Trices Group Book Review Journal

Denial and Deception

Mahle, Melissa Boyle

by:

Nation Books: Avalon Publishing

Publisher:

Location:

2004

Tom McKeveny

Cover:

Hardcover

Type:

Lynard Barnes

reviewed by:

05/16/2005

Comment:

Not must reading. Old ideas. Old package.

The phrase, “ripped from today’s headlines” is not exactly appropriate for the first part of this book. It is more a job of “pasted” from today’s and yesterday’s headlines, augmented by material from reputable sources. Well researched, one might say. Still, DENIAL AND DECEPTION is a floater.

There are some rewarding tidbits in DENIAL AND DECEPTION, though they come at a very high price. How much did the CIA know of significant pre-9/11 events? For instance, author Melissa Boyle Mahle discusses the events leading up to the arrest of Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center terrorist act perpetrated in 1993. She starts the five paragraphs covering the subject with a soft curve-ball; to wit, “While CIA Headquarters was in total disarray, others were focused on terrorizing the West.” There then follows a discussion of the discovery of Ramzi Yousef’s bomb making factory and laptop computer by Aida Bantay Fariscal, an officer of the Philippine National Bureau of Investigation [whom Mahle identifies as “a police officer”] in Manila in 1995. The author ends the discussion by saying that she “read the cable traffic as the operation against Murad, Shah, [Yousef accomplices] and Yousef unfolded”, revealing the link to Khalid Shaykh Muhammad. The discussion ends with the familiar refrain that the information was complicated and confusing. The last we hear of events related to this episode leading up to 9/11 is when Mahle reports that Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, the key Asian financier for al Qaeda andYousef ‘s Manila bomb factory, is that Muhammad is left free to roam because the FBI muffed a chance to arrest him in Doha, Qatar. The turf battle thing. The Manila bomb plot was the most significant “dot” in pre-9/11 events. In DENIAL AND DECEPTION the plot that was a dot is merely another fork in the road in which fingers are pointed.

Mahle makes a very strong case of the CIA being a bureaucracy–a bureaucracy she contends hit its stride under former Director John Deutch. “We in the Directorate of Operations knew that our new director had caved in to power-hungry congressional leaders before even setting foot down in Langley”, she states. In other words, Deutch vowed cooperation with Congress. It was the tipoff that the CIA as an instrument of U. S. foreign policy was pretty much at an end. If it was not a bureaucracy before Deutch arrived on the scene, it certainly was by the time he left. This is the strongest thread running through the book. A Clinton appointee, Deutch put the “old boys network” of the CIA in a state of impotency. Operations officers, the spies in the spy agency, developed an aversion to risk

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taking and honed the skills necessary to survive in a bureaucracy rather than pursue objectives. According to Mahle this was a bad thing.

Reading between the lines, you get the sense that Mahle believes congressional oversight of clandestine operations by the CIA is a bad thing. It is not a belief to be easily discounted. The CIA started existence as an arm of the executive branch. Mahle does not make the argument, but there really is no reason for the congress to have minute oversight of CIA operations, nor those of the military for that matter. That’s the President’s job. Congress has the authority to grant or deny budgets. Nothing moves without money. If, as Mahle contends, President Clinton had no use for the CIA and Congress was dissatisfied with the agency, one of the two should have did a front-and-center and simply pronounced an end to the mission. (A couple of members of congress did just that, but there were no followers). Instead the CIA was left to drift slowly in the wind of political expediencies. Along comes author and former CIA agent Melissa Boyle Mahle to inform us of the ills of the patient and the malignant atmosphere in which it tries to breathe. Coupled with the constant refrain of CIA personnel “low morale”, turf battles with the FBI, and the ever encroaching and prying eyes of congressional sub-committees, this book reads like a very long petition to save the CIA. Too late. This goose is cooked. The only hope is a Sphinx job in which a shadow of what once was rises to something resembling bureaucratic efficiency. The current CIA Director appointed in August 2004, Peter Goss, seems very intent on bringing that condition about. But that’s another story.

The major problem with DENIAL AND DECEPTION is not that it makes excuses for the failures of the CIA. There are very legitimate reasons for an institution to stumble at the onslaught of challenges. The U. S. military prepared to fight World War I at the onset of World War II for instance. The key consideration however is to stumble and recover, to get back on mission. Could it be, as former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan suggested in 1994, that the CIA has simply outlived its purpose? If so then the plethora of excuses for failure, from too much congressional oversight to too little interest by the President, are simply rhetorical flourishes stating the same conclusion but in a different way. If you intend to write a book about the failures of an institution, then at least identify the issue. Mahle treats the bureaucratization of the CIA as an issue. It is not an issue. It is not the issue. We do not need another treatise on the failure of an institution which simply perpetuates amorphous views of responsibility like Richard Gid Powers’ BROKEN: THE TROUBLED PAST AND UNCERTAIN FUTURE OF THE FBI in which he essentially blames the American people for the failure of the FBI to prevent 9/11. Mahle, perhaps because she is not an academician, does not go that far. But blaming “the bureaucracy” for the shortcoming of the CIA is an exercise in redundancy.

DENIAL AND DECEPTION can be read, but it adds nothing to discussions about the CIA–especially that most needed of ingredients, a perspective.

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