Angleton on Dennis Blair
“Early on, there was an admiral at the head of the CIA, and he was widely regarded as a buffoon. It was pretty much an article of faith in the old days that you shouldn’t have a seaman running the Agency. Army was ok (General Smith was great), but no Navy.”
I was chatting with my old friend, the late James Jesus Angleton, via the ouija board, and it was working very well. The blossoms are out in Washington, and I was a bit worried about interference, but I needn’t have. Anyway, for once JJA was a bit imprecise. He was talking about Admiral Raborn, who was indeed badmouthed by Agency old hands for many years. But he’d apparently forgotten Roscoe Henry Hillenkoetter, another admiral, who had headed up the Central Intelligence Group until the CIA was created by the National Security Act in 1947. This largely unknown man served honorably and seemingly effectively for nearly three and a half years, and was succeeded by General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s wartime chief of staff. They were all military guys until Allen Dulles succeeded Smith.
ML: “We’re kind of reverting to our earlier form, aren’t we? It’s all military guys nowadays, and plenty of admirals…both in the Intelligence Community and at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where Admiral Mullen is firmly in charge, headed for a second term. And of course we’ve got Admiral Dennis Blair at the top of the pyramid, he’s the Director of National Intelligence.”
JJA: “Yeah. And he succeeds another admiral, Mike McConnell. And let’s not forget Admiral Stansfield Turner, Jimmy Carter’s DCI. What a disaster he was! He tore up the clandestine service, bragged about hiring women and minorities, and was so nutsy that some of the guys put out a phony memo over his signature, modeled on Captain Queeg’s obsession with a bowl of strawberries.”
ML: “So you’re probably skeptical about Admiral Blair, huh?”
JJA: “You bet. And he hasn’t done much to reassure me. There was that silly attempt to make Chas Freeman the head of the National Intelligence Council, for example.”
ML: “Yes, it doesn’t look good when one of your first big appointments gets blown up in the Congress. And then the guy goes ballistic, accusing ‘agents of a foreign power’ of having brought him down.”
JJA: “Ah, yes, that would be the Jewish lobby, I mean the Israel lobby, wouldn’t it? But the person who pulled the plug on Freeman was a Catholic woman from San Francisco, Speaker Pelosi. And I don’t think her decision had much to do with Israel policy, it had to do with China. Freeman had been ambassador there, and couldn’t bring himself to criticize the repression of the democratic dissidents. On the contrary, he blamed Beijing for being insufficiently vicious.”
ML: “You agree?”
JJA: “Well I have a different sort of objection altogether. I don’t want intelligence officers to make policy. That’s not their job. And Freeman was a policy person, not an intelligence expert. And he said lots of things that led me to think he would have been a terrible intelligence officer.”
ML: “For example…”
JJA: “For example, he bragged
I’m a very practical man, and my concern is simply this: that there are movements, like Hamas, like Hezbollah, that in recent decades have not done anything against the United States or Americans, even though the United States supports their enemy, Israel.
That betrays a colossal ignorance of Hezbollah’s role in Iraq.”
ML: “And how! We’ve captured many Hezbollah terrorists in Iraq. And if I remember rightly, an American court recently ordered Iran to pay $25 million to an American family whose son was kidnaped and murdered by Hamas.”
Cicero long ago wrote that the very best method of communicating serious ideas is to write them in a dialogue. What a wondeful post, Dr. Ledeen.
Very interesting and true.
I think Blair has already turned out to be a big disappointment after all. This guy steals the ball on Iran and the Al-Qaeda terrorists in Gitmo. On Iran, he is practically saying to the mullahs :
“Hey, if you set aside the nuke thing, we(the US) are not only going to recognize you and give you all sorts of legitimacy as a regime(oh, and yeah,by the way too: we will also stop calling you ‘regime’ afterwards)–but we(the US) will actually help you become ‘secure’(translation: we won’t try to topple your regime, note: as if they have been trying so far!–…and not only that, but we(the US) will also give you money and economic aid and make you the “super power of the region”(the fantasy that mullahs have wet dreams about.)
Who’s side is this Blair guy on? This is typical of the eager deal-maker appeasers who ultimately score goals against their own team. But IS he in or team?
Obama is sure surrounding himself with terrible advisors, and I thought Condi sucked!
What’s Angleton saying about the Kremlin and the SCO these days?
““HE JUST TOSSES IT OFF:”
Taking that in the British sense there’s a lot he just tosses off.
I agree with “a Duoist,” (well, Cicero).. Whenever I want to know the counterpoint to a point — or a counter-counterpoint — writing it in dialogue is an easy way to see it formulate. These convos with Angleton are always interesting.
Oh Michael,I really miss your ouija board and the chatting with JJA.
ML: “Cigars are different.”
JJA: “That’s what Freud thought, and look how he ended up.”
ROFL! Thanks Michael! That Ouija board has bandwidth.
Lost your e-mail address so this is off topice-
Is Gabe Ledeen your son-saw article in JPost.
Also
Mike:
I’m becoming more and more convinced that the biggest threat to Israel is not the Arabs-but the lazy parasitic Haredi who used to be a pleasant zoo one visited on a trip to Israel but now suck the lifeblood out of the secular society and make unreasonable demands. They try to define who and what is a Jew. This nonsense about harassing the Pope at the Kotel is unbelievable.
I think the problem is that Israeli Governments, whether you like them or not, in the final analysis, and the population in general can deal with the Arabs.but a kind of guilt from non-observant Jews allows the Haredi to sponge off and direct Israeli society.
Is also becoming more prevalent in the Diaspora where normal good Jewish kids are becoming lazy torah scholars in schools funded by Jewish Federations.
In St. Louis the Haredi won’t even attend the Yom Hashoah ceremony because there will be a female cantor.
Why am I wrong?
Angleton singlehandedly crippled US intelligence with his childish obsessions. He would have been a star in a Stalinist police apparatus, because he instinctively fed his own people into the meat grinder of groundless, whispered accusations.
So naturally, Ledeen makes him the hero. It’s the standard neocon method: pick the worst possible side and push it, even when it’s obviously a bad idea.
Re. Ira Zad’s post, I wish all we were offering is a trade where Iran won’t get nuclear weapons and we won’t undermine their regime. As awful as the latter is for the people of Iran, who are we kidding? If Bush didn’t overthrow the regime, the current administration will? Hah. No Iranian nukes for us agreeing not to do something we won’t do anyway is a great deal for us.
But Iran knows that, too. So Iran will pretend to offer to halt all efforts to get nuclear weapons, and we’ll pretend to believe them and unlock sanctions and ship over all the other carrots we have thought of.
Iran is on the path to getting nuclear weapons and we spend all our time debating amongst ourselves about exactly where on that path Iran is. Amazing.
Sir,
I was under the impression that JJA switched to Virginia Slims towards the end of his life…
Also Mr/Ms Rogers—in spite of his many faults, JJA more or less founded most modern CI techniques. Your lack of knowledge is showing a bit. Best of luck with that!
Brian, I agree, the regime is more fortified from the outside: by EU and US than it has ever been in its 30-year nasty existence. And the shame of it is that this full, unconditional appeasement by the west is happening exactly at the time when the regime has very weak support inside of Iran and is despised by most all Iranians.
That shows our lack of acuity in recognizing when to offer carrots and when to pull the trigger. Shame on us for bending to the Islamist head terrorist of the world, Iran.
More evidence of this accelerated US “appeasement galore” policy towards the Islamic Republic of Turbaned Terrorist Turds of Tehran surfaces(pun intended) every day.
For example, look what L.A.Times brought in today; the same aforementioned crap that the lunatic left L.A.Times has the audacity(of Hope?) to print:
“Change is mandatory for the U.S. administration. For as history demonstrates, either you change, or you are forced to change.”
– By Ali Akbar Javanfekr who is the presidential advisor for press affairs to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
So basically L.A.Times is giving an Op-Ed space to the right hand man of Hitler. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6009880.ece?Submitted=true
I have said it before, and I say it again now: our only hope to derail this obvious process of the legalization and legitimization of the Iranian regime by EU & US are either the rising of Iranian people themselves to topple the regime, or Netanyahu and Leiberman. No other way left.
The rest of the options we are seeing today will surely lead to disaster for Iran’s secular democracy.
I said yestersay(above): “…either the rising of Iranian people themselves to topple the regime, or Netanyahu and Leiberman. No other way left.”
Well one of those “ways” just went up in odds ten-fold today; Here We Go: http://www.newsmax.com/headlines/netanyahu_obama_iran/2009/04/02/198955.html
Well, after all, there’s so much appeasement of, and softy weakness towards the mullahs by US that any red-blooded Israeli or for that matter any red-blooded Iranian could take. Let’s hope that if the bombings do happen(which there is increasing likelihood that they will), it will be a trigger for the Iranian people to finally rise up in droves against the Islamic Republic of Terrorists in Tehran and ultimately topple it.
After seeing Obama and Hillary in action, it’s refreshing to see there are still clear-headed leaders in the world who are not into making deals with evil and see facts as they are clearly.
You can’t love evil, you can’t accommodate evil, you can only destroy evil.
Post 14 Irad:
If you were going to attack someone within the near future would you broadcast it to the world? Bibi’s statements indicate Israel will do nothing at the moment and since the window of opportunity is closing it is unlikely Israel will do a thing. Furthermore doing it effectively is another story.
The next strategy is containment. Good luck world.