Robert Gates sounds off (again)
March 14th, 2012 | CIA Defense | Posted by Sean Reilly
Robert Gates was back in Washington this evening with a display of the understated candor that was a trademark during his five years as secretary of defense. It was Gates, after all, who last year described members of Congress as a group “with oversized egos and undersized backbones”—a line he cheerfully repeated during tonight’s award ceremony hosted by the National Academy of Public Administration.
Gates, on hand to receive the academy’s Elliot L. Richardson Prize for excellence in public service, spoke during a wide-ranging question-and-answer session with James Kitfield, senior correspondent at National Journal. Here are a few other excerpts:
* On the similarities between the CIA, Defense Department and Texas A&M University, all of which Gates headed during his long career: “In all three places, most of the people you work with have tenure. They’re there before you got there and they will be there after you leave. If you really want to change something, you’d better make them your partners in change.”
* On canning people: “I don’t think I fired anybody because they didn’t know about a problem. . . . What I fired them for was once they knew about it, they didn’t take it seriously.”
* On the increasing polarization of American politics: “I am very worried. It’s because we’ve got a situation where compromise has become synonymous with selling out or abandoning your principles. If you want highly ideological politics, go to France—those guys perfected it.”
The ceremony was held at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in downtown Washington.
Tags: National Academy of Public Administration, Robert Gates, Texas A&M University
The analyst who tracked down bin Laden
July 5th, 2011 | CIA | Posted by Stephen Losey
The Associated Press today profiles a CIA analyst known only as “John,” who was one of the most persistent hunters of Osama bin Laden. The article goes into his dogged pursuit, his insistence that a set of incomplete leads had uncovered the terrorist leader — and the unexpected, overwhelming emotions that came after his death:
Two days after bin Laden’s death, John accompanied Panetta to Capitol Hill. The Senate Intelligence Committee wanted a full briefing on the successful mission. At one point in the private session, Panetta turned to the man whose counterterrorism resume spanned four CIA directors.
He began to speak, about the operation and about the years of intelligence it was based on. And as he spoke about the mission that had become his career, the calm, collected analyst paused, and he choked up.
Tags: analysts, Osama bin Laden
In bin Laden hunt, all the pieces mattered
May 9th, 2011 | CIA | Posted by Stephen Losey
"We're building something here, detective. We're building it from scratch. All the pieces matter."
Economist blogger JF hits the nail on the head when he calls last week’s bin Laden operation “Lester Freamon’s finest hour.”
Regular viewers of HBO’s The Wire will remember Freamon as the veteran detective “with a gift for the paper trail,” who pored through reams of property records and campaign donation filings to uncover corruption, and listened to hours upon hours of banal wiretapped conversations to catch the one veiled reference to a contract killing necessary to bring down a drug lord. If it had an iconic image, it was Freamon sitting at a desk, painting dollhouse miniatures and peering over the rims of his glasses as gangsters’ pager numbers flashed across a computer screen.
The Wire didn’t traffic in car chases or shootouts, like other cop shows. It turned the drudgery and bureaucracy of police work into drama just as gripping as action shows like 24 — sometimes even more so.
Similarly, while SEAL Team 6 certainly deserves every plaudit they’re getting for their derring-do, the contributions of thousands of civilian intelligence analysts and operators should not be overlooked. What they did was slow, frustrating and decidedly unsexy work, but after thousands of late nights, it gradually added up to victory. Forget James Bond and Jack Bauer — that’s real intelligence work, and the Lester Freamons of the world deserve our thanks.
Tags: Intelligence, Osama bin Laden, The Wire
Obama: Bin Laden killed in firefight today
May 1st, 2011 | CIA | Posted by Stephen Losey
President Obama just said the American CIA operation that killed al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan took place today. He said no Americans were hurt or killed in the firefight.
He also said the first lead on bin Laden’s location came last August. “Justice has been done,” Obama said.
UPDATE: Obama said that shortly after taking office, he ordered CIA Director Leon Panetta to make killing or capturing bin Laden the top priority of the United States’ war against al Qaida.
The first possible lead that bin Laden was hiding in a compound deep inside Pakistan “was far from certain, and took many months to run this thread to ground,” Obama said. Last week, Obama decided the information was solid enough to authorize action against the terrorist leader. A small team of Americans killed bin Laden in a firefight in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and retrieved his body.
“The American people did not choose this fight,” Obama said. “It came to our shores, and started with the senseless slaughter of our citizens.”
The revelation that bin Laden had been hiding in Pakistan for some time is likely to raise international tensions. But Obama stressed that bin Laden could not have been found without Pakistan’s counterterrorism support.
Andrew Medici contributed to this report.
Obama picks Intelligence Community CIO
February 17th, 2011 | CIA Information Technology Intelligence Uncategorized | Posted by Nicole Johnson
Former CIA chief information officer Al Tarasiuk is President Barack Obama’s top choice for CIO of the Intelligence Community.
Tarasiuk served as the CIO of CIA from 2005 to 2010. Before that, he was director of the CIA’s Information Service Center.
“Al is well known for his leadership in information sharing and intelligence integration, and his experience, distinguished career and dedication to duty will greatly benefit the entire Intelligence Community,” National Intelligence Director James Clapper said in a news release.
Tags: CIO
Failing upward at the CIA
February 9th, 2011 | CIA | Posted by Stephen Losey
The AP has a story today examining the fates of CIA officers who allegedly staged mock executions, caused the deaths of prisoners, and mistakenly kidnapped the wrong people for rendition to other countries.
Were they disciplined? Fired? Prosecuted? No — they were promoted.
The AP goes into detail on the case of German citizen Khaled el-Masri as an example of the agency’s broken disciplinary process and the political realities that complicate matters.
Skunk Baxter, Dan Aykroyd to headline CIA charity benefit
July 1st, 2010 | CIA | Posted by Stephen Losey
Skunk Baxter in his pre-Pentagon days. Photo from Carl Lender via Wikipedia.
The most unlikely defense consultant ever will perform in Arlington, Va., next Thursday at a benefit for families of fallen CIA officers.
Steely Dan and Doobie Brothers guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter will appear July 8 at a charity dinner for the CIA Officers Memorial Foundation, the Intelligence and National Security Alliance announced yesterday. All proceeds from the dinner will help support the families of CIA officers who die on active duty, such as paying for college tuition for their children. “Blues Brothers” and “Ghostbusters” star Dan Aykroyd will deliver the keynote and perform with Skunk and his band.
It isn’t surprising to see Skunk Baxter help raise money for CIA families. He’s a unique guy, to say the least, and his acceptance into national security circles over the last quarter-century is an interesting story. In the mid-80s, Skunk became fascinated with defense weaponry and technology, and educated himself by reading journals on the subject. He wrote a prescient five-page paper on how Aegis cruisers could be converted into theater missile defense systems, and sent it to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., which launched his defense consulting career. He’s probably the only man in history to hold both eight platinum records and the chairmanship of a civilian advisory panel on ballistic missile defense.
Baxter has participated in numerous war game exercises at the Pentagon and, believe it or not, is respected for his creativity and unconventional thinking by military leaders. (He apparently makes a good bad guy, and the Wall Street Journal said he is frequently called in to help the Pentagon anticipate terrorist tactics and strategies.) NASA in 2005 named him to its Exploration Systems Advisory Committee, and he has also worked with the Missile Defense Agency and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
After the jump, read about my brief encounter with Skunk back in 2001.
Tags: CIA, Skunk Baxter
CIA’s Iraq propaganda apparently run by 14 year old boys
May 25th, 2010 | CIA | Posted by Stephen Losey
The Washington Post’s SpyTalk blog reports today that the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group was mulling some hairbrained schemes for discrediting Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein before the 2003 invasion. Their most outlandish idea was to play the homophobia card and create a phony video that appeared to show Saddam having sex with a teenage boy, two CIA officials told the Post.
The Post said that and other psychological operation, or PSYOP, ideas went nowhere, partly because the CIA didn’t have the money and expertise to carry them out and partly because they were, well, stupid. What they should have done was buy a few hundred DVDs of the South Park movie, which (explicitly) shows Saddam and Satan as feuding gay lovers, and airdrop those into Baghdad.
The CIA apparently actually did create a video that purported to show Osama bin Laden and his buddies “sitting around a campfire, swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys.” One CIA official told the Post that the agency used some of its “darker-skinned employees” to play the reminiscing terrorists. Something tells me that’s not what former chief human capital officer Ronald Sanders had in mind when he talked about the need to diversify the intelligence community.
EDIT: It’s also worth noting that the CIA may have been stealing from the Weekly World News, which once ran a series of articles on Saddam and Osama’s alleged romance.
Tags: CIA, diversity, Intelligence, Saddam Hussein, South Park
Three cheers for the tax man
April 19th, 2010 | CIA IRS Uncategorized | Posted by Tom Spoth
Everyone hates the IRS, right?
Bunch of pencil-pushing money-grubbers whose goal in life is to squeeze every last dime from the poor taxpayer.
That’s the old stereotype, anyway.
But a new poll from the Pew Research Center shows that over the last decade or so, the tax-collecting agency has improved in public perception more than any of the other 12 agencies included in the survey.
The ratings bump could be a result of new, user-friendly online tax software.
Or it could just reflect the fact that the IRS was starting from such a low point — its favorable ratings were a dismal 38 percent in the late ‘90s. Its current 47 percent rating is better, but still the second lowest in the survey. (Come on down, Education Department!)
The full results are after the jump.
Tags: CIA, IRS, Matt Damon, trust in government
Breaking: Plane crashes into Texas building housing federal offices
February 18th, 2010 | CIA Facilities IRS | Posted by Tim Kauffman
Update 3:50 p.m.: It appears that the man who flew his plane into the Austin office building may have intentionally targeted the building because it houses the IRS. A lengthy diatribe against the tax agency was posted on a website registered to Joe Stack, who has been identified as the pilot.
In addition, earlier reports that the CIA also leased space in the facility were incorrect, according to a federal official. The General Services Administration leases more than 44,000 square feet of space in the building for the IRS.
Original post: A small plane crashed into an office building in Austin, Texas, this morning that houses field offices for the FBI and CIA, according to various news reports.
Nearly 200 IRS employees work in the building, which is part of the Echelon office complex, and the building also houses CIA employees, according to local NBC affiliate KXAN. Employees were being accounted for.
Austin newspaper The Statesman quotes IRS agent William Winnie, who said he was in a training session on the third floor of the seven-story building when he saw a light-colored, single engine plane coming at the building. The plane crashed into the lower floors.
It looked like it was coming right in my window. I didn’t lose my footing, but it was enough to knock people who were sitting to the floor.