THE EXPERT WITNESS
THE SPIES WHO SHAGGED US
I saw the latest Austin Powers movie, "The Spy Who Shagged Me," the other day and throughout the movie could not get the CIA out of my mind. What exactly does a bumbling, goofy, inept spy with bad teeth, an overblown ego, and a missing "mojo" have in common with our own $30-billion-a-year real-life super-spies? Everything.
Look, the fact is, I'm a court qualified Expert Witness and 25-year-veteran federal agent who never lost a federal case that I was charged with bringing to trial. Among my cases were some of the most complicated and important conspiracy cases on record. So I value my credibility and don't make claims that aren't backed up by facts. Let's examine just a few of the lowlights of the Central Shagadellic Agency's known record for the past several decades and see what I mean:
·They allowed "Doctor Evil" China to steal our nuclear technology and THEN bombed their embassy?
·They allowed their own chief of Soviet Counterintelligence, Aldrich Ames, to work for the then "Doctor Evil" KGB for eight years, completely destroying all the CIA's human intelligence capabilities in Russia--and if it weren't for the FBI, the drunken, bumbling traitor, who would have been detected quicker by Wal-Mart Security, would still be working for them.
·They missed the fall of Russia entirely.
·They missed the development of nuclear weapons by India, while every Indian waiter in the Big Apple was gossiping about it for a year before it happened.
·They were outsmarted by "Doctor Evil" Saddam Hussein so badly that they were the laughing stock of the espionage world.
·They admitted before Congress to looking the other way for over a decade at massive drug smuggling into the US by their "assets," like Manuel Noriega and the Nicaraguan Contras, while Americans--trying to keep the stuff out of the brains and veins of their children--were taxed more than a half trillion dollars to fight drugs.
·They called the informant who walked into their Nairobi office with accurate details of the embassy bombings that would kill hundreds nine months later--a liar.
·The Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco--according to a CIA Inspector General's report, hidden in the Director's safe under "national security" for 37 years--was due to the CIA's amateurishness, puffed up egos, and lies to the President of the United States.
·Under their infamous MK-Ultra program, they used US taxpayer dollars to carry out some of the wackiest and most criminal mind-control experiments this side of the Third Reich on unwitting, innocent people around the world, even surreptitiously dosing one of their own scientists, Dr. Frank Olsen, causing him to leap out of his tenth floor hotel room in NYC.
·They gave the then "good guys," the America-hating Mujihideen, 750 stinger missiles to fight the then "Doctor Evil" Soviets (now "good guys") during the Afghan war. A good portion of these shoulder-fired, surface-to-air missiles are now in the hands of the now "Doctor Evil" Muslim terrorists and the subject of recent State Department alerts. Yes, they can now be used to shoot OUR planes out of the sky.
·They supported the now "Doctor Evil" Numero Uno Bin Ladeen during the Afghan war when he was a "good guy" and a "freedom fighter," throwing tens of millions of US taxpayer dollars into his efforts at creating, arming, and training the first Pan-Arab army in history, many of whom are now the terrorists engaged in a holy war against us!
·Among those trained with US taxpayer dollars in Afghanistan was Ramsey Youseff, the man who bombed the World Trade Center.
Look, I can go on for pages, but I think the list is already shagadellic enough to prove the point. And if you're not yet convinced that this is a spy agency in frantic search of its own mojo at our expense, dig this: In May 1998, when CIA failed to discern that India was preparing to explode nuclear devices, DCI George Tenet appointed a team to investigate this stupefying intelligence failure, headed by retired Vice Admiral David E. Jeremiah. The report damned the CIA's performance and recommended across-the-board changes and improvements.
Specifically, Admiral Jeremiah said that the CIA "needs to be scrubbed from the top down, from its spies to its analysts to its bureaucratic barons. The [Indian] debacle revealed chronic failures of imagination and personnel, flaws in information-gathering and analysis, and faulty leadership and training." This finding, so critical to the security of the American people, was virtually absent from mainstream media, and our congressional "protectors" pretended it didn't exist. And that's the other reason the world of our "real" CIA is so similar to the Austin Powers' world.
What makes Austin Powers' movies funny is that everyone in his world, particularly the politicians and the media, seem to take the guy seriously. He cannot screw up enough to outrage the bizarro characters in his world. Apparently the same can be said for the world of our CIA. Every single screw-up they have committed has led invariably to Congress' raising their budgets (e.g., $3 billion increase after bombing the Chinese Embassy). And if that weren't bad enough, every single debacle they get involved in is looked at by our media--who are awarded Pulitzers for Monica Lewinsky reporting--as unique, with their entire shagadellic history immediately forgotten.
One of the few CIA officers I've ever met whom I would consider a street-smart professional is 25-year veteran Ralph McGhee, who furnished me with excerpts from a CIA document, obtained via an FOIA request, wherein the Agency's PAO (Public Affairs Office) bragged that its relationships with "reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly and TV network . . . has helped turn some 'intelligence failure' stories into 'intelligence success' stories. . . ." As testament to the PAO's success at media manipulation, the CIA's decades-long record of horrific failure and screw-ups has been well documented but only published briefly and superficially by mainstream media.
As I write this, for example, the bombing of the Chinese embassy, an act that still may cost America dearly, has virtually vanished from mainstream American media in a blur of conflicting, vague statements, leaving the public confused about what really happened. Let's face it, folks: having a $30-billion-a-year spy agency in perpetual search for its lost mojo is only funny in movies.
If there is a lesson in this latest screw-up of bombing the embassy of a belligerent, nuclear superpower, it is that we had better follow Admiral Jeremiah's recommendations and take these guys apart before they do it to us.
Last week a New York newspaper reported that the Director of Central Intelligence addressed a graduating class of his high school where he admitted that he was "the biggest mouth in his class." How ironic that he would become the head of Central Intelligence. Shagadellic, Baby.
--Michael Levine is author of New York Times best-seller Deep Cover, The Big White Lie and Triangle of Death," and hosts "The Expert Witness" radio show, WBAI, 99.5 FM and KPFK 90.7 FM. <www.radio4all.org/expert> <www.shineon.org/levine/index.html>