James Bruno - Master of the Political Thriller

Blowback on a Risky Policy
Ambassador Arnie Raphel, the man who handpicked me to be the State Department's desk officer for Afghanistan, perished in a mysterious plane crash along with Pakistan President Zia ul-Haq in 1988. Thereafter, our policy to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan turned more coldly cynical as we turned a blind eye to our arms support being funneled to radical Islamist fighters. Today we are reaping the consequences as we fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban, heirs of our former largesse to the Afghans' efforts to end the Soviet occupation.

My Forrest Gump Moment
On November 12, 1986, I was in the West Wing of the White House on official business. After a long meeting, I made a pit stop at the downstairs men's room. While standing doing my business, the door swung open and in streamed several men. At the urinal on my left was Defense Secretary Cap Weinberger. On my right was Secretary of State George Shultz. At the toilet stood CIA Director Bill Casey. They obviously had just come out of a lengthy meeting of their own. All were stonily silent. None acknowledged any of the others. They studiously avoided eye contact at the sink, the towel dispenser and as they sought to exit the room. I sensed a definite chill between them and couldn't wait myself to get out of there. In the outside foyer, a suck-up White House flunkie greeted Shultz in a fawning voice. The Secretary stopped in his tracks and, red-faced, glowered at the man, then stormed off.
Next day headlines broke open the Iran-Contra scandal. The Washington Post reported on a stormy meeting between Pres. Reagan and his national security officials. For me it was truly a Forrest Gump moment.

Cuban Spies and White House Leakers
I served as the State Dept's staff representative to the Cuba Interagency Policy Group in the mid-'90's. This group, chaired by Special Advisor to the President Richard Nuccio, met monthly at the Old Executive Office Building (now the Eisenhower Bldg.) adjacent to the White House; sometimes we convened in the Situation Room in the White House. At this time, I was shuttling to/from Guantanamo Naval Base where I served as the Department's representative to monthly talks with the Cuban military on "The Line" — i.e., the boundary.
The White House group discussed U.S. policies toward Castro's Cuba and tasked the participating agencies with measures to further those policies. Trouble was, sensitive issues were being constantly leaked to the media. It got to the point where some of us became reticent, preferring to do business behind the scenes directly with counterparts in the other agencies. The group itself was sloppily managed, showing little in the way of concrete results.
In late 1996, the CIA stripped Mr. Nuccio of his security clearances. He resigned shortly thereafter. Turns out Mr. Nuccio had been leaking secrets to then Sen. Robert Torricelli and reporters. The investigation also revealed Nuccio had been preparing and transmitting classified documents on his home office equipment. Oh! And Torricelli, caught up in a bribery scandal, left the Senate after one term.
"The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves."
It wasn't only the press and uncleared members of Congress who were unauthorized recipients of U.S. government secrets about our Cuba policy.
Every month from Guantanamo, I sent classified cables to Washington via U.S. Navy encrypted communications concerning our meetings on The Line with Cuban military representatives as well as on what I'd learned from interviewing Cuban refugees.
When I traveled inside Castro's Cuba on official business, agents of the Cuban intelligence agency, the DGI, followed my every move and harrassed me, including slashing the tires of my rental car. While this is standard operating procedure for the DGI, in retrospect, I have to wonder whether Ana Belen Montes may have had something to do with it.
Ana Montes was the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency's senior analyst for Cuba. She had access to virtually all of our classified intelligence and policy planning on that country. In late 2001, she was arrested for espionage and convicted shortly thereafter. Sentenced to 25 years, Ana Montes is imprisoned in Texas.
For sixteen years, Montes had been passing to Castro's intelligence service a veritable torrent of official secrets. Her treason led to the killing of a Green Beret. Had Havana been reading my classified reports in virtual real-time, care of Ana Montes?

CIA Spooks or Keystone Kops?
At one of my overseas posts, the CIA had a defector from a Communist nation who claimed to be an air force pilot with detailed knowledge of biological and chemical weapons. Using interpreters, his CIA case officers had him polygraphed and said he passed. The CIA station was keeping this secret from the State Dept. I learned of this through my own network of local contacts who were on the CIA's payroll. These people liked me and kept me informed of what the Agency was up to; it was my way of keeping tabs on the spooks' activities in my area. The CIA was debating whether to break the news to the media or to reinfiltrate the pilot to his country. I confronted the Chief of Station with my information and asked to interview the pilot myself in his own language (in which I was fluent). The Station Chief relented. I asked the man detailed questions about his alleged training in the Soviet Union. He failed miserably, not knowing the first thing about the Russian diet, landscape or even climate. He was proven to be a liar. The red-faced CIA handlers released him immediately, washing their hands of the whole embarrassing episode.
When I read about "Curveball," the fraudulent source of the WMD claims against Saddam Hussein, I think back to the bogus "pilot-defector" and what our policies toward Russia might have been had his "intelligence" been accepted as true.

Ambassadors-at-Large for Incompetence . . .
In 1992, as the Khmer Rouge were targeting foreigners for assassination in the countryside, our ambassador in Cambodia ordered his staff to travel into the lawless interior to ascertain people's attitudes about upcoming UN-sponsored elections for that country. The staff refused such an irresponsible order, confronting the ambassador with passive resistance bordering on mutiny. The State Dept. countermanded the order.
When in charge of U.S. policy on Cambodia in the UN in the early '80s, my State Dept. boss asked me: "Are the Khmer Rouge the good guys or the bad guys?" As most of the world knows, the Khmer Rouge killed at least a million Cambodian citizens in the 1970s, a genocide second only to the Holocaust.

. . . and Embassies for Sale!
In the late 1980s, our ambassador to Italy was an Italian-American lumber baron from Minnesota. Having donated generously to his party, the man got the job, though he possessed no diplomatic or related experience. An otherwise gregarious sort, he was at sea in Rome. He used one of the most sensitive communications channels, normally reserved for matters of high policy, to update the Secretary of State on his project to remodel Villa Taverna, the U.S. ambassador's residence, including one lengthy cable on his selection of curtains. He was also fond of telling demeaning Italian jokes before crowds of host country officials and journalists, an act that endeared neither him nor the United States to the Italian public.
Jimmy Carter's ambassador to Singapore, a former South Dakota state legislator, walked off with the ambassadorial china upon completion of his unremarkable assignment. Upon being asked to return the expensive, eagle-embossed china, our ambassador refused, stating it was his just reward for having been an ambassador.
Faux pas by noncareer ambassadors include cocaine smuggling using diplomatic pouches, drunken imbroglios at embassy functions, embarrassing adulterous affairs, and simple ineptitude. We used to sell military flag officer ranks to political hacks until the end of the Civil War, when the extent of the slaughter revealed the tragic consequences of such practices. U.S. ambassadorships and other senior diplomatic positions, however, remain on the auction block for the highest bidders. Fully a third of ambassadorships, in fact, go to noncareer people.

Let's Kill the Messenger
When Bill Clinton paid a state visit to Vietnam in 2000, the first to a unified Vietnam by a U.S. president, the State Dept. assigned as presidential interpreter a nice young man whose only interpreting experience theretofore had been at Arlington County Court, where he translated traffic proceedings, family disputes and similar cases. The poor fellow failed miserably, mangling the President's keynote address to the Vietnamese people, and was sent packing on the next plane back to the U.S. I was directed to find a replacement immediately. I did and, lucky for me, he performed magnificently.

Fact Stranger Than Fiction
If you had any illusions that your government is manned with competent, bright, judicious officials who have your best interests at heart, you're wrong. Twenty-five years in the federal government showed me otherwise. Regularly, I faced situations which made me say, "Fiction can't rival this." Our debacle in Iraq, the Mark Foley affair, the Valerie Plame case and the Abramoff scandal only reconfirm my sentiment.
So, I cut short my diplomatic career to have more fun writing stories which encompass the chicanery and fecklessness of government. If you thought Washington was out of control, then don't read my books. They'll only confirm your worst fears about how things are done in our nation's capital. Two of my political thrillers are now out: PERMANENT INTERESTS and CHASM (http://www.lulu.com/JamesBruno) and are available through Amazon. My third will be published soon.::