It only took 24 hours for the Washington Post
to go from the sublime to the ridiculous.
On Saturday morning, the newspaper described
the mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheik Muhammad
(KSM), standing before “U.S. intelligence
officers in a makeshift lecture hall, leading
what they called ‘terrorist tutorials.’”
KSM “discussed a wide variety of subjects,
including Greek philosophy and al-Qaeda dogma”
and even “scolded a listener for poor
note-taking and his inability to recall details
of an earlier lecture. He’d even use a
chalkboard at times.”
Presumably the audience of high-level operatives
was hooded or masked to prevent KSM’s
recognition, which would explain the poor note-taking.
But there is no excuse for not paying attention
to a man who was waterboarded 183 times.
On the other hand, since KSM told the International
Committee of the Red Cross that he provided
“a lot of false information” during
the “harshest period of my interrogation,”
perhaps it was wise to be inattentive even in
front of the CIA’s “preeminent source,”
according to the Post. [See my column, “Washington
Post Provides a One-Sided Account of Torture
and Abuse,” August 29, 2009]
Post reporters Peter Finn, Joby Warrick and
Julie Tate, however, should be credited with
the fact that they never once used the word
“torture” in their article. Dick
Cheney would have approved.
On Sunday, however, the Washington Post turned
from solemn reporting to outright humor. In
a page-two article, Walter Pincus and Joby Warrick
discussed sagging morale at the CIA due to the
release of the 2004 IG report on CIA detention
and interrogation, basing their views primarily
on the remarks of A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard,
the third-ranking CIA official at the time of
the implementation of the policy of torture
and abuse.
“Buzzy,” by the way, is the brother
of Howard “Cookie” Krongard, the
former State Department Inspector General, who
blocked investigations of contractor fraud in
Iraq and Afghanistan. The Bush White House had
Karl Rove and Scooter Libby; the State Department
and the CIA had Cookie and Buzzy, respectively.
I imagine that few readers of the mainstream
media have heard of the Krongard brothers and,
since I first met them on the asphalt basketball
courts of Baltimore nearly 50 years ago, perhaps
I should fill in the blanks on the Washington
Post’s key source. Pincus and Warrick
describe Krongard as a “retired CIA officer,”
which of course he isn’t. Krongard never
had his finger on the pulse of the CIA workforce,
although he did have an impact on morale when
CIA director Porter Goss suggested to Buzzy
that he should leave the Agency after his six-year
“career.” When Buzzy left, morale
zoomed skyward.
CIA director George Tenet brought Krongard
into the Agency and told Newsweek that “Buzzy
is perfect. He’s my right hand.”
(Remember that Tenet called his deputy, John
McLaughlin, who drafted Secretary of State Colin
Powell’s fraudulent speech to the UN in
2003, the “smartest man I’ve ever
met). Tenet admired the tough-talking Krongard,
who liked guns, fought sharks, and did all the
martial arts. Krongard owns a Walther PPK pistol,
James Bond’s handgun of choice in the
1960s.
As one CIA insider noted, Buzzy “talks
tough, but he’s never been there.”
At Alex. Brown & Co., a Baltimore-based
investment firm, Krongard told his troops to
dress casually and hang out in bars patronized
by industry executives in order to catch unguarded
comments. Perhaps he had “been there”
after all. In any event, Krongard is the only
Agency official who believes that “we’re
better off with Osama bin Laden at large,”
because if something happened to him “you
might find a lot of people vying for his position
and demonstrating how macho they are by unleashing
a stream of terror.”
Buzzy became Tenet’s executive director
in 2001; Buzzy’s deputy was John Brennan,
the Agency’s cheerleader for secret prisons
and renditions, who President Barack Obama hoped
to make director of CIA. When Buzzy left, his
successor was Dusty Foggo, who is currently
serving a three-year prison sentence for bribery
and fraud, making him the highest-ranking CIA
official convicted of a federal felony.
Buzzy and Dusty, such harmless-sounding sobriquets,
were harsh critics of the Office of the Inspector
General (OIG) and big supporters of CIA director
Michael Hayden’s investigation of the
OIG. And Buzzy was particularly dismissive of
any criticism of Hayden’s investigation:
“The perception is like in a police department
between street cops and internal affairs.”
In fact, Buzzy wanted to stop OIG investigations
of CIA secret prisons, renditions, and detentions.
It is particularly noteworthy that Buzzy left
CIA and immediately joined the board of Blackwater,
which was only fair in view of the fact that
Krongard gave Blackwater its first Agency contract.
Krongard was joined by J. Cofer Black, the former
head of the CIA’s Counterintelligence
Center, which negotiated the assassination program
with Blackwater. Black eventually became the
vice chair of Blackwater and ran Total Intelligence
Solution, which was Blackwater founder Erik
Prince’s private CIA.
Jeremy Scahill, our leading expert on Blackwater,
has reasonably asked the congressional intelligence
committees to investigate high-ranking intelligence
officials such as Black and Krongard, who take
their knowledge, contacts, and access to Beltway
Bandits such as Blackwater. Editorials and opeds
in the Washington Post, by the way, have pooh-poohed
the significance of the assassination program
because “no one was killed.”
Once again the word “torture” never
appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post
article. Cheney must be happy with the editorial
policy at the Post.
Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the
Center for International Policy and adjunct
professor of government at Johns Hopkins University,
is The Public Record’s National Security
and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years
with the CIA, the National War College, and
the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of
Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.
Copyright 2009 The Public
Record
