The History Book Club discussion
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY - GOVERNMENT
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5. LEGACY OF ASHES ~ CHAPTERS 13 - 15 (122 - 155) (01/31/11 - 02/06/11) ~ No spoilers, please
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The chapter begins with the following quote:
Enthralled by covert action, Allen Dulles ceased to focus on his core mission of providing intelligence to the president.
He handled most of the CIA analysts and much of their work with studied contempt. Dulles would keep them waiting for hours when they came in to prep him for the nest morning's meeting at the White House. As afternoon turned to evening, he would burst out his door and blow past them, rushing to keep a dinner date.
What kind of an ugly human being was this man? Of am I missing something.
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In Chapter Fourteen titled "Ham-Handed Operations of all Kinds", things do not seem to be getting that much better.
The chapter begins with quite a quote by President Eisenhower. It is remarkable how the leaders speak behind closed doors. I guess we expect so much better of all of them. I am sure that he believed what he was saying was true and at a certain level it probably was in terms of needing assistance after living under dictatorships for so long; but the statement just didn't seem to be Presidential like. Especially in terms of the human dignity assessment.
He states, "If you go and live with these Arabs, " President Eisenhower told Allen Dulles and the assembled members of the National Security Council, "you will find that they simply cannot understand our ideas of freedom and human dignity. They have lived so long under dictatorships of one kind or another, how can we expect them to run successfully a free government?"
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In Chapter Fifteen titled "A Very Strange War", the author continues to show the view of the world through the CIA's eyes which is NOT the view from most Americans' eyes; yet it appears that we are duped by our leaders sadly.
The chapter begins with the following quote: "The American view of the world from the Mediterranean to the Pacific was black and white: a firm American hand was needed in every capital from Damascus to Jakarta to keep the dominoes from falling. But in 1958, the CIA's effort to overthrow the government of Indonesia backfired so badly that if fueled the rise of the biggest communist party in the world outside of Russia and China. It would take a real war, in which hundreds of thousands died, to defeat that force."
All I can say is without the CIAs determined efforts in the areas of regime change, assassinations, bribery and covert operations in foreign countries; I suspect that the world would be a better place and more hospitable to us all.
The troubles in the current world are explained quite literally by the fiascoes that the CIA got themselves into. Very, very sad.
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Dean Acheson served as Secretary of State under President Harry S. Truman during the height of McCarthyism. Despite his role in the formulation of Truman's anti-communist policies in the late 1940s, he was mocked as an effete, Eastern establishment man, perhaps disloyal and too soft to defend America's international interests.
Dean Gooderham Acheson was born on April 11, 1883, in Middletown, Connecticut. He was educated at Yale and Harvard Law School, and then became the private secretary to Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis. He later joined a law firm in Washington, D.C.
In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt chose Acheson to become Under Secretary of the Treasury. During the World War II years, Acheson became Assistant Secretary of State. In 1945, Truman made Acheson his Under Secretary of State. In that role, Acheson was active in the development of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. In 1949, he became Secretary of State.
In the period following the war, America appeared to be on the defensive against communism around the world. The Soviet Union exploded its own nuclear bomb, the communists under Mao Zedong drove Chiang Kai-Shek from the mainland of China, and the Korean War ground on without a resolution. To many Republicans, this was evidence of a weak, perhaps traitorous, leadership in the State Department, and Acheson became a focus of their scorn. Specific actions that provoked his critics included his attempts to dissociate the United States with Chiang Kai Shek's Kuomintang government, his omission of Korea from the American defense periphery in a speech delivered in January 1950, and his preference for limited war aims in Korea.
While he was under secretary, Acheson also secured a $90 million loan to Poland, over the protest of U.S. Ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane, about human rights abuses committed by the communist government there. During negotiations, the Polish government gave more than $50,000 to retain Acheson’s law firm. He also promoted men to high-ranking positions within the State Department, who were later found to be communist spies, including: Alger Hiss, John Stewart Service, John Carter Vincent, and Lauchlin Currie. In December 1950, conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives successfully voted to remove Acheson from office.
In the 1952 campaign, attacks came from all directions. Senator Joseph McCarthy said that Truman was probably as loyal as the next man but was being misled by Acheson. Vice-presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon described Acheson’s political friend, Adlai E. Stevenson, as "holding a Ph.D. from Dean Acheson's cowardly College of Communist Containment." After the Democrats were soundly beaten in the smear campaign of the November elections, a disillusioned Acheson returned to private practice. He wrote several books in his later years and served as a presidential advisor to the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. His advice to Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968 was to de-escalate the war in Vietnam.
He died in Sandy Spring, Maryland, on October 12, 1971, at the age of 78.
Source: United States History
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Ach...
Dean Acheson was born in Middletown, Connecticut, on 11th April, 1893. After being educated at Yale University (1912-15) and Harvard Law School (1915-18) he became private secretary to the Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis (1919-21).
A supporter of the Democratic Party, Acheson worked for a law firm in Washington before Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him as Under Secretary of the Treasury in 1933. During the Second World War Acheson served as Assistant Secretary in the Department of State.
In 1945 Harry S. Truman selected Acheson as his Under Secretary of State. Over the next two years Acheson played an important role in devising both the Truman Doctrine and the European Recovery Program (ERP). Acheson believed that the best way to halt the spread of communism was by working with progressive forces in those countries threatened by revolution. After becoming Secretary of State in 1949, Acheson and George Marshall, Secretary of Defence, came under increasing attack from right-wing politicians who considered the two men to be soft on communism.
On 9th February, 1950, Joe McCarthy made a speech at Wheeling where he attacked Acheson as "a pompous diplomat in striped pants". He claiming that he had a list of 250 people in the State Department known to be members of the American Communist Party. McCarthy went on to argue that some of these people were passing secret information to the Soviet Union. He added: "The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because the enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer - the finest homes, the finest college educations, and the finest jobs in Government we can give."
McCarthy had obtained his information from his friend, J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). William Sullivan, one of Hoover's agents, later admitted that: "We were the ones who made the McCarthy hearings possible. We fed McCarthy all the material he was using."
Acheson also upset the right-wing when he took the side of Harry S. Truman in his dispute with General Douglas MacArthur over the Korean War. Acheson and Truman wanted to limit the war to Korea whereas MacArthur called for the extension of the war to China. Joe McCarthy once again led the attack on Acheson: "With half a million Communists in Korea killing American men, Acheson says, 'Now let's be calm, let's do nothing'. It is like advising a man whose family is being killed not to take hasty action for fear he might alienate the affection of the murderers."
In April 1951, Harry S. Truman removed General Douglas MacArthur from his command of the United Nations forces in Korea. McCarthy called for Truman to be impeached and suggested that the president was drunk when he made the decision to fire MacArthur: "Truman is surrounded by the Jessups, the Achesons, the old Hiss crowd. Most of the tragic things are done at 1.30 and 2 o'clock in the morning when they've had time to get the President cheerful."
Acheson was the main target of McCarthy's anger as he believed Harry S. Truman was "essentially just as loyal as the average American". However, Truman was president "in name only because the Acheson group has almost hypnotic powers over him. We must impeach Acheson, the heart of the octopus."
Harry S. Truman decided not to stand for president in 1952 and Acheson's close friend, Adlai Stevenson, was chosen as the Democratic Party candidate for the election. It was one of the dirtiest in history with Richard Nixon, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, leading the attack on Stevenson. Speaking in Indiana, Nixon described Stevenson as a man with a "Ph.D. from Dean Acheson's cowardly college of Communist containment."
The election campaign of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon was a great success and in November they easily defeated Adlai Stevenson by 33,936,252 votes to 27,314,922. Disillusioned by the smear campaign, Acheson returned to his private law practice. He also wrote several books on politics including Power and Diplomacy (1958), Morning and Noon (1965), Present at the Creation (1970) and The Korean War (1971). Dean Acheson died at Sandy Spring, Maryland, on 12th October, 1971.
Source:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...
It seems all the failure in trying to build a intelligence network behind the Iron Curtain has come to roost in Hungary. We were pretty surprised and could do very little to help the rebels in 1956.
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It is so true. This organization is really flying blind. And reporting to the president from newspaper reports and even lying to Ike. Telling Ike that we were not using American pilots in Indonesia and we were, it is madness. I never fully appreciate the aggressiveness we had in toppling (or trying to topple) governments: Syria, Iraq, Indonesia. I think I knew of these events, but did not connect the dots the author has done.
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Bentley wrote: "I just always believed that our government and the folks leading it were different and had more ethical standards. How could this organization get away with lying to Presidents or to Congress for ..."It is a great question. How did the CIA survive? Dulles was very successful at deflecting these reports the President got to reform the system. It kind of like J. Edgar Hoover. He knows how to survive. Also the CIA or at least the perception of the CIA is pretty strong for all that they know: dirty little secrets...
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Watching the past week's events in Egypt, I am struck with a thought and a question that seem to relate to the book. So often the U. S. government has taken a soft stand for human rights and democracy to promote our capitalist interests, national security, and international stability. I do not condemn all of our choices but it is a conundrum.
What is the CIA doing right now? Hopefully learning from their past.
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And god only knows what the CIA is doing now?
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Excerpt from article:
The Administration response has been subdued, and the President himself has said little beyond urging “restraint” from the closeted confines of a White House forum on YouTube. The Administration seems to be biting its lip and hoping the Egyptian urn it paid billions for doesn’t topple off the shelf and shatter.
The forces aligning to replace the Mubarak regime are not a cheerful lot. Caroline Glick, senior fellow for Middle East affairs at the Center for Security Policy, observes that the ostensibly secular opposition leader, Mohammed ElBaradei, supports the ominous Muslim Brotherhood and has recently spoken in their defense. He’s also either a useful idiot for Iranian nuclear ambitions, or willingly turned a blind eye during his tenure as a United Nations weapons inspector. A STRATFOR report, not yet verified, says the Egyptian police have abandoned the border with Gaza, and Hamas foot soldiers are pouring into the country to give the Brotherhood more muscle.
Most American foreign aid to Egypt goes into weapons for the army. If it becomes an Islamist state, those weapons will fall into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood… along with the Suez Canal, and strategic resources necessary to project American military power into the Middle East. Oil is heading for $100 a barrel, and if the Suez Canal is closed, the resulting economic shockwaves will roll throughout the world.
A hardline Islamist takeover might swiftly produce a humanitarian disaster among the large Coptic Christian community in Egypt, which has already suffered violent persecution. Then again, the Copts were not happy with their treatment by the Mubarak government, and there have been encouraging signs of solidarity from moderate Egyptian Muslims, who attended Christmas services after a deadly bomb attack on a church in Alexandria. Muslims who were willing to offer their bodies as “human shields” for their Christian neighbors will want something more than a jihadist dungeon state to replace Mubarak.
There is growing concern the uprising might spread against the regimes of Jordan and Saudia Arabia, which would be a cascading disaster for U.S. foreign policy. The door to the Arab world will be shut and barred with rifles we paid for.
The United States has little influence with any of the factions maneuvering for control in a post-Mubarak Egypt. Protesters have been running up to news cameras to show them expended tear-gas canisters stamped “Made in the USA.” ElBaradei has been vocally unhappy with the American response thus far, quoted in an L.A. Times piece as saying, “What is very disappointing to the Egyptian people is the message coming from the U.S., which is saying that we are going to work with the Egyptian people and with the government. Well, you have to make a choice. This is an authoritarian government and on the other hand the people have been deprived of their freedom for 58 years.” In case you were wondering, he gets to 58 years by throwing in Mubarak’s predecessors, including Anwar Sadat, a sainted figure in the annals of global peacemaking.
When it comes to foreign policy, there are no “reset buttons.” People who live beneath autocrats who rule for decades are not going to shake the Etch-A-Sketch of historical memory over their heads when a new guy gets into the White House every few years, and gives a big speech about how different his foreign policy will be. The dictator we’ve supported for thirty years has comprehensively failed his people, and they may trade him out for something even worse, as we saw in Iran near the dawn of the Mubarak regime. Our Egypt policy has dwindled to hoping for the best, and trying to figure out exactly what we’re hoping for.
Additionally, the State Department has made repeated calls to Egypt protesting Egypt's shutting down the Internet.
Source: http://www.humanevents.com/article.ph... (conservative media)
I have to laugh about the U.S. having little influence with any factions...sounds very familiar with the book we are reading, doesn't it? Also, weapons and money seem to be the CIA's currencies.
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Bryan wrote: "Bentley wrote: "I just always believed that our government and the folks leading it were different and had more ethical standards. How could this organization get away with lying to Presidents or ..."I think they got away with lying because quite literally there was no way for the President and Congress to know that they were not telling the truth. It's like a kid telling their parents they did their homework when the books are still in the bag. They don't know what they don't know, right?
On the one hand you have the lack of success in field intelligence, so the analyists have little first hand info to rely on, their reports are bound to be influenced by 1 - what they speculate is the truth and 2 - what they think the President/Congress wants to hear. When it all blows up and they are discovered to be wrong, the President claims them as ineffective and seeks to change the leadership or direction in some way. It is a self-perpetuating problem. In the time period subject of these chapters, the technology was still pretty low rent so they had little to rely on, meaning money and weapons would be the only thing they could use to help them buy what they wanted to know. And that isn't working out so well.
Great post, Alisa. Yeah, I think the CIA is the only external eyes on intelligence. Yes, there are competing agencies in State and Defense, but they don't seem to get their voice heard at the Presidential level. So, it becomes a monopoly in a way. People say the real power in Washington is access to the president. The CIA built a direct access with the president with the President's Daily Brief.
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Chapter Thirteen began with this statement:
Enthralled by covert action, Allen Dulles ceased to focus on his core mission of providing intelligence to the president.
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Allen Welsh Dulles (April 7, 1893 – January 29, 1969) was the first civilian and the longest serving (1953–61) Director of Central Intelligence (de facto head of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency) and a member of the Warren Commission. Between stints of government service, Dulles was a corporate lawyer and partner at Sullivan & Cromwell. Allen W. Dulles was one of the directors of the J. Henry Schroder bank. His brother was the Secretary of State during the Eisenhower Administration, John Foster Dulles.
Early Life and Family
Allen Dulles was born on April 7, 1893, in Watertown, New York, and grew up in a family where public service was valued and world affairs were a common topic of discussion. Dulles was one of five children born to Presbyterian minister Allen Macy Dulles and his wife Edith (Foster).
He was five years younger than his brother John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's Secretary of State and chairman and senior partner of Sullivan & Cromwell, and two years older than his sister, diplomat Eleanor Lansing Dulles. His maternal grandfather was John W. Foster, who was Secretary of State under Benjamin Harrison.
His paternal grandfather, John Welch Dulles, had been a Presbyterian missionary in China. His uncle (by marriage) Robert Lansing also was a U.S. Secretary of State.
His nephew, Avery Dulles, was a Roman Catholic cardinal, Jesuit priest and noted theologian who taught at Fordham University.
Allen Dulles graduated from Princeton University, and in 1916 entered the diplomatic service. Dulles was serving in Switzerland and was responsible for reviewing and rejecting Vladimir Lenin's application for a visa to the United States.[citation needed] In 1920 he married Clover Todd, daughter of a Columbia University professor; their only son, Allen Macy Dulles Jr., was wounded and permanently disabled in the Korean War when a mortar fragment penetrated his brain. In 1921 while at the US Embassy in Constantinople, Dulles exposed the infamous Protocols of Zion as a forgery providing the story to The Times in London whose article was reprinted by the New York Times.
In 1926 he earned a law degree from George Washington University Law School and took a job at the New York firm where his brother, John Foster Dulles, was a partner. He became a director of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1927, becoming the first new director since the Council's foundation in 1921. He was the Council's secretary from 1933.
Background in Intelligence
After Allen Dulles graduated from college he become a diplomat and during his posts in different European countries started to gather intelligence information during the First World War, he was actually working as an intelligence officer.
After the war, in the 1920s, he served five years as chief of the Near East Division of the State Department. In 1926 he joined the New York firm where his brother was a senior partner to start working as lawyer.
From time to time, during the late twenties and early thirties served as legal adviser to the delegation at the League of Nations on arms limitation where had the opportunity to meet with Hitler, Mussolini, Litvinov and the leaders of Britain and France.
Dulles was transferred from Britain to Bern, Switzerland, where he lived at Herrengasse 23 for the duration of the war. He was assisted in intelligence-gathering activities by a German emigrant Gero von Schulze-Gaevernitz. Dulles notably was heavily involved in the controversial and secret Operation Sunrise (secret negotiations in March 1945 to arrange a local surrender of German forces in northern Italy).
He is featured in the classic Soviet TV series Seventeen Moments of Spring for his role in that operation. Dulles became the station chief in Bern, Switzerland, for the newly formed Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA), a logical one. Dulles supplied his government with much sensitive information about Nazi Germany.
Many of his ideas were born during family retreats at the Henderson Harbour on the southeaster shore of Lake Ontario with his paternal grandfather, John W. Foster, who had been Secretary of State in 1892 under President Harrison; Robert Lansing a person related by marriage to his family, who was Secretary of State from 1915 to 1920 under President Woodrow Wilson; and his five-year-older brother, John Foster Dulles, who would be Secretary of State from 1953 to 1959 under President Eisenhower.
When First World War was over some military and intelligence services remain, as Allen said, in “skeleton form”, such as the G-2, CIC, and the Naval ONI. It is fair to remember here that the “marines” where always the force threaten to be sent out, or actually sent out, to intimidate Central and South America government if a USA corporation was to lose any business or land.
After Pearl Harbour, December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–1945) decided to create an Intelligence group to combat the Japanese threat and set William J. Donovan, a Wall Street lawyer, for the job. Donovan worked with Allen Dulles, a Wall Street Lawyer too. The office was initially called COI (Coordinator of Information) which was set up in Room 3603 of Rockefeller Center, taking over offices staffed by Britain's MI6 and by June 1942 was renamed OSS (Office of Strategic Services).
In 1943 Frank Wisner was called in to join them. Frank Wisner was a Wall Street lawyer who has been working at the Carter Ledyard and Milburn, a Franklin Roosevelt’s firm dedicated to corporate law, and would become the mad man of the Clandestine Service who would keep the CIA doing daring and dubious cover operations that demonstrated the agency were capable of changing governments in the Third World Countries almost at will.
Wisner became the right hand of Dulles to overthrow Iranian’s President Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 because of Oil business, to overthrow Guatemala’s democratically-elected President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 for its intent to expropriate four hundred thousand acres from the United Fruit Company and later, in 1973, the Chilean’s democratically-elected President Salvador Allende for nationalizing several USA companies.
Dulles worked on intelligence regarding German plans and activities. Dulles established wide contacts with German émigrés, resistance figures, and anti-Nazi intelligence officers (who linked him, through Hans Bernd Gisevius, to the tiny but daring opposition to Hitler in Germany itself).
Although Washington barred Dulles from making firm commitments to the plotters of the 20 July 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler, the conspirators nonetheless gave him reports on developments in Germany, including sketchy but accurate warnings of plans for Hitler’s V-1 and V-2 missiles.
Dulles also received valuable information from Fritz Kolbe, a German diplomat and a foe of the Nazis. Kolbe supplied secret documents regarding active German spies and plans regarding the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter. In 1945, he played a central role in negotiations leading to the unconditional capitulation of German troops in Italy. After the war in Europe, Dulles served for six months as the OSS Berlin station chief.
Dulles played an active role in connection with the formulation of the legislation setting up the CIA: The National Security Act of 1947. In 1948, He and two more people appointed by President Truman presented some recommendation to the president to reform the CIA which eventually would make him director of it.
In the 1948 Presidential election, Allen Dulles was Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey's chief advisor. The Dulles brothers and James Forrestal helped form the Office of Policy Coordination. Under President Eisenhower, Dulles became CIA director.
Dulles is considered one of the essential creators of the modern United States intelligence system and was an indispensable guide to it in the critical period before the Cold War as well as the early part of the Cold War. He served to establish intelligence networks worldwide to check and counter Soviet and eastern European communist advances as well as international communist movements
Source for the above: Wikipedia
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CIA Career
In 1953, Dulles became the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence, which had been formed as part of the National Security Act of 1947; earlier directors had been military officers.
The Agency's covert operations were an important part of the Eisenhower administration's new Cold War national security policy known as the "New Look". Under Dulles's direction, the CIA created MK-Ultra, a top secret mind control research project which was managed by Sidney Gottlieb. Dulles also personally oversaw Operation Mockingbird, a program which influenced American media companies as part of the "New Look".
At Dulles's request, President Eisenhower demanded that Senator Joseph McCarthy discontinue issuing subpoenas against the CIA. In March, McCarthy had initiated a series of investigations into potential communist subversion of the Agency. Although none of the investigations revealed any wrongdoing, the hearings were still potentially damaging, not only to the CIA's reputation but also to the security of sensitive information. Documents made public in 2004 revealed that the CIA had broken into McCarthy's Senate office and intentionally fed disinformation to him in order to discredit him. In fact, the CIA had been seriously compromised and "duped by Soviet and Chinese intelligent services" from its inception. Dulles discredited McCarthy, knowing that revelations of these facts would lead to the agency's destruction as well, presumably, as that of his own career and reputation.
In the early 1950s the U.S. Air Force conducted a competition for a new photo reconnaissance aircraft. Lockheed Aircraft Corporation's Skunk Works submitted a design number called the CL-282, which married sailplane-like wings to the body of a supersonic interceptor. This aircraft was rejected by the Air Force, but several of the civilians on the review board took notice, and Edwin Land presented a proposal for the aircraft to Dulles.
The aircraft became what is known as the U-2 'spy plane', and it was initially operated by CIA pilots. Its introduction into operational service in 1957 greatly enhanced the CIA's ability to monitor Soviet activity through overhead photo surveillance. Ironically, the aircraft eventually entered service with the Air Force.
Involvement in Coups Against Governments of Iran and Guatemala
In 1953, Dulles was also involved in the covert operations that led to the removal of Mohammad Mossadeq, prime minister of Iran, by the Shah. Rumors of a Soviet takeover had surfaced due to the recent nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
In actuality, British diplomat Christopher Woodhouse had pitched the idea of a coup d'état to President Eisenhower to try to regain British control of the oil company. Woodhouse would later say, "Not wishing to be accused of using Americans to pull British chestnuts out of the fire, I decided to emphasize the communist threat [to Iran].
Dulles found success in his participation with the CIA's first attempts at removing foreign leaders by covert means.
Notably, the elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran was deposed in 1953 (via Operation Ajax), and President Arbenz of Guatemala was removed in 1954.
The Guatemalan coup was carried out under the CIA code-name Operation PBSUCCESS. Dulles was on the board of the United Fruit Company. Dulles saw these kind of clandestine activities as an essential part of the struggle against communism.
Sabotage Against Cuba: Operation 40
At the direction of President Eisenhower, Dulles established Operation 40, comprising 40 officials and agents whose primary area of operations was the Caribbean region, including Cuba. On March 4, 1960, La Coubre, a ship flying a Belgian flag, exploded in Havana Bay. It was loaded with arms and ammunition destined for the armed forces of the Cuban government of Fidel Castro.
The explosion killed 75 people and over 200 were injured. Fabian Escalante, an officer of the Department of State Security (G-2), later claimed that this was the first successful act carried out by Operation 40.
Operation 40 not only was involved in sabotage operations but also, in fact, evolved into a team of assassins. One member, Frank Sturgis, claimed: "this assassination group (Operation 40) would upon orders, naturally, assassinate either members of the military or the political parties of the foreign country that you were going to infiltrate, and if necessary some of your own members who were suspected of being foreign agents... We were concentrating strictly in Cuba at that particular time."
Over the next few years Operation 40 worked closely with several anti-Castro Cuban organizations including Alpha 66. CIA officials and freelance agents such as William Harvey, Thomas G. Clines, Porter Goss, Gerry Patrick Hemming, E. Howard Hunt, David Sánchez Morales, Carl Elmer Jenkins, Bernard Barker, Barry Seal, Frank Sturgis, William Robert Plumlee ("Tosh" Plumlee), and William C. Bishop also joined the project.
During the Kennedy Administration, Dulles faced increasing criticism. The pro-American but unpopular regimes in Iran and Guatemala that Dulles had helped put in place were widely regarded as brutal and corrupt.
Several failed assassination plots utilizing CIA-recruited operatives from the Mafia and anti-Castro Cubans directly against Fidel Castro undermined the CIA's credibility. However, the reputation of the agency and its director declined drastically after the Bay of Pigs Invasion fiasco and Allen Dulles and his staff (including Deputy Director for Plans Richard M. Bissell, Jr. and Deputy Director Charles Cabell) were forced to resign in September 1961.
President Kennedy reportedly said he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds."
George H. W. Bush was a fund raiser and eventually a recruiter for Operation 40.
Later Life
Dulles published the book The Craft of Intelligence (ISBN 1-59228-297-0) in 1963.
On November 29, 1963, President Lyndon Baines Johnson appointed Dulles as one of seven commissioners of the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of the U.S. President John F. Kennedy, though Kennedy had bitterly fired him.
The appointment was later criticized by some historians, who have noted that Kennedy had fired him, and he was logically unlikely to be impartial in passing the important judgements charged to the Warren Commission.
Despite his knowledge of the several assassination plots by the CIA against Castro, he is not documented to have mentioned these plots to any investigating authorities during the Warren Commission.
In 1969 Dulles died of influenza, complicated by pneumonia, at the age of 75. He was buried in Greenmount Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland.
Accusations of Financial Ties to The Third Reich
In 1994, John Loftus and Mark Aarons published "The Secret War Against the Jews" where they described Allen Dulles "as one of the worst traitors in American history, an economic version of Benedict Arnold."
They suggest Dulles was instrumental in financing Nazi Germany.
Dulles, according to these authors, created a financial network among Nazi corporations, American oil, and Saudi Arabia.
Together with his brother John Foster and Jack Philby, Allen Dulles established an international financial network for the benefit of the Third Reich.
Near the end of World War II, Dulles successfully directed the smuggling of Nazi money back to his Western clients, carefully evading Allied surveillance.
Like Jack Philby, the authors consider Allen Dulles to be an "archetypical upper-crust" anti-Semite.
In The Media
In the film The Good Shepherd, William Hurt portrays the fictional head of the CIA, Phillip Allen, who appears to be based on Dulles.
In the film JFK, Jim Garrison suspects Dulles as having a role in John Kennedy's assassination and attempts to subpoena him.
Source for the above: Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_We...
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John Loftus
Allen W. Dulles
Allen W. Dulles and editor/author - Neal H. Petersen
Allen Welsh Dulles
Allen W. Dulles
Allen W. Dulles
Glen Yeadon
Bentley wrote: "I have to ask everyone what they think of the CIA's covert mission goal? And when an organization becomes a rogue entity; when is it time for it to go or be thoroughly overhauled?Chapter Thirtee..."
I think covert action is necessary for state survival and it has always been that way in human history.
I'm not ready to say it was rogue, but it is open to thought. What might be lost here is that the mission states at the direction of the President. I think Eisenhower knew in general what the CIA was doing. I don't think he was happy with the outcomes or at least the sloppy methods. I do wonder how much Eisenhower was in the loop. I fear not as much as he should.
To me there is no doubt the CIA should have been overhauled early on under Truman. It was failing in its mission and suffered from poor leadership. So many government agencies have been investigated and changed over the years for so much less. The CIA had enough clout and political cleverness to block it.
I liked the opening sentence to Chapt. 13. By the Wikipedia post, I'm unsure he really was qualified to run this agency. Now he gets lured over to the "sexy" covert ops game at a costly price. I do think Dulles and Hoover have a lot in common.
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Allen Welsh Dulles is speaking concerning:
The Role of Intelligence in Policy Making
http://www.blackopradio.com/black252b...
He does reveal a lot about his personal feelings now and again. He said that Pearl Harbor was not the result of not gathering intelligence but not using the intelligence they had.
Moderator was Professor Arthur von Mehren, 1922-2006:
Here is the writeup on him:
Post Date: January 18, 2006
Arthur von Mehren
Arthur Taylor von Mehren, the Story Professor of Law Emeritus, died on January 16 at the age of 83.
In addition to educating thousands of Harvard Law students over the course of a 50-year teaching career, von Mehren was a pioneer in comparative and private international law. He helped to develop new thinking on a range of legal issues including international jurisdictions, commercial arbitration and comparative constitutional law.
"All of us in legal education owe a debt of gratitude to Arthur von Mehren, who was a trailblazer in his field," said Dean Elena Kagan. "At a time when law schools are increasing their focus on comparative and international law, Arthur's contributions have provided us with a strong and enduring foundation."
"Arthur von Mehren was a towering figure in the fields of international jurisdiction, choice of laws, comparative law and international commercial arbitration," said Professor Peter Murray, who organized a symposium honoring von Mehren's career in September 2002. At the two-day event, von Mehren was presented with Law and Justice in a Multistate World, a collection of more than 54 articles and essays written by leading academics. "He was one of the last of a generation of legal scholars trained in the immediate aftermath of World War II. His work spanned a time in which Europe arose from the ashes of that conflict to create a new legal and political order, which is still evolving."
During his remarkable career, von Mehren studied law in three countries, taught in nine, and authored over 200 publications, including 10 books. Murray noted that von Mehren maintained a demanding teaching and research regimen up until the point of his death. His work comparing German and American civil procedure has remained definitive for nearly 50 years.
"Arthur von Mehren was a true giant in the area of comparative and international law," said Professor Dan Coquillette, an expert on the history of American legal education. "The leadership and stature he brought to Harvard Law School was extraordinary. He put Harvard on the map globally."
Born on August 10, 1922 in Albert Lea, Minn., von Mehren graduated from Harvard College in 1942 and from Harvard Law School in 1945. In 1946 he was awarded his doctorate in government from Harvard and was appointed assistant professor at HLS. von Mehren spent the first three years of his more than 50-year career at Harvard Law School in full-time study of Swiss, German and French law at the Universities of Zurich and Paris. In 1953 he was named a tenured professor of law at Harvard and in 1976 assumed the Story Professorship. Since 1991 he has been the Story Professor of Law, Emeritus.
von Mehren founded the Joseph Story Fellow program, under which talented young German academics would come to work as his research assistant for one year periods. The 12 graduates of this program are now members of both German and American law faculties. At the time of his death, the Story Fellow alumni were in the process of preparing a commemorative volume of essays to be published in his honor.
A memorial service in his honor will be held on Wednesday, April 19, 2006, at 3 p.m. in The Memorial Church, Harvard Yard.
Here is a photo of von Mehren:
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THE ADMINISTRATION: The Man with the Innocent Air
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/art...
August 3, 1953
I do not think that this was a man with an innocent air.
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..."
I agree with you Bryan in many ways; I do think that Dulles may have been smoother and more polished from the outside; but inside they (meaning Dulles and Hoover) probably were cut from the same cloth.
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Bryan wrote: "I never fully appreciate the aggressiveness we had in toppling (or trying to topple) governments: Syria, Iraq, Indonesia. I think I knew of these events, but did not connect the dots the author has done. ..."One of the more curious CIA operations involved a Sukarno look-alike who appeared in a CIA-produced porn film.
Your tax dollars at work.
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I have to agree with almost everyone and say how disappointed I am with this display of American activity.I made some notes as I went thru the chapters and share some of them
Chapter 13 –
It is amazing to me that Eisenhower did not take stronger steps. His decision to change to primary aim to be to take advantage of opportunities to feed/sow disruption of Soviet control did not at all emerge during the 1956 Hungarian revolution. That the CIA did not know this revolt was coming made it hard to respond. (Is that what happened in Cairo this week?)
I do remember, being 12 years old at the time, the waiting for us, the Americans, and others to help the revolutionists. I also remember the Russian tanks arriving and nothing came from the West.
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chapter 15
The biggest disappointment is that at the end of this chapter we still have Allan Dulles in charge.
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Thanks to all for the info and comments and references
Mod
On the flip side, with Russian tanks, I don't know if the West was ready to wage a conflict that could break into war over Hungary. However, I think if the CIA had done a better job building its resources and intelligence, we could have helped the rebels so much more than we did (which was little to nothing).
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Bentley wrote: "True Bryan, but I think like anything else when you are dealing with rebels and/or insurgents they probably inflate their position and then the CIA inflates their infiltration success once again wi..."That is right about JFK. He wanted to break the organization apart, but didn't. Clearly Ike wanted to reform it, but did not. I think we are getting a part of the answer why they were not successful, at least during the Dulles' period. It is something I hope we learn more about as we go forward.
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Ike became president because Marshall had to stay in Washington because of President Roosevelt's request. If Marshall had been able not to lead stateside and was a younger man; he is the one who would have been president and a good one too. I never was that enamored with what I have read about Ike as President (what are your thoughts?)
I hope we do too.
Bentley wrote: "Bryan, he didn't because he was assassinated; who knows what he was planning to do the following week or weeks thereafter Ike became president because Marshall had to stay in Washington because ..."
Regarding JFK, I think you are right in part. He had a couple of years after he realized he wanted to dismantle the CIA. However, it takes awhile to reform or scrap a large agency, and with his death, he might not have had the energy or time to do it.
I think Marshall would have made a good president. For Ike, his second term was hard, not as successful in my opinion. He just seems to be reacting, not taking the strategic way as much. He is usually in the bottom of the top ten among rankings. This book makes me want to read some Ike biographies, though ;-)
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I think Marshall would have been fabulous. I agree - I think Ike was a good second in command but not "great" in the very top spot having to come up with strategic vision. That is where Marshall would have dazzled.
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From the Oxford Islamic Studies site:
Qaeda, al-
The base.
Militant organization formed circa 1986 by Osama bin Laden to channel fighters and funds for the Afghan resistance movement.
Became a vehicle for the declaration of international military struggle against governments and Western representatives and institutions in the Muslim world, America, and other parts of the West.
Influenced by the fundamentalist worldview and militant piety of seventh-century Kharijis, Wahhabism, and contemporary Egyptian extremist movements.
Allied with the Taliban regime of Afghanistan; the alliance became a base for a network of organizations and cells throughout the Muslim world.
Transnational in identity and recruitment; global in ideology, strategy, targets, economic transactions, and network of organizations.
Embraces extremist militant views that are rejected by mainstream Muslims.
The following site gives a great deal of information regarding this terrorist group.
http://spaces.brad.ac.uk:8080/pages/v...
From the United States Department of Justice site:
Al Qaeda Training Manual:
http://web.archive.org/web/2005033109...
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In his epic new (NOT NEW NOW) series, the Age of Terror, award-winning journalist Peter Taylor traces the modern history and development of terrorism through four major acts of terror over the last 30 years.
PROGRAM DETAILS
Episode four
In the final programme, Peter Taylor tells the story of Osama Bin Laden's declaration of war on the West.
In 1998, a truck bomb exploded outside the American embassy in Nairobi. Over 200 people died and thousands were injured.
The film tells the survivors' story with moving interviews and archive.
It also features an extraordinary interview with the FBI agent who tracked down and questioned a suspected al-Qaeda bomber.
It was Osama Bin Laden's first major strike in his jihad against America.
The programme provides important insights for anyone trying to understand al-Qaeda's methods of creating terror to this day.
WARNING: SOME GRAPHIC FOOTAGE
http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/news...#
Source: BBC
Here is the entire site so that you can watch all four segments. Be sure to click on the full episodes versus the clips.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes...
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AL Qaeda attempts to build radioactive bombs factory
http://www.coffetoday.com/al-qaeda-at...
Note: Pretty upsetting - the world we live in is not a nice place - hence I guess the CIA
You raise an interesting point: Presidents know how important the CIA is and maybe are afraid to dismantle or undergo a big reform.
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WPIX NEWSROOM
11:01 p.m. EST, February 1, 2011
NEW YORK (WPIX) — Al Qaeda may be setting their eyes on a new target: Wall Street.
U.S. intelligence officials have warned that financial institutions and executives may be at risk, although no specific threat has been made, NBC News reported.
An article in the Jan. 16 issue of the al Qaeda-linked online magazine Inspire encouraged future attacks against the finance industry, which initiated a cause for concern.
The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and NYPD have reportedly been in touch with employees at several of the major banks such as Goldman Sachs, Barclays, and JP Morgan Chase, for the past couple of weeks.
"In the post-9/11 world we routinely give security briefings to security personnel in various parts of the private sector. This was in the course of a periodic update in the evolving threat stream," a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Jim Margolin, told Reuters.
The article also implied using anthrax in an attack, prompting increased security in mailrooms and with the delivery of packages.
The English magazine was first launched in July 2010 aimed at Western Jihadists and features the work of Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who has been linked to the Fort Hood shooting and the attempted December 2009 bombing of a Detroit airliner.
Past issues of the magazine have included instructions on how to make home-made bombs, kill American civilians and have published messages from Osama bin Laden.
http://www.wpix.com/videobeta/8758caf...
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James Jesus Angleton (December 9, 1917 – May 12, 1987) was a long-serving chief of the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) counter-intelligence (CI) staff. His official position within the organisation was entitled Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counter-Intelligence (ADDOCI).
According to one-time Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms: "In his day, Jim was recognized as the dominant counterintelligence figure in the non-communist world."
Investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein agrees with the high regards given to Angleton by his colleagues in the intelligence business, and adds that Angleton earned the "trust... of six CIA directors -- including Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, Allen W. Dulles and Richard Helms. They kept Angleton in key positions and valued his work."
Early life
James Angleton was born in Boise, Idaho, to James Hugh Angleton and Carmen Mercedes Moreno. His parents met in Mexico while his father was a cavalry officer serving under General John Pershing. James Hugh Angleton purchased the NCR franchise in pre-war Italy, where he became head of the American Chamber of Commerce and later joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
Angleton spent much of his youth in Milan, Italy, where his family moved after his father bought NCR's Italian subsidiary, then studied as a boarder at Malvern College in England, before going to Yale.
Angleton was a poet and, as a Yale undergraduate, editor, with Reed Whittemore, of the literary magazine Furioso, which published many of the best-known poets of the inter-war period, including William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings and Ezra Pound.
He carried on an extensive correspondence with Pound, Cummings and T. S. Eliot, among others and was particularly influenced by William Empson, author of Seven Types of Ambiguity. He was trained in the New Criticism at Yale by Maynard Mack and others, chiefly Norman Holmes Pearson, a founder of American Studies, and briefly studied law at Harvard.
He joined the US Army in March, 1943, and in July married Cicely d'Autremont, a Vassar alumna from Tucson, Arizona.
During the Second World War Angleton served under Pearson in the counter-intelligence branch (X-2) of the Office of Strategic Services in London, where he met the famous double agent Kim Philby.
Angleton was chief of the Italy desk for X-2 in London by February, 1944 and in November was transferred to Italy as commander of SCI [Secret Counterintelligence] Unit Z, which handled ULTRA intelligence based on intercepts of German radio communications.
By the end of the war he was head of X-2 for all of Italy. He remained in Italy after the war, establishing connections with other secret intelligence services and playing a major role in the victory of the US-supported Christian Democratic Party over the USSR-supported Italian Communist Party in the 1948 elections.
CIA Career
Rise in influence in the CIA
Returning to Washington, he was employed by the various successor organizations to the O.S.S., eventually becoming one of the founder-officers of the Central Intelligence Agency.
In May, 1949 he was made head of Staff A of the CIA’s Office of Special Operations, where he was responsible for the collection of foreign intelligence and liaison with the CIA’s counterpart organizations.
Beginning in 1951 Angleton was responsible for liaison with Israel's Mossad and Shin Bet agencies, "the Israeli desk," crucial relationships that he managed for the remainder of his career.
During the next five years, Angleton helped put in place the structure of the new Agency and participated, to some extent, in the "rollback" operations associated with Frank Wisner in Albania, Poland, and other countries, concerning all of which Angleton counseled caution and all of which failed.
He worked particularly closely with his British counterpart, and familiar, Kim Philby, who, being groomed to head the Secret Intelligence Service, was also in Washington. The Angletons developed a varied social set in Washington, including professional acquaintances like the Philbys, poets, painters and journalists. In 1951, Philby’s colleagues Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean traveled to Moscow. Philby was, in effect, expelled from Washington, suspected of having tipped them off to imminent exposure based on the VENONA materials (decoded Soviet communications).
Chief of the counterintelligence staff of the CIA
In 1954 Allen Dulles, who had recently become Director of Central Intelligence, named Angleton head of the Counterintelligence Staff, a position that Angleton retained for the rest of his CIA career. Dulles also assigned Angleton responsibility for coordination with allied intelligence services.
In general, Angleton's career at CIA can be divided into three areas of responsibility: foreign intelligence activities, counterintelligence, and domestic intelligence activities.
Under the heading of foreign intelligence, there was the Israeli desk, the Lovestone Empire, and a variety of smaller operations.
The Israeli connection was of interest to Angleton for the information that could be obtained about the Soviet Union and aligned countries from émigrés to Israel from those countries and for the utility of the Israeli foreign intelligence units for operations in third countries. Angleton's connections with the Israeli secret intelligence services were useful in obtaining from the Israeli Shin Bet a transcript of Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 speech to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Congress denouncing Stalin.
The Lovestone Empire is a term for the network run for the CIA by Jay Lovestone, once head of the Communist Party of the United States, later a trade union leader, who worked with foreign unions, using covert funds to construct a worldwide system of anti-communist unions. Finally, there were individual agents, especially in Italy, who reported to Angleton.
It is quite possible that there were other foreign intelligence activities for which Angleton was responsible, for example, in Southeast Asia and in the Caribbean.
Angleton's primary responsibilities as chief of the counterintelligence staff of the CIA, counterintelligence, have given rise to a considerable literature focused, in particular, on his efforts to identify any Soviet or Eastern Bloc agents working in American secret intelligence agencies. As such agents have come to be called "moles", operations intended to find them have come to be called "Molehunts".
Three books dealing with Angleton take these matters as their central theme: Tom Mangold's Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: The CIA's Master Spy Hunter, David C. Martin's Wilderness of Mirrors: Intrigue, Deception, and the Secrets that Destroyed Two of the Cold War's Most Important Agents and David Wise's Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors that Shattered the CIA.
Secret intelligence agencies have two primary functions: obtaining secrets, often from other secret intelligence agencies, which is intelligence work per se, and protecting secrets and preventing penetration, which is counterintelligence.
There is a natural tension between those employees of secret intelligence agencies whose responsibilities include recruiting and managing agents, spies, and those whose responsibilities include preventing the agents of other secret intelligence services from penetrating their service.
A director of counterintelligence's job description assumes that there will be efforts by other secret intelligence agencies to penetrate his or her own agency.
Angleton thought that all secret intelligence agencies could be assumed to be penetrated by others, or, at least, that a reasonable chief of counterintelligence should assume so.
The opposite assumption, that there was no penetration, would, of course, lead to complacency and, perhaps, facilitate the work of enemy agents.
Prudence demands the assumption of penetration. In addition to such deductions from basic principles, Angleton had direct experience of ways in which secret intelligence services could be penetrated. There was the manipulation of the German services in WWII by means of ULTRA; there was the direct penetration of the British services by the Cambridge spies and their indirect penetration of the American services by means of the liaison activities of Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and perhaps others, and there were the highly successful efforts of the American secret intelligence services in regard to allied, hostile and Third World services. The combination of Angleton's close association with Philby and Philby's duplicity caused Angleton to double-check "potential problems." Philby was confirmed as a Soviet mole when he eluded those sent to capture him, and defected.
Philby said that Angleton had been "a brilliant opponent," and a fascinating friend who seemed to be "catching on" before Philby's departure, thanks to CIA employee William King Harvey, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, who had voiced his suspicions regarding Philby and others who Angleton suspected were Soviet agents.
Angleton's position in the CIA, his close relationship with Richard Helms, in particular, his experience and character, made him particularly influential. As in all bureaucracies, this influence brought him the enmity of those who had different views. The conflict between the "Angletonians" and the "Anti-Angletonians" has played out in the public sphere generally in publications about the mole hunts and, in particular, in regard to two Soviet defectors (among many): Anatoliy Golitsyn and Yuri Nosenko.
Golitsyn and Nosenko
Although Golitsyn was a questionable source (he also claimed that British Prime Minister Harold Wilson was a KGB agent), Angleton accepted significant information obtained from his debriefing by the CIA. In fact, it is claimed that Golitsyn, in asking to defect rather than to become a double agent, implied that the CIA had already been seriously compromised by the KGB. Golitsyn may have concluded that the CIA failed to debrief him correctly because his debriefing was misdirected by a mole in the Soviet Russia Division, limiting his debriefing to a review of photographs of Soviet embassy staff to identify KGB officers and refusing to discuss KGB strategy. After Golitsyn raised this possibility with MI5 in a subsequent debriefing in Britain, MI5 raised the same concern with Angleton, who responded by requesting that DCI Richard Helms allow him to assume responsibility for Golitsyn and his further debriefing.
In 1964, Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer working out of Geneva, Switzerland, insisted that he needed to defect to the USA, as his role as a double-agent had been discovered, prompting his recall to Moscow.
Nosenko was allowed to defect, although his credibility was immediately in question because the CIA was unable to verify a KGB recall order.
Nosenko made two controversial claims: that Golitsyn was not a defector but a KGB plant, and that he had information on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by way of the KGB's history with Lee Harvey Oswald during the time that Oswald lived in the Soviet Union.
More controversially, former New York congressman and lawyer, Mark Lane, alleged that Angleton might have been directly involved in the conspiracy to murder Kennedy. It was known, according to Lane, that under Angleton's counterintelligence staff was a team of assassins under the command of a Marine colonel named Boris Pash. This assassination team would be employed to deal with counterintelligence threats that could not be tried in an open legal proceeding due to security risk and sensitivity.
Source: Wikipedia
The History Book Club
Books mentioned in this topic
Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans: 1976 Us Senate Report on Illegal Wiretaps and Domestic Spying by the FBI, CIA and Nsa (other topics)James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence (other topics)
The Passenger (other topics)
Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton - Cia's Master Spy Hunter (other topics)
Spytime: The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Michael Holzman (other topics)Stieg Larsson (other topics)
Tom Mangold (other topics)
William F. Buckley Jr. (other topics)
Chris Petit (other topics)
More...
For the week of January 31st - February 6th, we are reading approximately the next 30 pages of Legacy of Ashes.
This thread will discuss the following chapters and pages:
Week Five - January 31st - February 6th -> Chapters THIRTEEN, FOURTEEN, and FIFTEEN p. 122 - 155
THIRTEEN - Wishful Blindness and FOURTEEN - Ham-Handed Operations of All Kinds and FIFTEEN - A Very Strange War
Remember folks, these weekly non spoiler threads are just that - non spoiler. There are many other threads where "spoiler information" can be placed including the glossary and any of the other supplemental threads.
We will open up a thread for each week's reading. Please make sure to post in the particular thread dedicated to those specific chapters and page numbers to avoid spoilers. We will also open up supplemental threads as we have done for other spotlighted reads.
We kicked off this book on January 3rd. We look forward to your participation. Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other noted on line booksellers do have copies of the book and shipment can be expedited. The book can also be obtained easily at your local library, on iTunes for the ipad, etc. However, be careful, some audible formats are abridged and not unabridged.
There is still a little time remaining to obtain the book and get started. There is no rush and we are thrilled to have you join us. It is never too late to get started and/or to post.
Welcome,
~Bentley
Week of January 31st (Week Five of our Discussion)
Week Five - January 31st - February 6th -> Chapters THIRTEEN, FOURTEEN, and FIFTEEN p. 122 - 155
THIRTEEN - Wishful Blindness and FOURTEEN - Ham-Handed Operations of All Kinds and FIFTEEN - A Very Strange War
This is a link to the complete table of contents and syllabus thread:
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/4...
We are off to a good beginning.
TO SEE ALL WEEK'S THREADS SELECT VIEW ALL
Remember this is a non spoiler thread.