Ralph McGehee's Archive on JFK Place ==================================== From: Ralph McGehee Date: Tue, 9 Dec 1997 08:04 ============================================ Another View of the Enemy 12/10/97 Included below are extracts from the 1997 book, Know Thine Enemy: A Spy's Journey into Revolutionary Iran. The book was authored by Edward Shirley, a pen name. As one of the CIA's finest "Iranian-target" officers in the 1980s, Edward Shirley was a front-line spy in Europe and the Middle East, ferreting out the secrets of [Iran]....Shirley left the clandestine service in disillusionment after nine years. Ralph McGehee CIABASE ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Iran, 76-79. It is astonishing how Khomeni caught the West off guard. As Khomeni was bucking the Pahlavi regime from his exile in France, Washington and the New York Times unbelievably called the Ayatollah an enigma. As clearly as Hitler in Mein Kampf, Khomeni had told the world his intentions in [his book] "Islamic Government" and in mass-distributed cassette recordings. An eminent professor of Middle Eastern studies had tried to warn the CIA....The professor translated passages of "Islamic Government" and sent them to Langley, but the CIA...in late 1978, after the Shah was finished, finally paid for a translation of "Islamic Government....When I arrived on the Iran desk, I found numerous unopened copies stacked along the walls. Page 189. My approach was too academic. If I wanted to stay, I had to adapt to the institution's standards. A successful operations officer had to learn to compromise. He had to forgive mistakes, join the team, and not engage in unhelpful criticism. Above all else, he couldn't rock the boat if he expected to rise....Too many senior officers had gone unpunished for horrendous mistakes. To respect channels in the CIA, seven times out of ten, was to be an accomplice to mediocrity or fraud. Pages 212-3. Good men were leaving the Agency in ever greater numbers. And good men entering were rare. Long before [Aldrich Ames] the clandestine service was falling apart. The unforgiving law of bureaucratic rot -- first class people may choose first class, but second chooses third, third chooses fourth -- had come brutally into play in CIA's closed society. First-class people, like Agency successes, were now few and far between. "The Directorate of Operations Iran desk officer sent in 1985 to debrief Ghorbanifar, couldn't recognize the names of senior Iranian officials..." The same officer remarked with pride that he hadn't finished reading a book in four years....Within a few years, despite numerous mistakes, he'd become the Acting Deputy Director of Operations, America's most powerful master spy. Page 125. Soul-searching is a case officer's worst enemy. C/Os are action oriented. They recruit, not analyze. Page 161. At a CIA conference on Iran, one bright analyst... explained the Iranian patronage system with finesse and subtlety....Not long before, he'd had the misfortune of briefing senior case officers on Iranian terrorism. He was shocked at how dull-witted they were. The Directorate of Intelligence was in horrible shape, with first-rate bureaucrats and second-rate analysts rising to the top....The Directorate of Operations was, however, a "wasteland, a Mecca for know-nothing men...." Reading Persian newspapers was a sure sign of questionable target love. One Harvard-educated C/O, a rare breed in the 1980s CIA [remarked] that most C/Os view books as recognition signals for clandestine meetings and not as something to read. Pages 229-231. If CIA case officers cannot read or speak the target language and don't know Iranian history, how can they seriously engage in anticlerical covert action?...[wise men] can only do so much in offices where Persian books and newspapers are stacked unopened along the walls. A dirty little CIA secret is that it is easier and safer to do nothing and pretend the utmost has been done. [Congressmen] are far easier to recruit than Persians. They work for the same country and rarely have the time, patience, and wherewithal to penetrate Langley's defenses, mediocrity and lies. Even after the arrest of Aldrich Ames exposed the rot inside Langley, most congressmen still believe it's easier and more patriotic to legislate millions for the Directorate of Operations and hope that something good is being done, somewhere. Page 122. Dispatches were pouched, not cabled, lengthy reports on operations and events. They died out with primitive keypunch communications in the early 1970s. Optical readers and rapid sophisticated encoding technology, [makes] communication between HQS and the field live-time, regardless of cable length. Accordingly the pressure for constant production increased. C/Os wrote more but knew less. [In] a 1956 dispatch I hadn't smelled in his words the usual C/O hunger for recruitments, the scalp-hunting game that would eventually gut the Operations Directorate's honesty....The more I learned about the Agency, the more certain I was that the DOs golden age -- when every C/O was from Harvard, Yale or Princeton -- was really bronze. In a closed society, fraud and mediocrity spread very quickly...I'd definitely joined in the dark ages. Reading that C/Os contemplative dispatch made me realize the depth of our decline and improbability of recovery. Page 212. Covert action has more flexibility than diplomacy....It covers everything from funding newspapers, magazines, radio stations, international conferences, journalists, academics and guerrilla operations to orchestrating rescue missions and coups d'etat. Page 121. -------------------------- end ------------------------------------------