Michael Ledeen's "Wilderness of Mirrors"

by emptywheel

Summary: In this post, I look at a series of columns Michael Ledeen has written using former Counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton (JJA) as a literary foil. In the earliest of these JJA columns, Ledeen basically uses the character of the noted paranoid JJA as an excuse to formulate his own baseless conspiracy theories. But of late, Ledeen has been using the device to excuse intelligence breaches he--or his very close allies--have been involved in. In this new formulation, Ledeen seems to be alluding to JJA as a way to boast of his own conspiracies to those in the know, while setting up straw man arguments to otherwise deny the conspiracy.

Michael Ledeen is regularly haunted by a crazy old ghost. Not just any ghost. He's visited by the longtime head of US Counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton (JJA), conjured up through an old ouija board he bought in New Orleans. Or at least that's what Ledeen contrives in a series of columns.

He first used this device, I think, to give himself cover for exploiting current events to make great paranoid claims. Want to turn the Chandra Levy murder into a case of international espionage? Conjure JJA to tell you that Gary Condit was a double agent--blackmailed into trading intelligence in exchange for silence about his multiple affairs. When Levy threatened to expose her affair, she threatened to ruin the double agent arrangement. Want to use the DC Sniper case to drum up fear about Islamic terrorists? Have JJA explain to you that Mohammed's attacks were done at the behest of an Islamic terrorist group who was actually probing US defenses. Want to exploit the anthrax attacks in your attempts to launch a war against Iraq? Make JJA explain how, contrary to all the evidence, the attacks were obviously a plot of Saddam's.

You see, by the end of his life, JJA was absolutely fricking nuts. He had spent his life hunting double agents--heck, he even was a close friend of Kim Philby. And by the end, he had been seeing double for so long he had by most accounts become certifiably paranoid. By invoking JJA, Ledeen allows himself to posit all manner of wacky plots without damaging his (in some crowds, anyway) considerable credibility.

But Ledeen's use of the JJA device has changed in recent years, in ways that I think merit some attention.

Ledeen's use of JJA to issue denials for others

Sometime in 2004, Ledeen begins to use the JJA device to project blame onto the CIA and others (Richard Armitage is a favorite scapegoat) for failures of the Bush Administration. So Ledeen channels JJA to excuse the Bush Administration for failing to predict 9/11. The August 6 PDB? Just one isolated, "vague" piece of intelligence. And Richard Clarke's mountain of evidence? A better justification of a hard line against Iran than evidence that Bush ignored 9/11.

This use of the JJA device is more complex than its earlier use to build grand conspiracy theories. Ledeen is still using JJA to make claims that are not defensible, similar to the way he used JJA to make totally unsubstantiated conspiracy claims. But he's now making logically inconsistent claims, so he can rage against ignored intelligence without acknowledging that Bush ignored it.

JJA: Right. So all the Dems and their pals in the press are busily looking at this one PDB as if everyone should have seen that 9/11 was coming. Such nonsense. They don't know the first thing about intelligence.

[snip]

it wasn't some vague statement like the ones in the PDB, "bin Laden is determined to attack inside the United States," and "al Qaeda is thinking about using airplanes," and so on.

ML: Yes, it looked like one of those CYA things, where CIA is passing on information from other intelligence services (funny how nobody's remarked on that, huh? It's not as if we had this stuff firsthand.) just in case something happens, so they can say "we told you."

JJA: Remember that Bush had asked about possible domestic attacks, so they gave him some bits and pieces. But that document does not say "we know an attack has been planned."

Let JJA claim that these are unspecific threats, rather than having to make such a ridiculous claim himself. But after dismissing the ability of intelligence to draw conclusions from such information, Ledeen has JJA suggest that we should be using the same evidence to attack Iran. What is at once inconclusive intelligence is, through the magic of JJA, also a casus belli.

JJA: Sure it is. But the point I'm making is that we didn't have enough information to justify a serious, specific warning. We were generally concerned, but we didn't have enough to act on. So we kept on looking. That's the way life is, most of the time.

ML: Right. But what about Clarke's book?

JJA: The dynamite stuff in Clarke's book has to do with Iran. He says, for example, on page 284, "al Qaeda regularly used Iranian territory for transit and sanctuary prior to September 11."

ML: But I thought the consensus view in the intel community was that Sunnis and Shiites couldn't work together?

JJA: Well, apparently they knew better, although, of course, Clarke hedges it a bit: "the 'ties' and 'links' between al Qaeda (and Iran) were minimal."

Clarke's book at once contains too little evidence to argue we should have anticipated 9/11, but enough evidence to argue we should do something about Iran. In this more complex form, Ledeen uses JJA to make logically incompatible arguments--to simultaneously exonerate his allies for not meeting the Ledeen standards of paranoia in the past, but demanding that they act on his paranoia in the future.

Ledeen's use of JJA to issue denials for himself

Many of Ledeen's most recent uses of JJA serve not to exonerate his allies, but to exonerate himself or others involved in plots they have propagated. He uses JJA to mock the AIPAC espionage investigation, the Chalabi leak case, the Plame and Niger forgery investigations--all intelligence breaches in which Ledeen is reputed to have a very close role. Ledeen, like Larry Franklin, has used close ties with Israel to leverage for a hard line against Iran (indeed, a hard line against Iran is about all he writes about of late). Ledeen was instrumental in helping Chalabi make the case for war against Iraq. And his role as a broker of the the Niger forgeries has been widely alleged. So these are all conspiracies in which he was at least tangentially involved.

His strategy in these JJA dialogues changes again. At several points, he uses JJA to just completely excuse his own behavior.

ML: Right you were. It's about Chalabi. He's a friend of mine, and I would be really upset if he turned out to be an Iranian agent.

JJA: You shouldn't take these things personally. Kim Philby was a friend of mine, after all, and he turned out to be a big-time KGB agent.

A friend of yours has shared code word intelligence with one of your own worst enemies? No big deal. JJA was great friends with Kim Philby, after all. Or take Ledeen's explanation for the Plame affair, that it was just an attempted political assassination (of Bush, not Wilson!).

JJA: It was probably the Plame Affair that clinched it. I can't ever remember the director of central intelligence pulling a stunt like that: asking the criminal division of Justice to investigate a leak at the White House.

ML: Yeah, exactly. Richard Helms once told me that they'd investigated some leaks, and invariably found that they had come from the top guys, and so the investigation ended right there.

JJA: Right. I was involved in a couple of those investigations. Helms was right.

ML: So the call for the Plame investigation was an attempted political assassination, so to speak.

You see, Vice Presidents are supposed to be able to out their own spies.

In other cases, Ledeen uses JJA to mock (but not refute) the claims to conspiracy advanced about his plots, as in this passage from this column on Franklin.

ML: But countries, even friendly countries, certainly spy on one another, so theoretically there might be friendly espionage operations in Washington.

JJA: There are certainly espionage operations here, from all our friends and enemies. But Israel is one of the countries least likely to recruit agents in the American government.

ML: Because of Pollard, right?

JJA: You bet. That damn near wrecked the relationship, and they don't want a repeat. And I keep coming back to the professionalism question. If someone in the U.S. government were passing secrets to Israel, I just can't imagine that it would take place in a restaurant, or that AIPAC — which knows it has endless enemies in the counterintelligence community — would do such a thing.

Ledeen, here, sounds like the rational one. But it's just a ruse. He's arguing that because the Israelis got caught once, they wouldn't spy on us again. Now that gives me comfort

But the thing is, when Ledeen deals with his own involvement in these plots, he never denies--or even credibly disproves--the case against him. Here's his take on his role in the Niger forgeries.

ML: Yeah, thanks for returning my calls. Have you seen these stories about the "Italian Connection" to the Niger Documents?

JJA: The ones that say you forged them? I didn't know your French was good enough (odd sound here, couldn't really tell if it was the usual cough or a spectral laugh) . . .

ML: No, no, not those. Anyway hardly anybody said that, mostly they accused me of schlepping them, not forging them. But I'm talking about a different lot: The ones that say that the Italian intelligence service never transmitted the documents to us.

JJA: Yes, I saw some of that here and there. Both an Italian parliamentary oversight commission and the FBI concluded that the Italian secret service didn't provide the United States with the infamous forged documents. They came through the State Department, do I have that right?

ML: A typical CIA fiasco, it seems. The documents were taken to the U.S. embassy by an Italian journalist (funny how there's always a journalist, isn't it?). One of the Lefties (who has a different version of the story almost every day) thinks the documents were brought to the Embassy by the guy who was peddling them all over the place. CIA people in Rome saw them, but didn't transmit them to Langley, and the agency didn't properly evaluate them until they were exposed as forgeries by the U.N.

Note that Ledeen doesn't bother to answer the accusation that he "schlepped" these documents. Instead he launches into a word game. He claims to be arguing against those who "say that the Italian intelligence service never transmitted the documents to us." Notice the double negative, which would suggest Ledeen was arguing that SISMI in fact had given us the documents. But then he shifts the focus of his argument again. He points out that Italy and SSCI had concluded that SISMI didn't provide the forgeries. But what he's really offering is a technical denial, solely that they didn't hand over the documents themselves (as eRiposte has shown, they provided near-transcriptions of the documents, corrected to make them more plausible). Which they didn't. But now he tries to discredit the Rozen/Marshall/Hersh argument, that Rocco Martino dealt the documents to Burba, who passed them on to the embassy. But he mischaracterizes their argument to do so. And finally, he finds some way to argue that since the documents came through State--through his buddy Bolton's department, no less!--the CIA is responsible for not having discredited the document. Huh?

In short, rather than offering a denial of his own involvement, Ledeen seems to be mocking the CIA that the conspiracy worked. He as much as admits several aspects of the story but uses the admission to taunt the CIA.

A comparison of methods--two columns on Ahmed Chalabi

The Chalabi column is particularly interesting, because it allows us to compare how Ledeen uses the JJA device with how he makes a similar argument in a more traditional essay. Ledeen wrote a traditional essay on the Chalabi leak just four days after publishing his JJA dialogue. In the JJA column, he excuses Chalabi by completely mischaracterizing the reports of the Chalabi leak and then refuting those mischaracterized claims.

JJA: So they're saying that the Iranians' chief operative in Baghdad told Tehran that their codes had been broken...and his message was sent in the same code?

ML: Seems so.

Um, no. I'm not aware of any portrayal of the Chalabi leak in which the leak was discovered because Chalabi communicated it in code that had been broken. Rather, the CIA noticed that Iran stopped using the code and put that fact together with earlier statements from Chalabi they had intercepted. Much of this straw man argument seems to be tongue in cheek, because Ledeen later raises an issue that he must know actually hurts his case and he does it using the same mocking tone.

JJA: Oh, I think it's mostly political, and has little if anything to do with intelligence. The CIA loves to smear people they don't like with claims of super-secret intelligence that rarely exists.

ML: Like those Iraqis who ran from Saddam after the debacle in the mid-Nineties?

JJA: Of course. Remember that we rescued them, and they ended up in Guam?

ML: Uh huh.

JJA: And then the CIA denied entry to three of them, claiming they were spies for Saddam, and they wouldn't let anyone see the intelligence, and they were demanding the three be sent back to Iraq?

ML: And they would have been sent there, to a terrible death, and were only saved because Jim Woolsey volunteered his legal assistance, went to court, demanded to see the intelligence, and found there was nothing there.

The thing is, the Chalabi episode by itself proves the CIA was probably correct to deny these exiles entry. They were denied entry for the same kind of double-dealing Chalabi was accused of (double dealing with Iran, not Iraq). And one of the exiles, Ali Karem, was challenged precisely because of his relationship with his cousin, Aras Karem, who is still alleged to be the key link between Chalabi and Iran. In other words, raising this history doesn't exonerate Chalabi. It simply reminds those in the know of how long the relationship between Chalabi and Iran has been suspected. And Ledeen seems to think this is witty, not alarming. In other words, Ledeen mocks the entire story as a wacky conspiracy--even though he as much as admits that the concern is well-founded.

In contrast, in Ledeen's traditional essay, he admits the INC has been infiltrated by Iranian intelligence.

I do believe that the INC, along with every other significant organization in Iraq, has been penetrated by the extremely skilled Iranian intelligence services, and therefore I would not be at all surprised to find one or another of his associates working with Tehran.

But he then uses that admission to shift the blame, once again, to scapegoat CIA and Richard Armitage. The scapegoat claim requires Ledeen to turn two more justifiable accusations on their head--that Chalabi ruined the 1996 coup in Iraq, and that his defectors were largely responsible for the mobile weapons claims.

By now everybody knows that the IC failed to appreciate the significance of al Qaeda, failed to see 9/11 coming, failed to develop reliable information about Iraq, whether it be about internal political realities (those failed coups, remember?), or the WMD facts, from their existence to their location, and so forth. The spooks must be wondering if some political or budgetary axe is hovering over them, and so they need a scapegoat. They picked Chalabi, a man they have always disliked, ever since he exposed one of their coup plots as amateur night.

[snip]

They are now even trying to blame him for the "mobile labs" story. Good luck with that one. Among their sources were foreign intelligence services and their own human recruits.

Which finally leaves Ledeen arguing that it doesn't matter if Chalabi is a spy, because our own intelligence services have still screwed up.

Even if Chalabi turns out to be a master spy, he cannot be blamed for this enormous intelligence and policy failure.

Now, both of Ledeen's claims--that Chalabi exposed the 1996 plot as amateur and that Chalabi wasn't directly responsible for the mobile weapons lab claims--are more misdirection. At least according to Bob Baer, it was partly Chalabi's involvement in the 1996 coup attempt that caused the US to withdraw support from an associated CIA-supported plot (See No Evil 200). And no greater authority than Chalabi himself asserts that Chalabi's defectors were responsible for the mobile weapons lab claims (and he says this even after Judy's article backing off the claim the trailers are mobile weapons labs).

"We gave very accurate information, and we produced people who we handed over to the United States who told them very significant things," Chalabi said today during a question-and-answer session with "NBC Nightly News" anchor Tom Brokaw at the New York office of the Council on Foreign Relations. "The only tangible things they have found are the mobile labs, which our defectors talked about."

So Ledeen, in both the traditional essay and the JJA form, mocks the claim against Chalabi and then introduces reasons why readers should believe the worst about Chalabi (if they're sufficiently aware to understand the oblique references to his past). But in the essay, he treats the claims against Chalabi with some seriousness in an attempt to shift blame. Whereas the dialogue comes off as almost a gleeful confession that, yes, Chalabi might be a double agent and did you know that the Neocons have been involved in his double dealing from day one???

Why channel James Jesus Angleton?

Which is why I'd like to reconsider Ledeen's use of JJA. At first glance, it appears he chooses to channel JJA because it allows him to claim expertise on intelligence issues he doesn't have and do so in a way that pushes the bounds of sanity.

But Ledeen also presents JJA as a very close friend. He calls him "my old friend." He describes JJA's voice as "that gravelly near-whisper I knew so well." These are curious claims. Ledeen returned to the US from his stint of writing books on fascism in Italy in 1977. While Ledeen got involved in Republican smear politics immediately--writing articles alleging Carter had ties to Libya--his ill-fated career in counterintelligence didn't start until several years later, well after JJA had been ousted from the CIA in 1974. Now, Angleton died in 1987, so it's certainly possible Ledeen knew him. But where would he have met him?

I'm not sure. But it's worth considering that JJA occupied the same nexus between Italy, Israel, and US intelligence as Ledeen (JJA apparently doesn't have Ledeen's well-established ties to Iranian fabricators, but his association with British intelligence before the war might amount to the same thing). JJA was rumored to favor Italian fascism when he lived there as a youth, managed counterintelligence in Italy after World War II, and has been alleged to be connected with the founding of Propaganda Due. And for much of his career he managed the CIA's relationship with Mossad. If these allegations are correct, JJA and Ledeen share a fondness for fascism (the fascist movement, Ledeen would say), close operational ties to Israel and Italy, and a habit of seeing ghosts behind every tree.

Which gives Ledeen's mockery of his own conspiracies a very different spin. At the risk of sounding like JJA (or Ledeen) myself, Michael Ledeen and JJA traveled similar paths in counter-intelligence, where a well-cultivated paranoia about enemies justifies all manner of covert activities. For JJA (as far as we know--there were accusations of much more), this justified establishing a wide-ranging spy network within the US. For Ledeen, it justifies trading secrets with friends and enemies and, apparently, constructing elaborate plots to bring the country into a unjustified war.

His JJA columns may have started as something else. But of late they seem to have turned into celebrations of Ledeen's own conspiracies ... at least for those in on the joke.

Ledeen admits the truth

My overall impression, then, of Ledeen's JJA articles relating to issues he's involved with, is that he's taunting his opponents--acknowledging the sheer ineptitude of his plots, but laughing that he hasn't been discovered yet.

I find one detail of these dialogues really telling. In both his JJA dialogues and his traditional essays, he occasionally attacks journalists by name. Ledeen attacks Josh Marshall particularly bitterly in one of the dialogues (apparently for Marshall's exposure of Michelle Ledeen's gravy train job in Iraq courtesy of the Heritage Foundation). He attacks Seymour Hersh repeatedly in his traditional essays. But I have not found one mention of Hersh in the JJA dialogues. Hersh, you'll recall, is the guy who brought down JJA in 1974 by exposing his domestic spying activities in a blockbuster article in the NYT. Perhaps, in his dialogues, Ledeen would rather not admit that a little real exposure might bring down the whole charade.

Maybe that will happen for Ledeen soon. On several key points, he has already been proved wrong, as in this passage where he predicts the Franklin case will never result in indictments.

ML: Let's come back to the journalists for a second. Aren't they culpable too?

JJA: That's a bit more difficult, but they certainly haven't covered themselves with glory. Whenever they're approached with a story like this, they should ask the FBI: If you've got such a strong case, why haven't you obtained indictments from a grand jury? And if there aren't any indictments, and if nobody's been arrested, then why are you asking me to do your dirty work for you?

ML: So put up or shut up, right?

JJA: Amen, brother. Put up or shut up.

Put up or shut up, indeed.

Not quite comprehensive list of Ledeen's JJA columns

The French Connection 11/7/05 Published in response to the La Repubblica series, Ledeen tries to blame the Niger forgeries on the French.

Z Squared 10/18/05 Uses the now largely discredited Zawahiri letter to claim terrorist ties between Sunnis and Shiites.

Intelligence? You Kidding Me? 8/12/05, In response to Curt Weldon's championing of the Able Danger story, Ledeen claims the 9/11 commission lied about knowing about the program.

Was It Suicide?  7/18/05 A supposition that the London tube bombing was not a suicide bombing.

Porter's Purge 11/16/04 complaining about the Plame investigation and Anonymous' (Michael Scheuer's) publication.

An Improbable Molehunt 8/31/04 Published before the Franklin case got too far, Ledeen claims the FBI doesn't have any real evidence because there have been no indictments.

The Agency Rides Again 5/24/04 To dismiss the notion that Chalabi is an Iranian spy.

Signals and Background Noise 4/12/04 An attempt to get Condi off the hook for her lies about the PDB that presented only "historical" information.

Once Upon a Spymaster, Part II 3/01/04 A continuation of the critique on Tenet, used to blab more about the Iranian regime.

Once Upon a Spymaster 2/27/04 A critique of Tenet's Senate testimony used to argue for a unified theory of terrorism.

Back to the Angleton Files 11/25/03 Allegations that the DC sniper was tied to Islamic terrorists.

No Finest Hour 4/8/03 Assessment of attempt to take out Saddam used to argue for regime change.

How We're Doing 11/12/01 Allegation that the anthrax was a plot of Saddam's.

An Unexplored Lead 7/16/01 Ledeen imagines Gary Condit is a double agent.

Comments

[landreau]

It looks like that old saw about criminals leaving clues to prove how smart they are, only to be tripped up by them.

EW, you do such wonderful work, and it's so important. Thanks.

[William Ockham]

Careful now, venturing into the mind of Ledeen is a dangerous pastime. Seriously, trying to differentiate between Ledeen the propagandist and Ledeen the right-wing kook is a fool's errand. The only useful lesson one can draw from Ledeen's writing is how easy it is for an ideologue to be tricked into helping out his sworn enemies. For a man dedicated to taking a hard-line against the Iranians it is beyond ironic that his great policy "successes" (Iran-Contra and the Iraq War) have redounded so emphatically to the benefit of the Iranian hard-liners.

[viget]

Excellent analysis EW.

I think you're really on to something. It's almost as if his JJA columns are his "diabolical confessions" you might say, just like the James Bond villian always lays out the whole convoluted plot right before he thinks Bond's about to be offed. Maybe he knows an indictment is right around the corner (or some other intervention that will "save" him).

And, if there's ever anything I've learned with this bunch, if you take the opposite of what they say as true, it's invariably pretty close to reality.

Also, JJA and Leeden (his protege, maybe?) probably have rights to be paranoid. The "good-guys" were probably on to them, hence JJA's need to have a domestic spying ring to know what the heck his "enemies" knew about his potentially treasonous activities. Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover were like that too. O what a wicked web indeed...

Someday, I hope either you or someone like you (with that amazing analytical style you have) writes a book about these folks and exposes this whole paranoid conspiracy crap they peddle for what it is. I'd love to see insights into how these guys think and what makes them tick.

[speakingcorpse]

Ledeen's goals are so insane and patently destructive of American interests that I am beginning to suspect that he is an IRANIAN agent under deep cover. That would explain the close ties to Gorbhanifar and the obsession with Chalabi/Christ. I think that he is functioning as a sort of Iranian version of a "Manchurian pundit," while at the same time engaging in secret contretemps. There is a wilderness of connections between the Mossad and the Iranians that will, hopefully, some day be traced and described.

[orionATL]

james jesus angleton

what a name.

what a dewstructive old crackpot.

that he rose so high in the cia and damaged the agency for so long says a lot about why the cia was and remains substantially disfunctional.

but angleton and ledeen?

good god.

i had no idea.

my first impression reading this essay is of ledeen's egotism.

does this guy really care about the ideology he espouses? or is the ideology just the framework that he happened to "grow up" in?

put another way

some people love to kill for the pleasure and thrill of killing

i wonder if ledeen loves his "espionage" tricks in the same way for the thrill they offer him. ideology is just the clothing he wears.

thanks for a truely remarkable synthasis.

i do hope there is another shoe to drop re niger.

[mainsailset]

Have you seen the post on AfterDowningStreet "Rummy, Saddam & the Secret History of the Aqaba Pipeline"? Certainly gives a deeper perspective of the history and motivation of the Iraq war.

[emptywheel]

RE: Ledeen and Iran. Someone (I think it was Ledeen, but not in the articles I worked on here) made the point that it is a mistake for the US to mistake political moderation in Iran with cooperation with our goals. While that makes sense for a realpolitik policy, it contradicts the very notion of Neocons' stated goals. Which doesn't mean they don't believe it.

In other words, it may be that part of Ledeen's strategy of tension (I'm sure both he and Angleton believed in a strategy of tension) to call for support for moderates in Iran while at the same time dealing with the hardliners. Don't know how that keeps Israel safe, but I'm trying to figure out what they hell he's thinking.

There are, of course, rumors that Ledeen/P2 were involved in whatever October Surprise Reagan/Bush pulled off in 1980. And all narratives of the October surprise argue Israel brokered the deal in an attempt to keep its alliance with the periphery (the non-Arab periphery of its sphere of influence) strong.

[peanutgallery]

Former umzu here. Thanks for this classic piece of literary forensic work. Like the Judy series, it gives those of us who don't do detailed leak logic at the speed of light a stable interpretive framework for understanding these guys. Ledeen seems to be using a literary device to document complex narratives and counternarratives. He didn't foresee the emergence of sophisticated, collaborative, public problem solving when he started this project in the Levy piece with the words "when things are so complicated that no living person can unravel them..."

[emptywheel]

umzu...I mean peanut gallery. Why the name change?

Great point about that first line of the Levy column. When setting out on an attempt to obfuscate his own conspiracies, Ledeen makes the claim that everything's too tough for people to figure out.

[peanutgallery]

just experimenting...trying to find the right number/type of personas for maximum productivity. Like Ledeen, ha ha. :)

[jonnybutter]

Fascinating, EW.

...I'm trying to figure out what they hell he's thinking.

I know you're a professional, but don't hurt yourself!

[kim]

I thought JJC was fascinating, in my early 20s, and spy novels are still my fictional favorite. Happy to know that I've (mostly) moved on, but a neo-con Master of the Universe seems not to have.

[kim]

Sorry, make that JJA! I also haven't developed an excessive interest in orchids either, BTW, fortunately, but for the grace of God....

[jane hamsher]

That is just full-on four-flushing insane.

[opriopnATL]

i've heard a lot about wikipedia but never used it. this evening i entered google and then wikipedia. at wikipedia i entered "michael leeden".

while there is a lot at that site one could exclaim about, the thing that stood out for me were citations involving ledeen's concern for the failure of modern leaders to "implement" machiavelli's "advise".

my understanding of machiavelli was that he was more an observer and recorder of current practices than an adviser on how a prince should proceed.

one of us has misconstrued machiavelli.

but more important is ledeen's interest in machiavelli. it suggests to me an in-the-mind idealization of governing virtually independent of reality, and, especially, the american reality of give-and-take, dicker and argue, and then settle things and go home.

off the cuff, ledeen sounds to me like the typical "romantic" political fanatic, operating from the certainty inside his head rather than from the messy, unstable reality of american democracy.

and that brings me, dont ask how, to a larger question which bothers me:

we in the united states seem suddenly to have become overwhelmed by conservative european philosophy and religion in a way we had managed to escape for centuries.

[kim]

Thanks Jane. I'll guess you haven't a generous sense of humor, or mine isn't much to your liking. C'est la vie.

[Smokestack]

Bravo, EW, bravo. Great to see such intelligent deconstruction of Ledeen. Hope to see more of these, hereabouts.

BTW, one thing you might add, Ledeen happens to be an execrably bad writer. Nothing but tin-eared cliches and that trademark phony bogus juvenile mysteriousness. It's beyond tiresome.

With apologies, if I may, below are a few contributory notes on Angleton. A glance at these items (from authors as cited) makes it more obvious why Ledeen would seem to admire to Angleton so -- shared cravings for compartmentalized illegality:

==========

1) From "Israel's Secret Wars: A History of Israel's Intelligence Services" by Ian Black and Benny Morris:

p. 132: "Another unwitting and complementary conduit for the Mossad deception appears to have been James Angleton, the CIA counter-intelligence chief, who maintained close and sympathetic liason with the Israelis. According to Robert Amory, the CIA's deputy director of intelligence, Washington learned of the imminent Israeli attack when a US military atache in Tel Aviv reported that his driver, a disabled Israeli reservist, had been called up. Amory concluded that a full-scale mobilization was under way. Angleton disagreed strongly. His Israeli contacts had told him emphatically that there would be no attack. An angry Amory called Angleton 'this co-opted Israeli agent,' but years later Amory would argue that Angleton was 'duped and not duplicitous.'"

==========

2) From "Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby" by John Prados:

p. 271: "Previous orders to remove Angleton from the chain of command for CIA activities in Israel also had never been implemented. Only a month after Colby took his oath as DCI, the Middle East erupted in the fierce October War of 1973. Israeli intelligence failed to predict the Arab attacks that launched the conflict. Angleton, with his cozy contacts with the Israelis, had followed their cue. Moreover, since Angleton handled this Israeli account as a tightly compartmentalized operation, some of the relevant intelligence never reached the CIA's own analysts. Angleton had used every argument already to dissuade Colby from taking him off the Israeli liason mission, but the October War made it clear that existing arrangements could not be continued."

p.297: "In a piece on Angleton he published in 1978, Seymour Hersh wrote that both the counterspy and the DCI were aware of his work on the CIA domestic story by the second week of December 1974. Colby had specific notice of a forthcoming Times story by the following Monday. Previously Colby had left Angleton in place as a token of stability at Langley, but with revelations in store about illegal operations for which Angleton had had responsibility, and which 'Mother,' as he was nicknamed, had fought to preserve, the old approach no longer appeared tenable. On Thursday, December 17, Colby had Angleton up to the seventh floor for a showdown. The director announced his irrevocable decision taking Angleton out of the Middle East chain of command, and then dropped the bombshell -- Colby had decided to appoint a new chief of counterintelligence."

==========

3) From "A Spy For All Seasons" by Duane Clarridge, p.404:

"Over the years the Clandestine Services has not handled counterintelligence well for a number of reasons. First, there was a lack of what I would call 'adult supervision.' James Angleton was the first egregious example of those who were allowed by senior management to isolate themselves from the mainstream of the Clandestine Services in the name of security and carry on unfocused and often paranoid investigations that had little relevance to the Agency's ongoing operations and were often mindlessly destructive of positive efforts. Richard Helms should go to his grave deploring his lack of courage or misplaced loyalty in his failure to remove Angleton; at least William Colby rose to the occasion."

[emptywheel]

Smokestack,

Thanks much for the additions. Those are valuable. And yes, Ledeen seems to have found a fellow traveler in JJA.

[orionATL]

smokestack--

your comments and citations were most instructive

thanks for taking the time to make them available to
others.

it's amazing what the web log world makes available to folks like me.

what an education.

[Chris Loosley]

Once again, I request that the meaning of acronyms be spelled out when they are first used, for the benefit of readers who do not actually work in Washington DC. I'm sure there must be a few of us. Today the problem was PDB. Wikipedia tells me it could mean:

-- the President's Daily Briefing
-- the Protein Data Bank
-- the trio Pastorius, Dennard, and Bullock, and a jazz album by that trio
-- a file format, Palm database, generally used to store data for an application
-- a (proprietary) Microsoft file format, Program Database, used to store debug information about a computer program
-- the Poco Di Buono crew, the most big National Italian writerz crew, recently inquired by police for the big quantity of damaged trains.
-- potato dextrose broth, a microbiological medium commonly used for culturing yeast and mold, but not bacteria.
-- the phpDataBase, a SQL understanding database- server completely written in PHP

Given this list, I have to assume you were probably freferring to the first. But I imagine there could also be other meanings not even listed here. It would be much easier to follow the discussion without having to overcome this kind of obscurity.

Thanks.

[Gotham Image]

I was amazed that you did this because I was thinking of doing something similar, albeit in a comic dialogue, like my recent Hitchens-Bush conversation.

But I have many old articles of Ledeen's to read, that are more interesting than his later stuff.

One of the ironies of Ledeen is that the real reasons he uses Angleton as a dramatic device, is not only to appeal to the reactionary imagination, but also to create a seperate conceptual framework,like the left wing dramatist Pinter.

[Gotham Image]

As a creative excercise, EW ought to think of the "deep game," when it comes to Iran. Think of Iran, not as Iran, but as Persia with some added states and tribes, some less loyal to Tehran than others.

Why did the Bush admin. seem to obstruct earlier efforts to prevent the Khan network from supplying material banned by the IAEA to Iran? That been alleged at least. Was this to give some real substance to a threat, Iran, that was only theoretical?

[Gotham Image]

EW

If you are looking for some domestic analogues for the theory of stress, look to the border/immigration policy, which is designed via paradox and left hand/right hand differentiation to supply cheap labor that is vulnerable because it is illegal, but to do so in a way that sluices blue collar blame away from the designers of policy to the Mexicans.

Think - the border is designed to be breeched. Yet, the victims of the downward drift in wages don't blame those who built the bad border and lured workers accross.

Iranian policy, is a bit like that. If you squint.

[prostratedragon]

EW, thanks for this survey of the Testament of Dr. Ledeen. His name, and the inevitable juxtaposition of Manucher Ghorbanifar's have long defined the boundaries of the roccoco for me. Somehow though, I had forgotten about Mother Angleton--a Psycho reference, surely--who I'm old enough to have been terrified by when I read about him during the tender years of my youth, probably in one of those Hersh articles.

Unfortunately, some intrepid souls are going to have to risk all by parsing this crowd before we're finally rid of them, cause it looks like they hold a lot of the loose ends.

[emptywheel]

Uh, Cymro, I'll let Ledeen know that you think he should spell out PDB, next time I see him.

[emptywheel]

Gotham

Yeah, I would agree about that AQ Khan lapse in general, and it works for Iran specifically.

And thinking of Persia more generally? Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if these guys were going back to Herodotous and Thucydides for their very twisted notion of Iran.

[KM]

EW, you just have an amazingly nimble mind.

Gotham, I think that perceptive description of the Admin's tactical construction of its border/immigration policy is broadly applicable to the Admin's political MO writ large.

[Arun]

It is evident there is too little accountability in American public life. The name Ledeen should have been forgotten long ago.