Mixed Signals
Odom, William E.
know these people. It is true they were here. It is true they bought diamonds." Other details soon emerge, and on November 2, 2001, the Washington Post ran Farah's story on page one. It...
...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...
...It would provide a much-needed single approach to the problems of security...
...He is a former Washington correspondent of the New York Sun, a newspaper which Brock attacks in his book for having labeled China "red...
...The book does not contain a single cogent argument...
...The NCIS would be responsible for delivering to all federal departments and agencies what they need in this area...
...government...
...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...
...It is simply a continuation of the narrative in Brock's grandiloquent memoir Blinded by the Right, a venom-filled assault on his ex-friends...
...The mainstream media are a front group for the Republican Party...
...Indeed, Brock's obsession with sliming anyone with an alternative viewpoint borders on what some might call McCarthyism...
...To my mind Odom's most trenchant single criticism of our intelligence establishment is in domestic counterintelligence...
...Executing them over the screams and howls of the entrenched bureaucracies will be the real challenge...
...much of the CIA's counterintelligence capability...
...A look at the endnotes shows that most of his information was culled from sources such as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), People for the American Way, a host of liberal magazines and websites, and Clinton apologist Sidney Blumenthal, whom Brock quotes as an authority on Matt Drudge...
...Their culture can never dominate an agency that is three-fourths cops, one-fourth spy catchers...
...Experience warns us that an agency deprived of its own intelligence entity is likely to re-grow it quite soon...
...Indeed, these writers pre dictably fail because they have no leg to stand on...
...Odom points out that if we had not shut down our signals intelligence capability in 1929, Herbert Yardley's highly revealing book on its activities, The American Black Chamber, could not have been writ-ten...
...And Americans don't even know it...
...Farah is kind to the Clinton administration in Blood From Stones...
...But he neglects to mention that when it became clear the agreement had led only to more horror and brutality, the administration lied...
...it denied it had brokered the agreement...
...All this started with old-time agents making drawings and taking pictures, then progressing to reconnaissance flights over the lines in World War I, a much denser effort in World War II, then the U-2 and the SR-71 Blackbird, satellite-based imagery, and of late, unmanned drones...
...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...
...Finally, Odom thinks the director of Central BOOKS IN REVIEW Intelligence really should refocus on being head of the Intelligence Community¡ªDirector of National Intelligence¡ªand not be double-hatted as operating chief of his Agency too, which should specialize in spying and analysis...
...then perhaps to feed deception back into the system...
...He would need to be close to the president in every sense...
...So, besides knowing the intelligence scene very well indeed, he also has a rounded, tough-minded, and highly original perspective...
...They dismiss the mountain of studies and surveys that show journalists over whelmingly consider themselves liberal...
...Pouring through the book's 350-plus pages, I got lost trying to find any attempt to prove how democracy is being corrupted by anyone...
...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...
...It would also create a National Counterintelligence School, whose primary resource for study would be the records of actual cases...
...The Truth About Bias in the News (which Brock draws upon), no convincing evidence is put forward here to show a sinister right-wing plot to brainwash and dominate America...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW upper reaches of the U.S...
...It described al Qaeda's diamond buying, and it told how it had enriched Charles Taylor...
...Odom observes that arrests of "lesser-known agents" have typically been based upon "the work of military counterintelligence officers who uncovered them abroad and tracked them for years, patiently building the evidence for a conviction, and then enticing than to travel to the United States, where only the FBI has the authority to make the arrests and support the prosecution...
...These are all important and reasonable conceptions...
...To wit, during an interview flogging the book on the Today show, the author boasted "I name all the names...
...An exception would be imagery intelligence tied to particular weapons systems and military units...
...It is written for the informed citizen, or the government official who needs a concise top-down guide to what is necessary...
...By the time the U.S...
...The rise of the right is the result of a nefarious, decades-old campaign by conservatives to create a myth of liberal media bias...
...But the new agency's director would report to the director of Central Intelligence...
...brainwash Americans...
...The latest of which, a study from the Pew Research Center, found that only 7 percent of reporters, editors, and...
...Farah seems to know what is he is talking about, and you may hope that someone is listening...
...Farah dutifully notes that the Clinton administration arranged the peace agreement that gave the Sierra Leone rebels control of the diamond mines...
...How else to explain the popularity of talk radio and the Fox News Channel, the success of conservative books or the sprawling right-wing presence on the Internet...
...In order to underline that conception Odom would take the DNI right out of Langley, so that he can look, as well as be, independent of any one component and instead preside over the whole...
...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...
...For example, the Soviet's amazing technical penetrations of our Moscow embassy baffled both the State Department and the CIA...
...Clinton's tenure, in fact, was a disaster for Africa...
...He recommends that we give the NSA responsibility for all signals intelligence and reverse that agency's policy of increased public disclosure...
...They include the CIA's National Reconnaissance Office, which built the U-2, the National Photographic Research Center, the Defense Mapping Agency, the ¡¡Committee for Imagery Exploit-Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office, and, since 1996, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA...
...B EFORE THEN, it might be profitable to peak behind that door...
...Money from wealthy benefactors has and is being used to influence the press and consciously Adam Daifallah is a member of the editorial board at Canada's National Post...
...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...
...Few outsiders are conscious of the many parts of our national imagery intelligence effort...
...Members of Clinton's National Security Council appear to be some of his best sources...
...The Rosenbergs proved the exception...
...Such intelligence must return to the shadows and lock the door...
...In today's world the Kim or Steven Maturin type of operative cannot approach the effectiveness of thousands of eavesdropping specialists with powerful computers...
...Odom's solution would be to create a National Counterintelligence Service (NCIS), to coordinate all intelligence community counterintelligence operations...
...A week later, a US...
...Odom argues that the varying demands of these components of national imagery intelligence require putting most of this effort under NIMA, supported by a worldwide communications system, just as most signal intelligence is under the NSA...
...Odom wonders whether this and other exposure were central to NSA's failure to figure out what al Qaeda was up to before the attacks of September 11...
...It's an odd subtitle...
...That is the conclusion less intelligent than those reading The American Spectator might come to after reading Brock's latest diatribe, The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It [sic] Corrupts Democracy...
...With the same objective, he favors substantially increasing the power of the National Intelligence Council, often called NIC, to lend perspective and the long view...
...embassy official in the Ivory Coast informed Farah there had been "credible threats" of "retribu tion" against him...
...Obviously, both demand everything ASAP...
...Like Joe Conason's Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth and Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media...
...policy is in disarray...
...That book caused the Japanese to change their codes and contributed to the surprise at Pearl Harbor...
...Farah, his pregnant wife, and their twoyear-old son boarded a plane out of Africa soon after...
...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...
...Its core would be selected members of the FBI's counterintelligence department, together with their files and agent operations...
...The CIA wants to penetrate networks, to put enemy spies under surveillance, patiently unravel their operations, taking years to do it, if necessary...
...entered World War II, "scores of Soviet agents were gaining access to the John Train is a contributing editor to The American Spectator...
...Namedropper The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It [sic] Corrupts Democracy by David Brock (Crown, 432 pages, $25.95) Reviewed by Adam Daifallah D AVID BROCK THINKS AMERICA has been duped...
...Instead I found spin, anger, and vilification...
...Tipped off by army code breakers...with the names of more than two hundred likely agents, the FBI proved unable to collect sufficient additional evidence to indict and prosecute them...
...Brock, who's now heading up his own media "watchdog" group, Media Matters for America, does no original research and makes no new arguments in this book...
...In combat, the military needs information immediately, while strategic forces can wait...
...The NSA's SIGINT produces most usable intelligence...
...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...
...Ultimately, getting wise and experienced officers into the right slots is probably key...
...In such cases, the military officers "received not even a thank-you as the FBI held press conferences to claim the cases as its own work...
...Finally the National Security Agency proved able to cope with the problem, resulting in a serious interdepartmental squabble...
...The FBI wants to nab crooks, turn them over for prosecution, and hold press conferences...
...Similarly, the disclosures in James Banford's book, The Puzzle Palace, gave great assistance to foreign services¡ªnotably the Russians and Chinese¡ªseeking to match and penetrate the NSA...
Vol. 37 • July 2004 • No. 6
