"Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage""

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	History
Author:	Douglas Waller

Viewed from the bare bones of his life story, William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan (1883--1959) resembles a type of hero out of the mists of some fiction writer's imagination--a handsome and roguish character who was fearless in the face of enemy bullets--German or Japanese--in war and prepared to buck or go around anyone who got in his way to achieve a national or personal mission in the corridors of power.

It's the rags-to-riches story of a tough "shanty" Irish-American kid from the wrong end of the tracks. Born in the poverty stricken First Ward of Buffalo, New York, "Wild Bill" managed to work his way to a top Ivy League college (Columbia) at a time when "shanty" Irish Americans were shown a good deal of disdain, along with those of Jewish backgrounds.

He married Ruth Rumsey, a member of a elite Protestant family. By the age of thirty Donovan had a successful career as a corporate lawyer and was a rising star in the Republican Party in New York. Gifted with perhaps an excessive amount of charm and magnetism with the ladies, he enjoyed numerous affairs. The details might make for spicy reading for some, but Waller mercifully steers clear of most of it, keeping the story focused his subject's professional life. It is noted that Donovan and his wife essentially led separate lives for the remainder of the life-long marriage.

He went off to war as an officer in 1917 in a low-key border affair with Mexican rebels and later the trenches of France on the Western Front. It was in the latter theater of carnage that his courage and leadership blossomed. Donovan and his "Fighting 69th" Brigade overcame bad generalship at the top and German aggression at the front to emerge as one of the most highly decorated units in the last year of the war. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and the French Co-ix de Guerre. He refused the latter honor until a Jewish-American soldier was given his due,however, and latter dedicated his medal to the men he had served with who didn't come home.

In the 1920's Donovan became a State Attorney in New York and later ran--unsuccessfully--for the governorship of the "Empire State". By the time World War II broke out in Europe, this staunch Republican became an intimate of an old political opponent, the patrician Franklin Roosevelt.
Two men of more different backgrounds could scarcely be found in the corridors of power in those days. But they shared one thing--a certainty that German and Italian Fascism sooner or later had to be stopped and Americans had to play a key part. Roosevelt sent Donovan over to Britain in 1940 to see the situation first-hand, meet with the new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and coordinate anti-Nazi activities with Canadian-born William Stephenson, another hero from the First World War and the man heading up Britain's main intelligence service. Big Bill (Stephenson) and Little Bill (Donovan) became close colleagues. Although friction developed between the fledgling American intelligence service Office of Strategic Services (the OSS) and the British Security Coordination Office (BSC), they shared common enemies. And not just Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese Empire, but also J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, who was highly suspicious of British intelligence services operating in America at any level. Hoover also kept up an internecine war with the OSS, gathering intelligence against the flamboyant Donovan and his crew of eccentric and unorthodox but often highly effective and intelligent staff members and agents.

Many Americans, including the fascist-leaning Ambassador to Britain, Joseph Kennedy thought that England was finished in 1940 . But Donovan, who was given unprecedented access by Churchill to his government and their wartime inner-establishment, thought otherwise. He also knew that it would take great deal more American aid than Congress was willing to give to help forestall a possible defeat for democracy and a Nazi death grip on the continent for decades to come.

Roosevelt would refer to Donovan as "his legs" throughout the war. This was high praise from a leader who rarely if ever confided in anyone beyond his inner, inner circle of advisers. Donovan indeed had no compunction about gathering information from any source--be they American Communists or European royalists to ferret out Axis agents. He also approved "black bag" units to go into foreign embassies in and out of Washington to crack open safes and gleam information from "neutral" countries like Vichy France, Spain and Turkey.

From the Washington Post review of the same book:

" ...six months before Pearl Harbor, Donovan sent a memo to President Franklin D. Roosevelt urging the creation of a central intelligence service. "Strategy, without information upon which it can rely, is helpless," the memo warned. Roosevelt, who badly wanted better information from abroad and regarded the military and State Department intelligence units as next to useless, embraced Donovan's idea. FDR gave him a bland interim title and in 1942 appointed him chief of the OSS.

"As the new player in town, Donovan was talented at making enemies, notably FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, but also the chief of G-2 (Army intelligence) and others. What comes through clearly is that Donovan spent as much time battling rival agencies as he did running the wartime spy service. Only his direct access to FDR saved him. And the turf wars among the spy agencies continue to this day."

This book should be highly entertaining for those interested in espionage and building an intelligence service from the ground up. The United States had Army, Naval and State Department intelligence units before the war but Roosevelt found them inadequate for actually getting in the field and doing things. In contrast, it was hard to get Bill Donovan OUT of the field. He insisted, sometimes against direct orders from higher-ups, to be in on every major Allied landing in Europe (including Utah Beach on D-Day) and came close to being killed or captured more than once. (He personally shot his way out of trouble in Sicily when ambushed by Italian soldiers, reportedly "as happy as a clam" to his military escort. Even in his fifties, Donovan exulted in being shot at. He also carried an "L" pill to use to kill himself in case he was taken alive by the enemy.

When he wasn't drawing fire and being frankly reckless, he was literally flying all over the globe during the war, from North Africa to Burma, London, Australia , Washington, Moscow, etc, to try and establish spy networks and to relieve those of his head operatives who had lost their grip.

But at the same time Waller points out Donovan's weaknesses. He was a poor administrator and could be careless with secret files. Many who worked under him found him too cavalier. And he could make enemies by never taking "no" for an answer.

After World War II and the death of Roosevelt, Donovan hoped to head up a post-war version of the OSS. It was not to happen as he and Harry Truman could never establish a good working relationship. The Cold War National Security Act of 1947 and the CIA went on without him. Except for a brief post as Ambassador to Thailand under Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950's Donovan's career in military affairs and government ended before he wanted it to.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

John LaCarre's 1975 book was first translated as a six-hour miniseries starring Sir Alec Guinness. Guinness was a great actor and all the coiled intensity and intelligent deduction he brought to a rather boring and ordinary-looking man made the show remarkable and a notch or three above the "Cocktails, Sex and Berettas" skulduggery that was typical fodder for the Cold War drama series. It seemed like La Carre must have known what was going on inside British Intelligence even though he denied he was using much fwcknew at how the top echelon of the British spy organization ("The Circus") starts to unravel on itself as it more than his imagination for years until it was revealed he had been a spy himself during the 1950's when Britain espionage services had its share of high-ranking"fifth columnists" like Donald Burgess, MacLean and Kim Philby.

"Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" takes place after the revelations of double-agents have put "The Circus" back on its heels. The head of intelligence, "Control" (John Hurt) believes a new mole has cropped up inside the agency, but he dies before being able to carry out a internal affairs investigation. The last of control's Old Guard, George Smiley (here played compellingly by Gary Oldman) is brought out of forced retirement to track down the mole; there are four main key figures he has to investigate and ferret out the one rotten apple before his own agents are shut down by the mole or "Moscow Center" further compromises his old agency, and everytrhing he and his cadre of spy recruits in "The Nursery" training center worked to build up since the end of World War II.

The politics around the story hardly matters as much as the threat of suspicion, betrayal and distrust. Smiley knows something about all this in his private life as his beloved wife, Ann, has been sexually involved with one of his suspects and the rest of his peers in the Circus know full well he is a wounded cuckold. Oldman imparts a weary but stoic and dogged portrayal of a man not home in his own home or his old agency.

He is driven to finish a job and its only at the end--for those who haven't read the book-- that we realize his work is far from over. Hanging over the whole story like a haunting specter is Karla, a Stalin-era Soviet super-agent who somehow survived the purges of Krushchev's
de-Stalinization programs at the Kremlin. He's a true believer that Smiley once tried to turn to the West in a meeting in New Delhi, and who wouldn't even flinch despite the desperate situation he faced back in Moscow.

He has more up his sleeve than the mole Smiley is trying to take down, hence the need for LaCarre's next two books in this series, "The Honourable Schoolboy" and his next masterpiece "Smileys People", later a 1982 television series that one hopes will become the next movie with these writers, director and fine cast.

In Memorial "Apollo 1"-January, 1967--Space Flight

As the last scheduled NASA Space Shuttle flight finishes up its mission, I was thinking back to the earliest space missions I could recall directly from my youth. Turns out the first mission I remembered was Apollo One, a mission which never got off the ground.

From Wikipedia: "Apollo 1 (also designated Apollo Saturn-204 and AS-204) was scheduled to be the first manned mission of the Apollo manned lunar landing program, with a target launch date of February 21, 1967. A cabin fire during a launch pad test on January 27 at Launch Pad 34 at Cape Canaveral killed all three crew members: Command Pilot Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Senior Pilot Edward H. White and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee; and destroyed the Command Module. The mission name Apollo 1, chosen by the crew, was officially retired by NASA in commemoration of them on April 24, 1967.

Immediately after the fire, NASA convened the Apollo 204 Accident Review Board to determine the cause of the fire. Although the ignition source was never conclusively identified, the astronauts' deaths were attributed to a wide range of lethal design and construction flaws in the early Apollo Command Module. The manned phase of the project was delayed for twenty months while these problems were corrected."



The NASA Space program meant a lot to myself and my fellow school chums. In the late 1960's I was just becoming slowly aware of how fractured our country was over racial issues, a long-distance ground war in South-East Asia and new ideas of sexuality, humor, free speech, feminism, fashions and a whole thing called "the generation gap".

Even the length of a man's hair was a subject of anger and dissent!

It was a different time and there weren't a lot of real-life heroes for kids to admire. The astronauts of thee Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs at least provided us what other generations took for granted--adults in the larger society we could all look up to. With some other grade school colleagues, I remember playing "Astronauts in Space" after school in my parents' garage. I'm sure a lot of kids did.

We even had a couple "girl astronauts"from down the block, who would drop by for a voyage. Must have been the influence of Lt. Uhura from "Star Trek" that made it seem more natural to have a girl or two on the crew from time to time. We beat NASA to gender integration by at least a full decade! We also had a lot of innocent fun.

If a new actual space mission would launch it would heighten interest of course. And there were new space missions. Apollo 7 was launced as part of the testing of the lunar module. Apollo 8 actually orbited the moon (!) in December of 1968. I still remember hearing the astronauts on that flight speaking on Christmas Eve and then seeing actual footage of the earth taken from one-quarter million miles away. Humans seen the earth for the first time not as a giant sphere dominating a picture but as a distant blue planet of small size. It changed the way people thought about our planet. Not surprisingly I think it helped the ecology movement as well.

No, NASA wasn't perfect. There were no African-American or Hispanic astronauts, no women, just middle-aged white guys in crew cuts. And they probably wouldn't have let any of them wear long hair even if one of the astronauts wanted to.

And yes, there was a "space race" on with the Soviets. But consider that that race led to a joint Apollo-Soyuz mission a few years later--American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts meeting in a orbital space docking of spacecrafts in 1975. And we all have an international space station circling above us today.

These brave men, including Chuck Grissom--one of the original Mercury astronauts--were our heroes. And, apart from the sports stars in baseball, basketball and football, these guys and the other astronaut crews would have been worthy of hero status in any generation I think.

And so it's worth remembering those who volunteered eagerly to overcome whatever fears they might have had, and risk their lives for something that humans had been dreaming about long before anybody ever heard of the USSR or the USA.

When the Apollo 11 crew of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, it was a great moment. But without all those who came before them, including Grissom and White and Chafee, and all those who either designed unmanned rockets going back to the Chinese centuries before or flew in propeller craft when human flight was in its infancy , none of this magic blend of individual grit and scientific prowess would have happened.

Russian Spies in New Jersey?: Boris and Natasha Redux!

      The news that eleven New Jersey Russian Americans from the posh suburbs outside New York City  are now in Federal custody, accused of being sent by Kremlin's SVR, Moscow's foreign intelligence service, brings back visions of Cold War gamesmanship to many. 

It perhaps says something about the odd way my brain has developed from those "Spy vs. Spy" years to recall that when the news was first announced I thought of Boris and Natasha. (pictured left). 

The images from television, movies and books I read about Moscow versus London and Washington in dealing with real-lie espionage agents of course had at least  a semi-serious entertainment value.  Images of Sean Connery as the tough and wise-cracking James Bond, Michael Caine as the intrepid if slightly flawed Harry Palmer,  and, on the lighter side, Don Adams as Maxwell Smart  leap to mind.

Some authors wanted to make a stronger case about the seemliness  of spy-craft itself and the sometimes ambiguous moral traps and personal problems spied had. Sober  portrayals of cold war intrigue were offered up by John LaCarre in his George Smiley novels or Graham Greene in "The Human Factor", where one of his characters defects to Russia out of a personal favor done to him and his lover in South Africa by a KGB agent. Both LaCarre and Greene had served in British Intelligence.    

But the earliest inkling in my memory banks  that NATO nations and our former Friends in the East were having t each other came  from a 1960's cartoon show called "Rocky and Bullwinkle". Rocky was a plucky flying squirrel, and Bullwinkle a dimwitted moose.  They were two friends from Frostbite Falls, Minnesota who were frequently running up against the nefarious and short Boris Badenoff and his Amazonian partner and apparent girl-friend, Natasha Fatale. 

Pictured here with their two-dimensional spymaster, known only as "Fearless Leader"(above) , this pair of idealized Russian spies set a path of ineptitude and total bad luck that made it rather hard for me  and other kids I knew to properly take the  Cold War spy-game with too much seriousness.  

  Parody like this, intended for both children and adults, only went to prove to me that the threats of international communism that had spread like wildfire in the America of the 1950's had been so overplayed that by the next decade it was clear the public wanted relief from such paranoia about "Reds under every bed" .  

That the "heroes" of the espionage stories in the Rocky and Bullwinkle saga were none other than a rodent and a large cow-like dufus with antlers only heightened the sense that some politicians in Washington had gone too far in trying to make people stop thinking and  just be afraid.  This was one man's  (Jay Ward, the producer) parody  against blacklisting and the politics of red hysteria under men like Senator Joe Mc Carthy, Richard Nixon and others.

But now we live in a post-modern world where irony can pop up anywhere.  The irony of Russian agents being sent to an America to gather information while posing as ordinary upscale citizens seems not only unnecessary   (what do the Russians  need to know about us? That Wall Street mortgage and hedge fund shell-gamers and con-men decimated  the economy? That we can't get out of Afghanistan just as they couldn't? That our environment takes a backseat to our desire for natural resources? ) but daft. 

Here's the "new Natasha", Titian-tress-ed beauty  Anna Chapman, on a news-spot featuring a  You Tube video she made before her arrest along with her husband and others..

Who's Afraid of Cuba?

A woman greets a relative during a visit from Miami to Havana, Cuba.(April 16, 2009, from "On Point"--NPR Radio)

 

One of the smartest things I think the Obama Administration has done in this "First 100 Days" of running the Executive Branch has been lifting the stringent travel and remittance regulations against the hundreds of thousands of Cuban-Americans who either left the Island decades ago, more recently got out in some way, or those who have never been to Cuba but have close relatives there. 

 It's a start.

For nearly five decades, The Cuban Embargo Act has been in place as a way to end the Castro government on that island.  Ironically, while even the USSR is out of business, Cuba remains under the authority of Fidel and his brother Raoul. I believe it is now time to declare the CEA a relic and a crashing failure that may have kept a tighter reign on the Cuban people from its government than would have if some past Administration had jettisoned it after the end of the Cold War Era in the early 1990's.

American foreign policy has been hostage for along time to the political clout of not only anti-Castro conservatives like the late "Senator No", Jesse Helms of North Carolina, but also the hard-core anti-Castro exiles living in Miami and New York.  No Republican or Democratic Presidential candidate over the years could afford to tick off the Cuban-American community, who wanted Castro gone like yesterday and would punish a politician who might say that geography and history (not all of it nice) make normal relations between Washington and Havana long overdue. 

To be clear, I do not support human right violations by governments from my own country to any torture and political re-education programs in the Caribbean. Castro should be given credit for resisting American business interests--some of it Mafia-based--but it is clear some of his promises to promote elections for his countrymen were fatuous gambits to raise money in the early days of this revolution. Many people were lined up and shot, many had their lives destroyed in prison under his government and so on.  That said, the USA enjoys good relations with nations like China, Saudi Arabia, and, in the past, Haiti's tyrant regime and Mubuto's Zaire and Franco's Spain and Somoza's Nicaragua and so on.  

I don't pretend to know how responsive the Castro government will be to normalizing relations with the Americans--relations that Cuba already has with the rest of the world--but it is time to turn the page and, barring some backlash against Americans travelling inside Cuba, its high time ALL Americans should be able to travel in that country and see for themselves the good and the bad. (and vice versa to Cubans.)  It's the only way to cut through the propaganda and learn from each others systems and, in some synthesis, perhaps improve both nations in a peaceful manner.       

 

    An example of the conflicting American attitudes toward Castro in 1959:

 

A bit of a primer on the 1961 US-launched "Bay of Pigs" Invasion of Cuba, which was as John Kennedy later put it, "a perfect failure".  This consolidated Castro's power and insured massive Russian presence and economic and military support there for decades. 

 

Interesting Television: The Prisoner (1967) and its remake (2009)--Part One

This was the opening dialouge to almost all episodes of "The Prisoner":

 "Where am I?"

"In the Village."

"What do you want?"

"Information."

"Whose side are you on?"

"That would be telling…. We want information. Information! INFORMATION!"

"You won't get it."

"By hook or by crook, we will."

"Who are you?"

"The new Number Two."

"Who is Number One?"

"You are Number Six."

"I am not a number — I am a free man!"

"The Prisoner" is a unique piece of television. It addresses issues such as personal identity and freedom, democracy, education, scientific progress, art and technology, while still remaining an entertaining drama series. Over seventeen episodes we witness a war of attrition between the faceless forces behind 'The Village' (a Kafkaesque community somewhere between Butlins and Alcatraz) and its most strong willed inmate, No. 6. who struggles ceaselessly to assert his individuality while plotting to escape from his captors."--Stuart Besick, from "The Prisoner" International Movie Database Website.   

I first saw "The Prisoner" as a CBS Summer Replacment show in  1969.  I was still a kid, but had seen my share of  American  spy dramas on telelvision ("The Man From Uncle", "Mission:Impossible") and spoofs of the James Bond craze ("Get Smart").  I had even seen some of "The Avengers" which was a hybrid of both the dramatic and the tongue-in-cheek espionage series.

But none of that prepared me for this show.    Even after I had watched several episodes  of it, I wasn't sure what to make of the whole thing.    In 1978 I got reaquainted with the series in a syndication run.  This time the series, starring Patrick McGoohan, the star of "Danger Man" (or "Secret Agent Man" in the USA) had me hooked by its enigmatic qualities.  The oppressive and eclectic athmosphere of "The Village" and its allegorical views of what constitutes freedom and individual integrity had resonance now that I knew something about George Orwell's and Franz Kafka's most popular writings.  But I still couldn't get a handle on what point on the politcal spectrum the show fell on.  And the last episode of the show "Fall Out", where "Number 6/The Prisoner" (McGoohan) finally gets to meet the "Big Brother/Number One" seems to be the most perplexing  ending to any work of drama I'd seen to that date.   

  And apparently I wasn't alone. Millions of adults had seen the series in the United Kingdom when itoriginally aired in 1967/1968 and didn't know quite what to make of it either. The American host of the station that presented the series claimed that McGoohan himself had felt the need to to leave England and for Switzerland and then America because so many people were angred by the enigmatic ending to the show.

This intrigued me.  Television dramas could be interesting of course but casual viewers usually don't get so worked up over a show that the star and co-creator has to hot- foot himself and his family out of the country to avoid people who were in an uproar over what was only a James Bond genre show, right?  Didn't make sense. It's onlly after seeing a couple episodes that you see that McGoohan and producers George Markstein and David Tomblin were subverting the whole "cold war spy" series into something that was neither stoic action-drama or smug spoofery.

(Exteriors for "The Prisoner" were shot along the coast of north Wales, at the resort of Portmierion. This was the backdrop for "The Village.)   

After the show had aired a few more times in the 1970's and 80's it took on a cult status, a status which apparently was only increased by the Internet, from which several "The Prisoner" sites can be found with a quick Google search. That cult status has not escaped the notice of movie and television executives either--a new "Prisoner" television series is currently in production in Namibia and Capetown, South Africa, to be broadcast next year on the AMC network.  Here's a link below for information on the new series.

http://www.amctv.com/originals/the-prisoner/    

The premise of the original series is deceptively simple.  A man who works for some British intelligence service marches into the office of his boss in the bowels of the Parliament Building, slams down a written resignation and then takes off in his sportscar to pack for a trip to the tropics.  But he finds himself waylaid to a place called "The Vilage", an idyllic little seaport where people are generally friendly but from which no person can leave. Every one has a number they wear on a badge on their person at all times.   

(above, McGoohan's character campaigns for the office of "Number Two" in the episode "Free For All".  In "The Village" elections are held from time to time. If he manages to win, freedom will be won and things will certainly change for the citizenry. Or will they?)     

 

Almost every week "Number 6" had to deal with a new leader of the village , an administrator known only as "Number 2", usually a man but in one episode a woman.   The new "boss" would try to get him to break down and acknowledge why he resigned from the service and/or entice him to join "The Village" as a proper good citizen.  Rather than simply eliminating him, or subjecting him to brute torture, the forces behind these various Number 2s had a mission to win him over as a potential new "boss" of the Village.  Number Six is no ordinary agent, one must surmise, but has great value.  (I later learned the basic premise of the show bears some resemblance to the philosophy of Ayn Rand's Objectivism, a philosophy of extreme selfishness I cannot say I am impressed with any more than I am with the notion of mass conformity in peace-time civilization.)        

Here is a scene from one of my favorite episodes, "Hammer And Anvil", which shows a quintessential encounter between Number 6 and the authorities. Number Two is played by the fine actor Patrick Cargill.  His character has just driven Number 73, a fragile woman prisoner, to suicide.  He now works his "charms" on our hero.  

 

In the next section of the blog, I will post a few more "Prisoner" clips and talk about why I think this is one series that is worth looking out for, even if you've never seen it.  The best aspects of the show have a unique way of being thoughtful and entertaining. 

Until then, here's a bit of a taste of the previous series McGoohan starred in,'Danger Man".  It  made him a big star on the small screen and the highest paid actor in British television.  It also reportedly bored him after awhile, but  its success in the UK and North America gave him the clout to  get something as off-the-wall as "The Prisoner" off the ground.  

 

 

The Cold War is Back---and Maybe Scarier Than Ever

From  The New York Times  

WASHINGTON — The United States and Poland reached a long-stalled deal on Thursday to place an American missile defense base on Polish territory, in the strongest reaction so far to Russia’s military operation in Georgia.

Russia reacted angrily, saying that the move would worsen relations with the United States that have already been strained severely in the week since Russian troops entered separatist enclaves in Georgia, a close American ally. At a news conference on Friday, a senior Russian defense official, Col. Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, suggested that Poland was making itself a target by agreeing to host the anti-missile system. Such an action “cannot go unpunished,” he said.

The deal reflected growing alarm in a range of countries that had been part of the Soviet sphere about a newly rich and powerful Russia’s intentionsin its former cold war sphere of power. In fact, negotiations dragged on for 18 months — but were completed only as old memories and new fears surfaced in recent days.

Those fears were codified to some degree in what Polish and American officials characterized as unusual aspects of the final deal: that at least temporarily American soldiers would staff air defense sites in Poland oriented toward Russia, and that the United States would be obliged to defend Poland in case of an attack with greater speed than required under NATO, of which Poland is a member.

Polish officials said the agreement would strengthen the mutual commitment of the United States to defend Poland, and vice versa. “Poland and the Poles do not want to be in alliances in which assistance comes at some point later — it is no good when assistance comes to dead people,” the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, said on Polish television. “Poland wants to be in alliances where assistance comes in the very first hours of — knock on wood — any possible conflict.”

*******************************************************************************************************

Like some Disneyland attraction being revamped to pack more thrills into the crowds it will attract, the Bush Administration  has finally got Cold War II up and running at max speed by getting Poland to agree to let our government place ballistic missiles in a former Warsaw-Pact nation on Russia's western border.  This "defense sheild" idea, some kind of warmed-over Reagan Era "Star Wars" plan, seemed a bad idea in its inception and, now, coming on the heels of the fighting between Russia and Georgia, it seems extra-reckless.

Bush seems to want the scowling Vlad Putin and his puppets in the Kremlin to buy into the notion that putting ballistic missiles in Eastern Europe poses no threat to Russia. They are really aimed at stopping "rogue states" like Iran.  Has anybody noticed Poland is nowhere near Iran?    If such missiles are what it takes to keep the military-industrial powers happy, why do they have to invite less real security for Americans?  Isn't it scary enough that a border dispute between Poland and Russia could break out, as it has in the Black Sea republic of Georgia, over some "breakaway region" and that NATO is obliged to fight as if an attack on a border town or a Polish city like Lublin is an attack on London or Chicago?  With allies like Poland, a battleground for European Wars since Napoleon was in short pants, who needs enemies?  Aren't our forces already bogged down in two wars?  In what dimension of understanding does this make sense?

It doesn't mater what Washington's Neo Cons think; what matters is that the Moscow doesn't want these missiles near its border anymore than President Kennedy's Washington  and most of the Western Hemisphere wanted nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962.  And how does provoking a mature nuclear power help prevent the emergence of a new one in Iran?   This could undo all that the collapse of state Communism achieved in the 1990's and, literally, undo it in a nasty radiated flash.