CIA Blows a Coup in Greenland

For the second time this year, Denmark’s foreign Minister has had to call the top US diplomat in Denmark to the carpet after Danish intelligence learned that Americans linked to the Trump Administration are trying to develop networks in Greenland to trigger an independence movement from Denmark and (fingers crossed) vote or sell itself to the United States. The first time the foreign minister had to dress down charge d’affairs Mark Stroh was when Danish intelligence originally pointed that US spy agencies were up to in Greenland.

Normally, when a covert operation is blown it is wound down, but when The Wall Street Journal reported the complaint in May Tulsi Gabbard, US Director of National Intelligence, didn’t deny it but simply accused the paper of “breaking the law and undoing our nation’s security and democracy.” And carried on as if no one noticed. Which is why you hire a spook to run spooks. That was an idiotic answer.

According to the Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, it’s not clear for whom the Americans are working. He’s lying to, but as least his BS is coherent. So… let’s take a stab at what, exactly, is going on.

In my experience, this operation has the CIA’s fingerprints all over it. Especially the part where a hastily a thrown together political operation gets blown in its planning stages. I’m not trying to knock the men and women of the CIA but, unlike the Federal Reserve or the courts, it’s not an institution designed to withstand pressure from political hacks. The sort of ass who calls politics “the art of the possible” rarely has time for people bound by anything approaching situational awareness.

And it shows: You can count the CIA’s successful attempts at overthrowing foreign governments on one hand - and still have enough digits left over to give someone bird.

Ungentlemanly Warfare

Unlike the DMV, the issue here is not incompetence and apathy in the rank and file. It is a system failure at the top, exacerbated by the CIA’s tortured relationship with nearly every White House since it was chartered in 1947. Its predecessor agency, Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was famously founded by “Wild” Bill Donavan in World War II with consulting help from James Bond creator Ian Fleming. But Commander Fleming wasn’t with Britain’s SIS (better known as MI6), was wartime Navel Intelligence, de-mobed after the war and arguably never recovered.

The OSS was not patterned on the SIS - a professional intelligence agency that was designed to operate in war and peace. It was a distinctly wartime creature that evolved along the lines of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) which Churchill famously dubbed “the ministry of ungentlemanly warfare.” The SOE was less an intelligence organization than a covert outfit with the brief to get arms and money to factional strongmen, blow stuff up, and then sift through the rubble for clues. At the end of the war both the OSS and the SOE were disbanded.

Yet, with United States on center stage whether it wanted to be or not, President Truman realized that need to have what he called a centralized intelligence “newspaper” to brief him what was going on in the world. And he needed it fast. The world had completely reordered itself from a kaleidoscope of far away powers ranked major, middle and minor to a bipolar contest with two adversaries gaming for the whole thing. The end result was that the new Central Intelligence Agency was staffed almost entirely by former OSS men - generally Ivy League guys who’d cut their teeth running around war-torn Europe blowing things up and throwing guns and money at small, post-occupation resistance movements left in the vacuum of retreating Nazis.

To understand the vibe of this original cohort, imagine a bunch of well-heeled fraternity alumni, facing careers in law and banking, being asked by their government to re-join their old clubs and resume their beer-fueled antics in the name of patriotism and well-funded by the government. By 1950 the newly minted CIA was running around the globe trying to establish a latticework of allies to check the Soviets from doing the same. They did this the only way they knew how - the fun way. Foreshadowing the American love affair with outsourcing, the CIA’s strictly intelligence gathering work was also being done by allies as well.

The CIA’s few successes in covert operations included a coup in Iran called Operation AJAX, another in Guatemala, and an engineered the 1973 coup by Augusto Pinochet in Argentina. Given the grief those successes have caused the United States, it might have been better if they too had been blown in the first hour too. Administrations from Eisenhower onwards - including George H. W. Bush, who’d actually run the agency – knew of the failures and, well, that didn’t help relations between the White House and its premier intelligence agency. Richard Nixon – Eisenhower’s veep during operation AJAX – watched with bitter schadenfreude as Kennedy endured CIA fiascos like the Bay of Pigs, its Mexican station dropping the ball on Lee Harvey Oswald. Then the agency make LBJ’s bed for him in Vietnam. As president, Nixon thought of the entire gang as “jokers” albeit useful ones. He used them to spy on Americans. When the CIA got caught, they’d really pissed in the whisky and the agency was gutted. And yet even a self-righteous mug like Jimmy Carter couldn’t keep himself from playing the Great Game by monkeying around in covert action around the world.

And here we are…

President Trump famously distrusts US intelligence, but again, they serve a purpose. Which brings us to last night where I was sitting in Memphis, watching the BBC Wold Service as Trump 1.0’s former ambassador to Denmark (we don’t have a current ambassador, the previous one was sacked on inauguration day, which doesn’t help the administration’s claims to not know what’s going on.) Carla Sands deny Denmark’s allegations of US covert operations by saying a) that every one does it, b) Copenhagen and Washington have a great relationship and - by way of example - c) it’s Denmark that trying to drive a wedge between the US and Greenland.

Well, old habits die hard. Seriously, though, who briefs these people? That is just terrible tradecraft.