Brush-Up On Your History: When Terrorist First Attacked the U.S.

A hundred years ago this month, the nation was blindsided by the first act of terrorism on U.S. soil—at the hands of Mexican troops commanded by the revolutionary Pancho Villa.

It has been 100 years since the first act of terror on U.S. soil was committed by revolutionary Francisco “Pancho” Villa.  On March 9, 1916 Villa and more than 400 heavily-armed mounted bandits crossed the Mexican border and attacked Columbus, New Mexico. The Villistas caught the town of 350 inhabitants, plus a garrison of 553 troops from the 13th U.S. Cavalry, completely by surprise. “I was awake, they were asleep,” he later bragged, “and it took them too long to wake up.”

For almost two hours Villa’s men ransacked the town’s hotel, its few stores, and adobe houses before the cavalry chased them back across the border. Left behind on Columbus’s dusty streets lay eight dead civilians and 10 American soldiers, and several others wounded. The Villistas took greater losses, between one and two hundred men, some killed during a cavalry skirmish 30 miles deep into Mexico.

Villa’s raid was an act of terrorism and the first of its kind conducted on U.S. soil. Unprovoked, his men gunned down innocent Americans and destroyed their property. Although the death toll pales in comparison with the 9/11 attacks or the recent Paris mass shootings, the American public was stunned and demanded immediate retribution, fearing Villa was on a rampage with plans to massacre other border towns. President Woodrow Wilson, a reluctant warrior, was in the midst of a reelection campaign that pledged to keep America out of the war in Europe. A war with Mexico was now a possibility and he had to act.

Villa never said why he orchestrated the attack, but his hatred for America was no secret. He was angered that the Wilson administration formally backed Villa’s chief political rival, Governor Venustiano Carranza. Seeking revenge three months before the Columbus raid, his Villistas murdered 18 Americans on board a Mexico train. Wilson ignored the episode and did nothing.

Yet, a day after Columbus was hit, Wilson needed to look strong and ordered his new secretary of war, Newton D. Baker, to send an armed force into Mexico. A week later, a punitive expedition of more than 14,000 troops under the command of Brigadier General John J. Pershing, including aide Lieutenant George S. Patton, headed to Mexico in pursuit of Villa.

Today, Pancho Villa is more associated with a slew of Mexican restaurants that bear his name than his true legacy as a cold-blooded killer. Villa was not a folk hero as some would like to believe, but a violent terrorist whose actions remind us of the atrocities committed by ISIS a century later.

—Mitchell Yockelson

Excerpted from Forty-Seven Days: How Pershing’s Warriors Came of Age to Defeat the German Army in World War I by Mitchell Yockelson:

Pancho Villa and around four hundred men raided Columbus, New Mexico, on March 9, 1916, and tangled with the 13th U.S. Cavalry Regiment, who were garrisoned nearby. Villa supporters had been terrorizing Americans in Mexico and conducting border raids for the past year in retaliation for the U.S. backing of President Venustiano Carranza, with whom Villa was embroiled in a civil war. The day after Villa’s invasion, President Wilson “directed that an armed force be sent into Mexico with the sole purpose of capturing Villa and preventing any further raids by his band, and with scrupulous regard to the sovereignty of Mexico.”

Secretary of War Baker, who had just arrived in Washington and knew little about the Army’s field officers, asked his general staff to recommend an expedition leader. Army chief of staff Major General Hugh L. Scott and his assistant, Major General Tasker H. Bliss, put Pershing’s name forward, and Baker selected him. The other possibility was Major General Frederick Funston, a Medal of Honor recipient and commander of the Southern Department out of Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. Funston outranked Pershing and seemed the obvious choice, but reports that he drank too much ruined his chances. Pershing also had more experience working directly with civilians than any other officer, and that comforted Baker.

Out of all his Army assignments, commanding the Mexican Punitive Expedition was the most difficult. Capturing Villa would be hard enough, considering the bandit knew the terrain better than Pershing and had many allies willing to protect him, but entering Mexico and not inciting its army into a full-scale war would be another challenge. Just after midnight on March 18, 1916, Pershing and the Mexican Punitive Expedition brought the U.S. Army into the modern era of warfare. Accompanying the 12,000 Regulars were motorized supply trucks, Signal Corps communication equipment, and some airplanes. Pershing split his army into two columns and headed toward the town of Casa Grandes, 100 miles south of Columbus. A supply base was established at Colonia Dublán and this is where Pershing made his headquarters.

Read the Remainder of the Article at The Daily Beast

 

 

The Espionage Files: The “Spider” James Jesus Angleton

Long before Game of Thrones dubbed its spymaster The Spider, James Jesus Angleton earned that name. His internal witch hunts still leave us wondering—madman, genius, or both?

“Mr. Dickey? This is Jim Angleton.”

I looked at the phone. I wasn’t sure what to say. This was 1978. I was a 26-year-old reporter on the Metro desk of The Washington Post, and James Jesus Angleton was the most famous, or infamous, spy in America.

Angleton had been forced to resign from the Central Intelligence Agency more than three years earlier after two decades of running its counterintelligence operations. In news reports and in outright fiction, Angleton was portrayed as amazingly eccentric and wildly paranoid, the mastermind who kept American intelligence operations safe from Soviet “moles,” and the madman whose “sick-think” destroyed careers and paralyzed the agency with his obsessive hunt for traitors. Indeed, there were some who said he’d done so much damage that Angleton must be the mole.

His name became part of every enigmatic event of the 1960s, including the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the subsequent murder of one of his mistresses (the ex-wife of another CIA man).

What seemed to be certain was that over the years Angleton had come to believe there was a “monster plot” by Moscow to deceive the United States at many different levels, wheels turning in wheels, a “wilderness of mirrors,” as he would say, taking a line from T.S. Eliot’s poem “Gerontion.”

But what could he possibly want from me?

Angleton was interested, he said, in a story I’d been covering: the trial of an alleged Vietnamese spy named David Truong and his American accomplice, Ronald Humphrey, an employee of the United States Information Agency.

The Vietnam War had come to its messy, humiliating end three years before with the fall of Saigon, but the wounds of that defeat were still carved deep into the American psyche, and the Truong case seemed at the time an awkward, and rather pitiful, attempt to win something back. But this was pretty small potatoes. Why would that interest the man known around the agency as “Mother”?

In Eliot’s poem, the line after “the wilderness of mirrors” asks “What will the spider do…?” Of course, one wanted to know.

 And so, a few days later, I met the master-spy at one of his favorite haunts in D.C., the Army and Navy Club on Farragut Square, a sea of white tablecloths amid an opulent 19th century décor, with a bar, in those days, at the far end of the room.

His appearance was as it had been described in countless caricatures: gray on gray, with gray hair, grayish skin, a gray suit. His build was tall and lanky but slightly stooped, and he had long, thin fingers. He was, indeed, a little spidery. His glasses were heavy-framed, and they were worn, one might think, as much for their symbolic weight as for their optical correction.

The hour was, I believe, about 1 o’clock, and apparently Angleton had not made a reservation. All the tables were filled. So, we started drinking.

Angleton’s poison may have been whiskey. I know it was hard liquor, because I was trying to keep up with him and the afternoon grew rather foggy rather quickly. My poison was scotch on the rocks. A real mistake. The drinks kept coming; the food did not. I switched to scotch and soda. And glasses of water. I had a Coke. But it was too late.

Mother asked me about the spy case I was covering. What was interesting about Truong, the personable son of a former South Vietnamese presidential candidate who’d run on a peace platform in 1967, was that he’d positioned himself in Washington as a voice of sanity in an increasingly insane war. He seemed to know anybody who was anybody in D.C. who had an interest in Vietnam.

Angleton started talking about William Colby, who had been the Saigon station chief, head of the agency’s Far East Division, and director of the by-then infamous Phoenix Program “that sought to attack and destroy the political infrastructure of the Viet Cong,” as the CIA’s in-house history puts it. President Richard Nixon appointed Colby Director of Central Intelligence in 1973. In 1974, to end “the great mole hunt,” Colby fired Angleton before, he, too, left the agency in 1976.

Read the Remainder at The Daily Beast

World War Two History: It’s D-Day for Ike’s Memorial!

The battle over plans for a Washington memorial to Dwight Eisenhower drags on, but meanwhile more and more of the Greatest Generation fades away each day.

If Bob Dole, the former Kansas senator and 1996 Republican nominee for president, has anything to say about it, 2016 will be the year in which the funding issues for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington are settled. As the new finance chairman of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission, Dole, who led the effort that raised more than $170 million in private donations for the National World War II Memorial, brings the right experience to the job.

Dole’s worries about the delays surrounding the Eisenhower Memorial are understandable. At the age of 92, he knows that time is not on the side of World War IIvets like himself who want the Eisenhower Memorial built while they are around to see it. Only 855,000 of the more than 16 million men and women who served in World War II are still living. Nearly 180,000 World War II vets die each year, and with the Eisenhower Memorial not having anywhere near the $140 to $150 million it is estimated to cost, more delays loom.

Delays on building memorials, especially presidential memorials, are nothing new. They rarely get completed in timely fashion. The Washington Monument was dedicated in 1885, the Lincoln Memorial in 1922, the Jefferson Memorial in 1943, and nothing has changed for our 20^th century presidents. The Franklin Roosevelt Memorial, which opened to the public in 1997, took 42 years to complete after it won congressional approval.

In the case of the Eisenhower Memorial, the current delays are rooted in an unexpected source—the Eisenhower grandchildren. For years they have been asking for a more meaningful memorial than the extravagant, almost cinematic presentation of their grandfather’s life that Frank Gehry has designed, and out of respect for their wishes, Congress has held back funding, even though the memorial has received the governmental approval it needs from the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission.

“It simply defies logic and decency to design and build a memorial to Dwight Eisenhower without obtaining the approval of the Eisenhower family,” Republican Congressman Ken Calvert of California, chairman of the appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the memorial,” told The Washington Post last year.

By law, construction cannot begin on the memorial until full funding has been achieved, and what Bob Dole is hoping to do with his private funding efforts is  get around Congress’s power to control when groundbreaking starts on the Eisenhower Memorial.

Read the Remainder at The Daily Beast

The Espionage Files: Lessons from My Father; How to Run a Secret Agent

 

Editor’s Note: The following conversation has been excerpted from the playwright John Hadden’s Conversations with a Masked Man: My Father, the CIA, and Me published by Arcade Publishing, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing. In the book, Hadden interviews his father about the latter’s long career in the CIA, the intricacies and follies of espionage, and dramatic decisions that altered the fate of the Cold War. In this excerpt, Hadden and his father discuss the precarious task of how a CIA officer cultivates informants and runs secret agents.

 

Son: Spy technique in Israel was a slightly different ball game than in Europe, yes? You say you just talked to people.

Father: No, it was pretty much the same. People would tell me things. By talking to everybody, see, soldiers, businessmen, judges, archeologists and farmers and opera singers and everybody, they couldn’t tell who was talking to me and who wasn’t.

Son: So having a formal arrangement is a vulnerable …

Father: It’s not important and very often stupid and counterproductive.

Son: Then how do you get them to talk?

Father: People always want to talk. A person will be most likely to talk if he’s somebody who hasn’t been properly appreciated—the best people are often left behind because they make people uncomfortable, they’re too smart for their own good. Then he really needs somebody to talk to, somebody who’ll understand how good he is.

Son: So you used friendship to get what you wanted.

 Father: I was very friendly, yeah. I would agree with anything anybody said. And when you deal with two people you learn something from one that you can tell the other, that he didn’t know, so then the other thinks you know more than you really do, and then he tells you things, and then—well, it’s like a Ping-Pong game.

Son: But there comes a point where you’re close to a mother lode of information and they have access to it … Then what do you do?

Father: Well, then you have to wait. I did finally recruit somebody … and, ah, yeah. It worked, it was …Yeah. It was the best thing I ever did. I got … [CIA director Richard] Helms liked it so much he took it to the president and …That was one thing, that was my one real … good one, yeah.

Son: And was your personal relationship different with this guy?

Father: I winkled him out and then I had somebody else dealing with him, under my control.

Son: So you stayed in the background.

Father: Oh yeah, Christ, I couldn’t have the Israelis knowing that I was doing things like that.

Son: So he went to other people and they passed it on to you.

Father: I only dealt with third parties.

Son: Were these third parties in danger?

Father: Not that they knew it, no. In Hamburg, all I did was …

Son: But you knew it.

Father: Well, that was what I was there for. In Hamburg all I did was talk to people.

Son: Did you know any of them well? Did you get into their lives, and …

Father: I would see them all the time.

Son: You must have gotten to know about their families, their sex lives …

Father: I suppose. Your mind sifts that stuff out very quickly.

Son: For them to have somebody to talk to …

Father: Especially if they think you’re friendly and if they think you agree with them anyway … so that you don’t have to be convinced of anything. Once you get into an argument with somebody, then you don’t learn anything. Then it’s gone.

Son: In order to be convincing, you have to become really interested in them …

Father: Yeah, you keep nodding your head …

Son: And then you bring them a book that you think they might like …

Father: Oh, gifts are the sine qua non.

Son: You have to give the right gift.

Father: You have to figure it out. I used to spend a couple of days at the Savile Book Shop in Washington, before Christmas, picking out a book for each one of these birds. There was an endless list.

Son: And you have to know the culture, the language.

Father: That helps. There was a guy in Israel named Karmon, who told his people never to speak Hebrew in front of me. I couldn’t speak enough Hebrew to get out of a paper bag, but he thought I was faking it. We went to a dinner party one night and I was sitting across from him, and there were two Israeli ladies sitting at our little card table, because that was kind of dinner party it was. Halfway through this meal one of the ladies said to Karmon in Hebrew, “Pour this guy a lot of wine, maybe he’ll tell you some secrets.” Of course they all knew who I was. And I picked up the only word I distinguished in all of that, yayin, the word for wine. For some reason I had learned a phrase from my two guys, my cartoon interpreters, which was “Nichnas yayin, yatzeh sod.” Which meant, ‘in goes the wine, out pops the secret.’ And Karmon turned white, because of course he thought I’d understood everything they’d said, and of course I hadn’t understood a thing. [laughs]

Mother: He was a good friend. He stopped to see us here.

Father: He was, he was a wonderful man. It would be people like that I would talk to. He was in a position where he didn’t have to worry what he said to me. They left it up to him as to what he would tell me. It was up to me to listen.

Son: And would you feed stuff back to him, to make it worthwhile for him?

Father: I would try. Intelligence is a kind of currency and you have to spend it. There’s no point in keeping it locked up in a safe. You lead a little bit and you take a little bit, you win some and you lose some. My young friend Shlomo Argov had gotten a pretty good post in Washington, when I was head of section. He had become a senior officer when[Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin was ambassador there. So we made a deal. I said, ‘I’ll get my guys and you get your guys, and that’ll give me the cachet to set the whole thing up, and we’ll go to Gettysburg and we’ll both see it like we’ve never seen it before, and maybe we’ll have fun. I think Rabin will enjoy it too, because he has a big interest in the Civil War.’

Read the Remainder at The Daily Beast

 

The Russians Just Did a Cyber-Attack Practice Run on Ukraine’s Nationwide Power Grid…America is Next

The Russians are masters of 4th Generation Warfare. They know the United States must be attacked on several fronts to weaken it internally before a Conventional strike happens. Look for continued attacks on the Financial sector as well.

A Nationwide Cyber-Attack on a Power Grid is now a stark reality folks. IMO it is not a question of how but just WHEN something like this will happen in the U.S.

Prepare Now, it could be a long, DARK 2016. -SF

It’s a scenario that has long worried cyber security experts.

Experts say they have established the world’s first known case of a cyber attack on a power grid, which cut power to more than 600,000 homes in Ukraine in late December. USintelligence agencies and cyber security experts are looking to Russia as the likely source of the attack.

Prykarpattyaoblenergo, an energy company in the Ivano-Frankisvk region of western Ukraine, said on Dec. 23 that a blackout in a large part of the area where it delivers electricity was caused by an “interference” in its systems.

Ukraine’s security service and government blamed Russia for the attack, and launched an investigation. According to Shane Harris at The Daily Beast, experts at the CIA, National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security are also investigating whether samples of malware recovered from the company’s network indicate that the blackout was caused by hacking and whether it can be traced back to Russia. If confirmed, it would be the first international cyber attack to cause a power outage.

On Monday, Jan. 4, researchers from the global cyber security company iSIGHT and antivirus firm ESET claimed they had samples of the malicious code that affected three of the region’s power companies, causing “destructive events,” Ars Technica reported.

It’s a scenario that has long worried cyber security experts. “It’s a milestone because we’ve definitely seen targeted destructive events against energy before—oil firms, for instance—but never the event which causes the blackout,” John Hultquist, director of cyber espionage analysis at iSIGHT told Ars Technica.

Experts say that the malware they found is a virus called BlackEnergy, which has been used in the past to sabotage companies and news organizations, including in the US. The virus has since been updated, acquiring new malicious capabilities.

Analysts at iSIGHT say the group behind the virus, which they have called “the Sandworm gang,” targeted NATO, Ukraine, Poland and European industries in 2014.

Read the Original Article at Defense One