Looking Ahead

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
For those of us who wonder about the need of a Presidential Commission to assess the control weaknesses that led to the the 9/11/2001 attack by 19 men who had virtually flaunted their intentions, you may want to read "See No Evil: the True Story of a Ground Soldier in CIA's War on Terrorism," by Robert Baer Crown Publishers, N.Y., Jan. 2002, $25.95). It shows political neglect, interagency rivalry, excessive "cover your butt" attitude of inactivity in the government intelligence agencies, the White House and the Congress as the sources of US loss of intelligence and judgment that led to the success of the suicide attacks.
The author, a competition skier, gifted in languages, son of a liberal divorcee, who spent years in Europe. took on the CIA job in 1976 after earning a Foreign Service degree from Georgetown, for its potential of free vacations with skiing in Switzerland. Following such basic training as parachute jumping he was sent to Madras, India, a hotbed of diplomatic activity, to try to develop sources for details of India's nuclear programs, and to search for Soviet military manuals (India was a major client for USSR's warfare tools). After two years of training, he was moved to such posts as Khartoum, Cyprus, and a Washington language school. The key that shaped his overarching interests in terrorism was the April 1983 car bomb that destroyed the American Embassy in Beirut, killing 63, including 17 Americans, and destroyed the core of the CIA's MidEast operation. Pursuing the culprits, Baer saw the hand of Arafat's Fatah, manipulated by Iran's Pasdaran Revolutionary Guard operatives, ensconced in Beirut. Six months later more car bombs blew up 241 Marines and 58 French troops. This was the culmination of eight years of civil war in Lebanon. Despite the deporting of Fatah activists, from Syria to Tripoli, Lebanon in June, and further, in December, to Tunisia, Palestinian fighters continued to participate in the ongoing Lebanese civil war. The author identifies the blowing up of PanAm flight 103 in 1988 as a PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palatina) effort, Iran-sponsored, in revenge for the inadvertent destruction of an Iranian airliner by USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf. The CIA, hampered by cover-your-butt attitudes, was useless. It was further crippled by the 1994 discovery of its betrayal by insider Aldrich Ames (whose flamboyant Jaguar went unnoticed in the CIA parking lot) , forcing Director Woolsey to turn the internal investigation over to arch-enemy FBI. The resulting witch-hunt and firings slowed down all real field work. Meanwhile, FBA's own Robert Hanssen was passing secrets in garbage bags.
The following year, 1995, saw Baer in North Iraq, monitoring the fighting between rival Kurd factions, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, led by Jalal Talabani, and Kurdish Democratic Party, Masoud Barzani's organization. The latter controlled Iraq's oil smuggling to Turkey, and was allied with Iran's Pasdaran. Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, ensconced at battle-scarred Salah al-Din, held a middle peace-making position, although the members - Shiite clerics, Bedouin chiefs, ex-Communists, ex-Army and ex-Baath party chiefs - equaled its Kurds in querulousness. When an ex-Saddam general told Baer of a forthcoming revolt to depose the Hussein government by three army brigades and a tank unit located near Tikrit that would hold the dictator immobile in his native village, the author received a wire from Anthony Lake, Clinton's national security advisor, requesting that the coup d'état be aborted. Barzani subsequently arrested the military coup leaders, although for a brief period, nevertheless dooming the effort. Talabani, whose several hundred pedi merga fighters carried the revolt on single-handedly, capturing thousands of discouraged Iraqi regulars and masses of equipment, eventually had to abandon the action. Saddam, alarmed by his army's collapse, instantly turned to improving the morale of his troops by boosting their pay and rations, and started courting Iraq's 120 tribes with funds and offers of self-government. But the revolt was lost, and Baer was brought home to face an accusation of attempted assassination of a foreign leader, forbidden by Executive Order 12333. The accusation, a fiction propagated by Chalabi and uncritically accepted by Lake's NSC office, was unfounded. The apologetic CIA gave Baer's team an award.
But more NSC trouble ensued, due to the activities of an American banker and oil operator Roger Tamriz, who sought support for an oil pipe from Baku in Azerbaijan, through Nagano-Karabakh, Armenia, and Turkey, to the Mediterranean. Tamriz had risen to financial prominence by adept manipulating, backed at various times by Kamal Adham, Saudi intelligence chief (InterBank collapse, a pipeline in Egypt, Tamoil gas station chain) Muammar Qaddafi (takeover of Amoco's oil refineries in Italy, with assist from Sicilian contacts), Ozer Ciller, husband of Turkey's president (acquisition of Turkmenistan's Block I, a major oilfield). An NSC staffer, Sheila Heslin, variously identified as purportedly acting in the interests of an oil consortium, headed by Amoco, with their own Baku-Ceyhan pipeline project, was investigating Tamriz, and accusing Baer of non-cooperation, Tamriz in the meantime was gaining influence by employing Clinton's attorney Lloyd Cutler, Senator Kennedy's wife Victoria, and buying access to the President at "teas" though campaign contributions (he had Al Gore's support for his pipeline). Lake and his deputy Sandy Berger were stockholders in the consortium's oil companies, Baer wryly notes, in remarking how an administration with less oil and more foreign affairs involvement could have supported CIA as a viable policy tool.
The topic of intelligence failures is also explored in "Breakdown: How America's Intelligence Failures Led to September 11" by Bill Gertz of the Washington Times (Regnery, Sept. 2002). Gertz shows how the intelligence community missed the signs and abused Baer, and where the actions of a Congressional Oversight Committee and a politically correct administration led to the CIA and FBI failures. Steven Emerson's "American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among US" (paperback, Feb. 2002) lays a heavy hand on the Muslim community and its lack of Americanism. The academic Bernard Lewis in the brief but well balanced "What Went Wrong: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East" (paperback, 2002) continues the theses of his "Middle East" (1995) text.
Robert Baer, who resigned from CIA in 1997, blames also the Carter, Reagan and Bush41 administrations in the gradual loss of CIA's ability to perform its mission, which includes lack of response to warnings of 9/11. The revelations show such cross-party line political sabotage of intelligence functions that one seriously doubts the ability and interest of a Presidential Commission to flush out the truth. Maybe US needs no new public slaps in the face, however well deserved. Earnest reform will do.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
The good Dr. P. e-mails: Do not take too seriously the suggestion that the North Korean situation is due to Kim Jung-Il, their eccentric supreme leader and a movie buff, getting annoyed by the rough treatment of his countrymen in the latest James Bond epic, "Tomorrow Never Dies." Actually, they have reactivated a heavy-water (weapon grade) reactor to have a bargaining chip with the United States, whose assistance is once more needed to lift their pauperized country out of the doldrums.
There are two theories regarding their "entitlement." One, espoused by Selig S. Harrison, Director of the National Security Project of the Center for International Policy and a scholar with the Carnegie Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson International Center, contends that we wronged the North Koreans, by withdrawing from the 1994 agreement. The NKs waited a long time. Now they are warning us with the nuclear weapons they appear to have produced in secret, and are demanding that we fulfill our obligation.
History shows otherwise. The Soviet-sponsored NK, the country north of the 38th Parallel, was created, along with South Korea, by the Potsdam Conference after WWII. NK's USSR installed dictator Kim Il-Sung (d.1994) in 1950 started a war to take over democratic SK, and occupied Seoul. US-led UN forces fought NK and its allies, until an armistice in 1953. Three million Koreans, one million Chinese and 53,000 Americans died. The US has had 37,000 troops guarding the Panmunjom demilitarized border (DMZ) ever since, against the one million strong NK military forces. NK deals in deceit; they signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1986, to mask their "nuclear energy" weapons research, particularly a new plant at Yongbyon. In 1993, after a refusal to admit UN International Atomic Energy Authority's inspectors, they announced withdrawal from the treaty, but suspended it after Jimmy Carter's mission led to the "Geneva Agreed Framework" treaty, under which the US would provide them with two light-water energy plants capable of producing 2,000 megawatts of electricity by 2003, also supplying 500 tons of heavy oil per year in the interim. There were also agreements for normalization of relations and a US assurance of protecting NK against a nuclear threat. In return, they agreed to shut down two heavy water reactor plants and a plutonium plant.
The US did supply the North with petroleum but did not place a plant on the readied site. Terrorist attacks and defector evidence of continued weapons research in two hollowed-out mountains, Chun-Ma, and Kwanmo-Bong, disrupted the agreement, although the hapless UN's IAEA agents in 2000 could not find any evidence of resumed secret research. In fact, it was established that Pakistan (not under Musharraf) in the late 1990s sold the NKs centrifuge technology for uranium enrichment. In October 2002 NK admitted to secret nuclear weapons research, and in December they dismissed the UN inspectors. Mid-January NK announced, once more, their withdrawal from the NP Treaty and resumption of missile (i.e. delivery system) testing, first since 1998, when NK shocked the world by firing a missile across Japan, into the Pacific.
What drives NK into the seemingly insane activities and declarations? There's the old fear of Japan, who occupied this, China's "Chosen" province, in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895 and reaffirmed its control in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. Further, Kim Il-Sung's "Joshe" (self-reliance) policy was driven by fear of US retaliation after 1953 (Gen. MacArthur had threatened NK with destruction by 30-50 nuclear bombs before Pres. Truman dismissed him for disobedience). Consequently, Kim's total militarization policy had turned NK into a pariah nation, next door to prosperous SK which they would like to occupy, and US had agreed to defend the latter, with nukes, if necessary. Threats, with pretense of nuclear weapons, which the world has to treat as real, has brought NK food relief for 1/3 of its 20 million population, also oil for its industry, principally from the US. Why not do it again, particularly after the agricultural disasters of the past two years? It appears that their war ally China, although expressing minimal dismay for the world's consumption, has not objected to this "mad dog" gambit, expecting the UN and US to knuckle under.
The US sees the ploy, and does not fall for it. Our line is more complex. Despite signing the NPT and membership tn the IAEA they have done WMD (weapons of mass destruction) and nuclear weapons research on the sly, soon after the Armistice of 1953. To prevent an attack on SK, the US had to have forces on the 38th Parallel, although their opposing Chinese and Russian counterparts withdrew in 1958. The 1994 agreement was the result of NK blackmail. We agreed to supply them with a reactor, but when the NKs did not meet the conditions of the UN, the reactor was not provided. Now they may have produced nuclear weapons on the sly, and are threatening the world with unspecified events, to get US aid. The US will not respond with war, because any aerial attack may inadvertently explode an atomic weapon and cause major destruction to the region - NK, SK, Japan, China and Russia. While we will not negotiate, it is to the advantage of the above nations to sway NK, in their own self-interest. They should induce NK to give up the weapons, as we did with Ukraine and Belorussia, and with Taiwan in 1998, when that island started flexing its "self-defense through nuclear armament" muscles. We, the US, shut them down, to please the Chinese and avoid major entanglement. China should be able to do the same. As to an US counter-ploy, our threat is making NK a total pariah by having the Security Council and the US isolate them completely. This will bring the dangers of implosion and refugee hordes by the million to China and Russia. These are our weapons to bring the latter countries into line. But the sufferers will be the poor defenseless people of NK, a humanitarian horror most clearly expressed by the SKs, who want the US the give in.
And why not, such a humanitarian thing? Well, there is also an extended threat scenario . The NKs have no intention of surrendering their nuclear chess piece, regardless of what the blackmail produces. It is the only means for their military government to retain power in a totally impoverished country, ready to collapse and implode, as the USSR did. The NK rulers can survive by continuing their arms manufacture and selling WMD technology, as well as their SCUDs, to other rogue nations that are afraid of the US hegemony and feel, likewise, that their governments' survival is only possible by acquiring nuclear weapons, creating more threats to the world. And, if NK does not have nuclear bombs today, they will have them tomorrow, given time, food and oil for energy. Not a pretty prospect. Dr P. advises to hold, not fold.