The communist on J. Edgar Hoover’s payroll
This is an excerpt from Enemies: A History of the FBI, published this month by Random House.
J. Edgar Hoover’s most valued secret agent was a Russian Jew named Morris Childs. The operation the FBI built on his work was code-named SOLO. It posed great risks and the promise of greater rewards.
The FBI’s first debriefings of Childs were declassified in August 2011. They illuminate several mysteries of the Cold War, including the origins of Hoover’s hatred for Martin Luther King, the reasons for Dwight Eisenhower’s failure to approve the CIA’s plans to invade Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and the beginnings of Richard Nixon’s thoughts about a détente with the Soviets.
Morris Childs was an important figure in the Communist Party of the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, serving as the editor of its newspaper, the Daily Worker. He had fallen out with the Party in 1948. Three years later, the FBI approached him as part of a new program called TOPLEV, in which FBI agents tried to talk top-level Communist Party members and officials into becoming informants.
Childs became a Communist for the FBI. He rejoined the Party and rose higher and higher in its secret hierarchy. In the summer of 1957, the Party’s leaders proposed that he serve as their international emissary in an effort to reestablish direct political and financial ties with the Kremlin. If Moscow approved, Childs would be reporting to Hoover as the foreign secretary of the Communist Party of the United States.
The FBI’s intelligence chief, Al Belmont, could barely contain his excitement. If the operation worked, he told Hoover, “it would enhance tremendously the Bureau’s prestige as an intelligence agency.”
On April 24, 1958, Childs boarded TWA Flight 824 to Paris, on the first leg of his long trip to Moscow, at the invitation of the Kremlin. He met the Party’s leaders over the course of eight weeks. He learned that his next stop would be Beijing. On July 6, he had an audience with Chairman Mao Tse-tung. Was the United States planning to go to war in Southeast Asia? Mao asked. If so, China intended to fight to the death, as it had during the Korean War. “There may be many Koreas in Asia,” Mao predicted.
US intelligence spending – value for money?
America’s spy agencies are spending more money on obtaining intelligence than the rest of the world put together. Considerably more. To what extent they are providing value for money is an open question.
“Sometimes we are getting our money’s worth,” says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington think tank. “Sometimes I think it would be better to truck the money we spend to a large parking lot and set fire to it.”
The biggest post-Cold War miss of the sprawling intelligence community was its failure to connect the dots of separate warnings about the impending attack on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. It also laid bare a persistent flaw in a system swamped by a tsunami of data collected through high-tech electronic means: not enough linguists to analyse information.
That problem was thrown into sharp focus by the government’s disclosure, long after September 11, that it had a 123,000-hour backlog of pre-attack taped message traffic in Middle Eastern languages, clear evidence of a system drowning in its own information.
The overall amount of money spent on the collection and analysis of intelligence as well as on covert actions and counter-intelligence by civilian agencies and the military was long shrouded in secrecy. It was disclosed last September by Dennis Blair, then President Barack Obama’s director of national intelligence: $75 billion a year.
No other country comes even close and no other country has as many people working in the intelligence industry — at least 200,000, counting private contractors. Russia and China lag behind.
“Nobody is quite as ambitious as the United States because nobody is trying to project global power as much as the U.S.,” said Steven Aftergood, an expert on intelligence spending who heads the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy.
In terms of terrorist threats I think it is fair to say that intelligence is our only front line hope to success, it is quite clear from Afghanistan, Hamas, Yemen, Pakistan, etc. that armed confrontations cannot remove these threats. Really we are better off spending the money we do on intelligence than on the regular military.
As far as whether or not the money spent yields the results it should we must recognize a couple things, first the difficulty of dealing with the sheer amount of information our services need to deal with, and secondly how daunting it is to really reform entrenched bureaucratic interests. The first issue makes it clear how important the second issue is. By creating the Department of Homeland Security we had hoped to solve a lot of the problems we have in duplication of efforts and sharing of information between departments. It is clear that effort at reform fell short and that we need to revisit that.
It isn’t the money we spend, it is what we get in return for it.
America’s spies and a language crisis
– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. –
“There is a great deal about Iran that we do not know…The United States lacks critical information needed for analysts to make many of their judgments with confidence about Iran.”
That was the verdict of a Congressional committee on U.S. intelligence policy two years ago. How valid it still is was highlighted by Iran’s June elections and their turbulent aftermath.
By most accounts, the huge margin of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s victory, the equally huge demonstrations of Iranians crying fraud, and their brutal repression all came as surprises to U.S. intelligence and foreign policy experts.
The reasons for America’s problems of coming to grips with Iran are manifold: a 30-year absence of diplomats on the ground, an opaque political system difficult to penetrate, wishful thinking, a perennial temptation to “mirror-image,” that is to expect others to think and behave like yourself. Last but not least: an acute shortage of Farsi-speaking analysts and agents.
The number of people in the sprawling U.S. intelligence community, 16 separate agencies with more than 100,000 employees, who speak Iran’s language is classified, as is the number of fluent Arabic and Pashto speakers. (The State Department says it has 22 foreign service officers out of 6,500 who are fluent in Farsi.)
The problem is not new and it contributed to the notorious misjudgments of the situation in Iran by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1978, a few months before the Islamic revolution that sent the Shah fleeing into exile.
Hello.
Iran is not a complicated country and the Persian Culture is pretty much the same as it has been for many centuries.
When the world realises that Iranians are Persian and not Arabs that may start to change the way people view Iran.
Persian Culture is one of tolerance and respect for other cultures, languages and beliefs.
Cyrus the Great was a lover of Culture and respected the Gods of other Nations. He showed great respect for the God of the Jews, releasing the Jews from captivity in Babylon in 539 BCE.
Israel owes a lot to the Persian King Cyrus, and many Jews respect and understand this fact.
I have traveled to Iran many times and have had many conversations with people from various walks of life. They all have one thing in common, they are not happy with the way things are in Iran.
The structure of the Persian language is full of gracious speach and salutations which when spoken to me In Tehran, Ehsfahan and Shiraz touched my heart.
I am British. All my family are British, I have no blood ties with Iran however if there is one culture the human race should be proud of it is Persians.
When you want to engage a child in conversation the best way is to get down on their level so as not to intimidate them.
The same is with cultures, learn to interact and respect the differences without dictating and dominating, whatever needs to be said will be accepted more readily.
A few weeks ago a few Somali men were talking near an area where i happened to be. some people were intimidated by them. One caught my eye and i smiled, he smiled back and i asked him where was he from. I asked him about Somalia and his family left behind. I learnt more about Somalia in five minutes than ever before. Also i broke down a barrier. I even could disagree on many points respectfully regarding the Koran and he respected my view.
Its all about respect.
Good intelliogence is born from respect.
The role of the Communist Party in furthering Martin Luther King’s career and the civil rights movement is generally unacknowledged in the United States. Although the topic came up repeatedly in the 1960′s it was widely regarded as a paranoid smear fomented by right-wing racist groups. As it happens, they were on to something although the facts were unknown to them.
At the very time that the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China were imprisoning dissidents and their own human rights activists, and China was on the verge of starving perhaps 50 million of their own citizens, American Communists were happily chattering about the “negro struggle” and ending segregation. They were less interested in these movements as a force for increased civil rights than as a tool for civil turmoil and their usefulness in promoting a Marxist revolution in the United States.
At the time of his assassination King himself was beginning the process of coming out as a Marxist in his own style, although there is no evidence that had anything to do with the killing. Many of his close confederates like Stanley Levinson and Hunter Pitts O’Dell, both closely associated with the CPUSA, had been working to influence King for many years. The anti-war demonstrations and radical student movement were helping to convince him that the time had come.
The late 1960s were a period ripe with possibilities for increased violence and civil disorder. Had Martin Luther King lived the American civil rights movement may have taken the form of an insurgent class warfare movement. His death and the widespread reaction to the riots that followed had a tempering effect on the radicalization of the movement. Formal Marxist sentiment faded outside of small radical circles on college campuses where it still festers to this day.