Dear Mr. Rothstein
“The boys in the basement at State will eat you alive.”
_BERT, my fictional State Department character from Ask Not
"We were given three little offices on the ground floor of the new
building in the middle of December 1960, while Herter was still secretary. The
really significant people, the A list, saw Rusk. The second most important
people, the B list, saw Bowles. The rest saw me."
Mr. Hughes: "Courtesy diplomatic passports certainly sound
dispensable. What's the downside in getting rid of them?”
Ms. Knight: "The bearer is the father of the president of the United
States. The bearer is the mother of the president of the United States.”
Mr. Hughes: "I'm afraid this is a problem that is well above my pay
grade, Miss Knight."
"After Castro's victory over the exiles, the press got wind of the
fact that Bowles had written a memo opposing the operation. Bobby rewarded
Bowles by punching him in the stomach at a White House meeting, saying 'You
were for the invasion. Get it?' Bowles denied leaking his memo, but the
incident reminded him that the Kennedys valued loyalty above any other virtue,
not that that was a new discovery."
_Tom L. Hughes, Interview with Mr. Thomas L. Hughes, Association for
Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, July 7,
1999.
FROM MY JOURNAL NO COP IS CONFISCATING—AGAIN:
08/06/2018
7:08 P.M.
“May I speak in public? Not Stone Spiral, the Train Station, and Legacy Books. Man, this is bad. DRUGS-who is really in bed with Ru? Not me. As far as you can toss the Kremlin, Batman. How did this accelerate, or was my nose too close to the grindstone 2001-2007?”
Bill Needs Medication
“Get that fellow Hughes out of bed
and tell him I want a memo by seven tomorrow morning. I want it masterfully
written, the way Abe Fortas would write a Supreme Court decision. It's up to
that fellow Hughes, him and his people over at State. Tell him their president
insists on it.”
_Lyndon Baines Johnson
It was Roger Hilsman at our
grade school.
He was sent to Vietnam often
and worked with Tom
Billy asked what commies had to
do with our neighborhood.
Did he talk to you 1:1?
The damn nun insisted on it.
What did he say?
It was something like, “If you
disagree with what we are doing, get a government job when you grow up” or
something like that. What went wrong?
“Incidentally, my INR
experience left me with ambivalent views about lawyers in government. I just
read an article in today's New York Times
about how our current national security advisor, Sandy Berger, is a lawyer and
therefore represents caution, presumably both tactical and strategic. By
contrast, my experience of lawyers in the foreign policy world of the 50s and
60s was that, far from being cautious, they were among the most enthusiastic
extra-legal interventionists around, starting with the two Dulles brothers,
both international lawyers, one of whom stood for “massive retaliation” while
the second specialized in covert operations—two very unlawyer-like notions.”
_Tom L. Hughes, .gov Madman
“The director of the
Counterterrorist Center at the time, Cofer Black, recalled to us that this
operation was one among many and that, at the time, it was 'considered
interesting, but not heavy water yet.' He recalled the failure to get the word
to Bangkok fast enough, but has no evident recollection of why the case then
dissolved, unnoticed.
The next level down, the
director of the al Qaeda unit in CIA at the time recalled that he did not think
it was his job to direct what should or should not be done. He did not pay
attention when the individuals dispersed and things fell apart. There was no
conscious decision to stop the operation after the trail was temporarily lost
in Bangkok. He acknowledged, however, that per-haps there had been a letdown
for his overworked staff after the extreme tension and long hours in the period
of the millennium alert.”
37 _Interview name = “Rich”
“On January 14, the head of the
CIA’s al Qaeda unit again updated his bosses, telling them that officials were
continuing to track the suspicious individuals who had now dispersed to various
countries. Unfortunately, there is no evidence of any tracking efforts actually
being undertaken by anyone after the Arabs disappeared into Bangkok. No other effort
was made to create other opportunities to spot these Arab travelers in case the
screen in Bangkok failed. Just from the evidence in Mihdhar’s passport, one of
the logical possible destinations and interdiction points would have been the
United States. Yet no one alerted the INS or the FBI to look for these individuals.
They arrived, unnoticed, in Los Angeles on January 15 (2000).” p. 354.
More like right on schedule.
Whose plan? Not Charlie Hughes,’ nor mine.
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