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Editor's
note: For Michael Ledeen's previous conversations with James
Jesus Angleton see 1
and 2.
 hat
with all the disruptions in the communications systems — even
the redoubtable NRO e-mail nets were down for days on end —
it was tough getting my Ouija board to work well, but I finally
got through to James Jesus Angleton, the long-time head of CIA counterintelligence
who died more than a decade ago, to ask him the obvious questions
about our war on terrorism. He was in a feisty mood.
ML: The first
question is the obvious one. Can we get these guys?
JJA: Yes, we
can, and the really good news, at least from this distance, is that
the president clearly wants to get them. All of them, the terrorists
themselves and their handlers.
ML: And public
opinion is very solid.
JJA: Public
opinion is solid today, but it's very fickle. We're going to have
some setbacks, and it's good that we're taking our time. The absolute
worst thing is to screw up the first operations. And that's fairly
likely, actually. We've been out of this business for such a long
time. It's like an athlete who's been in a hospital bed for a couple
of months, his muscles atrophying, suddenly asked to jump up and
run a marathon. Odds are, he's gonna tear a muscle or something.
ML: But I thought
our Special Forces were first class...
JJA: They're
pretty good, but they can't be any better than the intelligence,
and the intelligence is weak, as you know. Look at the first reactions:
They thought they knew who the terrorists were, because they had
passport information, and they thought the terrorists had thoughtfully
left them all kinds of clues in their cars, parked at the airports.
There was obviously lots of disinformation, false scents, misleading
documents, and so forth. It's incoherent. Why would they go out
of their way to tell us who they were? Now, of course, it turns
out that some of those Saudi passports were reported stolen months
and years ago.
It gets even
more preposterous. Look at that "letter" that Ashcroft
put out the other day. Can you believe the terrorists saved their
instructions instead of destroying them? It's a total violation
of all the rules of clandestine operations. I mean, it's as if they
desperately wanted us to believe that the only thing that matters
here is Islam, when we all know, indeed we have known for years,
that two out of the three major sponsors are certainly not religious
states: Iraq and Syria. Iran is a different matter, of course.
ML: Are you
saying that you don't think this is part of bin Laden's holy war
against the West?
JJA: Not at
all. Bin Laden is a true fanatic, and anyone who flies a plane into
a skyscraper is a True Believer of some sort. But if this is a state-sponsored
operation, the states would do everything possible to paint a false
picture, to say to us that it's ONLY bin Laden, that it's ONLY Islamic
fanaticism, and to cover any tracks that lead back to professional
intelligence services.
ML: And do
you see hints of a professional intelligence service?
JJA: Of course!
Somebody organized a long-term sleeper network inside the United
States, and that requires considerable spycraft. The sleepers need
money, clandestine communications, and considerable coordination
between the various cells, which were probably not in contact with
one another, but were linked back through a central control. They
needed false documents — and it's not easy to get really good,
false passports, by the way — and they needed to be trained
to assume their "cover" identities. It was a thoroughly
professional operation, top to bottom. The whole thing reeks of
an intelligence service.
ML: And our
counterintelligence was obviously not very good, was it?
JJA: Our counterintelligence
has been systematically corrupted for more than 25 years. It all
goes back to the Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Commission
in the mid-seventies, and of course my purge by CIA chief William
Colby at that time. Ever since, the counterintelligence units have
been penetrated by foreign agents over and over again, most recently
the FBI with Hanssen and the CIA with Ames.
ML: Yeah, but
that was Russian, wasn't it? And these are Muslims.
JJA: You have
to ask yourself, what happened after the fall of the wall? The Russians
didn't stop spying on us, and who knows whether they maintained
ties with Middle Eastern terrorist groups? We know that they trained
PLO terrorists. We know that they were at least in contact with
Arab sleeper groups in the United States back in the 1980s. Did
they cut those ties? Did they turn them over to "friendly"
governments? I have no idea. But somebody had better figure it out.
The history is enormously important.
ML: Do you
think we're serious enough to get to the bottom of it?
JJA: I do hope
so, but there are some worrisome signs. Nobody has been fired, which
tells the men and women in the field that they're still playing
by the old rules, whatever may be said in public. And, good grief,
what in the world is Gary Condit doing on the congressional committee
dealing with homeland defense? I mean, if ever there were an easy
target for blackmail...it was bad enough that they kept him on the
Intelligence Oversight Committee, but to put him at the very heart
of our antiterrorist efforts...it worries me.
Plenty to think
about, as usual. I thanked him for his time, and promised to get
back to him in a couple of weeks.
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