(Slain Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Photo CBP.)

“Gun lobby sycophants in Congress are calling the regulation a smoke screen to distract attention from a gun-tracking operation botched by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Known straw buyers made purchases that were supposed to lead to the cartels’ main brokers. But hundreds of guns disappeared into Mexico, and two turned up at the scene of a shootout where an American Border Patrol guard was killed. If anything, the ill-conceived operation, which deserves the fullest investigation, is a measure of the firearms bureau’s frustration in dealing with porous American law.”

– Editorial in the New York Times, 14 July 2011

I was going to tell you about the 12th Director of the Central Intelligence Agency this morning. Admiral Stansfield Turner was dispatched to Langley to facilitate the transition of the Agency from relying on human agents of dubious lineage and transitioning the Intelligence Community to a more pristine model that relied on satellites to collect imagery and communications intelligence from lofty orbits.

President Jimmy Carter was determined to rein in the Agency. Enough was enough. The testimony that reveals the background to the Family Jewels before the Church and Pike Committees was bad enough, and there was the suspicion that there was a lot more. Carter selected Admiral Turner, a Naval Academy classmate with a distinguished career in the surface line to go and fix the agency.

That he had no background or understanding of the Agency was irrelevant to the President. What the Agency had been up to, in his mind, was wrong, and the whole culture needed to be weeded out and transitioned to something else. He acted quickly, and with a cold anger at what he perceived as inappropriate conduct by an agency out of control.

The first thing the Admiral did was terminate 800 human intelligence (HUMINT) agents and case officers in what became known at Langley as “The Halloween Massacre” as the pendulum began to swing away from a culture of free-wheeling operations to a tightly controlled and well-overseen operation.

I will get to that, presently, since the last part of Mac’s career we can talk about is his role in helping to set up the special courts that reviewed all operational actions between the intelligence and Justice communities and those who were known as “US Persons” under law. And it was about the law, passed by Congress, and the establishment of the Federal Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA).

I will try to get Mac to talk about that at Willow in the near future- it must have been an exciting and unsettled time out there at Langley. My pal Charlie, who was a Navy Captain who went along to keep Admiral Turner company, said it was sort of eerie. No one would talk to the Director, or his people.

Anyway, what got me going this morning was the editorial that wouldn’t use the name “Fast and Furious,” the strange step-child of Operation Gunrunner orchestrated apparently by no-one in the Department of Justice or the ATF.

The idea behind Fast and Furious was to allow semi-automatic rifles to be sold and smuggled into Mexico. Then, the weapons would be tracked to drug cartel end-users and build criminal cases against them. The contention is that the contents of the gang arsenals are procured from gun dealers in U.S. Border States.

Now, the fact that thousands of the weapons were actually provided by the US government to the cartels might increase the number of guns that originated in America, right? Oh well, cause and effect should never get in the way of a good story, right?

Once Fast and Furious got under way, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms agents realized they had no way to keep track of the guns. Of the 2,020 guns involved in the operation, 363 have been recovered in the US and another 227 in Mexico, leaving more than 1,400 assault rifles still missing and presumed to be in the hands of bad guys.

The weapons began appearing at crime scenes on both sides of the border, and U.S. Immigration agent Jaime Zapata was assassinated in in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi. In December of last year a Fast and Furious gun was used to kill U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. His family is considering a civil suit against AG Eric Holder, who claims not to have heard about the operation until after the murdered.

There are many more dead, of course, some Americans and many Mexicans, part of the 40,000 who have died in the struggle over drug violence that stems from the self-perpetuating American need for drugs and the Mexican desire to service the lucrative market.

Brian Terry is the young man referenced facelessly in the editorial from The Times quoted above, while Jaime is ignored altogether. The prim acknowledgement about the negligence and cupidity of the ATF aside, the Gray Lady of Manhattan manages to wind up supporting a government whose conduct is clearly out of control.

The Times is a funny beast, isn’t it? It runs hot and cold on civil liberties, which it considers in a purely situational context. I mean, guns are bad, right? Therefore, anything that restricts a public health menace must be good, right?

So, let me recap what has been going on. The Department of Justice was supplying Mexican criminals with illegal weapons, at US taxpayer expense, and over the objections of the gun dealers who were directed to conduct the sales, even with provisions of immunity.

This is about pendulums, and it is about bipartisan Executive desire to expand authority and control.

The Intelligence Community that I served in, 1977-2003, was strictly limited in many activities. We had to learn Executive Order 12333 by heart. The provisions went from the highest to the lowest levels of the community.

In world famous Air Wing SIX, for example, I had a series of directives with which I had to ensure compliance. It included the admonition not to conduct assassinations, and specific prohibition against conducting medical experimentation on the pilots.

We had to laugh about it then, since the only such activity was normally self-inflicted by American Persons and conducted at Happy Hour at the NAS Cecil Field Officer’s Club, or a variety of venues across the Mediterranean, but I knew where the directives came from.

9/11 changed everything, of course, and George Tenet’s famous memo directing the Agency to “take off the gloves” turned back the clock. The pendulum swung rapidly. We have heard about some of the extraordinary things that have gone on since: renditions, black prisons, torture and all that.

The Obama Administration has hardly worked to scale things back. In fact, the pendulum has continued to swing.

The jury is out on whether it all worked to keep us safe, and at what cost. I am inclined to think that many things were useful if unpalatable, and I am OK with “mistakes were made” on some of them.

I am particularly pleased that Osama paid the price, and I want to avoid putting the gloves back on. But we have a real hard time finding the happy medium.

I find it disturbing that the DOJ had a direct hand in supplying the Mexican cartels with weapons, at taxpayer expense. It is disturbing that no one knew about it, with everyone from the President and the AG to the FBI and ATF shrugging that “they didn’t know.” I find it really weird that guns provided by our government to the criminals are counted as evidence that there is a need for increased enforcement.

It sounds a little like what they said back in the 1970s, doesn’t it?
Plus ça change, you know? Plus c’est la même chose.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com