A year or so ago I began reading “A Legacy of Ashes” which describes CIA field-actions. I became so disgusted about half-way through that I quit.
This book recommends that book so I may have to retrieve and finish it
one of these days. In any event, The
Spymasters organizes its contents around the CIA's various Directors, an organizing
principle that works well for this subject.
My Notes:
Pg. 7: Many
believe that the CIA has bungled its way through the last fifty years—missing
real threats and ginning up false evidence for fake ones. It’s a version of history culminating in the
agency’s botched estimate of Iraq’s WMDs.
And Iraq was hardly the agency’s only debacle—from missing Iran’s 1979
revolution to misjudging Russia’s social media assault on the 2016 US
presidential election. However, the CIA
has succeeded in disrupting terrorist plots and has sounded alarms that
politicians chose not to hear. Before
9/11, though it could not specify the target, the agency repeatedly warned of
an imminent attack. The Bush White House
remained asleep. (I believe the distinction between CIA intelligence analysis, which they usually do well, and their field-operations is important to keep in mind when reading this book).
Pg. 26: Plots
to murder Castro began under Eisenhower.
The CIA chose a man named Harvey to make and carry out plans for the
murder. Harvey was a gun-toting, hair-triggered loudmouth with a heavy drinking habit. Harvey decided to employ the Mafia for the
hit as they were in that kind of business.
Nothing came of the plot.
Pg. 66: Four
notable CIA assassination plots were against Castro, Diem, Patrice Lumumba of
the Congo, and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic.
Operation CHAOS or Operation MHCHAOS was a Central
Intelligence Agency domestic espionage project targeting the American people
from 1967 to 1974, established by President Lyndon B. Johnson and expanded
under President Richard Nixon, whose mission was to uncover possible foreign
influence on domestic race, anti-war and other protest movements. The operation
was launched under Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Richard Helms.
Pg. 73: Public
revulsion over the murder plots contributed to lasting changes. Gerald Ford in 1976 signed Executive Order
11905, prohibiting the US from engaging in assassination. (However, the debate goes on with the
introduction of drones).
Pg. 106:
American intelligence ignorance has led to foreign policy disasters: JFK
and Johnson’s delusions regarding Vietnam; (JFK's Bay of Pigs); Carter’s
ignorance of Iran; the architects of the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. Intelligence failures such as the Iranian
revolution and the botched estimate of Iraq’s WMDs may, in the end, be impossible
to prevent. They are not rare events.
Pg. 142: On
February 15, 1988, the last Russian soldier pulled out of Afghanistan. The CIA celebrated and it appears that few
gave any thought to what would now become of the mujahedeen. The roots of militant fundamentalism, the
roots of Al Qaeda, had been planted, but no one knew it yet.
Pg. 160: The
first drones began flying over Bosnia in late 1993, sending back video of
artillery, decoys, surface-to-air missiles, tanks, gun movements, checkpoints,
and mass graves. (Drones were not yet armed).
Pg. 174: George
Tenet held the position as the DCI (seven years) from July 1997 to July 2004,
making him the second-longest-serving director in the agency's history—behind
Allen Welsh Dulles—as well as one of the few DCIs to serve under two U.S.
presidents of opposing political parties. His tenure spanned a succession of
crises: 9/11 attacks; the interrogation
program known as ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’; the agency’s botched WMD
investigation of Saddam Hussein.
Pg. 201: The
brutal interrogation methods have been prohibited since December 2005 by the
Detainee Treatment Act, passed by the Senate and signed by President Bush. However, Trump has announced that “I’d bring
back waterboarding…and a hell of a lot worse.”
Pg. 216: The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism
Prevention Act of 2004 (IRTPA) is a 235-page Act of Congress, signed by
President George W. Bush, that broadly affects United States federal terrorism
laws.. It was enacted in response to the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Now,
all fifteen spy services,
including the CIA, would report to the director of national intelligence,
or DNI.
Pg. 229: The
CIA had worked closely with Israel’s Mossad to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program,
but there was a non-crossable line for the CIA as Assassination was off the
table because of Executive Order 12333.
So it fell to Mossad to target Iranian nuclear scientists. One by one, they kept dying, six out of
fourteen. (Note: I know of no Mossad
assassination attempts on heads of countries).
Pg. 284: With
the announcement of the 2016 election win of Trump, applause broke out in the
Russian Duma. But Obama was not done
with the Russians. He ordered new sanctions,
expelled thirty-five known Russian spies; and closed two Russian-owned
facilities in Maryland and New York.
(Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn assured the
Russian ambassador that sanctions would soon be lifted). The review of all the data the intelligence
community gathered about the Russian assault was completed in January 2017 and
it was alarming. While the Russians
hadn’t tampered with the electoral machinery or altered the actual vote count,
they’d been much more aggressive—and effective—than anyone had realized. They had effected a multifaceted and
ingenious digital disinformation campaign, using social media and other
internet platforms to spread falsehoods and divide Americans from one
another.
Pg. 321: Each year
a Worldwide Threat Assessment (WWTA) is presented to the president. The 2019 assessment stated that Iran was in
compliance with the nuclear agreement, (something the president did not want to
hear). The 2019 Assessment also, on pg.
21, warned of the threat of a deadly global pandemic (a year before it actually
happened).
“We assess that
the US and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or
large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates
of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain
international resources… (Preparations) may be inadequate to address the
challenge of what we anticipate will be more frequent outbreaks of infectious
diseases…”
Pg. 322: The
primary respomsibility for pandemic warning belongs to health agencies such as
the CDC. But the intelligence community
plays a supporting role, and it tried to alert Trump. In January and February of 2020, as the virus
was already spreading on US soil, warnings appeared frequently in the
President’s Daily Brief (PDB), which Trump seldom, if ever, reads. Yet, on May 3rd 2020 Trump
declared that the first time he had heard of the virus was during a CIA
briefing on January 23rd, 2020.
This is false: health officials and advisers had been sounding the alarm
since January3, when Redfield, head of the CDC, learned of the VOVID outbreak
from his counterparts in China. Two
weeks later Alex Azar, Secretary of Health and Human Services called Trump at
Mar-a-Lago to warn Trump. (Azar was
treated to a presidential diatribe on e-cigarettes.) Also: the threat was clearly mentioned in the
PDB, which Trump apparently seldom reads.
Pg. 323: While Trump
tried to wish the virus away, the virus began to overwhelm the country’s feeble
pandemic defenses. It was no accident
that they were enfeebled. In 2018, Joh
Bolton, Trump’s third national security adviser, had famously abolished the
National Security Council’s pandemic unit, which now made it more difficult to
get high level attention for an emerging health crisis. Trump’s aversion to
science and facts, his belief that nothing from the ‘deep state could be
trusted, and his rejection of governance generally, did not help.
Addenda:
The CIA mainly
consists of “two camps.” Analysts gather information on other
nations, sometimes through spies but often by simply reading their newspapers.
Their information is usually accurate, if often ignored; pressed to “predict
the future,” they obey, but, of course, they “aren’t perfect and they often pay
the price.” In the second camp are operatives,
who “practice deception and seduction, enticing strangers to betray their
countries.” Whipple emphasizes that the CIA serves presidents who may ask for
the impossible or the illegal, take credit for successes, and shift blame for
failures. Thus, it’s accepted that 9/11 took the agency by surprise, although
the author rightly points out that administration officials repeatedly ignored
warnings of an imminent attack.
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