Legacy of Stupidity

From the Economist's review of Legacy of Ashes:

The 1947 act that set up the agency gave it two tasks: briefing the president with intelligence and conducting secret operations for him abroad. In Mr Weiner's view the CIA was lamentable at both—and most presidents must take a share of the blame.

The CIA failed to warn the White House of the first Soviet atom bomb (1949), the Chinese invasion of South Korea (1950), anti-Soviet risings in East Germany (1953) and Hungary (1956), the dispatch of Soviet missiles to Cuba (1962), the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 and Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. It overplayed Soviet military capacities in the 1950s, then underplayed them before overplaying them again in the 1970s.

The record of covert action is little better. In Japan, France and Italy the CIA sought to protect democracy by buying elections. It sponsored coups in Guatemala, Iran, Syria and Iraq, where a Baath Party leader boasted in 1963, “We came to power on an American train.” When an invasion of Cuba masterminded by the agency failed, it plotted to kill Fidel Castro. In ascending order of bloodshed, it took a hand in military coups in South Vietnam, Chile and Indonesia.

One reckons many another tale of woe figures into Weiner's assessment, but this is a really nice synopsis of key debacles. We might throw the SOA in there for good measure.

Was such skulduggery worth it? Did the extra security for the United States outweigh the immediate human cost, the frequently perverse geopolitical consequences and the moral damage to American ideals? Doubters repeatedly warned presidents that on balance the CIA's foreign buccaneering did more harm than good. Mr Weiner has dug out devastating official assessments of covert operations from the 60 years he covers suggesting that many were not worth it. The sceptics were not peaceniks or bleeding hearts but hard-headed advisers at high levels of government.

We're not talking just operational ineptitude. We're talking about seriously stupid decision-making. Stupid and, in many cases, evil.

What we really need is a good intelligence organization. Why is that so hard?

tags technorati : CIA Legacy of Ashes

Blowback Chronicles: The Tehran-Managua Axis

According to the model (Rome/Berlin/Tokyo), you need three members for a proper axis (aka, "axis of evil"), despite the fact that an axis typically is a single line between two points. Two members should be the primary partners, and at least one should be in East Asia. With Iraq now safely a Western-style democracy, Iran and North Korea have been interviewing potential new partners. It looks like Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after considering such contenders as, well, most of the world, has finally settled on Daniel Ortega's Nicaragua.

The relationship between Iran and Nicaragua goes back to the 1980s, when Ortega was a former scrappy revolutionary fighting a US-backed right-wing counter-revolution, and Ahmadinejad was a soldier-engineer-student fighting a US-backed invasion by Iraq's then-dictator, Saddam ("The Hammer") Hussein. US President Ronald Reagan, famous for thinking out of the box before thinking out of the box was cool, funded the Nicaraguan counter-revolutionary freedom fighters known as the "Contras" by selling weapons to Iran (via Israel) for the war against Iraq that he was also supporting. A case study in success now referred to in NSA circles as the "Moebius Gambit," but more widely known as the "Iran-Contra Affair," Reagan's operation projected Oliver North and John Poindexter to fame and fortune, first in congressional hearings, and later on FoxNewsChannel, the History Channel, and in the US government's Total Information Awareness program.

Iran and Nicaragua have engaged in a barter trade deal, while Iran and North Korea support each other's nuclear ambitions. Adding Nicaragua to the partnership opens axis access to the volatile anti-US Latin American region, including particularly Venezuela's populist former-commando Hugo Chavez and Cuba's long-time post-revolutionary dictator, Fidel Castro.

Axis of Evil (NDAQ: EVIL) shares rose on the news.

tags technorati : Axis of Evil, Iran, Nicaragua, Ortega, Ahmadinejad, North Korea