Blows Against the Empire
The return of Philip K. Dick.
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Dicks mixture of satire and
fantasy has inspired countless films.
Theres nothing more exciting
to an adolescent reader than an unknown genre writer who
speaks to your condition and has something great about
him. The Ace paperback cover promises mere thrills, and
the writing provides real meaning. The combination of
evident value and apparent secrecy makes Elmore Leonard
fans feel more for their hero than Borges lovers are
allowed to feel for theirs. When they tell you
its going to be good, what more can you hope for it
to be?
Eventually, enough of these secret fans grow up and
get together, and the writer is designated a Genius,
acquiring all the encumbrances of genius: fans, notes,
annotated editions, and gently disparaging comprehensive
reviews. Since genre writing can support only one genius
at a timeand no genre writer ever becomes just a
good writer; its all prophet or all hackthe
guy is usually resented by his peers and their partisans
even as the establishment hails him. No one hates the
rise of Elmore Leonard so much as a lover of Ross
Macdonald.
Of all American writers, none have got the
genre-hack-to-hidden-genius treatment quite so fully as
Philip K. Dick, the California-raised and based
science-fiction writer who, beginning in the
nineteen-fifties, wrote thirty-six speed-fuelled novels,
went crazy in the early seventies, and died in 1982, only
fifty-three. His reputation has risen through the two
parallel operations that genre writers get when they get
big. First, he has become a prime inspiration for the
movies, becoming for contemporary science-fiction and
fantasy movies what Raymond Chandler was for film noir:
at least eight feature films, including Total
Recall, Minority Report, A
Scanner Darkly, and, most memorably, Ridley
Scotts Blade Runner, have been adapted
from Dicks books, and even morefrom Terry
Gilliams Brazil to the
Matrix seriesowe a defining debt to his
mixture of mordant comedy and wild metaphysics.
But Dick has also become for our time what Edgar Allan
Poe was for Gilded Age America: the doomed genius who
supplies a style of horrors and frissons. (In both cases,
it took the French to see it; the first good critical
writing on Dick, as on Poe, came from Europe, and
particularly from Paris.) Like Poes, Dicks
last big book was a work of cosmic explanation in which
lightning bolts of brilliance flash over salty oceans of
insanity. Poes explanation of everything was called
Eureka. Dicks was VALIS.
The second, literary Dick is now in the Library of
America ($35), under the excellent editorial care of
Jonathan Lethem, a passionate devotee, who also provides
an abbreviated chronology of Dicks tormented life.
Four of the sixties novels are neatly packed together in
the handsome black covers: The Man in the High
Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer
Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep? (the original of Blade Runner),
and his masterpiece, Ubik.
Dicks fans are not modest in their claims. Nor
are they especially precise: Borges, Calvino, Kafka,
Robertson Davies are cited, in the blurbs and
introductions, as his peers. A note of inconsistency
inflects these claimsCalvino and Robertson
Davies?but they are sincerely made and, despite all
those movies and all that praise, have a slight, useful
tang of hyperbolic defensiveness. One of the first things
that everyone is inclined to say about Dick is that his
subject and his mostly straight-to-paperback publication
kept him from literary respectability, leaving him a
neglected cult writer who is only now beginning to get
his due.
On the evidence of the biographers, though, this
doesnt seem quite true. While he served a fairly
long apprenticeshipa series of almost unreadable
realist working-class novels that he wrote in the fifties
are now back in printand struggled to make money,
from the time The Man in the High Castle won
a Hugo Award, in 1963, he was famous, admired, and read.
He wasnt reviewed on the front page of the Times
Book Review, but so what? Reading his
lifeeither in the reflective French version, by
Emmanuel Carrère, or in the thorough and intelligent
American one, by Lawrence Sutinone has a sense not
of a man of thwarted ambition but, rather, of a man
burning up with ideas and observations who found in a pop
form the perfect vehicle for expressing them.
Dicks allegiance was not to literature but to writing
and to the possibilities of writing as a form of protest
and instant social satire. Another twist of fate, or
circumstance, and he could have ended up as Rod Serling;
another and he could have ended up as Marty Balin,
writing lyrics for Jefferson Airplane. But its hard
to imagine any circumstances in which he would have ended
up as Doctorow, or wanted to. There were a million places
to write sci-fi in those years, publishers eager to have
it, and readers eager to argue about it. You can find
unfairly neglected writers in America; Dick, with a
steady and attentive transatlantic audience, was never
one of them.
Dicks early history is at once
tormented, hustling, and oddly lit by the bright
California sunshine of the late fifties. Born in 1928, he
had a twin, a sister named Jane, who died when she was
only a month old; like Elvis Presley, who also had a twin
sibling who died, Dick seems to have been haunted for the
rest of his life by his missing Other. He seems to have
blamed his mother, unfairly, for her death, poisoning
their relations. He had one of those classic, bitter
American childhoods, with warring parents, and was
dragged back and forth across the country. He had loved
science fiction since boyhoodhe later told of how
at twelve he had a dream of searching in Astounding
Stories for a story called The Empire Never
Ended that would reveal the mysteries of
existenceand he began writing quickie sci-fi novels
for Ace in the fifties and sixties. I love
SF, he said once. I love to read it; I love
to write it. The SF writer sees not just possibilities
but wild possibilities. Its not just What
ifits My God; what
ifin frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are
always coming. The hysteria suited him. He seems to
have been a man of intellectual passion and compulsive
appetite (he was married five times), the kind of guy who
cant drink one cup of coffee without drinking six,
and then stays up all night to tell you what Schopenhauer
really said and how it affects your understanding of
Hitchcock and what that had to do with Christopher
Marlowe.
The Man in the High Castle (1962), the
book that made Dick famous, is in many ways the least
typical, and least interesting, of his sixties novels. It
tells what would have happened if the Germans had won the
Second World War, and, though skillfully done, it leaves
his imagination too tethered to reality and
research to resonate; not enough Martians
come. Its in The Three Stigmata of Palmer
Eldritch, two years later, that his style explodes.
Dick tends to get treated as a romantic: his books are
supposed to be studies in the extremes of paranoia and
technological nightmare, offering searing conundrums of
reality and illusion. This comes partly from the habit,
hard to break, of extolling the transgressive, the
visionary, the startling undercurrent of dread. In fact,
Dick in the sixties is a bone-dry intellectual humorist,
a satiristconcerned with taking contemporary
practices and beliefs to their reductio ad absurdum. If
we oppress the Irish, why not eat them? Swift asked, in
the model of all black satireand if we can make
quotidian and trivial the technology that has already
arrived, Dick wonders, then why would we not do the same
to the future yet to come, psychic communication and time
travel and the colonization of Mars? Although Blade
Runner, with its rainy, ruined Los Angeles, got
Dicks antic tone wrong, making it too noirish and
romantic, it got the central idea right: the future will
be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how
amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes,
the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid
moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by
occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness,
will go on. Dicks future worlds are rarely evil and
oppressive, exactly; they are banal and a little sordid,
run by a demoralized élite at the expense of a deluded
population. No matter how mad life gets, it will first of
all be life.
In The Three Stigmata, for instance,
immigrants have been forced off an overheated Earth for
colonies on Mars and elsewhere, and live in cheap
communal hovels. For recreation and escape, the Martian
colonists build Perky Pat dioramas: little
doll houses inhabited by the Barbie-like Perky Pat and
her Ken-ish boyfriend, Walt. Fanatical about the details
of the miniaturized worldsa whole industry
flourishes to supply Lilliputian furniture and
appliancesthe colonists take a powerful, illegal
hallucinogen called Can-D, which lets them
translate the bodies and lives of Pat and
Walt: for a brief, intoxicated moment they are
Pat, or Walt, living in sixties-style San Francisco, and
happy.
At one level, the Perky Pat cult is obviously a satire
of middle-class escapism, and, particularly, of American
televisionif we are prepared to stare stoned at
that box for blank escape, why not at a more convincing
one? But if it was Dicks gift to find, again and
again, these extended hyperbolic parallels, it was his
genius to take them to a level of earnest madness that
makes satire touch the edge of the sublime. He saw that
his Perky Pat devotees would begin to grant their sad
entertainment the force of divine revelation. They argue
violently about whether the Perky Pat visions are just
trips or, as the Perky Pat fundamentalists
insist, real experiences of supernatural incarnation.
Industrialized entertainment becomes the entering wedge
of religion.
Dicks admirers identify his subjects as (in the
words of Ursula K. Le Guin) reality and madness,
time and death, sin and salvation. Later, as he
became crazier, he did see questions in vast cosmological
terms, but in these sharp, funny novels of the sixties he
was taking on a more pointedly American question: Are
there reliable boundaries between vicarious and real
experience? Is there anything that cant be
made into a form of show business, and any form of show
business that cant be made into something more?
Recreation and religion, and their intertwining, are the
DNA of his worlds: the tedium of existence forces us
toward fun; fun becomes the basis of our
faith.
Yet Dicks societies of entertainment are, in
turn, oblivious of their basis in organized violence. In
The Zap Gun, a Cold War satire from 1967, for
instance, two monolithic competing political blocs,
Wesbloc and Peep-East, have such an overabundance of
weaponry that eventually they turn to
plowsharing it, making weapons that are
really toys and ashtrays. They depend on gifted psychic
visionaries who see weapons as playthingsturning a
military killer-automaton into a new kind of Rock
Em Sock Em Robotand who are as rare,
and as well paid, as movie directors here on the other
side of the mirror.
The gift of Dicks craziness was to see how
strong the forces of normalcy are in a society, even when
what they are normalizing is objectively nuts. In
Clans of the Alphane Moon, from 1964, a
mental hospital in a remote solar system has been
abandoned by its keepers, and the lunatics have, over
time, proliferated and organized themselves into a
strange but functioning and interdependent country: a
clan of paranoids supplies the statesmen, the Skitzes
live in poverty but have wild poetic visions, the Deps
provide a depressed realistic appraisal of the future,
and the manics are the warriors. Its weird, but
its a working society, not a suicidal one.
And a society that in some ways resembles Dicks
own, that of the Johnson-Nixon years. Of the normalized
madhouse on the Alphane moon, a psychiatrist says:
Leadership in this society here would naturally fall to
the paranoids. . . . But you see, with paranoids
establishing the ideology, the dominant emotional theme
would be hate. Actually hate going in two directions; the
leadership would hate everyone outside its enclave, and
also would take for granted that everyone hated it in
return. Therefore their entire so-called foreign policy
would be to establish mechanisms by which this supposed
hatred directed at them could be fought. And this would
involve the entire society in an illusory struggle, a
battle against foes that didnt exist for a victory
over nothing.
In Ubik (1969), in turn, the first premise
is that the ancient human dream of communication with the
dead has been achieved at lastbut, when you go to
speak with them, there is static and missed connections
and interference, and then you argue over your bill. At
the beginning of the novel, one of the heroes, Runciter,
tries to connect with his passed wife, Ella:
Is something the matter, Mr. Runciter?
the von Vogelsang person said, observing him as he
floundered about. Can I assist you?
Ive got some thing coming in over the
wire, Runciter panted, halting. Instead of
Ella. Damn you guys and your shoddy business practices;
this shouldnt happen, and what does it mean?
. . .
Did the individual identify himself?
Yeah, he called himself Jory.
Frowning with obvious worry, von Vogelsang said,
That would be Jory Miller. I believe hes
located next to your wife. In the bin.
But I can see its Ella!
After prolonged proximity, von Vogelsang
explained, there is occasionally a mutual osmosis,
a suffusion between the mentalities of half-lifers. Jory
Millers cephalic activity is particularly good;
your wifes is not. That makes for an unfortunately
one-way passage of protophasons. . . . If this condition
persists your money will be returned to you. . . .
Facing the casket, von Vogelsang pressed the audio outlet
into his ear and spoke briskly into the microphone. . . .
This is very unfair of you, Jory; Mr. Runciter has
come a long way to talk to his wife. Dont dim her
signal, Jory; thats not nice.
The typical Dick novel is at once fantastically
original in its ideas and dutifully realistic in charting
their consequences. No matter what things may come, they
will be exploited, merchandised, and routinized by the
force of human weakness. And the interesting corollary:
it wont matter; the world of speaking ghosts will
work about as well as this one. A society of paranoids
can work as well as Nixons America did and,
perhaps, in similar ways.
The other crucial thing one notices rereading Dick
today is how much he belongs to a particular time, and
how keeningly the music of that time runs through his
booksnot the music of the spheres, or of the
future, but the AM-FM radio soundtrack of the sixties and
early seventies. On the one hand, the screeching, treble,
machine-gun announcements of public disasters; on the
other, the chesty, cooing accompaniment of hipster
reverie and psychedelic jamming. (You had to be there.)
These two worlds were separate then, or felt
separatedpeople did turn to progressive-rock
stations with the feeling that the mixture of the
d.j.s deep, stoned voice and Layla was
a form of rebellion against the Empire. (You really
had to be there.) Dicks world is always structured
around that sort of division: the public news is of one
kind, private understanding another. A small, futile, but
perceptive band of stoners and hipsters is ranged against
the Empire; they dont win, but they do see.
All this remains thrilling and
funny; to detail Dicks conceits is to inventory a
time. The trouble is that, much as one would like to
place Dick above or alongside Pynchon and
Vonnegutor, for that matter, Chesterton or
Tolkienas a poet of the fantastic parable he was a
pretty bad writer. Though his imagination is at least the
equal of theirs, he had, as he ruefully knew, a
hacks habits, too, and he never really got over
them. He has three, at most four, characters, whom he
shuffles from hand to hand and novel to novel like a
magician with the same mangy rabbits. There is the sexy
young stoned girl; the wise or shrewish wife; the
ordinary schlub who is his Everyman; and the Mad Engineer
who is usually the Designated Explainer. He flogs these
types into semi-life by means of Ellery Queen devices,
including the depressing one of funny names. Then, there
is the narrative falsely propelled by the one-sentence
paragraph, the internal monologue that really isnt,
and sometimes both together:
Sometime during the night, he reasoned, she had come into
the room, and then some process had started in her or
around her. She had sensed it and had crept off, hiding
herself in the closet, so he wouldnt know; in her
last few hours of lifeor perhaps minutes; he hoped
it was only minutesthis had overtaken her, but she
had made no sound. She hadnt wakened him. Or, he
thought, she tried and she couldnt do it,
couldnt attract my attention. Maybe it was after
that, after trying and failing to wake me, that she
crawled into this closet.
I pray to god, he thought, that it happened fast.
Thats from the beautiful and hallucinatory
Ubik, in which Dick also develops the
mysterious idea of a fading universe, where
objects slowly mutate back to their earlier essential
forms; hi-fis become Victrolas as they sit there. With
the ideas removed, though, it could be in any standard
police procedural of the period. The trouble isnt
that Dick suffers by some school-marmish standard of fine
writing. Its that the absence of any life within
the writing on the page ends up robbing the books of the
vital force that pushes you past pages. As an adult
reader coming back to Dick, you start off in a state of
renewed wonder and then find yourself thumbing ahead to
see how much farther you are going to have to go. At the
end of a Dick marathon, you end up admiring every one of
his conceits and not a single one of his sentences. His
facility is amazing. He once wrote eleven novels in a
twenty-four-month stretch. But one thing you have to have
done in order to write eleven novels in two years is not
to have written any of them twice.
Thats probably why Dicks reputation as a
serious writer, like Poes, has always been higher
in France, where the sentences arent read as they
were written. And his paint-by-numbers prose is ideally
suited for the movies. The last monologue in Blade
Runner (All those moments will be lost in
time like tears in rain. Time to die), improvised
by Rutger Hauer on the set that day, has a pathos that
the book achieves only in design, intellectually, because
the movie speech is spoken by a recognizable person,
dressed up as a robot, where Dicks characters tend
to be robots dressed up as people.
In February, 1974, Dick, after
having a tooth pulled by the dentist, and still high on
the vestiges of sodium pentathol, opened the door of his
house to get a prescription from a delivery girland
had a vision that dominated and damned the last eight
years of his life. The delivery girl visiting the already
drug-addled Dick was wearing a fish medallion; Dick
casually asked her about it, and she fingered it to show
him that it was an ancient Christian symbol. Dick had an
overwhelming, numinous experience of
unforgetting: he eventually saw (the vision
came in bursts) that he and the girl were both early
Christians in flight from Roman persecution and
exchanging a coded language of gesture. He wasnt
seeing, Shirley MacLaine style, that he had been a
Christian in an earlier life; the point was that he was
one now. The entire phenomenal world around him was an
illusion created by a fallen female God, twin to a good
immaterial God; he was experiencing not a flashback but a
flash-in. Sometime in the first centuryhe later
pinned it down to the year 70 C.E.the passage of
time had been deliberately stopped by the Empire, the
Black Iron Prison. There was no 1974; there never had
been. It was still the year 70. The Roman Empire had
never ended.
Dick spent the rest of his life working out the
complexities of this idiosyncratic Gnosticism, achieving,
at last, a fantastically elaborate metaphysical
cosmologythe central conception was of VALIS, for
Vast Active Living Intelligence Systemthat he
placed (under the signature of his alter ego Horselover
Fat: the Greek meaning of Philip combined
with the German meaning of Dick) at the end
of a visionary novel, also called Valis
(1981). Dicks admirers can fight for daysand
over hundreds of pagesabout the meaning, the
precise content, and the value of the 2-3-74
visions. As the people around him testified,
hallucinations and fantasies, wild paranoid delusions,
and plot-spotting filled his mind. He really did go
crazy, and it wasnt the cute-crazy of the movies,
with well-cast hallucinations and Jennifer Connelly to
comfort you. It was true staring madness, hell on earth.
But, as Lawrence Sutin insists, at another level Dick
always had a saving, ironic awareness that his crazy
visions might just be crazy visions, and this gave him,
at times, a comic distance from them which deepened his
writing.
Valis, the novel, the first and best in a
trilogy in which Dick struggled desperately to articulate
what he had seen, is a hard book to read, and a harder
one to forget. Without Dicks name, it almost
certainly wouldnt have been
publishedits just too static and strange.
Yet, once you force yourself to read it, and read past
the really nutty bits, it emerges as perhaps the most
emotional and in an odd way the most artistically
achieved of all his books. In a manner ironically
reminiscent of mid-period Philip Rothif you can
imagine a mid-period Philip Roth in which three-eyed
aliens living in a parallel dimension play a crucial
partDick divides his persona into two voices. One
belongs to Horselover Fat, who has had exactly the
epiphany that Dick had in 1974, and is trying to cope
simultaneously with the mental breakdown that the vision
entails and with his sad personal circumstaces (one of
his girlfriends is dying horribly of cancer, as was one
of Dicks); the other belongs to Philip
Dick, who narrates the book, in an empathetic but
disinterested tone, correcting Fats (that is, his
own) faults and speculating calmly on the real meaning of
his epiphany.
There are many books with unreliable narrators under
the control of sane authors; this is the only one I know
where a sane, reliable narrator (on the books own
terms) is under the control of a clearly crazy author.
What makes it heartbreaking is the authors
consciousness, expressed sporadically through the
fictional narrator Dick, that he (that is, the real Dick,
embodied in the pathetic Fat) has undoubtedly gone
nutsbut that, just as undoubtedly, he is in
possession of the truth about the cosmos. His account of
his vision is braided with the details of cancer
treatments and the mordantly rendered specifics of time
spent in a ward for the insanea man who knows
hes broken but believes that the breaking has
poured forth a flowing truth.
The core of my writing is not art but
truth, Dick wrote a year before he died. Thus
what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to
alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. It
doesnt dilute the force of his vision to see it as
a metaphor, consistent with, but crazier than, the
central metaphor of his earlier work: the social
arrangement of power is always that of a brute oligarchic
minority forcing its will on a numbed population, with
amusements the daily meal and brutality the implicit
threat; for all that has changed technologically, that
fatal pattern has never really altered. The future will
be like the present, he had once known, and now he saw
that the past was like the future, too.
What is moving in Dicks madness is his
insistence that the surest sign of the madness of the
world outside him is the violence that we accept as
normal. In Clans of the Alphane Moon, he had
already glimpsed the possibility that normal governing
might be the work of paranoids. This Nixon-era vision
becomes, in the VALIS books, a metaphysical truth.
The Empire is the institution, the codification, of
derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us
by violence, since its nature is a violent one, Fat
writes. That this is followed by an explanation of how
those deaf-mute three-eyed invaders arrived in ancient
Sudan from a planet in the star system Sirius does not
diminish its force; if anything, it increases it, by
reminding us of the price the visionary paid for it.
Until his death, of a stroke, in 1982, Dick never
stopped crying out. He was buried at last beside his
infant sister, Jane, the missing half he had longed for
and eventually made into a part of his cosmic mythology,
the much mourned female God. The vision of an unending
struggle between a humanity longing for a fuller love it
always senses but cant quite see, and a deranged
cult of violence eternally presenting itself as necessary
and realthis thought today does not seem exactly
crazy. The empire never ends. ?
George Tenet's Memoirs settles old scores with the Necons
Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2007 08:29:44 +0100
From: Rowan Berkeley <rowan.berkeley@googlemail.com>
An American spymasters tales from the CIA
Matein Khalid, Khaleej Times, 9 August 2007
http://khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?xfile=data/opinion/2007/August/opinion_August28.xml
George Tenets memoir In the center of the
storm. My years with the CIA (Harpers 2007) is a
fascinating read not only because the chief of the
worlds most powerful intelligence agency settles
old scores with the Bush White Houses necon cabal
but also for his admittedly sanitised glimpse into the
secret world of Langley and US policy quagmires in the
Middle East.
Tenet, CIA Director from 1997 to 2004, claims Dick Cheney
cynically manipulated intelligence on Iraqi WMD to
justify the decision to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam
Hussein. Tenet rightly protests as if Cheney needed
me to say slam dunk to go to war. He confirms that
ideological zealots like Rumsfeld, Wolfwoitz, Feith and
Cheney hijacked the foreign policy agenda of the Bush
White House, with predictably disastrous consequences for
both America and the Islamic world.
The CIA has played a seminal role in the secret history
of the modern Middle East. After all, a CIA coup returned
the Shah of Iran to power in 1953 and facilitated
SAVAKs political repression for the next twenty six
years, a key factor in revolutionary Irans visceral
anti-US Great Satan animus. The CIA also helped the Baath
Party seize power in 1963 because it helpfully
slaughtered Iraqi Communists allied to Brigadier Kassem.
The Agency assisted Washingtons tilt to Baghdad in
the 1980s by providing the odious Saddam regime
with satellite reconnaissance data on Iranian battlefield
positions even as he used poison gas against Kurdish
secessionists in Halabja. The fabled Afghan jihad was, of
course, the CIAs classic Cold War triumph.
Reagans DCI Casey used his wartime experiences as
an OSS spymaster running agents against Nazi Germany to
enlist Pakistani, Saudi and Chinese intelligence in a
venture to make the USSR bleed in the Hindu Kush.
While the Afghanistan war accelerated the collapse of the
Soviet Union, its terrible legacy was the Taliban,
Pakistans descent into a hellish spiral of
violence, terror in the skies of New York and Washington,
another bloody and unwinnable war in Afghanistan. In
Lebanon, the CIAs Phalangist clients were outwitted
by the Syrians and Hezbollah, reduced to impotence after
a suicide truck bomber massacred 241 Marines in their
West Beirut barracks and forced Reagan to withdraw US
peacekeeping troops, to abandon the Wests clients
to their fate, as in Saigon 1975. It is ironic that
American intelligence underwrote the litany of policy
failures that triggered such violent blowback, that
enabled the enemies of the West to triumph in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iran and even Pakistan.
Tenets book fascinated me because it confirmed my
suspicion that the CIA was more amateurish Keystone Cops
than the omnipotent intelligence colossus imagined by
Americas enemies in the Middle East. For instance,
Tenet shockingly revealed that the Department of
Operations, that runs Americas spies worldwide, had
only six trainees in its clandestine case officer
programme when he took over in 1997, at a time when Bin
Laden and Dr. Zawahiri trained hundreds of radical
Islamists in their Afghan training camps. The CIA was
unable to leverage the ethnic kaleidoscope that is modern
America to infiltrate the inner sanctums of Al Qaeda, the
Saddam regime or Hezbollah. A CIA attempt to topple
Saddams regime from Iraqi Kurdistan in 1996 ended
in tragedy and betrayal, with Saddams mukhabarat
executing dozens of anti-Baathist military officers
fingered by double agents the CIA failed to filter. Tenet
writes that the FBI had more special agents in Manhattan
than CIA had case officers all over the world in 1998,
the year Osama declared his jihad against the US.
The Clinton Administration threatened American national
security with its casual, even callous attitude to the
CIA. George Tenets four predecessors barely spent a
combined five years as DCI. Tenet was a default choice,
casually promoted, a Beltway apparatchik, the staff
director of the Senate Intelligence Committee, more
schmoozer than spy. Internecine turf battles among
Americas multiple intelligence agencies were easily
exploited by foreign powers and middlemen. For instance,
Rumsfelds Pentagon ran a de facto rival
intelligence service that spoon-fed dubious data from the
Mossad to the Bush White House, including the
self-serving, phony linkage between Saddam and Al Qaeda.
The DIA paid Ahmed Chalabi $350,000 a month while
Tenets CIA concluded that the disgraced owner of
the failed Petra Bank, convicted and sentenced to 22
years of jail by a Jordanian court, had no real support
base in Iraq. In fact, Tenet was stunned when Chalabi
showed up in Baghdad in a US Army C-130 plane despite the
vocal opposition of the Agency and State. With such vivid
examples of bureaucratic ineptitude, strategic myopia and
woeful ignorance of the Islamic world, I am no longer
surprised by the CIAs monumental intelligence
failures in Pahlavi Iran, 9/11, the invasion of Kuwait
and the Iraqi civil war.
Tenets book reveals the James Bond dimension in the
secret game of nations. He describes teams of Dari and
Farsi speaking CIA agents who roamed the Afghan provinces
on horseback with millions of dollar banknotes in cash,
offering Pakhtun tribal chieftains the choice between
money, guns, grain, even horse saddles if they abandoned
the Taliban or a 2000 pound laser guided bomb if they did
not. He describes how the CIA penetrated and tagged Dr AQ
Khans international nuclear component smuggling
network and now he himself acted as General
Musharrafs case officer in New York and Islamabad.
Musharrafs subsequent purge of the ISI and the
military high command was instigated by the CIA.
Tenet describes Colonel Gaddafis volte-face on
Libyan WMDs with secret meetings in European luxury
hotels and desert campfires. He describes the ghastly
ease with which a terrorist group could acquire and
detonate a nuclear warhead in an American city. He
alludes to enhanced interrogation techniques
that persuaded captured Taliban and Al Qaeda bosses to
break, to pinpoint safe houses, sleeper cells, camps and
terrorist networks. The Predator drone has emerged as the
CIAs aerial assassin all too successfully in Yemen,
the Bajour Agency and the villages of Afghanistan.
Incredibly, the CIAs counter terrorism head is a
certain Mr Ben Bonk. Tenets book confirmed my
nagging belief. The only thing more dangerous than being
Americas enemy in the Middle East is to be its
friend.
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