It’s surprising that I only saw a clear connection between intelligence work and my condemnation of Wordism.

When I use the term Wordism it sounds theoretical. In serious intelligence works it’s about as theoretical as explaining to an advertizing convention that they shoudl not refer to their product as bad.

Big appropriations went into the CIA’s New England Mafia. The money went to the Ivy League types to whom the field was afraid to report. When the Torricelli Amendment attacked the problem that so many informers used out in the field were — horrors! — very shady types, this problem surfaced like a tidal wave.

Torricelli that any informer a field operative wanted to use, if he had a police record, simply had to be checked out with Washington. There has never been a clear demonstration of how much the field operatives trusted the Harvard boys in DC.

On-the-ground intelligence collapsed. Despite that, not ONE SINGLE field operative ever sent a name to DC! They didn’t who Hansen was, but they knew there were plenty of his kind at HQ. Whatever you let CIA HQ in on went straight to the KGB, and your man would disappear.

On a practical level, this explains some of the desperate financing of real work during the Cold War. You couldn’t go “on the budget” so you went to the Howard Hunt types( I am describing a TYPE, not a person).

Let me repeat that the head of the Cuba Desk of the Defense Intelligence Agency was a Castro agent and is now in prison for it. How many did NOT go to prison?

She was a Hispanic leftist, but no one was allowed to question her loyalty to whatever philosophy Being a Good American was suposed to be in the Pentagon at the moment.

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, no sane person would trust you for a second if you did not understand you needed to deal with people who had GUT loyalties, not to a set of words about “What America Should Be” or “I Want to Teach the World to Sing in Perfect Harmony.”

If you didn’t want to be ratted out, you had better deal with a Southerner or a Phildelphia Irishman whose concept of loyalty had nothing to do with the latest theories on What America is All About.

He is loyal to his country, a specific people, and he won’t sell them out.