Mr. James Woolsey and the CIA


(Government) Administrators have a new way of escaping from censure. When a public official is being interviewed and criticism is leveled at him, he simply says, "Well, I am very proud of the work my people are doing." And if that fails, he looks directly at the interviewer with an unabashed smile and says, "I think if you ask around, people will say that we have been doing an excellent job." End of discussion.

Last night, Jim Lehrer simply asked the CIA Chief, James Woolsey what went wrong in Russia, Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti and these were the kinds of replies we all heard on national TV.... the CIA is doing an excellent job -- blah blah blah -- and their chief is so proud of the work everybody in his agency is doing. Jim Lehrer is simply too courteous to have said, "Look Mr. Woolsey, I would appreciate it if you wiped that complacent snigger off your face and tell our viewers why you did not know that General Aidid had the sort of firepower that could kill 18 American soldiers. Tell our viewers why we are being asked to support a leader in Russia who has to use tanks and artillery against his own Congress. Tell the American people why we are even thinking of negotiating with the cutthroat military leaders in Haiti".

I am not sure Mr. Woolsey would have been able to answer these questions. I remember watching a few minutes of his confirmation hearings on C-Span last spring and I was appalled at his lack of intellectual commitment. At that time he was asked for his views on a number of hot-spots around the world, and over and over he said, "I have not been briefed on that so I can't comment on it." Is it too much to ask that the man who is going to be in charge of the most sophisticated intelligence-gathering organization in the world have a general knowledge of history, geography and world affairs?

Jim Lehrer asked him the question we all have, that since the Cold War is over, what is the role of the CIA anymore? Here is one of the most powerful men in the world and he sits there and tells us that his agency and the KGB are going to work together to figure out ways to clean up the Great Lakes and Lake Baikal! And, if they have time, perhaps they can figure out a way to repair the Ozone cavity too. Give me a break please! When asked why the CIA budget and staff must remain so secretive he said, just like some of our grammar school teachers used to say when we were kids, "because I say so."

When we are talking about the CIA why do we forget Viet Nam? Was that an unmitigated failure or what? While some of us without reconnaissance planes and satellites could figure out the gist of things there the CIA apparently never quite got the picture did they? And what about Cuba? The CIA just can't seem to figure out how a fellow like Castro continues to run his little island "tyranny" and produce an Olympic team that came in fifth in the world, has a literacy rate better than ours, and a health care program which is the envy of the Third World. And Nicaragua? If that "below-the-belt" knock-down is counted as a CIA triumph we have every reason to be wary.

And now this most recent flap about Haiti. Jean Bertrand Aristide is a highly-respected priest who was duly elected president of his country. I mean, are we for Democracy or aren't we? An overwhelming majority of the people there elected this man. He is the de jure president of Haiti. Who in the hell does Jesse Helms think he is to dredge up some scurrilous report of the CIA and claim that Mr. Aristide is mentally incapable of ruling Haiti? What about Jesse Helms himself? What does his record look like -- Iran-Contra, illegal bases in Costa Rica and all sorts of other nefarious shenanigans? What about that stuff? And who the hell is Mr. James Woolsey, to allow a malodorous Bush-era report like this to resurface? My God, have we forgotten the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the CIA White Paper which claimed that Nicaragua was shipping arms to El Salvador and was proven a hoax, and have we forgotten Iran-Contra, to mention only a few of the recent CIA escapades.

Maybe they do a reasonably good job ferreting out the sexual proclivities of their counterparts in London and Beijing but when it comes to character judgement and figuring out if someone is a communist or just plain hungry, much less, a lunatic or a savant, the CIA would not be my agency of choice.