[Note for Tomdispatch readers: Think of this as the first "gone fishing" notice of the summer. The next Tomdispatch will probably appear the Sunday after July 4th. By the way, if you have a moment on the Fourth, check out the Declaration of Independence for a glimpse of the bad old days when Americans were ruled by a King George, who, as the document's authors made clear, refused "his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good," "affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power," and "transport[ed] us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences." Tom]

In a week dominated by the CIA -- the Agency of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s -- it might be easy enough to forget the Agency of the new century, the one known for creating its own offshore Bermuda triangle of injustice, including a global system of secret (or borrowed) prisons, as well as for kidnappings, ghost prisoners, torture, assassination, covert programs aimed at "regime change" in countries like (as in 1953) Iran, and, of course, everything we don't yet know because the "family jewels" for this period are nowhere near being released. Note, by the way, that even the recently released "family jewels" from that older era are not complete and remain heavily redacted -- in the case of one document (scroll down), far more so than in a version that was released in the 1970s.

In addition, this cache of documents seems to deal only passingly, at best, with the Vietnam War, despite the CIA's infamous Phoenix Program; nor does it focus on the Agency's covert wars and other major actions abroad, many of which were laid out in Roger Morris' three-part profile of Robert Gates at this site. Of course, one difference between those ancient decades and today is that the CIA is now but one jostling agency among the 16 that make up the official American "Intelligence Community," whose combined budget, while unknown, runs into the many tens of billions of dollars.

All that's missing, as Thomas Powers, an expert on the CIA and author of Intelligence Wars, makes so clear in the following essay, posted at this site thanks to the kindness of the editors of the New York Review of Books, is actual, serviceable "intelligence." Tom

What Tenet Knew

Unanswered Questions
by Thomas Powers

[This essay, which considers At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA by George Tenet with Bill Harlow (HarperCollins, 549 pp., $30.00) appears in the July 19th, 2007 issue of the New York Review of Books and is posted here with the kind permission of the editors of that magazine.]

How we got into Iraq is the great open question of the decade but George Tenet in his memoir of his seven years running the Central Intelligence Agency takes his sweet time working his way around to it. He hesitates because he has much to explain: the claims made by Tenet's CIA with "high confidence" that Iraq was dangerously armed all proved false. But mistakes are one thing, excusable even when serious; inexcusable would be charges of collusion in deceiving Congress and the public to make war possible. Tenet's overriding goal in his carefully written book is to deny "that we somehow cooked the books" about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. If he says it once he says it a dozen times. "We told the president what we did on Iraq WMD because we believed it."

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Iraq by the Numbers

Sometimes, numbers can strip human beings of just about everything that makes us what we are. Numbers can silence pain, erase love, obliterate emotion, and blur individuality. But sometimes numbers can also tell a necessary story in ways nothing else can.

This January, President Bush announced his "surge" plan for Iraq, which he called his "new way forward." It was, when you think about it, all about numbers. Since then, 28,500 new American troops have surged into that country, mostly in and around Baghdad; and, according to the Washington Post, there has also been a hidden surge of private armed contractors -- hired guns, if you will -- who free up troops by taking over many mundane military positions from guarding convoys to guarding envoys. In the meantime, other telltale numbers in Iraq have surged as well.

Now, Americans are theoretically waiting for the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, to "report" to Congress in September on the "progress" of the President's surge strategy. But there really is no reason to wait for September. An interim report -- "Iraq by the numbers" -- can be prepared now (as it could have been prepared last month, or last year). The trajectory of horror in Iraq has long been clear; the fact that the U.S. military is a motor driving the Iraqi cataclysm has been no less clear for years now. So here is my own early version of the "September Report."

A caveat about numbers: In the bloody chaos that is Iraq, as tens of thousands die or are wounded, as millions uproot themselves or are uprooted, and as the influence of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's national government remains largely confined to the four-square mile fortified Green Zone in the Iraqi capital, numbers, even as they pour out of that hemorrhaging land, are eternally up for grabs. There is no way most of them can be accurate. They are, at best, a set of approximate notations in a nightmare that is beyond measurement.

Here, nonetheless, is an attempt to tell a little of the Iraqi story by those numbers:

Iraq is now widely considered # 1 -- when it comes to being the ideal jihadist training ground on the planet. "If Afghanistan was a Pandora's box which when opened created problems in many countries, Iraq is a much bigger box, and what's inside much more dangerous," comments Mohammed al-Masri, a researcher at Amman's Centre for Strategic Studies. CIA analysts predicted just this in a May 2005 report leaked to the press. ("A new classified assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency says Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was in Al Qaeda's early days, because it is serving as a real-world laboratory for urban combat.")

It's fitting that, as part 3 of Roger Morris' monumental portrait of Robert Gates, the CIA, and a half-century-plus of American covert action comes to a close, a CIA document dump of previously secret materials from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s has put the years when our Secretary of Defense first entered the Agency back in the news. Assassination plots against foreign leaders, kidnappings, warrantless wiretapping of reporters, the illegal opening of American mail, illegal break-ins, behavior modification experiments on "unwitting" citizens, illegal surveillance of domestic dissident groups and critics of the Agency -- it seems never to end.

And yet, you have to read Morris on Gates to realize how much this list still lacks when it comes to the acts of the CIA. It is, after all, one of the ironies of our moment that our (relatively) new secretary of defense now travels the American world -- to Kabul and Baghdad in particular, where he frets about Tehran -- only to find himself, in essence, confronting (though our media never bothers to say so) the consequences of the misdeeds of his younger self. It's a grisly record and, not surprisingly, a grisly world has been its result.

If you haven't read bestselling author (and former National Security Council staffer) Roger Morris' first two parts on Gates and the CIA -- "The Gates Inheritance" and "The World That Made Bob," then do so and prepare yourself for the mayhem of the world Gates helped make when, in the 1980s, he came into his own. That this is the man meant to save us from the disparate fundamentalisms of Bush the Younger and Dick Cheney tells us a great deal about just how low we've sunk. Tom

The Rise and Rise of Robert Gates

The Specialist (Part 3)
By Roger Morris

Beirut, Lebanon, Friday, March 8, 1985, an Islamic Sabbath -- In Bir El-Abed, an impoverished, crowded Shiite quarter in the southern reaches of the Lebanese capital, Muhammad Husain Fadlallah stops on the street to speak to an elderly woman; and so, the revered 51 year-old cleric, delayed momentarily, will not be home at the usual time when a car bomb explodes at his apartment doorstep with a force felt miles away in the Chouf Mountains and well out in the Mediterranean.

"Even by local standards," reported the New York Times from car-bomb and shell-shocked Beirut, the explosion "was massive." Eighty-one people were killed -- men, women, and children -- and more than two hundred wounded. Fadlallah, the target of the attack, was unhurt. The next day, a notice hung over the devastated area where grief-stricken families were still digging the bodies of loved ones out of the rubble. It read: "Made in the USA."

The sign was more apt than even its furious makers knew. The terrorist strike on Bir El-Abed was a classic product of American covert policy. Behind the bombing lay a convoluted secret history and, beyond that, a longer legacy of power wantonly uninformed by "intelligence."

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[Note for Tomdispatch readers: Let me recommend a book that goes nicely with Roger Morris' series on Robert Gates and the CIA. Jim Peck's Washington's China: The National Security World, the Cold War, and the Origins of Globalism is a close-in, detailed study of the secret documents America's top security managers on the National Security Council created for each other in the early years of the Cold War as they were trying to formulate ways to "isolate" China. (Rick Perlstein in the Nation magazine just called the book "brilliant, forceful and awesomely researched" and Chalmers Johnson has termed it "devastating," which it is.) At heart, it is a reminder of how American national-security elites, ready to manipulate publics, first manipulated and essentially indoctrinated one another (and so, it is no less applicable to the Bush/Cheney neocon moment). Like Morris' series, it is also a reminder that American provincialism and American globalism are not, in fact, opposites; that what we now think of as globalism emerged in the late 1940s out of American provincialism and out of -– though it's a word we reserve for other peoples -– a fervent, near-religious brand of American nationalism. (We prefer to use the word "patriotism" or, at an extreme, "super-patriotism" when describing ourselves.) In our pride in our globalism, we forget the narrowness with which our imperial leaders viewed the world long before our recent band of armed, unilateralist isolationists decided to take the planet by storm. If you want to see where it all began, check out Peck's book. Tom]

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has just returned from his fourth trip to American Iraq in the last seven months -- basically to the heavily fortified Green Zone in the Iraqi capital where most U.S. officials huddle, and which many of them never leave during their year's tour of duty "in" the country. In a sense, moving from Inside-the-Beltway Washington to the inside-and-being-belted-way in Baghdad catches something of both the imperial globalism and the insularity that Roger Morris indicates has been so essential to Gates' life and career. The former CIA director is a man who, after a fashion, has never as an adult left the Green Zone of American life.

At a press briefing in Baghdad this week, a reporter made a very American observation and then lobbed an oh-so-American question at the Secretary of Defense: "In fact the Iraqi government does not exactly share America's desired end-state. How do you, government-to-government, diplomatically convince, cajole, or force them to the proper end-state?"

Gates began his response to this question about the uses of raw imperial power in the following fashion: "I think the way I would answer your question is that I think no country can escape its history…" Of course, the Secretary of Defense was only thinking about how the various embattled sectarian groups in Iraq can't escape their histories (which we've had such a hand in misshaping these last years), but, as part 2 of Roger Morris' profile of Robert Gates and American "intelligence" (that is, covert intervention and interference abroad) makes clear, there could hardly be a better epitaph for Gates himself, or for all of Washington's wisdom about the Arab world these last decades.

Morris' remarkable "Gates Inheritance" -- a necessary history lesson for an ever grimmer world -- continues below. Those who missed Part 1, "The Specialist, Robert Gates and the Tortured World of American Intelligence," might consider doubling-back. Otherwise, onward! Tom

The CIA and the Politics of Counterrevolution

Robert Gates, The Specialist (Part 2)
By Roger Morris

Students like Bob Gates were to be something of a remedy for the CIA's first generation of men, so uneducated about a world they manipulated with such careless and brutal abandon. In widening recruitment efforts, and requiring a gamut of substantive and psychological tests (even a psychiatric interview for its new officers), the CIA seemed to acknowledge that its ranks lacked a certain professionalism -- in terms of diploma knowledge of the world as well as certifiable sanity.

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Think of him as the spymaster who came in from the cold. Well, it wasn't actually so cold out there. After all, Robert Gates was on innumerable corporate boards and the President of Texas A & M University (which, not coincidentally, houses the library, presidential papers, and museum of George H. W. Bush under whom he served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency). But after two dozen years in the CIA and on the National Security Council, after a career which touched (or more than touched) on just about every great foreign policy event in Washington's world from the final days of the Vietnam War and the great Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union to the Central American wars of Ronald Reagan, the Iran-Contra Affair, the Afghan anti-Soviet war, and so much else, he was out of Washington and in hibernation until James Baker's Iraq Study Group called him back. Then, of course, he was picked by George W. Bush as the replacement for the disastrous reign of error of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Gates has, it seems, returned to Washington with a quiet vengeance and evidently with all those skills acquired in his rough-and-tumble years in the intelligence bureaucracy still intact. In practically no time at all, he purged the Defense Department of its leftover neocon civilians, and at every crisis has inserted his own choices in positions of influence -- as secretary of the army, as Centcom commander, and most recently, in place of Rumsfeld's man, Marine General Peter Pace, as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (His emphasis has been on Navy men to replace the discredited Army leadership of the Rumsfeld years.) It's quite a record so far for a man who represented -- until the neocons boarded the ship of state -- more than three decades of the imperial Washington Consensus.

Now, at a moment that couldn't be more crucial, Gates and his "inheritance" get their due, thanks to Roger Morris, a member of the National Security Council Senior Staff under Presidents Johnson and Nixon (he resigned in protest over the invasion of Cambodia) and bestselling author of biographies of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and the Clintons. Over the next week Tomdispatch.com readers will get not just a portrait of the real Robert Gates, but a full-scale, yet miraculously concise, always surprising, history of American "intelligence" (for which read: global covert action and covert intervention). Morris, who previously offered a striking two-part portrait of Donald Rumsfeld and the Defense Department at this site (The Undertaker's Tally, parts 1 and 2), now offers the Gates legacy, which is really the legacy of mainstream Washington, the globe's imperial capital for this last half-century-plus.

The Gates Inheritance will be posted in three parts this week and, long as it is, it's actually a marvel of compression, packing into a relatively modest space an epic history of mayhem none of us should avoid -- a grim history that led to September 11th, 2001 and now leads us into an unknown, increasingly perilous future. Think of it as a necessary reckoning with disaster -- and consider this but a second major installment in the rogue's gallery of Washington portraits Morris will continue to produce periodically for this site. Now, plunge in. Tom

The Specialist

Robert Gates and the Tortured World of American Intelligence (Part 1)
By Roger Morris

"I may be dangerous," he said, "but I am not wicked. No, I am not wicked." -- Henry James, The American

It was a failed administration's ritual scapegoating, the ousting last winter of its ruinous secretary of defense. But in the sauve qui peut confirmation of his replacement -- "The only thing that mattered," said a Senate aide, "was that he was not Don Rumsfeld" -- there was inadvertent irony.

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