What is New in Club News:

Radio Free World &

Rebelvision T.V.

Hail Caesar!!

The New “War Czar”

And Strategy

Strategy Paralyzed

Review of the Movie

“Fog of War”

The Other Uranium

“BOMB” Threat 

                    How Democracies Lose

SMERSH Part II                                  Imperial Wars

                Thucydides Reconsidered

 

 

 

Volume II, Number 6

Table of Contents

P. 3–Strategos Procurator

 

Getting Closer

P. 4–Club News

P. 6–Politics

War Czar, Divided Leadership,

and Strategy

P. 8–Politics

Walking Dead

by Charles M. Barnard

P. 10–Politics

SMERSH Part II:

The Troubles in Modern Intelligence

P. 21–Review

Review of: Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. (Film). Produced and directed by Errol Morris. Radical Media and Smart Films Production. Sony Pictures Classics. 2002.

 

P. 23–Review

Review of: Thucydides. The History of the Peloponnesian War. Edited in translation by Sir Richard Livingstone. London: Oxford UP, 1959.

Strategos Procurator

Getting Closer

T he Strategy Gazette gets closer with every issue to the vision for which we set out and strove. Cosmetic things may look minor to readers, but they begin fulfill what our small, small-time editorial staff work very hard to achieve: an attractive, quality newspaper/journal. But superficial things would only increase its acceptance by readers for our goal of a grass roots source of news and views that bring the ideas for the resolution of wars on favorable terms and the possibilities of community cooperation for peace closer to people not exposed to or informed about the “other” ways of doing things. Each issue of SG gets us closer to what we would consider success: a rational, well-considered, self-sustaining publication free for all readers anywhere.

We cannot expect that all to whom we send SG will read it. We certainly will not presume that everyone agrees with all we say, or indeed any part of it. Skeptics may doubt that a few guys living in smallish rural cities can know anything about economics or culture, or comment on how to improve them. Even more, people may believe that such loonies cannot possibly know much than about the political natures of war, the admitted focus of Strategy Gazette’s attempt increase individual awareness and community activism for a better future for everyone.

Such people we need not convince of anything we believe with all of our living purpose and energy: Like non-partisan foreign policy, truth in government, the protection of the people’s natural rights and liberties derived from God, maintaining the independence of the United States, or the preservation of constitutional rule by and equality before the law, and communities building understanding, cooperation, and true fellowship to secure the blessings of humanity united for peace and prosperity. We stress that WE believe these things, reason enough for us to give voice to the censored perspective, practical hope to the faithful, an organ to the body of ideas that might, just might, work if everyone believed and worked together.

Visionary or utopian? We leave our readers to decide. Now, to more practical business of SG.

Embarrassingly, we have had to yet again rethink our frequency of publication. We produced four issues in the first volume and hoped to increase the present second volume to six issues. In trying to publish a supposedly profitable newspaper/journal, your humble editor came to realize that publishing a periodical depends on a fine ratio of “free” readership and paying advertisers to sustain the newspaper. We encountered a conundrum, or a paradox (we don’t know which), that we need advertisers to support production of even the e- versions of SG. More support also translates ultimately into better issues all around. It takes time and money to spread the visions.

Yet we need to have some quantified number of readers to attract both advertisers and the rates to make the project viable. While we certainly hope that giga-tudes of people (in our dreams) forward to their friends either the e-version .pdf or the www.cepiaclub.com/Strategy_Gazette.htm link to view the newsletter absolutely free, it did not prove reasonable to spend scores of hours on the production of SG if we could not measure our readership/advertiser ratio at this time. So, we have reverted to four issues for the present volume indefinitely.

While people can guarantee the postal-delivered versions of Strategy Gazette for a paid subscription of $16, we have instituted a “service” for our web-site version. We keep all e-versions free at the moment, and certainly will forever if we can.

But on the web-site, visitors can find near the top a PayPal button to make a “Free Will Supporting Subscription” if they want to assist The Cepia Club in printing as many issues as we can afford for more mass distribution. If people believe in our Libertarian Internationalism and for that on which we stand in principle–peace among all people, we hope they will help us spread SG in all ways. Again, people can read it for free anytime and they can pay if they wish. Ultimately at some point we want to publish a couple hundred (thousands?) In newsprint tabloid of a generic issue for mass free distribution. We will have to see if anyone in the whole wide world believes in us that much.

 

Club News

The Mad Tales on Sale in Osceola, WI

F ind Pi Kielty’s first published collection of stories, The Mad Tales, on sale at The Curiosity Shop in Osceola, WI. Kielty’s book, the culmination of 6 years of hard work, samples his ideas on an experimental genre Pi calls “alternative realism and the auto-horrific.” Pi’s unusual, weird “twists of reality” plots focus on life and land of Polk County, Wisconsin. He adds his particular diabolic combination of dark humor and fantastic tragedies create the alternative reality people live in their sleep-time dreams. Sometimes the elements of the horrific and humorous bleed into the same story, like the “tragic satire” Quixote of River City.

Reviewer Bradley Simpson says of Pi Kielty’s The Mad Tales, “This eclectic group of short stories has a running theme of what could happen if fear or despair ruled our lives.” (To read Simpson entire review or for select excerpts from the book, visit www.cepiaclub.com/Store.htm . Also, mail order or PayPal purchase of the book at this location).

The Mad Tales is a limited-release publication of The Cepia Club’s Publishing Enterprise. Visit The Curiosity Shop at 105 Cascade Street, Osceola, WI to purchase one of the remaining copies of the first edition of Pi’s bizarre and thought-jerking book..

Rebelvision and Radio Free World Updates

T he Cepia Club has renamed its www.cepiaclub.com/TV.htm page Rebelvision, and renamed its www.cepiaclub.com/Radio.htm page “Radio Free World.” Doing so for marketing reasons to reflect the true nature and spirit of the Club’s Broadcasting Enterprise comprises only an early step in the improvement and development in our PiK. Media projects. Rebelvision will take more time and energy to get to the desired status where revenue AND world-wide-viewership will meet the time, energy, and resources needed to commit to a quality selection of informative, creative, promotional and other video programming.

The goal for Rebelvision later this year is to have enough productions from PiK. Media efforts and projects of outside grass-roots film and television makers (some of which the Club would assist or support or even sponsor) to support web-streaming. If anyone has a video project they would like aired or have underway for which they need support of some kind, contact The Cepia Club at pr@cepiaclub.com to discuss the possibilities.

The same web-streaming capability also forms the Club’s long-term vision Radio Free World. Already on the website (see address above), local bands like Dorthy Fix, Squib, Pretty Far Gone, and other Club Friends bands allowed Radio Free World to post one song each for free download. In exchange to getting material for the page, the Club posts links to the bands’ website or Myspace addresses.

Besides groovy, beautiful music, Radio Free World also offers audio versions of some Club speeches and important historical documents like the US Bill of Rights and the source of the people’s power, The US Declaration of Independence. More historical documents and news-talk materials will be added. If anyone belongs to a local band and would like to offer a song, contact pr@cepiaclub.com for discussion. Stay-tuned for more developments on The Cepia Club’s Radio Free World.

                                                                        

Freedom Affairs Completes First Season;

Expect New and Better Show in Second

I n April, The Cepia Club’s flagship television program, Freedom Affairs, completed its first season with all four episodes posted on-line on the Club’s Rebelvision TV (www.cepiaclub.com/TV.htm). Season One was a successful pilot year, when the experimental content of a grass roots activism gelled and took shape.

The Freedom Affairs team, LaMoine MacLaughlin, Don Hansen, and Charles M. Barnard (all of whom took turns as test guests–LaMoine on community arts, Don on freedom of expression through the arts, and Chuck on the impact of science and technology on freedom), made THE essential contributions to the effort. The shows executive producer and host, Tim Krenz, will work closely with the FRAF team, including the incoming producer of the show, Michael Dagen, to improve the show in July before filming Episode 5 scheduled for August. Look for a new and improved Freedom Affairs Show late this summer!

www.wizodd.com 

 

 

Politics

War Czar, Divided Leadership,

and Strategy

 

O n May 15, 2007, President Bush selected Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute as his new so-called "war czar." Lt. Gen. Lute's official position, approved by the U.S. Senate in June 28th (the Senate must ratify commissioning and assignments of general-grade officers), will be Assistant to the President AND Deputy National Security Advisor. Beneath Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Steven Hadley, Lute is mandated under this new arrangement for development and implementation of policy on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He will report directly to President Bush on a daily basis. It is unclear if Lute would also direct the "global war on terrorism" (GWOT--the official government acronym).

Lute will move from his current posting at the Department of Defense as Director of Operations (J-3) of the Joint Staff, the military bureaucracy which manages policy and implementation for the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Lute, a career armored cavalry officer, previously held the post of Director of Operations for U.S. Central Command before assuming his current job in Sep. 2006. As most of the public does not know, the J-3 responsibilities form the heart of the U.S. military "brain.” The Joint Staff has the overall planning and coordination duties for all U.S. military operations. The Joint Staff “colors itself purple,”the combination that brings the U.S. Navy/Marines, the U.S. Army, and the U.S. Air Force together to fight as one unified military organization.

 

The J-3, while not directly in the chain of command (which goes from the U.S. President, then the Secretary of Defense, and then to Combatant Commanders of the Unified Commands) serves as the chief implementer of Presidential orders and to fulfill his political grand strategy. The J-3 translates those political objectives into a unified war plan, encompassing everything from unit assignment and deployment to national strategic operations. While the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS), the soon-to-be retired Marine Corps General Peter Pace, by law is the President's chief military advisor, the J-3 makes waging national war-fighting possible as the Chairman's "chief of staff."

Lute's appointment followed months of fruitless searches by President Bush to find a "war czar." The press reported during those months that a handful of retired four-star generals and admirals declined the job. Lute, a three-star Lieutenant General, will be empowered by this very political arrangement to issue orders to all government agencies, including the Pentagon and its civilian and military staff, including the Joint Chiefs. President Bush seems to have wanted someone with enough credibility and seniority, with enough respect within the military, to direct the policy and implementation of strategy in the two concurrent wars, under President authority. The vacated coordinator of Iraq policy, held by relatively junior National Security Council staff member, Meghan O'Sullivan, possessed neither the credibility, the clout, or in the end, the confidence of President Bush to act in the name of the Commander-in-Chief, a.k.a. the President himself.

 

Appointing a "war czar" could be a cheap trick of the Bush Administration for avoiding ultimate responsibility for the course the war takes by the time Bush leaves office on January 20, 2009. What the appointment of Lt. Gen. Lute may ultimately mean is a political way for Bush to blame someone else for the final result of a disastrous and irresponsible strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq’s story so far has been a grand strategy (read: political) catastrophe. Afghanistan’s future stability, pacification, and viability also looks uncertain. By making a military officer responsible from here to January 2009, Bush might preserve whatever "legacy" of his presidency his public relations advisers can manipulate history into believing. But Bush will have a bonus for this appointment if the wars continue on their disastrous paths : Bush could finally pin the blame on a military general officer corps that refused to offer better strategic advice at the begging of the war in 2003 for whatever political reason.

 

Let's consider, however, that President Bush's has honest intentions, that he appointed a “Caesar” to salvage victory by placing a competent general officer in charge of policy. Lute record states clear competent conduct throughout his career. Does appointing a military officer help further that?

 

 So far, criticism for allowing the war to happen, and happen the way it did, can be heaped onto the general officer corps of the U.S. military. Generals like former CJCS Richard Meyers and former Central Command Commander Gen. Tommy Franks, from the views of field-grade, mid-career officers now voiced, never challenged the Bush Administration policy in the first place. The generals allowed the war to proceed against the better judgement that they America entrusts to offer. Now, one of their own corporate officers will not only be in charge of the military policy with the authority of the President, that officer will direct all the civilian agencies and personnel as well, including the Department of State, as they contribute to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

One can see two problems with this arrangement. First, the failure in the war does not rest on the fighting of troops in the field. So why put a military man in the White House in charge of political grand strategy, the pre-requisite for winning a war? Second, the real problem stems not in the "economic" employment of strategy, but in the political realm of grand strategy, where the civilian elected and appointed public servants have failed miserably. The political policy all along--in foreign policy, in political-military policy, in Congressional and Presidential leadership and the lack of bi-partisan consensus on policy overall--truly loses this war. Does a military man like Lt. Gen. Lute understand this? Is he prepared to fix the issues concerned here, from Israeli-Palestinian issues to energy policy to supporting dictatorships in the Middle East? If not, then Lt. Gen. Lute might become famous as the man who took the fall on his sword for Bush, both parties in Congress, and a party-based political system that fails America in every possible way. Unless there is unity of the politicians, cooperation, consensus, and service to the national interests, not to corporate special interests and the profit of the politicians, we will lose this war even faster in the end.

 

Politics

 

Walking Dead

by Charles M. Barnard

 

M any people felt we should have used nuclear bombs on Iraq when we first went to war in March 2003. Most people do not know this, beginning with Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Iraq has been the victim of “atomic” weapons. The United States military has spread over 400 tons of "depleted" Uranium (DU) across Iraq. DU is an extremely dense (about 1.5 times as dense as lead,) radioactive and poisonous substance used for armor and solid bullet-like shells fired from a variety of US weapons systems. A DU tank round fired at a row of concrete buildings in a city will penetrate over a city block. In the field a DU tank round has been used to destroy enemy armor by firing hundreds of feet through a sand dune. DU is the armor penetrating round of choice because it catches fire upon impact, and penetrates nearly any armor. When DU burns it creates a fine dust of uranium oxide, a toxic and radioactive material.

 

Attack helicopters like the Apache A-64 and Air Force close-air support planes like the A-10 mount chain-fed heavy machine guns firing DU projectiles because DU can rip to shreds most of the hardened armor on armored vehicles. The rapid burst of stream-shot projectiles penetrates protective systems on such vehicles, such as reactive-armor (which explodes outward away from the tank or infantry fighting vehicle, hopefully destroying the projectile before it penetrates the base armor of the intended target). Additionally, DU is be used in armor-piercing rounds fired from main battle tank guns (gun calibers of anywhere from 105mm to 150mm.)

 

Iraqis, US soldiers, civilian contractors, and the press--everyone who has been in Iraq since the first Gulf War has been and will be exposed to the DU debris. Over 300,000 alliance personnel and up to 35,000,000 Iraqis have been exposed to the radiological debris in since 1991. In addition, factory workers at munitions plants manufacturing DU weapons and armor, also receive exposure. DU contains about 3 times less U-235 as naturally occurring uranium (.711%), giving it about 60% of the radiation. As a radiological element, depleted Uranium releases radiation over time, the half-life (the time it takes for a substance to lose half of its radiation). The half-life of uranium-238 is about 4.47 billion years and that of uranium-235 is 704 million years.

 

The biological half-life (time for ½ of the material to leave the body) is 200 years.

During and after the first Gulf War, Dr. Doug Rokke, the Army's expert on depleted uranium, warned that everyone who entered the combat zone, during or after the conflict, would receive a massive dose of radiation. Everyone.

 

Your sons & daughters, fathers & mothers, husbands & wives who serve(d) in Iraq have all been exposed to radioactive and poisonous, DU debris. Exposure to DU is recognized as a cause of nerve diseases, reproductive damage, numerous cancers, etc. Uranium, among other things, destroys the kidneys and greatly increases the incidence of lung cancer. Basically, everything that can happen via exposure to radiation after a

thermonuclear detonation can happen with exposure DU debris, with many problems not surfacing until years afterward.

 

Exposure affects veterans from the 1991 war with Iraq, 16 years later, and can be part of the cause of many “unacknowledged” health effects of combat presently in the Iraq. However, since he US military "officially" (despite their own study results,) denies any radiation risk, no soldier ill from radiation exposure will get their case handled as a battle injury.

 

According to official US Army training tapes regarding the handling of DU, the material is “reasonably safe” on the battlefield—so long as you do not inhale or ingest the dust, contaminate wounds or come in contact with the material. Use of depleted uranium in weapons is illegal according to the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, beginning with its pronouncements in resolutions in 1996 and 1997, and then in reports prepared at its request submitted and accepted in 1997, 2002 and 2003. In particular, the 2002 and 2003 reports (UN Docs. E/CN.4/Sub.2/2002/38 and E/CN.4/Sub.2/2003/35 prepared by Chief Justice Yueng Sik Yuen, Supreme Court, Mauritius) clearly indicate that weapons with depleted uranium are necessarily indiscriminate (weapons of indiscriminate effect, or WIE) and cause superfluous and unnecessary suffering. This makes their use incompatible with existing rules of armed combat.

 

It is highly regrettable that neither the United States nor Britain fully acknowledges the lethality of DU weapons, although studies made in the US years ago attest to governments’ awareness of it. And, there are increasing calls for a moratorium on the use of DU weapons due to their inherent illegality. But no matter if DU vaporized in the heat of weapons or when metal is drilled or sanded in a factory, the physical effects are the same. And those exposed due to mass use of DU weapons in war or from factories making use of it have a right to both full disclosure, the highest standard of medical care, and, of course, and compensation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Politics

 

SMERSH Part II:

The Dangers of Modern Intelligence

 

[Editor’s Note: This is the secpmd part to SMERSH Part I: The Politics of Modern Intelligence, which appeared in The Cepia Club Strategy Gazette, Volume II, Number 1, April 2006. Although Part II was supposed to conclude the survey of SMERSH-think and modern intelligence, the serialized nature of this series demands for considerations of space that we extend into Part III which will appear in Volume II, Number 3. TJK]

 

IX: The Far Effects of SMERSH

 

W hile “Death to Spies” (Smert Shpionam–SMERSH--in Russian) embodied the paranoia of Soviet state security at its logical extreme toward in World War II and after, following World War I in the 1918-19 revolutions, intelligence became a favored tool of many for carrying out an aggressive foreign policy. As the memory of war in the trenches spurred attempts at international disarmament, intelligence became , especially for the young Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (formed in 1922), the most inexpensive and efficient use of resources for defending national interests. As shown in SMERSH Part I: The Politics of Modern Intelligence, the Soviet OGPU’s “Operation Trust” masterfully used counter-intelligence on both internal, exiled, and foreign enemies of the USSR. The enemies succumbed to “mass strategic deception” (the maskirovka discussed in SMERSH Part I). From skillful manipulation of information and world-views, those hostile to the Bolshevik government in Russia paid the costs of their lives for believing what they wanted to believe. This bought valuable time for the Bolsheviks to consolidate their control and build their power.

 

The Cheka and its descendants (OGPU, GPU, NKVD, MGB, and KGB) also actively assaulted foreign governments with espionage. Not even the United States, who had no diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia until 1933, remained immune from intelligence penetration. In the 1930s and early 1940s, U.S. State Department official Alger Hiss served (most likely) as a Soviet spy. The Hiss investigations in the late 1940s by the U.S. Congress surfaced a witness Whitaker Chambers. Hiss, involved in the formation of the United Nations, escaped punishment for espionage but a jury found him guilty him of perjury in his sworn testimony.

 

The Hiss investigations, while in general inconclusive, had enormous political consequences for America. A Congressman on the Congressional committee, a freshman from California named Richard M. Nixon, began his rise to play his hubris-filled role in the politics for the following 30 years. As President, Nixon’s paranoia, executive SMERSH-think, ended in the Watergate conspiracy and a crisis for the US Constitution-based form of government. We shall explore this further in SMERSH Part III.

 

Another, more indirect result of the Hiss investigations, concerned Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI). Building on the kernel of truth in the Hiss case to advance his own agenda, McCarthy used a pathological opportunism to claim Soviet penetration of the U.S. Government, media, entertainment, and higher education. “McCarthyism” baited Americans, the average and the influential, with the labels of “communist agent” and “communist sympathizers” to instill fear and terror to advance a personal agenda. Similar to the “Red Scare”of a communist conspiracy in the US following World War I, McCarthyism in the 1950s manipulated the national debate for personal gain.

 

Both the “Red Scare”and McCarthyism taught a valuable lesson in democratic politics: Anyone unprincipled and immoral enough to promote SMERSH-like paranoia can gain great power and control over politics through the skillful manipulation of the public’s fears and a cooperative media. With the proper symbol and a formula for using such “terror” methods, one person, interest or lobby can impact politics, but only as long as those with influence and reputation lack courage to challenge the “big lie.” In the case of McCarthy, it took a leader of proven courage and flawless integrity like Eisenhower to put an end to the SMERSH-play of McCarthyism.

 

The Soviet successes in intelligence, real or imagined, gave power to people like McCarthy. While McCarthy never showed, and never possessed evidence to question loyalty and character of his victims, the America public empowered the accusations. Much of the public believed it plausible that Soviet intelligence could have the wide penetration of the United States. A “whiff” of a hint like Hiss led millions of Americans to give McCarthy credibility. While the Soviets had witting and unwitting agents and sympathizers in America, McCarthy’s claims of its extent was public relations spin. The Soviet Union’s reputation in espionage and subversion did indeed cause greater harm to America than their actions achieved. Americans began to not trust and even turn on their family friends, neighbors, colleagues, and associates. SMERSH-plots work in more ways than just executing spies.

 

 At the height of his hunt for traitors, McCarthy and his supporters owned the ability to bully every institution short of the Oval Office, including the media when they challenged him. What brought McCarthy down? His stab in the air to extend his witch with bigger fish, i.e. the US armed forces, crossed the threshold of his usefulness to the pragmatic politicians. Eisenhower and others in Congress who had managed to manipulate some benefit from McCarthyism abandoned the senator, and led a public campaign to destroy him. Eventually, the US Senate censured him, banning him from the theater of his displays. McCarthy died a short time later (probably due to acute alcoholism).

 

X. The Cambridge Five

 

Soviet intelligence in the 1920s and 1930s developed effective penetration of foreign governments elsewhere as well. After World War II, the Soviet’s almost succeeded in completely undermining Western intelligence security. As the expert research and writing of British intelligence historian Christopher Andrew has shown (in authoritative books like Her Majesty’s Secret Service and the The Mitrokhin Archive–now into three volumes), the Soviet Union nearly won some decisive intelligence battles. Soviet intelligence stole plans and products of Western industry, including military technologies. They brought down a government in West Germany because they had completely penetrated West German intelligence and politics. The KGB might have engineered the assassination attempt of the moral crusader for freedom that helped bring them down in the end, Pope John Paul II ( “public” history still does not confirm the extent of their involvement).

 

In espionage, intelligence officers, the actual employees of the agencies, recruit agents, “spies.” While often suspected by a target nation’s counter-intelligence, intelligence officers try to assume inconspicuous diplomatic status, like embassy clerks or passport officers. The Soviets in the 1920s often used legal fictions of “trade representatives.” As official members of diplomatic missions, if discovered, an officer has by international treaty (and proper passport) “diplomatic cover.” Soviets call these officers “legals.” A host nation can only expel from if caught engaging in espionage or subversion, not arrest or imprison them, at least in theory.

 

When an intelligence officer operates in a foreign country without diplomatic credentials, they assume “legends,” elaborate fictions of an alternate, phony, “normal” personal history, creating “paper trails” and acquiring language or other cultural skills needed to operate under a cover. This labored and time-consuming manufacture of legends insulates, in multiple layers, “illegal” intelligence officers from immediate suspicion by the counter-intelligence opposition. This proves a benefit in certain types of activities that legal officers cannot do easily.

 

If caught in possession of target nation secrets, weapons and explosives, committing tax fraud (good spies should always pay their taxes), doing illegal activities, or engaging in acts of violence, sabotage, or recruitment, bribery, extortion, etc., the illegal officers opens himself to arrest and imprisonment under sovereign and international law. This same vulnerability applies to any civilian intelligence officers or commissioned or non-commissioned member of a military or paramilitary organization of a foreign power without diplomatic status

 

The greatest achievement of Soviet intelligence, as far as known, achieved historical fame as the “Cambridge Five.” In the early years 1930s, after one of the Five, Kim Philby, worked his way into serving the Communist International (COMINTERN) via a tutor, a Soviet OGPU agent recruited friends recommended by Philby. (Did “Otto” recruit more never discovered?) As Cambridge University men, all of The Five showed intellectual ability, social connections, skill, and, most important, idealism for their chosen faith of socialism. 

 

The Cambridge Five–Philby, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blount, Donald Maclean and John Cairncross -- ended up such willing recruits because they believed so vehemently in socialism, a government and society composed of workers. All five wanted a world-wide “workers paradise” based on Marxist-Leninist philosophies. Idealism gains intelligence agencies the most loyal spy’s.. Belief in a cause or principle means the spy creates in his or her own mind the moral justifications for treason. It leaves them subservient and pliable t to the authority, orders, and will of their spy masters, called “handlers.” Other means of recruiting spies always came with less chance of success. Those other means, exploited by all intelligence agencies, include: Sexual indiscretions (pederasty and homosexuality, most often, either real or manufactured for blackmail), alcoholism, indebtedness, greed, or an escalating series of little favors that would amount to prison time if exposed. Basically, the idealist, a “true believer,” will sacrifice much to do his treason. Yet in the espionage game, anything open to discovery or manufacture serves as blackmail enticements.

 

 In theory, some penetration agents during the Cold War may have waited two or three decades until called to action for a mission. The Cambridge Five, however, quickly made inroads into positions of increasing usefulness to Soviet national security. Kim Philby built credentials as an anti-communist by organizing pro-fascist fronts in England. He also posed as a Fascist-leaning journalist covering the Spanish Civil War before the outbreak of world war. At one time, he received orders to assassinate the Fascist leader, General Fransisco Franco. Fortunately for the Soviets, they rescinded the order, saving Philby for bigger possibilites.

 

The British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) has continuously existed since the reigns of Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I in the 16^th Century. Defending against armadas threatening English command of the world’s oceans, and against armies attempting to invade the British Isles or win control of the European continent, the United Kingdom developed expert espionage corporate culture. In the five centuries of practicing a professional-level espionage, few have attained the level of the Her Majesty’s Secret Services.

 

The legend of British intelligence has even become a multi-billion dollar enterprises in fiction–the James Bond book and movie franchise. Unfortunately, the public may never know the greater part of SIS history for reasons of state. Nations well keep the crown jewels of their victories and defeats within mysteries, puzzles, enigmas (to paraphrase Winston Churchill’s comments on Soviet Russia). As ironic pay-back for British attempts to overthrow the new Bolshevik government after World War I, Soviet intelligence came close to achieving the greatest espionage victory possible, short of placing an agent as president or prime minister of a country.

 

Before and early in the Second World War, The Five received orders to sabotage by subversion the British war effort against Nazi Germany. From August 23, 1939 to June 22, 1941, Adolf Hitler of Germany and the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin maintained a mutually beneficial alliance. This alliance of dictatorships ended when Hitler ordered the invasion of Soviet Russia. During the war of the Grand Alliance against Nazi Germany, Philby worked for a branch of the Secret Intelligence Service during World War II, Section IX, charged with organizing sabotage behind enemy lines. One of The Five even penetrated Buckingham Palace.

One, Maclean, worked in the Foreign Office, when a US signals counter-intelligence operation opened suspicions on him, and by default his friend Philby, then working in Washington, D.C.. Known as the Venona decrypts, the fragmented a decoding of a Soviet cipher pad used incorrectly, revealed that a Soviet agent, “Homer,” had passed American atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. With American and British intelligence zeroing on Homer, actually Maclean, he along with Burgess, defected to the Soviet Union in 1951. Philby became further suspected because Burgess had lived with Philby for a year in Washington.

 

One of The Five did not get publicly exposed until the early 1980s, for fear of the intense embarrassment it would cause to the Government and royal family. Because of his close personal friendship with the first defectors, the British government prudently reconsidered their planned promotion of Philby to top positions in the corporate SIS. By the time of their unraveling, The Cambridge Five had done great damage to Western security, in foreign policy as well as intelligence. History remains in argument about the extent of Philby’s effectiveness as a spy by the time of intense suspicion on him in 1951. His most mentioned service to Soviets involved a betrayal of secret agents parachuting into Stalinist Albania. The July 10, 2007 article on Philby at Wikipedia even says that some believe he assisted Homer/Maclean in passing atomic weapon secrets. These secrets revealing a weaknesses in America’s atomic capabilities may have spurred Stalin into the Berlin blockade of 1948-49 and into authorizing the North Korea invasion of South Korea in 1950, leading to a US-led war against the communist north until 1953. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Philby).

 

Philby also put his cover in jeopardy by intervening with “burned” Soviet agents with whom the “Center” in Moscow told him not to bother. On a couple of occasions, Philby’s position in SIS allowed him to intervene with defectors to the West who could have exposed him. With no definite evidence, Philby retained minor duties until his own defection from the British station in Lebanon in 1963. But, as great deceivers to both enemies and patriots, intelligence agencies keep the real dirty secrets, especially the failures, from the public uproar, and also to prevent informing the enemy the extent of damage actually done.

 

XI. SMERSH-think and Absolute Fear

 

The real damage that resulted from Philby’s final guilty verdict upon his defection to the Soviet Union in 1963 took place in the psyche of Western intelligence–the paranoia, fear, and terror it aroused. Intelligence agencies can see things in the corners of their eyes where nothing dwells, believing what they want to believe. What happened internally to Western intelligence agencies in the 1960s and 1970s became a democratic version of “death to spies” and a relentless campaign to expose secret enemy agents and personal traitors within the US Central Intelligence Agency.

 

What happened as a result of this SMERSH campaign contributed to the destruction of America’s effectiveness in intelligence beginning in the 1970s resulting from a “war on moles.” Suspicions even fell on the authenticity and sincerity of defectors from the KGB and GRU (Soviet military intelligence), preventing Western intelligence from taking advantage of these and other miraculous bonanzas. The structural damage to the CIA still lingers in some ways from the long effects of SMERSH-think.

 

A former World War II Office of Strategic Services veteran, James Jesus Angleton, rose to head the American Central Intelligence Agency’s counter-intelligence division. An acquaintance of Philby’s from wartime service in London, Angleton became obsessively angery that Philby succeeded in running a major spy ring within Western intelligence. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Jesus_Angleton). With Philby’s final guilt proven, Angleton, who might have may felt some type of pathological betrayal, became filled with a messianic obsession to find a “mole” (double agent) that he believed operated within the Central Intelligence Agency.

 

Until the time of his firing by DCI William Colby, Angleton’s direction of CIA counter-intelligence empowering his own SMERSH-obsession drove the CIA into the unholy purging of anyone even suspected, with no proof whatsoever. Angleton suspected almost anyone and everyone, (he even accused foreign leaders) investigated thoroughly any suspects, and managed to destroy the careers and lives of the innocent victims. The agency and its agents feared Angleton’s accusing finger pointing at them. Like McCarthyism, friends received incentives to turn on one another, perhaps to save themselves. The CIA never found Angleton’s mole, even after the firing Angleton for his excesses. But Angleton managed via the SMERSH-think to gain great power over the lives of CIA employees. Hollywood fictionalized Angleton’s career in 2006 with the Robert DeNiro production of The Good Shepard.

 

Did Angleton have it right? Did a mole operate inside the CIA? Why didn’t he or his successors in counter-intelligence ever discover one before Aldrich Ames in 1994? What about the inevitable yet queried question: Did Angleton mislead others in order to protect himself from something? While the CIA in the summer of 2007 released its documents known as the “family jewels” (a 1973-74 series of internal studies on CIA mishaps and illegal activity since its founding), intelligence agencies keep the “crown jewels” buried from the public forever.

 

SMERSH, “death to spies,” serves as the convenient tool for despots like Stalin, Hitler and Mao, who all practiced it to the cost of scores of millions of mostly innocent lives. SMERSH as a weapon to destroy past, present, and future opposition from challenging the established order shows throughout history that it keeps dictators and tyrants in power. The history of SMERSH can poetically and ironically speak like when Stalin kept sending new executioners to arrest and execute the executioners that came before.

 

SMERSH-think in a republic of liberty, if not really solved with bullets to the head or imprisonment in death camps and the Gulag, can consume all logic and reason of constitution-based democratic nations. Angleton’s chase for the boogeyman mostly effected his own corporate body, the CIA, in destructive ways. Like Joseph McCarthy’s accusations they made insider gossip and personal, ego-stroking popularity. Those willing to confront men like Angleton and McCarthy eventually stopped the madness. Only influential and credible people can do so, and should do so from the beginning. But Angleton and McCarthy never possessed the power to threaten the very rule of the Constitution in America. Their excesses resulted in their final undoing.

 

Three American president from 1961-1974 owned the power to threaten America’s republican form of democracy under the Constitution. They did so indirectly at first, then directly by the end. Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, acting the way they thought necessary for US national security, successively escalated SMERSH-think that caused the greatest legal crisis in American history. And in the end it may have unhinged the power of the American people from holding the legitimate power over U.S. government into the 21^st Century.

 

XII. American Intelligence: Successes and Failures

 

Most historians agree that of all the Presidents in the last 100 years, the former general Dwight D. Eisenhower used intelligence operations prudently and effectively during his two terms from 1952-1961. He did suffer some bad luck, but the United States received massive strategic returns on the limited investment in intelligence activities he ordered. Eisenhower’s CIA officers had honed their skills during the war, learning much from such British officers like Bill Stephenson, code-named “Intrepid.” America did not have a civilian foreign intelligence agency before the war. It had only military intelligence organizations until President Franklin Roosevelt created the Coordinator of Information in 1941 under the leadership of Wall Street lawyer and World War I Medal of Honor winner Colonel William J. Donovan. In 1942, under Roosevelt’s order, Donovan established the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) that conducted espionage, covert operations, and psychological warfare against the Axis countries. At the end of the war, President Truman terminated the OSS, shifting some functions to other government agencies (Research & Analysis went to the State Department).

 

Seeing the need for a professional, civilian, and peacetime intelligence agency, Congress created the Central Intelligence Agency for intelligence collection and analysis, covert operations, and psychological warfare in the 1947-48 national security re-organizations. (Congress also created the civilian/military National Security Agency for signals intelligence). In the 1950s, the CIA, staffed

www.jennifermuellerbooks.com 

 

with many wartime OSS veterans, enjoyed the heyday of successes with limited, prudently used resources. US intelligence operations achieved global impact on U.S. strategy and security.

 

In 1953, the CIA and the British SIS organized a coup in Iran against the socialist, communist-sympathizing government of Mohammed Mossadegh.. The restoration of the Emperor of Iran, Shah Reza Pahlevi, as the absolute dictator of Iran, lodged an American ally firm in a central position to bring stability to the Persian Gulf, ensuring the area’s oil resources for the Western allies and checking Soviet influence in the Gulf. In 1954, the CIA, partly in support of an American multi-national corporation, United Fruit Company, overthrew another Marxist-leaning government under Jacobo Arbenz, in the Central American country of Guatemala.

 

In the late 1950s, during the Superpower race to build effective inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) systems, a CIA-run project developed the U-2 spy plane (see SMERSH Part I on the Cuban Missile Crisis for an illustration of the role this plane played in October 1962). U.S. intelligence provided information that lessened possible intimidation from Soviet “rocket diplomacy” during the Suez Crisis in Egypt and the Second Taiwan Straights Crisis as well. The shooting down of a U-2 (considered impossible due to the height it flew) flown by Francis Gary Powers over the Soviet Union in 1960 marred an otherwise remarkable, known, record of intelligence victories for the Eisenhower Administration.

 

Upon leaving office in January 1961, Eisenhower left behind a policy legacy of toughness, resolve, secrecy, and prudence in handling the Cold War. He also left behind problems for the young new President, John Kennedy. Eisenhower built a U.S. commitment to fight communism in Southeast Asia by supporting an un-democratic regime in South Vietnam under Ngo Dihn Diem. Eisenhower also left to Kennedy a CIA-operation to invade the Marxist regime of Cuba under the newly victorious Marxist rebel, Fidel Castro. The invasion by Cuban exiles recruited by the CIA and trained in and staged from Central America happened in the remote, swamp-surrounded Bay of Pigs,.

 

First on the intelligence agenda came the Bay of Pigs set for April 1961, three months into the new Administration. The Director of Central Intelligence, an Eisenhower hold-over named Allen Dulles, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Lyman Lemnitzer, exerted pressure on Kennedy to authorize the invasion. Both protagonists guaranteed its resounding success and promised no embarrassing fiascos. As it happened, the highly flawed plan (not enough air power and poor location) fell apart the moment the exiles landed from the sea.

 

The Cuban population, as expected, did not rise up against Castro to help the invaders. Castro counter-attacked vigorously. Despite pressure from his security “professionals,” Kennedy refused to order the US military to intervene and the small “army” of exiles (about 3000 men) capitulated. The failure of the invasion, a public relations disaster for Kennedy, led to the firing of Dulles as the Director of Central Intelligence.. From the political catastrophe of the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy learned much that helped him make better decisions during the Cuban Missile Crisis 18 months later (See SMERSH Part I). One lesson he learned, to suspect the agenda of others giving advice, thankfully convinced him to not launch the full-scale preemptive war advocated by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to get the missiles out of Cuba. Such action would have led to nuclear holocaust.

 

 

XIII. “Death to Spies” in Southeast Asia

 

The foreign policy legacy of President Kennedy would, however, play out in the decade following the President’s assassination in November 1963, in Southeast Asia. From remote Vietnam, on the farthest side of the world, America’s SMERSH-think of paranoia, fear and terror at home would grow into danger for the rule of law by the Constitution in the United States.

 

When Kennedy entered office, the US had around 900 military advisors in South Vietnam. The CIA also fought a proxy war in Laos against Communist insurgents. Negotiation would put Laos into an uneasy draw, called “neutralization,” leaving Laos fighting internally between a royal government, a military block, and a North Vietnamese-supported Communist movement. Next door, the events in Vietnam’s struggle against Communist domination festered into a conspicuous black hole of America lives and riches.

 

In 1963, before Kennedy’s assassination, the number of US military personnel in South Vietnam exceeded 16,000. In later public disclosures, Kennedy’s closest advisors assert that before he died, Kennedy decided to cut losses in South Vietnam and withdraw all US advisers by 1966. This policy included ceasing to support the murderous, though friendly dictatorship. Kennedy actually reduced the number of advisors by 1,000 in 1963.

 

Had new President, Lyndon B. Johnson, continued the policy, 58,000 American might not have died in South East; no 300,000 Americans would have received injury; a million mentally scarred American veterans might not have happened; and it might have stopped a disintegration of American society in the numerous bad ways that did happen because Johnson escalated the US military commitment to South Vietnam.. Whether Kennedy’s wishes would have averted the genocide of 2, possibly 3 million people in Southeast Asia stands too far open to conjecture. The civil wars, the purges–the genocides–might still have happened. History does better not to speculate, too much.

 

In the summer of 1963, non-communist dissenters in South Vietnam began rising up against the Diem government. Protests, police arrests and murders, and even individuals burning themselves as a statement against Diem’s dictatorship, caused a civil breakdown in the south. In the meantime the Government of (South) Vietnam ineptly fought, even with massive US support, the Communist guerillas supported by the Democratic Republic of (North) Vietnam.

 

In early November 1963, less than three weeks before Kennedy’s death, the CIA, with the approval of the U.S. National Security Council, helped engineer a military coup against Diem and his political allies. Instead of allowing Diem and his family to go into exile, the conspiracy murdered him AND his family member, much to the US government’s horror. The new South Vietnamese government, or rather a succession of them, failed to survive and organize their own victory over the communist Viet Cong insurgency. Therein, the whole character of US involvement instantly changed.

 

The general story of the Vietnam War from this point pertains to the of modern intelligence security, for it forms a key factor for the breakdown of Constitutional rule “of the people, by the people, for the people” in America up to the present time.

 

The new President, Johnson, won his own popular mandate in the election of 1964 on a platform of not sending combat units to Southeast Asia. He made this promise despite a US/North Vietnamese skirmish in August 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to allow Johnson to use military force against North Vietnam to protect US interests. Before the year ended, the US Navy and Air Force began a major bombing campaign against the north. Johnson ordered two Marine combat units to South Vietnam in February 1965 meant initially to protect airfields following an attack against American advisers and aircraft. By the middle of 1968, the US had 500,000 troops on one-year rotations in Vietnam fighting regular army units of Peoples Army of (North) Vietnam (PAVN).

 

The nightmare of fighting a war without a plan to win decisively continued until January1973 and the Paris Peace Accord, leaving a balanced stalemate in all of Southeast Asia. The north renewed its aggression in 1974 when it correctly assessed a lack of US political will to police the cease-fire. By April 1975, the communists over ran Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam because the US Congress prevented the intervention of US Navy and Air Force units to stem the invasion, guaranteed by President Nixon in exchange for South Vietnamese acceptance of the Paris Accords.

 

The Vietnamese Communist guerillas (a.k.a . the “Viet Cong”) supported themselves by a political structure within the south, a shadow government, known as the National Liberation Front (NLF). Supported from North Vietnam with weapons, material, money, and from 1964 onward, regular army units infiltrated through the Demilitarized Zone, Cambodia and Laos, the NLF sought to intimidate the peasants of the south into a popular people’s war against American imperialism and its Saigon government allies.

 

The NLF created a political machine in the south that spread propaganda among the population, gathered excellent tactical intelligence on U.S.-and South Vietnamese military units and operations, and infiltrated southern society with agents, tax-collectors, village-based militia units, and locally-manned Main Force units composed of full-time guerilla soldiers. As a people’s war, backed by disciplined army units from the north, themselves supplied from communist governments around the world, the communist strategy for war depended the complete political, economic, and military control of Vietnamese peasants and outlasting America’s willpower to proceed. The communist fought a “total war,” a war with unlimited commitment, mass sacrifice, and the complete militarization of the Vietnamese “nation.”

 

In its own part, the corrupt and self-serving South Vietnamese government and its army proved unwilling and unable to even fight alongside its American, South Korean, Australian and New Zealand allies for its own survival. As the major military power in the south, the US attempted to fight the communists with large-unit conventional maneuver and indiscriminate massive firepower. US “search and destroy” tactics proved futile to win the political war of the insurgency where it really mattered: In the thoughts, feelings, body, and soul of the Vietnamese population. Dissenting Army officers and US government civilians believed the allies could only win with an infantryman using bullets judiciously, and by helping the peasants win control of their land and its essential rice production. The US would only lose the people with carpet bombing that killed more innocent than enemy in many cases. The US Army, but not the Marines necessarily, measured success in the number of enemy dead. It did not set benchmarks for achieving a secure, stable and enduring political order in the south, the only realistic goal for victory. U.S. strategy paralyzed itself by a lack of political creativity, in Southeast Asia and globally regarding North Vietnam’s communist allies.

 

The January-February 1968 Tet Offensive (which U.S. intelligence failed to predict and plan against) practically wiped out the Viet Cong militia and Main Force units. From that point, the war became a conventional campaign against North Vietnam’s army. Although a clear military victory by the US, the political effects of Tet proved the dagger in the heart of America’s willpower to fight. President Johnson called an end to the unlimited escalation, rejecting the military’s request for putting American on a proper war footing by calling up the politically sensitive National Guard.

 

Instead, Johnson offered to negotiate with the communists and offered to halt the bombing. The American people no longer saw any hope for victory in Vietnam, instead seeing only the number of dead and wounded and mentally damaged returning home. Opposition to the war reached new highs. The anger about the war, compounded by racial problems in the society (some of it from military experiences of African-American servicemen), caused a virtual cultural revolution against the authority of the United States Government and its political, cultural, and social establishments.

 

The new U.S. strategy for the war in Vietnam after Tet, while in the end a losing effort, built on creative political strategy. The new U.S. President in January 1969, Richard M. Nixon (from the Alger Hiss investigations), embarked on a diplomatic policy of disconnecting North Vietnam’s main communist allies and suppliers, China and the Soviet Union, with offers of more stable relations. Nixon also offered bribes on arms control, recognizing their sphere of interests, financial assistance, and even subsidized grain. He opened relations with the People’s Republic of China to play a three-way triangle of interests off the Soviet Union, using their fear of and competition with one another to improve US relations with them.

 

Military-political policy became one of gradually withdrawing U.S. and allied troops, arming and training the South Vietnamese to stand on their own, and doing a new “pacification” approach to build a stable and powerful nation in South Vietnam that protected the peasants. The new program sought to provide the peasants incentives to support the government and abandon the Viet Cong.

 

The key to the military policy rested on the most important counter-insurgency weapon: Accurate intelligence. And this operated as a CIA-created SMERSH campaign of Soviet-level enthusiasm. The campaign aimed at eliminating the “popular” support for communism among the South Vietnamese, in the villages and provinces. At the grass-roots level, the CIA launched a brutal “death to spies” offensive morally on par with Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. Called the “Phoenix Program” in English, the campaign destroyed the political-economic-cultural-social sub-structure of the communist National Liberation Front. Using counter-intelligence to locate and “neutralize,” through offers of defection or murder, the communist intelligence agents, political and propaganda organizers, the military recruiters, and the tax-collectors, the Phoenix Program terminated Viet Cong “cadre” controlling the peasants.

 

 The true scope and human cost of the Phoenix Program’s effects remains subject to non-disclosure. Conservative estimates range from 6,000-20,000 assassinations and up 15,000 wounded. High estimates run over 40,000. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program). Taken together with Viet Cong losses in the Tet Offensive, the NLF and its Viet Cong army as an alternative, underground, and revolutionary government gaining intelligence, finances, recruits, sympathy, cooperation, or assistance from the peasants ceased to function. It worked so well that the NLF/Viet Cong’s undermining of the South Vietnam from the peasant-level never reconstituted into a local, grass-roots organization the rest of the America part of the war. When the US fought the conventional North Vietnamese Army to a draw, cut off its supplies and support through diplomacy, (and a not-yet attempted bombing and mining campaign), the North Vietnamese Politburo called an end to the active war.

 

End of Part II–Read SMERSH Part III in the next issue, Volume II, Number 7, of The Cepia Club Strategy Gazette.

 

Resources Cited for Part II

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Jesus_Angleton

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Philby

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program

 

Review

 

Review of: Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. (Film). Produced and directed by Errol Morris. Radical Media and Smart Films Production. Sony Pictures Classics. 2002.

 

C onsidering the present war in Iraq, and the many mistakes made by the American Government (though not admitted by them very often), viewing a movie as important as Errol Morris’s documentary, Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, would be very useful for America’s citizens.

 

Morris uses raw stock of interview footage he conducted with Robert S. McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of Defense from 1961-Jan. 1968, to explore how reasonable, rational men pursued a policy that resulted in the quagmire of the Vietnam War. McNamara was known in the new Kennedy Administration taking office in 1961 as “Whiz Kid:” A highly intelligent, successful individual, who was the President of Ford Motor Company, and who brought a new order of doing things to the Pentagon based on facts and reason.

 

McNamara served in World War II as a quantitative control analyst with the rank of an Army Air Force Lt. Colonel by war’s end. He recommended some of the most momentous and moral changing events in that war. Using his Harvard teaching skills of getting the facts–the data–and making conclusions from that data to form an opinion, McNamara in early 1945 suggested to U.S. military commanders the firebombing of Japanese cities built of paper and wood. The firebombing resulted in the deaths of 60-90% of the people living in Japan’s 67 largest cities. In the interview, McNamara honestly looks at this decision and, while forming no judgement on his moral guilt or innocence in the policy, he wonders why in war excessive actions lacking moral restraint and used to achieve a limited goals are war crimes only if one’s country loses and not when they win a war.

 

The entire documentary is composed of these little snippets of insights from a rational man who, like all men, lost themselves in the complex confusion and uncertainty that governs all wars. The phrase “fog of war” has been most accurately described by German 19^th military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz. The impenetrable “fog” envelopes and obscures all human conflict–not knowing what you don’t know, not accepting someone else’s viewpoint, basing decisions on inaccurate or incomplete information–is the prime theme of McNamara’s Eleven Lessons, as the title makes clear. McNamara and his direction of the U.S. military effort in Southeast Asia from 1961 to 1967 suffered what I call the “poison of one’s own point of view.” While trying to build proper awareness of the reality, the action resulting from a narrow perspective, based on overconfidence or too much self-assurance, is dictated by accepting only what even rational people want to believe. Facts or political realities to the contrary, the poison of our one’s point of view leads all people, like those in the Bush Administration from 2002 to the present, to reject willingness for change, honesty to accept, and open-mindedness to listen as a proper means of directing political policy in war.

 

McNamara says at the beginning of the documentary, that any military commander will admit he has made mistakes in the application of military power, unnecessarily. Conventional wisdom of life says: Learn from your mistakes. As McNamara was well aware from being at center stage in the Cuban Missile Crisis, with the existence of nuclear weapons, “you make one mistake and you’re going to destroy nations,” if not the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

McNamara’s Lessons parallel his political memoirs on his public service, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. McNamara’s First Lesson explored in Fog of War came from a “successful” resolution of the crisis over Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba in October 1962. To solve the crisis, get the missiles out of Cuba, and avoid open warfare with the Soviet Union, President Kennedy was advised by the outgoing U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union to view the problem from Soviet leader Khrushchev’s point of view. Khrushchev needed to save his face in the crisis or he would lose control of his dominant position i