most of the roughly 150,000 U.S. military currently in-country.  To these ought to be added the perhaps 100,000 "advisers," mostly highly paid ex-military who constitute a very heavy drain on our deficit-plagued budget.

The problems anybody was going to face in Afghanistan were never a mystery around Washington.  An ex-State Department professional reminisced to me once about his time in Kabul during the years of the Russian occupation. Languishing in his hotel one rainy Sunday, he was invited by his Afghan counterpart to join a party and watch the afternoon's entertainment.  A woman supposedly taken in adultery was being held in a compound in one of the suburbs.  At the appointed hour, this diplomat and his colleagues were scheduled to stone the woman to death.

There remains a cultural disjunction between Afghan society and ours. There was a great deal of celebrating around Langley at the outcome of "Charlie Wilson's War," the CIA-managed effort to drive the Soviets and their brutal policies and their Hind armored helicopters out of Afghanistan with Stinger missiles and Agency- trained insurgents.  It has been largely forgotten since that the cadre we trained up included Osama bin Laden and Gulbudin Hekmatar, no doubt the two most ingenious and damaging gadflies we have had to contend with ever since.

Once the Soviets had cleared out of Afghanistan a contingent of CIA professionals moved in and installed a government in Kabul controlled by the Northern tribes.  This meant the Pashtun majority were largely denied much of a voice in their own governance.  A power vacuum opened up, with the potential for a civil war.

I recently chatted for a while with a general from Tajikistan.  He attributed the rise of the Taliban to the repeated efforts during the nineteen-nineties by an oil consortium led by Unocal to negotiate the construction of a north-south pipeline through the mountains of Afghanistan to transport the petroleum being discovered in the oil-rich territories of the newly independent Muslim nations along Afghanistan's northern borders -- the "Stans" -- directly south without having to contend with the harrassing policies of Russian bureaucrats.  This initiative never worked out, but, while preparing to exploit this valuable concession, the oil companies enlisted the poppy-growing Taliban Mullahs and warlords and instructed them in the rudiments of modern guerilla warfare in hopes that they would work out as mercenaries willing to protect the envisaged pipeline. The Taliban leaders moved on to occupy the power vacuum and made common cause with the Pakistani Secret Service, the ISI, which intended to exploit them as a buffer against the Indian forces to the east.

How we are to be expected to forward our national purposes inside this snake pit of ancient animosities has never been explained to the American people.  Al Qaeda is long gone. Afghanistan's corrupt President Karzai, openly negotiating with the Taliban,  has recently accused the U.S. forces of functioning as "occupiers," and invited us to leave.  We ought to take his good advice, and quickly.

Best to you all,

Burton Hersh

Whitewash

Countrymen,

I had intended to let this blogger format settle in a little bit before tiptoeing into the minefield of the JFK assassination. But last night, watching a two-hour History Channel rendition of the purported facts surrounding the shooting of John Kennedy, I found myself yelling back again and again at the television screen, not behavior I generally indulge.  Plainly, my time had come.

What I objected to was a simplified rendition of the Warren Commission conclusions, abetted by a confident-sounding voice-over stream of commentary intended to pick off any critics who might have threatened to unsettle the conventional presentation over the years. It may be that the History Channel producers were attempting to make amends for treatments of the events their own producers let slip into the programming during years past -- public funding is harder and harder to get.

I remember one very controversial episode built around a sort of Walpurgisnacht party at Clint Murchison's estate outside Dallas the night before the assassination at which Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, and Richard Nixon all supposedly celebrated the imminent demise of the Kennedy administration.  Within weeks the History Channel was compelled to repudiate that one.  Then there was the recent soap-operatic series on the Kennedys that was aborted recently when Caroline Kennedy and Maria Shriver weighed in in time.  Too much reality there, starting with the presentation of an indecisive JFK incapacitated by drugs and illness much of the time, controlled by his father, and struggling to reestablish his manhood by running amok among the ladies.

Certainly the current Warren Commission apologia ought to propitiate the keepers of the whitewash.  Even within its own body of statements the documentary is full of contradictions. For example, the narrator states early that Oswald had time to get off three shots, the first of which missed and chipped a curb.  The next two purportedly passed through the president's neck and back from behind.  Later on, when it has become plain that even these apologists will have to deal with the fact that Kennedy's brains were blown away, a fourth shot, a supposed entry wound, is identified at the crown of the president's head. There is no mention of the testimony of Kennedy's surgeons at Parkland Hospital and later during his autopsy in Bethesda that he sustained an entry wound in the right front temple that blew out much of his brain and the top of his skull, which Jacqueline Kennedy is seen scrambling after in the Zapruder footage.

There really isn't much point in developing too thoroughly the contradictory evidence here, all of which I laid out in the text -- and backed up in the notes -- of my 2007 book Bobby and J. Edgar.  Minor points, like the fact that the Dallas police found no evidence of powder burns on Oswald's hands and cheek, evidence that he might possibly have fired a weapon. Or the FBI's inability to get the loose old mail-order Mannlicher-Carcano rifle Oswald supposedly used to fire straight.

What bothered me particularly was this documentary's repeated efforts to discredit expert witnesses, like Notre Dame Professor Robert Blakey, who conducted the U.S. House of Representatives investigation into the assassination and concluded that there had been several shooters -- a conspiracy -- and that the Mafia played a major role.  One of Blakey's top investigators, Edwin Lopez, is presented in seeming agreement with the Warren Commission, when in fact Lopez subsequently published a book in which he asserted that there was indeed a conspiracy in which CIA operators were involved and that Blakey was conned by the CIA into omitting Agency records from his investigation.  In his own subsequent book, Blakey suggests that this might have been the case.  Perhaps most insulting of all to the responsible historian is the attempt here to present the experienced mid-level mob operative Jack Ruby as a "police character," in Hoover's words, who murdered Oswald on impulse.

A lot of time has passed. If we own anything, it is our history. When can we reclaim it?

Burton Hersh

  

Updating The New Reality

Countrymen,

First, sorry that almost two weeks has elapsed since I provided fresh clues as to what has been happening to our country beneath the establishment-directed media blitz throughout the recent decades. We managed our semiannual relocation -- to New Hampshire for the summer -- and had to bring the entire operation, including the internet hookup -- up to speed.  Wearing, especially the afternoon of sparring with folks in New Delhi.

One bounty even these early postings has provolked is messages from friends old and new in response to what I wrote.  For example, my old pal Judge Peter Kilborn, who was in the military during the fifties, has contributed his immediate reminiscences as to how close we did come to jumping into the Hungarian revolution during the Eisenhower era.  Another friend, the writer and legal scholar Richard Cummings who produced the outstanding biography of Allard Lowenstein, points out that after a nod from Ike the fledgling CIA bumped the aged premier Muhammad Mossagedh out of power in Iran to protect the interests of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, predecessor to BP, and set in train the events which have produced the reign of the Ahatollahs.  A year later the Dulles brothers engineered a revolution in Guatamala to protect the properties of United Fruit, a client of John Foster Dulles' law firm.  Hundreds of thousands ultimately died and only in recent years has that battered country begun to recover.

In fact, I dealt with both of these geopolitical travesties in great detail in The Old Boys. The point worth making here is that, ugly as these incidents were, neither sucked us into a major conflict. As with Ronald Reagan, who backed us out of Lebanon after the marine barracks in Beirut was bombed, at the presidential level a sense of proportion was maintained.  While researching The Old Boys I spent several afternoons with Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of Teddy and himself a historian -- he taught at Harvard as a young man.  Kermit was full of regret at the results the Agency had often produced in the Middle East; he himself had squeezed Nasser into power in Egypt as well as destroying a functioning democracy in Iraq.  The CIA's traditional role as a collection agency for Western special interests has regularly induced our intelligence services to boost proteges we would ultimately regret and have to deal with, from Fidel Castro to Noriega to Osama bin Laden.  When you start climbing under the covers internationally you had better make sure you are not embracing a Gorgon.

Musings on a Wednesday morning.  Best to you all,

Burton

    

Meaningful Greatness in Presidents

Countrymen,

Today we attempt to rethink that favorite of backwoods editorials:  What makes a President great?  As a historian manque, I have been startled again and again by the tendency of my more academic confreres to limit their full approval when it comes to grading past leaders to "wartime presidents."  Warren Harding and Millard Filmore have rarely made the cut. 

The fact is, much of what is only too quickly undermining what survives of our democracy comes out of the impulse of the likes of George W. Bush to establish his own military legacy, to nail that coontail onto the wall.  War tends to produce triumphal headlines -- at least at first -- a lot of profit -- and employment -- around the munitions business, and a swollen and expensive bureaucracy, military and civilian.  It tends to leave behind tremendous deficits, hundreds of thousands of ex-recruits too shot up or deranged to survive except at the government's expense, and exhorbitant bills for "nation-building" in some barbaric corner of the planet we will soon have forgotten.

All this was evident all along to our more seasoned presidents.  Let's take another look at the performance of, say, Dwight Eisenhower, long dismissed as a snoozer by the preponderance of academic historians.  Eisenhower inherited a war gone very bad in Korea.  He promised to end it while campaigning in 1952. While I was researching my history of the early CIA, The Old Boys,  I ran across a senior Agency official who explained to me how Eisenhower actually ended that war.  Ike called that official in, told him to catch the next plane to New Delhi and tell his Communist Chinese counterpart that unless the North Koreans and the Chinese agreed to come to the table and negotiate peace within a few weeks, Ike would instruct the Strategic Air Command to destroy the industrial cities of Northern China with atomic weapons.

Peace broke out.

In 1956, spurred in good part by CIA broadcasts promising the Hungarians that the U.S. would support a Hungarian uprising against their Soviet masters, the Hungarians revolted.  The Agency had been training an army that approached a million men from refugees out of the East, the so-called Vlasov Army.  One of their encampments was down the road in Germany from where I translated for the US. Army in the middle fifties.  Both Allen Dulles, the director of the Agency, and his brother John Foster, the Secretary of State, attempted to pressure Eisenhower into agreeing to release these refugees into Hungary to fight.  Not at all interested in triggering World War III, Eisenhower refused.

A similar situation played out soon afterwards in Indo-China.  As Ted Morgan brilliantly pieces out the history in his recent chronicle, Valley of Death, the pressure on Eisenhower from elements of his military as well as the leadership of the State Department was unremitting once the French fortress at Dien Bien Phu in Indo China was under seige. Eisenhower held fast.  As I spelled out in my controversial spellbinder Bobby and J. Edgar, during the early sixties John Kennedy -- as with Cuba, unable to resist either the Pentagon or Cardinal Spellman  --  authorized the 16,000 helicopter support troops who involved us directly in the South Vietnamese civil war and led to over fifteen years of senseless slaughter that was to gut a generation of young Americans and sap our economy.

Ronald Reagan, surrounded by cooler heads like George Shultz and Jim Baker and headed off at the pass by the legislative flanking actions of Ted Kennedy that led to the Boland amendments, barely avoided war against Nicaragua.  Here again I can recommend a supporting text by -- surprise! -- me: Edward Kennedy: An Intimate Biography.  Once George W. Bush took office the economy seemed to be under control and the political advantages of a foreign adventure proved irresistable.

Will we ever learn?  Maybe this will help.  Thanks for your patience,

Burton    

What's Left Out

Countrymen,

As a committed latecomer to technological innovation, I have been thinking about -- but not writing -- a blog of my own for some time.  I suppose I got serious about opening this possibility in the wake of the abuse I've taken over the last few years from establishment media after I joined the ranks of the "conspiracy nuts."  The trouble started with the 2007 publication of Bobby and J. Edgar, my treatment of the series of events that began when Joe Kennedy broke in as a bootlegger and ended with the assassination of John Kennedy and Bobby.

My research and reasoning is laid out in the controversial Chapter 19 of that embattled volume.  Well before the book came out the furor started, reflected in the astonishment expressed by traditional reviewers that a "respected historian," as I was still considered for the moment, would dare to question the conclusions of the Warren Commission.  Over the more recent decades experts from as wide a range as the chief investigator of the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations to Richard Nixon -- who privately called the Warren Commission report "The greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American public" -- have echoed my fundamental conclusions.  Still, the coverup goes on. 

All this got me to thinking:  What else goes unexamined in the narrative media and government sources impose on us?  What else should we be considering?

This blog will attempt to pry open answers to a number of questions never answered -- and rarely asked -- about our public life.  Keep checking this blog.

Burton Hersh