William Colby Quotes

The 6 Day War began less then 6 months later. This was another failure of U. S. Intelligence. Essentially, Rusk and others took the belligerent speeches of Nasser and other Arab leaders as rhetoric meant only for local consumption and did not realize that the Arabs had so deluded themselves that they thought that they could really destroy the state of Israel. American intelligence assumed that they knew better and their threats were just traditional Arab exaggeration and boasting.

The Arab Countries are notoriously corrupt and undemocratic. Huge amounts of national resources are looted by the politicians in power and their supporters. Before Israel existed, the Jews and Arabs of Palestine both had a standard of living that was considerably less than that of Egypt. The Palestinians under the Palestine authority after 50 years have a standard of living that is still less than that of Egypt. But the Israeli citizens have a standard of living that is now far greater then the other Palestinians, but many times greater than Egypt. And that goes for the Israeli Arabs living in a free democracy also; they too are far better off than their non democratic co-religionists. See {588744}.

Syria constantly goaded Nasser and Egypt to attack Israel. However, Nasser was receiving huge foreign aid in the form of wheat which was needed to feed his population. See {595373}

Nasser was indeed planning an attack. Israeli intelligence had discovered it, and the Israeli’s informed President Lyndon Johnson who in turn called Kosygin. Nasser and the Arabs had miscalculated again and ended up being not only defeated in the war they wanted but totally embarrassed by the incredibly poor performance of the Arab armies who greatly outnumbered the Israelis but had no stomach for a fight.

Carter, who had his own share of blunders, may well have been right about this. History will have to judge.

It is noteworthy that a U. S. President had such a harsh evaluation of our major intelligence agency. Even more important in this case is that this President justified his 2003 decision to invade Iraq and start the war on the intelligence he claimed was provided to him by the CIA that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. This quotation and the President’s view was not public at the time. I all fairness to the CIA staff, many of them had provided a number of caveats and warnings about the unreliability of the information. However, the CIA Director, George Tenant, advised Bush in a way that the caveats were sublimated. See {633093} for more detail.

He was the leader of the team that followed to invading troops into Iraq to find the nuclear and other WMDs that the CIA had said were deployed and ready to be used. They found none. Worse for the CIA, there were not even any development programs ongoing. The CIA Director was furious with Kay for admitting the CIA gross error. Kay was given minor assignments thereafter even though he was the best WMD analyst we had.

He was instrumental in setting up the Camp David peace meeting between Sedat and Begin.

Bush was Reagan’s Vice President, but had little influence on top level appointments. Bush would have been particularly helpful with this appointment as he had previously served as a very successful CIA Director. Others also disagreed with this Regan appointment. See {637469}. See {637470}, {613419} and {623500} for Casey quotes that support Bush’s judgment

A minority of Jewish Israelis do not recognize the United Nations 1949 partition boundaries of the land creating modern Israel. They believe that God gave all the land to the Jewish people—as described in the Bible. Therefore, to them, the West Bank is a part of Israel. No Israeli government has ever maintained that position. However some governments which depend on settler and ultra-Orthodox support do not publicly disavow the position. Palestinians, look with alarm, on this view and the constant attempts at encroachment on West Bank land that the settlers attempt. Like the extremist Palestinians who want to sabotage any two-state solution, there is a minority of Israelis who do the same. These two groups made the peace process very difficult as their adherents are not only very passionate about their views, but have political influence out of proportion to their relatively small number of voters.

This was meant as a criticism of Webster, but must people saw it as a compliment. What Clarridge and other old hands at the CIA could never get straight was that they were supposed to break the other countries’ laws but not the laws of the United States. They were supposed to lie to other countries, but not to our President and Congress. This has been a constant problem for United States intelligence agencies. Some scholars of espionage believe that a good spy or spy master lies so often that it is part of his nature to do so as well as break laws. Psychologically it is difficult for them not to lie to anyone and they have little respect for laws. Webster fired Clarridge when Webster reformed the CIA but in the process he alienated most of the “veterans”.

CIA Director Webster had cleaned up the agency, but morale was terrible and there were few human agents left in key spots around the globe. However, since CNN and the other news organizations of the world have been equipped with modern digital technology it is quite common that they get information before the CIA does and often obtain information that the CIA never did get. In this instance, Bush turned to the Defense Department instead of the CIA and ordered a full scale invasion to arrest President Noriega who was running illicit drugs into the United States and felt that because he had once been a CIA informant, he would be immune.

The scandals of the past of CIA lies to Congress and the President, mistakes they had made, and a raft of illegal activities, had eroded support for the agency. We still had the NSA and the Military Intelligence Agencies which had not been involved in the CIA scandals.