AP John Diamond 9/16/98 "The CIA is pumping money and people into recruiting efforts to battle a trend that the agency's departing inspector general says has sapped the clandestine service of its most experienced hands. Agency officials outlined Tuesday initiatives that CIA Director George Tenet announced internally last month to increase pay, provide hiring bonuses and shorten the waiting time for job offers..The program is intended to combat a problem outlined in an op-ed article by outgoing CIA Inspector General Fred Hitz who said the CIA's Directorate of Operations, the clandestine spy service, is losing its best people amid organizational drift and declining morale.."
The Electronic Telegraph UK 9/24/98 Ambrose Evans-Pritchard "In an interview with The Telegraph , Mr Woolsey gave a caustic assessment of the President he served until his abrupt resignation in January 1995 . Dismissing Bill Clinton as a "tactician" , he said the foreign policy of the administration was driven by opinion polls , short -term PR calculations and the spin-cycle rythmn of an election campaign. "If you want to know how they make decisions , all you need do is watch the War Room , " he said , referring to the documentary of Mr Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. During his two years as Director of Central Intelligence , Mr Woolsey managed to secure only two conversations with Mr Clinton. "It wasn't that I had a bad relationship with him . I just didn't have any relationship ," said Mr Woolsey. He believes the damage to the American national interest has been substantial , though largely hidden from view. Mr Woolsey compared the global scene to the late 1920's when inchoate foreign threats were ignored , played down , and ultimately allowed to escalate.."
AP 10/7/98 John Diamond "White House procedures for protecting highly secret information are often lax, congressional auditors said Wednesday. Security clearances are granted before completion of background checks, they said, and failing in some cases to order adequate CIA investigations.."
AP 10/14/98 John Diamond ".The Energy Department and Pentagon discovered sensitive nuclear weapons information in boxes of Cold War-era materials that were about to be publicly released at President Clinton's orders..."
Drudge Report 11/20/98 ".When the CIA uncovered "conclusive evidence" of the personal corruption of Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin of Russia in 1995, they sent a report to the White House, expecting Clinton administration officials to be impressed, according to a report in Monday's NEW YORK TIMES. "Instead, when the secret CIA report on Chernomyrdin arrived in the office of Vice President Al Gore, it was rejected and sent back to the CIA with a barnyard epithet scrawled across its cover," reports TIMES spook writer James Risen..."
Center for Security Policy 11/23/98 Decision Brief "."At CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., the message seemed clear: The vice president did not want to hear allegations that Chernomyrdin was corrupt and was not interested in further intelligence reports on the matter. As a result, CIA analysts say they are now censoring themselves."... Obviously, the highest levels of the Administration -- most especially Vice President Gore, Chernomyrdin's interlocutor in a highly secretive joint commission -- did not want to change American policy towards Russia in light of the thoroughly dishonest character of the government in Moscow. It did not even want to know about the Kremlin's dishonesty...History will record that the world became a much more dangerous place on Bill Clinton's watch. Worse yet, it will probably show that -- thanks to his unwillingness to see, let alone to take appropriate measures in response to, emerging dangers -- the Nation was woefully ill-prepared to deal with them. ."
Associated Press 2/21/99 "...The night before Cuban MiGs shot down two Miami-based planes of a civilian rescue group, an adviser to President Clinton warned the White House of a possible confrontation, a newspaper reported Sunday. Richard Nuccio told The Miami Herald that he never got a reply to the memo he sent at 6:44 p.m. on Feb. 23, 1996, using the White House's electronic mail system. The e-mail went to Sandy Berger, now Clinton's national security adviser, said Nuccio, who has since left the White House..."
Global Intelligence Update 3/8/99 “…But even behind this, even behind the hints of corruption and malfeasance, there has been a deep-seated sense within the defense and intelligence communities that the Administration was simply not sensitive to the national security needs of the United States. From the beginning, there has been a deep policy and cultural divide between the national security apparatus that was honed and seasoned during the Cold War and the Clinton Administration... Someone in the national security community, or among its congressional allies, decided this week to open a new campaign against the President. Whoever the leakers were this week, they are trying to paint a picture of an Administration that was simply indifferent to the classical concept of national security. The end of the Lewinsky affair has, it appears to us, opened a new battlefield in which the stakes are much higher. The President and his Administration are being charged with being either fools or knaves when it comes to defending the security interests of the United States….”
Capitol Hill Blue 3/9/99 Doug Thompson “… The FBI, CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) all warned the White House three years ago that China was obtaining U.S. weapons secrets at will, but the Clinton administration ignored the warnings and approved contracts that involved key Democratic campaign contributors..
Wall Street Journal 3/19/97 Editorial “…Just in the last week, we learned that FBI officials tipped off two NSC underlings last June about Chinese government intentions to influence U.S. politics. Mr. Lake says he was never told because the FBI advised the pair to keep it to themselves. …”
Capitol Hill Blue 3/10/99 Doug Thompson “…Many career intelligence officers consider President Clinton and the White House a security risk and withhold sensitive information whenever possible to prevent it falling into enemy hands, Capitol Hill Blue has learned. Often, information is also withheld from Clinton appointees at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Justice and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), veteran intelligence operatives say. "The White House is not secure when it comes to matters of national security," says one recently-retired intelligence analyst. "Career operatives realize this and place the security of their country above politics." . ”
LA Times 3/14/99 Bob Drogin “…In one report, GAO investigators said security was so sloppy at the three labs until last fall that foreign visitors, including suspected spies, often were allowed 24-hour, unescorted access to areas where sensitive and classified information was stored. In one case, the material was stashed in boxes placed in an open hallway. .”
The Washinton Post via NewsMax 4/1/99 John F. Harris "...The warnings were there for President Clinton. For weeks before the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia, sources said, CIA Director George J. Tenet had been forecasting that Serb-led Yugoslav forces might respond by accelerating their campaign of ethnic cleansing in the province of Kosovo -- precisely the outcome that has unfolded over the past week. All during this time, U.S. military leaders were offering Clinton a corresponding assessment of their own. If the Serbs did launch such an assault, they said, air power alone would not be sufficient to stop it -- precisely the analysis that NATO's supreme commander, Gen. Wesley K. Clark, articulated publicly this week when asked what the military could do to halt the humanitarian disaster unfolding in the Balkans. ..."
ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST 4/8/99 "... I received a call March 23 from a national security source who told me of secret U.S. intelligence that Serb forces were prepared to abduct American troops stationed in Macedonia. I could not confirm the tip, and besides, it seemed inconceivable that the U.S. military would permit this to happen. Wrong indeed. On March 31, three American soldiers were seized along the Macedonia-Kosovo border in an incident drenched with ambiguity and mystery...."
The American Spectator 5/99 Kenneth R. Timmerman "...One of the more shocking details I uncovered in my investigation of China's California networks was that a front company owned by the PLA's largest weapons manufacturer had set up shop directly above the CIA office responsible for contacts with U.S. aerospace manufacturers in the Los Angeles area, where some of the agency's most secret projects have been developed. The Chinese operated there for more than two years without the CIA ever knowing, U.S. law enforcement officers in the L.A. area told me. ..."
Washington Times 4/30/99 Editorial Board "...Attorney General Reno's Justice Department is far more culpable for this catastrophic national-security debacle. Time and again, the New York Times reports, the Justice Department declined to pursue FBI requests for wiretaps...">{? American Spectator 5/99 John B. Roberts II "...Intelligence insiders expect the publicly disclosed assessments to be a whitewash. Citing the administration's strenuous efforts to suppress publication of Rep. Chris Cox's committee report on Chinese espionage, they expect the White House to try to keep the details of the W-88 theft classified...."
Reuters 5/10/99 "...A scientist assigned to a classified Pentagon project in 1997 supplied China with secrets about advanced radar technology being developed to track submarines, a report in the New York Times said Monday. Submarine detection technology is closely guarded by the Pentagon because the U.S. Navy's ability to hide its submarines is a key military advantage, the newspaper said.....The Justice Department in Washington also blocked any prosecution of Lee, officials quoted by the paper said..... On March 26, 1998, a judge declined to put Peter Lee in prison and sentenced him to 12 months in a halfway house with three years' probation and a fine of $20,000, according to the newspaper..."
USA Today 5/16/99 AP LA Times "...The National Imagery and Mapping Agency and its predecessor organization have produced charts or maps that played a role in at least a dozen accidents since 1985, some involving fatalities and loss of military aircraft, according to documents and interviews reviewed by the Times. On May 7, fighter pilots using outdated maps attacked the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three journalists and injuring 20 people.... NIMA maps were a factor in three accidents in the last 15 months that killed a total of 28 people, including the clipping of an Italian gondola cable by a Marine fighter jet in February 1998 that left 20 people dead..... The agency has encountered funding shortages, a loss of senior analysts and cartographers and friction between intelligence and defense communities for its services. NIMA was created in 1996 by merging the 24-year-old Defense Mapping Agency with photographic analysts and intelligence personnel from seven other Pentagon and CIA branches...."
AP 5/20/99 JOHN DIAMOND "... Though the government is prone to leaks, the unauthorized publication of classified documents that in most cases are just a year or two old is rare. It has touched off widespread concern in the intelligence community..... But his book [Gertz/Betrayal] states the Clinton administration carried out a policy of appeasement of real or potential U.S. enemies that ``so angered some intelligence, defense and foreign policy officials that they responded in the only way they knew how: by disclosing to the press some of the nation's most secret intelligence.'' Gertz wrote that his sources were ``unsung heroes'' who ``jeopardized their careers to expose wrongdoing.'' ..."
House of Representatives 5/24/99 Rep. Kurt Weldon (R-PA) "...For 7 years, Mr. Speaker, we have heard the rhetoric coming from the White House that the world is safe, there are no problems, our security is intact, and therefore, we can dramatically cut the size of our defense forces and we can, in fact, shift that money over to other purposes...."
Washington Weekly 11/17/97 "...The most shocking and devastating revelation made by Bob Woodward's story Friday is that after Chairman Thompson announced two weeks ago that he was suspending his public hearings, the FBI obtained intelligence showing that the Ministry of State Security in Beijing -- the Chinese equivalent of the CIA -- boasted it had been successful in "thwarting" the congressional inquiry. ..."
Curt Weldon Website 6/8/99 "... Now, as extensive as this is, Mr. Speaker, I can tell you this is only scratching the surface. In one of our House hearings one of our colleagues asked the FBI when they were doing the investigation of these linkages how much of what they know is now available in public form with all the reports, all the investigations, how much of what the FBI and the CIA knows is available to the public, and this was the answer: Less than 1 percent...."
New York Times 6/27/99 James Risen Jeff Gerth "...Berger, now the national security adviser, has said that it was not until after he received a second, more specific briefing in July 1997 that he told Clinton about security problems at the nuclear weapons laboratories...."
Our enemies are within - and all America must know it!
Mr. Woolsley was on this morning encouraging the Bush administration to go further than just thinking the terrorists and those who "harbor" them must be dealt with. He said he hoped the Bush team would also focus on the NATIONS who finance, who train, who sponsor terrorism as part of their official policy - something the Clinton administration STOPPED DOING SHORTLY AFTER HE CAME INTO OFFICE!!!!
I totally agree with him!
I think these clips deserve a thread of their own.