Jarhead by Anthony Swofford and State of War by James Risen
I read two books this week: Jarhead and State of War.
Jarhead is a memoir covering the author’s work as a Marine fighting in the 1991 Gulf War. It contains a lot of profanity and crude expressions, but I suspect this is an honest recollection of the war. Jarhead evoked a sympathetic mood in describing the Marine’s experiences and yet still describes the emotional chaos and devastation convincingly.
Risen’s book, State of War, was largely a recounting of the failures of the CIA between the late 90’s and late 2005. Most of the information was already reported in the New York Times. Two chapters contained stories that I had not heard before: “The Hunt for WMD” and “A Rogue Operation.”
The first described a CIA mission in which Sawsan Alhaddad, an anesthesiologist living in Ohio who had left Iraq in 1979, was sent to Iraq in 2002 to convince her brother to try to escape Baghdad to defect to the US or at least tell her what he knew about Iraqi WMD. Her brother, Saad Tawfiq, was “a key figure in Saddam Hussein’s clandestine nuclear weapons program” (p. 88). Tawfiq told his sister that Iraq had had no WMD program since June of 1991, when the uranium refinement system they had been working on was dismantled, loaded onto 150 trucks, and driven into the desert to be hidden. The hidden equipment was revealed to UN inspectors 3 months later, according to Risen.
The final chapter in the book is called “A Rogue Operation,” but the operation described does not seem to be rogue. It describes the CIA’s attempt to leak flawed plans for a nuclear detonation system to Iran through an unidentified Russian scientist who had defected to the US at the end of the Cold War. The scientist likely succeeded in leaking the plans to Iran; he also suggested subtly to the Iranians that the plans were flawed. (”If you try to create a similar device you will need to ask some practical questions.” (p. 205)). Perhaps that sentence could be described as “rogue,” but the rest of the operation was carried out as intended.
My only complaint about Risen’s book, other than the lack of source attribution, which is perhaps necessary, is his weak description of a file transfer that betrayed all of the CIA’s agents in Iran in 2004. A CIA agent “sent a secret data flow to one of the Iranian agents . . .” (p. 193). She “didn’t think twice when she began her latest download.” But if she was sending information out to agents, this would be an upload, not a download. Was it that she was receiving a secret data flow, but revealing it to all of the agents? The crux of the agents’ betrayal is described as, “She had sent information to one Iranian agent meant for the entire spy network; the data could be used to identify virtually every spy the CIA had inside Iran.” This doesn’t make sense– how could identities be betrayed if the information was sent to fewer people than it should have been? My best guess is that Risen means that she uploaded a set of unique messages to one spy, when the intent was for each spy to receive one unique message. But what CIA agent would send a spy a message that contains his or her identity?
“Dear Saad Tawfiq, spy for the United States,
Please send us information about WMD. Also, have you seen OBL? We *really* need to find that guy. Please advise.
The CIA.”