The Largest Covert Operation in CIA History
by Chalmers Johnson

The Central Intelligence Agency has an almost unblemished record of screwing up every "secret" armed intervention it ever undertook. From the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953 through the Bay of Pigs, the failed attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro of Cuba and Patrice Lumumba of the Republic of Congo, the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, the "secret war" in Laos, aid to the Greek colonels who seized power in 1967, the 1973 killing of Salvador Allende in Chile and Ronald Reagan's Iran-contra war against Nicaragua, there is not a single instance in which the agency's activities did not prove acutely embarrassing to the United States. The CIA continues to get away with this primarily because its budget and operations have always been secret and Congress is normally too indifferent to its constitutional functions to rein in a rogue bureaucracy. Therefore the tale of a purported CIA success story should be of some interest.

According to the author of the newly released Charlie Wilson's War, the exception to CIA incompetence was the arming between 1979 and 1988 of thousands of Afghan moujahedeen ("freedom fighters"). The agency flooded Afghanistan with an astonishing array of extremely dangerous weapons and "unapologetically mov[ed] to equip and train cadres of high tech holy warriors in the art of waging a war of urban terror against a modern superpower," in this case, the USSR.

The author of this glowing account, George Crile, is a veteran producer for the CBS television news show "60 Minutes" and an exuberant Tom Clancy-type enthusiast for the Afghan caper. He argues that the U.S. clandestine involvement in Afghanistan was "the largest and most successful CIA operation in history" and "the one morally unambiguous crusade of our time." He adds that "there was nothing so romantic and exciting as this war against the Evil Empire." Crile's sole measure of success is the number of Soviet soldiers killed (about 15,000), which undermined Soviet morale and contributed to the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the period from 1989 to 1991. That's the successful part.

However, he never mentions that the "tens of thousands of fanatical Muslim fundamentalists" the CIA armed are some of the same people who in 1996 killed 19 American airmen at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; bombed our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; blew a hole in the side of the U.S. destroyer Cole in Aden harbor in 2000; and on Sept. 11, 2001, flew hijacked airliners into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Today, the world awaits what is almost certain to happen soon at some airport � a terrorist firing a U.S. Stinger low-level surface-to-air missile (manufactured at one time by General Dynamics in Rancho Cucamonga) into an American jumbo jet. The CIA supplied thousands of them to the moujahedeen and trained them to be experts in their use. If the CIA's activities in Afghanistan are a "success story," then Enron should be considered a model of corporate behavior.

Nonetheless, Crile's account is important, if appalling, precisely because it details how a ruthless ignoramus congressman and a high-ranking CIA thug managed to hijack American foreign policy. From 1973 to 1996, Charlie Wilson represented the 2nd District of Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives. His constituency was in the heart of the East Texas Bible Belt and was the long-held fiefdom of his fellow Democrat, Martin Dies, the first chairman of the House Un-American Affairs Committee. Wilson is 6 feet, 4 inches tall and "handsome, with one of those classic outdoor faces that tobacco companies bet millions on." He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1956, eighth from the bottom of his class and with more demerits than any other cadet in Annapolis history.

After serving in the Texas Legislature, he arrived in Washington in 1973 and quickly became known as "Good Time Charlie," "the biggest playboy in Congress." He hired only good-looking women for his staff and escorted "a parade of beauty queens to White House parties." Even Crile, who featured Wilson many times on "60 Minutes" and obviously admires him, describes him as "a seemingly corrupt, cocaine snorting, scandal prone womanizer who the CIA was convinced could only get the Agency into terrible trouble if it permitted him to become involved in any way in its operations."

Wilson's partner in getting the CIA to arm the Moujahedeen was Gust Avrakotos, the son of working-class Greek immigrants from the steel workers' town of Aliquippa, Pa. Only in 1960 did the CIA begin to recruit officers for the Directorate of Operations from among what it called "new Americans," meaning such ethnic groups as Chinese, Japanese, Latinos and Greek Americans. Until then, it had followed its British model and taken only Ivy League sons of the Eastern Establishment. Avrakotos joined the CIA in 1961 and came to nurture a hatred of the bluebloods, or "cake eaters," as he called them, who discriminated against him. After "spook school" at Camp Peary, next door to Jamestown, Va., he was posted to Athens, where, as a Greek speaker, he remained until 1978.

During Avrakotos's time in Greece, the CIA was instrumental in destroying Greek freedom and helping to turn the country into probably the single most anti-American democracy on Earth today. Incredibly, Crile describes this as follows: "On April 21, 1967, he [Avrakotos] got one of those breaks that can make a career. A military junta seized power in Athens that day and suspended democratic and constitutional government." Avrakotos became the CIA's chief liaison with the Greek colonels. After the fall of the colonels' brutally fascist regime, the 17 November terrorist organization assassinated the CIA's Athens station chief, Richard Welch, on Dec. 23, 1975, and "Gust came to be vilified in the Greek radical press as the sinister force responsible for most of the country's many ills." He left the country in 1978 but could not get another decent assignment � he tried for Helsinki � because the head of the European Division regarded him as simply too uncouth to send to any of its capitals. He sat around Langley for several years without work until he was recruited by John McGaffin, head of the Afghan program. "If it's really true that you have nothing to do," McGaffin said, "why not come upstairs? We're killing Russians."

Wilson was the moneybags and sparkplug of this pair; Avrakotos was a street fighter who relished giving Kalashnikovs and Stingers to the tribesmen in Afghanistan. Wilson was the more complex of the two, and Crile argues that his "Good Time Charlie" image was actually a cover for a Barry Goldwater kind of hyper-patriotism. But Wilson was also a liberal on the proposed Equal Rights Amendment and a close friend of the late Congresswoman Barbara Jordan (D-Texas), and his sister Sharon became chairwoman of the board of Planned Parenthood. As a boy, Wilson was fascinated by World War II and developed an almost childlike belief that he possessed a "special destiny" to "kill bad guys" and help underdogs prevail over their enemies. When he entered Congress, just at the time of the Yom Kippur War, he became a passionate supporter of Israel. After he traveled to Israel, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee began to steer large amounts of money from all over the country to him and to cultivate him as "one of Israel's most important Congressional champions: a non-Jew with no Jewish constituents." Jewish members of Congress also rallied to put Wilson on the all-powerful Appropriations Committee in order to guarantee Israel's annual $3-billion subsidy. His own Texas delegation opposed his appointment.

Wilson was not discriminating in his largess. He also became a supporter of Anastasio "Tacho" Somoza, the West Point graduate and dictator of Nicaragua who in 1979 was swept away by popular fury. Before that happened, President Carter tried to cut the $3.1-million annual U.S. aid package to Nicaragua, but Wilson, declaring Somoza to be "America's oldest anti-Communist ally in Central America," opposed the president and prevailed.

During Wilson's long tenure on the House Appropriations Committee, one of its subcommittee chairmen, Clarence D. "Doc" Long, used to have a sign mounted over his desk: "Them that has the gold makes the rules." Wilson advanced rapidly on this most powerful of congressional committees. He was first appointed to the foreign operations subcommittee, which doles out foreign aid. He then did a big favor for then-Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill Jr. (D-Mass.). The chairman of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee at the time, Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), had been caught in the FBI's ABSCAM sting operation in which an agent disguised as a Saudi sheik offered members of Congress large cash bribes. O'Neill put Wilson on the Ethics Committee to save Murtha, which he did. In return, O'Neill assigned Wilson to the defense appropriations subcommittee and made him a life member of the governing board of the John F. Kennedy Performing Arts Center, where he delighted in taking his young dates. Wilson soon discovered that all of the CIA's budget and 40 percent of the Pentagon's budget is "black," hidden from the public and even from Congress. As a member of the defense subcommittee, he could arrange to have virtually any amount of money added to whatever black project he supported. So long as Wilson did favors for other members on the subcommittee, such as supporting defense projects in their districts, they would never object to his private obsessions.

About this time, Wilson came under the influence of a remarkable, rabidly conservative Houston woman in her mid-40s, Joanne Herring. They later fell in love, although they never married. She had a reputation among the rich of the River Oaks section of Houston as a collector of powerful men, a social lioness and hostess to her fellow members of the John Birch Society. She counted among her friends Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, dictator and first lady of the Philippines, and Yaqub Khan, Pakistan's ambassador to Washington, D.C., who got Herring named as Pakistan's honorary consul for Houston.

In July 1977, the head of Pakistan's army, Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, seized power and declared martial law, and in 1979, he hanged Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the president who had promoted him. In retaliation, Carter cut off U.S. aid to Pakistan. In 1980, Herring went to Islamabad and was so entranced by Zia and his support for the Afghan freedom fighters that on her return to the United States, she encouraged Wilson to go to Pakistan. There he met Zia, learned about the Afghan moujahedeen and became a convert to the cause. Once Reagan replaced Carter, Wilson was able to restore Zia's aid money and added several millions to the CIA's funds for secretly arming the Afghan guerrillas, each dollar of which the Saudi government secretly matched.

Although Wilson romanticized the mountain warriors of Afghanistan, the struggle was never as uneven as it seemed. Pakistan provided the fighters with sanctuary, training and arms and even sent its own officers into Afghanistan as advisors on military operations. Saudi Arabia served as the fighters' banker, providing hundred of millions with no strings attached. Several governments, including those of Egypt, China and Israel, secretly supplied arms. And the insurgency enjoyed the backing of the United States through the CIA.

Wilson's and the CIA's greatest preoccupation was supplying the Afghans with something effective against the Soviets' most feared weapon, the Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunship. The Red Army used it to slaughter innumerable moujahedeen as well as to shoot up Afghan villages. Wilson favored the Oerlikon antiaircraft gun made in Switzerland (it was later charged that he was on the take from the Zurich-based arms manufacturer). Avrakotos opposed it because it was too heavy for guerrillas to move easily, but he could not openly stand in Wilson's way. After months of controversy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff finally dropped their objections to supplying the American Stinger, President Reagan signed off on it, and the "silver bullet" was on its way. The Stinger had never before been used in combat. It proved to be murderous against the Hinds, and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev decided to cut his losses and get out altogether. In Wilson's postwar tour of Afghanistan, moujahedeen fighters surrounded him and triumphantly fired their missiles for his benefit. They also gave him as a souvenir the stock from the first Stinger to shoot down a Hind gunship.

The CIA "bluebloods" fired Avrakotos in the summer of 1986, and he retired to Rome. Wilson became chairman of the Intelligence Oversight Committee, at which time he wrote to his CIA friends, "Well, gentlemen, the fox is in the hen house. Do whatever you like." After retiring from Congress in 1996, he became a lobbyist for Pakistan under a contract that paid him $30,000 a month. Meanwhile, the United States lost interest in Afghanistan, which descended into a civil war that the Taliban ultimately won. In the autumn of 2001, the United States returned in force after Al Qaeda retaliated against its former weapon supplier by attacking New York and Washington. The president of the United States went around asking, "Why do they hate us?"

Crile knows a lot about these matters and presents them in a dramatic manner. There are, however, one or two items that he appears unaware of or is suppressing. For the CIA legally to carry out a covert action, the president must authorize a document called a finding. Crile repeatedly says that Carter signed such a finding ordering the CIA to provide covert backing to the moujahedeen after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on Dec. 24, 1979. The truth of the matter is that Carter signed the finding on July 3, 1979, six months before the Soviet invasion, and he did so on the advice of his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in order to try to provoke a Russian incursion. Brzezinski has confirmed this sequence of events in an interview with a French newspaper, and former CIA Director Robert M. Gates says so explicitly in his 1996 memoirs. It may surprise Charlie Wilson to learn that his heroic moujahedeen were manipulated by Washington like so much cannon fodder in order to give the USSR its own Vietnam. The moujahedeen did the job, but as subsequent events have made clear, they may not be grateful to the United States.

The U.S. has run amok; former CIA analyst
By AMBIKA BEHAL
UPI Correspondent

WASHINGTON, March 9 (UPI) -- Corruption has run amok in intelligence circles and the president should be impeached, a former CIA analyst says.

Also, he said, the United States is undergoing a constitutional crisis.

"I do not wish to be associated, however remotely, with an agency engaged in torture," wrote Ray McGovern in a recent letter as he returned his Intelligence Commendation Award medallion to Congressman Pete Hoekstra, R-MI, and Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

At the time, McGovern was wearing an orange jump suit, similar to those worn at Guantanamo Bay, with a gag over his mouth on which was written the word, "torture." Along with 15 other individuals, dressed alike, he wandered the halls of Congress.

"It was simply a slow, dead man walking kind of thing," said McGovern, who said the reaction he received was interesting. "I had expected turbulence, the worst I experienced was people averting their eyes and the most common reaction was people looking at me, silence," he said.

He described the experience as having "a certain somberness and reverence."

There were more volunteers wanting to take part, he said, but "not enough jump suits."

A 27-year veteran of the CIA, spanning administrations from John F. Kennedy to George Herbert Walker Bush, the current president's father, McGovern has taken, in recent years, a vocal stand on several aspects of the current Bush administration's handling of the war in Iraq and ensuing events.

Returning his medal for "especially commendable service" took a lot of thought. "I had been thinking of ways I could disassociate myself from torture," he said, describing it as a response for his grandchildren who, he said, would ask him what role he played in current events.

"Pete Hoekstra was one of the few people in our government who would be able to stop this," said McGovern. But neither has he seen any action from Hoekstra in attempt to stop torture of prisoners at American hands, nor has he received any response from the return of his medal yet, he said.

"In my view, this is an order of magnitude different from my experiences in the past -- there has been torture before, but never before has it been ordered and openly 'justified'," he said.

Recent months have seen CIA Director Porter Goss and Vice President Dick Cheney unsuccessfully try to prevent Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. from his successful initiative to ensure there were legal restraints on torture.

Attorney General "Alberto Gonzalez in London was unwilling to say whether dogs were used in torture," said McGovern. "Even thought torture has always been conducted separosa, there should be a debate in this city," he said.

During his time at the CIA, McGovern at one point was responsible for daily briefings to the first President Bush. After retiring in 1990; he said he received a "wonderful letter from Bush, Sr. We do stay in touch periodically," but would not comment on the former president's opinions on McGovern's current activities.

Today, he spends his time writing and speaking around the world and abroad, mostly about the Iraq war, "trying to spread a little truth around," he said.

The alleged corruption of intelligence strikes a heavy chord with McGovern. The war in Iraq started, he said, because former CIA director George Tenet, was given no choice but to state the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

"Back in my day, I like to think we would have got up and walked out," if asked to force intelligence, he said. "Cooking intelligence is a cardinal sin in the intelligence world."

In a chapter in the new book, "Neo-Conned Again!" -- a compilation of condemnations of the war in Iraq -- McGovern referred to the New Testament passage carved into the marble entrance at CIA headquarters. "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."

"This was the ethos of the intelligence analysis directorate during most of the 27 years I spent there," McGovern wrote.

"As outraged as we are by the politicization, some say prostitution, of intelligence procedures, we are upset by the undermining of the Constitution," he said, speaking for the anti-war group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, of which he is a founder.

Currently the group has 54 members who are former and some current intelligence professionals from all branches of the government. VIPS started in 2003 with five members -- all former agency analysts.

"If you're going to have an intelligence apparatus that tells the president what he wants to hear, you might as well just abolish the whole thing," and let the State Department run intelligence operations, said McGovern. The point of the CIA was to be accountable, he said. "We're supposed to tell the truth."

VIPS focuses on putting out memos to critique and comment official actions regarding controversial subjects related to the War on Terror. "People can and do come to us for the straight answers," McGovern said.

"When I speak frankly about the real reasons why we went into Iraq," he said, "I use the acronym OIL - Oil, Israel, Logistical bases." In recent months, the debate has turned to Iran.

McGovern refers to a former colleague at the CIA -- Paul Pillar, recently retired and now able to voice his perspectives on current situations.

McGovern quoted Pillar's words from a talk given at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington Tuesday, "It is important to bear in mind that we don't know if Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon."

His point, he said, was that one must not only analyze the historical facts that would lead to such a conclusion, but also provide hard evidence -- not corrupted evidence. He said he believed that, if not prevented now, another war will start in the next month or two.

"The American people need to wake up now, the evidence is all there," he said. "Our president and vice president have started a war of aggression defined by Nuremberg as a supreme international crime."

Describing members of Congress as tools of the White House, McGovern expressed a need for the people to take a different way. "Together with torture and clearly illegal wiretapping, we need to look for ways to stop all these crimes and indignities," he said.

McGovern also discussed the constitutional provision of impeachment. "I think impeachment proceedings should begin" against President Bush, he said.

War And Peace
Warandpeace.com
April 28, 2006

It turns out one of the Watergate poker parties I had heard was covered in the 90s by the Post was actually reported by an Atlanta Journal Constitution journalist and pal of Charlie Wilson's back in 1994. Here is "A Fun Bunch of Guys When the (poker) Chips Are Down, Depend on Your CIA to Be There," by Joe Murray, Atlanta Journal Constitution, May 20, 1994:

WASHINGTON - The CIA plays for high stakes. Some of the pots are close to $ 1,000.

For these agents, international intrigue isn't the only game in town. Once a week, in a suite at the Watergate Hotel, they play poker. I'm not sure how they chose the Watergate. Perhaps because of a sense of history. Either that or a sense of humor.

Playing cards, these fellows are a bunch of cards. Funny? You wouldn't believe it. I'm telling you, they'll kill you.

I stopped by the game with my old friend, Charlie Wilson, the Texas congressman from my home town. Charlie is a CIA kind of guy. He rode with the rebels in Afghanistan's revolt against the Soviets. A year ago, he received the CIA's "Honored Colleague" medal, first time ever that it went to anyone outside the agency.

A book written by "60 Minutes" producer George Crile is soon to be published about Charlie's exploits. A movie deal is also in the works. Harrison Ford supposedly is interested. Maybe there'll be a role for me. Is Smiley Burnett still around?

Meanwhile, I was getting to know his CIA pals. I was meeting Charlie in the lobby of the Watergate. He said to be sure to wait for him.

"Don't go up to the desk and ask where the CIA poker game is," he warned. "Then they'd have to take care of you."

I asked, exactly, what he meant by take care of me.

"Oh, nothing elaborate. Probably they'd just dress you in a chef's uniform and say you were some Hungarian cook who suffered a heart attack."

Charlie laughed loudly. I laughed weakly.

It turned out they were a great bunch of fellows. For one thing, they smoke cigars. Never mind that the suite is on a no-smoking floor. We hit it off right away.

Charlie brought gifts as well, a sack full of pistols that included a Soviet automatic used by Russian paratroopers. "Note that it's bored for a silencer," Charlie said. They nodded approvingly.

Everybody was given pens, the kind that are definitely mightier than the sword. Instead of ink cartridges, these carry .32 cartridges. Pop the end and you pop the enemy.

All of a sudden everybody in the room started snapping their pens. I started to duck.

"How's it work?"

"Oh, this is great!"

"Boy, I wish I'd had it this afternoon."

"If only Aldrich Ames were here."

Funny? You wouldn't believe it.

Charlie and I didn't stay long. But I had the opportunity to ask them about world hot spots. I'd been a few places where they go. Tbilisi, in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, for instance.

One of the agents looks Russian and, on occasion, is Russian. I asked him if Georgia's ousted leader, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, was really dead. Supposedly he committed suicide. "Gamsakhurdia is really dead," he said.

As I was leaving, they offered me one of their cigars, a Dominican. I offered them one of mine, a Cuban.

"Geez! Take our whole box," I was told.

The agent added, "You know, of course, this is considered contraband. But you've done the right thing as a good citizen. You've turned it in to the proper government agency. Be assured that very shortly it will be destroyed by fire."

Interesting. Now we know a bit more: the Watergate suite was presumably paid for by Wilkes. The poker parties were happening every week, for years. At least among congressmen Charlie Wilson was a regular. And some folks from the CIA. Interesting.

Also heard tonight there was a third hotel between the Wilkes-era at the Watergate and the Wilkes-epoch at the Westin Grand: a time period in the late 1990s when he rented space at the Capital Hilton.

It's funny, from the moment Cunningham pled guilty in November, I remember thinking about the particular Congressional subcommittees he was on and how it made me think of Charlie Wilson's position on the defense appropriations subcommittee and how much secret power he had from that perch. Here's what I wrote at the time back in November:

If you've read Charlie Wilson's War, you might remember how powerful was the subcommittee that both Wilson and until today, Randy "Duke" Cunningham, sat on, the House Appropriations committee subcommittee on defense. As I remember from the book, that subcommittee was aggressively courted not just by defense contractors, but by lobbyists for foreign governments interested in swinging US defense spending in certain directions. It is really where the checks are signed, and decisions about funding sometimes wholly undebated aspects of US national security policy are made. What I'm wondering is, is the Cunningham story one of just simple corruption, or is there more to it? Was he bought just to help steer contracts to MZM, or was there other stuff going on? Stuff that had policy implications?

The pattern is interesting, and not only for what it says about Cunningham: it speaks also about the ends of the people who cultivated him. Was the Wilkes/Wade operation wholly just about making a lot of money, or something else? Why does Wilkes seem from so early on to be so connected to elements of the CIA? There's his long friendship with Foggo, including when Wilkes accompanied Foggo to Central America (Honduras, el Salvador, Panama) when Foggo was reportedly a CIA money man funding the contras during Iran Contra; and Wilkes would bring down mostly right-wing congressmen from Washington for a front-row view of the action. There are hints that at least Wilkes considered himself a kind of de facto CIA adjunct or associate, a friend of the Cold War era Agency, particularly in Central America. Perhaps it was useful too for the CIA to have friends in Wilkes' position, in private companies, who, as the San Diego Trib wrote, knew how to grease the wheels. And useful to all of them were a few key congressmen, needed to authorize the funding to pay for it.

More from POGO, Muckraker, and the Post.

Posted by Laura Rozen at April 28, 2006 08:50 PM

Bush Takes on the Firm Killing the CIA
By Sidney Blumenthal
SPIEGEL ONLINE - May 11, 2006, 11:14 AM
service.spiegel


In Goss, Bush found the perfect hatchet man to take vengeance on a despised agency. Now Goss is gone, scandal looms -- and the CIA is ruined.

The CIA is no longer what it used to be.

The moment that the destruction of the Central Intelligence Agency began can be pinpointed to a time, a place and even a memo. On Aug. 6, 2001, CIA director George Tenet presented to President Bush his presidential daily briefing, a startling document titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." Bush did nothing, asked for no further briefings on the issue, and returned to cutting brush at his Crawford, Texas, compound.

In Bush's denial of responsibility after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the search for scapegoats inevitably focused on the lapse in intelligence and therefore on the CIA, though it was the FBI whose egregious incompetence permitted the plotters to escape apprehension. Bush's intent to invade Iraq set up the battle royal that followed.

Tenet, an inveterate staff careerist held over from the Clinton administration, had ingratiated himself with the new White House tenant with salty stories, but it was in his eagerness to please Bush on Iraq that he ensured his tenure and made himself indispensable. At first, Tenet opposed including in the president's speech of October 2002 the disinformation that Iraq was seeking to build nuclear weaponry using yellowcake uranium Saddam Hussein supposedly sought to purchase in Niger, and the reference was knocked out. Yet, having already been discredited, the falsehood was inserted into the president's State of the Union address of January 2003, becoming the now infamous 16 words.

Tenet reassured Bush that the case for Saddam's possession of WMD was a "slam-dunk." At CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., Tenet promised then Secretary of State Colin Powell that for Powell's Feb. 6, 2003, speech before the U.N. Security Council, the information that would be used to prove Saddam had WMD was ironclad. Powell insisted that Tenet be seated behind him while he spoke as visual reinforcement of his statement's unimpeachable character. Yet every piece of it was false, and the humiliated Powell later said he had been "deceived." Tenet resigned on June 4, 2004, and shortly thereafter was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

After the brief interim appointment of CIA professional John McLaughlin, on Aug. 10, 2004, almost two years to the day after the Aug. 6 president daily briefing on bin Laden, Bush named Porter Goss the new director of central intelligence. The president was looking for someone to rid him of the troublesome agency. In Goss, he thought he had discovered the perfect man for the bloody job, but the nature of the task undid Goss, and in his unraveling another scandal unfolded.

In the absence of any reliable evidence, CIA analysts had refused to put their stamp of approval on the administration's reasons for the Iraq war. Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, personally came to Langley to intimidate analysts on several occasions. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his then deputy secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, constructed their own intelligence bureau, called the Office of Special Plans, to sidestep the CIA and shunt disinformation corroborating the administration's arguments directly to the White House. "The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made," Paul Pillar, then the chief Middle East analyst for the CIA, writes in the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs. "The process did not involve intelligence work designed to find dangers not yet discovered or to inform decisions not yet made. Instead, it involved research to find evidence in support of a specific line of argument -- that Saddam was cooperating with al Qaeda -- which in turn was being used to justify a specific policy decision."

But despite urgent pressures to report to the contrary, the CIA never reported that Saddam presented an imminent national security threat to the United States, that he was near to developing nuclear weapons, or that he had any ties to al-Qaida. Moreover, analysts predicted a protracted insurgency after an invasion of Iraq. Tenet, despite the lack of cooperation from the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, acted as backslapper for the administration's policy.

The White House was in a fury. The CIA's professionalism was perceived as political warfare, and the agency apparently was seen as the center of a conspiracy to overthrow the administration. Inside the offices of the president, the vice president and the secretary of defense, the CIA was referred to as a treasonous enemy. "If we lived in a primitive age, the ground at Langley would be laid waste and salted, and there would be heads on spikes," wrote neoconservative columnist David Brooks in the New York Times on Nov. 13, 2004, citing White House officials and "members of the executive branch" as his sources. Reflecting their rage, he called on Bush to "punish the mutineers ... If the C.I.A. pays no price for its behavior, no one will pay a price for anything, and everything is permitted. That, Mr. President, is a slam-dunk."

Goss combined the old-school tie with cynical zealotry. A graduate of Hotchkiss and Yale (class of 1960) and married to a Pittsburgh heiress, he had served as a CIA operative, left the agency for residence on Sanibel Island, Fla., a resort for the wealthy, bought the local paper, sold it for a fortune, and was elected to the House of Representatives in 1988. There he struck up an alliance with Newt Gingrich and his band of radicals. And after they captured the House in 1994, Goss used his CIA credential to become chairman of the Intelligence Committee.

In that position, he proved his bona fides to the Bush administration time and again. "Those weapons are there," he declared after David Kay, head of the Iraq Survey Group, reported that there were no WMD. He blocked investigations into detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and into prewar disinformation churned by the neoconservatives' favorite Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi. "I would say that the oversight has worked well in matters relating to Mr. Chalabi," Goss said. He also derided the notion of investigating the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson: "Somebody sends me a blue dress and some DNA, I'll have an investigation." Goss was on board with the cavalier way in which Plame was outed, a breach that revealed ingrained contempt for the agency as well as the supremacy of political objectives over national security.

On April 21, 2005, his mission dictated by Bush's political imperatives, Goss became CIA director. Immediately, he sent a memo to all employees, ordering them to "support the administration and its policies in our work." He underscored the supremacy of the party line: "As agency employees we do not identify with, support, or champion opposition to the administration or its policies."

He installed four political aides to run the agency from his offices on the seventh floor at Langley. Within weeks, an exodus of professionals began and then turned into a flood. In the Directorate of Operations, he lost the director, two deputies, and more than a dozen department and division directors and station chiefs out in the field. In the Directorate of Intelligence, dozens took early retirement. Four former operations chiefs, horrified by the carnage, sought to meet with Goss, but he refused.

As a result of hectoring by the 9/11 Commission, Bush established the position of national director of intelligence, a new layer of bureaucracy, but one that lacked operational or intelligence resources of its own. Suddenly, the CIA's preeminence was shattered. Since its creation by the National Security Act of 1947 at the onset of the Cold War, the CIA had dominated the intelligence community. But now the "central" part of the CIA was handed off to the new NDI, whose lines of authority and power were untested and uncertain.

The "global war on terror," meanwhile, was a boon to the concentration of power within the Pentagon, and that department gained control of more than 80 percent of the total budget for intelligence. Without its assigned place at the top of the pyramid, the CIA became disoriented and ever more peripheral. That suited Rumsfeld's empire building. And the CIA's plight was aggravated by the power grabs of the first NDI, John Negroponte (coincidentally an old Yale classmate of Goss'). Without natural functions of its own, Negroponte's office seized them from the CIA.

Acting on the president's charge, Goss in effect purged the CIA. He was even conducting lie detector interrogations of officers to root out the sources of stories leaked to the press -- to the Washington Post, for example, in its Pulitzer Prize-winning expose of CIA "black site" prisons where detainees are jailed without any due process, Red Cross inspection or Geneva Conventions protection. Last month, a CIA agent, Mary McCarthy, was fired for her contact with a reporter. Like others subjected to questioning, she was asked her political affiliation.

But Goss' purging weakened the agency and his own inherent bureaucratic strength in relation to his voracious rivals at the Directorate of National Intelligence and the Pentagon. The more he served as the president's loyalist, the less was his power. By fulfilling his mission, he diminished himself. The butcher's defense of the integrity of the CIA from the directorate and the Pentagon lacked all conviction.

Goss' attempt to run the CIA through his own band of loyalists proved his ultimate undoing. It turned out that the "gosslings," as they were known at Langley (after "quislings"), had unsavory connections that trailed them into the agency. An unintended consequence of Goss' dependence on his team of political hatchet men was that his future was dependent on their past.

As Goss parried with Negroponte and Rumsfeld, federal investigators began to close in on his third-ranked official, in charge of contracting, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, for possibly granting illegal contracts to Brent Wilkes, the military contractor named as "co-conspirator No. 1" in the indictment of convicted former Republican Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, now serving eight years in prison for accepting $2.4 million in bribes. Wilkes, who gave $630,000 in cash and favors to Cunningham, remains under investigation by prosecutors. Cunningham has confessed to accepting a $100,000 bribe from "co-conspirator No. 1." Wilkes' business associate, Mitchell Wade, has pleaded guilty to bribing Cunningham.

For years, Wilkes hosted "hospitality suites" at the Watergate Hotel for House members and other associates that involved poker games and, allegedly, prostitutes. That, too, is under investigation. Foggo has admitted his presence, but "just for poker." At least six House members, unnamed so far, are alleged to have participated. Goss has denied attending as CIA director, but not as an elected representative. Yet another hand at the poker table has been identified as Brant Bassett, aka "Nine Fingers." Bassett was Goss' staff director on the House Intelligence Committee and was hired as a consultant to the CIA's Directorate of Operations.

Foggo and Wilkes are best friends going back to high school in suburban San Diego. They were roommates at San Diego State, where they were members of the Young Republicans, were best men at each other's weddings, and named their sons after each other. Wilkes pays for a joint wine locker for them at the Capital Grille steakhouse favored by lobbyists and Republican legislators.

The White House announcement of Goss' resignation was incredibly abrupt, without advance warning or a named successor. White House aides frenetically briefed the press that the sole reason was an internecine conflict between Goss and Negroponte. But such an internal controversy could have been managed for a smooth transition. Something else appeared to be at work.

Indeed, in March, the CIA's inspector general had launched an investigation into Foggo's relationship with Wilkes, who had received CIA contracts in Iraq. Three days after Goss left, Foggo quit, too. In a highly unusual development, two days later, on Wednesday, the special agent in charge of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service's investigation in the "Duke" Cunningham case, Rick Gwin, spoke publicly: "This is much bigger and wider than just Randy 'Duke' Cunningham," he told Southern California's North County Times. "All that has just not come out yet, but it won't be much longer and then you will know just how widespread this is."

President Bush has nominated Gen. Michael Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency and currently Negroponte's deputy, as the new CIA director. He has distinguished himself as a loyalist to the administration by using his uniform as a shield against the heat generated by the revelation of illegal domestic surveillance by the NSA.

Regardless of anodyne assurances offered in his forthcoming congressional testimony, Hayden will preside over the liquidation of the CIA as it has been known. The George H.W. Bush CIA headquarters building in Langley will of course remain standing. But the agency will be chipped apart, some of its key parts absorbed by other agencies, with the Pentagon emerging as the ultimate winner.

The militarization of intelligence under Bush is likely to guarantee military solutions above other options. Uniformed officers trained to identity military threats and trends will take over economic and political intelligence for which they are untrained and often incapable, and their priorities will skew analysis. But the bias toward the military option will be one that the military in the end will dislike. It will find itself increasingly bearing the brunt of foreign policy and stretched beyond endurance. The vicious cycle leads to a downward spiral. And Hayden's story will be like a dull shadow of Powell's -- a tale of a "good soldier" who salutes, gets promoted, is used and abused, and is finally discarded.

No president has ever before ruined an agency at the heart of national security out of pique and vengeance. The manipulation of intelligence by political leadership demands ever tightened control. But political purges provide only temporary relief from the widening crisis of policy failure.

Dusty Abroad
Foggo’s travels in Honduras
May 13, 2006.
By Ken Silverstein.
harpers.org

SourcesA CIA spokeswoman said Friday that a federal investigation of Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, the CIA’s former number-three official, had “absolutely nothing, zero” to do with Porter’s Goss’s recent announcement to retire. That’s a bit hard to swallow at this point, especially as her emphatic statement came as FBI agents were raiding Foggo’s home and office.

Foggo is a long-time associate of Brent Wilkes, the defense contractor who is accused of bribing disgraced former Representative Duke Cunningham and allegedly providing him with prostitutes as well. The San Diego Union-Tribune has previously reported that Wilkes and Foggo “were college roommates at San Diego State, best men at each other’s weddings, and each named a son after the other.” Foggo recently acknowledged that he attended Wilkes-sponsored poker parties at Washington-area hotels and sometimes hosted the parties at his home.

Even before yesterday’s raid it was known that Foggo’s ties to Wilkes were being examined internally at the CIA and by federal law enforcement authorities. One question being asked is if Foggo steered contracts to Wilkes, whose companies have received tens of millions of dollars worth of government money in recent years.

I called and emailed Foggo’s lawyer, William G. Hundley, on Friday and Saturday, but was unable to reach him. He has previously denied any wrongdoing on Foggo’s part and said his client is “really more of a victim here.”

Foggo worked as a logistics expert for the CIA for several decades and has been based in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, as well as Vienna and Frankfurt. In addition to supporting CIA covert and overt operations abroad, Foggo often made arrangements for and escorted visiting congressional delegations. In the fall of 2004, Goss mysteriously “plucked him from obscurity,” in the words of the New York Times, and named Foggo to be the CIA’s executive director—the number-three position at the agency.

Over the past few days, I’ve spoken to six former CIA officials—all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity—who know Foggo or are well acquainted with his work at the agency. They provided a number of previously unreported revelations about Foggo’s career, particularly regarding his years in Honduras in the early 1980s, when the agency was using the country as a base both to support the Nicaraguan contras and for a variety of other covert programs in Central America.

During this period, Wilkes accompanied several congressional delegations to the region, “where they met with Foggo and contra leaders,” the Union-Tribune reported this weekend. “Three of Wilkes’ former friends say he told them he was involved in assignations between some of the legislators and prostitutes in Central America.” (Wilkes denied the allegations.)

My sources said that Foggo was a regular at the Maya Hotel’s casino in Tegucigalpa; in 1993, the Chicago Tribune described the hotel as having once been “the unofficial headquarters for those who came here to help—or watch—the U.S. try to purge neighboring Nicaragua and El Salvador of communist threats.” Foggo, said my sources, was also a regular at a local bar named Gloria’s, which one source said was chiefly known for having “a brisk hooker trade.” While my sources had no direct knowledge of Foggo consorting with prostitutes, several said that simply being at a place like Gloria’s was deemed to be a serious security problem and that Foggo’s nocturnal habits were a source of great concern within the local CIA station. Foggo, said one source, was “capable in the field but lacked a moral compass.” This source explained that working for the agency overseas “already puts you in a difficult position . . . [because] part of your job might involve violating the laws of the country you’re in. You don’t put a red light on your head by going to places where there’s gambling and hookers—it’s a stupid risk.”

“He was a logistics guy,” said one source about Foggo, “not a spy. Any time he was spending there was personal business, not for the CIA.”

Beyond drawing attention to himself, Foggo’s nightlife also raised concerns from a counterintelligence standpoint because of the risk that he could be entrapped by the Russians and their allies. “During the coldest days of the Cold War,” said another agency official, “hookers and casino employees were exactly the type of people we wanted on our payroll, and so did the KGB.”

“Gloria’s was a ticking bomb,” said the source cited above. “There were a lot of Cuban women there and you had to be mindful that you might be set up.” This person said that before he was sent to Tegucigalpa, his boss at the CIA gave him a “fire-breathing” lecture about staying far away from spots like Gloria’s. “He [told me], ‘If you get into trouble down there, you make sure you get killed because I’ll kill you otherwise.’” (It should be noted that, according to my sources, Foggo was not the only American intelligence officer who frequented the Tegucigalpa nightspots named above.)

Several of the former CIA officials had similar stories about Foggo’s days in Vienna and Frankfurt. (There’s a former CIA station chief in Vienna who I was told knows the full history of Foggo’s escapades in Europe. I called him at his current job in Texas and he declined to discuss the matter.) They were stunned when they heard that Goss had picked Foggo for the executive director position. “He should never have gotten the job,” said one. “With a guy like that, the past is always going to catch up with you.”

“This guy had a career’s worth of bad judgment,” said the source who was stationed in Honduras with Foggo. “He was in deep trouble when [George] Tenet headed the agency and was set to go when Tenet left [in mid-2004]. Then Goss and his Gosslings come in and he becomes the number-three. People were thunderstruck.”

Foggo's office also searched in probe tied to Cunningham case
By Dean Calbreath and Onell Soto
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITERS
May 13, 2006

VIENNA, Va. – Federal agents raided the home and office of former CIA Executive Director Kyle “Dusty” Foggo yesterday in the widening investigation of his ties to a defense contractor linked to the bribery case of former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham.

As outgoing CIA director Porter Goss announced the raids in an internal e-mail to staff, he formally removed Foggo from his post as the agency's third-highest official.

On Monday, Foggo had announced his intention to resign at an unspecified date after reports surfaced that the FBI was investigating whether he had improperly steered contracts to a longtime friend, Poway defense contractor Brent Wilkes.

Agents from the CIA's Office of Inspector General, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service participated in the raids, said Phillip Halpern, an assistant U.S. attorney in San Diego.

The CIA's inspector general has been investigating Foggo for at least three months, trying to find out whether he helped Wilkes gain CIA contracts. Wilkes has been identified as co-conspirator No. 1 in the Cunningham case.

One of Wilkes' companies, Archer Logistics, received several multimillion-dollar contracts involving supplies of water, first-aid kits and other provisions to CIA agents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Business associates and intelligence sources say Wilkes provided Foggo with numerous favors, including free flights on his corporate jet and free vacations in Hawaii and Europe.

In Honolulu, several of those sources said, Wilkes hosted Foggo at the $50,000-per-week estate of the late shampoo mogul Paul Mitchell. In Scotland, Wilkes rented a castle where he hosted Foggo, they said.

“They're old friends, godfathers to each other's kids, and they continue to be old friends,” said Michael Lipman, Wilkes' attorney. “Of course they do things together. They've done things together since they were in high school.”

Sources close to the investigation expect any possible prosecution might involve a charge of “honest services fraud,” which is based on the notion that public officials can deprive the public of their honest services by unethical conduct.

“There's a whole range of things you could do that would not be discharging your duty fairly, that could be considered honest services fraud,” one criminal expert said. “I mean, you could do it for money or you could do it for friendship, for a bunch of things.”

Lipman dismissed such talk as “gross and inaccurate speculation.”

Foggo's whereabouts were unknown yesterday and his attorney, William G. Hundley, did not return calls seeking comment on the raids.

While Foggo remains on the CIA's payroll, “he will not be coming into the office anymore” at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., said a well-placed source in the intelligence community.


Not at home
A caravan of vehicles carrying law enforcement agents pulled up to the front and rear of Foggo's rented home in Vienna about 8 a.m. yesterday, according to a neighbor. A vehicle was backed into the carport of the house and, at one point, a man wearing latex gloves emerged from the house and went around to the back.

The split-level brick home sits on a quiet street, shaded by a canopy of oak and maple trees. Red and white azaleas were in bloom across the front of the house, and a breeze ruffled an American flag near the front door.

An agent at the scene said Foggo had not been detained and was not at the home, which sits in a pleasant, unpretentious suburban neighborhood near the CIA's headquarters.

Federal prosecutors have identified Wilkes as one of two defense contractors who plied Cunningham with more than $2.4 million in bribes in return for government contracts, but Wilkes has not been charged with a crime. The other contractor, Mitchell Wade, pleaded guilty to corruption charges in February and is awaiting sentencing.

Cunningham, a former Rancho Santa Fe congressman, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and tax evasion and resigned his seat after 16 years in the House. He was sentenced in March to eight years and four months in prison.

Wilkes and Foggo are lifelong friends who grew up in Chula Vista, where they attended Hilltop High School and played on the football team. They roomed together at San Diego State University, where they were active in the Young Republicans club. Later, each was the best man at the other's wedding, and each named a son after the other.

As Wilkes launched a career in accounting, Foggo gravitated to law enforcement. In college, he worked as a security guard at Sears, Roebuck & Co. and was named in two lawsuits by people who accused him of falsely arresting them for shoplifting. Sears settled the cases out of court.

After graduation, he joined the San Diego Police Department, patrolling Paradise Hills.

“He was a real hard charger, really interested in the job and really interested in the community,” said a retired police sergeant who worked with Foggo at the time. “He was just a really nice young guy.”

Foggo quit the police force in 1979 to work as an investigator with the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office. About two years later, he was recruited into the CIA. Sources who knew Foggo at the time say the CIA appointment came with the help of political ties he had forged at the Young Republicans club.

Honduras post

Foggo's first foreign posting was to Honduras, the center of the U.S.-backed Contra guerrilla fighters who were trying to topple the Marxist government of Nicaragua.
About that time, Wilkes launched a Washington-based financial firm and accompanied lawmakers on trips to Central America, where they met with Foggo and Contra leaders.

Three of Wilkes' former friends say he told them he was involved in assignations between some of the legislators and prostitutes in Central America. The former friends – each of whom has known Wilkes and Foggo since high school – would speak only on the condition that they not be identified.

“Brent Wilkes adamantly and vehemently denies ever being involved in getting anybody prostitutes, and that includes congressmen and any other officials,” Wilkes' attorney said.

The only congressman who has been publicly identified as traveling with Wilkes in Central America is former Rep. Bill Lowery of San Diego. During the mid-1980s, Lowery was part of a Republican task force formed to build congressional support for President Reagan's aid to the Contras.
Lowery “strenuously denies” that he was involved with prostitutes on the Central American trips, said his attorney Lanny Breuer. Lowery has declined to answer questions about what he was doing in Honduras with Wilkes and Foggo.

Wilkes and Lowery knew each other from Young Republican meetings at San Diego State, which was also Lowery's alma mater. In his current career as a lobbyist, Lowery has been paid at least $200,000 by Wilkes since 1998.

After the Nicaraguan government was overthrown, Foggo was transferred to other CIA stations, including Vienna, Austria, and Frankfurt, Germany, while Wilkes established a career as a defense contractor in the United States.

Over the past decade, Wilkes has made more than $90 million selling technology to the government. According to papers filed in the Cunningham case, those sales were often at inflated prices.

In the beginning, most of Wilkes' sales were to the Defense Department. But in the past six years, Wilkes has concentrated more on the CIA, said several of his former business associates. They said Cunningham shifted funding for Wilkes' projects into the CIA's so-called “black budget” because it is hidden from public scrutiny.

As Wilkes lobbied for business on Capitol Hill, his hospitality suites in the Watergate and Westin Grand hotels were the sites of frequent poker games with high-ranking CIA officers, including Foggo, as well as legislators and staffers of the House Intelligence Committee.

Last month, the FBI began investigating reports that Wilkes was providing prostitutes at the Watergate and Westin to curry favor with lawmakers during his campaign to win contracts.

Wade has told federal prosecutors that Cunningham was one of the lawmakers for whom prostitutes were provided, said sources close to the investigation.

Through official CIA channels, Foggo has denied there were any prostitutes at the poker games he attended.

“If he attended occasional card games with friends over the years, Mr. Foggo insists they were that and nothing more,” said CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise-Dyck.

"Freedom's” Just Another Word For Fascism
By Mark Ames ( editor@exile.ru )
Exile.ru

The Putin regime's moves to tighten controls over foreign NGOs is being portrayed in the West as yet another example of Russia's savage authoritarianism and anti-Western paranoia. While only a drunken apologist could deny Putin's authoritarianism, the real question is whether or not the crackdown on NGOs is a symptom of classic tyrant-paranoia, or if it has a valid basis.

If the Putin regime is being paranoid, then the case of blue-chip NGO Freedom House - an American NGO whose name seems to pop up more than any other in this part of the world, particularly when it comes to the push for democracy - provides a clear example of Henry Kissinger's dictum that "even a paranoid has some real enemies."

Freedom House was founded innocuously enough in 1941 by Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the President and one of the great modern champions of human rights, and Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate for president in 1940, uniting the mainstream American political spectrum to ensure that it would not be accused of being ideological. It was founded, according to its website, out of concern "with the mounting threats to peace and democracy...[and has been] a vigorous proponent of democratic values and a steadfast opponent of dictatorships of the far left and the far right."

Who today is the far-left/right dictatorship that Freedom House steadfastly opposes?

James Woolsey, who chaired Freedom House for the past three years and only recently stepped aside, told Radio Free Europe in an interview in October that Russia was one of, if not the, main target. "We are really quite honored that President Putin, who is increasingly coming to head a government that is edging towards fascism in Russia, would be critical of what the NGOs, including Freedom House, were doing to help bring about a movement toward democracy in Ukraine," he said.

He described Russia as "fascist" several times in the interview. "We had a period of time in the early 1990s when we were working cooperatively with the Russian security services, but now apparently they have decided to try and blame the security services in the West for their own movement toward fascism," he said. "Mr. Putin and his movement toward fascism in Russia are on the wrong side of history. They are not going to succeed... ultimately they will lose."

All of this warlike talk might be excusable, even laudable, if it came from a genuine human rights activist who paid for these words. But this is James Woolsey - one of the closest things America has to a Blackshirt (if we're going to abuse this over-abused word as he does). Indeed it's almost comical - in the way that so many insane-rightwing-plots are pure applied black comedy in the Bush Era - that a seemingly-heroic, do-good NGO like Freedom House could be led by one of the most nefarious vertebrates ever to befoul the halls of American power. You'd think that Woolsey, the notorious neocon goon and ex-CIA head, would have better things to do than to front organizations which would seem, on the surface, better suited for the likes of a Jimmy Carter. But then again, it's even scarier to consider that his role there is no accident.

A little background: Woolsey, among other things, was one of the original founding members of the Project for the New American Century, the neocon vanguard which, in 1997, called for: a massive rearming of America to ensure that it had full spectrum dominance; aggressive use of American power, including military, to implement and secure American global domination; and the invasion, occupation, and democratization of Iraq. As most anti-Bush watchers know, the PNAC group famously bemoaned the fact that its imperial policies would meet resistance with the American public: "[T]he process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor." Like, as in, a 9/11. What luck!

Two of its key goals explain the nexus between Freedom House and Russia: "[T]o challenge regimes hostile to U.S. interests and values; Promoting the cause of political and economic freedom outside the U.S."

Woolsey's resume of evil is impressive. He helped found the notorious Iraqi National Congress, which provided "proof" about Iraqi WMDs. And he also serves on the Center for Security Policy, headed by fellow goon Frank Gaffney, who in 2004 publicly advised President Bush to level Fallujah (which Bush did), invade Iran and North Korea (which Bush can't but yet may try), and adopt "''appropriate strategies for contending with China's increasingly fascistic trade and military policies, Vladimir Putin's accelerating authoritarianism at home and aggressiveness toward the former Soviet republics, the worldwide spread of Islamofascism." Note how Gaffney, like Woolsey, equates "Islamofascism" with Putin's Russia, making Russia a mortal enemy bent on destroying the US.

And speaking of fascism, Woolsey is also the co-chair of the Committee on the Present Danger, a far-right group (they love that word "committee," like the Bolsheviks they are) famous for launching a three-month network TV scare-campaign in the early 1950s about the "present danger" that the US faced against the Soviet Union before the committee eventually dissovled. After the CPD was revived in 2004, its managing director, Peter Hannaford, was forced to resign when it was revealed that his firm had lobbied on behalf of Austrian fascist Joerg Haider.

Woolsey also boasted in the Wall Street Journal that the National Security Agency used its international eavesdropping network, ECHELON, to spy on European companies in order to give major US corporations a competitive advantage. His reasoning? "We have spied on you because you bribe." As with Freedom House, Woolsey operates by abusing American power in ways once thought unimaginable, and then blaming the other side for uncivilized behavior which naturally provokes us.

This brief dossier is important because it casts the appointment of Woolsey as the chairman of Freedom House as not merely strange or comically sinister, but intentional. Freedom House is just one of the many effective tools used to implement the policies outlined in the Project for the New American Century, and that is why the cross-pollination, in which goons like Woolsey simultaneously head up "human rights" NGOs and far-right think-tanks, makes perfect sense.

Under Woolsey's term, Freedom House played a crucial role in the pro-US revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan - drawing on its experience covertly supporting the first "color" revolution in Serbia in 1999. According to a Washington Post article, "US Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition" (Dec 11, 2000), "U.S.-funded consultants played a crucial role behind the scenes in virtually every facet of the anti-Milosevic drive, running tracking polls, training thousands of opposition activists and helping to organize a vitally important parallel vote count. U.S. taxpayers paid for 5,000 cans of spray paint used by student activists to scrawl anti-Milosevic graffiti on walls across Serbia, and 2.5 million stickers with the slogan 'He's Finished,' which became the revolution's catchphrase.

"...The lead role was taken by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government's foreign assistance agency, which channeled the funds through commercial contractors and nonprofit groups such as NDI and its Republican counterpart, the International Republican Institute (IRI)."

Freedom House's role included mass-printing Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation, which was used as the guidebook for the Serbian student opposition group "Otpor." Otpor became the model for student opposition movements in every color-revolution since, including Ukraine's Pora and Georgia's Kmera.

In Ukraine, Freedom House helped organize the "largest civil regional election monitoring effort" in Ukraine, involving more than 1,000 trained observers. They also organized crucial exit polls showing that Yuschenko had actually won, which gave the Revolution its moral energy - as did their carefully-organized exit polls in Serbia and Georgia.

In Kyrgyzstan, Freedom House provided the printing press for the opposition newspaper My Capital News, which printed damning stories about then-President Akayev's corrupt family. When the Kyrgyz authorities cut off electricity to MCN's offices, Freedom House delivered emergency generators to keep it running - generators provided by the US Embassy.

The moral algebra in this tale of intrigue gets confusing because Freedom House happened to be on the side of the Good Guys in many of these fights. On the other hand, considering the way the revolutions in Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine have soured, it's hard to say what has been won and lost - unless of course you're measuring the spread of American power and influence.

Indeed, Freedom House is not always on the side of the good guys, as evidenced by its choice in chairmen, as well as in the makeup of its board members - a cast of cartoon-villains which includes such prime-time ogres as Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Kenneth Adelman - the same Adelman who had famously predicted that the war in Iraq would be a "cakewalk." Freedom House's sponsors include the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a far-right pro-big business foundation which, among other things, took a strong stand in the 60s against affirmative action, and once supported academics who pushed the Bell Curve theory arguing that blacks were genetically less intelligent than whites. During the early years of the Vietnam War, Freedom House argued that American intervention was justified because - yup, you guessed right - it helped the spread of democracy. Why'd they do that? Becuase that's what Freedom House does. It agitates for right-wing America's interests, cynically deploying appeals for democracy and human rights at properly chosen times to to serve the right's global mission.

More recently, Freedom House sided with the far-right in argueing against America joining the International Criminal Court (ironically using the exact same bogus argument that the Defense Department used, citing the possibility that rogue nations like North Korea could bring cases against American "peacekeepers" for crimes against humanity). Today, it still refuses to condemn, let alone even cite, the illegal detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, using the same rationale as the Bush Administration (the inmates are "illegal combatants" rather than POWs and therefore are not entitled to Geneva Convention protections).

One of the most suspect gigs that Freedom House helped kickstart, in 1999, is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya, a pro-Chechen "charity" group chaired by notorious Cold War Russophobe Zbigniew Brzezinski. Freedom House has not launched any other pro-Muslim separatist causes except for this one. Among its committee members are, again, James Woolsey, the famous crusader against Islamofascism, as well as "Cakewalk" Adelman, William "Weekly Standard" Kristol, and Max Kampelman, who is also Chairman Emeritus of Freedom House and another OG on the Project for a New American Century. Why would Woolsey, Brzezinski and the rest of the far-right supergoon squad choose, among all oppressed Muslims around the world, to heart-bleed over just the Chechens and only the Chechens? Are you starting to see why the Putin regime is "paranoid"?

Freedom House also developed a soft spot for Hizb-ut-Tahrir, the radical Islamist opposition group in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan before their respective revolutions. Freedom House's work with HuT was one reason cited by Uzbek authorities for throwing Freedom House out of the country.

Since 2002, Freedom House's annual "freedom reports" have been used as the basis by the White House to determine international aid, primarily through the Millennium Challenge Corporation. The reports are also regularly cited by both the American media and Congress. Since 2004, Russia has been demoted to the very bottom ranking - "Not Free" - along with genuinely tyrannical regimes like North Korea and Libya. To those of us who live here, even those of us who oppose the direction Putin has taken, this is not only surprising but nauseating, an example of the worst type of "moral relativism" that these same right-wingers constantly denounce.

Interestingly, a feudal monarchy like Kuwait gets a higher "freedom" rating than Russia, while pro-American Egypt, whose dictator-for-life Mubarak recently won another "election" with 89 percent of the vote, and then subsequently jailed his rival for five years, was praised and upgraded on the freedom scale for apparently assisting in the formation of a few women's groups. What is the difference between Kuwait and Russia? Go back to the Project for a New American Century: one "promotes" American interests, and the other "opposes" American interests. Therefore, the other, Russia, is "Not Free" and "fascist."

In light of this story, it's hard to listen to all of the Bush Administration's Orwellian bleating about "civil society" and "democracy" in the fight to keep foreign-funded NGOs operating in Russia as they have since Yelstin's time. In fact, Russian authorities would have to be suicidal not to tighten control. Woolsey himself outlined the role he saw them play: "I think what is important is to help build up civil society, the student organizations, the NGOs and the others that the FSB and President Putin hate so much." This isn't about civil society; it's about fighting for America.

In September of 2005, Woolsey gave up his post as chairman of Freedom House. The new chairman is Peter Ackerman. And, not surprisingly, Ackerman is also the chairman of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, an organization which helps train and supply color-coded revolutions. Its website says that the ICNC "develops and encourages the use of civilian-based, nonmilitary strategies to establish and defend democracy...provides assistance in the training and deployment of field advisors, to deepen the conceptual knowledge and practical skills of applying nonviolent strategies in conflicts throughout the world where progress toward democracy and human rights is possible."

So the McDonald's of NGOs is run by avowed US imperialists and who repeatedly and aggressively attack Russia as "fascist" and push to challenge and isolate Russia, which they see as much of a threat to American hegemony as Islamofascism. And then they whine about human rights when the Russian government moves to curb their activities on Russian soil.

The real tragedy in this is that genuinely admirable, courageous NGOs, like Memorial and Soldiers' Mothers of Russia, will suffer from the aftershocks of Woolsey and Co.'s abuse of NGOs. In the end, civil society, democracy and human rights will deteriorate, allowing the Bush goons to cite it as a reason to step up the battle against Russia. And as always the Russian people will be caught in the crossfire in a cruel and savage game, where words like "freedom" and "sovereignty" are mere Trojan Horse weapons used by one elite battling for power against another.

WSJ: CIA Blocking Cunningham Investigation
By Justin Rood - January 9, 2007, 10:01 AM
tpmmuckraker.com

The CIA is refusing to cooperate with federal prosecutors investigating the Duke Cunningham scandal, the Wall Street Journal's Scott Paltrow reports today.

Before getting caught in 2005, Cunningham was involved in a sprawling corruption ring between Congress and the national security community. The scandal allegedly enjoyed the participation of current and former CIA officials, including Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, the executive director of the agency. Foggo would be the highest-ranking CIA official to be prosecuted in the agency's history, according to Paltrow.

Prosecutors had expected to indict Foggo several months ago, but the Agency's refusal to declassify important documents has hampered their efforts, Paltrow reports.

Of course, prosecutors haven't received much help from Congress with their investigation, either. Last month they were forced to serve subpoenas to several powerful committees in an effort to force them to turn over documents.

Foggo's indictment -- and possible plea bargain -- would be a notable triumph for the Feds. For many months the case has stagnated, and observers have wondered if the investigation was hopelessly compromised. Nailing Foggo would also be important for prosecutors, as it would give them leverage to go after alleged Cunningham briber Brent Wilkes. Wilkes, who ran a government contracting business, was close with Foggo and is said to have worked closely with him. Despite being identified by Cunningham as a major briber, Wilkes has refused to plead guilty or cooperate with prosecutors.

The Swift Boating of America
by Greg Grandin
Friday, June 2, 2006
by TomDisaptch.com
commondreams.org

An illegal war, torture rooms, warrantless wiretapping, manipulated intelligence, secret prisons, disinformation planted in the press, graft, and billions of reconstruction dollars gone missing: just when it seemed that the Bush administration had reached its corruption quota comes a new scandal. This one is a bribery case involving defense contractors, Republican congressmen, prostitutes, secret Hawaiian getaways, Scottish castles, and -- wait for it -- the Watergate Hotel. At its center is the just ex-Executive Director of the CIA, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, whose sole qualification for being appointed to that post by just ex-Director Porter Goss seems to have been his ability, while head of the Agency's Frankfurt post, to hand out bottled-water contracts to friends and show junketing politicians a good time.

Don't fret though if you are having trouble separating this particular crime from other Republican offenses. There's a good reason -- they're all one scandal, part of the same wave of militarism, fraud, and ideology that has swamped American politics of late. While this wave of scandal seems now to be heading for tsunami proportions, its first swells date back decades. Just take a look at Dusty's resume.

After his zealotry got him booted from Sears' security and the San Diego police department, Foggo drew on his collegiate Young Republican connections to land a job in the early 1980s with the CIA. His first mission was in Honduras, then the staging ground for Ronald Reagan's secret paramilitary war against Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government. In addition to his official duties, Foggo helped his old college buddy Brent Wilkes -- the defense contractor now implicated in the ongoing bribery case involving former Republican Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham -- bring conservative cadres down to Central America. There, he introduced them to anti-Sandinista rebels, better known as Contras. It seems that, even then, a lot more than anti-Communist solidarity was on the agenda. Three of Wilkes' former friends now claim that these trips included partying with prostitutes.

A New Right Mecca

Dusty, of course, is not the only veteran of Reagan's Central American policy who has resurfaced to help fight George W. Bush's "Global War on Terror." The list includes John Negroponte, Elliot Abrams, Otto Reich, John Poindexter, John Bolton, Oliver North, Robert Kagan, and Michael Ledeen. They can also be found in the highest levels of the White House: Dick Cheney cut his political teeth in Congress in the 1980s plumping for Reagan's Nicaragua policy, thundering that any attempt to prohibit Contra aid was a legislative "abuse of power." And on the frontlines, James Steele, who led the Special Forces mission in El Salvador and worked with North to run weapons and supplies to the Contras, was sent to Iraq to help train a ruthless counterinsurgency force made up of ex-Baathist thugs. (Steele is batting two for two: As in El Salvador, such training has produced not security but widespread death-squad atrocities.)

Just as progressives from the United States traveled to Nicaragua in the 1980s to support the Sandinistas, militants of the ascendant Reagan Revolution flocked to Honduras as well as El Salvador and Guatemala, where staunchly anti-Communist regimes were waging ruthless counterinsurgencies that resulted in the murder of over 260,000 people. Dig a bit into the past of any of the thousands of religious or secular movement conservatives who came up in those years and odds are, as with Dusty, you'll find they played some role in Central America.

Central America became a New Right mecca because it was the one place where conservatives could match words to deeds. Reagan swept into office promising to restore America's pride and purpose in the post-Vietnam world. But the complexities of the Cold War often forced a more equivocating diplomacy on him than he had promised his followers. There was unexpected conciliation (he befriended Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev) and deep humiliation (the withdrawal of American troops from Lebanon after a devastating car bombing). By midpoint in his second term, the Right had had enough of what they considered Reagan's timidity, condemning their President as an appeaser and a "useful idiot" for his evident willingness to negotiate nuclear-arms reductions with Moscow.

But on Central America, of little geopolitical importance in itself, there would be no conciliation or humiliation. Based on policies designed and executed by the hardest of hardliners in his administration, Reagan's unwavering patronage of death-squad states in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, and his backing of anti-Communist "freedom fighters" in Nicaragua gathered the disparate passions of the conservative movement -- of all those obscure Dusty Foggos -- into a single mission. It also turned Central America into a sinkhole of fanaticism and murder.

Enter Ollie North

Many of those who traveled down to Central America were Young Turk Republicans who would preside over the right-wing radicalization and corruption of the House of Representatives under Reagan in the 1980s and during the Gingrich insurgency of the 1990s. San Diego Representative Bill Lowery, for example, first elected to the House in 1980 at the tender age of thirty-three, traveled in the Foggo and Wilkes Honduran road show, part of a Republican task force organized to help sell Reagan's Contra war against the Sandinistas to a skeptical Congress and public. After leaving office, Lowery, who has floated around the edges of every Republican scandal from the Savings and Loan collapse of the 1980s to the recent Jack Abramoff lobbying case, and is now reportedly under investigation by the Justice Department, went on to become a top lobbyist, skilled in the art of "earmarking."

The corruption represented by Foggo, Wilkes, and Duke Cunningham is an integral part of what President Dwight Eisenhower termed the "military-industrial complex." And it goes hand-in-hand with war-making. If we didn't have an enemy to fight, how could we justify spending all that money on defense, not to mention on the hookers and poker that went with the lobbying parties?

But in the wake of Vietnam, just as Foggo's generation of conservatives was beginning to taste power, the Democratic Congress, along with the State Department and even much of the Pentagon, was not in a fighting mood. Congress had enacted a slew of laws, set up oversight committees, and designed prohibitions to limit the White House's ability to wage war and execute covert actions. Congress now claimed the power to regulate presidential decisions related to military aid, arms sales, and the sending of troops abroad; it also demanded that the CIA inform up to eight committees of its activities. Banned were peacetime assassinations of foreign leaders, as were covert operations against American citizens at home. Worse yet, the USSR, the "evil empire," was proving to be an uncooperative opponent -- or rather, it was being too cooperative, willing to negotiate on a range of security issues. In order to implement a policy of "rollback," as the neocons and militarists wanted to do, one needed an enemy to rollback.


Enter Colonel Ollie North, then an aide to the National Security Council -- and the rest of the Iran-Contra gang. It was twenty years ago this November that a story broke in the press revealing a secret sale, brokered by North, of thousands of high-tech missiles to Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran at a greatly inflated price, with the profits laundered through a rogue's gallery of unsavory middlemen – Iranian expatriates, Israeli-arms dealers, right-wing mercenaries, anti-Communist client states like Saudi Arabia, Moonies, and drug runners -- to bypass a congressional prohibition on military aid to the Contras.

No One Left Behind

What became known as "Iran-Contra," however, was much more than an illegal arms deal. It was the New Right's first concerted campaign to restore to the executive branch the power to wage unaccountable war, to override congressional scrutiny, and go on the ideological and military offensive in a place where, unlike in Vietnam, there was no major power to get in the way.

Democratic and public opposition to the Contras, which was strong, proved to be a blessing in disguise for the conservative movement. It forced the White House to rely on its social base to execute its "off-the-books" Nicaraguan war, thus thickening the connections between diverse New Right groups. It created a dense network of intellectuals, action groups, and social movements, uniting mainstream conservatives with militants from the carnivalesque Right. Urbane sophisticates like Ambassador to the UN Jeanne Kirkpatrick and businessmen like Rite-Aid heir Lewis Lehrman (today a member of the infamous neocon Project for the New American Century) made common cause with Soldier of Fortune wet-op lunatics, Sunbelt evangelical capitalists like Pat Robertson, and end-timers like Tim LaHaye (who, long before he hit the best-seller lists with his Left Behind series, was hawking Reagan's Central American crusade to the evangelical rank-and-file).

In Washington, the first generation of neoconservatives, in alliance with politicized Vietnam vets like North who took second-tier positions in the Reagan administration, created an inter-agency war party that allowed them to move forward with support for the Contras despite congressional opposition. The shadowy infrastructure of Iran-Contra, designed to override more cautious area experts in the State Department and the CIA, who opposed Contra funding, foreshadowed Douglas Feith's scheming Office of Special Plans, which cooked the intelligence and helped manipulate the media to make the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In fact, a key Feith advisor, neocon intellectual Michael Ledeen, who in the 1980s worked the Israeli angle of the Iran-Contra affair, has recently helped to rehabilitate his old buddy and fellow Iran-Contra luminary, the habitual liar Manucher Ghorbanifar, as a credible proponent of "regime change" in Iran. (There are even reports that the Pentagon, with Dick Cheney's backing, has just put Ghorbanifar on the U.S. payroll.)

It was over Central America that New Right ideologues first began to junk multilateralism. When the International Court of Justice ordered that the United States pay Nicaragua billions of dollars in reparations for mining the country's principle port and for conducting an illegal war of aggression, Washington balked and withdrew from the Court's jurisdiction. It was a "watershed moment," according to legal scholar Eric Posner, in the U.S. relationship with the international community, one that Bush's Ambassador to the UN John Bolton has cited as evidence for why the U.S. should not support the new International Criminal Court.

In the field, Reagan's Central American wars provided a way to reactivate CIA and Pentagon counterinsurgency operatives, desk-bound since the U.S. was kicked out of Southeast Asia, coordinating their work with private mercenaries, conservative (often evangelical) financiers, and a rising Christian fundamentalist movement.

So even as the military high command was taking steps to prevent another Vietnam from happening by attempting to limit the use of American troops to clearly defined objectives with clearly defined exit strategies, civilian ideologues and militarists in Central America were pushing in the opposite direction. In El Salvador, they were funding the largest nation-building counterinsurgency since Vietnam; while in Nicaragua -- where they were hailing rapists, torturers, and murderers as "the moral equivalents of our founding fathers" -- they were advancing a vision of military power used not for specific ends but to launch what they today call a "democratic global revolution."

Watch Out, John Murtha

As does today's "War on Terror," Iran-Contra had a domestic front, which helped to normalize the kind of media manipulation, political harassment, and domestic surveillance that has since become commonplace in Bush's America.

Staffed with psych warfare operatives from the CIA and the Army's Fourth Psychological Operations Group, the Office of Public Diplomacy, set up in 1983 and headed by Otto Reich, carried out a massive campaign of media deception. Working with polls conducted by Madison-Avenue PR firms, the office provided emotive talking points to government officials, pundits, and scholars, linking the Sandinistas to any number of world evils: terrorism, Soviet nuclear submarines, religious and ethnic persecution, Cuba's Castro, East Germans, Bulgarians, PLO leader Arafat, Libyan dictator Qadhafi, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, even Germany's Baader-Meinhof Gang -- claims as false as, yet no less effective than, those now famous sixteen words in Bush's State of the Union Address of 2003 that pinned the yellowcake tail on the Iraqi donkey.

It was through Reich's Office of Public Diplomacy that the White House mobilized grassroots conservative organizations not just to supply anti-Communist rebels with arms, bibles, medicine, and food, but to go after congressional and media critics. Here began the "swift boating" of American politics -- distinct from 1950s McCarthyism in that it was actually orchestrated and funded by the executive branch.

For instance, New Right militants, advised by PR experts under government contract, focused much of their work on unseating the congressional anti-militarists elected in the wake of the Vietnam disaster, particularly those who opposed Reagan's Central American policy. If you "cross" Reagan, said a Republican aide, "they're going to carve you up publicly." That's what happened to Maryland Democratic Congressman Michael Barnes during a failed Senatorial bid. He fell victim to a smear campaign organized by International Business Communication, a Republican PR firm that worked closely with Public Diplomacy and the independent Anti-Terrorism American Committee. "Destroy Barnes," said the notes of one of the Committee's operatives. Watch out, John Murtha.

It was also in defense of Reagan's Central American policies that the various branches of the country's intelligence agencies joined forces to intimidate domestic dissenters, anticipating many of the practices -- FBI and CIA file-sharing, for instance -- that would be institutionalized by the Patriot Act and the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (filled by John Negroponte, who presided over the Contra war as ambassador to Honduras, where he reportedly covered-up death-squad murders). And the logic that today justifies Gitmo contains more than a whiff of Oliver North's plan to suspend the Constitution and place domestic opponents of the Contra War in concentration camps.

The Swamp of Militarism and Corruption

Like the Watergate scandal, Iran-Contra started out as a small, back-page newspaper story only to explode into a major constitutional crisis. Yet unlike Watergate, which yielded a broad consensus regarding the dangers of unchecked executive power, Iran-Contra produced no closure. The Tower Commission, appointed by Reagan, focused on procedural issues related to presidential control over the NSA; Congress's investigation turned out to be a mess; and the Special Prosecutor's inquiry dragged on for years, stonewalled by the Department of Justice, with none other than John Bolton taking the lead in playing defense.

One reason neither the public, nor the press, nor the political system ever successfully came to terms with Iran-Contra was the tendency of reporters and government investigators to get lost in a thicket of conspiracy, to waste their energy tracing the tangle of branches that they always hoped would provide a clear map of the crime. Aspects of Iran-Contra were certainly criminal -- illegal arms sales to an enemy nation to fund an illegal war; the use of drug traffickers to run supplies to the Contras; money laundering; the deployment of CIA operatives to influence domestic opinion.

Yet, in a sense, the investigators were all barking up the wrong tree. It wasn't a conspiracy at all, but part of a larger storm of ideological passion, entwining economic interests and political ambition, that delivered the American system to the New Right. Iran-Contra -- and Reagan's Central American policy more broadly -- broke down the tottering levees of a foreign policy already discredited from failure in Vietnam, creating the swamp in which militarism and corruption thrive. Until it is recognized as such, it will continue to suck us down, even as odd pieces of flotsam like Foggo, Wilkes, and Cunningham continue to rise to the surface.

Greg Grandin teaches Latin American history at New York University and is the author of Empire's Workshop: Latin America, The United States, and The Rise of the New Imperialism.

Exclusive: Curveball, the Defector Whose Lies Led to War
March 13, 2007 1:46 PM
Brian Ross and Rhonda Schwartz Report:

The Iraqi defector known as Curveball, whose fabricated stories of "mobile biological weapons labs" helped lead the U.S. to war four years ago, is still being protected by the German intelligence service, an ABC News investigation has found.

Intelligence sources, who provided ABCNews.com with the first known photo of the man, say he has been resettled in a small town near the Munich headquarters of the German service, which has continued to honor its original commitment made when he fled Iraq in 1999.

Curveball's false tales became the centerpiece of Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech before the United Nations in February 2003, even though he was considered an "unstable, immature and unreliable" source by some senior officials at the CIA.


Powell told ABC News he is "angry and disappointed" that he was never told the CIA had doubts about the reliability of the source.

"I spent four days at CIA headquarters, and they told me they had this nailed," Powell said.

Behind the scenes at the CIA, however, a former senior official says he was trying to keep the Curveball information out of the Powell speech.

Drumheller_book_cover_1"People died because of this," said Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of European operations at the CIA, who has written about it in a new book, "On the Brink." "All off this one little guy who all he wanted to do was stay in Germany."

Drumheller says he personally redacted all references to Curveball material in an advance draft of the Powell speech.

"We said, 'This is from Curveball. Don't use this,'" Drumheller says. Powell says neither he nor his chief of staff Col. Larry Wilkerson was ever told of any doubts about Curveball.

"In fact, it was the exact opposite," Wilkerson told ABC News. "Never from anyone did we even hear the word 'Curveball,' let alone any expression of doubt in what Secretary Powell was presenting with regard to the biological labs," Wilkerson said.

Drumheller also says he met personally with the then-deputy director of the CIA, John McLaughlin, to raise questions about the reliability of Curveball, well before the Powell speech.

"And John said, 'Oh my, I hope not. You know this is all we have,' and I said, 'This can't be all we have.' I said, 'There must be another, there must be something else.' And he said, 'No, this is really the only tangible thing we have.'"

McLaughlin adamantly denies any such meeting or warning from Drumheller and also denies knowing that Drumheller had attempted to redact the Curveball portions of Powell's speech.

"This man never came into my office, sat down, looked me in the eye and made a case that Curveball was a fabricator. That didn't happen," McLaughlin, now retired, told ABC News.

The CIA has since issued an official "burn notice" formally retracting more than 100 intelligence reports based on his information.