>>>>>>>>>Imad Mughniyeh has passed away. He died peacefully in a car bomb explosion in Damascus. Fitting. I don't know if Mossad did it, but I wish I had.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>It has been traditional to send the Vice President to funerals. Some of the nastiest scum in the terrorist world will be at this one. I think we should send Cheney - with a fleet of helicopter gunships.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>When you read connected news about all these various bombings and assasinations, it looks little bit like Italian mob or Albanian vendetta.
>>>>>>>>...then he looses brother then bombs something, then someone else gets assasinated, then something else blows up and so for.
>>>>>>>>After a while it is impossible to determine order and interlinking of events and what caused what.
>>>>>>>>One thing is for sure; Every new bomb that kills innocent or bad people produces nothing else but grief and strong motivation for more violence.
>>>>>>>>Sad thing is that unlike ordinary tribal vendettas, all this had obviosely very bad impact on world politics.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>Imho, unless it is unilaterally stopped, it will never decline.
>>>>>>>>There will be always mad people on this planet, but will wisdom prevail depend only on wise people.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>Peace
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Yes
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>I read about William Buckley who Charles mentioned. Involved with CIA assassination squads .
>>>>>>
>>>>>>William Buckley was Beirut station chief. He was kidnapped by Hezbollah, tortured and murdered. If by 'assassination squads' you mean he was a station chief for an agency that sometimes went after people killing us and our friends - yes. Kind of like those nasty RAF pilots who assassinated Germans.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Look on the bright side, some of those people would probably have put bombs in the Tube by now.
>>>>>
>>>>>I'm not defending Hezbollah at all or what happened to Buckley but Buckley and others associated with a him had a long and not very glorious history of covert destabilisation of countries. How many dead in Chile as a result of their actions.
>>>>>Where the CIA's actions a response to terror or a cause.
>>>>>
>>>>>And by the way Churchill disassociated himself from area bombing after Dresden. Wrongly in my view.
>>>>
>>>>Not talking about Dresden but the Battle of Britain. Our actions in Lebanon were hardly 'destabilizing'. What Syria, Iran, the Palestinians and the Hezbolloh did to Lebanon was one of the great crimes of the post WWII period.
>>>>
>>>>I'm certainly not a fan of every action our government, military or intelligence agency have taken over the last 60 years. The few that I got to see up close were evidence enough that choices are made for a lot of reasons by a very wide range of personalities and are always complex.
>>>>
>>>>I guess my point was that while our society sets a standard for behavior which is quite admirable, it has to be recognized that nasty covert wars (or for that matter overt ones) often require behavior that is outside of that norm. I agree it is troubling but the alternative is often a lot more troubling. I think sometimes it takes a certain kind of moral courage to make complex choices rather than take the 'I need to feel good about myself' easy way out that may have far more negative consequences. ( and yes I do understand that to supporters of Mughniyeh this arguement would be applied to him - I just think it okay to have a definite point of view on who was right and who was wrong and that it does not have to be sucked into the nihilism that comes from moral relativism )
>>>>
>>>>But I do agree that a lot this is very grey and I still am pleased our society at least finds it troubling that sometimes those choices have to be made.
>>>
>>>I don't feel it as a "I need to feel good about myself" thing. I feel it as a "they made wrong decisions and did bad things" thing. Did they make the world a safer better place by running amok as they did. No. They made the world a more dangerous place. We almost had it here when the security services contemplated removing Wilson.
>>
>>If those elements of your MI-5 ( and 6 for that matter ) had been correct that Wilson was in fact a Soviet agent, what would have been your take on it? ( not defending their position, just saying that people in certain positions are given certain responsibilities and how to exercise those is always a judgement call. ) Now move it to 1940 and let's say Edward VIII had never abdicated. And Lord Halifax is at the Admiralty And you are SIS. ... It just isn't easy.
>>
>>Read the bios of KGB and Stasi folks from those days and you get a little more balance. Marcus Wolf for example. ( Stasi - E. Germany ) It is easy to talk about 'running amok' but it has to be seen in the perspective of the realities on the ground at the time. It was a very very rough game. But a lot of it was done the way it was done because even at its worst it was often the alternative to very large military - or even thermonuclear - confrontations.
>>
>>I knew some pretty serious Cold Warriors back in the 70s who were old-school - they had begun in OSS in WWII. What happened between 1945 and 1950 was traumatic and very formative for what happened after that. And who would have thought that a proper lad like Kim Philby ... They were shaped as much by those experiences as my generation was shaped by the social upheavals of the 60s and the debacle of Vietnam.
>>
>>As I said, I don't agree with all the decisions that were made, but I know a little of the environment in which they had to be made and I'm very glad I didn't have to make them.
>
>>>Now move it to 1940 and let's say Edward VIII had never abdicated. And Lord Halifax is at the Admiralty And you are SIS<<

>> that sums up my problem Charles. Why should the security services intervene and who controls them. Why should a spy who thinks he or she knows best dictate policy behind the scenes. For example what if SIS had gone the other way and wanted to remove Churchill. Because they are spies does that mean they know best.

Of course you are absolutely right about this. "But who will watch the watchers?" I don't advocate rogue operations at all. But that is not to say the state does not need a very robust covert capability - and this is more true now than ever in an era of asymetric war and threats that can't be deterred by pointing a missle at a country. Iraq is a very good example. Had we been able to overthrow Saddam without invading and destabilizing the country it would have been a much better outcome.

>Too many times the security services have been unaccountable and out of control. Their actions should be confined to gathering intelligence. Leave the covert actions where they belong, in Hollywood.

But covert action is often the only alternative to the kind of nonsense we are seeing in Iraq and the kind of 'Clintonesque' gestures in lobbing tow missles at tents that led to Bin Laden thinking we were a push over.

I think Hollywood part is even stronger in over-emphasizing the rogue intelligence agency thing. It is PC in hollywood to make the villian our own intelligence or military so as to defang any charge of jingoism or xenophobia in making the bad guys Arabs or any other third world entity. Imbalance in that regard can go either way. But there are lot of people in both analysis and ops who are very dedicated, very intelligent and very aware of their responsibilities in working in a democratic society.

Intelligence services - like politics and programming - draws a pretty broad range of personalities, motivations and backgrounds and there is an internal dynamic to each service. When OSS was founded and then morphed into CIA we mimicked SIS - MI6 and for a long while drew heavily from the Ivy League and the 'right kind of people'.

Built into this was an arrogance about a right to rule. That culture hung on for a while - Dick Helms roomed with the future Shah of Iran at Rosey prep school in Switzerland and Williams, Amherst and Princeton were like prep schools for Langley - but after a while a certain meritocracy started to get a foothold on the seventh floor.

But field work requires something a little different. As to making policy, I'd trust a lot of field men who speak the language, know the country and have few illusions about what rule book the opponents play by over a blowhard politician who literally cannot imagine the realities on the ground.

If the CIA would have had its way, we would not have been in Vietnam for fifteen years. The purges of the mid seventies played very well on telivision and fueled hundreds of movie and novel plots but they also severely damaged our intelligence capabilties for 20 years. Bill Casey definitely tried to make an end run around Congress but a lot of people who knew something about it understood why.