--- Begin Message ---
-Caveat Lector-
By Carol Rosenberg. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Posted on Fri, Dec. 13, 2002 in
<A HREF="http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/world/cuba/";>The Miami
Herald</A>
CIA spy master Ted Shackley dies at 75
By Carol Rosenberg. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Posted on Fri, Dec. 13, 2002 in
The Miami Herald.
Theodore ''Ted'' Shackley, a legendary spy master and Cold War figure who ran
the CIA's huge Miami operation during the height of U.S. tensions with Cuba
during the 1960s, has died of cancer in Maryland. He was 75.
Nicknamed ''The Blond Ghost'' because he hated to be photographed, Shackley
was an exacting, intense, elusive covert operator. As Miami station chief
during Operation Mongoose, an interagency U.S. effort to topple Fidel Castro,
he ran about 400 agents and operatives during a period that included the
Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.
The Miami assignment was only one of the many powerful posts he held during a
28-year counterinsurgency career that spanned the globe.
The places where he worked as a senior CIA officer -- Berlin, Saigon, Laos --
served as signposts in the global struggle between the United States and
Soviet-backed communism.
In Miami, he directed an ambitious anti-Castro propaganda and paramilitary
campaign, and as a sign of its significance, Shackley would later say that he
commanded the third-largest navy in the Caribbean -- only the United States
and Cuba had more vessels than the CIA station chief's flotilla.
Thirty-year friend Tom Spencer, a Miami attorney, described Shackley Thursday
as "the master spy chief, a strategist, tactician, a brilliant man, a chess
player -- a person who could read tea leaves and watch things which ordinary
people could not see or pick up.''
Added fellow CIA retiree E. Peter Earnest, now director of Washington, D.C.'s
International Spy Museum: "He had a keen sense of discipline, and was very
goal-oriented. He found himself periodically in situations where there was
chaos, and he could pull some order out of that.''
RETIRED IN '79
Shackley retired from the Central Intelligence Agency in 1979 and set up a
D.C.-area consulting firm that offered security strategy to corporate
executives.
But for nearly three decades before that, including 17 years overseas, he
served as a CIA officer who recruited and handled agents, hatched plots and
gathered intelligence in Cold War settings.
>From May 1976 to December 1977, he served as associate deputy director of
operations, the No. 2 position in the clandestine operations branch. He held
the job first under CIA Director George H.W. Bush, then under Adm. Stansfield
Turner, who relieved him of his title in a late 1977 shake-up.
At issue: a Carter administration decision to fire thousands of secret agents
and informants, notably in the Middle East, and dismantle Cold War spy
networks.
Shackley, said Spencer, soon ''left in disgust,'' retiring from the agency he
had joined straight from Army duty in 1945 in Europe. Besides consulting, he
also wrote a primer on counterinsurgency in 1981 called The Third Option.
Shackley was Miami station chief from 1962 to 1965, running his vast spy
network out of the University of Miami South Campus, now the Metrozoo. It was
the largest CIA hub outside of headquarters in Langley, Va.
''When I got there, the mission was to implement an intelligence collection
program and clean up the residuals of the Bay of Pigs,'' he told retired
Herald journalist Don Bohning in April 1998 in Washington. "As we got into
the intelligence program and restructuring, we started detecting Soviet
buildup in the context of all that, how to bring about change in Cuba.''
IN MIAMI
Some of his Miami activities, he told Bohning, included ''psychological
warfare pressure on Cuba,'' including infiltrations, radio propaganda and
ties with a paramilitary, anti-Castro movement.
The only full-fledged CIA station in the continental United States, its code
name was JM-Wave.
After Miami, he moved on to another Cold War hot zone, Southeast Asia, where
he was a top CIA officer in Laos and Saigon in the late 1960s and early '70s.
AUTHOR RECOLLECTS
''In Laos, Shackley helped run a secret war using local tribes people, and at
the end of that campaign the tribe was decimated,'' said David Corn, author
of the 1994 book, Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusade.
''Shackley was in some ways the archetype of the Cold War covert bureaucrat.
He took orders from above . . . running secret wars, undermining
democratically elected governments, compromising journalists and political
opponents overseas . . . and made them a reality,'' Corn said.
Shackley also ran Latin American operations out of CIA headquarters in 1973
when Gen. Augusto Pincohet led a coup in Chile that toppled the elected
government of President Salvador Allende.
''He was not the mastermind of the clandestine operations of presidents and
CIA directors. He was the implementer,'' Corn said. 'And in doing so, he
avoided the moral questions that accompanied such actions and embodied the
'ends justify the means' mentality of America's national security
establishment.''
Fellow former CIA agent Mo Sovern, who said they were colleagues for 45
years, summed up Shackley's management philosophy this way: "Screw up and
you'd hear about it. Screw up twice for the same problem, and you're gone.''
He could be a controversial figure, said Sovern, chairman of the Central
Intelligence Retirees Association. "A lot of people absolutely hated him. A
lot of people thought he was marvelous. But he got the work done.''
LAST DETAILS
He cited this example of Shackley's micromanagement style:
After receiving last rites on Sunday, he had his wife summoned a funeral
director to their suburban Washington home and he picked out a casket,
negotiated the fee and asked to be buried in West Palm Beach, where he was
raised and educated before going to the University of Maryland. He died
Monday.
Burial will be next week in West Palm Beach. Visitation is scheduled for
today in Washington. Mass will be said Saturday in Bethesda, Md.
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
All My Relations.
Omnia Bona Bonis,
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Please let us stay on topic and be civil.
To unsubscribe please go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cia-drugs
-Home Page- www.cia-drugs.org
OM
Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A>
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html
<A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html";>Archives of
[EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
<A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/";>ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
--- End Message ---
