WHEN REALITY IS OTHER PEOPLES' FANTASY | 2006-06-12
I wrote a piece about the Torricelli Amendment. That Amendment said that a field operative had to give the name of any informant who had a police to the CIA HQ in DC and get him celared or else stop using that informant.
That was AFTER the Cold War. But DURING the Cold War, you NEVER sent anything to CIA HQ DC.
But the response to the Torricelli Amendment is instructive about the decades before it.
Not one single field head of station (Yes, I am using the wrong terms, but screw it) sent in a single name to CIA HQ.
In recent times, there was a WOW! discovery. When the KGB files opened up, it turned out that McCarthy was a wimp. There were a LOT more KGB informers in the US Government than McCarthyism ever DREAMED of.
In the decades before those KGB files were opened up, we lived with that.
We DIED by that.
Instead of sending names to DC CIA HQ, it would have been simpler to send them straight to the KGB.
Better. The KGB would have lost them.
The KGB was pitiful, but that's another story.
So here you are, trying to fight the Reds while you know all the officials who get all the money are either on their side or trust people who are on the other side.
Fun, huh?
Have you ever heard of the Church Commitee? Senator Church exposed the inner operations of the CIA.
Now the fact is that the CIA is a bureaucracy. Most of what it does is absurd.
But wht is not so easy to understand is that the CIA was a bureaucracy with a "TOP SECRET" stamp on it.
The only thing more hopeles than a bureaucracy is a bureaucracy that can hide everything it does behind TOP Secret. So Senator Church was able to uncover what, even by FEDERAL standards, was misbhavior beyond the level of lunacy.
Meanwhile there were those of us who were perfectly aware what the CIA was, but found some ways to make it do some useful things precisely because so much was covered up.
If you look at the records of the Church Committee, they never missed an opportunity to toss NAMES and INFORMERS into their legitimate list of grievances. The KGB got what it wanted, and a lot of people disappeared.
Anybody connected with the Church Committee staff did not have to make names public. They just told their buddies at a party in Georgetown and the guy or gal disappeared.
So are you going to make that connection to the media?
No way. That would be paranoia and McCarthyism. No editor would touch it.
Let's step back a moment. This was the world we LIVED in.
I remember two lectures from two lawyers I got, years and thousands of miles apart. I remember observing that the two lectures were clones of each other.
They both said that, no matter how old I got, I must NEVER say what really happened. I was warned that leftists NEVER forget.
My boss was ranking Republican onthe House Select Intelligence Committee. I was in the direct line of clearance for ALL civilian employees of the Federeal Government.
Used correctly, these positions give you a certain access to files, including your own.
Mine is as clear as a whistle.
I was never an anti-Communist. Nobody can ever accuse me of doing those awful things.
But there are thousands of others out there who are waiting for the other shoe to fall, while the Greatest Generation brags and brags and brags and brags.