The Devil and Daniel Ellsberg - From archetype to anachronism.

Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg, by Tom Wells, New York: Palgrave, 692 pages, $32.50


In 1973, as his world began falling apart, Richard Nixon demonstrated his rhetorical prowess to his press secretary, Ron Ziegler. The topic was a break-in at the office of Lewis Fielding, Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist. Ellsberg was a former consultant at the RAND Corporation who had leaked the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Defense Department history of the Vietnam War.

Nixon wanted dirt on Ellsberg, so his men dispatched a ham-fisted outfit to Los Angeles to see what Fielding had. When the White House came under suspicion, Nixon complained to Ziegler, "The president knows a hell of a lot of things, but does he know what the Christ some dumb assholes are going to do? -- .Goddamn to hell, I didn't tell them to go fuck up the goddamn Ellsberg place." As Tom Wells notes in Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg, the president not only knew about the Fielding break-in but was probably the one who ordered it in the first place.

It was arguably Ellsberg's greatest triumph: He had roused the self-destructive impulses of a president and an administration that he felt had betrayed the American people by allowing the war in Vietnam to continue. Some would nominate Ellsberg's role in exposing the Pentagon Papers as his finest moment, but despite the furor that their release provoked they largely disappeared into the sludge of post-Vietnam skepticism in the U.S. They were a valuable confirmation of the worst fears of those opposed to the war, but they were too bulky and intricate a collection of documents to affect most of the public. Indeed, the difficulty of Wells' book is that he describes a man and an event that, while interesting, have left virtually no enduring impact on American society.

What's more, he does so in a book that goes on forever. Wells strives to emulate the epic quality of other Vietnam-period biography-cum-Zeitgeist-accounts, such as Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie or David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, but Wells has neither author's talent, nor does he much care for the man at the center of his research.

Besides, Ellsberg does not rate a 600-page book, particularly from an author who tends to confuse perspiration and inspiration: Wild Man is overloaded with other people's quotes, doggedly hunted down, so that one is never sure whether Wells' discomfort with Ellsberg springs from his own misgivings or from those of the myriad sources he cites.

There was a time when biography produced art, not phone books. Uncertainty was part of the bargain, so that the great biographers were -- are -- those tolerant of their subject's complexities and flaws. Wells is not, which leads him into a stifling form of deconstruction as he vainly hunts for clarity in Ellsberg through an unfiltered inventory of detail. To see how biography should be done, one might read René Grousset, the great French historian, whose description of Pompey in his Figures de Proue (1949) is both a tribute to brevity and a remarkably apt description of Daniel Ellsberg: "What was it his ambition to attain in the Republic? A sort of moral presidency to which, after the services he had rendered, he had some right? To rule, with or without a formal title? Especially to accumulate honors, many honors, which would have satisfied his vanity and his irresolution, but which his secret mediocrity would have prevented him from turning into something redoubtable?"

This is more or less the Ellsberg of Wild Man. Wells describes someone who is an egotist and a megalomaniac, with writer's block and a taste for sex. But that description fits many people. What makes Ellsberg relevant is that he is an archetype of a particular era -- the late 1960s -- whose values have aged badly in America's collective memory. The motives that led to the release of the Pentagon Papers would be ridiculed in this post-September 11 climate, where compliant loyalty to the state is commonly regarded as an obligation.

Daniel Ellsberg was born in Chicago in 1931, to Jewish parents with a passion for Christian Science. The young Daniel was acknowledged as brilliant, a quality his mother, Adele, sought to exploit by channeling the boy into piano playing. Harry, the father, was an aloof engineer, disliked by Adele's family and apparently indifferent to the piano. Wells follows a hackneyed route in recording the psychological influences on Ellsberg: an ambitious mother who "was not, it seems, a nurturing sort," and a detached father who would interrupt this convenient Freudian tableau by having a car accident that killed Adele and their daughter. Afterward, the young Daniel, no longer manacled to the keyboard, would feel a sense of release. Though he plainly loved his mother, he later said that he never cried at her death.

Ellsberg's reserve showed, if nothing else, that he was policy analyst material. In 1958 he was invited to join the RAND Corporation, the private, nonprofit research institution in Southern California founded after World War II by the Air Force to advise the government on military issues. This came after a dazzling romp through Harvard, where Ellsberg was invited to join the university's select Society of Fellows. He later earned a doctorate on the subject of decision making under uncertainty, at a time when game theory was all the rage. Revealingly, Ellsberg had earlier enlisted in the Marine Corps, a move that would raise eyebrows from acquaintances in academe. He would describe himself as being "a liberal on domestic matters and, on foreign policy, a tough guy."

At RAND, Ellsberg tasted the malicious nectar of high secrecy. He rubbed elbows with the institution's nuclear strategy gurus -- Herman Kahn, Albert Wohlstetter, Bernard Brodie -- and gained access to confidential U.S. war plans in order to study nuclear command and control issues. Ellsberg found the plans dangerously rigid, though Wells goes to some length to prove that Ellsberg overstated his importance in formulating an alternative policy. Wells cannot abide Ellsberg's hyperbole, but throughout the Kennedy and Johnson years this self-promoter was involved in very important government projects, always propelled by friendly patrons and a reputation for being a genius. His Washington career began in 1964, when Ellsberg landed at Robert McNamara's Pentagon as special assistant to John McNaughton, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. There he would start working on Vietnam.

Vietnam would come to inhabit Ellsberg, transforming him completely. Ellsberg left the Pentagon for Saigon to join a team led by Gen. Edward Lansdale, who had become a counterinsurgency sage after defeating the Huk rebellion in the Philippines in the 1950s. Ellsberg's exposure to the conflict -- in particular, his forays into distant districts where few

Americans traveled -- convinced him that the U.S. pacification campaign was failing. It would take time for him to turn against the war -- too much time, some argue -- but at least he did so, in contrast to, say, his more experienced friend John Paul Vann, a former Army officer who acted as a U.S. adviser during the war and who until the very end believed the conflict to be winnable.

After returning to RAND, Ellsberg began copying the Pentagon Papers, hoping that their exposure of a decade of official dissembling on how the war in Vietnam was conducted would force the government to pull out of the conflict. As Wells persuasively argues, Ellsberg's delay in leaking the papers was motivated by an enduring desire to be part of the Establishment. Harvard men such as McGeorge Bundy and Henry Kissinger pursued the kinds of careers that Ellsberg thought should be his by right, although they had a ruthless discipline he lacked. By the time the papers were published, Ellsberg had largely undermined his chances of becoming a senior policy official. The reason was that his recognized brilliance was overtaken by a reputation for being inefficient and unable to write -- a fatal liability in a world where power is measured by one's aptitude to generate timely papers and memoranda.

Though Ellsberg copied and privately circulated the Pentagon Papers, his involvement in their publication by The New York Times in June 1971 was less simple than is often believed. He had initially tried to leak the papers through members of Congress, whose immunity would have allowed Ellsberg to protect himself legally, but he was rebuffed. He also allowed scholars at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) to copy part of his set. Finally, after much dithering, Ellsberg met with Neil Sheehan of the Times. After reneging on a publication agreement with Sheehan, he allowed him to see some of the documents but told him not to copy them. Sheehan ignored the request, combined his duplicates with those he had received from the IPS, and published them, giving the Times an exceptional scoop.

The Nixon administration took the matter personally. This may seem odd, since the papers described the duplicity of the previous Democratic administrations. But at the time, Nixon and Kissinger were attempting to secure an "honorable peace" to cover a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, which meant that the war had to drag on. The Pentagon Papers created an uncomfortable context for this strategy by highlighting the fact that the lies about Vietnam were continuing under the Republicans.

Small wonder, then, that Nixon personally targeted Ellsberg. The president's plan was to do to the leaker what he had done to Alger Hiss: to gather information that would sully him in the public eye.

Henry Kissinger was especially discomfited. In 1968 he had hired Ellsberg to help prepare National Security Study Memorandum 1, which outlined options for withdrawing from Vietnam. Kissinger's bureaucratic instincts told him he should be among the shrillest of Ellsberg's detractors. Soon he was spreading word that Ellsberg had shot at peasants from helicopters in Vietnam, a peculiar -- and false -- accusation from someone whose widening of the war led to the deaths of almost 1 million Cambodians and Laotians.

When that was not enough, Kissinger accused Ellsberg, again falsely, of being homosexual. One is reminded of the spiteful, throwaway remark Kissinger directed at Christopher Hitchens recently, when he accused the journalist of being a Holocaust denier, words he was subsequently made to eat.

The criminal charges against Ellsberg for releasing the Pentagon Papers were dismissed because of government tampering with the evidence against him, and his star began waning almost immediately afterward. Ellsberg tried to expand on the moral presidency he had been led to believe was his, but his secret mediocrity got the better of him. His historical purpose served, he became an afterthought. Though he continued to play a part on the '70s protest circuit, particularly against nuclear proliferation, by 1981, when a conservative Republican returned to the White House, Ellsberg had become a vague memory. Under Ronald Reagan, illegal concealment would again be fashionable, and there were no Ellsbergs to give the game away. Instead, the person best personifying the spirit of the day was Oliver North.

Yet it was not Reagan but Bill Clinton who would symbolically inter what Ellsberg (who still hits the lecture circuit) represented. The first baby boomer president had all the generational ambiguities that Ellsberg once had (though he was considerably younger), but he cast them aside for the sake of power. Clinton's jovial abandonment of principle, and America's willingness to play along, created a setting where someone like Ellsberg, though no moral paragon himself, appeared obsolete. The line of confrontation in the 1990s was no longer between a potentially corrupt state and a civil society defending its liberties. What Ellsberg lost in the process the republic did, too, and to its detriment.

Second-front Sideshow - Is Syria turning Lebanon into a battle zone again?

When Syria's late president, Hafiz al-Asad, died in June 2000, Syrian officials circulated the story that he had expired while on the phone to his Lebanese counterpart, Emile Lahoud, as the two men discussed what they would bequeath their children's generation.

The story was bogus, but also symbolic: Even in death, it implied, Asad maintained a grip on Lebanon, one that stretched on into an indistinct future. The message was fundamental enough to Syria's interests that the country's apparatchiks had to edit Lahoud into Asad's passion play.

In the past week a more pernicious aspect of the Syrian-Lebanese bond -- Syria's use of Lebanon in its conflict against Israel -- has threatened to amplify the war in the Middle East. As the U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell traveled to the region, he risked finding himself breaking up not one but two fights, one of them along the southern Lebanese border.

Two key developments occurred locally after the recent Arab League summit in Beirut in late March. As Israel pursued its onslaught against Palestinian towns in the West Bank and Gaza, successive attacks were mounted against Israel from Lebanese territory. By yesterday, the attacks had escalated from individual actions into the rocketing of northern Israeli towns.

Meanwhile, Syria announced last week it would redeploy its forces from Beirut and its surrounding areas to Lebanon's Biqaa Valley, thus implementing clauses of the 1989 Taif agreement that ended Lebanon's civil war. Ironically, the Syrians spent years undermining Taif by ignoring calls for a redeployment.

To put this all into context one must return to May 2000, when Israeli forces withdrew from south Lebanon after a 22-year occupation. The UN drew a boundary between Israel, Lebanon, and Syria that it called the "blue line." The Lebanese government recognized the line, except in an area of southeast Lebanon known as the Shebaa Farms. It argued the land was Lebanese, and that Israeli must vacate it. The UN replied the land was actually Syrian and that Lebanon had no claim to it.

There was a simple reason for the Lebanese assertion: It satisfied Syria's need for a motive to pursue armed conflict by proxy in the Shebaa Farms, in order to maintain military leverage over Israel during future negotiations over the Golan Heights. (Israel seized the Golan from Syria in 1967.) Syria and Lebanon gave Hizbullah a green light to harass Israeli forces in the farms area, defending this as legitimate resistance.

Cut to the latest attacks (which in targeting Israeli territory were different from Hizbullah's operations in the occupied Shebaa Farms). These were the work of Damascus-based Palestinian groups. The Lebanese government declared it opposed military action against northern Israel and arrested several Palestinian militants. However, the attacks continued, mainly because Syria wanted them to. Coupled with the Hizbullah raids in the farms area, these attacks threaten to provoke a spiraling conflict.

What is going on? Simply, the Syrian president, Bashar al-Asad, is using Palestinian groups to respond to the Arab League's recent adoption of the Saudi peace initiative. The plan offered Israel normal relations with the Arab states in return for a withdrawal from occupied Arab lands, recognition of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as capital, and a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem.

The Israeli government, led by Ariel Sharon, rejected the plan. Ironically, Syria could not stomach it either: It promised Israel normal relations, which the Syrians had refused to do before Israel accepted a full withdrawal from the Golan. Syria's security-oriented regime cannot easily manage relations with a detested enemy. And Asad fears that once Arab states normalize relations, he will have no leverage over Israel if it reneges on a Golan withdrawal agreement.

So, the Syrians are using cross-border violence in Lebanon to derail the Arab initiative. They hope that a conflict will delay progress indefinitely. The Syrian troop movements inside Lebanon were designed to prepare for a possible Israeli backlash. They allowed the Syrians to regroup their forces, but also to claim that whatever happens henceforth in Lebanon is not their responsibility.

That is, of course, patently false. Israel has seen through the Syrian game, while the U.S. has expressed distaste for Syrian policy. Last Thursday George W. Bush noted: "It's time...for Syria to decide which side of the war against terror it is on." And Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld remarked earlier: "States like Iran, Iraq and Syria are inspiring and financing a culture of political murder and suicide bombing."

Despite its criticism of Syria, however, the U.S. has always tolerated paramount Syrian influence in Lebanon: Washington believes that Syria alone can bring Hizbullah to heel. But if Syria is accepted as an agent of stability, then the Bush administration might want to clarify what has become of this quid pro quo in south Lebanon.

If Colin Powell is to make headway in the Middle East, he will have to revive the Arab initiative. It provides the only realistic long-term political solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, whether Asad and Sharon approve of it or not. Indeed, the fact that both men are trying to scuttle the proposal suggests it has genuine merit.

Saudi Summitry - Will the U.S. run with the Arab League's peace proposal?

Beirut -- As Israel reeled from a suicide attack in a Netanya hotel on Wednesday, George W. Bush declared, "I condemn it in the most strongest of terms."

The president's double superlative may have emphasized his outrage, but as the retaliatory Israeli offensive against the Palestinian town of Ramallah underscored, much more than outrage will be expected of Bush in the coming months if Palestinians and Israelis are to make peace.

That is because the Netanya bomb went off just as one of the more interesting Arab League summits in recent memory stumbled towards an acrimonious end to its first day at a different hotel, Beirut's Phoenicia Inter-Continental.

On the table was a Saudi initiative, first floated by Crown Prince Abdullah to Thomas Friedman of The New York Times. It offered Israel normal relations and security in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal from all Arab lands occupied in June 1967, recognition of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as capital, and a "just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem."

The acrimony in Beirut was provoked by Lebanon's president, Emile Lahoud. As summit chairman his job was to call on Arab representatives to address the chamber. The Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, confined in Ramallah, waited for his turn to speak by satellite link-up. Astonishingly, Lahoud ignored him. The Palestinian delegation walked out in protest. Others followed, and the summit looked set to collapse.

Saudi mediation soon turned things around and the conference was saved. However, what had occurred was a bold effort by Lebanon, no doubt at Syria's behest, to undermine the Saudi initiative by breaking up the summit. The Syrians oppose normal relations with Israel, fearing this will destabilize their unyielding, security-crazed political system.

The Bush administration will have to bear this in mind as it devises a response to the Saudi proposal, which the Arab League formally adopted yesterday. Whether the plan has been superceded by Israel's subsequent military actions in the West Bank remains to be seen. Even so, the plan's approval showed the Saudis could deliver a valuable offer from otherwise divided states that rarely miss an opportunity to disappoint. This should help paper over post-September 11 animosities between Washington and Riyadh.

Since it took office the Bush administration has been at sea over what to do in the Middle East. One problem is that it has based its indecisiveness on a sound premise: The Palestinians and Israelis are so far apart in their aspirations that diplomatic intervention is impossible. Consequently, the U.S. is better off containing the conflict until the parties are ripe for a deal.

However, the administration also insists that it alone can eventually breathe life into a regional settlement. As Vice President Dick Cheney told NBC news last week: "The fact of the matter is, there isn't anybody but us. Left to their own devices, the Israelis and the Palestinians have been unable to resolve [their] differences."

What Cheney did not mention is that the U.S. has nothing to offer, either. For months the administration has backed a two-step strategy that no one actually believes in: movement towards a ceasefire plan named for CIA director George Tenet, to be followed by an exchange of short-term confidence-building measures known as the Mitchell plan.

Neither plan addresses, nor was intended to address, a fundamental question: the kind of Palestinian state that will emerge. The Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, wants at most to offer the Palestinians a small state in parts of the West Bank and Gaza at some ill-defined point in the future, with few if any concessions on Jerusalem and refugees.

The Palestinians, in turn, are beyond interim deals like the Tenet and Mitchell plans. They perceive their fight against Israel as a war of national liberation, with their minimal objectives the conditions outlined in the Saudi plan. Arafat refuses to crack down on his militants because he has been offered no ultimate political horizon. Without the contours of a final solution, Arafat believes that halting the Intifada will only benefit Israel.

He is not altogether wrong. When Bush took office he erred by accepting Bill Clinton's edict before his departure that the failure of two rounds of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations -- at Camp David in July 2000 and at Taba, Egypt, in January 2001 -- compelled him to declare null all agreements reached in both locations. The U.S. thus threw out the baby with the bathwater, abandoning even Palestinian and Israeli points of convergence.

The irony is that both gatherings pushed Israelis and Palestinians closer to a final peace deal than they had ever been before. By discarding points of agreement, Clinton and Bush deleted the memory of the Palestinian-Israeli negotiating track. This also prevented the U.S. from defining what a mutually acceptable peace settlement might look like, with the details to be filled in by the parties themselves.

Thanks to the Saudis a political horizon now exists. What emerged from the Beirut conclave was an inventive offer that defied the tide of anger in the region aroused by the Intifada. Pointedly, it was directed at Israeli public opinion and came accompanied by a most amiable Saudi interpretation of the type of "normal relations" the Arabs promised Israel.

In an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour, the Saudi foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, noted: "We envision a relationship between the Arab countries and Israel that is exactly like the relationship between the Arab countries and any other state." He defended Israel's right to live within its 1967 borders in "serenity".

By welcoming the proposal, the Bush administration may have found an endgame to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Nothing in the Saudi (now Arab) proposal was new, yet everything has changed. The Arabs are bluntly offering Israel what it has always demanded. If Israel refuses, its quarrel may no longer be merely with its neighbors, but also with the U.S.

Spy Watch - Behind closed doors at the National Security Agency

Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency From the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century, by James Bamford, New York: Doubleday, 721 pages, $29.95

Osama bin Laden is a dutiful stepson. This mundane bit of information took on particular importance following the September 11 attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As James Bamford reminds us in Body of Secrets, his latest book on the shadowy National Security Agency (NSA), officials at the organization would routinely play intercepted telephone conversations between bin Laden and his stepmother to congressmen in order to acquire more funds for eavesdropping activities.

As Bamford could not have known when he wrote his book, the passage highlights what is both right and wrong in America's reliance on communications intelligence. One such call, taped in early September, allegedly constitutes part of the evidence that bin Laden was involved in the mass homicides in Washington and New York. At the same time, the United States, despite its ability to listen in on its arch foe, was unable to prevent the attacks from taking place, underscoring the chasm between the NSA's technological prowess and the intelligence community's capacity to absorb, analyze, and act on information gleaned.

The NSA was formally established on October 24, 1952, to replace the shaky and ineffective Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA). The United States had begun collecting signals intelligence (or Sigint) before World War II, but had avoided creating a single authority to handle it all. Instead, the armed forces services collected Sigint separately, and even when the AFSA was set up to combine these efforts, the services maintained control over their specific code breaking and intercept activities. This fragmentation proved catastrophic during the Korean War -- the North Korean invasion took the U.S. completely by surprise -- and led to the NSA's urgent creation. Though the agency reports to the secretary of defense, it became early on a semi-sovereign entity.

The NSA is the largest of the U.S. intelligence agencies, with a staff of some 38,000 people, an additional 25,000 non-staff personnel in listening posts, and an annual budget estimated at $7.3 billion. It is headquartered in an enormous complex known by some agency employees as Crypto City, located off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway near Annapolis Junction in Maryland. The atmosphere there is reminiscent of the Polish science fiction novelist Stanislaw Lem's outlandish The Building in his Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1971), where spies search for secret meanings in Shakespeare and one character exclaims, "A cracked code remains a code. An expert can peel away layer after layer. It's inexhaustible. One digs ever deeper into more and more inaccessible strata. That journey has no end."

To Bamford's credit, he single-handedly has done a considerable share of excavation into the NSA's inaccessible strata. He first did so in his much-acclaimed The Puzzle Palace (1982). The numerous government documents he managed to obtain for Body of Secrets confirm the earlier book's underlying premise: The NSA is both a remarkable and disquieting embodiment of the awesome power of the American government. While Bamford never draws explicit political conclusions from this observation, he is acutely sensitive to the illegal behavior an institution like the NSA can help generate. Granted partial access to NSA officials, he is also rarely taken in by his subject or sources, constantly playing off inconsistencies in quotes by some agency members against those from others. This is laudable when one has been provided unique information, as Bamford was, on an ultra-secretive organization -- one increasingly conscious, however, of the advantages of partial transparency after decades of stony silence.

One of Bamford's most damning accusations is that the NSA failed to do what it was mainly designed to do: break high-level Soviet ciphers. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the U.S. Sigint effort had some sterling successes. A team of experts, known collectively by the codename TICOM, was able to get hold of the USSR's "Fish" cipher machine, one of which had been captured by the Germans, and therefore read Soviet communications. The system worked until 1948 when, overnight, the USSR's encrypted lines went dead. (An AFSA linguist, William Weisband, was suspected of having warned Moscow, but he was never convicted.)

The array of the NSA's duties is vast and complex. Though high-level Russian codes remained unbroken, the NSA had greater success penetrating and unscrambling Soviet communications traffic (Comint, in the professional jargon). It also gathered much vital electronic intelligence, or Elint, meaning those signals put out by radar, missiles, and other devices. When the Cold War ended, the NSA shifted its focus away from the former Soviet Union. Though the NSA eavesdropped on most countries from the moment it began operating, the agency's principal mission had changed by the mid-1990s and it spent most of its time listening in on friendly states and allies.

Some allies would prove to be more equal than others. One of the peculiar byproducts of the NSA's activities was the formation of an Anglo-Saxon fraternity of snoops, UKUSA, named for a communications intelligence agreement originally signed between the NSA and its British counterpart. The grouping, which now includes the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, is sometimes inaccurately known as Echelon, for the software program integrating the Sigint capabilities of the member states.

As Bamford writes, the idea behind Echelon was that "agencies would be able to submit targets to one another's listening posts and, likewise, everyone would be allowed to share in the take -- to dip their electronic ladles into the vast cauldron of intercepts and select what they liked."

Bamford doesn't take kindly to this invasion of the privacy of others, whether the others are foreign states or individuals. He discerns threatening patterns that can, in extreme cases, have a nefarious impact on domestic American life. The NSA is legally barred from spying within the continental United States, or even, in most cases, on American citizens. Nevertheless, it has on numerous occasions engaged in domestic surveillance, leading in one noted case in the late 1990s to the arrest of Nasser Ahmad, an Egyptian immigrant, and his detention in solitary confinement for three years. Only when Ahmad was finally allowed to see a portion of the secret evidence against him was he able to gain his release.

Such misuse of power has always lurked in the NSA's past, even as elected officials have tried to expand its legal range of activities. Richard Nixon, for instance, tried to empower the NSA to spy inside the U.S. (The effort was derailed by, of all people, J. Edgar Hoover, who didn't want anyone competing with the FBI.) Yet one of the most infamous examples of political manipulation by a branch of the U.S. government did not directly involve the NSA. Bamford wisely includes a discussion of the benignly named Operation Northwoods. He suggests that the political system that could spawn the NSA was also one that could take the mania with communism to the repulsive extremes revealed by that scheme.

Northwoods was a secret and illegal plan drawn up by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, chaired by Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, during the Kennedy administration. Bamford succeeds in showing that all those '60s and '70s films about generals with a screw loose and a taste for Armageddon weren't entirely fictional. The idea was to provoke violent incidents inside the United States, including murders, bombings, and hijackings, that could then be pinned on Cuba, thus justifying military action to overthrow Fidel Castro. Northwoods was ultimately rejected by Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, but the fact that the plan could have reached the upper echelons of the administration reveals that Kennedy's top brass felt the president could stomach considerable misconduct.

Like all bureaucracies, the NSA is in perpetual search of more funding to generate ever-larger amounts of information with less and less practical use. To be fair, it is not the NSA's brief to analyze what it accumulates -- that is the role of the CIA and various government departments, and their respective intelligence arms. In the past, notably during the Vietnam War, the agency's fine intelligence was simply ignored by those to whom it was directed, most prominently Gen. William Westmoreland. (The NSA warned, for example, of the 1968 Tet Offensive.) The problem is that the volume of information gathered by the NSA today far outreaches the intelligence community's capability to process it. As former CIA director Robert Gates put it: "Sometimes I think we just collect intelligence for the thrill of collecting it....We have the capacity to collect mountains of data that we can never analyze. We just stack it up."

Despite the NSA's colossal budget and its tendency toward information overkill, the agency's deputy director for services, Terry Thompson, could complain in 1999: "One of the reasons we don't get more support on the Hill for the budget is that we don't have a strong lobby in the defense industry....We spend our money on four hundred or four thousand different contracts and it's hard to get a critical mass of people who want to go down and wave the flag for NSA when budget deliberations are going on." Thompson was speaking in the wake of successive budget cuts at the NSA, so perhaps he had a point. But then one gets a distinct sense that he would consider any amount of money for the NSA to be somehow too little.

Whatever its faults, the NSA has suffered a fair share of casualties in its relatively short history. The most costly episode, which Bamford describes in detail, was the Israeli attack against the NSA spy ship, USS Liberty, off the Sinai Peninsula during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. The Liberty incident led to the death of 35 crew members, but was long ago swept under the rug of U.S.-Israeli relations. Bamford tears down the official explanation, that it was all an accident.

He writes that NSA officials with access to secret intercepts from the episode "were virtually unanimous in their belief that the attack was deliberate." Liberty crew members noted that during the attack, the Israelis first went after the ship's communications apparatus, which required knowledge of its makeup. According to intercepted radio traffic, the Israelis positively identified the Liberty and the markings painted on the ship's side. In contrast, the attacking airplanes were unmarked, undermining the Israeli claim that their pilots confused the Liberty with an Egyptian vessel, one that they, incidentally, knew to be much slower than the moving U.S. ship. Bamford's hypothesis is that the Liberty recorded radio communications between Israeli units discussing the extensive execution of Egyptian prisoners-of-war. He believes the Israelis sought to destroy the ship to cover up their war crimes.

Some have questioned Bamford's allegation. For example, New York Times reviewer James Finder disingenuously wrote that the Egyptian POW theory was based on slender evidence, and mentioned a single Israeli journalist as Bamford's source. In fact Bamford cites three sources, all Israelis. One of them was a participant in the attack and another was an eyewitness. The third, an Israeli military historian, concluded (on the basis of interviews with dozens of soldiers who themselves had killed prisoners) that as many as 1,000 Egyptians were shot. Bamford's argument is surely plausible, as anyone who has surveyed a half-century of Israel's wartime behavior will admit. The only part of Bamford's theory that is dubious -- and here Finder's protest is in order -- is that it would have been foolish for Israel to cover up one massacre by another. Yet where Finder sees this as evidence of Israeli blamelessness, readers will conclude that an explanation for the undeniably deliberate assault must lie elsewhere.

The last two chapters of Body of Secrets are devoted to detailed descriptions of Crypto City, of life at the NSA, and of past progress in the organization's successive supercomputer programs. Those parts don't make for particularly compelling reading, but they represent a major accomplishment, since Bamford is the first reporter to ferret out such details, which have been secret for decades. Published in a year when the U.S. Congress sought -- and then postponed -- passage of an official secrets act that would have criminalized the unauthorized disclosure of any type of classified information by federal employees, Body of Secrets is a valuable reminder of the enduring siren song of concealment, the enemy of all true democracies.

Bill of Benevolence - Maybe the U.S. should apply its "non-negotiable demands" to Israel and Arafat.

BEIRUT--Sitting in his Ramallah confinement, Yasser Arafat might contemplate just how much the U.S. has overlooked its stated principles in backing his authoritarian rule over the Palestinians.

He might even pull out George W. Bush's State of the Union address and entertain himself by reading the following passage: "America will always stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity: the rule of law, limits on the power of the state, respect for women, private property, free speech, equal justice and religious tolerance."

No U.S. administration would say otherwise. Yet in dealing with the actors in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the U.S. has long ignored Bush's bill of benevolence.

After Oslo, the U.S. encouraged Arafat to arrest anybody who failed to support peace talks with Israel. This not only included Islamist militants, who were denied equality under the law, but also secular nationalists, including moderate intellectuals. The American message was that the Palestinian people merited no better than a regime of thugs.

The U.S. also promoted a stifling Palestinian Authority, undermining the notion of limited state power. Arafat expanded his influence by conscripting tens of thousands of people into his police force and administration, as a means of dispensing patronage. Meanwhile, the corruption in his entourage exacerbated the poverty and indignities suffered by Palestinians, eroding Arafat's legitimacy and compelling him to become more aggressive in the interest of his own power.

The U.S. has been as indifferent to Bush's demands when addressing Israel. Since 1967 Israel has occupied the West Bank and Gaza, and in support of this occupation has turned well over a million Palestinians into a subject people. It has also routinely denied them equal justice, suppressed their free speech, and violated their property rights.

The Oslo process returned some territory to the Palestinians, leaving the definitive contours of a Palestinian entity up to bilateral negotiations. At Camp David in 2000 Israel made a generous, though never formalized, offer to Arafat on final statehood. The Palestinian leader rejected it, and has been criticized to this day for doing so. However, the best that Israel offered still included retaining swathes of occupied land and leaving unresolved the fate of a vast majority of Palestinian refugees.

The U.S. has always condemned the illegalities in Israel's occupation, while also defending Israel against those demanding an immediate withdrawal from occupied areas. This contradiction took root during the Cold War, when Israel was a valued U.S. ally. But times have changed, even if the bonds between Israelis and Americans endure.

So what can the U.S. do now? Certainly something different from what the administration has done in the past year. In this period, its policy has blended apathy and uninspired replication: apathy towards a conflict that neither Palestinians nor Israelis seem eager to end by compromise and uninspired replication in the administration's insistence on a roadmap for a resolution that none of the parties really believes in.

Bush did change course, momentarily, after September 11. He was persuaded by Secretary of State Colin Powell to advocate Palestinian statehood, and did so publicly twice last year, at the White House and before the U.N. General Assembly. He also sent an envoy to the region, retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, who was greeted with a Palestinian suicide attack on his first visit to Israel. Zinni's mission has virtually collapsed amid the ambient violence.

However, something more fundamental is required. Reassessment of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is an option, even if the U.S. sees no immediate advantage in backing a new diplomatic initiative. The Middle East is a graveyard of righteous disputation, yet in the absence of an imaginative policy to end the conflict, the U.S. might best stick to principles. Why not the ones Bush listed in his address?

For ideas on how to proceed, Bush might learn from Israel's "new historians," an amorphous group of scholars, including Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev, and Ilan Pappe, who in the mid-1980s began challenging Israel's founding myths. They did so by basing their arguments on a powerful premise: that Israel's behavior often contradicted the humanist principles they believed their state should epitomize.

The jury is still out on some of the conclusions of the "new historians." However, few can deny that the group has helped bring about a fundamental change in Israeli attitudes; the country's school curriculum was recently changed to provide new perspectives on Israel's recent past. This transformation was not only a tribute to the dynamism of intellectual subversiveness, it underlined that cultural principles often carry more weight than the diktats of practical policy.

Bush should remember this as he weighs U.S. policy towards the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and his country's natural take on such a confrontation. The president alleges that his principles are non-negotiable. In that case he should throw them into the Middle East arena so that all can determine whether he's true to his word.

An Ornamental Education? - Political relevance and the funding of Middle East studies in the U.S.

An Israeli-American scholar, Martin Kramer, has declared war on Middle East academe in the U.S., and the mortarboards are flying. Kramer, editor of the Middle East Quarterly, recently published a monograph titled Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America. In it he accuses Middle East academics of ignoring practical issues in contemporary Arab affairs. In a Wall Street Journal article, Kramer wrote that on September 11 experts of the Arab world failed to "prepare America for the encounter with Muslim extremism, and...can't contribute anything to America's defense."

To illustrate his point, Kramer quoted Edward Said's pre-September 11 dismissal of "speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airliners and poison water supplies." At around the same time, Kramer's colleague, Daniel Pipes, wrote an article in the San Francisco Chronicle in which he cited another unfortunate pre-September 11 statement, this time by the Lebanese scholar Fawaz Gerges, to the effect that "the terrorist industry" had perpetuated an "irrational fear of terrorism by focusing too much on farfetched horrible scenarios."

Kramer believes it is time for Middle East studies to reform, and for the U.S. Congress to reexamine its financial aid to the discipline under Title VI of the International Education Act (1958). His attack is directed in particular at the 2,600-member Middle East Studies Association (MESA), a private nonprofit organization that brings together specialists studying the Middle East and Islam. Kramer asks that a utilitarian yardstick be used to consider Title VI funding, which is, he argues, "not an entitlement...[but] a discretionary appropriation. It has to be rationalized in terms of the public interest, on an ongoing basis."

The implications of Kramer's broadside go beyond Middle East studies. They address the rationale behind federal funding for education and culture. Some of Kramer's arguments in favor of reforming Title VI are similar to those raised, in a different context, on the future of the Public Broadcasting System. Kramer wants to introduce market mechanisms -- albeit policy-market mechanisms -- into Middle East studies, so that the government can draw greater advantage from what it funds. However, it is what Kramer's proposal might conceal that has fueled finger-pointing from his adversaries. And their accusations have not always been directly related to Kramer's contention that Middle East academia failed on September 11.

One assertion is that Kramer and his partisans have a "pro-Israel" agenda. They are accused of wanting to cut into MESA funding because the association (which includes American, Arab, and Israeli specialists) is frequently critical of Israeli policy. Neither Kramer, nor Pipes for that matter, denies a fondness for Israel. Indeed, that is probably why both men often are fixated on the behavior of Islamist movements. However, the fact remains that, whatever Kramer's agenda, Middle East academics have not really concerned themselves with the potential for Islamist attacks against the continental U.S., and have systematically played down latent threats to the U.S. emanating from the Arab world.

The problem is institutional, ideological, and definitional. Institutional, inasmuch as learning about the Middle East involves, as in all area studies, building up substantial political, cultural, economic, and linguistic competence. So those striving for academic promotion and recognition often have a natural (and laudable) tendency to move beyond the mundanely functional into history, theory, and ideas. Ideological, because Middle East academia is often favorably disposed towards the Arab world, while disapproving of Israeli and U.S. policy in the region. This is perfectly valid, but it has also dissuaded scholars from focusing on the insalubrious aspects of Arab states and Islamist militant groups, both for reasons of sympathy and out of concern that this might splinter the united front against Israel and the West.

But it is the definitional barrier -- notably regarding the word "terrorism" -- that is most intriguing. In his Wall Street Journal article, Kramer wrote that MESA has engaged in a "studied avoidance of the words 'terror', 'terrorism,' and 'terrorist.'" While no satisfactory definition of "terrorism" exists (and many MESA members employed far more condemnatory language to describe the September 11 attacks), the ensuing lack of a consensus on the term has been used by Middle East academia, consciously or not, to avoid researching the practical policy implications of, most conspicuously, violent Islamic militancy. Indeed, investigation of the topic is frequently perceived by the Middle East studies mainstream as philosophical surrender to those advocating the controversial terrorism definition. Rarely has discomfort with a word so pervasively shut down an entire branch of a discipline.

Kramer's demand that federal funding of Middle East studies be reconsidered (though not entirely terminated) has provoked anger in scholarly ranks. Some have openly accused Kramer of seeking to censor his ideological opponents and use the threat of a federal financial aid cutoff to push them into adopting his preferred political line. Others have gone further, stating that the underlying premises of Kramer's proposal are racist. As one scholar put it, Kramer is trying to peddle a message that Islamism is "inherently terroristic."

Charles Butterworth of the University of Maryland protests that congressional funding of area studies should not be a contractual arrangement, where specialists have their funding renewed only if they fulfill specified tasks. In a message sent to Gulf 2000, an interactive email list of individuals interested in Persian Gulf affairs, he wrote: "[A]t issue is ensuring that some citizens have the tools, especially the language tools, to study the literature, history, religion, mores, politics, and philosophy of peoples whose culture is expressed in something besides English. The goal of such study is to learn about others as part of understanding our own culture. Anything else is incidental."

Both criticisms expose the depth of difference between Kramer and Middle East academia. Where those who mistrust Kramer's politics converge on the surreptitious implications of his proposal, Butterworth outlines a theory of education. Kramer's response to Butterworth, also posted on Gulf 2000, was that he overlooked the wording of Title VI, which is robustly utilitarian. Kramer quoted from a Congressional finding on Title VI: "The security, stability, and economic vitality of the Unites States in a complex global era depend upon American experts in and citizens knowledgeable about world regions, foreign languages, and international affairs, as well as upon a strong research base in those areas."

The hidden agenda accusation is more pointed, but raises a question Kramer's critics must address. If Kramer is advancing Israeli interests, the way to derail his efforts -- at least regarding government funding -- is simply to insure that Middle East studies are more in-tune with everyday policy issues. That Middle East academia did not warn of Osama bin Laden is a serious problem. Congress is entitled to demand that taxpayer-funded experts be at least able to identify compelling threats to U.S. national security. Middle East studies would not suffer from competing in the marketplace of pertinence, particularly when there are plenty of private benefactors willing to finance more contemplative pursuits.

The two sides in the Middle East studies contest will continue to argue over what is the optimal way to survey the Arab world. For Kramer, Title VI must be modified because it essentially allows Middle East academics to disburse funds to themselves through a flawed peer review process, with little input from government officials and what Kramer calls "public consumers." Kramer's critics, in turn, charge that the process provides plenty of oversight and that federal funding for Middle East studies is negligible anyhow, and should be increased. At the heart of the dispute, however, is a more elemental divergence over how each side perceives the general welfare.

The implications are similar to those raised by supporters and opponents of public funding for PBS. For decades, PBS resisted reform by hiding behind a pretense of cultural uplift, where the station depicted itself as a citadel of enlightenment combating insidious commercialism. Middle East studies are in a similar predicament today. Under the guise of intellectual uplift, the discipline has often circumvented the bazaar of consequence. Butterworth is not wrong in arguing that general knowledge helps us learn about ourselves, but Kramer is right to say that this general knowledge must somehow profit its funders. Otherwise America's enemies will again pilot their commandeered aircraft through the gap between the supply and demand of relevant information furnished by Middle East academia.

Arabs, Anger, and America - The sources of Mideast aversion.

Beirut -- Recently, a foreign correspondent in Beirut asked the opinion-page editor of one of Lebanon's leading newspapers about the tenor of the essays he was receiving. The editor's response was revealing: "Most writers feel they have to be opposed to the United States, but in this case they are equally uncomfortable siding with Osama bin Laden."

Therein lies a recurring dilemma of Arab intellectuals, and indeed of many Arabs: How does one escape from siding with the unsavory enemies of the U.S. while avoiding landing in the U.S. camp? Or, how does one oppose the U.S. while not backing its more unpleasant antagonists? The fact is that America has long been a favorite enemy in the Middle East, even if the usual claim is that this loathing is directed at "the U.S. government, not the American people."

Of course, there are many Arab writers and thinkers who have differing views of the U.S. and its role in the world. But it is fair to say that intellectual credibility in the Arab world (as in many Western countries) requires adopting an outlook that is, at least, systematically critical of the U.S. This constraint has frequently obstructed sensible thought. The result has in some cases been a predicament reminiscent of that of Communist intellectuals in the 1930s, who accepted the diktats of the Comintern, even when they contradicted their better judgment.

It may be useful to examine the sources of this aversion, before asking a question that has been long avoided: Why, in seeking a resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (without doubt the main bone of contention between the Arab states and the U.S.), have Arab elites agreed to operate through Washington? In other words why, in the defining event of the contemporary Middle East, have many Arabs been so dependent on a power they cannot quite bring themselves to like?

Generally speaking, Arab intellectuals and opinion-makers have been influenced by four long-term factors when censuring the U.S.: Cold War attitudes; the failure of secular regimes in the Middle East; the question of Palestine; and uneasiness with globalization. This is hardly an exhaustive list, but it is almost certainly one that applies to a vast majority of those who find the U.S. objectionable.

It is remarkable how many Arab intellectuals (often though not always older ones) revive Cold War preconceptions when judging the U.S. Like their liberal counterparts in the West, these Arab intellectuals continue to cast a tolerant eye on the former "peoples' democracies" for two reasons: first, Leftist values, allegedly embodied in various postwar socialisms, are still regarded as more humane than those of free-market capitalism; second, the U.S. is still perceived as an agent of neo-colonialism, whereas the U.S.S.R., despite unremitting proof to the contrary, is remembered as a sponsor of anti-colonialism.

Anachronistic Cold War responses dovetail with another conviction of Arab elites: that all-powerful states are acceptable, if they are politically and socially just. Most problems in the Arab world -- poverty, over-population, rural migration, the absence of democracy, etc. -- appear extensive enough to require state intervention. However, it is also true that the Arabs, throughout much of their history, have been accustomed to strong government, because it is virtually the only type of political system they have experienced. That is why Arab elites have sought deliverance not by jettisoning overbearing, paternalistic states, but by reforming and democratizing them. Lebanon alone has adopted a political model that limits central state power -- a result of the country's peculiar communal composition.

The rub came when post-colonial Middle Eastern secular regimes failed to reform, democratize, or resolve pressing social and economic problems. What the Arabs received instead was a diet of traditional autocracy in modern garb. In 1954 the Lebanese-British historian Albert Hourani, whose Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age remains a classic of Middle East intellectual history, could still yearn for an Arab world that integrated the Liberal values that earlier drove European modernism. The region's failure to do so demoralized many of its intellectuals, who would accuse the U.S. -- rightly in many cases -- of favoring the intolerant regimes that oppressed them.

This led to a paradox: the Arab intellectual elite, not wanting to adopt the free-market ways of an abhorred U.S., moved to the Left. In some countries this led to communist- or socialist-inspired coups, as in Iraq, Syria or Libya. Elsewhere, regimes unilaterally adopted socialist principles, as in Egypt. The obvious foe in the wake of these Leftwards movements was the U.S.

In 1981 the Lebanese-American political scientist, Fouad Ajami, wrote The Arab Predicament, a gloomy extension of Hourani's hopeful Arabic Thought. Ajami, who is routinely disparaged by Arab intellectuals for his overt pro-Americanism, examined the failure of the Middle East's secular regimes in light of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. The war was a disaster for the Arabs, and as Ajami recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal, it led to an Islamic revival that alone seemed to offer a chance for success. "The secular fathers begot this strange breed of holy warriors," noted Ajami, a view undisputed by Arab Leftists. Once again America could not escape condemnation: the Islamists had no patience for its corrupt ways, while the disappointed secularists associated the U.S. with Israel, the instrument of their defeat in the 1967 war

It is after 1967 that Palestine became the paramount sticking point between the Arab world and the U.S. No issue provokes as much unanimity in a fractured Arab world as the sorry fate of the Palestinians. The U.S. stands at the center of this drama, both as culprit and vehicle for salvation. The Arabs have for decades been on solid ground morally when addressing the Palestinian problem. Proof of this is that both the U.S. and Israel have steadily moved towards recognition of Palestinian national rights, the very same ones that they refused to consider two decades ago. This progress, however, has not been sufficiently appreciated or exploited by Arab opinion-makers, who still use the term "Oslo process" pejoratively. They refuse to accept that Oslo returned Yasser Arafat to his land and legitimized Palestinian statehood.

In the past year, following the outbreak of the Intifada, the Arabs have related to the Palestinian problem almost exclusively in emotional terms. There is some justification in doing so, if only because of the imbalance in firepower -- and casualties -- between the Palestinians and Israel. The Arabs have been particularly incensed with the policies of the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, who is believed to oppose giving up significant amounts of land to reach a settlement with the Palestinians. They are probably right in thinking so, and the U.S. has taken a great deal of time before giving this hypothesis serious consideration.

The problem is that even as the U.S. swerved on Palestinian rights -- a few weeks ago it formally endorsed a Palestinian state -- the Arab public and intellectuals continued to regard U.S. intentions suspiciously. More seriously, no Arab state picked up politically on the changes in Washington in order to corner Sharon. On the contrary, most Middle Eastern regimes continue to curry favor at home by supporting a continuation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, deterring U.S. efforts to mediate between the parties.

The final motivation for opposing the U.S. -- nervousness with globalization -- is complex, so defining a single Arab point of view would be inaccurate. However, the misgivings that many Arab intellectuals have toward globalization emerged naturally from the inability of Arab states to modernize adequately. In general, many Arab intellectuals perceive globalization as a byword for U.S. hegemony. In this they are influenced by leftist ideologies, by past anti-colonialist attitudes, and by a feeling that globalization is socially inequitable -- the last not altogether untrue.

On the other hand, quite a few Arab intellectuals consistently overlook the potential advantages that their countries might derive from globalization, and dismiss the rewards of genuinely free markets. The appearance of Al-Jazeera as a singular global Arab source of information has shown how shortsighted this bias may be. The appeal and reputation of the station might help reconcile Arab opinion-makers somewhat with a phenomenon that allows them, for once, to disseminate their messages worldwide.

Much must be done by both the Arab countries and the U.S. if relations are to improve. However, the Arab states in particular should develop a more confident autonomy -- free of knee-jerk anti-Americanism or unpopular subservience to the U.S. -- on specific major issues, so that the U.S. can be regarded as either friend or adversary, depending on the situation. In changing their assessments of the U.S., however, many in the Arab world will have to alter their perceptions of their own societies, since the U.S. is often a convenient scapegoat to explain domestic ills.

The place to start is Palestine. If the U.S. has been so intolerably partial on the Palestinian issue, then it's time for the Arabs to circumvent Washington. There are two options: to declare war on Israel, something few Arabs desire or expect will succeed; or to address the Israelis directly and set down realistic demands for a settlement of the Palestinian imbroglio. Palestine was always primarily an Arab-Israeli concern. There is no reason why it should not again be so. It's time for the Arab elites solve a half-century conundrum that still baffles them.

Many opinion-makers in the Arab world today find themselves in an intellectual no-man's land: neither with bin Laden nor with the U.S.; angry at U.S. behavior towards the Palestinians, but unwilling, or unable, to address Israel in a unified way. The Arabs have legitimate beefs, but the U.S. is not the source of all their problems. On the contrary, the Arab elites' obsession with America, by deflecting self-questioning and self-criticism, has become an obstacle to breaking free from the cliches that tend to pervade the Middle East. It is only beyond those cliches that the true emancipation of Arab intellect and culture awaits.