A Secret Legacy: Cuban Exiles, the CIA and the Congo Crisis (A Documentary Film in Progress)
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CIA Study of Covert Aid Fueled Skepticism About Helping Syrian Rebels  

10/29/2014

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NEW YORK TIMES
By MARK MAZZETTI    
OCT. 14, 2014

(To read the story on NYT website, click here)

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency has run guns to insurgencies across the world during its 67-year history — from Angola to Nicaragua to Cuba. The continuing C.I.A. effort to train Syrian rebels is just the latest example of an American president becoming enticed by the prospect of using the spy agency to covertly arm and train rebel groups.

An internal C.I.A. study has found that it rarely works.

The still-classified review, one of several C.I.A. studies commissioned in 2012 and 2013 in the midst of the Obama administration’s protracted debate about whether to wade into the Syrian civil war, concluded that many past attempts by the agency to arm foreign forces covertly had a minimal impact on the long-term outcome of a conflict. They were even less effective, the report found, when the militias fought without any direct American support on the ground.

The findings of the study, described in recent weeks by current and former American government officials, were presented in the White House Situation Room and led to deep skepticism among some senior Obama administration officials about the wisdom of arming and training members of a fractured Syrian opposition.

But in April 2013, President Obama authorized the C.I.A. to begin a program to arm the rebels at a base in Jordan, and more recently the administration decided to expand the training mission with a larger parallel Pentagon program in Saudi Arabia to train “vetted” rebels to battle fighters of the Islamic State, with the aim of training approximately 5,000 rebel troops per year.

So far the efforts have been limited, and American officials said that the fact that the C.I.A. took a dim view of its own past efforts to arm rebel forces fed Mr. Obama’s reluctance to begin the covert operation.

“One of the things that Obama wanted to know was: Did this ever work?” said one former senior administration official who participated in the debate and spoke anonymously because he was discussing a classified report. The C.I.A. report, he said, “was pretty dour in its conclusions.”

The debate over whether Mr. Obama acted too slowly to support the Syrian rebellion has been renewed after both former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and former Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta wrote in recent books that they had supported a plan presented in the summer of 2012 by David H. Petraeus, then the C.I.A. director, to arm and train small groups of rebels in Jordan.

Mr. Obama rejected that plan, but in the months that followed, Obama administration officials continued to debate the question of whether the C.I.A. should arm the rebels. Mr. Petraeus’s original plan was reworked until Mr. Obama signed a secret order authorizing the covert training mission after intelligence agencies concluded that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria had used chemical weapons against opposition forces and civilians.

Although Mr. Obama originally intended the C.I.A. to arm and train the rebels to fight the Syrian military, the focus of the American programs has shifted to training the rebel forces to fight the Islamic State, an enemy of Mr. Assad.

The C.I.A. review, according to several former American officials familiar with its conclusions, found that the agency’s aid to insurgencies had generally failed in instances when no Americans worked on the ground with the foreign forces in the conflict zones, as is the administration’s plan for training Syrian rebels.

One exception, the report found, was when the C.I.A. helped arm and train mujahedeen rebels fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan during the 1980s, an operation that slowly bled the Soviet war effort and led to a full military withdrawal in 1989. That covert war was successful without C.I.A. officers in Afghanistan, the report found, largely because there were Pakistani intelligence officers working with the rebels in Afghanistan.

But the Afghan-Soviet war was also seen as a cautionary tale. Some of the battle-hardened mujahedeen fighters later formed the core of Al Qaeda and used Afghanistan as a base to plan the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. This only fed concerns that no matter how much care was taken to give arms only to so-called moderate rebels in Syria, the weapons could ultimately end up with groups linked to Al Qaeda, like the Nusra Front.

“What came afterwards was impossible to eliminate from anyone’s imagination,” said the former senior official, recalling the administration debate about whether to arm the Syrian rebels.

Mr. Obama made a veiled reference to the C.I.A. study in an interview with The New Yorker published this year. Speaking about the dispute over whether he should have armed the rebels earlier, Mr. Obama told the magazine: “Very early in this process, I actually asked the C.I.A. to analyze examples of America financing and supplying arms to an insurgency in a country that actually worked out well. And they couldn’t come up with much.”

Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said that “without characterizing any specific intelligence products, the president was referring to the fact that providing money or arms alone to an opposition movement is far from a guarantee of success.”

“We have been very clear about that from the outset as we have articulated our strategy in Syria,” Ms Meehan said. “That is why our support to the moderate Syrian opposition has been deliberate, targeted and, most importantly, one element of a multifaceted strategy to create the conditions for a political solution to the conflict.”

Arming foreign forces has been central to the C.I.A.'s mission from its founding, and was a staple of American efforts to wage proxy battles against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The first such operation was in 1947, the year of the agency’s creation, when President Harry S. Truman ordered millions of dollars’ worth of guns and ammunition sent to Greece to help put down a Communist insurgency there. In a speech before Congress in March of that year, Mr. Truman said the fall of Greece could destabilize neighboring Turkey, and “disorder might well spread throughout the entire Middle East.”

That mission helped shore up the fragile Greek government. More frequently, however, the C.I.A. backed insurgent groups fighting leftist governments, often with calamitous results. The 1961 Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba, in which C.I.A.-trained Cuban guerrillas launched an invasion to fight Fidel Castro’s troops, ended in disaster. During the 1980s, the Reagan administration authorized the C.I.A. to try to bring down Nicaragua’s Sandinista government with a secret war supporting the contra rebels, who were ultimately defeated.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, C.I.A. paramilitary officers and Army Special Forces teams fought alongside Afghan militias to drive Taliban forces out of the cities and set up a new government in Kabul. In 2006, the C.I.A. set up a gunrunning operation to arm a group of Somali warlords who united under the Washington-friendly name the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism. That effort backfired, strengthening the Islamist fighters that the C.I.A. had intervened to defeat.

“It’s a very mixed history,” said Loch K. Johnson, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Georgia and an intelligence expert. “You need some really good, loyal people on the ground ready to fight.”

The progress of the Syrian conflict has only deepened skepticism about the loyalties — and the capabilities — of the Syrian opposition. Years of a bloody civil war have splintered the forces fighting the Assad government’s troops, with an increasing number of fighters pledging loyalty to radical groups like the Islamic State and the Nusra Front.

Last month, Mr. Obama said he would redouble American efforts by having the Pentagon participate in arming and training rebel forces. That program has yet to begin.

Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said last week that it would be months of “spade work” before the military had determined how to structure the program and how to recruit and vet the rebels.

“This is going to be a long-term effort,” he said.




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Interesting story about the daughter of Larry Devlin (CIA Chief of Station of Congo)

10/11/2014

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The True Story Of The 14-Year-Old Girl Who Earned One Of The CIA's Highest Valor Awards

For full article on the Business Insider website, click here

by
Paul Szoldra

A 14-year-old girl became the youngest recipient of the CIA’s second-highest award in the late 1960s, and she went on to become a successful intelligence officer in adulthood.

It’s one of the many fascinating insights gleaned from newly declassified documents as a result of a FOIA lawsuit.

In May 1966, Maureen Devlin was living in the Congo with her parents — her father, Lawrence, was the CIA’s station chief — amid civil war and general lawlessness in the capital of Kinshasa. One night, the family had a firsthand encounter with the turmoil.

Maureen was awakened by armed burglars in her bedroom as she pretended to sleep. As she kept up the ruse, the robbers stole a ring and bracelet from her hand, but it wasn’t long before she woke.

From “The Youngest Intelligence Star” in the agency’s “Studies in Intelligence” journal:

The girl heard the burglars discussing the possibility of harming her. She understood their local language, Lingala, but she did not understand the word rape, only that it was a physical threat. They turned on the lights, and one used a butcher knife to cut her nightgown. She managed to roll over and cover herself with the sheet, still feigning sleep. Her greatest fear at the time was that perhaps the men had already killed her mother and father.

She couldn’t pretend to be sleeping any longer after the burglars pricked her neck with the knife. But she acted quickly, speaking their language to tell them they shouldn’t harm anyone in the house — and in a genius move to capitalise on local superstition — told them the US embassy had “secret and magic” ways of identifying people who harmed Americans.

Later, after her parents were woken up and put into a corner of the bedroom, the girl’s mother talked back to the robbers in French and told them to leave. Maureen, for her part, told the bandits the family had “a dawa,” a black-magic spell that would result in the deaths of their wives, children, parents, and others if any harm came to them.

The journal noted the bandits had killed other families under similar circumstances.

“My God, this is the end of us,” Lawrence Devlin thought at the time, according to an account in The Washington Times. He knew of the other families found murdered in their bathrooms, but he was able to slam and lock the door.

The robbers eventually gave up and left. They were later captured by police, tried, and executed.

Maureen Devlin received the CIA’s second-highest award — the Intelligence Star — for “her quick appraisal of the situation, calm deportment, knowledge and use of the local language, exploitation of local lore, and resolute action,” the article says, adding that it “served her well as a teenager, and they continue to do so now in her career as a case officer in the Directorate of Operations.”

A 2008 New York Times article also recognised Maureen as having followed her father into the CIA. Her calm during this episode was similar to her father’s reaction to a trigger-happy Congolese soldier, who “defused a potentially lethal confrontation by calmly offering the soldier a cigarette.”




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On the lighter side...a story about the Starbucks at Langley!

10/9/2014

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AT CIA STARBUCKS, EVEN THE BARISTAS ARE COVERT
(to read the article on Washington Post website, click here)

By Emily Wax-Thibodeaux September 27

The new supervisor thought his idea was innocent enough. He wanted the baristas to write the names of customers on their cups to speed up lines and ease confusion, just like other Starbucks do around the world.

But these aren’t just any customers. They are regulars at the CIA Starbucks.

“They could use the alias ‘Polly-O string cheese’ for all I care,” said a food services supervisor at the Central Intelligence Agency, asking that his identity remain unpublished for security reasons. “But giving any name at all was making people — you know, the undercover agents — feel very uncomfortable. It just didn’t work for this location.”

This purveyor of skinny lattes and double cappuccinos is deep inside the agency’s forested Langley, Va., compound.

Welcome to the “Stealthy Starbucks,” as a few officers affectionately call it.

Or “Store Number 1,” as the receipts cryptically say.

The baristas go through rigorous interviews and background checks and need to be escorted by agency “minders” to leave their work area. There are no frequent-customer award cards, because officials fear the data stored on the cards could be mined by marketers and fall into the wrong hands, outing secret agents.

It is one of the busiest Starbucks in the country, with a captive caffeine-craving audience of thousands of analysts and agents, economists and engineers, geographers and cartographers working on gathering intelligence and launching covert operations inside some of the most vexing and violent places around the world.

“Obviously,” one officer said, “we are caffeine-addicted personality types. ”

Because the campus is a highly secured island, few people leave for coffee, and the lines, both in the morning and mid-afternoon, can stretch down the hallway. According to agency lore, one senior official, annoyed by the amount of time employees were wasting, was known to approach someone at the back of the line and whisper, “What have you done for your country today?”

This coffee shop looks pretty much like any other Starbucks, with blond wooden chairs and tables, blueberry and raspberry scones lining the bakery cases, and progressive folk rock floating from the speakers. (There are plans to redecorate, possibly including spy paraphernalia from over the decades.)

But the manager said this shop “has a special mission,” to help humanize the environment for employees, who work under high pressure often in windowless offices and can’t fiddle with their smartphones during downtime. For security, they have to leave them in their cars.

Amid pretty posters for Kenyan beans and pumpkin spice latte, nestled in the corner where leather armchairs form a cozy nook, the supervisor said he often hears customers practicing foreign languages, such as German or Arabic.

The shop is also the site of many job interviews for agents looking to move within the CIA, such as from a counter­terrorism post to a nuclear non-proliferation gig. “Coffee goes well with those conversations,” one officer said.

The chief of the team that helped find Osama Bin Laden, for instance, recruited a key deputy for the effort at the Starbucks, said another officer who could not be named.

One female agent said she occasionally runs into old high school and college friends in line at Starbucks. Until then, they didn’t know they worked together. Such surprise reunions are not uncommon. Working at the agency is not something you e-mail or write Facebook posts about, she said.

Normally, during the day, the bestsellers are the vanilla latte and the lemon pound­cake. But for officers working into the night, whether because of a crisis or they are dealing with someone in a different time zone, double espressos and sugary Frappuccinos are especially popular.

“Coffee culture is just huge in the military, and many in the CIA come from that culture ,” said Vince Houghton, an intelligence expert and curator at the International Spy Museum. “Urban myth says the CIA Starbucks is the busiest in the world, and to me that makes perfect sense. This is a population who have to be alert and spend hours poring through documents. If they miss a word, people can die.”

The nine baristas who work here are frequently briefed about security risks.

“We say if someone is really interested in where they work and asks too many questions, then they need to tell us,” the supervisor said.

A female barista who commutes from the District before sunrise said she initially applied to work for a catering company that services federal buildings in the region, not knowing where she might be assigned. She said she underwent extensive vetting “that was more than just a credit check.”

The 27-year-old woman was offered a job and told that she would be working in food services in Langley. On her first morning of work, she recalled, she put a location in her GPS and nothing came up. So she called the person who had hired her and got an explanation of the address. “Before I knew it, I realized I was now working for the Starbucks at the CIA,” she said.

Unfortunately, she can’t boast about where she works at parties. “The most I can say to friends is that I work in a federal building,” she said.

She said she has come to recognize people’s faces and their drinks. “There’s caramel-macchiato guy” and “the iced white mocha woman,” she said.

“But I have no idea what they do,” she added, fastening her green Starbucks apron and adjusting her matching cap. “I just know they need coffee, a lot of it.”






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    Sandra Alvarez-Smith is the director and Executive Producer of the film

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