Negative indicators of action
by digby
Howie has written a very provocative post on the historical legacy of various CIA chiefs over the years that’s well worth reading as we contemplate how much “trust” we are required to have in these allegedly top flight professionals who know what they’re doing.
He quotes this telling excerpt from the biography of the two men most associated with the founding of the CIA, Allen and John Foster Dulles called The Brothers about the day after the botched Bay of Pigs invasion when the military was clamoring for a full scale invasion:
At White House meetings the next day, Kennedy fended off more pleas that he send U.S. forces to support the Bay of Pigs invaders. The strongest came from his chief of naval operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke, who came into the Oval Office late in the evening with an equally agited [CIA official Richard] Bissell.
“Let me take two jets and shoot down this enemy aircraft,” Burke pleaded.
“No,” Kennedy replied. “I don’t want to get the United States involved with this.”
“Can I not send in an airstrike?”
“No.”
“Can we send in a few planes?”
“No, because they could be identified as United States.”
“Can we paint out their numbers?”
“No.”
Grasping for options, Burke asked if Kennedy would authorize artillery attacks on Cuban forces from American destroyers. The answer was the same: “No.”
Later that day Kennedy told an aide, “I probably made a mistake keeping Allen Dulles.”
…More than one hundred of the invaders had died. Most of the rest were rounded up and imprisoned. For Castro it was a supreme, ecstatic triumph. Kennedy was staggered.
“How can I have been so stupid?” he wondered aloud.
Others were equally stunned. Criticism of the CIA, in both the press and Congress, rose to unprecedented intensity. Allen was not spared. The cover story in Time, headlined “The Cuba Disaster,” questioned his very concept of intelligence.
…If Allen had not yet confronted the implications of the Bay of Pigs disaster, Kennedy had. In private he cursed “CIA bastards” for luring him into it, and wished he could “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.”
Needless to say, Howie’s post is in response to the brouhaha over the memoir of ex-CIA chief and GOP defense secretary holdover Robert Gates. He concludes his post with this:
Historically, the United States would have been better off to use CIA Directors as negative indicators of action. They are always wrong, always wrong about everything. From day one, they missed everything important and disastrously misinterpreted everything they touched.
Their track record really is abominable.
It’s time to re-imagine the national security apparatus. I’m not sure we can ever form a better system. it may just be the nature of the beast to be this incompetent. But it’s very hard to imagine one that’s worse.
Read the whole post. There’s much more there about our vaunted spooks and warriors. They have too much power and too little sense. It’s a miracle they haven’t done worse than they have.
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