THE REAL CIA

[First a note on OBL, as so many of you have asked:  how can the Bin Laden audio tape be real when I said he died last December?  Two comments.  Why do we never get to see this guy?  Why is there never a video like with Zawahiri or Zarqawi?  It’s much easier to fake audio than video.  Yet the bottom line now is I don’t know.  My sources in Iran are very – very – well placed.  They all swear OBL died early December 2005, and tell me they have been to his grave site.  They are mystified by this tape and doubt it’s for real.  But they are checking, and I’ll let you know what they know. —ML]

You just don’t get it, but it’s all so obvious. I mean, we had to do something, so I set it up."

I had finally gotten through via my broken-down ouija board to my old friend, the late James Jesus Angleton, for many years the head of CIA’s counterintelligence operations, and I had asked him about the Mary McCarthy story. I had expected him to be furious at the discovery that a CIA officer was meeting with Washington journalists, contrary to agency policy.

ML: Huh? What’s that supposed to mean? You telling me you’re responsible for setting up McCarthy’s conversations with Dana Priest? You’ve been dead for a long time, how could you manage that from, uh, where you’re at?

JJA: You might put it that way. It all goes back to Watergate, of course, which hardly anybody understands. Haven’t I explained it to you?

ML: No, but it’s never too late, go for it.

JJA: Well you know how Nixon hated the CIA, he thought we were all a bunch of effete Ivy League intellectuals who despised him, a simple soul from a Quaker background, etc., and he didn’t trust CIA analyses.

ML: Okay, nothing new there. When I was in the Reagan administration there was general distrust of those analyses too.

JJA: Right, especially the stuff about the Soviets, which invariably put the most benign possible interpretation on their actions. Part of that came from the instincts of the analysts, but part of it came from the actions of the KGB, both abroad and, to a frightening degree, within the CIA.

Our shop had identified many likely KGB and GRU moles inside CIA, and some of our people wanted to start a very aggressive mole hunt, but Nixon wouldn’t hear of it, despite his antipathy to the place.

ML: Because of political fallout?

JJA: Yes, there was that – the ACLU and the 1st Amendment extremists would have been all over it, arguing that it was just an excuse for the politicization of intelligence, suppression of dissent, and so forth – but there were also the practical considerations, which I shared: the place was so riddled with penetrations that we’d never be able to feel confident we’d solved the problem.

Second, any investigation would risk blowing the cover of the good operations we were running against the Soviets, and third, the publicity would worry our allies, who would cut back on their cooperation with us.

ML: Yeah, and meanwhile there were congressional investigations, endless leaks to the press…

JJA: Exactly. In essence, we were being deprived of the most important thing for a secret intelligence service: the ability to protect our sources and methods. Without that, you just can’t have good intelligence.

ML: Haha, CIA had to reveal its most secret activities, but meanwhile the press was claiming an absolute right to protect their sources and methods…Hoho.

JJA: You figured it out, well done.

ML: Huh?

JJA: I mean, you couldn’t run a secret intelligence service at CIA, but you could do it at a newspaper. Congress could pry all the secrets out of Langley, but nobody could ask Jack Anderson for his sources.

ML: Well now they can, even though he’s in your neighborhood, heh. The FBI guys are trying to go through his documents.

JJA: Yes, I heard that from a source here. But anyway, back in the Seventies the press had absolute protection of sources and methods, and the government didn’t. We couldn’t do a serious internal investigation, but we had to do something about the massive penetration of CIA. The solution was obvious: Relocate our serious operations to the media.

ML: Reporters as agents?

JJA: You don’t actually need to recruit reporters, they act like intelligence agents anyway. All you really need is editors, and Mrs. Graham was happy to cooperate, which made it easy. Ben Bradlee fancied himself a great patriot, and he worked closely with me. We just tasked their reporters with collection requirements, and they filed their stories, just like always. Bradlee made sure the really sensitive stuff never made it into print.

ML: But the Post brought down Nixon…

JJA: Of course, in fact Bradlee chose the two agents personally when we decided Nixon had to go.

ML: What say??? I thought Nixon was with you.

JJA: Well, no. This sort of thing has to be done by the professionals, you can’t bring in the short-termers, even the ones that are going to be there maybe eight years. The problem was that Nixon was just too smart for his own good. With all his contempt for CIA, he still noticed the dropoff in reporting when we moved clandestine collection from Langley to the Washington Post, and he started to snoop around with those annoying pseudo spooks of his, Hunt and Liddy.

ML: So Nixon was brought down to protect the real CIA, which was on 15th Street, not in northern Virginia?

JJA: Right. He was getting too close. And we had to get rid of some others, too, you know, people who would have figured it out, like that Sorenson guy who Carter wanted to make DCI. He never knew what hit him, and we managed to get Stan Turner to Langley. What a dolt he was! But there was no chance he’d notice that he wasn’t getting anything except Soviet disinformation and rewritten newspaper stories from the operations directorate.

ML: So nobody should be surprised if the "journalists" get better information than the "professionals."

JJA: Not at all, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Over time, we signed up editors at the New York Times and other publications.

ML: And McCarthy? If CIA were utterly gutted, how could she have known anything worth passing to the Post?

JJA: Well, in reality it worked the other way around. Notice that she says she didn’t provide any classified information, which is probably technically true, since she got the information from the Post in the first place.

ML: I don’t quite follow…

JJA: The classified information is in the real "company," and controlled by the editors, using the reporters as agents. Somebody at the Post, excuse me if I don’t give you the name, but it’s classified, told a reporter, apparently Priest (but also others, as the CIA’s press statements make clear), about the "rendition" business, and that’s how McCarthy learned about it.

McCarthy was able to confirm it. I mean, they are not totally out of the loop, they can check things…and we have people in key positions at Justice and the NSC who are happy to confirm…

ML: So this whole war against Bush is a replay of the Nixon thing?

JJA: Yes, precisely. Bush got so annoyed with CIA – after all those commissions revealed that CIA didn’t know anything about anything – that he got too curious about it all, and we decided there was a real risk of having the whole operation blown.

ML: And you’ve stayed in touch…from here?

JJA: You never heard of divine inspiration?

I’m not superstitious about these things, but he cut out as soon as he pronounced those words, and I haven’t been able to get back to him for several days.