24 October 2005

Coming Ashore

Hurricane Wilma has finally made up her mind and is coming ashore today. She took her sweet time beating up Mexico , but now she is moving purposefully toward the Citrus State , hitting the Keys now, pushing a storm surge at high tide of up to eighteen feet. She is moving at forty knots, like a freight train. Add that speed to the winds on the front, and subtract it from the back.

Insistent.

Of course, she is not the only storm coming ashore. There is a storm surge in the affairs of men, or at least those of the Administration. Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, the President and Vice president's men, respectively, are in the eye of the storm for a moment. But that will only last a day or so, and then they will be tossed like everyone else.

Prosecutor Fitzgerald is driving this storm, and only he knows which way he will go.

It started as a sort of comic opera thing, typical of Karl's character assassination tactics that he brought from Texas . He is a master of personal destruction, allowing the Boss to remain above the fray. It seemed like a small enough deal, the disclosure of the identity of Valerie Plame as a member of the Directorate of Operations at CIA.

The part of the equation that has been missing is the "why" of it, and why it seems as though there has been a war between Langley and the White House. Certainly the Agency had its critics, and some of them were well earned. But the Agency itself had been eaten up. The wild cowboy years of the 1960s had piled up the ammunition that resulted in the Pike and the Church Commissions in Congress.

Oh, the days! There were honey-traps and alcohol in Wshington, raising sunken Soviet submarines from the seafloor. James Bond himself would have seemed a bit staid in those whiskey-soaked days.

The Agency had alumni on Nixon's Plumbers, and there are still whispers about the role of the spooks in Watergate and other matters. Certainly the black-bag trade-craft that was used in the Ellsberg break-in and the Watergate came from a combination of the FBI and Langley business.

The tower pile of dirty laundry finally collapsed in the spotlight of the Pike and the Church Commissions on the Hill. The public disclosure of the Crown Jewels, carefully collected by the DCI, blew things wide open. It made the institution so necessary to a series of Presidents seem to be a rogue agency, rather than a creature of its executive masters.

The Church Commission and the election of pious Jimmy Carter brought Stansfield Turner to the Agency, with a mandate to clean house. That he did in the famous Halloween Massacre of 1977, when 820 Directorate of Operations billets were cut.

Many here in town point to that as the moment the heart was cut out of America 's spies, and when they ceased to be cowboys and became cautious managers. Only 17 case officers were actually fired, but hundreds were re-assigned.  I t was an effective neutering, none-the-less. Turner was a methodical sailor, and he believed that intelligence could be collected safely and sanitarily from the heavens.

The weakness of this approach against the terrorists is clear now, and in a way it accounts for the war between the White House and Langley.

Not that they have not tried to defend themselves. One former CIA official made statements to prosecutors in the Valerie Plame investigation that implicated senior officials around the Vice President, But that in turn goes back to the early days of the Administration, after the decision had been made to go to war, but before the case for it had been made to the public.

Martyr-journalist Judith Miller said in the Times last weekend that Mr. Cheney's Chief of Staff "Scooter" Libby complained to her that CIA was engaged in "selective leaking" and a "hedging strategy" that would make the agency look good, regardless of how the search for weapons of mass destruction turned out.

And of course, that was only tangential to the reason that the war was necessary. That was decided by the Iraq Group in the White House and at the Pentagon. Never let facts confuse policy.

Mr. Cheney felt that he was burned by the Agency, and the election campaign against Mr. Kerry didn't help anything. Word around town was that the Agency might as well have put a "Kerry for President" sign in front of the gate on the George Washington Parkway .

That is never a good way to start an Administration. In short order, George Tenent was gone, and then his top deputies, and Porter Goss was in. He brought the senior staff of the House Intelligence Committee with him, to clean the house at Langley.

But shortly Mr. Goss was stripped of the leadership of the Community and was rendered just another Director of a Federal Agency. Responsibility for spying was divided into Justice and Defense and CIA functions. Agency Station Chiefs overseas were reminded that they reported to the new Director of National Intelligence.

The brain-drain is continuing at the Agency. And even if Karl Rove and Scooter Libby are not indicted, there is no going back to the way things were.

I asked a member of the 9/11 Commission one time if the intent of the recommendations had been the destruction of the CIA. There was some hemming and hawing, and the answer finally was “Well, not exactly.”

But from here, that is exactly what it looks like. And the storm is just coming ashore today.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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