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<A HREF="aol://5863:126/alt.conspiracy:548006">CIA's Tenet - Columbia</A>
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Subject: CIA's Tenet - Columbia
From: Ralph McGehee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Thu, 26 August 1999 12:20 PM EDT
Message-id: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Below are recent articles relating to issues of importance
to foreign policy. Each item begs further comment but time
constraints do not allow for such.
Two items however demand immediate commentary -- the
United States is to increase military aid to Colombia; and
Tenet as the DCI.
Re Colombia, one major consideration is how this increase
in United States military involvement in Colombia reflects
the Vietnam War. The population numbers of the two countries
are similar, and the existence of revolutionary movements
somewhat similar. How heavily have these movements organized
that population? In Vietnam the Communists organized millions
of South Vietnamese who committed themselves totally to
their victory -- while our intelligence blinded itself and
counted only a fraction. Are we doing this again in Colombia?
Another major issue is the Colombian military which is corrupt,
supports drug traffickers and sponsors death squads. Can such
an organization demand the loyalty of the people and the
unquestioning support of the United States? Does this not
mirror Vietnam realities?
Lastly, David Ignatius in a Op-ed piece asks the question
how George Tenet is doing as DCI. He in writing the article
apparently had the assistance of the CIA's staff. Yet in his
piece there is no mention at all of analysis, analysts, etc.
Tenet focuses entirely on operations and recruitments -- the
road to all the disasters of the past.
In fact Tenet opens each morning's staff meeting with the
question -- who did we recruit and what difference will it
make?
When asked his reaction to criticism and if he plans
to resign he responds with an obscenity. Yet he is on
record as saying he takes ultimate responsibility for the
mistaken rocketing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.
To him, apparently, saying he is ultimately responsible
is all that is required.
To me the lack of analysis -- 1% -- one percent -- of the
intelligence budget is allocated for all-source intelligence.
This figure reflects his approach and foresees many more
and possibly more disastrous intelligence failures under
his reign.
Ralph McGehee
http://come.to/CIABASE
----------------------------
The U.S. is to step up military and economic aid to Colombia
[to fight] the drug-financed Marxist guerrillas there. U.S.
officials warned President Andres Pastrana that he risks losing
U.S. support if he makes further concessions to the insurgents to
restart stalled peace negotiations. But White House drug policy
director McCaffrey and State's Thomas Pickering, also told Pastrana
the U.S. will increase aid if he develops a comprehensive plan to
strengthen the military, halt the nation's economic free fall and
fight drug trafficking. Security assistance already stands at $289
million this year. The U.S. [has already] resumed helping the army
and expanded intelligence sharing and is training a 950-man Colombian
army counternarcotics battalion. The U.S. is planning to fund at least
two more such battalions. Colombia produces 80 percent of the world's
cocaine and about 70 percent of the heroin sent to the U.S.
Two Marxist guerrilla groups -- the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC), with about 15,000 combatants, and the National Liberation Army (ELN),
with about 5,000 -- control about 40 percent of territory and receive
hundreds of millions of dollars from protecting drug trafficking routes,
airstrips and laboratories. 7,000 right-wing paramilitary troops, who also
derive millions of dollars from cocaine trafficking, control about 15 percent
of the territory. In a world with a lot of bad policy options toward
Colombia,
we are taking the worst one, said Winifred Tate of the Washington Office
on Latin America. "By strengthening the military you are strengthening an
abusive, corrupt institution that has resisted civil control and human rights
reforms..." while U.S. aid should be focused on fighting drugs,
the line between counternarcotics and counterinsurgency has blurred so
much that it is almost meaningless. The immediate increase in military aid
will focus on upgrading a sophisticated intelligence and listening post
in Tres Esquinas, and U.S. training of new, special units in the Colombian
army. Washington Post 8/29/99 A1.
The White house has a plan for a new global strategy for the
next century -- that calls for U.S. military intervention in
trouble spots and says the U.S. is facing it biggest espionage
threat in history. The attacks could be nuclear, biological
or chemical weapons, bombs or cyber attacks on our systems.
The strategy statement represents a road map for how 21st century
policy-makers...should influence events abroad -- a road map for
how 21st-century policymakers should use America's strength to
influence developments overseas and at home. It foresees an active
military. "We must be prepared to use all appropriate...national
power to influence the actions of other states...to exert global
leadership..." Washington Times 8/24/99 A1.
Tenet has embraced the spirit of Helms's trademark phrase within
the agency, "Let's get on with it." He wants his people to get out
in the world and run operations. Tenet is said to open his 8 a.m.
staff meeting by asking a simple question: "Who did we recruit last
night, and what difference will it make?" [While] embittered former
officers complain that promotions were often based on what amounted
to phony recruitments.
Tenet talks like a high school football coach. Ask him what he
thinks about a newspaper column that morning suggesting that,
in light of all the CIA screw-ups, he should resign, and he
answers: "I don't give a ----!" Washington Post Outlook,
8/22/99 B7.
DCI George Tenet, briefed CIA staff re CIA's problems.
The failure to forecast India's underground explosions teaches little.
Real problems are worse: CIA's network of spies, demoralized after the
Aldrich Ames spy scandal, is depleted and ineffective. The intelligence
community is slowly losing its technological edge - particularly in
satellite photography and eavesdropping. CIA too often reports on the
obvious. In his May 5 briefing for CIA's staff, Tenet outlined a new
"strategic direction" centered on the Directorate of Operations (DO).
Tenet to hire new case officers and outfit them with the latest
equipment. For the first time in years, the DO will see its budget rise.
Experience suggests CIA does not have enough of the right people:
On the eve of the Balkan war, it published a paper on Yugoslavia's
prospects for the 1990s entitled "A Decade of Growth?" Fully 80
percent of useful intelligence comes from intercepted conversations. But
that technological edge may soon be lost. Fiber-optics are
harder to intercept than radio or microwaves. Encryption software could
make it easy for adversaries to conceal messages. U.S. News and World
Report 6/1/98.
A State Department unit will control the flow of government news
overseas, especially during crises. The new International Public
Information group, or IPI, will coordinate news of various U.S.
agencies. The new group is a smaller, less-structured successor to the
independent U.S. Information Agency, which State will absorb in October.
U.S. officials say the group came about partly in response to the
spread of unflattering or erroneous information via electronic mail, the
Internet, cellular telephones and other communications advances. A new
office of Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy will run IPI. The
current USIA director, Evelyn S. Lieberman, has been nominated. An
unclassified mission statement described IPI's role: "Effective use of our
nation's highly developed communications and information capabilities to
address misinformation and incitement, mitigate inter-ethnic conflict,
promote independent media and the free flow of information, and support
democratic participation will advance our interests. IPI will hold its
first formal meeting this fall. Officials at the Pentagon, FBI, CIA and
State, Commerce and Treasury to organize the group.
AP in the 8/13/99 Washington Post A23.
In FBI slang they are known as "dirty teams" and "clean teams," or
as "dark" and "light" agents, or as "fives" and "sixes." The two groups
are deployed together when terrorists strike or when top-secret
information has gone astray, and they often spend months, even years,
working in tandem. Yet they rarely talk to each other. As FBI becomes
more involved in overseas investigations of terrorist threats, using
two distinct teams of agents kept apart by an imaginary wall has
become a key to separating criminal cases that can be prosecuted in open
court from intelligence secrets that must be protected forever. On one
side of the wall are agents privy to top-secret intelligence. On the other
side are agents protected from such information so that when they are
challenged in court, they need not fear revealing national security
secrets or introducing evidence tainted by human rights abuses
committed in a faraway jail. Following a presidential directive issued
last May, the FBI now works with intelligence agencies and the military in
foreign counterterrorism. When a case crosses the boundaries
between national security and criminal investigation, the FBI
sets up one team--the dirty or dark team--drawn from the National
security Division, AKA division Five to handle the intelligence.
another team--the clean or light team--of FBI's Criminal Division, or
Division Six, builds the case that will be presented in court.
Washington Post 8/16/99 A13.
CIA cut off former DCI Deutch's access to classified information
for violating agency rules by keeping secret files on an unsecured
computer at his home. CIA normally does not announce suspension of
security clearances but did because of prior news about the case.
Deutch, a former deputy defense secretary who spent 38 years in public
service, was CIA director from May 1995 to December 1996. CIA security
found 31 classified documents on a CIA-issued computer not configured
for classified work. In 4/99 the Justice Department decided not to
prosecute Deutch. CIA said Tenet decided to suspend Deutch's
clearances indefinitely in light of the ``nature of the security violations
involved.'' AP 08/20/99.
China has detained an American who was "inspecting" a proposed World
Bank project for engaging in an "illegal investigation." Tibetan
advocate Daja Meston, 29, entered China on a tourist visa and traveled
to Qinghai province's remote Dulan county earlier this month to
interview residents about a controversial World Bank project, per his wife,
Phuntsok Meston. The project would move tens of thousands of poor
Chinese farmers to a new area with better agricultural prospects.
Meston was detained along with an Australian scholar, Gabriel
Lafitte, also a longtime advocate of Tibetan causes.
China suspects they were "pushing...Tibetan separatism."
On a trip to China in 8/97, Meston was the Tibetan language
translator for Rep. Frank R. Wolf during an unauthorized trip.
Wolf, said China was brutally repressing Tibet's people. A World Bank
spokesman [denied the American and the Australian] were representing
the bank. The World Bank disputed accusations that the project will
help China move large numbers of ethnic Chinese into a Tibetan area
- it will move 58,000 poor people, most of whom are ethnic minorities
to a sparsely populated region. Meston's wife, is a Tibetan exile.
Daja Meston, grew up in a Tibetan monastery in Nepal. Both Mestons
have been very public opponents of Chinese policies in Tibet.
Washington Post 8/19/99 A15.
An Australian researcher who was detained with Meston was
escorted onto a plane by Chinese security agents. Gabriel Lafitte
said he is concerned about a third man, a Chinese citizen,
who was detained along with them. Tsering Dorje, a Tibetan, traveled
with Lafitte and the American, Daja Meston. China said Meston, a fluent
Tibetan speaker, and Lafitte "confessed" to "illegal covering and
photographing in closed areas." Washington Post 8/22/99 a24.
An article in the Jan. 25, 1997, Chicago Tribune re training
of Tibetan mercenaries at Camp Hale in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado
throughout the 1950s. They were then parachuted into Tibet. Per
the "Pentagon Papers," there were at least 700 of these flights in
the 1950s. Air Force C-130s were used, as later in Vietnam, to drop
ammunition and submachine guns. There were also special bases in Guam and
Okinawa for training Tibetan soldiers. [EMAIL PROTECTED] 8/20/99.
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Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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