America owes Russia a big apology for the embarrassing case of bumbling CIA spy Ryan Fogel caught red-handed in Moscow trying to recruit a Russian agent.

Shame on the US. What ever happened to professional respect? Russia has always been the grand master of espionage. In Russia, spying is a high art form, like ballet.

Having been given an exclusive visit to the KGB’s museum of espionage, I can heartily attest to Russia’s mastery of spying. Too bad most people don’t known how masterful and patient the Russian were – and continue to be.

Sending an amateur American spy on a ham-handed attempt to recruit a Russian agent was an insult to the profession. Russia deserves the top US agents, not bumblers from the backwoods.

Agent Fogel, under thin diplomatic cover as third secretary at the US Moscow Embassy, was certainly no James Bond. More like agent 000. According to the Ruskis, he even had a nifty little spy kit with a Swiss Army knife, map of Moscow, two wigs, and compass. And a letter offering a bribe of “up to” $1 million to work for CIA.

Why didn’t CIA just run a spy-wanted ad in Moscow’s “Pravda” newspaper?

A counter-story was immediately spread that the bumbling Fogel was somehow trying to glean information related to the recent Boston bombing.

Coming just before crucially important US-Soviet talks over Syria, the Fogel affair was either incredibly inept or a crude attempt to sabotage the peace talks.

Agent 000’s case underlines concerns of veteran US intelligence professionals that CIA has become too absorbed running its own paramilitary operations around the globe and hunting so-called terrorists to pay proper attention to its basic business of gathering information.

The Cold War is long over, but intelligence operations continue at a higher intensity than during the long US-Soviet confrontation. China’s spies are increasingly active across the globe, particularly so in the US and Canada, but also in Russia.

Even allies spy on one another, most often to acquire advanced technology. The venerable “honey trap” where an attractive female agent seduce a target remains a favorite of the Russians, French, Israel’s Mossad, and, yes, the prudish CIA.

I recall nights in my awful Moscow hotel waiting for lovely Soviet female agents called “swallows” to tempt my devotion to the Free World. Alas, none ever came.

This writer has closely followed Soviet, then Russian intelligence operations . In 1989, I was the first journalist ever allowed into KGB headquarters at Moscow’s dreaded Lubyanka Prison. I interviewed two senior KGB generals who told me the Soviet Union was about to collapse due to the ineptitude of the Communist Party.

“What we need,” said one, “is a leader who will make Russians work at bayonet point, like Chile’s Pinochet or South Korea’s Park Chung-hee.” A decade later, they got their wish in the form of a former tough KGB/FSB agent, Vladimir Putin.

In spite of America’s self-congratulation over its victory in the Cold War, there is little doubt in my mind that though Moscow’s empire collapse into ruins, the Soviet KGB bested America’s CIA and other western spy agencies.

KGB and GRU(military intelligence) put agents into President Roosevelt’s White House. At the infamous Yalta Conference that divided up Europe, I saw the palace where Roosevelt and the US delegation stayed that was bugged from basement to roof by the KGB. The naïve Americans didn’t even think to look for bugs. In the early 1990’s, I saw the new US Embassy in Moscow that was so filled with bugs it was a giant microphone. The US had given the construction contract to a Russian company!

Soviet moles Aldrich Ames and John Walker handed America’s most precious secrets to Moscow. KGB spies like Philby, Burgess, Lonsdale and Blake came very close to destroying Britain’s intelligence agency MI6, and wrecking France’s spy outfit, SDECE.

In the end, the Soviet KGB managed to survive the Soviet collapse, re-emerging as FSB and SVR foreign intelligence from the KGB’s elite First Directorate. While CIA and the 15 other US intelligence agencies enjoy leadership in electronic, air and space-based intelligence(ELINT), their human intelligence (HUMINT) has lagged way behind the Soviets/Russians. US HUMINT about the Mideast, Iran and especially North Korea is poor.

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copyright Eric S. Margolis 2013

WASHINGTON DC – The vicious Syrian civil war has put the world’s two biggest nuclear powers on a collision course over a small Levantine nation of no strategic interest to Washington. This cannot be allowed to go on.

News that the US and Russia will hold a Syrian peace conference this month is most welcome and long overdue.

As Benjamin Franklin so wisely noted: “there is no good war, and no bad peace.”

Moscow has been calling for such a conference for two years. But Washington rejected the idea in hope the Syrian rebels it was backing would prevail. However, now that the Syrian war is in stalemate, the US has opted, albeit reluctantly, for a diplomatic effort to end its war before the whole region goes up in flames.

Syria is the latest example of Henry Kissinger’s famous quip, “being a US ally is often more dangerous than being its enemy.”

The Assad government in Damascus was for decades a tacit Western ally that suppressed militant Islamists, kept its border with Israel quiet, and interrogated prisoners for US intelligence services. Damascus even muted claims to its Golan Heights, illegally annexed by Israel after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

But good behavior and cooperation did not help Syria when the US, Britain, France and Israel decided to go after Iran, Syria’s leading ally. When Syria’s President Bashar Assad refused to join the US-led alliance of western powers and conservative Arab states against Iran, his nation’s fate was sealed.

“The road to Tehran runs through Damascus,” went up the cry. Syria was marked for Iraq-style destruction.

In Syria, Washington encouraged growing animosity between Sunni and Shia Muslims which it had found so useful in breaking Sunni resistance in Iraq. Theological differences were turned into bitter political rivalry as Iran also continued inflame the Sunni-Shia dispute across the Muslim world.

What began in Syria as a small, non-violent protest against the Assad regime was met by typical brutal repression and quickly grew into a national rebellion. Recalling the western-engineered uprising that overthrew Libya’s Muammar Gadaffi, the West and its Arab allies quickly armed, financed and directed Syria’s insurgents. As in Libya, the cutting edge of the rebellion were militant Islamists.

France, Syria’s former colonial ruler, played a quiet but important role, supplying the rebels communications gear and anti-tank weapons. France seems intent in reasserting its former colonial influence in West Africa, the Sahel, Lebanon and Syria.

The US stayed in the background, providing finance, advanced equipment and political support, letting ally Turkey do most of the work.

But after two years of vicious fighting, the Syrian civil war appears stalemated. The cautious US President Obama seems reluctant to get US forces involved in a Mideast ground war – and for good reason. The US military is dangerously stretched across the globe and the US Treasury runs on money borrowed from China and Japan. But Obama is under intense political pressure from warlike Republicans, the religious far right, and partisans of Israel to crush Syria, then Iran.

As a result, Obama has been dithering while Syria bleeds and its war threatens to spread to Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq. Last week, Israel launched heavy air strikes against Syrian military targets, a clear act of war, killing some 80 Syrian soldiers.

It was unclear if Israel was indeed trying to destroy shipments of long-ranged artillery rockets being sent from Iran to Lebanese ally Hezbollah, as it claimed, or launching a campaign to defeat the Assad government by destroying its air and armored forces.

According to reports, Israel did not give the US prior warning of its air strikes against Syria. Here in Washington, many security officials are now wondering if Israel might drag the US into a war with Iran in a similar fashion.

What is clear: Syria is being ground up and pulverized. Like Iraq, it is being severely punished for a defiant, independent policy and refusing to comply with western plans for the Mideast. Syria is also serving as a whipping boy in the place of Iran – a graphic message to Tehran of what can happen if its nuclear program is not switched off.

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copyright Eric S. Margolis 2013

NEW YORK – Two years ago this week, US special forces shot and killed Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man.

American TV is filled with chest-thumping and flag-waving about how bin Laden was hunted down and executed. For most Americans, bin Laden was the acme of evil and author of the 9/11 attacks that killed 3,000 people. Good riddance.

Hunting “bad guys” is a venerable American tradition from the days of the Wild West and the Roaring 20’s: Billy the Kid, Pancho Villa, Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger. The TV program “America’s Ten Most Wanted” remains one of the nation’s most popular programs. Osama bin Laden was the ultimate most wanted.

However, this simplistic “good guys v. bad guys” tale remains troubled by the facts. Why, for example, was a clearly retired bin Laden living without bodyguards in a villa in Abbottabad, Pakistan? Was he really found by the CIA’s patient detective work, or betrayed for the $25 million put on his head by Washington? Did Pakistan really not know Osama was in Abbotabad, and hour’s drive from its capital, Islamabad?

Why was bin Laden executed gangland style and not brought to stand proper trial in New York City? A trial could have finally determined if he was in truth the author of 9/11, as alleged by the US government and media. If not, who was?

Circumstantial evidence regarding 9/11 points to bin Laden. But he always denied responsibility for the attacks, though he applauded them after the fact. The Afghan Communists produced fakes tapes supposedly showing bin Laden demonstrating how the attacks were made. These fakes tapes ran widely on US TV.

The 9/11 attacks were planned in Hamburg, Germany and, apparently, Madrid, Spain, not by al-Qaida in Afghanistan, as the US claimed. The planners and executors of the attacks were mostly Saudis, not Afghans.

After the attack, US Secretary of State Colin Powell demanded Afghanistan’s Taliban government hand over bin Laden. Taliban refused to do so without a proper extradition request detailing bin Laden’s involvement in 9/11. Powell promised to issue a White Paper about bin Laden’s guilt, but never did so. Why? Probably because the US could not assemble a convincing case. US forces invaded Afghanistan and began their hunt for the elusive bin Laden.

The Bush administration, caught sleeping on guard duty, needed a target for America’s fury over 9/11: Afghanistan, Taliban (which had nothing to do with 9/11), bin Laden and his al-Qaida organization were blamed. Al-Qaida was wildly exaggerated by western governments and media into a nefarious worldwide network of fanatical Islamic conspirators worthy of Dr. Fu Manchu.

I was in Afghanistan and Pakistan at the birth of al-Qaida and spent many hours with its founder, Sheik Abdullah Azzam, bin Laden’s mentor. Al-Qaida was a rest house for jihadists going to fight in Afghanistan; it never had more than a few hundred members. Al-Qaida was not run by CIA, but the US planned to use bin Laden’s men against Muslim regions of western China in the event of a US-China war.

Al-Qaida’s so-called “terrorist training camps” in Afghanistan were in fact mostly run by Pakistani intelligence to train guerillas for use in Indian-ruled Kashmir.

Al-Qaida was dedicated to battling Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the Afghan Communists, and KGB agents of influence, warlords Ahmad Massoud and Rashid Dostam.

In 2010, then CIA chief Leon Panetta admitted there may only be 25-50 al-Qaida members in Afghanistan. But the convenient myth of al-Qaida continues. While America glories in killing bin Laden, many in the Muslim world still see him as an Arab Che Guevara, one man against the mighty US imperial order. Most Muslims disapproved of the 9/11 attacks, yet many felt a sneaking admiration for the Saudi firebrand whose goal was to drive western influence from the Muslim world.

Osama bin Laden is dead, and discarded at sea in true pirate “dead men tell no tales” tradition. But the anti-western movement he began is alive and growing: al-Qaida was not an organic organization but a trans-national movement.

Anti-western groups have sprung about across the Mideast, Africa, Central and South Asia. Many have adopted the al-Qaida brand name. That was bin Laden’s plan.
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copyright Eric S. Margolis 2013