Customer Reviews

State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration

5 star:		(46)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

EDITED to add note at bottom addressing anonymous sceptic. EDITED 6 Jun 06 to add note of Pentagon failing to capture Bin Laden.

There are three major scoops in this book that earn it five stars where the rest of the book might only merit four:

1) The obvious scoop now before Congress and the press, with respect to the National Security Agency (NSA) eavesdropping on citizens without a warrant.

2) The really really huge scoop, that Charlie Allen, then Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Collection, was able to guide the recruitment of no fewer than 30 Iraqis able to travel back to see their relatives and conclusively document that there was no nuclear program and no weapons of mass destruction--this information was evidently not provided to Congress, the President, or (naturally), the public.

3) Slightly less sensational, the book reveals for the first time that a CIA "bait" operation actually delivered to Iran completely useful plans for creating a nuclear bomb...the CIA "flaws" intended to render the plans unworkable were detected in one glance by a Russian courier scientist, and easily correctable by the Iranians.

Over-all the book renders an important public service by pulling together in one place the many tid-bits that are publicly known, but is distressingly weak on crediting those many other sources (e.g. Jim Bamford, the last word on NSA).

The cover of the book is quite revealing in that it has photos of Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Tenet--those who follow the politics of the Executive know that Cheney is the man pulling the puppet strings, generally without being detected, and it is Cheney that allowed Rumsfeld to blatantly ignore the President, steam-roll Condi Rice, disrespect Tenet, and sideline Colin Powell.

Other major points in the book that merit our attention and respect:

1) According to the author, but consistent with my own experience across three three of CIA's directorates, CIA consistently screws those that try to tell the truth, such as the Chief of Station in Iraq that wrote the report saying the insurgency was going to hurt us badly and we were not winning.

2) CIA developed a "poisonous culture" that sought to mollify the President, avoid conflict with the Pentagon, and generally not be serious about its mission {"ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free")

3) CIA did not blow the whistle on the ramping up of Afghan drug production, and allowed the Pentagon to ignore the urgent calls from the Department of State for aerial spraying and other eradication measures--today Afghanistan provides 80% of the opium on the market.

4) Israel's Mossad briefed the neo-conservatives along lines they were pleased to hear, going around and against the CIA.

There are several minor flaws in the book that would normally reduce my appreciation to four stars, but the above scoops more than compensate. However, they are worth noting:

1) The book seriously over-sells and exaggerates NSA's capabilities. While they can indeed do some wondrous things, on balance NSA is in the 1970's and not at all ready for the modern world of emails, web directories, and phone texting.

2) The book touches on New York Times stories based on "leaks" from the White House but avoids naming Judith Miller or exploring whether she was an Israeli agent of influence.

3) The book touches on torture and rendition, but does not discuss how many have been imprisoned erroneously (in the dozens according to some accounts) or died as a result of torture (as many as two dozen according to some accounts). CIA literally made people "disappear" making it no better than the Argentines or the Israelis or the Nazis. Most of CIA is honest; a small segment engaged in torture and renditions is out of control.

4) The book supports the CIA field claims that the Northern Alliance allowed Bin Laden to escape, but fails to mention the well-documented facts that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, without consulting anyone, gave the Pakistanis an air corridor, ostensibly to evacuate a few of their "observers," that was used to actually evacuate over 3,000 Taliban and Al Qaeda personnel trapped by US forces in the Tora Bora area; and that CIA tracked Bin Laden for four days from Tora Bora to the Waziristan border, but the Pentagon was too chicken to drop a battalion of Rangers in his path (see my review of "JAWBREAKER."

5) The book comments on the 9-11 Commission being contradicted by open records in many respects, but fails to examine the close relationship between the White House, the Bush Family, and the Saudis, who were complicit in Al Qaeda's global growth and unwilling to help the US until after 9/11 and even then, very marginally.

6) The book has a highly questionable allegation that a single error by a CIA communicator "blew" all CIA Iranian assets. My understanding is that the CIA has been equally incompetent in recruiting Iranians as it was in recruiting Iraqis. This smells like a fish story.

Over-all the book delivers two compelling indictments:

1) Of CIA for self-censorship, pandering to the President and the Vice President, and failing to cover the Middle East properly over a period of decades.

2) Of Cheney and Rumsfeld, for orchestrating a virtual coup in which the President could be ignored, the National Security Advisor steam-rolled, the Secretary of State side-lined, and the entire policy process set aside in favor of Cheney-Rumsfeld dictates.

This is quite an amazing book, and highly recommended.

NOTE TO SCEPTIC: I bought this book from Amazon as soon as it was offered, read it on an airplane to Los Angeles on 10 Jan, and posted my review along with those of three other books I read on the trip, the evening I returned, 13 January. I read a lot, mostly on airplanes and hotel rooms. I put my notes on the flyleaf and mark the books up heavily.

The author, James Risen attempts to write a fair and accurate account of the secret history of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration. He succeeds admirably.

He acknowledges that President Clinton had little interest in the intelligence services, which had already begun to stagnate after the end of the cold war. Not realizing that danger doesn't go away, it only changes shape, the CIA had no assets embedded in the middle east to get the valuable intelligence it required. Most of the regimes maintained control that was so tight it would have taken years for someone to successfully infiltrate any regime.

Then there was bad management and bad decisions. Clinton appointed a director who made it clear he had no interest in the job. Senior CIA personnel left the agency and their experience at the door of retirement. Although a new director named Tenant restored morale, he was not able to provide the leadership the agency needed. He also allowed ingratiating junior analysts to bypass their immediate supervisors to deliver the information that he wanted to hear e.g. that aluminum tubes were used for WMD production.

Tenent also steered clear of information that he knew would not please his bosses. This included the Iraqi-American woman the CIA coaxed into returning home to elicit information from her brother who was working on nuclear development. He told his sister that Americans inadvertantly blasted the facility in the first Gulf War, and that the project was dead in the water. When the Iraqi-American doctor returned with her brother's information, the information was given short shrift.

C.I.A. officers who told the painful truth about the deteriorating conditions in Iraq found themselves defending their careers or being harangued into retirement. The administration was already heavily invested in a series of bad decsions, and as usual bad decision-making goes, they continued with it because they had spent too much time and money defending it.

Enter Don Rumsfeld, the arrogant and smug Defense Secretary whom Risen makes clear was determined to do things his way, and you have the CIA turned on its head. Rumsfeld was determined to make the Defense Intelligence Agency the premier intelligence organization. Rumsfeld implemented his plans even when the administration told him to do otherwise. He simply ignored his boss. But who is responsible for Rumsfeld being, pardon the expression, a loose cannon?

Enter George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Risen makes it clear through his numerous shadowy sources that Cheney and senior White House officials made policy decisions without the knowledge of the President of the United States. This afforded the president deniability for decisions ranging from officially sanctioned torture, wire taps on American citizens, increased heroin prodution in Afghanistan, ad infinitum.

So we end up with a president who fills the role of godfather protected by his vice president and consigilieri, and no one is responsible or accountable for haphazard and cherry-picked intelligence. Risen at least has the guts to put the acountability where it belongs. After all, the president has to take responsibility for something.

One day we will be called to account for invading a sovereign nation that did not threaten us, defining torture as just short of organ failure, sanctioning water board torture, and practicing it with a barbarity we would only expect from our enemies, wiretapping our own citizens in clear violation of the law, and for gaining the enmity of the world.

Let's hope our president takes a better look under the couch before he jokes about not being able to find WMD's somewhere else.

This is the kind of book that may have benefitted from an extra 400 pages. Based primarily on a series of New York Times articles, and hurried into print just fast enough to stare slack-jawed as George W. Bush received an inexplicable boost in the media for defending the very domestic spying program this book exposed, "State of War" feels as if it came covered in Post-It notes and editorial marking saying [insert explanations here later].

A case in point: the book's epilogue ends with the poetic conclusion: "Dreams die hard, but the dreams of the Bush administration died in places like Fallujah, Ramadi, and Tal Afar." Fine, but those geographical slash military references aren't explained anywhere in the book. Clearly you have to know something about Iraq going in; "State of War" is not a definitive history. That's not a problem today in the heat of the moment, but it does indicate that "State of War" is something of a quickie meant to cash in on a story now, and lay forgotten in 20 years when more information comes to light. To make a Watergate reference out of this (because everything comes back to Watergate) this is more likely to be remembered as H.R. Haldeman's "The Ends of Power", rather than "The Haldeman Diaries".

That said, Risen's narrative is very compelling in places, especially when he is telling a story from someone else's point of view. The book is at its most direct and urgent when he describes the Iraqi doctor visiting her nuclear physicist brother in Baghdad on a last-ditch human intelligence gathering misison for the CIA, or when he tells the story of the Russian nuclear scientist secretly paid by the CIA to delivery faulty weapons blueprints to an Iranian embassy in Vienna.

The outline of the book develops the argument that inherent weaknesses in the Bush administration (Cheney and Rumsfelds' tendencies to make their own policy) have made a mockery of American foreign policies, and eviscerated long-standing institutions. I'm no insider so all I can do is stroke my chin and say that Risen writes in a way that sounds believable. At the same time, this is no liberal-slanted "yellow journalism" -- Risen doesn't miss several opportunities to assail Bill Clinton's neglect of the intelligence community, but his facts differ from what Richard Clarke wrote about a few years ago so I am not sure I believe every word he writes. Interestingly, Clarke is only mentioned in passing in "State of War", even though the two books share considerable overlap.

Anyway, Risen follows a story from 9/11, through Afghanistan and Iraq, and then into Iran and perhaps beyond. For those fully supportive of the Bush administration's policies in 2006, this book provides a dose of skepticism. For those already inclined to believe that Bush is steering foreign policy increasingly in the wrong direction, this book provides sobering ammunition.

This is a clear exposition of the CIA's incompetence, and back-door politics within the Bush administration. James Risen exposes several violations of the US Constitution, in terms of blatant infringements of privacy laws committed against the American people. He also outlines the back-channel decision-making between Vice President Cheney and Donald Rumsfield, known old hands at Machiavellian politics, clearly going behind the president's back on key issues regarding world terrorism and the war in Iraq. The key theme in Risen's argument is the incompetence, lack of courage and downright obsequiousness of once Director of the CIA, George Tenet, who appears more of a PR man, one of the "good old boys", the tragic "yes man", letting play ground bullies like Donald Rumsfield call all the shots, attempting to pull the entire US intelligence community under his power - and he has almost succeeded. In this convoluted mess of lies, betrayal and incompetence, Risen has managed to write a clear piece on many touchy issues, revealing a government that has knee-jerked us into a war that has become a quagmire, that some believe is far worse than Vietnam.

The WMD question has currently become old news. When the National Intelligence Estimate (Independent WMD committee) concluded that the CIA's reports regarding Iraq's so-called nuclear program and biological laboratories, "were all wrong" (P. 22)
Risen unpacks the lies, withheld reports and bully tactics that the Bush administration used towards anyone who contradicted their views, is a chilling story of out and out bureaucratic warfare, revealing once again the ineptness of the dwindling CIA. The administration did not want to hear the truth, that is to say, Iraq having folded their nuclear aspirations at the end of the first Gulf War. As the true "yes men" they had become, the CIA gave their bosses the information they required, in order to support their justifications to invade Iraq.

The more pressing story and one that continues to be under investigation, appears in chapter two, The Program. The NSA was given Carte blanch to use their highly sophisticated communication and eaves dropping technology to spy on the American people. President Bush, just after 9/11, secretly authorized the NSA to monitor private communications within America's borders. This is domestic espionage, eavesdropping without the authority of due process - a direct violation of the 4th Amendment of the Constitution. The justification, however, was the fact that the "country is at war". Though, in reality, it certainly does not take a lot of time to discover "probable cause", and get a judge to sign the pertinent warrants. This "secret" violation of civil rights, which the founding father's ensured was included in the constitution for the obvious reasons, should be enough to at least begin a major investigation or at best, begin impeachment proceedings. This secret authorization goes against everything the US stands for and is quite terrifying in its implications.

Risen goes into detail regarding Afghanistan's five billion dollar opium industry, which the Bush administration has conveniently turned a blind eye. Because of neglect, Afghanistan is returning to what it once was - an asylum for al Quada and other terrorists organizations. He also explores the links between the money made from Afghanistan's opium industry and the funding of al Quada itself. The insanity of this is that these links are not being investigated, making the "war on terror" rhetoric an empty farce.

Even more incredible, the Afghani drug king-pin, Noorzai, known to have financed al Quada in the past, offered to make a deal with the American authorities, by offering key information regarding al Quada, however, he was left waiting at the rendezvous point, and told later that the government was too preoccupied with Iraq. Later, Noorzai approached the government again, stating he would come to the US, if granted amnesty for his information. He arrived secretly where; he was arrested, leaving the authorities to explain to the press why a known terrorist was on American soil.

State of War is a short but clear account of CIA incompetence, finally speaking up in the last year, but now no one will listen as they have lost all credibility. The book also analyses CIA and military interrogation techniques, including torture and cruel and unusual punishment, in direct violation of the codes of the Geneva Convention. This was exposed when the Abu Ghraib photos emerged on the Net anonymously, causing international outcry. Risen has given us a concise overview of CIA incompetence and the machinations of the current administration.

Risen gives a very detailed look into the Bush White House and the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. What he shows is infighting and a shocking lack of competence within the various departments. The right hand never seems to know or care what the left hand is doing. It seems that at a time when our country needs leadership, we have to settle for the Keystone Kops. Tenet's incompetence, Rumsfeld's ego, Cheney's empire-lust and Condi's weakness all have conspired to undermine the national security. The most frightening conclusion to be made is that Bush is completely irrelevant in all this. He seems to be a fool motivated by his own narrow ideological and emotional impulses, and the perfect pawn for neocons hell bent on world domination. We are in deep trouble.

A brilliant current history, written by a careful, talented and accurate journalist. Mr. Risen is a member of that rare, dying breed, a journalist who is neither paid off, nor prostituting himself for a political agenda, AND who works hard to dig out the truths behind the lies.
The result is a book that is truly hard to put down, even though the reader is repeatedly tempted, just so he can scream or write a letter to the White House or to his local paper.

Risen makes sense out of much of the history which brought us to the quagmire currently known as Iraq. He confirms much of what many thinking Americans suspect, only to inform us that things are actually much worse.
NSA data mining and domestic spying?
CIA in competition with the FBI and DOD on prisoner torture?
Tenet being rolled repeatedly by Rumsfeld?
Cheney and Rummie actually setting foreign and war policy, to the exclusion of other branches of government?
Condi Rice - an idiot who was way out of her league, and quite probably the worst National Security Adviser ever to mis-serve her president and her country?
Wolfowitz being brainwashed by Israeli Intel, then blaming CIA truth-tellers of lying?
What a list. What a book!

This is a must read book, one that will help the reader make sense of so much and make the reader quite angry at what has happened to our country.

James Risen's "State of War" may be a thin volume but it's as power-packed an indictment as I've witnessed with regard to the Bush administration thus far. It should be read by everyone in and out of Washington....especially neo-conservatives. This book hits the ground running and doesn't let up for one second.

"State of War" is centered around the CIA and its troubling relationship with the Bush White House (although Bill Clinton comes in for a fair share of criticism) as the author gives concise judgments on all of the major players surrounding Bush. There are clear winners and losers in Risen's narrative, as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George Tenet (to name just three) represent both sides. While Tenet is presented as a sycophant, Rumsfeld and Cheney are really in charge with Rumsfeld simply ignoring directives he doesn't like. Colin Powell, as we know, played by the rules and lost out in the first-term power struggle while Condi Rice is portrayed as second-rate and ineffectual. As told by Risen, the current president is either detached, uninterested or unaware of foreign policy, much to the continuing chagrin of a plurality of Americans. The author makes a persuasive case to support this stance.

What makes "State of War" so fascinating beyond the participants is how the Bush people bungled so many things. Richard Clarke gave us a great initial look at this in his excellent book, "Against All Enemies", but Risen takes it even farther (of course much more has unfolded since Clarke's book). Risen's last three chapters deal with the unbelievable mishandling of the situation in Afghanistan, followed by several pages concerning America's complicated relationship with Saudi Arabia and a final chapter regarding MERLIN....a secret plan to confuse Iran on how to assemble a nuclear bomb....a plan that may have actually helped them.

Risen reminds us that Bush ran in 2000 trying to assure Americans that he would surround himself with the best team available. Instead we got the Keystone Kops. While the diversion of Iraq continues, the world becomes less safe, due in large part to over-preening egos and an unwarranted sense of political self-preservation and hubris in the nation's capital. "State of War" is a terrific book and I highly recommend it.

-- Months before the latest Iraq war, the CIA recruited 30 Iraqi-Americans to visit their families and approach members of their families involved in that country's nuclear or WMD program. Every one of the thirty returned to America and reported the same message to their CIA contacts - the WMD programs had been dead for a decade. Their message was promptly ignored.

-- George Tenet was so incessantly busy cultivating his "good old boy" relationship with George Bush, he single-handedly allowed Donald Rumsfeld to militarize the American intelligence system and place it under Department of Defense control.

-- The CIA through its Operation Merlin apparently handed critical nuclear weapons design blueprints to Iraq and likely enhanced Iraq's ability to construct a nuclear WMD.

-- When the first high-ranking Al Qaeda terrorist (Abu Zubaydah) was captured, two bank cards were found on his person, one from Kuwait and one from Saudi Arabia. It appears that the transactoin histories for these accounts were never aggressively investigated by the CIA to help trace terrorist money flows. Furthermore, the financial records for this account at the Saudi bank were seized by Saudi intelligence officials at about the time of Zubaydah's capture and have since conveniently disappeared.

These are just a few of the inside stories James Risen tells in his stunning new book, STATE OF WAR. Risen, a long-time reporter for the New York Times, details the history of the CIA and American intelligence operations under the Bush II Administration, and the story is ugly enough to suggest that the phrase "American intelligence" has become an oxymoron. Risen himself compares the CIA's status by 2004 as "the government's equivalent of Enron." According to Mr. Risen, the CIA has been marginalized, slavishly devoted to technology-based spying to the detriment of first-hand, "feet on the ground" operations, increasingly flying blind in the countries where they are most needed, and politicized into ineffectuality, perhaps beyond repair.

Risen explores a wide range of the CIA operations. He begins with the problematic issue of interrogation (and systematic abuse) of terrorist suspects, focusing heavily on the case of Abu Zubaydah, the first high-ranking Al Qaeda leader captured after 9/11. The next chapter discusses "The Program," the NSA's program of domestic, warrantless spying on Americans authorized by George Bush (and revealed in the Times by Risen's reporting). This is followed by chapters on how the Bush Administration tainted and otherwise skewed intelligence information in the run-up to its long-planned war against Saddam Hussein, the national embarrassment of the search for Iraqi WMD, the repeated misreporting of the nature and strength of the Iraqi insurgency and the Administration's refusal to hear the truth from its own field personnel, the utter deterioration of post-invasion Afghanistan into the world's leading narcotics producer, the failure to capture Osama bin Laden, the Bush Administration's uncomfortably close relation to the Saudis, including the bin Laden family, and the U.S. lack of intelligence information regarding Iran and its nuclear weapons program.

According to Risen, senior CIA and DOD personnel have effectively been browbeaten into silence, unwilling to report uncomfortable truths for fear of demotion or loss of their jobs. Risen's view is that the Bush Administration is controlled by a handful of people (Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.) who decide policy, look for (or force) the intelligence to match their plans, and ruthlessly sweep aside (or render impotent) anyone who disagrees (witness Colin Powell and Condi Rice, among others). Reading this book, one can only come to the conclusion that the recent Newsweek Magazine cover drawing was correct: George Bush does indeed live in a bubble, a clueless but happy camper.

To his credit, Risen supplies a wealth of detail to support his contentions. The flip side of this detail is that his writing can occasionally turn dense, a slog of names and places and circumstances as complicated as intelligence gathering itself can be. Furthermore, since the author rarely mentions his sources by name, his arguments sometimes feel more like speculations than facts, leaving the reader to wonder where each story falls on the "hard truth scale." Still and all, STATE OF WAR is a stunning and eye-opening look into the sorry state of American intelligence and this Administration's unprecedented manipulation of that system for its own ends. If just half of this book is true, it is more than enough reason to view the Bush Administation as the fourth, and most dangerous, "axis of evil."

First off let me discuss my rating of five stars. The book read as an apparent series of New Yorker style articles. Some of the chapters would make great topics for a whole book in themselves. Yet in tying these far ranging topics together the book provides the general reader (and voter) a place to go to get a broad short hand version of this administrations (and to some extent Clinton's) undermining of national intelligence. It is really a story told by anonymous sources. So my rating is for content and the books eye opening information. To most readers it will not come as a surprise to learn of the political militarization of American intelligence by neoconservatives lead by Rumsfeld, Cheney, and their enabler George W. Bush.
Risen is just informing us (and apparently many of our elected leaders) what our government is doing in our name, with our tax dollars. The CIA/Department of Defense misadventures are in them selves worth what is a very short read, they are after all, a kind of a wag the dog story (as in attack Iraq, take you eyes off Bin Ladin, allow Afghanistan to become a warlord "narco state", and ignore that most of the 9/11 highjackers came from Saudi Arabia).
Bush is now into his second term and we should begin to see early histories and memoirs which will, in future years, become the pebbles in the river of histories judgment of the Bush dynasty. No mater what you think or think that you know or want to believe I encourage you to spend a few hours and read Mr. Risen's book.

The White House and radical conservative supporters have singled out this book for trashing; so beware. As a professional researcher and author I can attest that the book is well documented and supported by factual data. It contains vital information for the American electorate, which needs to know that this administration is one of the most dishonest, corrupt and incompoetent in the history of the United States. It came to power buy selling everything in Wahsington to the highest bidder and massive election fraud, and stays in power by subverting democratic processes and the U.S. Constitution. In the end, as this book demonstrates, truth wins out. The Bush administration, along with its corrupt religious right supporters, is going down in flames. Members of the CIA, NSA, Congress and other Washington insiders are now talking because they have had enough and will not be intimidated and bought off any more. If Bush cannot pay reporters and writers to publish lies, then he orchestrates hate campaigns against authors, as is the case in this book and in this review section.