McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld
Author: Misha Glenny 2008 348 pp
My rating: 1.5*
Started July 17 2008, Finished July 24 2008
Aside from a sense that globalization has been a boon to large scale criminal operations, I did not get much out of this book which I found this book very annoying, a combination of overly ambitious, under researched and endlessly digressive wherein. The first section of the book dealt with the emergence crime networks in eastern Europe and was relatively focused and informed but marred by the chapters’ independence from the others and failure to build upon each other – they could have been randomly rearranged without much affecting how they read. The rest of the book is worse with some chapters having little to do criminal networks, instead being filler/digression concerned primarily with the author’s take on globalization.
The writing is generally characterized by TV docudrama-like suspenseful interruptions as if heading to commercial and sudden lapses into the most jarring slang.
For this book to be more successful, much more research would have been required which would have been an admittedly difficult task – showing how many of the world’s criminal networks operate and interact; such an expose seems beyond even the combined abilities of all the world’s law enforcement agencies. Glenny probably would have been better off focusing his efforts on Eastern Europe where he seems the most knowledgeable.
[During the Yugoslavian civil war] “ … “Bosnians, Croats, and Albanians [were] more than happy to sell oil to their Serbian enemies because of the extraordinary profits that a sanctions regime generates.” (29)
“Bulgaria’s main route to the rest of Europe was through Serbia. The UN Security Council had already told Sofia to kiss good-bye the $1 Billion it was owed by Saddam’s Iraq when it imposed sanctions on Baghdad. Now the UN was telling Bulgaria it could not send its trucks through Serbia. This was devastating, as the country’s most important exports to Western Europe were perishable. ‘Bulgaria had a GDP of $10 billion and on the fruit and vegetables alone they lost $1 billion of income annually, explained Bill Montgomery. ‘I proposes that we allow the Bulgarians to send a weekly convoy through Serbia [escorted by UN forces]. The UN signed off … the Europeans signed off …; but Leon Furth, advisor to … Al Gore … blocked it.’ [This provided a] boost to organized crime, which thrived on the economic distress such myopic policies promoted.” (31)
“Despite the murders and the shoot-outs, the Russian mob actually ensured a degree of stability during the economic transition [from Communism to Putinist stability] (61)
Tomas Machacek, head of the Czech anti-Russian organized crime unit “is a real life Arkady Renko … engaged in a quixotic struggle with much more powerful and darker forces.” (71)
Sloppy writing: “Gazprom .. [has] an annual turnover of just less than $30 billion” (78)
Pakistani ISI trains Indian Moslem criminals to plant explosives for a terrorist act in which hundreds die. (138-9)
Clinton administration had an anti money-laundering initiative which the Bush administration eliminated as being anti business. “After 9/11 no AML regime is too strong for the US. Any kind of concerns about secondary effects go out the window. … everybody has to have this regime, and the stronger, the more onerous, the better – no cost is too high.” (147-8)
“Gangsters from Mumbai to the Balkans began pouring money into Dubai’s property market in an effort to launder their money and, where possible, to launder their reputations as well.” (153)
The last 20 pages of Chapter Seven, ostensibly about the Mumbai underworld, is instead a long digression about globalization and Dubai containing digressions within digressions such as an account of the author’s summer job in Carbondale IL in the 1970s.
Page 167, in the midst of a wandering discussion of Nigerian 419 scammers, contains a nearly full page and absolutely irrelevant aside about a Macumba priestess.
Page 170 contains another annoying aside, one paragraph about McNamara and the World Bank.
Page 176 contains another big digression, this time about the history on international trade including the “mercantile period of the 16th to 18th century.”
(184) Of a South African drug courier imprisoned in a US minimum security federal prison where a guard manipulated her into having sex: “ … if she reported it, she said, he would have killed her.” Author presents this claim of ultimate retribution as if it were a likely consequence in a US minimum-security prison as if no one would have noticed or cared and the guard would have gotten away with it.
Page 206 the country China is spelled with a lower cased ‘c’.
Page 216. Account of marijuana growers in British Columbia running large artificial 24/7 indoor growing environments on electricity illegally tapped from grid. Doesn’t the BC power company notice the loss of such a large amount of power?
218 contains unsubstantiated generalizations about Canadian attitudes towards Americans that have nothing to do with the ongoing discussion of drug cultivation in the Pacific northwest.
Chapter ten is essentially a recitation of the failure of the War on Drugs and has very little to do with organized crime.
Logic attempting to indicate that growing coca plants is far more lucrative to the Columbian farmer than bananas would be: “a kilo of bananas during the 1990s would fetch $2 on average; a kilo of coca base … was worth between $750 and $1000.” (256) This is a meaningless comparison as it gives no idea of the amount of acreage or effort required to produce a kilo of each product – if, say, an acre could yield 1000 kilos of bananas or enough coca to produce a kilo of coca base, then bananas would be more profitable on a per acre basis.
Page 272 claims that each peripheral attached to a computer has its own IP address. This is not necessarily true.
301 paragraph long digression on how tattoos are created.
“… pachinko [in Japan] … has an annual turnover estimated at about $300 billion, twice the value of the entire Japanese automobile industry …” (308)
“Health concerns and legislation aimed at reducing smoking in the United States and Europe may have dented tobacco companies’ profits in the West, but in China and Asia, it’s party time!” (336)
“One man well known both to the ‘baccy mafia and the Chinese police was Tun Yan Yuk …” (337)
The last chapter, about China, again has very little to do with organized crime and is mainly a discussion of how Chinese manufacturing has prospered in the last 15 years.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Monday, July 14, 2008
The Road to Wigan Pier
- The Road to Wigan Pier
Author: George Orwell 1937 232 pp
My rating: 3*
Started July 8 2008, Finished July 11 2008
Orwell’s examination of working class poverty in the coal mining towns of northern England during the depression has two parts: the first is a detailed description of what that poverty entails based on Orwell’s first hand experiences living among his subject families and the second is Orwell’s proposed remedy, in a word, Socialism. The first part was quite compelling, but felt a bit truncated; perhaps as with The Reluctant Communist, there is just not very much one can say about such drab, uneventful and purposeless lives. Also of note about this section, since the early sproutings of what would eventually become the British welfare state were extant at the time of Orwell’s research, his subject families received enough assistance from the government to avoid starvation (though their diets were quite limited and innutritious) or homelessness. Since these people weren’t faced with starvation as say, the characters in Down and Out in Paris and London were, the most destructive effect of poverty for the residents of Wigan Pier was the lack of self-worth resulting from lives without gainful employment or any hope thereof.
The second part of the book is a testament to the power of Orwell’s writing – his take on the human condition places such a premium on honesty, particularly due to his constant questioning of his own prejudices and biases, that his prose can be far more readable than his logic and conclusions would justify on their own. In part two, Orwell addresses the issue of what can be done to rectify England’s social-economic structure that allows perhaps one third of its citizens to exist in dire poverty. The only answer Orwell sees is the adoption of Socialism. The alternatives are dismissed in passing: capitalism is self-destructive, dying (if not already dead) and essentially designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many; Communism is a perverted, dictatorial perversion of Socialism; Fascism, which was ascendant at the time Wigan Pier was written, is an abomination that Orwell was willing to put his life on the line to combat it years before the outbreak of WWII. Orwell wastes much time defending Socialism from its supporters who are stereotyped as head in the cloud proto-hippies or the subset of the affluent classes which espouses support for the working class while secretly detesting almost everything about the people who constitute it. The biggest problem in this section though is that as the book’s original publisher, Victor Gollancz, points out in the book’s forward, Orwell never defines what he means by Socialism; I read the forward after reading the rest of the book and this was a point that had bothered me for almost all of point two – I found this lacking severely undercut whatever points Orwell was trying to make.
Also of note in part two are several instances where Orwell draws boneheaded conclusions or time has proved him utterly wrong: - “I have listened by the hour to their tirades against their own class, and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table-manners. Why should a man who thinks all virtue resides in the proletariat still take such pains to drink his soup silently? It can only be because in his heart he feels that proletarian manners are disgusting.” (Ch 8) This reader considers it possible that such silent soup sipping is the ingrained habit of a lifetime, requiring no thought or effort, not an overt statement of social revulsion.
- “In order that one may enjoy primitive methods of travel, it is necessary that no other method should be available. No human being ever wants to do anything in a more cumbrous way than is necessary.” (Ch 12) This passage, part of a section where Orwell inveighs against the increasingly complete mechanization of society, completely fails to appreciate that people could come to enjoy activities such as biking, hiking and running for their own sake.
- “… Socialism is the only real enemy that Fascism has to face. The capitalist- imperialist governments, even though they themselves are about to be plundered, will not fight with any conviction against Fascism as such.” (Ch 12) This quote is one of many throughout Orwell’s studies on poverty where he completely underestimates the health of capitalism; of course it was the “dying” capitalist and the corrupt communist countries that crushed capitalism, socialist countries playing no significant role whatsoever.
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On the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I decided to leave. (Ch 1)
This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people's convenience, is inherent in working-class life. (Ch 3)
It is a great achievement to get slum-dwellers into decent houses, but it is unfortunate that, owing to the peculiar temper of our time, it is also considered necessary to rob them of the last vestiges of their liberty. (Ch 4)
In a working-class home it is the man who is the master and not, as in a middle-class home, the woman or the baby. Practically never, for instance, in a working-class home, will you see the man doing a stroke of the housework. Unemployment has not changed this convention … (Ch 5)
We may as well face the fact that several million men in England will--unless another war breaks out--never have a real job this side the grave. (Ch 5)
Instead of raging against their destiny they have made things tolerable by lowering their standards. (Ch 5)
I happened to be in Yorkshire when Hitler re-occupied the Rhineland. Hitler, Locarno, Fascism, and the threat of war aroused hardly a flicker of interest locally, but the decision of the Football Association to stop publishing their fixtures in advance (this was an attempt to quell the Football Pools) flung all Yorkshire into a storm of fury. (Ch 5)
Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio. What we have lost in food we have gained in electricity. Whole sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life. (Ch 5)
The most obvious sign of under-nourishment is the badness of everybody's teeth. (Ch 6)
I should say that a manual worker, if he is in steady work and drawing good wages--an 'if which gets bigger and bigger--has a better chance of being happy than an 'educated' man. (Ch 7)
In the kind of shabby-genteel family that I am talking about there is far more consciousness of poverty than in any working-class family above the level of the dole. Rent and clothes and school-bills are an unending nightmare, and every luxury, even a glass of beer, is an unwarrantable extravagance. Practically the whole family income goes in keeping up appearances. (Ch 8)
Hence, at the age of seventeen or eighteen, I was both a snob and a revolutionary. I was against all authority. I had read and re-read the entire published works of Shaw, Wells, and Galsworthy (at that time still regarded as dangerously 'advanced' writers), and I loosely described myself as a Socialist. But I had not much grasp of what Socialism meant, and no notion that the working class were human beings. At a distance, and through the medium of books--Jack London's The People of the Abyss, for instance --I could agonize over their sufferings, but I still hated them and despised them when I came anywhere near them. I was still revolted by their accents and infuriated by their habitual rudeness. (Ch 9)
And all the while everyone who uses his brain knows that Socialism, as a world-system and wholeheartedly applied, is a way out. (Ch 11)
the swindle of “progress” (Ch 12)
But at any rate we must drop that misleading habit of pretending that the only proletarians are manual labourers. It has got to be brought home to the clerk, the engineer, the commercial traveller, the middle-class man who has 'come down in the world', the village grocer, the lower-grade civil servant, and all other doubtful cases that they are the proletariat, and that Socialism means a fair deal for them as well as for the navvy and the factory-hand. They must not be allowed to think that the battle is between those who pronounce their aitches and those who don't; for if they think that, they will join in on the side of the aitches. (Ch 13)
“so that it is still necessary, and will be necessary for a long time yet, to show that modern methods of production do work under Socialism and no longer work under capitalism. (xviii) From forward by Victor Gollancz.
Mr. Orwell does not once define what he means by Socialism (xx)
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Netherland
Netherland
Author: Joseph O’Neill 2008 256 pp
My rating: 3.5*
Started July 2 2008, Finished July 4 2008
This book, belonging to that new genre, the post 9/11 NYC novel and subject of (too) much critical praise, often comparing it to Gatsby, has much to recommend it including state of the art prose that as with Updike and Roth, occasionally causes me to marvel “now that’s writing”, a couple of intriguing mysteries that keep one turning the pages, a refreshingly outer-boroughs centric point of view, a novel to the American reader central cricket-as-new-world-life-metaphor, an almost unequaled differentiation among voices – contrary to most novels, each character speaks in a unique and credible voice -- and a bravura stream of consciousness time changing in the narration of a long chapter near the end when the narrator’s thoughts range seamlessly across almost his entire life with each shift unapparent until well after it has occurred. However, Netherland falls short of greatness for me because the mysteries are not satisfactorily resolved and its central characters never really resonated. The novel hinges on the trans-Atlantic separation of the narrator, a successful early 30’s Dutch expatriate financial analyst, and his wife Rachel, an English lawyer who for nebulous reasons loses faith in Hans and their life in New York, prompting her return to her native country. The separation plunges Hans into isolation and despondency which ultimately lead to his immersion in the sub world of New York area cricket leagues comprised primarily of barely legal third world immigrants and through which he meets Chuck Ramskoonian, a Trinidadian expat, dreamer, schemer and bootstrapper who is the book’s Gatsby analogue. Chuck is an intriguing character, but not enough to build a book around. The nostalgic grounding Hans finds in cricket is more described than felt causes the book’s center to never fully cohere. However, the biggest problem for me was the inability of Hans and Rachel to communicate about their marriage. Hans clearly resents the separation and throughout the book longs for a resumption of the relationship, but is maddeningly passive, letting the barely communicative Rachel dictate their course. I find it very hard to believe that such a UMC couple would not have talked the issue to death or that at the least, Hans would have repeatedly demanded an explanation and a prognosis from the confused and tongue-tied Rachel; Hans’ simmering deferral to his wife, which extends over years, rendered him implausible to me; Rachel’s disinclination to explain her actions had a similar effect and my consequent lack of identification with and belief in the central characters significantly diminished the book for me.
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“You know what my motto is?”
“I didn’t think people had mottoes anymore.” (80)
“Like an old door, every man past a certain age comes with historical warps and creaks of one kind or another, and a woman who wishes to put him to serious further use must expect to do a certain amount of sanding and planing.” (109)
[London] “… I’ve speculated, to the bizarrely premature crystallization of lives here, where men and women past the age of forty, in some cases even the age of thirty, may easily be regarded as over the hill and entitled to an essentially retrospective idea of themselves; whereas in New York selfhood’s hill always seemed to lie ahead and to promise a glimpse of further, higher peaks: that you might have no climbing boots to hand was beside the point.” (178-9)
… “ she reaches for my hand and squeezes it. Strange, how such a moment grows in value over a marriage’s course. We gratefully pocket each of them, these sidewalk pennies, and run with them to the bank as if creditors were banging on the door.” (183)
“As he stared up at millions of stars, he was filled with a dread he had never known before.
… I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.” (200)
“ … all people, Americans, whoever, are at their most civilized when they’re playing cricket.” (211)
Author: Joseph O’Neill 2008 256 pp
My rating: 3.5*
Started July 2 2008, Finished July 4 2008
This book, belonging to that new genre, the post 9/11 NYC novel and subject of (too) much critical praise, often comparing it to Gatsby, has much to recommend it including state of the art prose that as with Updike and Roth, occasionally causes me to marvel “now that’s writing”, a couple of intriguing mysteries that keep one turning the pages, a refreshingly outer-boroughs centric point of view, a novel to the American reader central cricket-as-new-world-life-metaphor, an almost unequaled differentiation among voices – contrary to most novels, each character speaks in a unique and credible voice -- and a bravura stream of consciousness time changing in the narration of a long chapter near the end when the narrator’s thoughts range seamlessly across almost his entire life with each shift unapparent until well after it has occurred. However, Netherland falls short of greatness for me because the mysteries are not satisfactorily resolved and its central characters never really resonated. The novel hinges on the trans-Atlantic separation of the narrator, a successful early 30’s Dutch expatriate financial analyst, and his wife Rachel, an English lawyer who for nebulous reasons loses faith in Hans and their life in New York, prompting her return to her native country. The separation plunges Hans into isolation and despondency which ultimately lead to his immersion in the sub world of New York area cricket leagues comprised primarily of barely legal third world immigrants and through which he meets Chuck Ramskoonian, a Trinidadian expat, dreamer, schemer and bootstrapper who is the book’s Gatsby analogue. Chuck is an intriguing character, but not enough to build a book around. The nostalgic grounding Hans finds in cricket is more described than felt causes the book’s center to never fully cohere. However, the biggest problem for me was the inability of Hans and Rachel to communicate about their marriage. Hans clearly resents the separation and throughout the book longs for a resumption of the relationship, but is maddeningly passive, letting the barely communicative Rachel dictate their course. I find it very hard to believe that such a UMC couple would not have talked the issue to death or that at the least, Hans would have repeatedly demanded an explanation and a prognosis from the confused and tongue-tied Rachel; Hans’ simmering deferral to his wife, which extends over years, rendered him implausible to me; Rachel’s disinclination to explain her actions had a similar effect and my consequent lack of identification with and belief in the central characters significantly diminished the book for me.
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“You know what my motto is?”
“I didn’t think people had mottoes anymore.” (80)
“Like an old door, every man past a certain age comes with historical warps and creaks of one kind or another, and a woman who wishes to put him to serious further use must expect to do a certain amount of sanding and planing.” (109)
[London] “… I’ve speculated, to the bizarrely premature crystallization of lives here, where men and women past the age of forty, in some cases even the age of thirty, may easily be regarded as over the hill and entitled to an essentially retrospective idea of themselves; whereas in New York selfhood’s hill always seemed to lie ahead and to promise a glimpse of further, higher peaks: that you might have no climbing boots to hand was beside the point.” (178-9)
… “ she reaches for my hand and squeezes it. Strange, how such a moment grows in value over a marriage’s course. We gratefully pocket each of them, these sidewalk pennies, and run with them to the bank as if creditors were banging on the door.” (183)
“As he stared up at millions of stars, he was filled with a dread he had never known before.
… I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.” (200)
“ … all people, Americans, whoever, are at their most civilized when they’re playing cricket.” (211)
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Homage to Catalonia
Homage to Catalonia
Author: George Orwell 1938 232 pp
My rating: 3.5*
Started July 7 2008, Finished July 8 2008
Written immediately upon Orwell’s return from his stint as a volunteer with the “Government” (anti-fascist) in the Spanish Civil War -- service foreshortened by his being shot through the throat – this memoir cum political reportage is best when chronicling the life of a soldier at the front and least engaging during its overlong description and analysis of the internecine battling among Government forces (communists versus anarchists) while he was on leave in Barcelona. Upon finishing it, the reader cannot help but feel a strong admiration for Orwell’s clear sighted honesty and devotion to honest reporting, his willingness to sacrifice all for his beliefs and his ability to maintain an idealistic hope for a more just world in the face of corruption, waste and self-serving
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Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. (Ch 1)
We were near the front line now, near enough to smell the characteristic smell of war--in my experience a smell of excrement and decaying food. (Ch 2)
In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy. In winter on the Zaragoza front they were important in that order, with the enemy a bad last. Except at night, when a surprise--attack was always conceivable, nobody bothered about the enemy. They were simply remote black insects whom one occasionally saw hopping to and fro. The real preoccupation of both armies was trying to keep warm. (Ch 3)
The centuria was an untrained mob composed mostly of boys in their teens. Here and there in the militia you came across children as young as eleven or twelve, usually refugees from Fascist territory who had been enlisted as militiamen as the easiest way of providing for them. As a rule they were employed on light work in the rear, but sometimes they managed to worm their way to the front line, where they were a public menace. I remember one little brute throwing a hand-grenade into the dug-out fire 'for a joke'. At Monte Pocero I do not think there was anyone younger than fifteen, but the average age must have been well under twenty. Boys of this age ought never to be used in the front line, because they cannot stand the lack of sleep which is inseparable from trench warfare. At the beginning it was almost impossible to keep our position properly guarded at night. The wretched children of my section could only be roused by dragging them out of their dug-outs feet foremost, and as soon as your back was turned they left their posts and slipped into shelter; or they would even, in spite of the frightful cold, lean up against the wall of the trench and fall fast asleep. Luckily the enemy were very unenterprising. There were nights when it seemed to me that our position could be stormed by twenty Boy Scouts armed with airguns, or twenty Girl Guides armed with battledores, for that matter. (Ch 3)
But in practice when the emergency came I seldom fired my rifle; I was too frightened of the beastly thing jamming and too anxious to reserve at any rate one round that would go off. (Ch 3)
Nothing will convince a Spaniard, at least a young Spaniard, that fire-arms are dangerous. Once, rather later than this, I was photographing some machine-gunners with their gun, which was pointed directly towards me. 'Don't fire,' I said half-jokingly as I focused the camera. 'Oh no, we won't fire.' The next moment there was a frightful roar and a stream of bullets tore past my face so close that my cheek was stung by grains of cordite. It was unintentional, but the machine-gunners considered it a great joke. Yet only a few days earlier they had seen a mule-driver accidentally shot by a political delegate who was playing the fool with an automatic pistol and had put five bullets in the mule-driver's lungs... (Ch 3)
And apart from the libels of the inter-party feud, all the usual war-stuff, the tub-thumping, the heroics, the vilification of the enemy--all these were done, as usual, by people who were not fighting and who in many cases would have run a hundred miles sooner than fight. One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right. (Ch 5)
It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours. Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him. (Ch 5)
In stationary warfare there are three things that all soldiers long for: a battle, more cigarettes, and a week's leave. (Ch 6)
In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no privilege and no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me. (Ch 8)
'Hi! Don't you shoot at us!' 'What?' 'Don't you fire at us or we'll fire back!' 'No, no! I wasn't firing at you. Look--down there!' … 'I was firing at him. He fired first.' (I believe this was true.) 'We don't want to shoot you. We're only workers, the same as you are.' He made the anti-Fascist salute, which I returned. I shouted across: 'Have you got any more beer left?' 'No, it's all gone.' (Ch 10)
When you are taking part in events like these you are, I suppose, in a small way, making history, and you ought by rights to feel like a historical character. But you never do, because at such times the physical details always outweigh everything else. Throughout the fighting I never made the correct 'analysis' of the situation that was so glibly made by journalists hundreds of miles away. What I was chiefly thinking about was not the rights and wrongs of this miserable internecine scrap, but simply the discomfort and boredom of sitting day and night on that intolerable roof, and the hunger which was growing worse and worse … (Ch 10)
It may seem that I have discussed the accusations against the P.O.U.M. at greater length than was necessary. Compared with the huge miseries of a civil war, this kind of internecine squabble between parties, with its inevitable injustices and false accusations, may appear trivial. It is not really so. I believe that libels and press--campaigns of this kind, and the habits of mind they indicate, are capable of doing the most deadly damage to the anti-Fascist cause. (Ch 11)
One morning it was announced that the men in my ward were to be sent down to Barcelona today. I managed to send a wire to my wife, telling her that I was coming, and presently they packed us into buses and took us down to the station. It was only when the train was actually starting that the hospital orderly who traveled with us casually let fall that we were not going to Barcelona after all, but to Tarragona. I suppose the engine-driver had changed his mind. 'Just like Spain!' I thought. But it was very Spanish, too, that they agreed to hold up the train while I sent another wire, and more Spanish still that the wire never got there. (Ch 12)
I admit I was angry when I heard of Kopp's arrest. He was my personal friend, I had served under him for months, I had been under fire with him, and I knew his history. He was a man who had sacrificed everything--family, nationality, livelihood--simply to come to Spain and fight against Fascism. By leaving Belgium without permission and joining a foreign army while he was on the Belgian Army reserve, and, earlier, by helping to manufacture munitions illegally for the Spanish Government, he had piled up years of imprisonment for himself if he should ever return to his own country. He had been in the line since October 1936, had worked his way up from militiaman to major, had been in action I do not know how many times, and had been wounded once. During the May trouble, as I had seen for myself, he had prevented fighting locally and probably saved ten or twenty lives. And all they could do in return was to fling him into jail. It is waste of time to be angry, but the stupid malignity of this kind of thing does try one's patience. (Ch 13)
I did not make any of the correct political reflections. I never do when things are happening. It seems to be always the case when I get mixed up in war or politics --I am conscious of nothing save physical discomfort and a deep desire for this damned nonsense to be over. Afterwards I can see the significance of events, but while they are happening I merely want to be out of them … (Ch 13)
Smillie's death is not a thing I can easily forgive. Here was this brave and gifted boy, who had thrown up his career at Glasgow University in order to come and fight against Fascism, and who, as I saw for myself, had done his job at the front with faultless courage and willingness; and all they could find to do with him was to fling him into jail and let him die like a neglected animal. (Ch 14)
I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few bad memories of Spaniards … They have, there is no doubt, a generosity, a species of nobility, that do not really belong to the twentieth century (Ch 14)
Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings. And I hope the account I have given is not too misleading. I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan. In case I have not said this somewhere earlier in the book I will say it now: beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. (Ch 14)
Author: George Orwell 1938 232 pp
My rating: 3.5*
Started July 7 2008, Finished July 8 2008
Written immediately upon Orwell’s return from his stint as a volunteer with the “Government” (anti-fascist) in the Spanish Civil War -- service foreshortened by his being shot through the throat – this memoir cum political reportage is best when chronicling the life of a soldier at the front and least engaging during its overlong description and analysis of the internecine battling among Government forces (communists versus anarchists) while he was on leave in Barcelona. Upon finishing it, the reader cannot help but feel a strong admiration for Orwell’s clear sighted honesty and devotion to honest reporting, his willingness to sacrifice all for his beliefs and his ability to maintain an idealistic hope for a more just world in the face of corruption, waste and self-serving
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Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. (Ch 1)
We were near the front line now, near enough to smell the characteristic smell of war--in my experience a smell of excrement and decaying food. (Ch 2)
In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy. In winter on the Zaragoza front they were important in that order, with the enemy a bad last. Except at night, when a surprise--attack was always conceivable, nobody bothered about the enemy. They were simply remote black insects whom one occasionally saw hopping to and fro. The real preoccupation of both armies was trying to keep warm. (Ch 3)
The centuria was an untrained mob composed mostly of boys in their teens. Here and there in the militia you came across children as young as eleven or twelve, usually refugees from Fascist territory who had been enlisted as militiamen as the easiest way of providing for them. As a rule they were employed on light work in the rear, but sometimes they managed to worm their way to the front line, where they were a public menace. I remember one little brute throwing a hand-grenade into the dug-out fire 'for a joke'. At Monte Pocero I do not think there was anyone younger than fifteen, but the average age must have been well under twenty. Boys of this age ought never to be used in the front line, because they cannot stand the lack of sleep which is inseparable from trench warfare. At the beginning it was almost impossible to keep our position properly guarded at night. The wretched children of my section could only be roused by dragging them out of their dug-outs feet foremost, and as soon as your back was turned they left their posts and slipped into shelter; or they would even, in spite of the frightful cold, lean up against the wall of the trench and fall fast asleep. Luckily the enemy were very unenterprising. There were nights when it seemed to me that our position could be stormed by twenty Boy Scouts armed with airguns, or twenty Girl Guides armed with battledores, for that matter. (Ch 3)
But in practice when the emergency came I seldom fired my rifle; I was too frightened of the beastly thing jamming and too anxious to reserve at any rate one round that would go off. (Ch 3)
Nothing will convince a Spaniard, at least a young Spaniard, that fire-arms are dangerous. Once, rather later than this, I was photographing some machine-gunners with their gun, which was pointed directly towards me. 'Don't fire,' I said half-jokingly as I focused the camera. 'Oh no, we won't fire.' The next moment there was a frightful roar and a stream of bullets tore past my face so close that my cheek was stung by grains of cordite. It was unintentional, but the machine-gunners considered it a great joke. Yet only a few days earlier they had seen a mule-driver accidentally shot by a political delegate who was playing the fool with an automatic pistol and had put five bullets in the mule-driver's lungs... (Ch 3)
And apart from the libels of the inter-party feud, all the usual war-stuff, the tub-thumping, the heroics, the vilification of the enemy--all these were done, as usual, by people who were not fighting and who in many cases would have run a hundred miles sooner than fight. One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right. (Ch 5)
It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours. Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him. (Ch 5)
In stationary warfare there are three things that all soldiers long for: a battle, more cigarettes, and a week's leave. (Ch 6)
In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no privilege and no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me. (Ch 8)
'Hi! Don't you shoot at us!' 'What?' 'Don't you fire at us or we'll fire back!' 'No, no! I wasn't firing at you. Look--down there!' … 'I was firing at him. He fired first.' (I believe this was true.) 'We don't want to shoot you. We're only workers, the same as you are.' He made the anti-Fascist salute, which I returned. I shouted across: 'Have you got any more beer left?' 'No, it's all gone.' (Ch 10)
When you are taking part in events like these you are, I suppose, in a small way, making history, and you ought by rights to feel like a historical character. But you never do, because at such times the physical details always outweigh everything else. Throughout the fighting I never made the correct 'analysis' of the situation that was so glibly made by journalists hundreds of miles away. What I was chiefly thinking about was not the rights and wrongs of this miserable internecine scrap, but simply the discomfort and boredom of sitting day and night on that intolerable roof, and the hunger which was growing worse and worse … (Ch 10)
It may seem that I have discussed the accusations against the P.O.U.M. at greater length than was necessary. Compared with the huge miseries of a civil war, this kind of internecine squabble between parties, with its inevitable injustices and false accusations, may appear trivial. It is not really so. I believe that libels and press--campaigns of this kind, and the habits of mind they indicate, are capable of doing the most deadly damage to the anti-Fascist cause. (Ch 11)
One morning it was announced that the men in my ward were to be sent down to Barcelona today. I managed to send a wire to my wife, telling her that I was coming, and presently they packed us into buses and took us down to the station. It was only when the train was actually starting that the hospital orderly who traveled with us casually let fall that we were not going to Barcelona after all, but to Tarragona. I suppose the engine-driver had changed his mind. 'Just like Spain!' I thought. But it was very Spanish, too, that they agreed to hold up the train while I sent another wire, and more Spanish still that the wire never got there. (Ch 12)
I admit I was angry when I heard of Kopp's arrest. He was my personal friend, I had served under him for months, I had been under fire with him, and I knew his history. He was a man who had sacrificed everything--family, nationality, livelihood--simply to come to Spain and fight against Fascism. By leaving Belgium without permission and joining a foreign army while he was on the Belgian Army reserve, and, earlier, by helping to manufacture munitions illegally for the Spanish Government, he had piled up years of imprisonment for himself if he should ever return to his own country. He had been in the line since October 1936, had worked his way up from militiaman to major, had been in action I do not know how many times, and had been wounded once. During the May trouble, as I had seen for myself, he had prevented fighting locally and probably saved ten or twenty lives. And all they could do in return was to fling him into jail. It is waste of time to be angry, but the stupid malignity of this kind of thing does try one's patience. (Ch 13)
I did not make any of the correct political reflections. I never do when things are happening. It seems to be always the case when I get mixed up in war or politics --I am conscious of nothing save physical discomfort and a deep desire for this damned nonsense to be over. Afterwards I can see the significance of events, but while they are happening I merely want to be out of them … (Ch 13)
Smillie's death is not a thing I can easily forgive. Here was this brave and gifted boy, who had thrown up his career at Glasgow University in order to come and fight against Fascism, and who, as I saw for myself, had done his job at the front with faultless courage and willingness; and all they could find to do with him was to fling him into jail and let him die like a neglected animal. (Ch 14)
I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few bad memories of Spaniards … They have, there is no doubt, a generosity, a species of nobility, that do not really belong to the twentieth century (Ch 14)
Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings. And I hope the account I have given is not too misleading. I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan. In case I have not said this somewhere earlier in the book I will say it now: beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. (Ch 14)
Monday, July 7, 2008
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Author: George Orwell 1936 248 pp
My rating: 3*
Started July 5 2008, Finished July 5 2008
This volume continues Orwell’s chronicle of poverty in English society, examining the lot of a member of the working poor. The protagonist, Gordon Comstock, attempts to as fully as possible, reject participation in the “money society”, forsaking a promising job as an advertising copy writer for a much lower paying, dead end one as the sales clerk at a used book store which, in theory, will pay him just enough to subsist while he focuses his energies on writing poetry. What happens though is that Gordon loses his muse, writes virtually nothing and become obsessed with his sense that money controls everything in society and that a person who lacks it is nothing, developing an Underground Man like hostility to the world around him and a paranoid sense that all the interactions in his life are determined by the contempt people have for him as a person without money.
The book had several flaws as a novel, primarily because most of its characters do not ring true as human beings. The book gets off to a bad start in this respect in chapter one’s description of a typical day in the bookstore where all the customers all caricatures in action, speech and book preference. Further, the adoration Gordon’s sweetheart, Rosemary, has for him is never really plausible given that we see him offer her little but rudeness and complaint. The support Gordon receives from Rosemary, his spinster sister and his friend/champion, the well-to-do Ravelston, stretch credibility in the face of Gordon’s endlessly self-defeating actions and self pity which make him a thoroughly unlikable anti-hero, whatever the reader feels about Gordon’s anti-capitalist principles.
The book’s centerpiece is memorably excruciating chapter in which Gordon manages to in the course of a few hours to convert an unexpected windfall into an appalling, completely abasing catastrophe after which he develops a Bartleby-like indifference to his own existence and appears headed straight for the gutter. Given Gordon’s negative trajectory in the rest of the book, its relatively happy, nearly Hollywoodesque ending jars a bit, though offering everyone, the reader included, substantial relief from the grinding spectacle of Gordon’s self destruction.
Eliot’s take on the modern world, one of the many things Gordon scoffs at, casts a shadow over this novel of “lonely clerks in shirt sleeves” who conduct degrading assignations with their equally unmoored female contemporaries. Also of note is the degree to which the materialism of the “dying capitalist society” portrayed in the book resembles that in our own; the copywriting for which Gordon has such unlimited contempt is for things which sound all too familiar to the reader seventy years after: “Whiterose Pills for Female Disorders, Your Horoscope Cast by Professor Raratongo, The Seven Secrets of Venus, New Hope for the Ruptured, Earn Five Pounds a Week in your Spare Time, and Cyprolax Hair Lotion Banishes all Unpleasant Intruders.” (51)
Another plus for me was the nasty comic relief provided by Mr Cheeseman, the owner of a for profit lending library where Gordon finds better-than-nothing employment after the windfall catastrophe, a feisty dwarf who “was not a bad person to work for, so long as you understood that if you worked till the Day of Judgement you would never get a rise of wages” and who despite owning a mini-empire of book stores “had never in his life read a book himself, nor could he conceive why anyone should want to do so.” (204-5)
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“It was the lack of money, simply the lack of money, that robbed him of the power to 'write'. He clung to that as to an article of faith. Money, money, all is money! Could you write even a penny novelette without money to put heart in you? Invention, energy, wit, style, charm--they've all got to be paid for in hard cash.” (9)
“Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success.” (43)
“The prospect of searching for another job bored him even more than the prospect of poverty. Besides, he would never find another job. There are no jobs to be had nowadays. He was going down, down into the sub-world of the unemployed--down, down into God knew what workhouse depths of dirt and hunger and futility. And chiefly he was anxious to get it over with as little fuss and effort as possible.” (189)
Author: George Orwell 1936 248 pp
My rating: 3*
Started July 5 2008, Finished July 5 2008
This volume continues Orwell’s chronicle of poverty in English society, examining the lot of a member of the working poor. The protagonist, Gordon Comstock, attempts to as fully as possible, reject participation in the “money society”, forsaking a promising job as an advertising copy writer for a much lower paying, dead end one as the sales clerk at a used book store which, in theory, will pay him just enough to subsist while he focuses his energies on writing poetry. What happens though is that Gordon loses his muse, writes virtually nothing and become obsessed with his sense that money controls everything in society and that a person who lacks it is nothing, developing an Underground Man like hostility to the world around him and a paranoid sense that all the interactions in his life are determined by the contempt people have for him as a person without money.
The book had several flaws as a novel, primarily because most of its characters do not ring true as human beings. The book gets off to a bad start in this respect in chapter one’s description of a typical day in the bookstore where all the customers all caricatures in action, speech and book preference. Further, the adoration Gordon’s sweetheart, Rosemary, has for him is never really plausible given that we see him offer her little but rudeness and complaint. The support Gordon receives from Rosemary, his spinster sister and his friend/champion, the well-to-do Ravelston, stretch credibility in the face of Gordon’s endlessly self-defeating actions and self pity which make him a thoroughly unlikable anti-hero, whatever the reader feels about Gordon’s anti-capitalist principles.
The book’s centerpiece is memorably excruciating chapter in which Gordon manages to in the course of a few hours to convert an unexpected windfall into an appalling, completely abasing catastrophe after which he develops a Bartleby-like indifference to his own existence and appears headed straight for the gutter. Given Gordon’s negative trajectory in the rest of the book, its relatively happy, nearly Hollywoodesque ending jars a bit, though offering everyone, the reader included, substantial relief from the grinding spectacle of Gordon’s self destruction.
Eliot’s take on the modern world, one of the many things Gordon scoffs at, casts a shadow over this novel of “lonely clerks in shirt sleeves” who conduct degrading assignations with their equally unmoored female contemporaries. Also of note is the degree to which the materialism of the “dying capitalist society” portrayed in the book resembles that in our own; the copywriting for which Gordon has such unlimited contempt is for things which sound all too familiar to the reader seventy years after: “Whiterose Pills for Female Disorders, Your Horoscope Cast by Professor Raratongo, The Seven Secrets of Venus, New Hope for the Ruptured, Earn Five Pounds a Week in your Spare Time, and Cyprolax Hair Lotion Banishes all Unpleasant Intruders.” (51)
Another plus for me was the nasty comic relief provided by Mr Cheeseman, the owner of a for profit lending library where Gordon finds better-than-nothing employment after the windfall catastrophe, a feisty dwarf who “was not a bad person to work for, so long as you understood that if you worked till the Day of Judgement you would never get a rise of wages” and who despite owning a mini-empire of book stores “had never in his life read a book himself, nor could he conceive why anyone should want to do so.” (204-5)
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“It was the lack of money, simply the lack of money, that robbed him of the power to 'write'. He clung to that as to an article of faith. Money, money, all is money! Could you write even a penny novelette without money to put heart in you? Invention, energy, wit, style, charm--they've all got to be paid for in hard cash.” (9)
“Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success.” (43)
“The prospect of searching for another job bored him even more than the prospect of poverty. Besides, he would never find another job. There are no jobs to be had nowadays. He was going down, down into the sub-world of the unemployed--down, down into God knew what workhouse depths of dirt and hunger and futility. And chiefly he was anxious to get it over with as little fuss and effort as possible.” (189)
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Author: Tim Weiner 2007 514 pp
My rating: 4*
Started June 13 2008, Finished June 21 2008
This book’s discouraging chronicle of the CIA’s history documents a non-stop litany of Agency ineptitude, political kowtowing, lack of oversight and even malfeasance. The salient themes include:
The CIA’s failure to accurately fulfill its primary mission of intelligence gathering resulting in failure to predict many of the major events of the last sixty years including: the development of the A-Bomb by the USSR, the invasion of South Korea by the North Koreans and subsequent Chinese entry into the war, almost anything involving Vietnam, the fall of the Shah, the collapse of the Soviet Union and various terrorist strikes against the US.
Covert operations which, especially in the agency’s early years, drained resources and usually spectacularly failed to meet their objectives though when they did succeed it was towards a goal which at this historical remove usually seems strategically counterproductive and often morally reprehensible e.g. the overthrow of Mossadeq in Iran.
Presidents who ignored the agency unless it told them what they wanted to hear. The only presidents who come across as somewhat effective and concerned in their interactions with the agency are Eisenhower and Carter. Nixon and Clinton come off particularly unfavorably.
The tendency of the later agency directors to tailor reports – corrupt the intelligence – in order to curry favor with the current president, a trend which culminated most disastrously for the US in the intelligence concocted to justify the US invasion of Iraq.
Lack of institutional controls and processes resulting in mistakes being repeated across the tenures of multiple directors: to this day, the agency lacks sufficient linguists to translate essential intercepts from the most prominent threats, moles and double agents were never effectively dealt with and covert operation seem a series of criminally wasteful rogue actions from beginning to end.
This book is certainly worthwhile reading for the concerned citizen, but to my mind it had significant weaknesses. The author is a writer for the New York Times, not an historian which perhaps is why the book occasionally comes across as somewhat rushed and unbalanced and lacking in historical perspective. In particular, the agency’s few successes are generally not discussed as thoroughly as the far more numerous failures and events are sometimes dropped after the author has made his point, even though the reader would like to know more about how they played out – this is a book that would have justified at double the length. A strength and a weakness of the book is its reliance for sources upon interviews with and the memoirs of high ranking current and former personnel, particularly directors, and internal agency histories and documents. While these sources impart a great deal of credibility to Weiner’s arguments, they often come off, no matter how badly the reflect on the CIA, as self-serving; the book could have used more outside observations, perhaps from congressmen who dealt with the agency and historians. A definite though lesser strength of the book is its self-documenting: 153 pages of thoroughly detailed endnotes.
“All told, hundreds of the CIA’s foreign agents were sent to their deaths in Russia, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and the Baltic States during the 1950s. Their fates were unrecorded; no accounts were kept and no penalty assessed for their failure.” (47)
[1950] “… the agency had misread every global crisis of the past year: the Soviet atom bomb, the Korean War, the Chinese invasion.” (52)
“… almost all the secret information the agency gathered during the [Korean] war had been manufactured by the North Korean and Chinese security services.” (57)
[During Korean War] “The ability to represent failure as success was becoming a CIA tradition. The agency’s unwillingness to learn from its mistakes became a permanent part of its culture. The CIA’s covert operators never wrote “lessons-learned” studies. Even today there are few if any rules or procedures for producing them.” (58)
[Overthrow of Mossadeq] By renting the allegiances of soldiers and street mobs, the CIA had created a degree of violence sufficient to stage a coup. Money changed hands and those hands changed a regime” (92)
This operation was considered a great success.
CIA history re 1953 Berlin tunnel electronic intercepts: “We were never successful in obtaining as many linguists as we needed.” (111)
“The CIA knew none of this. Dulles assured Eisenhower that reports of a joint Israeli-UK-French military plan were absurd. He refused to heed the CIA’s chief intelligence analyst and the American military attaché in Tel Aviv both convinced that Israel was about to go to war against Egypt …” (128)
Wisner in Hungary, during 1956 uprising: “He had told the White Hosue he would create a nationwide underground for political and paramilitary warfare … He had failed completely. The exiles he sent to cross the border from Austria were arrested. The he tried to recruit were liars and thieves. His efforts to create a clandestine reporting network inside Hungary collapsed. He had buried weapons all over Europe, but when the crisis came, no one could find them.” (129)
“Dulles told the president ‘Because of the power of public opinion, armed force could not be effectively used. Approximately 80 percent of the Hungarian army had defected to the rebels and provided the rebels with arms.
But Dulles was dead wrong. The rebels had no guns to speak of. The Hungarian army had not switched sides.” (131)
1958, CIA attempts to overthrow Indonesia’s Sukarno, heretofore believed to be anti-American and pro communism, collapsed when leading American operative is captured with all his identifying documentation after attempting to bomb Indonesian ships, causing US to stage an intelligence and policy reversal. “As quickly as possible, American foreign policy reversed course. The CIA’s reporting instantly reflected the changed. … For the rest of his days in power, Sukarno rarely failed to mention [the US’s attempt coup] He knew the CIA had tried to overthrow his government … The ultimate effect was to strengthen Indonesia’s communists …” (153)
One of the CIA’s “best analysts” in 1958: “we had constructed for ourselves a picture of the USSR, and whatever happened to be made to fit into that picture. Intelligence estimators can hardly commit a more abominable sin.” (154)
“In 1960, the agency .. projected … that the Soviets would have five hundred ICBMs ready to strike by 1961.” Moscow actually had four missiles pointed at the US. (158)
CIA puts Mobutu in power in Congo. (163)
“Long before Nixon created his “plumbers” unit of CIA veterans to stop news leaks, Kennedy used the agency to spy on Americans” (193)
Implies CIA dropped ball on Oswald: “In short, an angry defector who admired Castro, whom the CIA had reason to believe might be a recruited communist agent, who was urgently seeking to return to Moscow via Havana, was staking out the route of the president’s motorcade in Dallas.” (228)
DG: would the CIA have any reason to know the route of the presidential motorcade?
1964: Director McCone wants to get CIA “out of the cloak-and-dagger business” and concentrate on intelligence. “the clandestine service was consuming close to two-thirds of the agency’s budget and 90 percent of McCone’s time.” (239)
Tonkin Gulf: “Within an hour [onseen commander] reported: “ENTIRE ACTION LEAVES MANY DOUBTS.” Ninety minutes later, those doubts vanished in Washington. The NSA told the secretary of defense and the president … that it had intercepted a North Vietnamese naval communiqué reading: “SACRIFICED TWO SHIPS AND ALL THE REST ARE OKAY.”
… “Upon review, the message actually read: “WE SACRIFICED TWO COMRADES BUT ALL ARE BRAVE. … [After a couple of days, NSA reviewed the message and its time of transmission, retranslated it and determined the correct translation; it turned out not to be about the pivotal second clash when US ships were allegedly fired upon, but the first one, two nights earlier] … The NSA buried this salient fact.” (241-2)
“Within the Agency, our failure to penetrate the North Vietnamese government was the single most frustrating aspect of those years. We could not determine what was going on at the highest levels of Ho’s government, nor could we learn how policy was mad or who was making it. [At the root of this failure of intelligence was] our national ignorance of Vietnamese history, society, and language” (244)
After an early setback in Vietnam, the White House orders heavy bombing: “The White House sent an urgent message to Saigon seeking the CIA’s best estimate of the situation. George W. Allen, the most experienced Vietnamese intelligence analyst at the Saigon station, said the enemy would not be deterred by bombs. It was growing stronger. Its will was unbroken. But Ambassador Maxwell Taylor went over the report line by line, methodically deleting each pessimistic paragraph before sending it to the president.”
(247)
“Like almost all who followed him, LBJ liked the agency’s work only if it fit his thinking.” (248)
“Four times in 1965, the Americans destroyed innocent civilian targets in Laos, once bombing a friendly village that Ambassador Sullivan had blessed with a goodwill visit the day before. The bombing run had been called in by Bill Lair, who was trying to rescue a CIA pilot who had touched down in a hot landing zone and was captured by the Pathet Lao. The bombs fell twenty miles from the intended target; the pilot, Ernie Brace, spent eight years as a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton.” (255)
“Yet the CIA’s best analysts had concluded in a book-length study, The Vietnamese Communists’ Will to Persist, sent to the president and perhaps a half dozen top aides, that nothing the United States was doing could defeat the enemy.” (266) But Helms, for no reason other than political pressure to support military’s more optimistic picture, later reduces agency’s estimates of Vietcong in South Vietnam by more than 25% (268)
Helm’s “greatest triumph as director of central intelligence: the CIA’s accurate call of the Six-Day War. (277) (From Israelis through Angelton.)
“Nixon was outraged when the agency argued that the Soviets had neither the intention nor the technology to launch a knockout nuclear first strike [which] flew in the face of Nixon’s plans to build an antiballistic missile system.” In the end, Helms fold to political pressure, “erasing a key passage of the CIA’s most important estimate on Soviet nuclear forces in 1969.” (296)
“Under President Nixon, secret government surveillance reached a peak in the spring of 1971. The CIA, the NSA and the FBI were spying on American citizens.” (318)
1980: “Intelligence analysis had become corrupted – another tool wielded for political advantage – and it would never recover its integrity. The CIA’s estimates had been blatantly politicized since 1969, when President Nixon forced the agency to change its views on the Soviets abilities to launch a first strike.” (352)
“The Soviets would be most reluctant to introduce large numbers of ground forces into Afghanistan,” the CIA’s National Intelligence Daily, its top secret report to the White, the Pentagon, and the State Department, confidently stated on March 23, 1979. That wee, thirty thousand Soviet combat troops began to deploy near the Afghan border in trucks, tanks, and armored personnel carriers.” (365-6)
Success: “ … in January 1980, the agency execute a classic espioage operation to extract six State Department employees who had managed to find refuge across town at the Canadian embassy.” (372)
“When Casey disagree with his analysts, as he often did, he rewrote their conclusions to reflect his views. When told the president, ‘This is what the CIA thinks,’ he meant, ‘This is what I think.’ He chased independent-minded. Let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may analysts out of the CIA.” (379)
Success, plot to sell faulty gas pipeline control software through Canadian shell company to Soviets was “a smashing success” (387)
Iran-Contra, Casey persuades Reagan to make a public statement saying the operation was intended “to foil the Soviets and the terrorists in Iran – not trading weapons for hostages … Once again, as in the U-2 shootdown, as at the Bay of Pigs, as in the war in Central America, the president lied to protect the covert operations of the CIA.” (408)
Successes: uncovers Taiwan ability to build nuclear weapons; destruction of the Abu Nidal terrorist organization, Afghanistan. (419)
After repeatedly saying Saddam was unlikely to invade Kuwait, CIA warned White House that invasion was imminent. “Bush did not believe his CIA.” Hours later, Iraq invaded. (426-7)
Ames: “his personnel records were a chronicle of drunkenness and ineptitude. He had failed upward for seventeen years. In 1985, he had reached a pinnacle: chief of counterintelligence for the Soviet Union and Easter Europe. He was known to be an alcoholic malcontent. Yet the agency gave him access to the files of nearly every important spy working for the United States behind the iron curtain.” (448) “ … he named every name he knew … The agency knew that something had destroyed its Soviet operation. But it took seven years to being to face the facts.” (449) “For eight years, from 1986 to 1994, the senior CIA officers responsible for these reports had known that some of their sources were controlled by Russian intelligence. The agency knowingly gave the White House information manipulated by Moscow – and deliberately concealed the fact.” (450)
1994: “ … a total of three people in the American intelligence community had the linguistic ability to understand excited Muslims talking to each other.” (453)
Guatemala, early 90s: CIA was supporting murderous right wing military dictatorship while unknowing American ambassadors were “preaching human rights and justice.” Guatemalan intelligence provided CIA with tapes of US ambassador engaged in pillow talk with her secretary, Carol Murphy, in the ambassador’s bedroom. CIA spread this report throughout Washington – the “ … CIA had defamed an ambassador by back channels.” Turned out the tapes were of the ambassador talking to her pet poodle.” (459-60)
Agency caught by surprise when India explodes a nuclear bomb. “ … a nuclear blast by the world’s largest democracy should not have come as a shock – but it did. The reporting from the CIA’s station in New Delhi was lazy. The analysis at headquarters was fuzzy. … The test revealed a failure of espionage, a failure to read photographs, a failure to see.” (468)
A few months prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Tenet told the Senate Intelligence committee “’Iraq provided al Qaeda with various kinds of training – combat, bomb-making, and [CBR] and nuclear.’ He based that statement on the confessions of a single source … a fringe player who had been beaten, stuffed in a two-foot-square box for seventeen hours, and threatened with prolonged torture. The prisoner had recanted after the threat of torture receded. Tenet did not correct the record.” (486)`
Powell addressing the UN on 5 Feb 03: “Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” (491) Powell asserted, based on CIA’s “best intelligence” that Saddam had biological weapons, mobile bio-weapons labs and massive stocks of chemical weaponry. (491)
Judge Silberman’s report on CIA’s prewar Iraq intelligence: “The president’s daily briefs … left an impression of many corroborating reports where in fact there were very few … the daily reports seemed to be ‘selling’ intelligence – in order to keep its customers, or at least the First Customer, interested.” (495)
“The clandestine service routinely ‘used different descriptions for the same source,’ so that readers of its reports believed they had three corroborating sources on information when they had one.” (496)
[Porter Goss, upon becoming director] “ … surrounded himself with a team of political hacks he had imported from Capitol Hill. They believed they were on a mission from the White House … to rid the CIA of left wind subversives. It was the perception at headquarters that Goss and his staff … prized loyalty to the president and his policies above all.” (503)
Author: Tim Weiner 2007 514 pp
My rating: 4*
Started June 13 2008, Finished June 21 2008
This book’s discouraging chronicle of the CIA’s history documents a non-stop litany of Agency ineptitude, political kowtowing, lack of oversight and even malfeasance. The salient themes include:
The CIA’s failure to accurately fulfill its primary mission of intelligence gathering resulting in failure to predict many of the major events of the last sixty years including: the development of the A-Bomb by the USSR, the invasion of South Korea by the North Koreans and subsequent Chinese entry into the war, almost anything involving Vietnam, the fall of the Shah, the collapse of the Soviet Union and various terrorist strikes against the US.
Covert operations which, especially in the agency’s early years, drained resources and usually spectacularly failed to meet their objectives though when they did succeed it was towards a goal which at this historical remove usually seems strategically counterproductive and often morally reprehensible e.g. the overthrow of Mossadeq in Iran.
Presidents who ignored the agency unless it told them what they wanted to hear. The only presidents who come across as somewhat effective and concerned in their interactions with the agency are Eisenhower and Carter. Nixon and Clinton come off particularly unfavorably.
The tendency of the later agency directors to tailor reports – corrupt the intelligence – in order to curry favor with the current president, a trend which culminated most disastrously for the US in the intelligence concocted to justify the US invasion of Iraq.
Lack of institutional controls and processes resulting in mistakes being repeated across the tenures of multiple directors: to this day, the agency lacks sufficient linguists to translate essential intercepts from the most prominent threats, moles and double agents were never effectively dealt with and covert operation seem a series of criminally wasteful rogue actions from beginning to end.
This book is certainly worthwhile reading for the concerned citizen, but to my mind it had significant weaknesses. The author is a writer for the New York Times, not an historian which perhaps is why the book occasionally comes across as somewhat rushed and unbalanced and lacking in historical perspective. In particular, the agency’s few successes are generally not discussed as thoroughly as the far more numerous failures and events are sometimes dropped after the author has made his point, even though the reader would like to know more about how they played out – this is a book that would have justified at double the length. A strength and a weakness of the book is its reliance for sources upon interviews with and the memoirs of high ranking current and former personnel, particularly directors, and internal agency histories and documents. While these sources impart a great deal of credibility to Weiner’s arguments, they often come off, no matter how badly the reflect on the CIA, as self-serving; the book could have used more outside observations, perhaps from congressmen who dealt with the agency and historians. A definite though lesser strength of the book is its self-documenting: 153 pages of thoroughly detailed endnotes.
“All told, hundreds of the CIA’s foreign agents were sent to their deaths in Russia, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and the Baltic States during the 1950s. Their fates were unrecorded; no accounts were kept and no penalty assessed for their failure.” (47)
[1950] “… the agency had misread every global crisis of the past year: the Soviet atom bomb, the Korean War, the Chinese invasion.” (52)
“… almost all the secret information the agency gathered during the [Korean] war had been manufactured by the North Korean and Chinese security services.” (57)
[During Korean War] “The ability to represent failure as success was becoming a CIA tradition. The agency’s unwillingness to learn from its mistakes became a permanent part of its culture. The CIA’s covert operators never wrote “lessons-learned” studies. Even today there are few if any rules or procedures for producing them.” (58)
[Overthrow of Mossadeq] By renting the allegiances of soldiers and street mobs, the CIA had created a degree of violence sufficient to stage a coup. Money changed hands and those hands changed a regime” (92)
This operation was considered a great success.
CIA history re 1953 Berlin tunnel electronic intercepts: “We were never successful in obtaining as many linguists as we needed.” (111)
“The CIA knew none of this. Dulles assured Eisenhower that reports of a joint Israeli-UK-French military plan were absurd. He refused to heed the CIA’s chief intelligence analyst and the American military attaché in Tel Aviv both convinced that Israel was about to go to war against Egypt …” (128)
Wisner in Hungary, during 1956 uprising: “He had told the White Hosue he would create a nationwide underground for political and paramilitary warfare … He had failed completely. The exiles he sent to cross the border from Austria were arrested. The he tried to recruit were liars and thieves. His efforts to create a clandestine reporting network inside Hungary collapsed. He had buried weapons all over Europe, but when the crisis came, no one could find them.” (129)
“Dulles told the president ‘Because of the power of public opinion, armed force could not be effectively used. Approximately 80 percent of the Hungarian army had defected to the rebels and provided the rebels with arms.
But Dulles was dead wrong. The rebels had no guns to speak of. The Hungarian army had not switched sides.” (131)
1958, CIA attempts to overthrow Indonesia’s Sukarno, heretofore believed to be anti-American and pro communism, collapsed when leading American operative is captured with all his identifying documentation after attempting to bomb Indonesian ships, causing US to stage an intelligence and policy reversal. “As quickly as possible, American foreign policy reversed course. The CIA’s reporting instantly reflected the changed. … For the rest of his days in power, Sukarno rarely failed to mention [the US’s attempt coup] He knew the CIA had tried to overthrow his government … The ultimate effect was to strengthen Indonesia’s communists …” (153)
One of the CIA’s “best analysts” in 1958: “we had constructed for ourselves a picture of the USSR, and whatever happened to be made to fit into that picture. Intelligence estimators can hardly commit a more abominable sin.” (154)
“In 1960, the agency .. projected … that the Soviets would have five hundred ICBMs ready to strike by 1961.” Moscow actually had four missiles pointed at the US. (158)
CIA puts Mobutu in power in Congo. (163)
“Long before Nixon created his “plumbers” unit of CIA veterans to stop news leaks, Kennedy used the agency to spy on Americans” (193)
Implies CIA dropped ball on Oswald: “In short, an angry defector who admired Castro, whom the CIA had reason to believe might be a recruited communist agent, who was urgently seeking to return to Moscow via Havana, was staking out the route of the president’s motorcade in Dallas.” (228)
DG: would the CIA have any reason to know the route of the presidential motorcade?
1964: Director McCone wants to get CIA “out of the cloak-and-dagger business” and concentrate on intelligence. “the clandestine service was consuming close to two-thirds of the agency’s budget and 90 percent of McCone’s time.” (239)
Tonkin Gulf: “Within an hour [onseen commander] reported: “ENTIRE ACTION LEAVES MANY DOUBTS.” Ninety minutes later, those doubts vanished in Washington. The NSA told the secretary of defense and the president … that it had intercepted a North Vietnamese naval communiqué reading: “SACRIFICED TWO SHIPS AND ALL THE REST ARE OKAY.”
… “Upon review, the message actually read: “WE SACRIFICED TWO COMRADES BUT ALL ARE BRAVE. … [After a couple of days, NSA reviewed the message and its time of transmission, retranslated it and determined the correct translation; it turned out not to be about the pivotal second clash when US ships were allegedly fired upon, but the first one, two nights earlier] … The NSA buried this salient fact.” (241-2)
“Within the Agency, our failure to penetrate the North Vietnamese government was the single most frustrating aspect of those years. We could not determine what was going on at the highest levels of Ho’s government, nor could we learn how policy was mad or who was making it. [At the root of this failure of intelligence was] our national ignorance of Vietnamese history, society, and language” (244)
After an early setback in Vietnam, the White House orders heavy bombing: “The White House sent an urgent message to Saigon seeking the CIA’s best estimate of the situation. George W. Allen, the most experienced Vietnamese intelligence analyst at the Saigon station, said the enemy would not be deterred by bombs. It was growing stronger. Its will was unbroken. But Ambassador Maxwell Taylor went over the report line by line, methodically deleting each pessimistic paragraph before sending it to the president.”
(247)
“Like almost all who followed him, LBJ liked the agency’s work only if it fit his thinking.” (248)
“Four times in 1965, the Americans destroyed innocent civilian targets in Laos, once bombing a friendly village that Ambassador Sullivan had blessed with a goodwill visit the day before. The bombing run had been called in by Bill Lair, who was trying to rescue a CIA pilot who had touched down in a hot landing zone and was captured by the Pathet Lao. The bombs fell twenty miles from the intended target; the pilot, Ernie Brace, spent eight years as a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton.” (255)
“Yet the CIA’s best analysts had concluded in a book-length study, The Vietnamese Communists’ Will to Persist, sent to the president and perhaps a half dozen top aides, that nothing the United States was doing could defeat the enemy.” (266) But Helms, for no reason other than political pressure to support military’s more optimistic picture, later reduces agency’s estimates of Vietcong in South Vietnam by more than 25% (268)
Helm’s “greatest triumph as director of central intelligence: the CIA’s accurate call of the Six-Day War. (277) (From Israelis through Angelton.)
“Nixon was outraged when the agency argued that the Soviets had neither the intention nor the technology to launch a knockout nuclear first strike [which] flew in the face of Nixon’s plans to build an antiballistic missile system.” In the end, Helms fold to political pressure, “erasing a key passage of the CIA’s most important estimate on Soviet nuclear forces in 1969.” (296)
“Under President Nixon, secret government surveillance reached a peak in the spring of 1971. The CIA, the NSA and the FBI were spying on American citizens.” (318)
1980: “Intelligence analysis had become corrupted – another tool wielded for political advantage – and it would never recover its integrity. The CIA’s estimates had been blatantly politicized since 1969, when President Nixon forced the agency to change its views on the Soviets abilities to launch a first strike.” (352)
“The Soviets would be most reluctant to introduce large numbers of ground forces into Afghanistan,” the CIA’s National Intelligence Daily, its top secret report to the White, the Pentagon, and the State Department, confidently stated on March 23, 1979. That wee, thirty thousand Soviet combat troops began to deploy near the Afghan border in trucks, tanks, and armored personnel carriers.” (365-6)
Success: “ … in January 1980, the agency execute a classic espioage operation to extract six State Department employees who had managed to find refuge across town at the Canadian embassy.” (372)
“When Casey disagree with his analysts, as he often did, he rewrote their conclusions to reflect his views. When told the president, ‘This is what the CIA thinks,’ he meant, ‘This is what I think.’ He chased independent-minded. Let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may analysts out of the CIA.” (379)
Success, plot to sell faulty gas pipeline control software through Canadian shell company to Soviets was “a smashing success” (387)
Iran-Contra, Casey persuades Reagan to make a public statement saying the operation was intended “to foil the Soviets and the terrorists in Iran – not trading weapons for hostages … Once again, as in the U-2 shootdown, as at the Bay of Pigs, as in the war in Central America, the president lied to protect the covert operations of the CIA.” (408)
Successes: uncovers Taiwan ability to build nuclear weapons; destruction of the Abu Nidal terrorist organization, Afghanistan. (419)
After repeatedly saying Saddam was unlikely to invade Kuwait, CIA warned White House that invasion was imminent. “Bush did not believe his CIA.” Hours later, Iraq invaded. (426-7)
Ames: “his personnel records were a chronicle of drunkenness and ineptitude. He had failed upward for seventeen years. In 1985, he had reached a pinnacle: chief of counterintelligence for the Soviet Union and Easter Europe. He was known to be an alcoholic malcontent. Yet the agency gave him access to the files of nearly every important spy working for the United States behind the iron curtain.” (448) “ … he named every name he knew … The agency knew that something had destroyed its Soviet operation. But it took seven years to being to face the facts.” (449) “For eight years, from 1986 to 1994, the senior CIA officers responsible for these reports had known that some of their sources were controlled by Russian intelligence. The agency knowingly gave the White House information manipulated by Moscow – and deliberately concealed the fact.” (450)
1994: “ … a total of three people in the American intelligence community had the linguistic ability to understand excited Muslims talking to each other.” (453)
Guatemala, early 90s: CIA was supporting murderous right wing military dictatorship while unknowing American ambassadors were “preaching human rights and justice.” Guatemalan intelligence provided CIA with tapes of US ambassador engaged in pillow talk with her secretary, Carol Murphy, in the ambassador’s bedroom. CIA spread this report throughout Washington – the “ … CIA had defamed an ambassador by back channels.” Turned out the tapes were of the ambassador talking to her pet poodle.” (459-60)
Agency caught by surprise when India explodes a nuclear bomb. “ … a nuclear blast by the world’s largest democracy should not have come as a shock – but it did. The reporting from the CIA’s station in New Delhi was lazy. The analysis at headquarters was fuzzy. … The test revealed a failure of espionage, a failure to read photographs, a failure to see.” (468)
A few months prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Tenet told the Senate Intelligence committee “’Iraq provided al Qaeda with various kinds of training – combat, bomb-making, and [CBR] and nuclear.’ He based that statement on the confessions of a single source … a fringe player who had been beaten, stuffed in a two-foot-square box for seventeen hours, and threatened with prolonged torture. The prisoner had recanted after the threat of torture receded. Tenet did not correct the record.” (486)`
Powell addressing the UN on 5 Feb 03: “Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” (491) Powell asserted, based on CIA’s “best intelligence” that Saddam had biological weapons, mobile bio-weapons labs and massive stocks of chemical weaponry. (491)
Judge Silberman’s report on CIA’s prewar Iraq intelligence: “The president’s daily briefs … left an impression of many corroborating reports where in fact there were very few … the daily reports seemed to be ‘selling’ intelligence – in order to keep its customers, or at least the First Customer, interested.” (495)
“The clandestine service routinely ‘used different descriptions for the same source,’ so that readers of its reports believed they had three corroborating sources on information when they had one.” (496)
[Porter Goss, upon becoming director] “ … surrounded himself with a team of political hacks he had imported from Capitol Hill. They believed they were on a mission from the White House … to rid the CIA of left wind subversives. It was the perception at headquarters that Goss and his staff … prized loyalty to the president and his policies above all.” (503)
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