History

Bruce Schneier brings attention to a 2002 paper by Paul Karger and Roger Schell (PDF) about lessons learned from Multics security that are still relevant today, and Multicians come out of the woodwork in the comments. Karger and Schell were part of the Air Force “tiger team” that ran penetration attacks against Multics in the 1970s. They were successful, which ultimately led to a Multics security enhancement project, the result of which was that Multics was the first commercial operating system to obtain a B2 security rating from the National Computer Security Center. I played a small part in that project, fixing some bugs and helping to run tests of Multics’ Trusted Computing Base (TCB).

There has been an all-too-predictable Christian uproar about Kathy Griffin’s Emmy acceptance speech, in which she said that Jesus had nothing to do with her win, the award was now her god, and “Suck it, Jesus!” These remarks are apparently being edited from the broadcast to protect Christian sensitivities. Lauren Green, former Miss America turned religion correspondent for Fox News, wrote an article claiming that Griffin’s remarks and her winning of the award were only possible because of Jesus. Some bloggers are jumping to agree with her, without recognizing how off-base her historical argument is. Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars points out the historical inaccuracies in Green’s article, such as this one: Ninety-four percent of America’s founding era documents mention the Bible; 34 percent quote the Bible directly. Ah yes, that old canard, which has been debunked time and time again. The phrase “founding era documents” is quite slippery; she doesn’t bother to say, doubtless because she has never read Lutz’ study and hasn’t a clue what it actually says, is that most of the documents in his study had nothing at all to do with the founding of the country and were in fact reprinted sermons. Small wonder that sermons contained Biblical references. ...

Source and page references are to Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, 2007, Doubleday, pp. 71-167. 1953-1961 President: Dwight D. Eisenhower February 18, 1953: The CIA’s “Operation Ajax” (in conjunction with the British, who call it “Operation Boot”) begins, with Kim “Kermit” Roosevelt, Jr. (Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson) in charge–a plan to oust Iran’s prime minister, Mohammed Mossadeq, because of his nationalization of the Iranian oil industry (p. 83). March 5, 1953: Joseph Stalin dies. “We have no reliable inside intelligence on thinking inside the Kremlin. Our estimates of Soviet long-range plans and intentions are speculations drawn from inadequate evidence.” (p. 73) March 1953: The CIA and British back Fazlollah Zahedi to overthrow Mossadeq in Iran. April 1953: Zahedi goes into hiding after his supporters are suspected of kidnapping and murdering Iran’s national police chief. (p. 85). May 1953: CIA propaganda portrays Mossadeq as an enemy of Islam being supported by the Soviet Union. (p. 86) June 5, 1953: Allen Dulles tells the National Security Council that the CIA cannot give “any prior warning through intelligence channels of a Soviet sneak attack” (p. 75). 1953: The CIA guesses that the Soviets will not be able to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile at the United States until 1969 (p. 75). June 16-17, 1953: “Nearly 370,000 East Germans took to the streets” to protest against the Soviet Union and East German Communist Party. The CIA does nothing, “the uprising was crushed.” (p. 76) July 7, 1953: Iran’s Tudeh Party radio “warned Iranians that the American government, along with various ‘spies and traitors,’ including General Zahedi, were working ’to liquidate the Mossadeq government.’” (p. 87). In other words, the CIA and British intelligence plot was blown and made known to the Iranian public even before it began. July 11: President Eisenhower gives approval to the plot. August 1953: Soviet Union tests its first atomic bomb. The CIA “had no clue and gave no warning.” (p. 75) 1953: Joint Chiefs of Staff tells Eisenhower, regarding defense against Soviet aggression, that (as reported by Eisenhower) “we should do what was necessary even if the result was to change the American way of life. We could lick the whole world … if we were willing to adopt the system of Adolph Hitler.” (p. 75) 1953: Allen Dulles builds CIA propaganda machinery by building ties with heads of magazines and newspapers including The New York Times, Time (including Henry Luce), Newsweek, CBS News, and Axel Springer in West Germany (p. 77). August 1953: General Norman Schwarzkopf is brought in by the CIA to try to get the Shah of Iran to support the coup against Mossadeq and appoint Zahedi as prime minister (p. 88). August 16: “Hundreds of paid agitators flooded the streets of Tehran, looting, burning, and smashing the symbols of government.” (p. 89) August 19: Continued protesting occurs, and at least 100 people are killed on the streets of Tehran and 200 killed when the shah’s Imperial Guard attacks Mossadeq’s home. August 20: Mossadeq surrenders, spends 3 years in jail and a decade under house arrest before dying. Zahedia becomes prime minister, is paid $1 million by the CIA, and jails thousands of political prisoners. The shah sets up a secret police force, SAVAK, “trained and equipped by the CIA,” imposes martial law, and exercises dictatorial control over Iran (p. 92). This is considered a great success of the CIA–at least until 1979. The CIA’s internal history of the Iranian operation has been published online, authored by Donald Wilber, who was the main planner of the operation. End of 1953: An internal poll of the CIA yields a report that describes “‘a rapidly deteriorating situation’: widespread frustration, confusion, and purposelessness. … ’too many people in responsible positions apparently don’t know what they’re doing.’ … ‘a shocking amount of money’ going to waste on failed missions overseas.” (p. 78) Allen Dulles suppresses the report (p. 79). 1953: The CIA provides millions of dollars to Japanese gangster Yoshio Kodama, a man who led a group that attempted to assassinate the prime minister in the 1930s, in order to smuggle tungsten from the Japanese military into U.S. hands. December 1953: Colonel Al Haney sets up shop at an air base in Opa-Locka, Florida for “Operation Success," a plan to overthrow the government of Guatemala that has been discussed by the CIA for the previous three years. (p. 93) The plan is to put Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas of the Guatemala military in command, removing President Jacobo Arbenz. Haney draws out timelines and plans on a 40-foot roll of butcher paper pinned to the wall (p. 96). 1954: Frank Wisner has doubts about Haney, so sends Tracy Barnes and Richard Bissell to investigate his operation (p. 96). Henry Hecksher is sent to Guatemala City to spend up to $10,000/month on bribes of military officers, including Colonel Elfego Monzon, and CIA HQ sends Haney a list of 58 Guatemalans to be assassinated as part of the coup. The event that prompts the initiation of the coup is the discovery that a freighter named Alfhelm was transporting $4.86 million in Czech arms to Guatemala. The CIA lost the trail, and the arms–many of which were old WWII weapons with swastikas stamped on them–were successfully delivered (p. 98). May 1, 1954: Voice of Liberation radio, run by David Atlee Phillips, begins broadcasting propaganda to Guatemala. May 26, 1954: A CIA plane drops leaflets promoting rebellion over the presidential guard’s headquarters. June 6, 1954: The propaganda prompts Arbenz to become the dictator he was described to be, as he suspends civil liberties and engages in mass arrests to try to find anyone plotting against him (p. 99). June 18, 1954: Armas launches his assault at Puerto Barrios, but most of his men are killed or captured (p. 100). June 19, 1954: The U.S. ambassador to Guatemala calls for the U.S. to drop bombs. June 22, 1954: A CIA plane drops a bomb that starts an oil tank fire that is put out within 20 minutes. Dulles and businessman William Pawley meet with Eisenhower, who asks if the rebellion will be successful without further assistance. Eisenhower gives approval for the CIA to provide three planes to Nicaragua, funded by Pawley with money transferred through Riggs Bank, which are used by CIA pilots to attack Guatemala City. Armas still fails to gain ground. (p. 102). June 25, 1954: The CIA bombs “the parade grounds of the largest military encampment in Guatemala City” (p. 103) which prompts officers to switch allegiance to support the coup. June 27, 1954: Arbenz cedes power to Colonel Carlos Enrique Diaz, who vows to fight Armas. Diaz is called a “Commie agent” by Haney and informed by a CIA officer that he is “not convenient for American foreign policy” (p. 103). There are quickly four successive military juntas, “each one increasingly pro-American,” and two months later Castillo Armas becomes president and is welcomed at the White House. Weiner writes: “Guatemala was at the beginning of forty years of military rulers, death squads, and armed repression.” (p. 103) May 1954: WWII war criminal Nobusuke Kishi makes his political debut with CIA support. Kishi befriended former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew by letting him out of detention in Tokyo in 1942 to play a round of golf (p. 117). Grew became the first chairman of the CIA’s National Committee for a Free Europe and was a powerful ally of Kishi. 1954: Joseph McCarthy begins accumulating claims of Communist agents working for the CIA, feeding it disinformation. The claim is true, but the CIA responds not by addressing its own problems but by bugging McCarthy’s office and feeding him disinformation in order to discredit him (pp. 105-106). May 1954: Eisenhower receives a six-page letter from Jim Kellis, blowing the whistle on serious problems in the CIA–the CIA unwittingly funding Communists, being duped in various operations, and Dulles lying to Congress (pp. 107-108). July 1954: Eisenhower asks General Jimmy Doolittle and William Pawley to report on the state of the CIA in response to Kellis’ letter. October 19, 1954: Doolittle reports back to Eisenhower about serious problems within the CIA, with a written report titled “Report on the Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence Agency." November 1954: The U2 spy plane project begins, under a bureaucracy run by Richard Bissell. 1955: Eisenhower creates the “Special Group” to oversee covert operations, consisting of representatives of the White House, the State Department, and the Department of Defense. Dulles, however, frequently did not bother reporting covert operations to the group or to the president (pp. 114-115). February 1955: A joint U.S.-British project to dig a tunnel from West Berlin to East Berlin to tap Soviet cables is completed, with the taps put in place in March, and information flow beginning in May, hampered by a lack of sufficient Russian and even German linguists (p. 111). April 1956: The Soviets uncover the tunnel and the information flow stops as the Soviets loudly complain. It subsequently turned out that the Soviets knew about the plan in December 1953, when planning first began, having been informed by George Blake, a British intelligence officer who was a Soviet spy. Much of the intercepted information was likely deliberate misinformation, though the CIA did learn about Soviet and East German security systems (p. 112). Spring 1955: The CIA considers assassinating President Sukarno of Indonesia because of fears of communist influence, and because he had declared himself “a noncombatant in the cold war” (p. 143). Sukarno holds a conference of 29 Asian, African, and Arab chiefs of state in Bandung, Indonesia, to propose “a global movement of nations free to chart their own paths, aligned with neither Moscow nor Washington” (p. 143). The White House authorizes “all feasible covert means” to keep Indonesia from going communist. The CIA contributes $1 million to Sukarno’s opponents, the Masjumi Party, but Sukarno wins the 1955 parliamentary elections. November 1955: Nobusuke Kishi sets up the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan with the help of CIA funding; LDP candidates and officials are recruited and approved by (and bribed by) the CIA (p. 119). 1956: Sukarno visits Moscow and Beijing as well as D.C. February 1956: Nikita Krushchev gives a speech denouncing Stalin. March 1956: The CIA hears rumors of the speech and attempts to obtain a copy. April 1956: Israeli spies deliver a copy of the speech to James Angleton. (p. 123) Early 1956: CIA analysts conclude that no Eastern European nations are likely to rebel against the Soviets during the 1950s. June 28, 1956: Polish workers riot against wage reductions and destroy the equipment jamming Radio Free Europe. 53 Poles are killed and hundreds imprisoned (p. 125). July 1956: Gamal Abdel Nasser, head of Egypt, nationalizes the Suez Canal Company, a British-French joint venture, to the surprise of the CIA. The CIA had supported Nasser with millions of dollars, but as the U.S. did not fulfill promises of military aid, Nasser traded cotton to the Soviet Union for weapons. The British proposed Nasser’s assassination, but the U.S. opposed it. The British, French, and Israel plotted Nasser’s overthrow and kept the U.S. in the dark; Dulles assured Eisenhower that rumors of such a plot were untrue, relying upon James Angleton who had contacts with Israeli intelligence (which were feeding him disinformation) (pp. 127-128). October 28, 1956: Israel invades the Sinai Peninsula as a pretext for the British and French to demand a cease-fire and move in to protect the Suez canal. The Soviet Union demands British and French withdrawal. The U.S., caught completely by surprise, applies pressure to force the British and French to leave. Israel was also forced to withdraw, though it destroyed infrastructure on the way. A UN Emergency Force occupied the peninsula until 1967. (More information on the 1956 war may be found here.) October 1956: A CIA-British intelligence plot for a coup in Syria is put on hold due to the Suez fiasco, which pushes Syria closer to the Soviets (p. 138). October 1956: A popular revolution begins in Hungary. The CIA had a single agent in Budapest, a low-level State Department clerk. The uprising was crushed within two weeks. A CIA history of the uprising says “At no time did we have anything that could or should have been mistaken for an intelligence operation.” (p. 129) During the brief revolution, former Hungarian prime minister Imre Nagy, who had been expelled from the Communist Party, went on state radio “to denounce the ’terrible mistakes and crimes of these past ten years.’” He stated that the Russians would leave and a new democratic government would be set up. Nagy formed a coalition government, abolished one-party rule, broke with Moscow, declared Hungary neutral, and appealed to the U.S. and UN for assistance. The CIA attacked Nagy on radio broadcasts as a traitor, liar, and murderer, and claimed that he had invited Russian troops into Budapest–all because he had once been a communist. November 4, 1956: The Soviets sent 200,000 troops and 2,500 tanks and armored vehicles into Hungary to crush the rebellion, killing tens of thousands and sending thousands to Siberian prison camps (pp. 130-131). February 1957: Nobusuke Kishi becomes prime minister of Japan. The CIA-influenced Liberal Democratic Party runs the Japanese government to this day (pp. 119ff); Japanese refer to the CIA-supported political system as kozo oshoku or “structural corruption” (p. 121). (Current Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe is Kishi’s grandson.) April 1957: Plans for a Syrian coup are revisited; the plan is for the CIA and British SIS to “manufacture ’national conspiracies and various strong-arm activities’ in Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan, and blame them on Syria” (p. 138). The Syrians uncover the plot with a sting operation and arrest CIA operative Rocky Stone, publicly identify him as an American spy, and expel him from the country. In return, the U.S. expelled the Syrian ambassador from D.C. Stone’s Syrian co-conspirators are sentenced to death, and “a purge of every military officer who had ever been associated with the American embassy followed” (p. 139). These events permanently poisoned U.S.-Syrian relations. September 25, 1957: Eisenhower, convinced by the CIA that Sukarno was going communist, orders the CIA to overthrow his government (p. 147). September 28, 1957: The Indian newsweekly Blitz (controlled by Soviet intelligence) reports “AMERICAN PLOT TO OVERTHROW SUKARNO” (p. 147). January 8, 1958: The CIA provides weapons to Indonesian army rebels on Sumatra, without any attempt at secrecy. February 10, 1958: A CIA-financed radio station broadcasts demands for “a new government and the outlawing of communism within five days” (p. 148). February 21, 1958: The Indonesian air force bombs the CIA radio stations. The Indonesian army, led by anticommunists trained in the U.S. who referred to themselves as “the sons of Eisenhower,” were at war with the CIA (p. 148). April 19, 1958: CIA pilots began bombing and strafing Indonesia’s outer islands, killing hundreds of civilians, as well as sinking a British and Panamanian freighter (p. 151). The Indonesians claimed, correctly, that these planes were piloted by Americans, but the president and secretary of state of the United States denied it. May 18, 1958: CIA pilot Al Pope was shot down by the Indonesians. May 19, 1958: The U.S. decides that Sukarno is doing a good job of suppressing communism (p. 153). Sukarno frequently mentioned the U.S.’s failed attempts to overthrow his government in public speeches, and the actual communists in Indonesia gained in power and influence. July 14, 1958: The CIA had been active in Iraq, offering money and weapons for support of anticommunism. On this date a military coup occurred, overthrowing Nuri Said. The General Abdel Karim Qasim regime found proof that the CIA had been paying off the previous government, and an American working for the CIA as a writer for American Friends of the Middle East (a CIA front group) was arrested and disappeared. CIA officials left the country and Qasim began ties with the Soviets. The Ba’ath Party attempted to assassinate Qasim, which led to CIA support. (The Ba’ath Party later gained control with the help of the CIA, which then led to Saddam Hussein coming to power.) (pp. 140-141) January 1, 1959: Richard Bissell becomes chief of the clandestine service. April-May 1959: Fidel Castro visits the U.S. and meets with the CIA, which was supportive. December 11, 1959: Richard Bissell sends a memo to Allen Dulles asking that “thorough consideration be given to the elimination of Fidel Castro.” Dulles replaced “elimination” with “removal from Cuba." 1960: The CIA projected that the Soviet Union would have 500 ICBMs aimed at the U.S. by 1961. In fact, it had four. (p. 158) March 17, 1960: Dulles and Bissell present plans for an overthrow of Castro to Eisenhower and Nixon, which did not involve an invasion (p. 157). April 9, 1960: The first U-2 flight over the Soviet Union occurs; the Soviets detect it and go on high alert (p. 159). May 1, 1960: A U-2 is shot down by the Soviets over central Russia, and the CIA pilot, Francis Gary Powers, is captured. The CIA cover story was that it was a weather plane lost in Turkey, which the White House and State Department insisted was the case for a week before coming clean (pp. 159-160). Summer 1960: Richard Bissell arranges with Guatemala’s President Manual Ydigoras Fuentes to set up a training camp for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba (pp. 160-161). August 1960: Richard Bissell hires the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro, in hopes the Cuban invasion will be unnecessary. A second assassination plot is developed in-house by the CIA. August 16, 1960: Dulles and Bissell obtain approval from Eisenhower to spend $10.75 million on paramilitary training for five hundred Cubans in Guatemala, the invasion force. Eisenhower approves on the condition that “So long as the Joint Chiefs, Defense, State and CIA think we have a good chance of being successful” (p. 161). Summer 1960: The Congo declares independence from Belgium; Patrice Lumumba is elected prime minister. Lumumba’s request for U.S. assistance is ignored, so he seeks help from the Soviet Union. The CIA sends Larry Devlin to head the CIA post in the Congo, and CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb delivers him vials of poison to inject into Lumumba’s food, drink, or toothpaste. Devlin asks who the order came from, Gottlieb told him “the President.” Devlin refused to follow through (pp. 162-163). October-November 1960: The CIA selected Joseph Mobutu to be the new leader of the Congo, and supplied him with $250,000 and weapons. Mobutu successfully captured Lumumba, who was then killed by a Belgian officer. It took five years for Mobutu to gain full control of the Congo, where “he ruled for three decades as one of the world’s most brutal and corrupt dictators, stealing billions of dollars in revenues from the nation’s enormous deposits of diamonds, minerals, and strategic minerals, slaughtering multitudes to preserve his power” (p. 163). January 5, 1961: The President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities issues a report which states that “We are unable to conclude that, on balance, all of the covert action programs undertaken by CIA up to this time have been worth the risk of the great expenditure of manpower, money, and other resources involved.” It urged “complete separation” of the director of central intelligence from the CIA. Dulles claimed that everything was fine and that he had “corrected deficiencies”, and Eisenhower gave up in defeat, stating that he was leaving a “legacy of ashes” for his successor (p. 167). ...

Rightwing Nuthouse reports that the History Channel’s documentary, “9/11 Conspiracies: Fact or Fiction” gives the conspiracy theorists a high-quality debunking. The format is to allow a 9/11 conspiracy theorist to make a claim, and then have experts in the appropriate fields respond to the claim. I’ve got the TiVo set up to record this weekend’s showing. UPDATE (August 26, 2007): I watched the show today, and I thought they did a very good job, though of necessity they were fairly brief in their rebuttals. I was pleased to see that, contrary to some conspiracy theorist claims, they did in fact address conspiracy theorist claims about the collapse of WTC Building 7. I was also quite amused to see that in Alex Jones’ concluding remarks, he made the classic crackpot self-comparison to Galileo, and did so in such a way to demonstrate his own lack of awareness or concern for factual accuracy by stating that the dispute between Galileo and the Catholic Church was about whether the earth was round or flat.

Tonight I attended the Goldwater Institute’s screening of the HBO documentary “Mr. Conservative," a biography of Barry Goldwater produced by his granddaughter, CC Goldwater, who was in attendance along with Barry Goldwater Jr. The audience was a mix of people who still call themselves conservative, libertarians, and even a few liberals. (Gary Peter Klahr sat directly behind me, and his question in the Q&A session was what Goldwater would have thought of the Bush administration’s power grab and war in Iraq. Barry Goldwater Jr.’s answer was that his father disliked foreign entanglements and supported the Constitution.) The film features footage and photographs taken by Barry Goldwater himself–the film notes that he always had a camera in his hand, and at least three books of his photographs have been published. He was born in Arizona prior to its statehood, to a Jewish father and an Episcopalian mother–which led to one quip from Goldwater reported by Robert MacNeil in the movie: “He would say things like, ‘I went to a golf club where they wouldn’t let Jews play, and I said, “I’m only half Jewish. Can I play nine holes?’" The movie features interviews with people ranging from George Will, Barry Goldwater, Jr., and Sandra Day O’Connor to Ben Bradlee, Sally Quinn, Al Franken, Julian Bond, and Hillary Clinton. Also featured is the exceedingly evil Jack Valenti. The film covers Goldwater’s life in Arizona, including his mother teaching him to shoot guns, his coming home from the University of Arizona to run the family store in Phoenix so his smarter older brother could stay at Stanford, his love of ham radio and flying airplanes (he would hear on the radio of medical emergencies among the Hopi Indians and personally deliver medicine from Phoenix–and this during his political career). He was a very early runner of the Colorado River (in 1940 using wooden dories–when fewer than 100 people had run the river; Goldwater was #73). He ran the river with camera equipment, making a film which he traveled about Arizona to show, which made him well-known before running for office. He won his first election to the Phoenix City Council, and went straight from the City Council to the U.S. Senate. In his later life, he was outspoken in his support for a woman’s right to abortion, for gays to serve in the military, and for the religious right to stop pushing their religious views into politics. The film reveals that he supported his daughter obtaining an abortion before Roe v. Wade, and that he has a gay grandson. Several of the more liberal interviewees say that they thought Goldwater became liberal later in life (and some in the audience seemed to have a similar view), but Goldwater himself is shown making a statement that preempts this claim, back in 1963–that he is a conservative, but that at some time in the future people will call his views liberal. He was a supporter of individual liberty who wanted the government’s role in private life minimized across the board, on both economic and social issues–it wasn’t he who changed, but the political environment that changed. I recommend the movie–it is well done, it fairly points out his foibles and flaws as well as his strengths. It is sad that there are virtually no politicians today who are as forthright, honest, and outspoken about their views–who are as genuine as he was. We need more people in the public sphere who speak out with integrity and honesty, rather than with dissembling and spin. UPDATE (August 17, 2007): I glossed over Goldwater’s negatives in my last paragraph, but the film doesn’t. It reports on how he lost the 1964 election in the biggest landslide in history, and why–including his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (though he supported the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, supported the Arizona NAACP, and helped desegregate the Arizona National Guard), his remarks about the use of atomic weapons for defoliation in Vietnam, and his remark about sawing off the eastern seaboard of the U.S. and letting it float away. LBJ’s political ad graphically depicting the latter remark and his famous “Daisy” mushroom cloud ad are shown in the film. Goldwater’s reaction to the latter is reported as saying that if he thought that accurately depicted what he would do, “I wouldn’t vote for me either." A few other points of interest in the film: Goldwater was a friend of John F. Kennedy, and they were looking forward to running against each other in the 1964 election, flying from city to city on the same plane together to campaign against each other face to face. That would have been an interesting match up. (I should note that my opinion of JFK is not as positive as the general public’s view, after having read how he made use of the CIA. He was one of the worst abusers of the CIA for interventions in attempt to overthrow the governments of other countries who ever sat in the White House.) Barry Goldwater Jr. was a long-time friend of Nixon White House counsel John Dean, and Dean consulted with Goldwater Sr. before testifying in front of the Senate about Watergate. Goldwater told him to go ahead and nail Nixon, because Nixon was a liar. During Watergate, Goldwater, whose wife had decided to remain in Arizona, spent much of his time in D.C. at the home of Lt. Gen. William W. Quinn and his wife Bette. The Quinn’s daughter Sally was a journalist engaged to Ben Bradlee, publisher of the Washington Post. Bradlee reports that Goldwater told him that he thought Nixon was going to resign, but not to publish a story about it because if he did, Nixon was so stubborn that he’d then refuse to do it. The Wikipedia page on Goldwater is quite comprehensive. UPDATE (August 18, 2007): Apparently the golf story is apocryphal. The discussion page on Goldwater’s Wikipedia entry says “In his autobiography, ‘Goldwater,’ BG attributes this joke to his brother Bob, speaking about HIS brother Barry at ‘a golf pro tournament near Los Angeles.’ B. Goldwater adds, ‘The story got a big laugh, but the incident never occurred.’”

A major gap in Tim Weiner’s A Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2007, Doubleday) is that it contains not a word about the 2002 coup in Venezuela against Hugo Chavez, which lasted 47 hours. The U.S. has denied any involvement, and an Office of the Inspector General investigation started at the request of Sen. Christopher Dodd came to the same conclusion. Press reports published in the U.S. about Hugo Chavez’s recent referral to the coup as “attacks” by the U.S. put the word in quotes and gave it no credence. But the foreign press, on the other hand, documents facts which make it sound just like many other events described in Weiner’s book where the CIA gave support to coup attempts in Central and South America, and the CIA’s own reports in advance of and during the coup are remarkably detailed predictions of what was going to happen. The incidents prior to the coup were growing protests against Chavez’s heavy-handed approach to politics (which he has unfortunately continued since regaining power), which culminated in violence and gunfire between pro-Chavez and anti-Chavez protestors on April 11, 2002. There are conflicting reports about who was responsible (the pro-Chavez protesters say they were shooting back at snipers who were shooting at them, the anti-Chavez protesters say they were fired upon unprovoked), but the result was that military leaders seized Chavez, threw him in jail, and asked for his resignation on the condition that he would be exiled, otherwise he would be tried for the deaths of the protesters. Chavez said that he would resign only under the condition that his vice president would succeed him and the government would continue. The military leaders publicly proclaimed that Chavez had resigned, and put businessman Pedro Carmona, not Chavez’s vice president, in charge. Carmona and other coup leaders had visited the White House on multiple occasions in months and weeks prior to the coup to visit Special Envoy to Latin America Otto Reich, and the U.S. was the only foreign government to immediately recognize the authority of the new leader. But Carmona began his short term of office by abolishing the Venezuelan constitution, dissolving the National Assembly and the Supreme Court, and even changing the name of the country. This did not make the Venezuelan public or the military happy, and Carmona was quickly forced to resign in favor of power being briefly turned over to vice president Diosdado Cabello until Chavez was returned to office a few hours later. The total duration of the alternative government was about 47 hours. Carmona and his team went into exile. It certainly looks like the CIA was involved. Otto Reich founded the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean at the State Department, which engaged in covert propaganda activities before being declared illegal by the U.S. Comptroller General in 1987 for engaging in “prohibited, covert propaganda activities, beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities.” Reich was also involved with Col. Oliver North during the Iran-contra scandal. Both of these appear to indicate Reich being directly involved with the CIA.

Source and page references are to Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, 2007, Doubleday, pp. 1-70. 1945-1953 President: Harry S Truman September 20, 1945: Office of Strategic Services ordered to disband; General William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan fired. OSS Intelligence analysts moved to the State Department. January 24, 1946: Truman appoints Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers as chief of the “Cloak and Dagger Group of Snoopers” and “Director of Centralized Snooping,” the Central Intelligence Group. Brigadier General John Magruder interprets this as meaning the group should operate a clandestine service, though Truman has said nothing of this and no legal authority has been given. June 10, 1946: General Hoyt Vandenburg appointed director of central intelligence. He creates an Office of Special Operations and obtains $15 million in Congressional funding. The group uses the money to buy intelligence information in Europe about the Soviets, most of which turns out to be fraudulent. July 17, 1946: Vandenburg obtains an additional $10 million in funding from the Secretary of War and Secretary of State. September-October 1946: The OSO attempts to organize Romania’s National Peasant Party into a resistance force. Soviet intelligence and the Romanian secret police detect the plot and imprison the Peasant Party’s leaders. The OSO gets the former foreign minister of Romania and “five other members of the would-be liberation army into Austria” and out to safety on October 5. “A brutal dictatorship took control of Romania, its rise to power hastened by the failure of American covert action.” (pp. 18-19) May 1, 1947: Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter becomes head of central intelligence. June 27, 1947: A Congressional committee holds secret hearings that lead to formal creation of the CIA on September 18. Dean Acheson writes “I had the gravest forebodings about this organization, and warned the President that as set up neither he, the National Security Council, nor anyone else would be in a position to know what it was doing or to control it.” (p. 25) James Forrestal wrote that “This office will probably be the greatest cemetery for dead cats in history.” (p. 24) The National Security Act says nothing about clandestine operations overseas, only the correlation, evaluation, and dissemination of intelligence information. September 1947: CIA counsel Lawrence Houston warns Hillenkoetter that the agency has no legal authority to conduct covert action without Congressional approval. December 14, 1947: The National Security Council instructs the CIA to engage in “covert psychological operations designed to counter Soviet and Soviet-inspired activities.” (p. 26) The CIA’s first plan of action is to defeat the communists in the April 1948 Italian elections. The CIA gains access to the Exchange Stabilization Fund, which held $200 million for the reconstruction of Europe. $10 million is distributed to wealthy Americans, many of whom are Italian-Americans, who pass it on to CIA political front groups as “charitable donations,” and on to Italian politicians in suitcases filled with cash. Italy’s Christian Democrats win the election, and the CIA repeats this process in Italy and many other nations for the next 25 years (p. 27). March 5, 1945: After Communists seize power in Czechoslovakia, General Lucius D. Clay, head of occupation forces in Berlin, cables the Pentagon that he fears Soviet attack. The CIA’s Berlin office assures the president that there is no sign of a Soviet attack. Truman warns Congress of an imminent Soviet attack, gaining approval of the Marshall Plan. 5% of Marshall Plan funds are allocated to the CIA ($685 million), used to create front organizations throughout Europe and to create underground political groups that would become a fighting force if needed. This operation was carried out under the Office of Policy Coordination inside the CIA, reporting to the Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State. September 1, 1948: Frank Wisner becomes head of covert operations at the CIA; his organization quickly becomes larger than the rest of the CIA. Wisner recruits spies from Ivy League institutions, obtains a quarter of a billion dollars worth of military equipment in Europe and Asia, and builds a huge organization. November 1948: Wisner attempts to break communist influence over trade organizations in France and Italy using U.S. labor leaders Jay Lovestone (former head of the American Communist Party) and Irving Brown to deliver cash to “labor groups backed by Christian Democrats and the Catholic Church” (p. 36). The CIA creates the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Radio Free Europe. Early 1948: James Forrestal asks Allen Dulles to investigate the weaknesses of the CIA. The report’s main conclusions are (in Weiner’s words) that “the CIA was churning out reams of paper containing few if any facts on the communist threat,” “the agency had no spies among the Soviets and their satellites,” and “Roscoe Hillenkoetter was a failure as director.” (p. 37) May 27, 1949: Congress passes the Central Intelligence Act of 1949, giving the CIA power to do pretty much whatever it wanted, except for acting as a secret police force inside the United States. One clause of the act permits the CIA to admit 100 foreigners per year into the U.S., giving them “permanent residence without regard to their inadmissibility under the immigration or any other laws.” The CIA brings Ukrainian Mikola Lebed into the U.S. under this law, despite the fact that the CIA’s files describe Lebed’s organization as “a terrorist organization.” Lebed went to prison for his murder of the Polish interior minister in 1936, escaping when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. The Justice Department considered Lebed a war criminal responsible for the slaughter of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews, but he was defended by Allen Dulles for his assistance in operations against the Soviets. December 1948: CIA officer Steve Tanner assesses a band of Ukrainians in Munich, the Supreme Council for the Liberation of the Ukraine, as a group deserving CIA backing. July 26, 1949: CIA special operations chief General Willard G. Wyman approves an operation to drop two Ukrainians from the group into their homeland. Tanner hires “a daredevil Hungarian air crew who had hijacked a Hungarian commercial airliner and flown it to Munich a few months earlier” (p. 44). The men were dropped on September 5, 1949; a CIA history declassified in 2005 says that “The Soviets quickly eliminated the agents." July 1949: The CIA took over the Munich-based group run by General Reinhard Gehlen, former leader of Hitler’s military intelligence service, the Abwehr. This group turned out to be penetrated by Soviet and East German moles at the highest levels, including Gehlen’s chief of counterintelligence. September 5, 1949: An air force crew flying out of Alaska detected traces of radioactivity in the atmosphere. September 20, 1949: While those radioactive traces were being analyzed, “the CIA confidently declared that the Soviet Union would not produce an atomic weapon for at least another four years.” (p. 48) September 23, 1949: Truman informs the world that Stalin has the atomic bomb. October 1949: Frank Wisner and the British send nine Albanian rebels from Malta into Albania. Three are killed immediately, the rest are captured by secret police. Wisner sends additional recruits via Athens with Polish pilots after training in Munich, each time all are captured or killed. It turns out that the German training camps were infiltrated by Soviet spies, and CIA counterintelligence head James Angleton was sharing information with Kim Philby at MI6, who was also working for the KGB. “Angleton gave Philby the precise coordinates for the drop zone for every agent the CIA parachuted into Albania.” (p. 46) 1950s: “hundreds of the CIA’s foreign agents were sent to their deaths in Russia, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and the Baltic States during the 1950s.” (p. 47) 1945-1949: U.S. signals intelligence intercepts and decrypts messages between the Soviet Union and the Far East. This ends when William Wolf Weisband, a Russian translator and Soviet spy recruited in the 1930s, gives information about broken codes to the Soviets. The loss of intelligence information leads to the creation of the National Security Agency. July 25, 1950: The Korean War begins with a surprise attack from North Korea. October 1950: General Walter Bedell Smith becomes head of the CIA. October 11, 1950: Truman leaves for Wake Island. The CIA assures him that “no convincing indications of an actual Chinese Communist intention to resort to full-scale intervention in Korea .. barring a Soviet decision for global war.” CIA Tokyo station chief George Aurell, however, “reported that a Chinese Nationalist officer in Manchuria was warning that Mao had amassed 300,000 troops near the Korean border.” October 18: The CIA “reported that ’the Soviet Korean venture has ended in failure.’” October 20: “The CIA said that Chinese forces detected at the Yalu were there to protect hydroelectric power plants.” October 28: “those Chinese troops were scattered volunteers.” October 30: “after American troops had been attacked, taking heavy casualties, the CIA reaffirmed that a major Chinese intervention was unlikely.” November 1: “300,000 Chinese troops struck with an attack so brutal that it nearly pushed the Americans into the sea.” (All quotes from p. 52.) 1950-1960s: Classified CIA histories of the Korean War “say the agency’s paramilitary operations were ’not only ineffective but probably morally reprehensible in the number of lives lost.’” (p. 54) “Bedell Smith repeatedly warned Wisner to watch out for false intelligence fabricated by the enemy. But some of Wisner’s officers were fabricators themselves–including the station chief [Albert R. Haney] and the chief of operations [Hans Tofte] he sent to Korea.” (pp. 55-56) Haney’s 1952 replacement, John Limond Hart, found that “nearly every Korean agent he had inherited had either invented his reports or worked in secret for the communists. Every dispatch the station had sent to CIA headquarters from the front for the past eighteen months was a calculated deception.” (p. 57) Similar operations in Taiwan to recruit spies and drop them into mainland China failed. Over $100 million is spent on weapons for a “third force” of 200,000 guerillas between April 1951 to the end of 1952, but the agency was unable to recruit them. January 4, 1951: Allen Dulles appointed CIA deputy director of plans (a cover for his actual position, chief of covert operations) despite not getting along with Bedell Smith. Shortly thereafter, deputy director Bill Jackson resigns, and Dulles is appointed to deputy director and Frank Wisner to chief of covert operations. Early 1951: 1,500 followers of Chinese Nationalist General Li Mi were stranded in northern Burma; the CIA supplied guns, gold, and additional Chinese Nationalist soldiers. Those who crossed into China were killed; Li Mi’s radioman in Bangkok was a Chinese communist agent. July 1952: A four-man Chinese guerilla team is dropped into Manchuria and radios for help four months later, which turns out to be a trap that leads to the death or capture of the rescuers–with two young CIA agents spending the next 19-20 years in Chinese prisons. “Beijing later broadcast a scorecard for Manchuria: the CIA had dropped 212 foreign agents in; 101 were killed and 111 captured.” (p. 60) The CIA supplies more guns and ammunition, but Li Mi’s men choose not to fight, but instead to settle into the Golden Triangle, harvest opium poppies, and marry local women. Li Mi becomes a heroin kingpin. [Note added 23 November 2014: The CIA film “Extraordinary Fidelity” tells the story of John T. Downey and Richard G. Fecteau, the two young CIA agents imprisoned in China mentioned here.] July 1953: After the armistice, the CIA nearly kills South Korean President Syngman Rhee when a yacht he is on sails past Yong-do, an island where the agency trained Korean commandos. The CIA’s paramilitary group is given 72 hours to leave the country. 1950s: Wisner’s men are active in Europe, spending Marshall Plan money to prepare for a future war against the Soviets, including “dropping gold ingots into lakes and burying caches of weapons for the coming battle” (p. 64). 1948-1950s: Secret prisons set up to interrogate suspected double agents–in Germany, in Japan, and in the Panama Canal Zone (the largest such prison). May 15, 1952: Dulles and Wisner receive a report on Project Artichoke, a “four-year effort to test heroin, amphetamines, sleeping pills, the newly discovered LSD, and other ‘special techniques in CIA interrogations.’” (p. 65) Dulles approves Ultra, under which “seven prisoners at a federal penitentiary in Kentucky were kept high on LSD for seventy-seven consecutive days” and Army civilian employee Frank Olsen is dosed and leaps to his death out the window of a New York hotel. Project Artichoke continues until 1956, but most records of these activities were destroyed. 1952: The “Young Germans” (many of which were aging Hitler Youth) are supported by the CIA. The “Free Jurists’ Committee,” an underground group in East Germany, was taken over by Frank Wisner, whose men selected one of Gehlen’s officers to train them as a fighting force. “After Soviet soldiers kidnapped and tortured one of their leaders on the eve of the international conference, every one of the CIA’s Free Jurists was arrested.” (p. 67) 1952: Wisner supported a Polish liberation group, the Freedom and Independent Movement (known as WIN). They had contacts with “WIN outside,” emigres in Germany and London, and believed they were supporting thousands of sympathizers of “WIN inside” in Poland. They dropped $5 million in gold and weapons for “WIN inside,” but the Polish secret police and the Soviets had wiped out WIN in 1947 and it was all a trap. (p. 67) October 27, 1952: Gen. Bedell Smith convened a “Murder Board” to kill off the worst of the CIA’s covert operations, but his efforts came to naught when Eisenhower appointed Allen Dulles as head of the CIA. November 26, 1952: “British spy Monty Woodhouse flew to Washington to meet with Walter Bedell Smith and Frank Wisner” about how to get rid of Mossadeq in Iran (p. 83).

Today’s Arizona Republic features an article titled “Mormon tourists travel to key sites of their faith," about Mormons from Utah and Arizona who are traveling with companies like Book of Mormon Tours, L.D.S. Guided Tours, and Liahona Tours to sites in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras to be told that Mayan ruins are sites described in the Book of Mormon as belonging to the Nephites and the Jaredites. The different tours are not only contradicted by real archaeologists, but the tour companies contradict each other about what sites correspond to which locations in the Book of Mormon–a book by a con artist, plagiarized from the Bible, the Apocrypha, Josiah Priest’s The Wonders of Nature and Providence Displayed (1825) and Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews (1823) (itself lifting from other books such as James Adair’s History of the American Indians (1775) and Elias Boudinot’s A Star in the West (1816)), which also drew from Adair), which themselves are works of pseudo-history. These tours are not so different in some respects from tours of some of the locations of alleged religious significance in the Middle East, where there are multiple claimed locations of the tomb of Jesus, the Garden of Gethsemane, and Noah’s Ark. The difference is that the sites being visited are sites of real significance regarding real historical people who have nothing at all to do with the Book of Mormon. Fortunately, these tour operators are treated with dismissal even by the Mormon church, as the Republic article points out with a quote from John Clark of the church’s New World Archaeological Foundation at Brigham Young University: “I just see the tours as entertaining, and I try not to get upset that people are wasting their money doing foolish things." If he cares about the truth, why wouldn’t he get upset? Perhaps because encouraging his fellow Mormons to care about accuracy would be sure to lead to trouble if they ever carefully examined the historical foundations of their own religion, at least for any who were curious enough to look. But most aren’t, as the article’s quotation from one tour participant shows: But whether the archaeological evidence backs up the Book of Mormon is irrelevant, said tour participant Dawn Frenetti, 28, of Milpitas, Calif. Just seeing such sites is inspiring, she said. “It definitely helps me stay interested in learning more about the Book of Mormon,” she said. “But, as far as confirming my faith, my faith has always been there."If there were a religion based on the works of Mark Twain, a visit to Disneyland’s Tom Sawyer island would no doubt be considered a pilgrimage to a holy site. UPDATE (June 21, 2007): This Mormon response to plagiarism in the Book of Mormon is quite amusing, in that it completely fails to address the specific evidence of copying from the sources in question. It is no response at all to a plagiarism accusation to point out that there are also differences between the works! A more fair-minded LDS response also argues that the Book of Mormon is not entirely or mostly based on Ethan Smith’s book, but states that “My analysis of Persuitte’s parallels reveals that, with one exception, no single book in the Book of Mormon received more than 8.09% influence from View of the Hebrews (see chart 1).” But that is sufficient to refute Joseph Smith’s claim of translating golden plates that predated Ethan Smith’s book! ...

I just came across a wiki devoted to Casey Serin, the failed housing flipper turned blogger whose “I am Facing Foreclosure” blog documented the details of how he used liar loans to drive himself into $2 million in debt. It’s got quite an extensive collection of details about Serin, his deals, his blog, and the people he’s burned along the way, as well as appropriately critical articles about various real estate investment “gurus” like Robert Kiyosaki and descriptions of new natural phenomena and genetic mutants. Some very funny stuff. ...

Andrew Sullivan reports on the origin of the term “enhanced interrogation techniques," as well as justification for their use that directly parallels those of the Bush administration.