Interview: 27-Year CIA Veteran by Will Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Interview
Thursday 26 June 2003
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/062603B.shtmlRay McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years, serving seven Presidents. He is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an outreach ministry in the inner city of Washington.
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PITT: Could you give me some background regarding who you are and what work you did with the CIA?
McG: I was a graduate student in Russian studies when I got interested in the Central Intelligence Agency. I was very intrigued that there was one central place to prevent what happened at Pearl Harbor from happening again. I had been commissioned in the US Army, so I needed to do my two years service there, but wound up down in Washington DC. I took a job with the CIA in 1963, and it was what it was made out to be.
In other words, I was told that if I were to come on as an analyst of Soviet foreign policy, when I sat down in the morning, in my In-Box would be a bunch of material from open sources, from closed sources, from photography, from intercepts, from agent reports, from embassy reports, you name it. It would be right there, and all I had to do was sift through it and make some sense out of it. If I had an important enough story, I would write it up for the President the next morning. That seemed too good to be true, but you know what? It was true, and it was really heady work.
PITT: Which Presidents did you serve?
McG: I started with President Kennedy and finished with President Bush, the first President Bush. That would make seven Presidents.
PITT: What was your area of expertise with the CIA?
McG: I was a Soviet Foreign Policy analyst. I also worked on Soviet Internal Affairs when I first came on, but then my responsibilities grew and I became responsible for a lot of different parts of the world. During the 1980s I was briefing the Vice President and Secretaries of State and Defense, the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. I did this every other morning. We worked in teams of two, and on any given morning depending on schedules, I would be hitting two or perhaps three of those senior officials.
(snip)
PITT: In your time at CIA as a Soviet Foreign Policy analyst, you were directly involved with analyzing Soviet policy issues in the run-up to and duration of the
Soviet war in Afghanistan?McG: Yes.
PITT: How deep into the details of that did you get?
McG: Oh, quite deep. By that time my responsibilities had grown, and I stayed very interested and abreast of what was going on there.
PITT: Could you talk about how America’s involvement in the Soviet war in Afghanistan led to the events of September 11? There are some very clear, straight-line connections – starting with Brzyznski’s ‘Afghan Trap’ in 1978 - between the two events, yes? From your perspective, how did that develop?
McG: The big momentum was put on by a fellow named William Casey, who was head of CIA under Reagan. He saw this as a little war that he could wage and win, and he had a lot of support from folks on the Hill. What they did was arm and recruit folks like Osama bin Laden and others. One of the big decisions they had to make was whether or not to give them Stinger missiles. I remember when that was under discussion. The dangers of giving these uncontrollable folks Stinger missiles was emphasized, but the decision was to go ahead and give them those missiles anyway. In many respects, the folks that were used as our proxies in this war against the Soviets have come back to bite us, and to bite us very hard as we know from 9/11.
PITT: The invasion came in 1979 because the Soviets were worried about their puppet regime in Afghanistan. It became a great Muslim cause to defend Afghanistan against the godless invaders. Osama bin Laden became a hero by funding this fight, and by fighting along with the others. When the war ended in 1989, when the Soviets withdrew with their tail between their legs, Afghanistan was left in an utterly shattered and destroyed state. Given the fact that we basically precipitated the start of that war by arming and training those mujeheddin fighters to go after the Afghan government in 1978 and 1979, why was the decision made in 1989 to leave Afghanistan in such a sorry state? The chaos left in the aftermath of that war led to the rise of the Taliban. Why didn’t we help clean up the terrible mess we had helped to cause?
McG: I hate to be cynical about these things, but once we got the Soviets out, our reason to be there basically evaporated. You may ask about the poor people and the poor country. Well, we have a history of doing this kind of thing, of using people. The Kurds are one example. We use them and betray them, and we don’t care much once our little geopolitical objective has been achieved. That’s what was in play here. Nobody gave a damn. We had a brilliant victory, we got the Soviets out of there, we started pounding our chests, and nobody gave much thought to helping the poor Afghanis that were left behind.
In addition, these bad guys were our good guys. Osama bin Laden and all those folks were people we armed and trained, and when you get that close – and this is a systemic problem within the Agency – when you get that close so that you’re in bed with these guys, you can’t step back and say, “Whoa, wait a second. These guys could be a real danger in the future.” You can’t make a calculated, dispassionate analysis of what might be in store for these guys. It was a poor situation politically, strategically, and as it turned out, analytically as well....more...
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