[quote]Aragorn wrote:
[quote]orion wrote:
[quote]SexMachine wrote:
[quote]orion wrote:
[quote]SexMachine wrote:
[quote]Gambit_Lost wrote:
[i]Several current and former U.S. intelligence officials in the audience ?rolled their eyes? at Kahlili?s claims, said one observer who was present.
[/quote]
Who were the officials who “rolled their eyes?” Who was the observer present who said they did?
The Compost did a nice job but as they said: “A current U.S. government official did vouch for Kahlili’s role as a spy,” Ignatius added. “I can’t confirm every jot and title in the book,” the official told Ignatius, “but he did have a relationship with U.S. intelligence.” [/quote]
Thousands of suitcase nukes!
THOUSANDS!!![/quote]
He made no such claim. If you go to the actual speech and read it in context you will see he was talking hypothetically and about the strategy. There was never any suggestion that he was talking literally about the numbers. It’s clearly a figure of speech - he said:
‘Now to a lot of people here in the West think this is crazy talk. But if you give it 1 percent chance, are you willing to risk it? The other side of the coin is that, let’s say that they have a rational mind, let’s say that they are interested in survival, let’s say they just want to use it as a source to protect their government, to become untouchable. The proliferation is going to become a disaster, and I was at the front row seats of Mohsen Razaei when they brought out the new strategy which was numbers - meaning a thousand small groups of small boats is going to cause a threat. A thousand suitcase bombs spread around Europe and the US is going to pose a threat. You are not going to get a handle on the proliferation. They are going to be untouchable. They are going to pass it on to Hezbollah, to Syria, to Venezuela. It is going to become a nightmare.’[/quote]
[/i] You know the whole “But if you give it 1 percent chance, are you willing to risk it” spiel was complete bullshit from the getgo.
Yes, there is a chance that the Martians might land in Monaco which will subsequently rise to world domination due to its awesome multiphasic laser Mechs, but in the end it just makes you paranoid, and broke, and paranoid, and a police state, and very, very paranoid.
[/quote]
Very possibly true. On the other hand, I believe you have to have at least a small paranoid streak to work in national security intelligence these days, no matter your country. Besides, if there were one subject to be paranoid about, I’d probably pick nuclear bombs proliferated by rogue states. Just sayin, that’s kind of a bang-for-your-buck subject after all.[/quote]
I don’t think you need to HAVE a paranoid streak to work in intelligence, but I think you inevitably end up acquiring one the longer and deeper you get into it. Paranoia is something that the CIA tries not to encourage at all. It’s a detriment to otherwise sound judgment and can be used against not only a single agent or officer, but against an entire intelligence station if paranoia is allowed to proliferate.
James Jesus Angleton is a perfect case study in the dangers of paranoiac thinking within an intelligence agency. In the end, intelligence agencies need to think dispassionately at times. Obviously, an agent or officer has to be committed to the cause or he becomes a security risk. But within that framework, one needs to be able to look at things with as much objectivity as possible, and from all angles. Paranoia tends to focus the intensity on a particular angle or line of thought. If one is convinced that the enemy is after them at all times then the evaluation of any action or intelligence is tainted by that prejudice.
Vigilance is imperative, but paranoia is to be avoided. It’s a fine line, but one that the CIA is aware of and tries to walk safely. Although I will say that their entire counter-intelligence wing DOES demand a path much closer to the edge of that line than the rest of the CIA.
Counter-intelligence, whose father in the CIA was Angleton, necessarily involves looking inside your own agency and at your own people to determine if you’ve ever been penetrated. In essence, what happened to Angleton is that he became convinced that EVERYONE was a possible mole due to the info provided by a Soviet defector who took advantage of Angleton’s latent paranoia. This ground the entire counter-intelligence wing to a halt because Angleton soon became convinced that any intelligence gathered was simply disinformation from the Soviets BUT that the opposite wasn’t necessarily true either since Angleton felt the Soviets would be too smart for something that simple, so there was a third plan they always had and the ACTUAL intelligence AND its theoretical opposite were almost always eliminated as possible scenarios by him right from the start. Angleton was further fortified with reasons for paranoia because he was also close friends with Kim Philby at a time when Philby was a highly-active Soviet double-agent who may have gleaned a lot of info from Angleton during their infamous marathon drinking bouts in Washington.