Do you remember how the black and white spies in Mad Magazine’s "Spy vs. Spy" were both incompetent? Sometimes the black spy would win and sometimes the white spy would win, but they both seemed a little dim…and mostly dead.
According to a new book out right now, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner, the CIA was/is as incompetent as…well…the Whitehouse these days. Check out this excerpt from the NY Times book review:
The C.I.A. never did have much luck operating inside Communist China, and it failed to predict the Iranian revolution of 1979. “We were just plain asleep,” said the former C.I.A. director Adm. Stansfield Turner. The agency also did not foresee the explosion of an atom bomb by the Soviet Union in 1949, the invasion of South Korea in 1950, the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the explosion of an atom bomb by India in 1998 — the list goes on and on, culminating in the agency’s wrong call on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in 2002-3.
Okay, so the C.I.A. pretty much missed the boat on every major global political event since its inception. I imagine being a spy is not easy, but you would think at least with how rich our country is that we could have bribed our way into some knowledge. The Soviets bribed that good Catholic, C.I.A. case officer Aldrich Ames into giving up ten agents who were then executed; you would think that we could have done the same.
But perhaps we should look no further than the leadership. Our country certainly has been lead downwards by G.W. and Cheney. The C.I.A. is not any different:
In Weiner’s telling, a president trying to use the C.I.A. resembles Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. The role of Lucy is played by scheming or inept directors. Dulles is particularly egregious, a lazy, vain con artist who watches baseball games on television while half-listening to top-secret briefings (he assesses written briefings by their weight). Casey mumbles and lies and may have been almost mad from a brain tumor by the end. Even the more honorable directors, like Richard Helms, can’t resist telling presidents what they want to hear. To fit the policy needs of the Nixon White House in 1969, Helms doctored a C.I.A. estimate of Soviet nuclear forces. In a draft of the report, analysts had doubted the Soviet will or capacity to launch a nuclear strike. Helms erased this crucial passage — and for years thereafter, until the end of the cold war, the C.I.A. overstated the rate at which the Soviets were modernizing their arsenal. The C.I.A.’s bogus intelligence on Iraq in 2002-3, based on the deceits of dubious sources like the one known as Curveball, was hardly unprecedented. To justify the Johnson administration’s desire for a pro-war Congressional resolution on Vietnam in 1964, the intelligence community manufactured evidence of a Communist attack on American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.
This would be amusing if so many people hadn’t died because of their lies and incompetence. I think America does need information. What hinders us is our xenophobia. Our education rarely bothers to teach us about other cultures, and we’re lucky if learn Spanish, much less Russian, Arabic, or Farsi. Our own President barely knows anything outside of Washington and Texas. Arrogance and firepower can only take you so far. Even our own army kicks out translators for being gay. How inept can we be? Apparently a lot:
A few years later, in 1979, Iranian revolutionaries seized the American embassy in Tehran. They captured a C.I.A. case officer named William Daugherty and accused him of running the agency’s entire Middle Eastern spy network while plotting to assassinate Ayatollah Khomeini. Daugherty, who had been in the C.I.A. for only nine months, tried to explain that he didn’t even speak the native tongue, Persian. The Iranians seemed offended that the Americans would send such an inexperienced spy. It was “beyond insult,” Daugherty later recalled, “for that officer not to speak the language or know the customs, culture and history of their country.”
It’s moving beyond insult right into stupidity.
According to a new book out right now, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner, the CIA was/is as incompetent as…well…the Whitehouse these days. Check out this excerpt from the NY Times book review:
The C.I.A. never did have much luck operating inside Communist China, and it failed to predict the Iranian revolution of 1979. “We were just plain asleep,” said the former C.I.A. director Adm. Stansfield Turner. The agency also did not foresee the explosion of an atom bomb by the Soviet Union in 1949, the invasion of South Korea in 1950, the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the explosion of an atom bomb by India in 1998 — the list goes on and on, culminating in the agency’s wrong call on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in 2002-3.
Okay, so the C.I.A. pretty much missed the boat on every major global political event since its inception. I imagine being a spy is not easy, but you would think at least with how rich our country is that we could have bribed our way into some knowledge. The Soviets bribed that good Catholic, C.I.A. case officer Aldrich Ames into giving up ten agents who were then executed; you would think that we could have done the same.
But perhaps we should look no further than the leadership. Our country certainly has been lead downwards by G.W. and Cheney. The C.I.A. is not any different:
In Weiner’s telling, a president trying to use the C.I.A. resembles Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. The role of Lucy is played by scheming or inept directors. Dulles is particularly egregious, a lazy, vain con artist who watches baseball games on television while half-listening to top-secret briefings (he assesses written briefings by their weight). Casey mumbles and lies and may have been almost mad from a brain tumor by the end. Even the more honorable directors, like Richard Helms, can’t resist telling presidents what they want to hear. To fit the policy needs of the Nixon White House in 1969, Helms doctored a C.I.A. estimate of Soviet nuclear forces. In a draft of the report, analysts had doubted the Soviet will or capacity to launch a nuclear strike. Helms erased this crucial passage — and for years thereafter, until the end of the cold war, the C.I.A. overstated the rate at which the Soviets were modernizing their arsenal. The C.I.A.’s bogus intelligence on Iraq in 2002-3, based on the deceits of dubious sources like the one known as Curveball, was hardly unprecedented. To justify the Johnson administration’s desire for a pro-war Congressional resolution on Vietnam in 1964, the intelligence community manufactured evidence of a Communist attack on American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.
This would be amusing if so many people hadn’t died because of their lies and incompetence. I think America does need information. What hinders us is our xenophobia. Our education rarely bothers to teach us about other cultures, and we’re lucky if learn Spanish, much less Russian, Arabic, or Farsi. Our own President barely knows anything outside of Washington and Texas. Arrogance and firepower can only take you so far. Even our own army kicks out translators for being gay. How inept can we be? Apparently a lot:
A few years later, in 1979, Iranian revolutionaries seized the American embassy in Tehran. They captured a C.I.A. case officer named William Daugherty and accused him of running the agency’s entire Middle Eastern spy network while plotting to assassinate Ayatollah Khomeini. Daugherty, who had been in the C.I.A. for only nine months, tried to explain that he didn’t even speak the native tongue, Persian. The Iranians seemed offended that the Americans would send such an inexperienced spy. It was “beyond insult,” Daugherty later recalled, “for that officer not to speak the language or know the customs, culture and history of their country.”
It’s moving beyond insult right into stupidity.
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