| Thank you for this excellent assessment and history On May 23, 2024, at 2:14 PM, Raymond L McGovern via Salon <salon@listserve.com> wrote: More suspect stuff from SpyTalk. From the early 60s to 1990 (while I was at the agency) analysis on Israel-Palestine was mixed. On the one hand, in the EARLY 60s a sensible (but, admittedly, highly unamerican) attempt was made to prevent pro-Israel bias on the part of analysts working on Israel-Palestine by taking care to avoid populating the analyst branch with Zionists. (There was no problem about pro-Palestinian analysts; there were none.) Working against that attempt to ensure objectivity was the ever present eminence grise, the intimidating specter of James Angleton, to whom the heads of the Agency ceded the final word on what could be said about Israel, and who was able to adulterate everything -- analysis as well as operations. When the six-day war came in June 1967 (during which the Israelis killed 34 US sailors and wounded 170 others in trying to sink the USS Liberty), I recall no objection to that; nor in general to the 1967 war Israel initiated as a war of aggression -- "the supreme international crime". Most observers had to wait till former Prime Minister Manachem Begin blurted out, during a major speech in Washington in August 1982: In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him. Angleton and others left a residue of Zionists in charge of Israel-Palestine analysis. One prime example is Bruce Riedel, who ended up at the NSC helping other Xionists in several administrations support Israel's oppression of Palestinians in the occupied territories. Angleton was eventually gone, but his pro-Israel bias lived on in those, like Riedel, who bubbled to the top. When Prime Minister Ariel Sharon "mesmerized" junior Bush and "had him wrapped around his little finger" (Scowcroft to Financial Times, Oct 14, 2004), there was apparently not a solitary objective analyst left to warn that Israel's prodding (for short-term interest; i. e., getting rid of Saddam Hussein) was a huge factor in moving Cheney/Bush to launch their war of aggression against Iraq. Things have gone downhill, even from there. I am told that pro-Israel analysts have been ruling the roost for decades. I knew Martha Neff Kessler well. She was quite a good analyst (on Libya) and then Branch Chief. She used to draft for us, time and again, good grist for us to fashion into a piece for The President's Daily Brief. Perhaps even more to her credit, Martha refused to give young-ambitious-but-mediocre analyst John Brennan a promotion. Brennan, by a stroke of (his) luck, became great pals with George "Slam Dunk" Tenet. When Tenet appointed Brennan to a supervisory position over Martha, Brennan promptly fired her. In a word, I find this SpyTalk puff-piece misleading, to put it mildly. Ray On Thu, May 23, 2024 at 1:52 PM Jeff Stein via Salon <salon@listserve.com> wrote:
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