Diamonds Are Forever

...entered World War II, "scores of Soviet agents were gaining access to the John Train is a contributing editor to The American Spectator...

...T HE REAL JIMMY CARTER only goes part way in revealing what a hapless dunce (or "grinning dunce" as this magazine memorably labeled him) the subject truly was...

...The vast bulk of the transactions¡ªby migrant workers sending money home¡ªare benign...

...Their culture can never dominate an agency that is three-fourths cops, one-fourth spy catchers...

...That's the kind of anecdote foreign correspondents like to tell...

...It described al Qaeda's diamond buying, and it told how it had enriched Charles Taylor...

...Consequently Farah goes to Dubai, in January 2002, and twice interviews Razzak, who, of course, denies ever having done anything either unethical or ille gal...

...law enforcement officials refer to "white hawala...

...Blood From Stones is a primer on the terrorists' financial network, and the difficulties in closing it down...

...Currencies are volatile, but the price of gold is the same in New York as it is in Dubai, and so the hawalas run on gold...

...Odom maintains that, essentially, the FBI has only caught spies by accident, while the aura of omniscience put out by its domestic propaganda machine, perfected by J. Edgar Hoover, makes it extremely reluctant to change...

...Gold is an alien concept...

...After reading The Real Jimmy Carter, one is led to wonder not only what is wrong with the man's mental state, but what form of dementia seized me and my fellow citizens who gave him 50.1 percent of the popular vote in 1976...

...Farah dutifully notes that the Clinton administration arranged the peace agreement that gave the Sierra Leone rebels control of the diamond mines...

...It is true they bought diamonds...

...Farah, his pregnant wife, and their twoyear-old son boarded a plane out of Africa soon after...

...m Mixed Signals Fixing Intelligence For a More Secure America by William E. Odom (Yale University Press, 230 pages, $25.95) Reviewed by John Train T HIS IS THE BEST SHORT BOOK On its particular subject: how our national intelligence com munity can be organized more effectively...

...Grant, and even Bill Clinton look like later-day Pericleses by comparison...

...and European intelligence agencies, according to Farah, "missed the shift completely...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW place of dollars...

...Carter's Panama Canal giveaway, his obsession with "human rights," his instantly failed Camp David accords, his betrayal of the Shah of Iran, and his botched handling of the 1978 oil crisis all helped to plunge his approval rating to a dismal 25 percent even before he was assaulted by a "killer rabbit" while fishing in Georgia...

...The next day, a Post editor called to tell him the intelligence service of another country had warned the paper of a plan "to take care of the Washington Post reporter...

...The economies of several countries, including India and Pakistan, depend upon it...

...It is written for the informed citizen, or the government official who needs a concise top-down guide to what is necessary...

...Al Qaeda bought the diamonds from the murderous rebels of Sierra Leone to use as currency in John Corry, a senior editor of The American Spectator, travels frequently to Africa...

...The CIA wants to penetrate networks, to put enemy spies under surveillance, patiently unravel their operations, taking years to do it, if necessary...

...he is also reported to have ties to "India's most wanted criminal kingpin," a known terrorist financier...

...In Karachi, Farah says, he is told of an Abdul Razzak, who presides over a gold empire that is based in Dubai, but stretches from the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian subcontinent to Britain and America, and includes an oil refinery, jewelry stores, and a satellite TV station in London...

...Farah has a particular grudge against the CIA, understandably so...

...He had seen two of them, he said, in Sierra Leone, where they had bought many diamonds...

...Farah goes to Washington after that and meets with Treasury and Customs officials, all of them eager to hear what he has learned...

...So, besides knowing the intelligence scene very well indeed, he also has a rounded, tough-minded, and highly original perspective...

...embassy official in the Ivory Coast informed Farah there had been "credible threats" of "retribu tion" against him...

...Diamonds Are Forever Blood From Stones: The Secret Financial Fetwork of Terror by Douglas Farah (Broadway Books, 225 pages, $24.95) Reviewed by John Corry As S DOUGLAS FARAH SAYS, apparently correctly, he as "often far ahead of what U.S...

...We were talking about a different culture and a completely dif ferent way of doing business than what we are used to," an official tells Farah...

...By the time the U.S...

...Farah, intrigued, arranged a meeting then with rebel commanders, sullen, suspicious men who could neither read nor write, and had spent their lives in the bush...

...Farah then visits the U.S...

...then perhaps to feed deception back into the system...

...The NSA's SIGINT produces most usable intelligence...

...Members of Clinton's National Security Council appear to be some of his best sources...

...In fact, diamonds are easy to transport, smuggle, and convert, and along with gold, tanzanite, emeralds, and sapphires they make up a parallel cur rency for terrorists...

...Farah mentions them, but only in passing...

...Hoover proved a pushover for Soviet intelligence operatives, a mere amateur whose bureau was swindled, misled and thoroughly thrashed in the espionage war....There are and have been outstanding counterintelligence officers in the FBI, but they have never been properly supported...

...Six weeks before the election Carter admitted in a Playboy interview that he lusted in his heart after women...

...While the White House has sheltered a ragged parade of mountebanks, scoundrels, and poseurs over its two-century history, few have bordered as close to dementia as Jimmy Carter...

...The FBI wants to nab crooks, turn them over for prosecution, and hold press conferences...

...Farah is kind to the Clinton administration in Blood From Stones...

...Throughout his long career, his toothy smile and cuddly demeanor concealed a knife-edged ruthlessness and propensity to align himself with unsavory characters in behalf of his own glory...

...The murderous rebels, meanwhile, were pawns of the equally murderous Taylor, who had prominent American friends, Jesse Jackson, Pat Robertson, and members of the Congressional Black Caucus, among them...

...But U.S...

...policy is in disarray...

...It was, and still is, a neglected area, and U.S...

...intelligence gencies knew as they scrambled to under stand al Qaeda's money in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks...

...General Odom has also been the Army's assis tant chief of staff for intelligence, and military assistant to the president's national security advisor...

...But the hawala system is not likely to be shut down...

...But he neglects to mention that when it became clear the agreement had led only to more horror and brutality, the administration lied...

...Clinton's tenure, in fact, was a disaster for Africa...

...Hayward stays the course in dealing with Carter's bungled policy decisions while essentially ignoring his even goofier private life...

...Not exactly equal to the Gettysburg Address or Roosevelt's "day of infamy" speech, but branded trademarks of a tenure in the White House of a man who makes Warren G. Harding, U.S...

...After September 11, Razzak apparently helped the Taliban spirit millions of dollars in gold out of Afghanistan...

...We were so ethnocentric we couldn't conceive of doing something different ways...

...it denied it had brokered the agreement...

...Indeed the Customs officials want to know how he had been able to track down Razzak...

...It is true they were here...

...His erratic behavior, which ranged from the saccharine to canine viciousness, is truly the subject not of Hayward's polite dissection but rather that of a learned psychiatrist...

...Intelligence agencies and law enforcement offi cials also suffer from a cultural gap...

...In July1999, Farah writes, the Clinton administration froze $240 million in al Qaeda and Taliban funds...

...Here we have a serious problem, arising from the different cul tures of the FBI and the CIA, exemplified by the failure to share information that has become notorious in the 9/11 investigation...

...To my mind Odom's most trenchant single criticism of our intelligence establishment is in domestic counterintelligence...

...In today's world the Kim or Steven Maturin type of operative cannot approach the effectiveness of thousands of eavesdropping specialists with powerful computers...

...It tried to discredit his reporting, and it long denied that al Qaeda was buying Sierra Leone diamonds...

...He talks to them for hours, and is on the verge of giving up when one finally says, "We do know these people...

...And there is the intelligence gap, even wider, per haps, than the culture gap...

...Terrorist financing and other criminal activities are "black hawala," and black and white often intertwine, and are impossible to separate...

...Correspondents who are willing to take risks and endure discomfort may be our best sources...

...p lARAH DISCOVERED AL QAEDA'S interest in diamonds when a Liberian acquaintance, idly leafing through a copy of Newsweek, saw pictures of three al Qaeda operatives...

...They thought Osama bin Laden financed terrorism by writing checks...

...in fact, "no one in the embassy had even heard of one of the largest companies in the gold business...

...In my case, during the month of November 1976, he was dead right...

...That interview, plus his speech vilifying his fellow citizens for their alleged "malaise," stand as the only memorable remarks to come out of his presidency...

...The author's qualifications are outstanding: As a lieutenant general he ran the National Security Agency, charged with signals intelligence, and by far the largest component of our intelligence establishment (reputedly some 70,000 employees...

...Almost unmentioned is his steely wife Rosalynn, who hated Washington society as much as it hated her, or his soused, redneck brother Billy and his scraggly daughter, Amy, who plunged into the counterculture at Brown and disappeared forever...

...intelligence assets there are virtually nonexistent...

...Western efforts to trace criminal financial networks, however, have focused on drug money flowing to South America...

...It shows they know the world in away bureaucrats do not...

...Similarly the most vivid parts of Blood From Stones come when Farah writes about himself and what he has seen, especially in West Africa...

...A week later, a US...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW For all his erratic behavior, Jimmy Carter is a fierce duplicitous warrior bent on his own form of success...

...I told them I had looked in the telephone book," Farah writes, "and then called...for an appoint ment...

...Blood From Stones concludes with a warning that the Iraq invasion has siphoned the resources neces sary for an overall counter-terrorism strategy, and that US...

...Farah, then the West African correspondent for the Washington Post, wrote the first account of al Qaeda's interest in the "blood diamonds" of Sierra Leone and, by extension, Charles Taylor's government in Liberia...

...Farah seems to know what is he is talking about, and you may hope that someone is listening...

...Other details soon emerge, and on November 2, 2001, the Washington Post ran Farah's story on page one...

...Hawalas, relying almost entirely on trust and family relationships, for example, move hundreds of billions of dollars a year across the Arab world and Asia...

...Aware of its vulnerabil ity then, al Qaeda began moving its money from banks into commodities...

...Mencken once said that no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people...

...During the run-up from his father's peanut farm to the governorship of Georgia, he simultaneously courted the axe-wielding racist Lester Maddox and Martin Luther King, Jr.¡ªa juggling act that deserves high marks for cleverness if not morality...

...He is more concerned by the failures of the FBI and the CIA...

...embassy official in Abu Dhabi who supposedly monitors the gold market and knows all the big players...

...The official, howev er, had never heard of Razzak...

...Most of the major media did not include in their coverage his additional remark, "Christ says, don't consider yourself better than someone else because one guy screws a bunch of women while the other guy is loyal to his wife...

...Moreover, this wily old fox never hesitated to bloat his resume, claiming to be a "nuclear physicist" following his service on nuclear submarines...

...That loony episode, coupled with his collapse from exhaustion during a 10-kilometer run in suburban Maryland, ele vated him to stardom in most stand-up comedians' monologues, a hilarious distraction from his fumbled effort to solve the Iranian hostage mess that was the capstone to his failed presidency...