With all the stories and commentary about the Obama/Holder “attack” on the CIA, I thought it was time to resume my conversation with the late James Jesus Angleton, the former chief of CIA counterintelligence. The untrusty ouija board needed a recharge, and that takes several hours, so it wasn’t until late Sunday afternoon that I finally made contact. The familiar high-pitched but gravelly voice came through loud and clear.
JJA: There you are! I thought something bad had happened to you.
ML: Well I was in the hospital for a while, and then the rehab wing, and they don’t permit ouija boards…
JJA: What about cigars? That must have been a bit of a strain (coughs and chuckles, simultaneously).
ML: Well, there were signs up all over the place, “smoke free campus,” but I found a little garden between two wings where I could smoke.
JJA: Good for you! It’s getting harder and harder to find a suitable place here (NB: I have never been able to figure out precisely where “here” is; and I don’t want to ask him whether it’s “up here” or “down here” if you see what I mean…). But so far I manage.
ML: Have you been following the big CIA story? Holder appointed a special prosecutor to decide if anyone should be prosecuted for torture.
JJA: Yes, I’ve seen them (cough, no chuckle).
ML: And so?
JJA: And I’ve seen lots of commentary about how “nobody at Langley will risk doing anything the slightest bit out of line,” and how morale is awful. That sort of thing.
ML: Seems logical doesn’t it? I thought you’d be sympathetic to them.
JJA: Well obviously I’m sympathetic to the poor bastards who are going to be dragged in front of the usual grand jury. That really stinks. Especially because, as usual in Langley, everything is always in the hands of the effing lawyers, one way or the other.
ML: Right you are. First they get told by the lawyers that they can do it–from blowing cigar smoke at the terrorists to waterboarding them–and then a new batch of lawyers comes along and prosecutes them.
JJA: You don’t know the half of it.
ML: Do tell…
JJA: For decades now–DECADES–you had to get approval from some lawyer before you could do anything. Lawyers signed off on wartime targets (really! you couldn’t drop a bomb with a lawyer’s approval). And during the war in Iraq, if somebody shot at the Marines, they had to call their base and get an ok to shoot back, unless it was really hot and heavy. The rules can change any time. I mean, I know a lot about that. We’d been opening the mail for a very long time…
ML: But you weren’t prosecuted.
JJA: No, I was purged. That’s probably better, it saves you the grand jury and maybe your own trial later on. But it’s the same concept, isn’t it? You do what everybody thought was normal, ok, and routine, and then somebody comes along and decides it was wrong, and you get your head chopped off (he actually referred to a different part of the anatomy, or better different PARTS of the male anatomy, but this is a family publication).
ML: Don’t you think it’s legitimate to go after malefactors?
JJA: Of course I do. And I even think it’s fine to change the rules. You know, Hegel and all that…ideas change and we have to change too. But what is NOT fine is to change the rules, and then go after your predecessors, who were playing by an entirely different set of rules. That’s immoral. But…
ML: But what? That seems pretty clear.
JJA: Well nothing in this game is clear, you know, it’s different shades of gray, not sharp lines and colors.
ML: Ok, but what?
JJA: But everybody knows that it’s all political now. And CIA has been all about politics for, uh, decades. Since they’ve shown themselves to be utterly pathetic about doing intel, they do the political thing, they leak stuff (sometimes accurate, sometimes not), they sabotage folks they don’t like…you know all this. It’s really hilarious to see Cheney, of all people, out front defending them. He was their favorite target for eight years, after all.
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28 Comments
1. Ran:“ML: And the ultimate irony is that Cheney, their bete noire, is now their most effective defender.”
The “they” being the few remaining assets in the Service not on the hard Left, about to be “purged”, perhaps?
Then there’s Andy McCarthy’s theorem… The investigation isn’t about torture, but about transnationalism. Bets Cheney agrees, making his defense of the Agency also an attack on Holder’s broader agenda? [note the pun...]
Aug 30, 2009 - 6:39 pm 2. a Duoist:Long ago Senator Moynihan argued for the abolishment of the C.I.A., and his reasons back then are even stronger today. Get our spooks into the military where they belong, subject to the Military Code of Justice. Soldiers with an honor code don’t “leak” for partisan political advantage, and they don’t risk American lives by issuing false data. At the very least, putting the Military Code of Justice in charge of our spies would clean out Langley like Hercules cleaned out the stinkin’ stables.
Aug 30, 2009 - 9:52 pm 3. Pajamas Media » Aw, the Poor CIA:[...] Read the entire piece here. [...]
Aug 31, 2009 - 12:26 am 4. Rashputin:In spite of the fact that the CIA has in many ways outlived its usefulness, this can’t help but backfire on both Obama and the democrat party as well. Not only has the majority party failed to reward the CIA for supporting them with both ammunition and disinformation over the past eight years, they’ve managed to attack the single most widely supported function the CIA is tasked with. The mere fact that Obama is letting this proceed after saying it wouldn’t be pursued shows that he’s having serious problems with the CIA as well as his own party’s left. This is his attempt lay a little “Chicago” on the CIA and at the same time appease his left, to his mind both goals far more important than is whatever harm it may do to our national security.
Unfortunately for Obama and his flock of radical parrots, the CIA is quite capable of making a fool of the administration even when it’s under investigation. Unlike the era of Frank Church or even Carter, however, the public at large will no longer believe the sensational stories party propaganda organs headline in the “Times” or lead with on CNN. Obama hasn’t yet grasped the fact that after working the media golden goose to death, he’s lost the ability to sway opinion. Possibly even worse for Obama and company, are their claims that Cheney was the cleverest evil demon ever unleashed on us haven’t led them to credit him with any common sense. The CIA may well be conducting an investigation of the administration that is far more effective than the administration investigation of the CIA will be. Who better to give whatever they find than Cheney who could reasonably have had access to whatever they may feed him?
Regards
Aug 31, 2009 - 4:58 am 5. Bilgeman:#4 Rashputin:
“The CIA may well be conducting an investigation of the administration that is far more effective than the administration investigation of the CIA will be.”
Do you think that they could even do THAT effectively?
Remember, to get “face time” with Osama, all you needed to be was a California suburban White kid who converted to Islam.
Johnny Walker Lindh could manage what the See Eye Ay couldn’t.
“Who better to give whatever they find than Cheney who could reasonably have had access to whatever they may feed him?”
I happen to think pretty highly of Dick Cheney, so I reckon that anything Langley might slip into his pocket in the way of “ammunition” against The Alleged Hawaiian and his drones will be promptly deposited in an abandoned oil well where it can do him no harm when it explodes.
No…CIA, if they’re smart, will attack Obama and the Democrats’ support structures…the Union bosses, (and believe me, there’s a LOT to attack there!), and the foreign-money funded advocacy groups.
Help to pick off a few Congressmen from re-election here and there, bust open a few scandals, and the Fellow Who Claims To Have Been Born In Hawaii gets the message.
Or if he doesn’t, he’ll be left atop his soapbox, wondering where the Democratic chorus and the ACORN and SEIU crowds all disappeared to. Rather like Carter in his last two years.
Aug 31, 2009 - 5:36 am 6. Meryl:In the last 7 days, a new, useful and terrible word is becoming part of the conversation: transnationalism.
I’m not surprised. We can just as well keep building our glossary.
This ugly, ugly snake just gets longer and longer.
That’s not surprising either. It’s just depressing to have been so right 18 months ago about what an obaMadministration would be like, using at the time nothing more than common sense, some knowledge of history, the scant truths available about obama and taking note of the vast blank places on his personal map.
Aug 31, 2009 - 6:02 am 7. Ken:I will say this about Cheney – he’s more effective now than he was as VP. I think he deferred to Bush’s non-partisan tone too much. The Cheney we see now is what we’ve needed all along.
Too bad we couldn’t have had him and Bush switch roles.
Aug 31, 2009 - 6:17 am 8. Hetookuazy:The word “penetrated” comes to mind…
Aug 31, 2009 - 6:46 am 9. Seriously:Ahhh…. But who is/are the penetrator/s? Why would “somebody” want to penetrate CIA? Hmmmmmmm…. My brain hurts too much.. I think I’ll leave all this complicated speculation to the media. I’m sure they’ll get to the bottom of it.
“obaMadministration”? You conservatives are as clever as you are funny and smrt. Wow the CIA under Bush tell you that there are WMDs in Iraq and you think its great to start a decade long war. Now Obama and the Dems are running things and suddenly the CIA needs to close shop. The irony of your positions can’t get any deeper. Thank you for making my day more sunny you contradicting true patriots.
Aug 31, 2009 - 7:48 am 10. Pops in Vienna:It might be for the best if they shut down the CIA and start all over again. The place is full of leakers who seem bent on destroying the USA. I think they went wrong when they started hiring all the “bright sparks” from ivy league schools. We’d be better off hiring only ex-military and keeping the agency lean and mean.
Aug 31, 2009 - 7:57 am 11. Pelaut:The CIA will NOT turn up scandals on the Dems, not because it’s against the law for them to do internal intelligence, which it is, but because…
the CIA is a 40,000 people nest of bureau-rats like the Plames, left wing wannabe elites craving vengeance on imaginary ‘right wingers’.
Aug 31, 2009 - 8:25 am 12. Nobama 2012:To the Democrats:
Go Get The CIA:
Waterbored them and make em sweat.
Use the NORK water torture.
Stay after them until they give us the dirt on Eric Holder,
Harry Greed
and release Bambie’s birthed records and Passport.
I am not a birther,
Bambie was born in Hawaii,
but maybe it says father was Islamic Terrorist or something-
GET THEM!
We know they have thousands of laptops full of secret stuff.
Aug 31, 2009 - 8:39 am 13. Professor Guvinoff:Boy, I’d love to find a Ouija board on E-bay, but I can’t get one because you need to possess one already to pass the login barrier of the Ouija’d part of the website.
Mr. Ledeen, the next time you recharge your Ouija board, would you please consider arranging for a chat with one of the Langley janitors in the JFK days?
Aug 31, 2009 - 9:07 am 14. Rashputin:Bilgeman – (5)
First, if they had tried at the time they could have pulled it off, Clinton would have imprisoned them and freed Osama. The FBI and Go Relic were in charge of the Osama law enforcement problem, not the CIA.
Second, Osama is in a solitaire cell in Texas singing Methodist Hymns, and is now a staunch Calvinist. Two teenage girls in GA saw him buying scented candles at Richs’ in Atlanta and turned him in for the reward. The story broke in the Atlanta Urinal-Constipation on page nine, shoved aside by the news that Obama settled on which dog to buy.
Pelaut – (9)
“the CIA is a 40,000 people nest of bureau-rats like the Plames, left wing wannabe elites craving vengeance on imaginary ‘right wingers’.”
Fine, I’m wrong that some equal and opposite reaction to the investigation of the CIA will come from the CIA. I am sure though, that there will be information developed by someone, channeled to someone, and that the someone who gets it will make good use of it. Maybe some guy in the bridge inspection department will do it rather than someone in the CIA, but it’ll be used effectively, and most likely obviously.
Have a nice day
Aug 31, 2009 - 11:01 am 15. John Friendley:I hope the CIA has better luck with a Ouija board than I did when I was a kid! Those things are scary!
Aug 31, 2009 - 11:52 am 16. Calvin Ball:Somehow, I have to think that if there’s any dirt on Teh Won et al, they have it. I don’t think this is going to end well for them. If you have any skeletons in your closet, you don’t want to piss off the spooks.
Stock up on popcorn.
Aug 31, 2009 - 12:37 pm 17. Poor Citizen:I have to agree with the majority argument. At the very least, much of our intelligence gathering assets should be reduced/eliminated and streamlined down to a single chain of command and/or authority. The military option is a good possibility. All the bells and whistles and billions never stopped nine eleven. Take it back to old secretive days, when it still failed some of the time but worked rather well most of the time, for alot less money.
Aug 31, 2009 - 12:47 pm 18. Michael Ledeen:you said it! scary and unreliable. but when they work, wow.
Aug 31, 2009 - 1:09 pm 19. Nobama 2012:Eric Holders Justice Dept has released New Black Panther Party thugs even after they intimated voters.
Rewind- 1999
I think the guy is mentally challenged.
Aug 31, 2009 - 1:57 pm 20. Rashputin:Nobama 2012 – (19)
Didn’t he arrive on in length challenged yellow bus?
Regards
Aug 31, 2009 - 2:30 pm 21. Bilgeman:#14 Rashputin:
“First, if they had tried at the time they could have pulled it off, Clinton would have imprisoned them and freed Osama. The FBI and Go Relic were in charge of the Osama law enforcement problem, not the CIA”
Ah yes…”G-Men Abroad” I’ve always wanted to see Efrem Zimbalist Jr. dubbed into Farsi.
(Did I just show my age?)
And Gore-Lick gets punished by being put on the 9/11 Commission, where, (sur-prise! sur-prise! sur-prise!), she finds that she was not AT ALL at personal fault for anything.
“Second, Osama is in a solitaire cell in Texas singing Methodist Hymns, and is now a staunch Calvinist. Two teenage girls in GA saw him buying scented candles at Richs’ in Atlanta and turned him in for the reward. The story broke in the Atlanta Urinal-Constipation on page nine, shoved aside by the news that Obama settled on which dog to buy.”
Have you ever heard “Hand of The Almighty” by
John R. Butler?
You might enjoy the tune.
Aug 31, 2009 - 2:32 pm 22. Jassem Othman:Yes, the CIA still trying to prevent you from doing anything against the mullahs repressive regime.
Aug 31, 2009 - 4:43 pm 23. BC:It was a big wrong from Mr President Bush to award Mr George Tenet the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Mr Tenet does NOT deserve this kind of great medals, rather he just deserve the medals of tyrannized regimes.
I think the CIA just needs a clearer mission statement regarding its philosophy and purpose, and then should try to maintain it as administrations change. In addition to its spy games, it seems to be overly accepting of tasks that would make a Mafia hit man hesitate. There are enough smaller black ops departments to quietly go about things best not known about if they are seemingly absolutely necessary (which I’m always skeptical about), but the CIA is a high profile agency like the FBI. Unlike the FBI, however, who are easy to portray on TV and film as the good guys for pretty good reasons, it’s way to easy to show the CIA as just the opposite, and unfortunately again for pretty good reasons.
Aug 31, 2009 - 5:10 pm 24. Ran:@13, Guvinoff,
Normal Ouija boards like EBay’s are text-only, require two operators and a lot of beer… Now, Ledeen’s… Heh – That sounds like a transistorized, super-het unit. Wouldn’t surprise me that damned thing’s stereo-capable, too. [I'll bet it's an Olivetti he picked-up on a sidewalk in Naples.]
Speaking of sidewalks of Naples… I can’t help but think that administrative bloat and O/H legalese in the “professional” outfits gives the one-man & one-gal operations genuine operational advantage on a dollar-per-datum level. Given that the “advantage” of official support is about to be yanked from a few people, anyway, what’s the upside to joining a GM-like source for intelligence work? Dunno, I’m just wondering if there’s a lucrative boutique free-range alternative to the big vertically integrated farm models. On the other hand, I haven’t a clue how quality control or risk-management is handled. But given how the CYA has morphed into the “intelligence” wing of the Democrat Party… there has to be a better supply model?
Aug 31, 2009 - 8:11 pm 25. wGraves:Hmmm, approval rating at 42%. Attack the CIA. Attack the American voter. Spend $9T on his buddies. Fire every IG in site. Hire a bunch of tax evaders to run the Treasury, for a Ways and Means chairman who doesn’t pay his taxes either. So that’s ‘change’ is it? Well we may have a few out there experiencing buyer’s remorse? Certainly sounds like a plan for success.
Aug 31, 2009 - 10:18 pm 26. David W. Lincoln:Langley is about as useless, these days, as a string bikini in a blizzard.
Isn’t that the bottom line of that outfit?
Sep 1, 2009 - 5:14 pm 27. Pelaut:All 1.8 million Federal Bureau-rats, including Langley, are useless slackers making double the same job descriptions’ salaries in the no-longer free market.
They spend most of their time decorating their cubicles for the next holiday (halloween, T’giving, Xmas, Valentine…), inventing new wallpaper for thier PCs, playing internet, texting dirty, planning their next pornoparty and fantasizing about the dark forces surrounding them in the non-government world outside.
They can’t be fired. Only more can be hired. Neither can the Congress be fired. They have blank checks to hire purple-red-brown shirted goons to win every time.
CIA: who can be serious about them?
Sep 2, 2009 - 6:33 am 28. davod:“They can’t be fired. Only more can be hired. Neither can the Congress be fired. They have blank checks to hire purple-red-brown shirted goons to win every time.”
And Gates just Federalized over 40,000 former contract employees.
Sep 3, 2009 - 4:23 am