...the incompetence of intelligence agencies is legendary. Every one of which you have records at all, whether it's the CIA, or the Israeli Mossad, or British M-6 or whatever they're called, they're just error after error... Some of them are almost unimaginable. [...] Just take Vietnam. That was the top issue in American international affairs for, you know, 30 years. And we have a record of intelligence, very unusual record of intelligence, because it was not released by the government, it was stolen from them. So it's like capturing enemy archives. That's the Pentagon Papers. That's a 25-year record of high level intelligence, raw intelligence, CIA, DIA, whole bunch, State Department intelligence. A lot of it is in there, and it's very intriguing to look at it. In fact, the most interesting revelation of the Pentagon Papers in my view by far is the intelligence record. Here's roughly what happened, if you're interested I've gone through it in print in detail, but here's the main story. In the late 1940s, the United States was kind of unclear about which side to support. That was true in Indonesia, it was true in Vietnam. You know, do you support the colonial power that's trying to reconquer it, or do you support the indigenous government and then try to take them over, that was their question. [audience laughter] And they made different decisions in different places. In the case of Indochina, for whatever reason, they decided at one point to support France, in it's reconquest of Indochina. Well, at that point, essentially orders went to the U.S. intelligence communities, CIA and others, to demonstrate what was required. What was required to justify the support of France was that Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh were agents of either the Russians or the Chinese, didn't really matter, one or the other. But they had to be agents of the international communist conspiracy. OK, that would then justify support of the French reconquest. Everyone knew that was untrue, but that was plainly required for doctrinal reasons in order to support France and it's reconquest. OK, then comes a comic opera scene, for about 3 years, in which U.S. intelligence tries to prove what is necessary, that Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh are agents of the international communist conspiracy. And they tried, and tried, either China or Russia, they didn't care, anything would do. They couldn't do it, they couldn't find anything. They came back, occasionally they'd say, 'Well we think we found copy of Pravda in the Bangkok legation', or something. But finally the intelligence concluded, look, this is very weird, but that is the only place in South East Asia where a nationalist movement has no connections at all with China or Russia. OK, what was the conclusion? The conclusion in the State Department was, OK, this proves that they're agents of the international communist conspiracy. Ho Chi Minh is such a loyal slave of, pick it, Mao or Stalin, that he doesn't even need orders. [audience laughter] He just does it automatically, so you don't even have to have connections. From that point on, U.S. intelligence never investigated the question of whether the North Vietnamese, the Vietnamese but that's what they were, were following their own national interest. That issue was not discussable. In fact, in this 25-year record, turns out there's one staff paper, which was never even submitted, that raises the possibility that Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh were concerned with their own national interests instead of acting as agents of the international communist conspiracy. Well you know, anybody with a head screwed on knew that they were following national interests, but U.S. intelligence could not contemplate that possibility because it was doctrinally unacceptable. That's very similar to what was going on in the academic world, I should say. And you can't imagine a more dramatic case, I don't know which to call it, incompetence or whatever, doctrinal control. And this happens all the time. Take, say, the Israeli Mossad, which has a reputation for fantastic insights and so on. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 with the intention of destroying secular Palestinian nationalism, that was the goal, it was basically an attack on the PLO. OK, what did they get? Well, they ended up with a fundamentalist islamic movement which drove them out of Lebanon, Hezbollah. Israel's major defeat, they were expelled from most of Lebanon by resistance movement which was basically islamic fundamentalist. OK, they did destroy the secular PLO and instead what they got was a islamic fundamentalist movement that they couldn't control, drove them out of most of Lebanon. What did they do next? They did exactly the same thing in the West Bank. They undermined the secular PLO, and they ended up with Hamas on their hands, which they can't control. And they don't understand it, they just keep making the same mistake over and over again. It's just out of ideological fanaticism. And I think you find that wherever you look at intelligence activities.

Politics·History·Intelligence·Vietnam·Error