Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House (2007) by Valerie Plame Wilson

This is a book written two parts. The first part is written by Wilson with much of it redacted with blacked out sections shown on the page, and the second part is an afterword written by Laura Rozen. The afterword is written from the public record that is meant to fill in much of the pieces that was redacted by the C.I.A. So, the book is really all over the place.
The book is not that well written. Even taking the redactions into consideration the author loses focus and writes about three different books in one. She is not a professional writer and her emotions seems to be shot from the traumatic events in her and her families lives due to the well documented outing of her C.I.A. agent status and the right wings war against her family.
I wanted to read this book because I wanted know about a woman’s experience being in the C.I.A. It is a perceptive that I have never heard before. I do get that buried in somewhere within the emotional life of Ms. Wilson, which not a criticism. The woman is learning how to feel. She is getting her life organized her brain and is obvious when reading this.
What is surprising is just how likable the author is. She is very girly girl. She tries to tries to write the book with a tough bravado. She does this with her chapters on her C.I.A. special agent training on “The Farm.” However due to the redactions and the fact that it just didn’t seem like her, it doesn’t last for very long.
Next.
Probably the most fun you have with this book is the time she is a working as mother with two small children and as a C.I.A. agent. She is totally a mom, and she has working mother concerns all while having this super risky important spy job.
Then comes the dark side. While working for a part of the C.I.A. that was looking into nuclear proliferations in the outside world, a request from the Vice-President Office came in to have a lead that the Iraqi government was looking to buy Yellow Cake Uranium from Nigeria. Plame writes that it was suggested to her ask her husband former ambassador Joe Wilson to look into it. She would have been derelict of her duties if she did not follow through with that. It was common practice that people outside the agency, such as business people or former government officials to carry out some important matters such as this. Joe Wilson went pro-bono ( meaning that only expenses were paid) . He found nothing, wrote his report and they went on with their lives until the President, she writes, used a few words citing Yellow Cake Uranium and Iraq to sell the war on Iraq. Wilson wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times, debunking those words in the Presidents speech. After that everything fell apart.

The right wing declared war on the Wilson’s. Most egregious from the office of the Vice President and Carl Rove leaked Valeria Plame Wilson’s name to the press. Supposedly Carl Rove who is member of the Wilson’s church said that Valerie Wilson was “Fair Game” in retaliation to Joe Wilson. The so-called liberal press printed her name and protected their sources; hence exposed her status putting her and her contact lives in jeopardy. It was a political retaliation for crossing the administration.

She goes on and tells about how the war on the Wilson’s went as far as death threats, lack of protection from the C.I.A., tax audits, and more. Right wing donators threatened Universities and High Wealth individuals to make sure that Joe Wilson’s consulting business would go bust and that he would not get any speaking engagements. Plame speculates that these tactics were a dry run on the swift boat attacks on John Kerry in the 2004 Presidential Campaign.

Although, some justice eventually came her way in the form of “Scouter” Libby being prosecuted for the leak by the federal government. The toll taken on her family and her career was more than most people could take.

Towards the end of her she is pouring facts and unbelievable stories from her experience. It is upsetting, and it is clear that it is probably not over.

It was hard to read, because it was really upsetting. What was good about it is that is a first hand account of a family being hunted by the right wing for saying anything that contradicted it.

The One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind

The full title is The one percent doctrine: Deep inside America’s pursuit of it’s enemies since 9/11.

The book reads like an information overload. It is like the best spy novel you have ever read, expect it isn’t fiction. You wish it were fiction.

Suskind picks up the story in the August before 9/11 when the CIA interrupted George W. Bush’s long vacation to warn him of the imminent threat to the country. Of course Bush had been warmed of the threat since before he took office. Over a year later, and with intelligence all of the world, especially the Middle East, saying that America was going to be attacked, George Bush told George Tenet and the CIA, OK, you have covered your ass, and went back to his vacation. Bush did nothing. (This meeting has been reported by many sources, and George Bush talked about it his interview with Bob Woodward)

After the attacks many things happened. George Bush saved CIA director George Tenet job, and thereby owning Tenet. A series of policies were put into place on how conduct the new war against terrorism. Dick Cheney put forth the One Percent Doctrine. This stated that there if there was even a one percent chance that something could threaten the United States, the government must act as if the country was certain to be attacked. This idea threw out analysis and evidence.

Cheney and Rumsfeld made sure that CIA had all the weapons it needed to fight this new war. This included torture and wire-tapping. The funny thing is that these measures have been used since the start of the CIA. The old rule used to be if it is isn’t public then it is legal. (A History of the CIA by Tim Weiner). The Bush administration went to great lengths to make it legal, even with great costs to the country’s collateral. I am not sure you can say that the difference is scale, because during the Cold War all mail that went out of the United States was searched. It begs the question that this insistence, to make it all legal was less about fighting terrorism than it was about gaining revenge for two men who were burnt by the Watergate era and wanted payback; to put the country where they thought is belonged.

The idea was that the United States would never be caught off guard again is the rational for these new measures. Of course, if the Administration would have just listened to its intelligence, maybe 9/11 could have been avoided. Al Gore, in The Assault on Reason suggests that if the government had just followed their leads, all the terrorists could have been caught using public records and know lists. Of course, the CIA, FBI and other government organization have a long disastrous history of not talking to each other. One the best things that the Bush administration has done, is not tolerate such behavior, which is the first time in history. The idea was that the FBI was fight terror at home and the CIA overseas, and that effectively worked.

The story really starts when Libya decided that it wanted to join the world community again. (Check out current news, i.e. Libyan meeting with the new French President). It had been alienated since the Reagan Administration for terrorist actions. Now a Libyan representative met with the CIA at the Hyde Park, London home of a Saudi Prince. He gave as an offering one name. The CIA took it and found that person in Pakistan. Working with Pakistani authorities that capture him and more importantly a computer, a diary and other important information.

Now like most things in the past few years, once American agencies have an opportunity to do their job right, they do, and they do it great. Unfortunately, the ideologues in the Administration, like Rumsfeld, get a hold of information and they filter it through fantastic and unrealistic view of how the world works and they screw everything up.

Now from here on, the story goes in two directions. One is the CIA success from that seed that of the original Libyan contact, and the other is the political story of the Administrations war on Terror. The CIA/FBI investigation went great. The seed lead to more and more information and arrests. Their money systems tapped. The U.S. was everywhere they raised their head. At the same time torture such as water boarder was being used those capture those who had to no knowledge anything, and those who were mentally unstable, although you have to wonder about the mental stability of all these people who are out to do so much harm. Nevertheless, things were said do to the torture that were untrue. However, because of the One Percent Doctrine everything had to be taken as a threat even though there no possible way these wild stories could be taken seriously. So what happened was that resources were spent chasing nothing. These stories of terrorist plots everywhere came mainly from one unstable man during torture. Evidence had to be thrown out due to directives from the highest level of government. American threat levels were constantly going up and down. This is why.

In fact, the combatants were trained and expect torture (so the argument that talking about American torture is giving intelligence to the enemy is complete nonsense), what they weren’t expecting of the FBI’s technique of doing favors. The FBI even went so far as to get someone’s wife for him from Pakistan and the wife told him that he better tell the U.S. what they wanted to know. Most who experience such treatment told the U.S. want they wanted to here. What the ideologues don’t understand is the history of the United States. They only knew the propaganda and the bravado. People from most countries expect to be tortured or spied on. It doesn’t help to be just as bad as the worst dictators. What worked for the U.S. in World War was that the Germans knew that the American were the most humane of all the Allies. They really didn’t want to be captured by the Russian, because they knew death would be better. German soldiers and citizens more easily surrender and cooperated with the American because they knew that the American would be just to them. (Source Stephen Ambrose ‘Citizen Soldier’).

Politics and reality become very confusing. As old and never followed through plots were uncovered were released to the press as if it they were current threats at prime periods during the 2004 Presidential elections, it would push the public towards President Bush. He ran on the premise that he had kept America Terror free. Even Bin Laden got in on the election. By making an appearance Bin Laden almost sealed the presidency for George W. Bush. It was clear that Bin Laden wanted Bush in the White House.

But it asks the question why hadn’t American been hit by a terrorist attack. To CIA the answer was that maybe they didn’t want to hit America again. Sure, America was now a harder target to hit, but the terrorist don’t do anything without a purpose. They have goals that they are trying to achieve. They only do things in their interest. Terrorists create chaos and achieve their ends by destabilizing a society. When they hit Spain, they got the Spanish out of Iraq. The scariest part, I thought is that, you realize while reading the book that they are an outsourced organization. Just like how everything is outsourced in business, so is policy of rogue or unfriendly states. Somehow these stateless organizations aren’t so stateless.

The One Percent Doctrine doesn’t really end anywhere. It just takes the reader along what is probably the first chapter on the War on Terror. It gives no answers. The author gives a statement on how it is an act of civil disobedience just to report on these events. Because the sources went against the current Administration’s political polices by telling what they knew, they put themselves in great danger.

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner (2007)

I think it was impossible to understand the United States' foreign policy and the world of current events without knowledge of the history of the CIA.

Take currents events: at the time of this writing the country of Turkey was launching military offensives inside the Kurdish part of Iraq. The Kurdish area was the most stable part of Iraq. Besides fighting the Turks, the Kurds have also been fighting the Iranians on that side of the border. So how did this come to be? Did it have anything to with the Cold War?

It had everything to do with Cold War. Many years ago, the United States was aiding and arming Islamic extremist in an effort to thwart the influence of communism in the world. The Kurds took the communist side and the U.S. supported their removal. However, in the past thirty years things have changed.

The Kurds were happy to see the Islamic extremist leave. The point being that it was the Cold War that has set up this conflict with Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the region. Almost anywhere the CIA interfered with governments in the effort of fighting communism; the U.S. now struggles with them.

Tim Weiner writes a very enthralling book that breaks the myths of the CIA that has been propagated in movies, books, and television.
Legacy of Ashes was well writing and was an intriguing work that leaves the reader with an different view of American foreign policy in the past half-century.

Here are a few highlights:


The Beginning

The Central Intelligence Agency was created after World War II in 1948. The CIA came out of the Office for Strategic Services (OSS). The OSS ran covert actions against the Nazi with the British and the Russians.

The CIA was born at the beginning of the Cold War. Its main objective was to protect American interests, especially against Communism. The U.S. was never to experience another Perl Harbor. On its own the CIA was a neophyte organization. As European spy agencies had been around for centuries, the CIA had almost no idea what they were doing.

The Russians were always many steps ahead of the Americans. The CIA never got anything right about the Russians. The KBG had agents all over the CIA and they fed the CIA false intelligence since the start the agency till probably right now.

The CIA was better at strong-arming small poor countries. The CIA got results there but it later kicked back at the U.S.

A cast in point Iran

The British were taking most of the oil profits from the Iranians while the Iranians lived in squalor. The Government of Iran wanted to split the profits 50/50 with the British. The British were not keen on this, so they wanted a change of government in Iran. The U.S. did not want to take part of this as they felt the British were being unfair. However, the Korean War was starting, and Churchill put a condition on British support of the Korean War, which was, help them in Iran or they would not support the U.S. in Korea. So the CIA staged a coup against the Iranian leader. They paid to organize radical Islamic forces in Iran to act against the government. They were planting the seeds of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The CIA did overthrow the government of Iran and implemented a U.S. puppet government who ruled Iran with an iron fist, which lasted until the revolution.

Throughout the 1950’s the CIA projected a mystic sense of competence if not omnipotence. But it was not the case.

The Kennedy Assignation

The book sheds little light on the Kennedy assignation but it does shed a little light. It strongly suggests that Castro might have ordered a hit on the President for the failed assignation plots order against him by the Kennedys.

It makes it very clear that the Warren Commission was a joke. All information about the covert actions conducted by the CIA was hidden from the commission. President Gerald Ford, who was a member of the Warren Commission, made it very clear that if such information had been provided to the Commission that the outcome of the report might have been different.

As soon as the assignation happened, both Johnson and the head of the CIA thought that it was a conspiracy. The CIA order an intern report, which was kept secret, but it never completed or made a formal conclusion.

The Assignation was a bit like 9/11. Many sections of the government had files on Oswald. The FBI, CIA, immigration services all had files on him. All knew he was a threat long before the shooting and if they had shared information, it would have been clear to take him out before anything happened.

The Vietnam War

If there was any question on whether Kennedy or Johnson started the Vietnam, it was Johnson. In fact, the CIA had been running gorilla operation in Vietnam as part of its covert operations around the world. So, there was a secret war there too. It was only in the gulf of Tonkin that brought the U.S. officially in the war. U.S. warships in the gulf took at shorter length than the international waters guideline. They were listening in on North Vietnam. Vietnamese patrol boats were spotted and they were fired upon by the United States. The patrol boats shot back. The American warships maybe took a bullet of damage, but this was blown out to be an unprovoked attack on the United States. This Official CIA report was hidden until recently. Hawks in Johnson administration were set for war. In fact, most of the CIA intelligence was good during the Vietnam War, but the Johnson administration wanted facts to fit political opinion. The, if you don’t support what we think argument then you are not of the side of the U.S.A, argument raised its head. Furthermore the CIA knew early on that war was not winnable, eventfully the people in the Johnson administration took them seriously, and people like Bob McNamara got it. Of course then Nixon came in.

Nixon and the CIA

Nixon and CIA were not a good fit. Nixon stepped up the war in Vietnam on all fronts. He tore the agency apart, and when he tried to have the CIA take the fall for Watergate. The agency wouldn’t go that far for him and Nixon was forced to resign.

Enter the NeoCons
In the late part of the Carter administration, the CIA entered a new battle against communism, which was a battle via humanitarianism. The U.S.S.R. had a battle that they couldn’t win.

During this period, Paul Wolfowitz and other NeoCons would end up in the CIA and produced fictitious reports about the capabilities of the Soviet Union, which caused a 2nd red scare and produced large increases of defense spending. It created a panic which ultimately, with the Iranian Hostage situation, got Ronald Reagan elected.

CIA under Reagan
The CIA under Ronald Reagan was more of a mess. They essentially got very little right. They were unable to be helpful in events in the Middle- East. In the cold war they armed the radicals Islamic factions. At the time, a great success of the 80’s was seen as being the gorilla war in Afghanistan against the Russians.

The CIA never saw the fall of the Soviet Union coming until after it happened. It would be irresponsible to say that the defense spending of the Reagan administration was a calculated measure effort that destroyed the U.S.S.R. Certainly an arms race helped, but it was only by accident.

The hunt for Osama bin Laden – The Clinton years

Bill Clinton’s relationship with the CIA got off to a bad start. The CIA was bitter that Clinton beat their favorite son George H.W. Bush, former CIA director in the Ford administration. Bill Clinton, a son of the anti-government activists of the 60’s and 70’s had a lack of interest in the agency. In the beginning, he rarely met with them.

Sadly, Clinton was responsible for an egregious complacency with Rwanda. He was not interested and in atrocities that weren’t televised. He refused to call the events in Rwanda as genocide.

The CIA really didn’t know what to do with itself after the fall of Communism.

Eventually, they came together on a common enemy, Osama bin Laden. The last three years of the Clinton administration tried to kill Osama bin Laden. The CIA was in charge of that hit, but they failed every time. The CIA failed to act everytime they had an opportunity to act. There were many chances blown to take him out.

9/11, Iraq and George W. Bush


The CIA had been warning George W. Bush since September of 2000 when he was running for president. The CIA director warned Bush then that Terrorism was an imminent threat to the United States. Later in 2000 after the election, Bush was warned specifically about Osama bin Laden. When Bush took office, Bill Clinton told President Bush that Osama bin Laden was his biggest problem. Bush claims to have no memory of that. Throughout all the days of the Bush presidency before 9/11, the CIA fervently tried warn the president about danger to the United States, which was not a question of if but rather when. The data was clear. Intelligence agencies all over the world were warning the United States because terrorist chatter was loud and very active. Nevertheless, George Bush was just not interested, and nothing was done about it. 9/11 happened and it was no surprise to the CIA. After that the CIA jumped on the Bush administration bandwagon and manipulated intelligence to appear that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. So how did they do this? Of course, they a few guys saying exactly what the president wanted to hear , so they would structure their analysis so that it would look as if they had many sources instead of the same few informants who were defectors or others that had something to gain.

After, no WMD’s were found Bush blamed it on the CIA intelligence and made an effort to clean house at the CIA. They hired a Bush ideologue, who politicized the agency, and got rid of anyone who was considered being part of the left, like if they came on board at the time of Democratic President. Many highly qualified agents were let go.

The CIA was further run into the ground by trying to accommodate President Bush’s Faith-based agenda. Finally, it was out-sourcing that nailed another nail into the coffin of the CIA. As the government started out-sourcing, agents started leaving the agency for higher paid jobs for government contractors. (For fun look up Blackwater) It is hard for the CIA to hold on to anyone because in five years, basically when they are up to speed, they leave for higher pay.

It was interesting reading a book about the CIA. The CIA is not the omnipotent agency that is widely believed. They are neither the evil empire which is also believed by many. In fact, I was constantly amazed by how many good people that were spoken about. It was really impressive in the midst of such chaos in the world that there are people who stood up for was right and humane, and many in the CIA did that.

The CIA was often misdirected the presidents who lead them and the politics of time. Sometimes the CIA was just wrong and sometimes they were right as in Vietnam, but the politics of those in charge buried the right information.

Of course, not all information about the topics covered in this book has been released to the public. This book was written this year, so it is pretty up to date for now.

The Legacy of Ashes was clearly written and easily assessable in non-technical writings. It was engaging and thought provoking. I thought that it didn’t cast moral judgments to it. It presented in a matter of fact style, which leaves the reader the choice to make up their judgments.