Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror
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* An accusation that information, like smoke, moves vertically in an organization but not horizontally between organizations.
* The East German intelligence service notorious for the voluminous files it kept on everyone, files created by citizens reporting on other citizens.
* The NCTC, not to be confused with CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC). Both organizations persist, undoubtedly with some overlap and duplication, but with NCTC broadly focused on threats and CTC broadly concerned with taking the fight to the enemy.
* Mohamed later received a one-million-pound settlement from the British government, in part to spare the government more litigation and the need to release even more documents in its own defense.
* Apparently, loyalty continued to be a big thing with him. He later wrote a letter from Guantánamo to his Ohio-based lawyer trashing Akron native LeBron James as a “very bad man” for leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers.
* Which also probably made it easier for Assad to let the eventual air strike pass without an outward response. More would have learned about the embarrassment if he had reacted.
* They will cheat, of course. It’s what they do. But here I’m talking about cheating with strategic significance.
* Focus pays off. We briefed President Bush in December 2008 about closing in on Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, bin Laden’s courier and the eventual key to finding him at Abbottabad.
* As I was about to leave CIA, my British counterpart John Scarlett presented me with a framed replica of the cable that the wartime MI6 station chief in Washington had sent to London introducing Donovan to his headquarters. “Impossible to over emphasize importance of DONOVAN’s visit. He has (been) controlling influence over KNOX, strong influence over STIMSON, friendly advisory influence HULL and President. A Catholic, Irish American descent, Republican holding confidence of Democrats, with an exceptional war record, places him in unique position to advance our aims here.” Our British allies have an appreciation for history (and bloodlines).
* Later the head of ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service.
* To be fair, the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2008 would have confined all US government agencies to the interrogation techniques in the Army Field Manual, but the bill was vetoed by President Bush.
* In the summer of 2015 I met with presidential candidate Jeb Bush. When the subject of interrogation techniques came up, I opined that—after the memos being released, the techniques being exposed, and CIA officers seemingly abandoned—any future president who would want to resurrect the techniques had better practice up because he would have to administer them himself.
* In the June 2015 USA Freedom Act, Congress gave NSA six months to end its acquisition of American metadata, although the agency could still access it by going directly to American telecoms with its queries.
* Neither confirming nor denying the existence of something, as the government did in 1975 in response to a Los Angeles Times story on the recovery of a Soviet submarine from the bottom of the Pacific by the Hughes Corporation’s Glomar Explorer.
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