Dirty counter-terrorism
Here’s a fascinating—and chilling—2006 Atlantic article by Matthew Teague about the world of terrorists and double-agents. The specific setting is the British counter-war against the IRA. But the situation it describes is relevant to our own war with Islamicist terrorism.
The article was mentioned by “James Drake” in a comment made on my post about the murder of the CIA operatives by a double agent in Afghanistan. The CIA officers in Afghanistan appear to have shown a very unfortunate laxity about following the usual security precautions against double agents.
Compare and contrast, if you will, to the attitude of the British described in the IRA article. They showed a hardness bordering on amorality, one that raises many deep and troubling ethical questions. How far to the dark side is it necessary to go in order to eliminate a greater darkness? At what point can we say that we have become so like the enemy that the two are barely distinguishable?
Once you read the piece, you will understand that all our furor over something as relatively mild as waterboarding is almost comical in comparison. Here’s an excerpt (the man known as “Fulton” is a double agent working for the British against the IRA):
Each night Fulton rocked himself to sleep repeating the mantra his handlers had given him: “The greater good. The greater good. The greater good.” He and [another double agent] engaged in a difficult mathematics, a calculus of souls. If a man kills thirty people to save 3,000, has he done right? What about thirty for 300? Or thirty for thirty-one?
At one point I asked Fulton whether, in light of the human toll he would exact in the course of his career, someone could have served the greater good by killing him as a young man. I meant the question to be rhetorical. But Fulton just nodded.
“Yes,” he said.
I don’t know whether Fulton was correct in his answer. But I certainly understand the question. Winning a war requires making extraordinarily tough choices among a host of profoundly dreadful alternatives, trying to find the least bad one, and Fulton was the agent of some terrible things. I also understand that, if the article indicates the sort of ruthlessness and hardness we need to win this fight, we’re in big trouble.
[NOTE: This post reminded me of the quote usually attributed to George Orwell: “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” The idea is true, but the quote may not be his; here’s Wiki on that score:
* Alternative: “We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us.”
* In his 1945 “Notes on Nationalism”, Orwell claimed that the statement, “Those who ”˜abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf” was a “grossly obvious” fact. “Notes on Nationalism”
* Notes: allegedly said by George Orwell although there is no evidence that Orwell ever wrote or uttered either of these versions of this idea. They do bear some similarity to comments made in an essay that Orwell wrote on Rudyard Kipling, when quoting from one of his poems. Orwell did write, in his essay on Kipling, that the latter’s “grasp of function, of who protects whom, is very sound. He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.” (1942)
o “Yes, making mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep” – Rudyard Kipling (Tommy)
o “I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it.” – Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men)
* Alternative: “We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” – Winston Churchill (miscellaneous quotation, no date)
In the case of the double agents in the Teague article, those “rough men” sometimes inflicted violence on the innocent as well, as part of the fight to eliminate terrorists who would inflict even greater harm on the innocent.]
I also understand that, if the article indicates the sort of ruthlessness and hardness we need to win this fight, we’re in big trouble.
Yes, probably. It really hasn’t seeped in many Westerner’s heads that there are a number of folks who claim to be a Muslim who really want to see us dead. They hold our religions in contempt. They hold our freedoms in contempt. They hold our institutions in contempt. They hold us in contempt.
One comment I saw a while back expressed a statement that the poster hoped that after the Afghanistan invasion, a thousand years from now, Afghan mothers would quiet their rowdy children with If you don’t behave, the Americans will come and get you. I don’t disagree with that sentiment.
This is an existential fight.
Provisional Irish Republican Army
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_Irish_Republican_Army
There are allegations of contact with the East German Stasi, based on the testimony of a Soviet defector to British intelligence Vasili Mitrokhin. Mitrokhin revealed that although the Soviet KGB gave some weapons to the Marxist Official IRA, it had little sympathy with the Provisionals
The IRA has received some training and support from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In 1977, the Provisionals received a ‘sizeable’ arms shipment from the PLO, including small arms, rocket launchers and explosives, but this was intercepted at Antwerp after the Israeli intelligence alerted its European counterparts.[115] In the 1980s, the Provisionals also had some contact with Hezbollah
more at the link…
Official Irish Republican Army
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_IRA
and how many know that the official IRA is marxist?
During the 1960s, the republican movement under the leadership of Cathal Goulding radically re-assessed their ideology and tactics after the dismal failure of the IRA’s Border Campaign in the years 1956-62. They were heavily influenced by popular front ideology and drew close to Communist thinking. A key intermediary body was the Communist Party of Great Britain’s organisation for Irish exiles, the Connolly Association. The Marxist analysis was that the conflict in Northern Ireland was a “bourgeois nationalist” one between the Protestant and Catholic working classes, fomented and continued by the ruling class. Its effect was to depress wages, since worker could be set against worker. They concluded that the first step on the road to a 32-county Socialist Republic in Ireland was the “democratisation” of Northern Ireland (i.e., the removal of discrimination against Catholics) and radicalisation of the southern working class. This would allow “class politics” to develop, eventually resulting in a challenge to the hegemony of both “British imperialism” and the respective unionist and nationalist establishments North and South of the Irish border
and
The sense that the IRA seemed to be drifting away from its conventional republican and nationalist roots into Marxism angered the more traditional republicans. Many in the Official IRA later referred to the Provisional IRA as “the rosary brigade” because of what they saw as the Catholic and romantic nationalist ideology of the latter. Some radicals believed that the Irish government, MI5, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had conspired to cultivate the split because they were afraid of another Cuba in Europe’s “backyard”. The Arms Crisis provided evidence that some members of the Irish (Fianna Fé¡il) government had attempted to supply arms and funds to a variety of individuals in Northern Ireland. The radicals viewed Northern Protestants with unionist views as “fellow Irishmen deluded by bourgeois loyalties, who needed to be engaged in dialectical debate”[citation needed]. As a result, they were reluctant to use force to defend Catholic areas of Belfast when they came under attack from loyalists – a role the IRA had performed since the 1920s.[5] Since the civil rights marches began in 1968, there had been many cases of street violence. The Royal Ulster Constabulary had been shown on television in undisciplined baton charges, and had already killed three non-combatant civilians, one a child. The Orange Order’s “marching season” during the summer of 1969 had been characterised by violence on both sides, which culminated in the three-day “Battle of the Bogside” in Derry.
so once again.. the same people are involved, and yet most of us dont know.
and what is Official Sinn Féin?
Workers Party of Ireland en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Sinn_F%C3%A9in
and what is Provisional Sinn Féin or just Sinn Féin?
they were taken over by marxists…
like most existing groups of the 50s-70s
(like feminists too, and other social fringe groups)
The archives also show the vengefulness of the Soviet machine towards those accused of betrayals. They considered maiming the ballet stars, Rudolf Nuryev and Natalya Makarova, who defected to the West in 1961 and 1970 respectively. The plan was abandoned because the KGB feared exposure and a wave of public opprobrium.
The files also show how the KGB planned to recruit President Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Cyrus Vance, who later became secretary of state. Both attempts failed.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/the-spy-scandal-mitrokhin-archive–how-mi6-stole-details-of-kgb-plots-1118771.html
The KGB ran scores of secret “false flag” military operations inside Afghanistan during the 1980s.
In these, Soviet-trained Afghan guerrilla units posed as CIA-supported, anti-Soviet mujaheddin rebels to create confusion and flush out genuine rebels for counterattacking. By January 1983, there were, according to Mitrokhin, 86 armed, KGB-trained “false bands,” as they were called, operating throughout Afghanistan. These disclosures also throw new light on the chronic mujaheddin infighting during the 1980s. A perhaps significant number of the clashes among mujaheddin groups during the 1980s, which set the stage for the catastrophic civil war in the 1990s, apparently were carried out deliberately by paid KGB agents. A KGB operative but increasingly disaffected following the bloody suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 and the dissident movement, Vasiliy Mitrokhin decided to compile his own account of the KGB’s foreign operations when he was put in charge in 1972 of the transfer of the foreign operations archives from the KGB’s headquarters at Lubyanka in Moscow to Yasenevo southwest of the capital. Working in complete secrecy for over ten years, Mitrokhin first took notes in longhand while working in the archives and later, once safely in his dacha, sorted and transcribed them. They are now being made available at no charge by the CWIHP at http://cwihp.si.edu.
Vasili Mitrokhin, The KGB in Afghanistan – Geographical Volume 1
tinyurl.com/ydxcq4z
The “Rules of Engagement” fettering the hands of our warriors in the GWOT are horrid enough. To similarly shackle our Black Ops-Counter Intel knights is inexcusable. They are SUPPOSED to fight dirty in order to protect us and to WIN. It’s a sometimes(often) dirty-stinking business. DON’T handcuff them from doing what they need to do.
The subjects of the first volume, published in 1999, were KGB operations in Europe and North America. The second volume, also researched and published in cooperation with Professor Christopher Andrew of Cambridge University, deals with the hitherto less known activities of the KGB in the rest of the world. If there was ever any doubt about the extensive network and the scale of secret operations by the KGB, this book and its predecessor will certainly take that doubt away. It not only shows the expected implication of major icons of the left, such as Fidel Castro and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, but also reveals, for example, the huge presence of the KGB in India in the 1970s and the unconscious cooperation of Indira Gandhi with the organisation. For many on the left it will be a tremendous shock that Chile’s president, Salvador Allende Gossens, codenamed Leader, was on the KGB’s payroll. This arrogant politician had been in contact with the KGB since the 1950s and was by far the most important asset of the KGB in South America. Contact with Allende was maintained until he committed suicide during the Pinochet coup in 1973.
Another explosive revelation is the fact that the KGB turned out to be a sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East. Dr Wadi Haddad, who had the dubious honour of standing at the cradle of modern terrorism, was recruited by the KGB in 1970. He would remain in close contact with the Soviet secret service until he died of a brain haemorrhage in East Germany in 1978.
and i like this one… the last quote put in by the left to discredit mitrokhen… but the statement is a lie.
in early 1970 Haddad was recruited by the KGB as an agent, codenamed NATSIONALIST. Thereafter, in deep secrecy the Soviets helped to fund and arm the PFLP. The KGB had advance warning of its major operations and almost certainly sanctioned the most significant, such as the September 1970 hijackings. Haddad remained a highly valued agent till his death in 1978. Mitrokhin is not universally regarded as a reliable source.
A letter by Yuri Andropov allegedly confirming Haddad’s role as an agent was independently discovered in Soviet archives by Vladimir Bukovsky, and has been published since
mitrokhen IS considered a VERY reliable source, with prosecutions and cache findings… so that last statement was inserted falsely.
he isnt a reliable source except the next sentence confirms him (again)
if you want to know more about the terrorists, then read golytsin.
139 of his predictions have come true… over 90%… including the fall of the soviets…
He first ran into difficulties when he said there were KGB agents within the CIA.
Like most bureaucratic organizations, the CIA could not face the truth.
Angleton’s views were resented. In 1974 the CIA’s new boss, William Colby,
began to zero in on Angleton. Colby later admitted to journalist David Wise:
“Yeah, I was trying to ease … (Angleton) out.” In order to accomplish
this, Colby began to reorganize the CIA. This reorganization weakened CIA
counterintelligence, destroying Angleton’s effectiveness.
Colby then engaged in a further intrigue. In December 1974 he met with
reporter Seymour Hersh of the New York Times. Colby confirmed a story Hersh
was working on about CIA domestic spying. Such spying is against the rules
and Angleton was implicated. Hersh left Colby’s office and rushed to
telephone Abe Rosenthal, his boss at the Times. “Abe, I got it,” said Hersh.
The story led to the resignation of Angleton. America’s secret war was lost.
With the fall of Angleton, Golitsyn’s warnings about Russian deception strategy were officially and finally discredited.
ah… but they werent… only in the eyes of the administration which ignored him. (favoring a plant named nosenko).
“As a crystal-ball gazer,” wrote Mangold, “Golistyn has been unimpressive.” Mangold listed six predictions by Golitsyn that failed to come true. Six failed predictions out of 145. Mangold forgot to mention the 139 predictions that proved correct.
Golitsyn’s description of controlled democratization and liberalization in
Russia was so close to the actual events, which occurred from late 1989
through 1991, that researcher Mark Riebling, author of “Wedge: The Secret
War Between the FBI and CIA,” credited Golitsyn with 94 percent accuracy.
Since that time Golitsyn’s accuracy has increased further. His prediction
that Russia and China would unite into “one clenched fist” at the end of the
final phase of the long-range strategy has come true. Now Golitsyn has
proved correct in 140 out of 145 predictions.
page 229 of
Golitsyn’s book, “The Perestroika Deception.” he predicts the rise of putin as a nationalist leader…
But this nationalist government, says Golitsyn, would be Communist at its core. Nationalism is simply a motivational device to jump-start the old Soviet machinery. The Russian people are more energized by nationalism than by Marxism-Leninism, so the trick is to use the slogans and propaganda which most efficiently serve the cause of militarization. That is the key to Putin’s policy. That is why “the Bear” faction in the Duma has been given life — as the second strongest political party after the Communists.
“Since an outright military or nationalist
government might prejudice the flow of Western aid and the continued ‘cooperation’ with the West … it is more likely that the Kremlin strategists will opt for … a new President and Commander-in-Chief with a military background and a ‘reformist’ Prime Minister, in the context of overtly tighter KGB control.”
Very briefly, ?the final phase? theory is this:
Anatoliy Golitsyn (a Ukrainian who became a major in the KGB) defected to the West in 1961. He had first-hand knowledge of a planned restructuring of Russia?s intelligence organizations combined with a long-range plan of strategic deception against the West aimed at its eventual destruction.
He said that the Sino-Soviet split was a ?scissors strategy? which would fake enmity between these two communist nations in order to play off the West?s expected response of taking advantage of the split by making China a stronger nation in order to neutralize Russia?s threat. (Sino-Soviet border clashes in the 60?s ? where real battles were fought, real blood was shed, and real lives were lost were all part of the larger plan and factored in as acceptable, calculated ?losses.?)
Golitsyn said that Nixon?s rapprochement of China was exactly what the scissors strategy had in mind and one of its objectives. (Look at China today.)
Golitsyn said, that in ?the final phase? of the strategic deception, Russia and China would become openly allied (note the formal alliance of 16 July 2001), but that such alliance would not alarm the West ? at the time of their future open alliance – due to the successful effect of the scissors strategy on the West?s perceptions.
He said the West has failed to properly analyze developments in the East due to a flawed understanding of the concepts behind Russia and China?s thinking, which is based on dialectical thought. The long-range strategic deception is very much based on the apparent manifestation of opposition forces, which look the West as signs of chaos or dissembled, fractured unions.
In 1984 (although written and warned about long before then), Golitsyn?s book New Lies for Old was published (Gorbachev did not come to power until 1985 ? the USSR did not ?dissolve? until Christmas Day, 1991). In his book, he said the long-range plan of strategic deception would enter into the most dangerous phase of the plan ? ?the final phase? ? with the advent of a leader who would bring about a new twist to the deception that would convince the West of the USSR?s eventual downfall. The deception would entail social and economic rationale behind a surge of independence in the Eastern Bloc. Liberalizations would be instituted. The Warsaw Pact might dissolve. The Berlin Wall might be taken down. East and West Germany might be unified. And, even the USSR itself might dissolve under the surging ?democratic? forces. (Golitsyn predicted over 139 events that would manifest themselves as all part and parcel of the strategic deception. See Mark Riebling?s site that addresses Golitsyn?s predictions: link )
A Czechoslovakian defector (Feb ?68), MG Jan Sejna, wrote about a similar deception (We Will Bury You (1982) entailing the apparent dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in furtherance of leading the West astray in its analysis of the East Bloc?s future events. Sejna also emphasized the strategic use of domestic organized criminal elements which would grow to gobble up the rest of the world?s criminal syndicates in order to implement future ploys against the West while providing plausible deniability of state-sponsored provocations of the Kremlin.
In 1995, Golitsyn wrote another book, The Perestroika Deception, which continued to explain the more recent manifestations of ?the final phase,? which included the fake ?August Coup? in Russia as well as other matters.
Long story short, Golitsyn was fired by the CIA in 1969 as a crackpot ?paranoid? and later got rid of his main supporter, James Angleton, in 1974. Angleton was unique in intelligence history getting his start in the WWII OSS (Office of Strategic Services) and its transformation into the modern CIA ? he was the chief of CIA?s counterintelligence branch and considered by many as an absolute genius, especially in matters of understanding Soviet deception practices and techniques.
It is a bit complicated to explain how and why these two voices within the CIA were eventually snuffed out, but suffice it to say, they were. Both Golitsyn and Angleton were eventually tarred and feathered by the established group think at CIA and have been relegated as ?paranoids? responsible for the development of ?sick think? at Langley.
I’d always heard that quote originated with Heinlein. Even if it didn’t, it sounds like something he’d say. Anyhoo
I’ve devoted a lot of thought to ROE over the years due to the horror stories I’ve heard from close friends serving. When I’ve been brave enough to voice my ideas in polite company, its usually enough to make sure I don’t get invited to any parties.
I believe the United States could win many battles without violence just by taking these two, huge and politically abhorrant (to the ruling elite) steps:
The U.N. must be evicted from our shores and our membership in it terminated. Take no other action, in regards to them but that. Just a diplomatic, “Thanks, but in these trying times, our sovereignty is paramount. Best of luck to you all.” (sotto voce: Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out…”)
Second, the abrogation of all Geneva conventions.
Our enemies would fear a Mad Dog. Would we still need to fight? Of course. But I imagine many of our enemies would think twice.
I realize this is nothing but a fantasy. Sometimes, given the current state of things, I need to retreat into one. Like they’d go willingly anyway, even if our leaders had the resolve to do it. Damn squatters.
“Compare and contrast, if you will, to the attitude of the British described in the IRA article. They showed a hardness bordering on amorality, one that raises many deep and troubling ethical questions. How far to the dark side is it necessary to go in order to eliminate a greater darkness? At what point can we say that we have become so like the enemy that the two are barely distinguishable?”
I think there are better reasons for worry in the war on terror than what the British did to the IRA. Personally, as an Irish woman, I’m fine with wiping them out. People like that cannot be stopped with normal tactics.
“Dirty Counter-terrorism” is an oxymoron.
If it’s not, it isn’t counter-terrorism.
I’ve avoided this thread for a variety of reasons; not that it isn’t a good post….
That is all I am saying on this thread.
I don’t get it. You keep saying Fallows. The story credits Matthew Teague.
[from neo-neocon: I will correct. Got some wires crossed there.]
In my comment that neo-neocon referred to in her post I said I’d heard that the US Army had used Indians against their own tribes in the Plains Indian Wars. Here is an historical reference to it.
My previous comment is missing the following quotation from the reference cited.