So where do retired spies go on holiday exactly? If you're an ex-Director of the CIA the answer would appear to be SpyCruise® as a recently broadcast BBC radio documentary Ship of Spies revealed.
Outward appearances suggest it's just a regular cruise. But as the MS Eurodam sets sail from Fort Lauderdale in Florida, this vast ship is carrying two men who've been at the very heart of the US intelligence services. Former CIA directors Porter Goss and Michael Hayden are on board for the Spy Cruise, a seven day trip devoted to issues of national security.
I think you'll find the details of what went on during this voyage fascinating and perhaps just a little disturbing - but it's the identity of the BBC reporter that filed the report that I find to be of equal interest. Because his name is Tom Mangold and I've written about his apparent ease of access to senior CIA personnel before, specifically in relation to the most egregious propaganda exercise the Bush administration ever tried to sell. But of that more later.....
"This is not a pleasure trip for me..." Porter Goss
So if not a superannuated freebie for ex-CIA personnel then what? Mangold explained more in a tie-in article posted on the BBC website. He began by introducing convention organiser Bart Bechtel:
....an ex-CIA operations officer, a specialist in domestic and international terrorism matters and a US Navy veteran with 31 years of espionage and counter-intelligence experience - a spy to his fingertips......
It was Bart Bechtel who decided to organise a seminar for spooks - past, present and future - and their wives, girlfriends and interested parties.
But instead of hiring a dreary university lecture hall in a Washington suburb, he invited students to come on a seven-day Caribbean cruise (for which they would pay) and spend most days on lectures, briefings and rubbing shoulders with the principal speakers.
Indeed this was the fourth such cruise run by Bechtel (who even has his own " SpySkipper " blog where you can purchase souvenir mugs and assorted other memorabilia!) for a company called SpyTrek® which itself is an off-shoot from a Virginia based firm called the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies or CI Centre
UK Blogger Barthsnotes also registered the BBC broadcast, and in response compiled a detailed piece on the organisers' background here worth reading in its own right that references the CI Centre as one of a number of private intelligence firms offering "highly politicized, biased seminars and industry conferences.”
Given the title of Goss' lecture on this particular trip was
"Radical Fundamentalism and (Judeo-Christian) Western Civilization are Irreconcilable"
while Hayden wowed the crowds with the snappy
"Iran's Pursuit of Nukes and War on Terror: Continuity, and Change Between the 43rd and 44th Presidents"
this doesn't appear too harsh a characterisation to make. [Further details on these Private Sector groups can be found via this recently published Daily Kos diary
How to save $1.67 billion: Don't give it to anti-Muslim counterterrorism 'trainers' by Joan McCarter]
But returning to Mr Bechtel, he made clear to Tom Mangold what the motivation was for undertaking these trips:
For Bart Bechtel, this was a golden opportunity to proselytise. "The intelligence community is under attack, badly understood, the civil libertarians are trying for scalps. There are all kinds of indignities......."
"Our commitment to war is a little uneven at this point. The fact of the matter is we are at war but it's not evenly understood."
And the organisers were keen to "drum home this message at every opportunity" as Mangold put it via :
...talks and confidential briefings on Iran, Hamas, Israel, Pakistan, rogue states, failed states, al-Qaeda and a host of other threats to national and international security.
Quite the laundry list of hot topics there, though these briefings would have been "confidential" only in the sense that they were just open to conference attendees - and as Mangold explained these were an eclectic bunch, to say the least:
Among the paying passengers who formed their audience on the cruise were a novelist, a soccer coach who wanted to be a spy and a National Security Agency worker whose wife bought him the cruise as a present.
I don't imagine the vetting process extended much beyond waiting for the cheque to clear, but that wasn't really necessary as most of the conference goers were quite like-minded according to Mangold:
Obama supporters were in short supply - I found only one in 120 people. The seminar was no place for beards, sandals, liberals or Wikileakers.
[my emphasis]
Without realising it Mangold has identified the real problem with this event - a group of like-minded people with a fixed world view spend a week reinforcing their own beliefs and come away none the wiser (though dangerously they may think they are). How likely is it that any of those briefings, talks and seminars held last November even hinted at the possibility of mass democracy movements spontaneously erupting across the Middle East for instance? And the presence of two former CIA chiefs, rather than lending gravitas, actually serves to underscore how this mindset has bedevilled the Agency itself - so no wonder everybody was blind-sided by events in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.....
But the problem with the event is also sadly the problem with Mangold himself - because by his own admission, he wasn't just covering it for the BBC, he was an active participant in it!
My role, as a defence and intelligence reporter and writer, was to show a couple of my BBC TV Panoramas to the audience and take questions.
[my emphasis]
Now while this programme may only be familiar to viewers in the US via the most famous April Fool's Day stunt ever pulled on television, Panorama actually has been the BBC's flagship current affairs series for nearly 60 years and Mangold was regularly involved from the late Seventies onwards in fronting editions devoted to precisely those subjects he mentioned.
But Tom Mangold appears to have suffered a self-awareness failure at this point - having identified the event as one which was quote "no place for beards, sandals, liberals or Wikileakers" unquote, didn't he realise how this reflects on him as an invited guest? And suddenly his documentary doesn't seem quite as challenging as it had first been billed by the BBC :
In wide-ranging and rigorous interviews, he (Mangold) grills the two ex CIA bosses on extraordinary renditions, enhanced interrogations, water-boarding, and targeted assassinations.
[my emphasis]
Yet if, like me, you listened to the actual radio programme, the "challenge" didn't extend much beyond raising these issues with Goss and Hayden who were then allowed to present some pretty tendentious justification for those activities without further cross examination. In fact more time seems to have been spent on ironic counterpoint between the spy seminars and the karaoke or disco taking place simultaneously elsewhere on ship while Mangold waxed lyrical on how implausible it would be for the head of British security service MI5 to ever be seen in such a public venue.
While in a separate feature Mangold wrote for the Travel section of UK tabloid the Daily Mail it seems clear that the "rigour" of the interviews might perhaps have had room to be dialled up a notch:
We took my favourite spies to the Tamarind, an Asian fusion place on Deck 11, and discussed the pros and cons of extraordinary rendition, water boarding and life in Guantanamo. Talk about mixing business with pleasure...
My, how we laughed.
Now contrast the rather cosy relationship displayed here with an article on exactly the same subject written by reporter Colin Freeze for Canada's Globe & Mail newspaper titled Show girls, sake-tinis and spies on a Caribbean cruise.
Like Mangold, Freeze attended the November cruise, listened to the seminars and managed to obtain interviews with the main participants, including Gen. Hayden. But he seems to have kept much more grounded in the reality of the issues being discussed. Here he is commenting after his first encounter with Hayden:
He was so affable I had to keep reminding myself that spymasters are the most Machiavellian men on the planet. In Langley, Va., he would have helped decide who gets killed in Waziristan and Yemen – the badlands where CIA drone planes blow up presumed terrorists with Hellfire missiles.
Decidedly less starry-eyed don't you think? While here's his take on the juxtaposition between the topics being discussed and the environment they were hosted in:
Days were spent chewing over topics along the lines of the growing Iranian hegemony in the Shia Crescent. Evenings were spent savouring shiraz, sucking back “sake-tinis” – delicious – and watching showgirls strut onstage. Even as I eyeballed the Eurodam's ostentatious luxury, my mind's eye kept imagining the specific kinds of brute force being employed in some of the world's failed and failing states.
And though Freeze was no less averse to fully enjoying the ship's comforts whilst interviewing Hayden and Goss, the results appear decidedly more...well, frosty (if you'll pardon the pun):
One night in a bar called the Silk Den, while talking to the former CIA directors, I called them Doubting Thomases. Centuries ago, the most circumspect apostle, Thomas, had demanded to see Christ’s wounds before acknowledging that the crucifixion took place. These days, the CIA refuses to admit that torture has gone on in Middle Eastern prisons to which it has sent individuals suspected of terrorism. Hayden inspired my remark by mentioning that he is Catholic – but found it off the mark and out of line. He finds “torture” to be an ugly word and fiercely denies that the CIA ever encouraged it or acquiesced to it anywhere.
[my emphasis]
Ouch! Ex-CIA chiefs can be so easily offended these days!
But Freeze also displayed a much better eye for picking out background details on the hard-working cabin crew of 800 who "who typically spend 10 months a year working", people like
"...the pretty card dealers from Eastern Europe, women with oddly rhyming names like “Galyna” and “Sabina,”
or the
"Beyond obsequious... Indonesian cabin stewards and Filipino food servers (who) act as if they exist to carry your bag, take your food order, fetch a bottle of wine."
Though even he seems to have failed to spot the irony of the attendees being served both by former denizens of the Soviet Block and the country with the largest Muslim population in the world.......
On the other hand, Freeze did manage to winkle out a remarkable detail from the organiser's past:
Bechtel was working at a California liquor store when first recruited by the CIA. “If I can sell a bottle of Jack Daniels, I can sure as hell sell America,” he recalls thinking.
[my emphasis]
I've never come across Freeze's material before (and to be fair to Bart Bechtel I only discovered his feature because it was posted in full on the SpySkipper blog) but his work here is to be commended for asking some tough uncomfortable questions and not treating the event as a glorified freebie - a decent example of proper reportage in fact, and one that seems to contrast favourably with Mangold's efforts. Yet in the UK you'll find it is Tom Mangold who enjoys the reputation as a tough impartial investigator into security matters, not least through those appearances on the Panorama series as briefly mentioned above.
But is his reputation still deserved in the light of this most recent broadcast? Or could it possibly be the case that he has always taken an obsequious approach when dealing with Western security services (the CIA in particular), we just never noticed it before?
The latter possibility first occurred to me when I stumbled across a hitherto little discussed documentary put together by Mangold in 2001 as part of Panorama's post 9/11 coverage of the just-launched War On Terror. In one single hour long broadcast Mangold made a series of remarkable claims directly connecting Saddam Hussain not only to the terrorist campaigns of Osama Bin Laden but also the Anthrax attacks in New York City. These bold assertions were stoutly supported by on the record interviews with the likes of former CIA director James Woolsey and - surprise surprise - future CIA director and fellow SpyCruiser Porter Goss
I wrote a couple of diaries dissecting his arguments here and here but the conclusion was, for me at least, surprising if not somewhat shocking - Tom Mangold appeared to have swallowed Bush administration propaganda against Iraq hook,line and sinker without any serious attempt to critically analyse or question their claims.
That this documentary did not immediately get greater traction in the media is I believe due purely to a strange twist of fate regarding the circumstances of its production (which I intend to explore in a subsequent post) but as it stands Mangold's broadcast seems to have been something of a 'trial run' for the big push that would be made the following year to convince the public a new Gulf War was necessary. While the credulity shown by him in both in this instance and on-board the Ship of Spies makes one seriously consider how much else of his work suffers the same flaw.
So which two Panorama editions did the Cruise organisers ask him to show, I wonder?