Author Archives: johnprados

Where in the world is Mike Pompeo

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June 19, 2017–Like Carmen Sandiego, no one seems to know where in the world is Mike Pompeo, the current director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). I say this not in jest. Pompeo has been placed in a number of places where President Donald J. Trump has major interests, including in South Korea, just after the latest eruptions from Kim Jong-un in the north; in Syria-Saudi Arabia, in the context of the U.S. covert operations against ISIS/ISIL, and so on. Director Pompeo has specifically been placed at the White House with Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats when Mr. Trump took aside the top spooks and reportedly implored Director Coats to try and tamp down on then-FBI director James B. Comey. The Senate intelligence committee is bending every effort to obtain testimony from Coats, but so far there is complete silence on Mr. Pompeo. It is as if the CIA has divorced itself from oversight and accountability. In fact I argue this precise case in my forthcoming book The Ghosts of Langley. There you will find extensive discussion on this matter.

Score a Point for Openness

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June 17, 2017–Every so often the public gets to crow about something that is a real advance for transparency and openness in government. This is especially welcome during these days when plots, counterplots, and maneuvers swirl around us relying upon secrecy. Today’s point concerns the State Department documentary records series called the Foreign Relations of the United States. This series of bound volumes and, more recently, electronic versions, constitutes the official record of American diplomacy. You can find sets of it at good libraries. Multiple volumes focus on each region of the world, and on some global topics, for each American president. Kudos to the State Department Historian, his staff, the Historical Advisory Panel, and declassification authorities at the State Department and the CIA.

This story concerns President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Iran. Back in the first year of Ike’s presidency (1953), he ordered a CIA covert operation that overthrew the legally-installed prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh. In 1989 the State Department published a FRUS volume that pretended there was no CIA role in the fall of the Iranian leader–a populist by the way. By that time, however, the spooks’ covert operation had become pretty widely known–for example I had written of it at some length in my book, first published in 1986, called Presidents’ Secret Wars—and the FRUS volume was met by derision.

A panel of historians advises the State Department on maintaining the FRUS as our authoritative record. The panel not only guffawed at the volume, it told the Historical Office to redo its sums and produce a new FRUS volume properly recounting the story. When State demurred, the historians lobbied Congress, with the eventual result that today it is a matter of statute that the FRUS series must reflect the activities of all U.S. agencies and must be truly “authoritative,” starting with a new Iran 1953 volume.

Eventually the Iran volume would be supplemented by one, just as long, which contained the hidden history. That volume went into declassification review in the late 1990s. There it sat. And sat. And sat. And sat. Mind you, this was at a time when President Bill Clinton had instituted secrecy rules providing that, with narrow exceptions, all documents older that 25 years should immediately be declassified. Iran 1953 was already past that. As the FRUS volume languished, an internal history of the CIA operation leaked to the public. Later a similar account was declassified. From time to time historians, including my colleague Malcolm Byrne of the National Security Archive, advocated for release of the FRUS. The State Department actually did release two other FRUS volumes on CIA covert operations–on Guatemala in 1954 and on the Congo in the 1960, plus a dual-volume on Cuba which covered the Bay of Pigs and more–while the Iran records sat in the secret vault. Until two days ago, June 15, 2017. The Iran volume has finally emerged!

A look at the final product shows that there’s work still to be done. The FRUS volume has 10 CIA documents that were wholly deleted, 38 which contain deletions of more than a paragraph, and 80 that have lesser redactions. This amounts to a large percentage of the material that covers the actual CIA coup. More to the point, it includes the operative portions of the project planning papers, the detail of CIA monthly reports, and much more. The new FRUS volume is a great advance over what we had before, but the redactions make it plain the CIA believes it can still live in a world of secrecy.

More on Contempt of Congress

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June 16, 2017–Today’s New York Times responds directly to the posts here yesterday and two days ago (“Obstruction Starts to Come into Focus,” June 15; “Jeff Sessions’ Looking Glass,” June 14) about contempt of Congress. Correspondent Charlie Savage enlightens us on the details (his article is titled “On Executive Privilege and Sessions’ Refusal to Answer Questions”). Justice Department officials dragged up two pieces of paper to show an explicit claim to–let’s call it “potential-presumptive executive privilege,” where the president had asserted no such claim but the individual resisting answering an inquiry uses it as authority to refuse an answer.

Both these documents date from 1982. Only one was presidential–President Ronald Reagan signed a directive in November 1982 governing response procedures for “this administration.” On the face of it Reagan’s assertion had no power on any other president. Moreover, the “policy” was swept away in the Iran-Contra Affair.

The second document was a paper from Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), an August 1982 memo titled “Confidentiality of the Attorney General’s Communications in Counseling the President.” The OLC paper carved out a legal argument for presumptive privilege, but, Charlie Savage reports, it never addressed to the specifics of refusing to answer questions when under oath. OLC is also the entity that produced the notorious “torture memos” of the George W. Bush administration. There are two points to make here. First, here is a fresh example of why OLC papers are way overvalued when people attribute the power of court opinions to them. Second, the Reagan-era OLC opinion had no weight after January 1989. Other administrations needed to have joined with Reagan to make this a “longstanding policy.” Bottom Line: there is no such authority.

The Times also refers to an event of the Obama presidency as another exercise of the “potential privilege” power. This came during the Senate intelligence committee’s investigation of the CIA torture program, when agency officers hacked Senate committee computers and removed 10,000 pages of documents from them which the CIA had previously furnished to the Senate. (You will be able to read much more about this episode in my forthcoming book The Ghosts of Langley [New Press].) Savage describes this material as “notes of briefings and [White House] Situation Room meetings.” If so, the outrage is magnified, since the CIA itself declassified notes of these types to its own officers for them to use in an effort to discredit the Senate intelligence committee report on CIA torture. That kind of self-dealing is unacceptable.

Mr. Davidson referred to–and journalist Savage reported–the practice of halting testimony with a point of order and asking the committee chairman to overrule the witness. This has not happened in Davidson’s experience. But there was plenty of that in Congress right through the 1970s. This is the time to bring back an old practice. As I said in this space two days ago, by not enforcing its authority the Senate intelligence committee here is helping to kill democracy in America.

Obstruction Starts to Come Into Focus

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June 15, 2017–Just very quickly, because I am on something else. You are beginning to see the reasons why President Trump had an interest in having his officials stonewall at their congressional appearances. For Coats or Rogers to have confirmed that the president even mentioned to them the possibility of speaking out in behalf of Michael Flynn or, worse, pressing FBI Director Comey to drop the Flynn inquiry, would be disastrous for Mr. Trump. Our information is that the special counsel opened a wider inquiry on Donald Trump, to include obstruction of justice, shortly after the president fired Comey on May 9. Federal rules require the FBI to inform a person when they become the subject of an inquiry. Thus Mr. Trump was aware of that investigation from about mid-May. His officials, including the lap dog Jeff Sessions, testified at the Senate intelligence committee in June.

Mr. Trump could not openly claim executive privilege for his officials. There is legal precedent for criminal inquiry trumping (!!) privilege. The court hearing would merely worsen the president’s position–and his claim could itself be construed as a further act of obstruction. Mr. Trump could not claim secrecy–you saw in this space yesterday a citation to the statute that prohibits that. In addition there are prima facie grounds to argue that a personnel change is not secret. Trump’s minions were thus forced to contrive some excuse to justify their refusal to testify. An extremely awkward formula (of pretending to reserve the president’s ability to claim privilege later) was the result.

I continue to believe the Senate’s proper response, at the second (or was it the third? the first two occurred during the same hearing) instance of this maneuver, would have been to hold the witness in contempt.

Another Spook Passes

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June 15, 2017–Every so often there’s a spy story that brings back the (supposed) romance of the second oldest profession. These are the kinds of narratives that enthrall kids and make them want to grow up to be spies. It may be that the age has passed–the machine spies, the computer hackers, the drone pilots, the faceless bureaucrats of the modern spyocracy do little to evoke the foggy streets and dark alleys of classic espionage. Samuel Vaughan Wilson is today’s story. He passed away a few days ago. For someone who roamed five continents and the seven seas, Wilson made it full circle to die at 93, in the same small Virginia town where he was born in 1923. Wilson was the real thing.

It was 1940, with war clouds on the horizon and Europe already enveloped in World War II, when Sam walked seven miles in the rain to enlist in the Virginia National Guard. Soon enough the Guard were mobilized. Wilson rose to sergeant before he was selected for officer candidate school, from which he emerged in good form. The Army sent him to Burma with the 4507th Provisional Infantry Regiment, famous as “Merrill’s Marauders.” He became regimental intelligence officer to Brigadier General Frank B. Merrill. Wilson personally scouted behind Japanese lines to prepare Merrill’s first attack. When Hollywood made a movie about the Marauders in 1962, Wilson actually appeared in the film, using the name Vaughan Wilson to play Merrill’s aide.

Army troops in Burma had a very close, almost interchangeable, relationship with the spooks of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which had a unit there called Detachment 101. Wilson made his first contacts with a number of people he would encounter again later. He spent roughly a third of his career on detached service with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), starting with four years with a Russian-immersion unit called “Detachment R.” That prepped him for assignment to the CIA base in West Berlin. Wilson occupied a place perhaps just one step below the CIA’s top Soviet case officers, George Kisevalter and Richard Kovich. Wilson became the agency’s first case officer for Igor Orlov, an agent whom people variously view as either an important spy or a Russian mole. There were other espionage assignments too. In 1963 Wilson was assigned to the Pentagon office supporting the CIA and its Project MONGOOSE aimed at Fidel Castro. In his later guise as a college president Wilson recalled browsing book stalls in Paris, Moscow, Beijing, and Tokyo; and strolling through the marketplaces of Baghdad, Marrakesh, Samarkand, and Ulaan Bator.

Then there was the Army.  It sent him to South Vietnam. As a colonel when Henry Cabot Lodge was the U.S. ambassador in Saigon, Wilson served as military adviser to South Vietnamese General Nguyen Khanh. In January 1964 Khanh launched a coup that overthrew the junta of the time. Colonel Wilson became the man on the spot, funneling spot reports to Ambassador Lodge on ops of the South Vietnamese airborne brigade, Khanh’s securing of the command compound at Tan Son Nhut airbase, and his schedule. When Maxwell D. Taylor succeeded Lodge, Colonel Wilson became the U.S. military attaché. Over the holidays in 1964-65 Taylor, held in high esteem by President Lyndon Johnson, assembled his country team to consider whether to support the dispatch of American troops to South Vietnam. Wilson opposed that. He returned to Vietnam in 1966-67 as head of pacification under the Agency for International Development. Successes and failures at pacification further soured Wilson on the war.

In 1971 Brigadier General Wilson went to Moscow as U.S. military attaché. Even that late in his career the general is reported to have attempted on-the-street recruitments on behalf of CIA. The Soviets did not ignore him. Wilson is said to have been the target of a Russian “swallow,” a female spy who recruits using her wiles. Returning to the United States in 1973, Major General Wilson won assignment to head the Directorate of Estimates at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Following a year there, in September 1974 Wilson returned to the CIA as Bill Colby’s deputy to liaise with the other members of the intelligence community. He held that job until May 1976, when Lieutenant General Wilson became the director of DIA in his own right. Wilson is quoted as telling his people that Sherlock Holmes had become a better role model than James Bond.

The Carter administration took office in January 1977 and it made a start on new special forces and tactics, in the style of Detachment 101 and Merrill’s Marauders. General Wilson advocated for the initiative and put in the good word. He also furnished valuable advice to Colonel Charles Beckwith, originator of Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta. That unit, the Delta Force, was in the works as Sam Wilson retired in the fall of 1977. In the Iran Hostage Crisis the Delta Force carried out the rescue mission that failed at Desert One. Sam Wilson came out of retirement to serve on the Pentagon panel that reviewed the execution of Operation EAGLE CLAW, as the mission had been known. Wilson remained in demand as a consultant, and educator, and he circled back to his boyhood town. Altogether an interesting trajectory.

Trump’s “Satellites”

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June 10, 2017–So, like Nixon at Watergate, The Donald does not mind jettisoning minions to avoid the hammer of justice descending upon his own head. There has already been a good deal of attention devoted to a set of individuals directly involved in the Russia Caper, but what about those people who work for President Trump within his own administration? Who might those “satellites” be?

Jeff Sessions: Let’s start with the Attorney General, both because of his prime position but also because former FBI director James B. Comey hinted during his June 9 testimony before the Senate intelligence committee that the Bureau was aware considerably in advance of things in his record that would oblige Sessions to recuse himself from investigations related to the Russia Caper. Apart from his potential vulnerability to Russia Caper charges, Sessions is open to perjury charges for sworn testimony before Congress. If Sessions did have vulnerabilities that required him to recuse himself, then his participation in the firing of James Comey opens him up to charges of conspiracy plus aiding and abetting illegal activity.

Sean Spicer: The president’s press spokesman of course has stood before the public day after day, effectively spouting lies. Some of those lies may have abetted the illegal activity. Also the degree to which he was witting of the rest, and the political advice he gave, may expose Spicer to conspiracy charges.

Political advice, public posturing, and leaking may expose Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus to charges of conspiracy and of leaking classified information.

Dan Coats, Mike Rogers, and Mike Pompeo, respectively the Director of National Intelligence, and heads of the NSA and CIA, have stonewalled Congress, opening them to contempt charges, since the National Security Act of 1947, as amended, explicitly provides that no order, charge, or other instruction may be cited to justify denying Congress any information necessary for its oversight role. Their stonewalling posture also aids and abets the cover up. President Trump also made an affirmative attempt to recruit Coats and Rogers to pressure the FBI to drop its investigation of Mike Flynn. If these officials either did as asked, or indicated to President Trump that they would do so, they would become active participants in an obstruction of justice. Depending on the advice they gave the president, the spooks may also be open to conspiracy charges.

H. R. McMaster : Here we’ve taken to calling the general “Appropriate Dereliction” McMaster for his excuses made for the Trump campaigners who asked the Russians for a backchannel on Russian communications links, an element of the Russian Caper conspiracy (which I am treating separately). Though that action represents a separate transgression, McMaster’s defense of it as completely “appropriate” is part of the cover up. If Donald Trump ordered McMaster to mount that defense, it would be an unlawful order and, as an active-duty Army officer General McMaster would be liable for carrying out an illegal order (Universal Code of Military Justice, 908– 890 (Art.90[20]); 891 (Art. 91 [2]); 892, Art. [1], [2]). If McMaster did this voluntarily and the conspiratorial act is found to have been criminal, then he is open to charges of aiding and abetting.

Stupid Foreign Policy = Damaged National Security

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June 9, 2017–When President Donald J. Trump sashayed over to Europe on his first foreign trip, in this space we commented about the stupidity of the foreign policy. The context there primarily concerned NATO and how snubbing our great friends in the alliance was certainly not a good thing. Our coverage mentioned the fabulism involved in thinking that Israel and its Arab neighbors were moving along converging pathways. Now I want to return to the Middle East to show just how stupid all of this has been.

Let’s start with Syria. The cruise missile attack on the Russian-Syrian airbase has come and passed. As Jack Kennedy once said, it’s like taking a drink–after a while the effect wears off and you need another. Trump is there now. The U.S. is upping the ante, sending in more Special Forces for more active roles, and moving ahead with heavy arms for Syrian rebel troops. But since the target is ISIS, America is effectively ranging itself alongside the Syrian government (and against the rebels we are arming) and the Russians. This was a problem for Obama policy too–made in this space years ago now–but Trump has not solved it.

Next to Qatar. This one is all Trump. The president insists he encouraged the Saudis to act aggressively against supporters of terrorism. Saudi Arabia and a number of other locals–some of them on Trump’s travel ban list, by the way–joined together to ostracize Qatar. Now it happens that Doha, Qatar’s capital, is a main transit point for American soldiers headed for Afghanistan and a site for diplomatic contacts, with the Taliban, among others. Qatar also hosts Al Uedid, the major U.S. airbase from which the Syrian war is being conducted, as well as a sophisticated command center that wages it. Trump not only supports the Saudi initiative he went on twitter to claim credit for encouraging it. Saudi Arabia is angry at Qatar for supporting the other side in its Yemeni war. U.S. policy in that affair is completely at odds with our interests in Syria and Afghanistan.

Now Iran. The Trump-era CIA has just refashioned one of its mission centers to target Iran–with which we are supposed to be improving relations because they are keeping their side of the nuclear bargain (something the U.S. concedes). Worse, ISIS is now attacking Iran too. So, in Iran Mr. Trump now has the United States allied with ISIS?

President Trump’s grasp of American national interests is so tenuous that policy careens from pillar to post. Stupid foreign policy damages U.S. security.

[EDITOR: This piece was actually written to appear before the “update” on this website but it appears the posting instructions were entered incorrectly. Sorry!]

 

Update: Senate Torture Report

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June 9, 2017–Some days are better than others. Yesterday North Carolina Senator Richard Burr seemed fairly reasonable in his questioning of James B. Comey before the Senate intelligence committee. Not long before that, Burr raised concern when he renewed earlier demands he had made that the federal executive return to the intelligence committee all copies of the SSCI report of its investigation into CIA torture and detention programs. That day was a pretty poor one.

The Obama administration took little formal action on Burr’s demand. Its Justice Department wavered on whether to declare the report a “federal record,” which would have ensured its perseveration and opened it to freedom of information requests. It ordered other agencies not to “open” their copies. The John Brennan CIA working to bury the report, interpreted that as an instruction to destroy copies in its possession. Now, under the Trump administration, Senator Burr is about to get his wish.

The publisher Melville House, which put out one of the printed editions of the executive summary of the committee study, is responding to this effort to put the report back in the secret vault by making its edition available to the public for free. Get in touch if you are interested.

Stupid = Damage : Update

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June 9, 2017–The latest gem to percolate to the surface here is that President Donald J. Trump, when encouraging Saudi Arabia to bully the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar, did not know that there are 10,000 American servicemembers stationed at a Qatari airbase and command center. (Not to mention that nearby Bahrain, with its port Manama, serves as base for the U.S. Fifth Fleet, our Gulf battle fleet.)

Did not know? What kind of excuse is that? It is the responsibility of the president to know these things. When making decisions affecting U.S. forces, in particular, a president does not proceed without due deliberation. The president has an entire bureaucracy behind him precisely to ensure stupidities like this do not occur. No doubt Trump would like to blame his NSC staff, but the president was shooting from the hip in his conversations with the Saudis, and never consulted them. No doubt he would like to blame the State Department, but it is Trump himself who has done his best to ensure the diplomats have nothing to do, plus empty seats and desks to do it from. And Trump himself went on twitter to claim credit for this stupidity–apparently not even knowing it was that.

On the whole this was an average Trumpian performance. Not worse than usual and definitely not better. The arrogance is only exceeded by the incompetence. No wonder America’s allies now doubt us.

 

Watergate and its “Satellites”

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June 8, 2017–Everyone here is abuzz with the testimony of former FBI director James B. Comey before the Senate intelligence committee. Some pundits are saying the remarks move us further in the direction of something akin to the Watergate scandal of 1972-1974, when the presidency of Richard M. Nixon was brought down by initial criminal acts, followed with attempts to cover them up. There are some distinct differences between what happened in America in 1972 and in 2016, but here I want to focus on two kinds of similarity.

The first is the initial conspiracy. In both 1972 and 2016 the future president would be insulated from conduct of the conspiracy. In 1972 that was handled by the attorney general (interesting, huh?) with his campaign unit called CREEP (Committee to Re-Elect the President). The conspiracy was embodied in a political “intelligence” plan presented at a briefing by CREEP official G. Gordon Liddy. Aside from Nixon’s attendance at that briefing there is no direct evidence of the president’s participation in the first stage plotting. For 2016 the political organization of the conspiracy has yet to come into focus, but it involves the characters who have been discussed here. In some combination they include Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, Carter Page, Jeff Sessions, and others. The apparent participation of candidate Donald J. Trump occurs at an April 2016 speech, where he is introduced to the Russian ambassador; and at the Republican party convention, where operatives collaborated to alter the party platform in a way that rewarded Russia, a move that required Mr. Trump’s approval.

The second element is the coverup. In both 1972 and, it now appears, 2016, presidents responded similarly to exposure of conspiratorial plotting. James Comey gave the word today for Donald Trump: in one of his conversations with the president, Mr. Trump (relieved the FBI director was telling him he was not, at that time, a subject of investigation) assured the FBI that he stood with them if they uncovered “satellites” among his campaign staff who had engaged in criminal activities. In other words, Trump stood ready to throw his minions under the bus. Richard Nixon, the same. Nixon first gave up his super-loyal chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, and counselor John D. Ehrlichman; later Mr. Mitchell; then other staff, until the harsh light of suspicion showed right in on him.

Watergate, it is always said, shows the coverup is worse than the crime. With Mr. Comey’s testimony the evidence mounts against Donald Trump. The coincidences in time between key points in the discovery of the Russian Caper and Trump’s actions (or the lack of them), the president’s efforts to get the FBI to shut down parts of its investigation (in Watergate Nixon attempted to get the CIA to shut down the FBI), the sacrifice of “satellites,” are all astonishing.

A few weeks ago a lot of people were swaggering around like lords of the manor. Today in Washington, it seems the worst possible thing is to be a “satellite.”