Eric Margolis

THE US AIR FORCE RULES THE SKIES

WASHINGTON - The capital may be buzzing with talk about the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq, but the US Air Force appears to be planning for a long stay in Mesopotamia and Central Asia.

The USAF is reported to be expanding its air bases in Iraq, including lengthening a second 11,000 ft runway at Balad Airbase, a nerve center for American air operations. There are persistent reports from the Pentagon that the US intends to keep four to six major military bases in Iraq, each with a powerful air component, and a 3,500-man helicopter-mobile, rapid reaction infantry brigade. Other US operating air bases
in Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Pakistan, and Central Asia are being steadily improved.


Bush Administration hawks hope to retain control of oil-rich Iraq, and sharply decrease the number of US battle casualties, by using American air power and Iraqi troops. Iraqi `native’ troops, or `sepoys,’ as the British used to call its local mercenaries, will do all the dirty work on the ground and keep the populace under control.

US air power and infantry will only intervene when Iraqi sepoys get into trouble. This is precisely the same formula use by the British Empire to rule Iraq after World War I. Winston Churchill even authorized use of mustard gas by the RAF against rebellious Kurdish tribesmen – and troublesome Pashtun tribesmen on India’s Northwest frontier.

The US Air Force recently moved new squadrons of advanced F-16C’s fighters and workhorse A-10 ground attack aircraft to Iraq. Powerful B-1B heavy bombers have been repositioned from remote Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to the Gulf.

The $220 million each B-1’s can carry up to 41,000 lbs of bombs. Their deadly accurate GPS-guided 500-lb and 1,000-lb bombs have inflicted heavy casualties on resistance fighters and, inevitably, civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thanks to amazingly accurate targeting, the USAF is now developing a new small, low blast radius 250lb bomb specially configured for anti-guerilla operations in civilian areas.

Without US fighters, B1’s and B-52’s heavy bombers, and AC-130 gunships constantly flying top cover, over-stretched US infantry in Iraq, and US/NATO forces in Afghanistan, might very well face defeat. Western forces could not protect their long, vulnerable supply lines and mall, scattered outposts against local guerillas without immediate, intensive air support.

Deprived of constant air support, US and NATO bases in Iraq and Afghanistan would become little Dienbienphu’s: surrounded and isolated, like the infamous French field fortress in the Vietnamese highlands, under heavy bombardment, and forced to rely on always insufficient air drops of munitions, supplies and reinforcements.

Afghanistan’s previous invaders, the British and Soviets, were primarily defeated by their inability to protect their long lines of communications. During World War I, a British army in Mesopotamia met the same fate at Kut after the Turks cut its supply lines to Basra.

By contrast, the mighty USAF maintains 24-hour combat air patrols that can respond within minutes to calls from ground units, directing devastating cluster munitions, smart bombs, and cannon fire onto attackers. When the Soviets occupied Afghanistan, the Red Air Force’s response time to attacks by mujahidin on Russian ground units was often as much as 30-60 minutes, by which time the attackers had escaped.

Consequently, assaults on US and NATO ground units are near suicidal affairs. So Iraqi and Afghan resistance forces have adopted as their weapon of choice roadside bombs command detonated by a single fighter from a safe distance.

US and NATO units, under mounting attack, are increasingly calling in close air support and bombing runs. This over-reliance on air support is causing civilian casualties to mount sharply in Afghanistan and Iraq. Guerilla forces can be suppressed and dispersed by air power, but not decisively defeated. Israel’s shocking failure to defeat Hezbullah guerillas in southern Lebanon last year by air attacks was a graphic example.

Whenever the US and NATO claim `100 dead suspected Taliban’ or `50 dead Iraqi insurgents,’ many are actually dead civilians. There is no way fighter and bomber pilots flying at over 300 mph can distinguish between un-uniformed fighters and civilians. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the general rule is to attack any groups of men numbering more than two or three, and, as the old line from the Vietnam War went, `let God sort them out.’

The US has also developed reconnaissance capability of formidable capacity and coverage. US satellites can read license plates through clouds, smoke, rain or foliage, and track human infrared signatures. Drones, U-2 spy planes and a fleet of electronic warfare aircraft provide unblinking, 24/7 `eyes in the sky’ over almost all of Afghanistan and Iraq. The flood of data from all these sensors is consolidated and distributed to field commands or shared with HQ units in what is called `actionable’ information.

The US Air Force has become to the American Imperium what the Royal Navy was to the British Empire, the source of its might, and means of power projection.
While the Royal Navy ruled only the waves and littoral regions, the USAF can today reach and strike any point on the globe with devastating accuracy, speed and force. It is the mightiest, most technologically accomplished military force in history.

In fact, the USAF, with its new stealthy F-22 and upcoming F-35, are now so technologically advanced, they are at least 1.5-2 generations ahead of the rest of the world.

Russia has advanced technology and anti-stealth systems on the drawing board but cannot yet afford to deploy them in sufficient numbers. Russia, China, and India are unlikely to catch up with US military technology for the next 25 years – if ever.

The US accounts for 50% of total global military spending, and is simply too far ahead for any other powers to catch up – unless some radical new military technologies suddenly emerge that neutralize or make obsolete today’s advanced weapons systems.

Only Europe could compete militarily, had it the will, which it does not. In fact, America’s air force and naval aviation have enjoyed near absolute air superiority since 1943 with only temporary challenges during the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

The USAF also has the US military’s smartest, best educated, and most forward-thinking officers. The US Army’s thankless role – and I say this as a former Army infantryman - has become to pin down enemy units so they can become targets for the USAF’s smart bombs.

Today, the only real challenge facing the US Air Force comes from its old enemy, the US Navy, which is determined not to let the flyboys blitz its budgets and steal all the glory.



copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007

IS THE US PREPARING TO ATTACK PAKISTAN?

The Bush Administration may be preparing to lash out at old ally Pakistan, which Washington now blames for its humiliating failures to crush al-Qaida, capture its elusive leaders, or defeat Taliban resistance forces in Afghanistan.

One is immediately reminded of the Vietnam War when the Pentagon, unable to defeat North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong forces, urged invasion of Cambodia.

Sources in Washington say the Pentagon is drawing up plans to attack Pakistan’s `autonomous’ tribal region bordering Afghanistan. Limited `hot pursuit’ ground incursions by US forces based in Afghanistan, intensive air attacks, and special forces raids into Pakistan’s autonomous tribal region are being evaluated.

This weekend, the US national intelligence chief and other intelligence spokesmen confirmed that strikes against `terrorist targets’ in Pakistan’s tribal belt are increasingly possible. These warnings were designed to both further pressure Pakistan’s beleaguered strongman, President Pervez Musharraf into sending more troops to the tribal areas to fight his own people, and to prepare US public opinion for a possible widening of the Afghanistan war into Pakistan.

Pakistan’s 27,200 sq km tribal belt, officially known as the Federal Autonomous Tribal Area, or FATA, is home to 3.3 million Pashtun tribesmen. It has become a safe haven for al-Qaida, Taliban, other Afghan resistance groups, and a hotbed of anti-American activity, thanks mostly to the US-led occupation of Afghanistan which drove many militants across the border into Pakistan. Osama bin Laden is very likely sheltered in this region, as US intelligence claims.

I spent a remarkable time in this wild, medieval region during the 1980’s and 90’s, traveling alone where even Pakistani government officials dared not go, visiting the tribes of Waziristan, Orakzai, Khyber, Chitral, and Kurram, and meeting their chiefs, called `maliks.’

These tribal belts are always referred to as`lawless.’ Pashtun tribesmen could shoot you if they didn’t like your looks. Rudyard Kipling warned British Imperial soldiers over a century ago, when fighting cruel, ferocious Pashtun warriors of the Afridi clan, if they fell wounded, `save your last bullet for yourself.’

But there is law: the traditional Pashtun tribal code, Pashtunwali, that strictly governs behavior and personal honor. Protecting guests was sacred. I was captivated by this majestic mountain region and wrote of it extensively in my book, `War at the Top of the World.’

The 40 million Pashtun – called `Pathan’ by the British – are the world’s largest tribal group. Imperial Britain divided them by an artificial border, the Durand Line, which went on to become, like so many other British colonial boundaries, today’s Afghanistan-Pakistan border. When Pakistan was created in 1947, the Pashtun were split between that new nation and Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s Pashtun number 28-30 million, plus an additional 2.5 million refugees from Afghanistan. Pashtuns, one of the British Indian Army’s famed `martial races,’ occupy many senior positions in Pakistan’s military, intelligence service and bureaucracy, and naturally have much sympathy for their embattled tribal cousins in Afghanistan. The 15 million Pashtun of Afghanistan form that nation’s largest ethnic group and just under half the population.

The tribal agency’s Pashtun reluctantly joined newly-created Pakistan in 1947 under express constitutional guarantee of total autonomy and a ban on Pakistani troops ever entering there.

But under intense US pressure, President Pervez Musharraf violated Pakistan’s constitution by sending 80,000 federal troops to fight the region’s tribes, killing 3,000 of them. In best British imperial tradition, Washington pays Musharraf $100 million monthly to rent his sepoys (native soldiers) to fight Pashtun tribesmen. As a result, Pakistan is fast edging towards civil war, as the bloody siege of Islamabad’s Red Mosque and a current wave of bombings across the nation show.

The anti-communist Taliban movement is part of the Pashtun people. Taliban fighters move across the artificial Pakistan-Afghanistan border, to borrow a Maoism, like fish through the sea. Osama bin Laden is a hero in the region, and likely shelters there.

The US just increased its reward for bin Laden to $50 million and plans to shower $750 million on the tribal region in an effort to buy loyalty. Bush/Cheney & Co. do not understand that while they can rent President Musharraf’s government in Islamabad, many Pashtun value personal honor far more than money, and cannot be bought. That is likely why bin Laden has not yet been betrayed.

Any US attack on Pakistan would be a catastrophic mistake. First, air and ground assaults will succeed only in widening the anti-US war and merging it with Afghanistan’s resistance to western occupation. US forces are already too over-stretched to get involved in yet another little war.

Second, Pakistan’s army officers who refuse to be bought may resist a US attack on their homeland, and overthrow the man who allowed it, Gen. Musharraf. A US attack would sharply raise the threat of anti-US extremists seizing control of strategic Pakistan and marginalize those seeking return to democratic government.

Third, a US attack on the tribal areas could re-ignite the old irredentist movement to reunite Pashtun parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan into independent state, `Pashtunistan.’ That could begin unravelling fragile Pakistan, leaving its nuclear arsenal up for grabs, and India tempted to intervene.

The US military has grown used to attacking small, weak nations like Grenada, Panama, and Iraq. Pakistan, with 163 million people, and a poorly equipped but very tough 550,000-man army, will offer no easy victories. Those Bush Administration officials who foolishly advocate attacking Pakistan are playing with fire.

Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007

LIES, MORE LIES, AND DAMN LIES

As Americans turn increasingly against President George Bush’s calamitous war in Iraq, and revolt spreads through Republican ranks, the White House is again resorting to its tried and true ploy of fanning grossly inflated fears of terrorism.

The president just made two preposterous claims last week that insult the intelligence of his listeners. First, Bush insisted US forces in Iraq are fighting `the same people’ who staged 9/11.’

Second, withdrawing US forces from Iraq, as the Democratic-controlled Congress is urging, means `surrendering Iraq to al-Qaida.’

These canards mark the latest steps in the Bush administration’s evolving efforts to mislead Americans into believing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are all part of a global fight against al-Qaida.

When marketers want to change the name of an existing product, they first place a new name in small type below the existing one. They gradually shrink the old name, and enlarge the new one until the original name vanishes.

That’s what’s been happening in Iraq. When the US invaded, Iraqis who resisted were initially branded `Saddam loyalists,’ `die-hard Ba’athists,’ or, in Don Rumsfeld’s colorful terminology, `dead-enders.’ Next, the Pentagon and US media called the Iraqi resistance, `terrorists’ or `insurgents.’ The reason for invading Iraq, the White House insisted, was all about removing the tyrant Saddam, seizing weapons of mass destruction, defending humans rights and implanting democracy.

Then, a tiny, previously unknown Iraqi group that had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden appropriated the name, `al-Qaida in Mesopotamia.’

This was such a breathtakingly convenient gift to the Bush Administration, many cynics suspected a false-flag operation created by CIA and Britain’s wily MI6. Soon after, the White House and Pentagon began calling most of Iraq’s 22 plus resistance groups, `al-Qaida.’

The US media eagerly joined this deception, even though 95% of Iraq’s resistance groups had no sympathy for bin Laden’s movement. Watch any US network TV news report on Iraq and you will inevitably hear reporters parroting Pentagon handouts about US forces `launching a new offensive against al-Qaida.’

Al-Qaida in Mesopotamia didn’t even exist before 9/11, but that didn’t stop President Bush from trying to gull credulous voters. He simply ignored the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate that found US-occupied Iraq had become an `incubator’ for violent anti-American groups.

If the US were to withdraw from Iraq tomorrow, the nation would be split between warring Shia, Sunni and Kurdish parties. The fake Al-Qaida in Iraq would end up at the bottom of the totem pole, or be wiped out by other Iraqis. Even Osama bin Laden and his number two, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, have blasted the phony al-Qaida in Iraq and called for an end to its attacks on Iraqi civilians.

Polls show that in spite of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, White House disinformation strategy has worked. Today, an amazing 60% of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks.

At least that’s down from the 80% who originally believed this Orwellian big lie in 2003. The White House continues to blur the facts and make Americans believe Iraq and Afghanistan are `central fronts in the global war on terror.’

The fact recent polls found 60% of Americans – and 90% of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan – still believe Saddam and bin Laden had colluded to launch 9/11 is shocking, but not surprising. Ignorance of foreign affairs and mindless flag waving are as American as apple pie.

Tens of millions of Americans are fed a steady diet of political or religious ideology disguised as news from the administration’s house organ, Fox News; from evangelical Christian TV and radio; or from the neoconservative’s version of Pravda, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages. The rest are too busy watching brain-deadening TV pap to pay the least attention to events overseas.

They remain unaware the faux `war against global terror’ is now costing a mind-boggling US $12 billion monthly, according to the non-partisan Congressional Research Service. That’s the cost of 3 nuclear-powered `Nimitz’ class 97,000 ton aircraft carriers every month.

The Bush Administration has spent $610 billion dollars since 2001 on its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, making them the second most expensive conflict in US history after World War II.

Last week, US Homeland Security Czar Michael Chertoff allowed he had a `gut feel’ that an al-Qaida attack on America was imminent this summer. At the same time, Washington was abuzz with a leaked US intelligence report that al-Qaida – the objective of the so-called war on terror – had reconstituted and was as strong as prior to 9/11, 2001.

America’s sixteen intelligence agencies spend $40 billion annually, with another $15-20 billion in their hidden `black budgets.’ Homeland Security spends $44.6 billion. In spite of these gargantuan expenditures of a trillion dollars – that’s $1,000,000,000,000 - the best intelligence Czar Cheroff can come up with is `gut feel?’

One suspects Chertoff’s worried stomach has far more to do with the growing Republican Party revolt against the president’s Iraq war than nebulous threats from Osama bin Laden’s loud but tiny group.

Polls show the only area where Republicans still command popular support is the `war on terror.’
So Bush/Cheney & Co are trying to use al-Qaida to scare Americans to vote Republican, just as they did prior to 2004 elections. It worked well last time and got Bush re-elected.

But Americans are increasingly leery of the White House’s crying wolf. Many are also asking how Bush could claim `steady progress’ was being made in his wars when it appears the al-Qaida movement is back to pre-2001 strength, anti-American groups are popping up across Asia and Africa, and Iraq is a bloody mess.

After six years of conflict, 3,600 dead and 25,000 wounded American soldiers, expenditure of $610 billion, tens of thousands of dead Iraqis and Afghans, collapse of Mideast peace efforts, and a Muslim World enraged against the US, nothing positive seems to have been accomplished by a leader who likes to style himself, `the war president.’

As the White House now ponders an attack on Iran, we would do well to recall the famed words of King Pyrrhus of Epirus, `one more such victory and we are ruined.’


copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007

LONDON AND GLASGOW: WORSE THAN A CRIME, A MISTAKE

NEW YORK – Pundits and self-appointed experts on Islam are wringing their hands as they try to explain why two Muslim doctors and at least six other medical workers were involved in this week’s failed bombings in London and Glasgow.

It certainly sounds horrific and counter-intuitive. Physicians, trained to heal, turned into would-be mass murders with cars packed full of explosive materials and nails. Since I’m writing a book on why the Muslim World is so angry at the west, let me venture some heretical thoughts.

First, there is nothing sacrosanct about doctors. Behind carefully cultivated veneers of icy detachment, they have the same emotions as ordinary mortals. The most evil, frightening man I ever met – and I’ve met a lot – was Haiti’s tyrant, `Papa Doc’ Duvalier, who was a crusading country doctor before he turned into a Voodoo-crazed despot.

Second, the amateur, would-be killers who staged these bungled attacks were not, as many western pundits claim, likely to have been driven by some sort of homicidal perversion native to Islam. An entire cottage industry of publicity-seeking anti-Muslim writers is at work seeking to confirm the increasingly popular prejudice that Islam is a sick, demented, homicidal faith. These pundits are merely licking the hand that pays them.

There is nothing in Islam that advocates homicidal acts or mass killing. In fact, while its popular these days to demonize Islam as a violent faith, we should recall that history’s biggest mass murderers, Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao and Hitler, were not Muslims. Auschwitz and the gulag did not come from Islam. World wars I and II, the most murderous in history, were begun by Christian nations and Japan.

The two accused doctors now under arrest In Britain, one of whom was Iraqi and the other Jordanian of Palestinian descent, were most likely driven by rage over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, pure and simple.

Nothing ever excuses killing civilians. Those who stage horrific bombings against Israelis, Europeans, American and fellow Muslim civilians are criminals. Nothing excuses their behavior. But we must understand why it happens and why it will continue. Understanding has nothing to do with condoning.

Britain’s new prime minister, Gordon Brown, responded the right way to the London and Glasgow incidents. Unlike Tony Blair, who raised anti-western attacks to hysterical, apocalyptic levels, declaring civilization in peril, the dour Brown properly characterized the latest outrages as `criminal’ acts to be handled by the police.

The two doctors who tried to kill British civilians were most likely motivated by the same ferocious fury as the suicide squads who attacked New York and Washington on 11 Sept 2001.

Their attacks were not the result of some innate sickness in Islam, misreading the Koran, brainwashing, or hatred of western shopping habits. Our governments and media just refuse to face the ugly reality that such attacks are very often a direct reaction to our own violent actions in the Mideast and South Asia.

We can’t expect to go on bombing and shooting up Iraq, or shredding Afghan villages with cluster bombs and 20mm Gatling guns, and not expect violent reaction. The increasing death of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the ongoing agonies of Palestine, have enraged the Muslim World against the west.

Most Muslims simply complain. But a tiny number, as in Britain, forget rationality, humanity, or common sense and try to strike back at what they believe are the oppressors of the Muslin World.

I was in London two years ago this past weekend when a group of British Muslims bombed the London Underground and a bus. Their motivation, it was subsequently revealed, was revenge against Britain for its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Such violence is criminal and, worse, to paraphrase Tallyrand, a mistake. They undermine whatever cause the militants are fighting for, making them into criminals with no possible justifiable grievances. In the end, innocent Muslims in Britain and other western nations become victims of these mindless attacks.

But revenge attacks will continue, and even intensify, until the west reassesses its policies in the regions that are generating such anti-western violence.

Intensified police work is needed at home to prevent more attacks. Muslim leaders must keep telling their people that attacks against civilians are immoral and self-defeating.

But western governments have to face the fact that the wars they are waging against the Muslim World are the primary generators of terrorism. In the intelligence business, it’s called blowback.

Blaming every violent incident on the shadowy al-Qaida is a handy excuse for avoiding reality and responsibility. But it won’t change the fact that a good 20% of the world’s population is increasingly enraged at the US, Britain, Australia and, most lately, Canada. How can we hector the Muslim World to cease its acts of violence when we westerners continue to intensify our own?

Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007

PARANOIA AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL

Last week, CIA finally released a series of top secret files known in the agency as the `Crown Jewels’ that covered its illegal activities from 1960-1970’s. The much anticipated dossier offered few surprises and confirmed much of what was already well known.

Still, the files officially confirmed CIA plans in the 1960’s to assassinate foreign leaders like Fidel Castro, Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, and Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem. It also revealed extensive agency spying on Americans, illegal wiretaps and often embarrassingly amateurish cloak and dagger operations that contrasted unfavorably with rival KGB’s more professional performance.

Unfortunately, many other secret operations that violated US law – an attempt to kill Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, overthrowing governments in Syria and Central America, or waging war in Indonesia - remained classified. Former CIA directors, Adm. Stansfield Turner and Dr. James Schlesinger, both told me in the 1980’s that they had wanted to reveal far more information about CIA than had then come out, but were not able to do so.

Revelations of CIA’s `family jewels’ certainly bring back lots of Cold War nostalgia. Americans, however, are asking how these past CIA illegalities compare to today’s violations of the Constitution and federal laws by US national security agencies.

The answer: today’s violations by CIA, FBI, NSA(National Security Agency) and various Pentagon intelligence operations– that include massive wiretapping, data mining, and communications intercepts, kidnapping, and torture - are far more serious and widespread. However, their justification, the alleged threat to national security by `Islamic terrorists,’ is tiny compared to the huge threat posed by the Soviet Union’s massive nuclear arsenal during the Cold War.

CIA’s dramatic historic revelations bring us to the shadowy figure of the real power in the White House, US Vice President Dick Cheney. It was Cheney who engineered the Iraq war, is urging attacks Iran and Syria, and has championed CIA’s domestic surveillance programs. He sees America surrounded and infiltrated by enemies.

In these respects, Cheney bears a remarkable resemblance to the fabled Cold Warrior, and US intelligence grand master, James Jesus Angleton.

Angleton rose through US wartime OSS intelligence to become director of CIA’s powerful counter-intelligence division. He was extremely close during the 1950’s to the senior British MI6 intelligence officer, Kim Philby, who headed up British intelligence in Washington and was the nexus of Anglo-American intelligence operations.

The charming, brainy Philby fed Angleton a steady stream of disinformation and lies. Angleton fell totally under Philby’s spell; some intelligence sources hinted at an even more intimate relationship, though no proof has ever emerged. Whatever the case, Philby used Angleton and made a complete fool of him.

In 1963, Philby defected to Moscow after being finally unmasked as a high-level KGB agent by a Russian defector. By then, the damage was done. Philby’s treachery inflicted huge damage on US and British intelligence, nearly bringing the demoralized MI6 to its knees.

Philby’s betrayal, so brilliantly captured in semi-fictional form by the writer John le Carré in `Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ and `Smiley’s People,’ caused something to snap in Angleton’s tormented brain - just as the 9/11 attacks appear to have transformed Dick Cheney from a capable but colorless, mostly apolitical senior bureaucrat into an ardent militarist, sword-bearer of America’s far right, and soul-mate of Israel’s rightwing Likud Party.

By the late 1960’s, the brilliant, eccentric, Angleton, whose job was to find enemy agents within US intelligence, had became a deeply disturbed and paranoid. Angleton trusted no one. He came to believe genuine Soviet defectors were KGB plants, and KGB plants legitimate defectors. He also become an active `asset’ or at least very close ally of Israel’s Mossad, and a champion of Israel’s cause in Washington.

On orders of President Lyndon Johnson, Angleton unleashed notorious operation `CHAOS’ that conducted highly illegal CIA surveillance of American anti-war and civil rights groups. He accused FBI of being infested by Soviet moles and blocked CIA-FBI cooperation.

By the 70’s, Angleton was seeing enemy spies everywhere. He suspected Henry Kissinger, and accused Canadian prime ministers Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau of being Soviet agents. He claimed Britain’s PM Harold Wilson, Sweden’s PM Olof Palme, and Germany’s chancellor Willy Brandt were also KGB agents.

Angleton’s galloping paranoia caused him to believe CIA was filled with Soviet moles. Similarly, Cheney concluded today’s CIA is unreliable, filled with `defeatists’ and `Arabists,’ and could not be trusted with national security. Cheney and old ally Donald Rumsfeld created two `special’ intelligence offices in the Pentagon linked to Israeli intelligence designed to bypass CIA and feed the White House and Congress bogus reports justifying invading Iraq and waging the so-called `war on terrorism.’

Angleton created his own internal intelligence unit within the agency that spied on its co-workers and fed his growing dementia. Agency morale collapsed. This period of fierce mutual suspicions, snooping on employees, double or triple agents, and ruined careers became aptly know as `a wilderness of mirrors.’

Angleton, a hero of America’s hard right, kept warning the White House the Soviets were about to attack. In 1974, the mentally unstable Angleton was forced to retire, having nearly wrecked CIA and severely damaged relations with key US allies.

Now, many in official Washington are worrying about how to retire the increasingly paranoid figure of Vice President Cheney, who, like Angleton, appears to have lost touch with reality in a wilderness of mirrors.


copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007