Central Incompetence Agency?
So what if the CIA were in fact more incompetent and corrupted than anyone could have ever dreamed? What if every operation was in fact the Bay of Pigs only we just didn’t know about them because they were ’secret failures’? Has Tim Shipman been talking to Larry C. Johnson?
The bungling by the CIA is chronicled in a history of the agency by Pulitzer prize-winning Tim Weiner, who has covered intelligence matters for The New York Times for two decades.
His book draws on 50,000 documents in CIA archives and more than 300 interviews with staff, past and present, including 10 former directors.
Weiner concludes that “the most powerful nation in the history of Western civilisation has failed to create a first-rate spy service”, a failure, he argues, that is a danger to American security.
He paints a portrait of a rogue agency that failed to predict every big international event from the outbreak of the Korean War to the fall of the Berlin Wall and September 11. ~theage.com.au
Judging from Larry C. Johnson and Valerie Plame this book doesn’t surprise me much. Especially in light of the fact that the only thing the CIA seems to be good at is political ‘active measures’.
- The CIA’s War Against President Bush
- Leaking At All Costs, What the CIA is willing to do to hurt the Bush administration.
- More on the CIA war against Bush
But wait, there’s more!
The book, Legacy of Ashes, details how the CIA relied from the outset on low-level sources and ill-trained officers. In 1953, its first officer in Moscow was so inept that he was seduced by his Russian housemaid — really a KGB colonel — and blackmailed.
Almost every agent parachuted into eastern Europe early in the Cold War was captured and killed.
During the Korean War, the CIA station chief concluded that nearly every Korean agent either “invented his reports or worked in secret for the communists”.
When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, Robert Gates, then the agency’s head and now the Defence Secretary, was at a family picnic.
A friend asked: “What are you doing here?” Mr Gates said: “What are you talking about?” She replied: “The invasion.” Mr Gates responded: “What invasion?”
Weiner lays the blame on the CIA’s leaders, including some senior officials who have since been revealed as alcoholics, and others who became mentally ill.
The book has infuriated some former CIA officers who insist that the agency needs support, not denigration. ~theage.com.au
Shoved into the internet 'tubes' on July 30, 2007, by Hegemonic Pundit,
under the following categories: central intelligence? agency
| Trackback URL for this post
