Tornado Alley (PROG)

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I've missed you guys, LOL!

Interesting guy here...



http://news.yahoo.com/s/usnews/20090423/ts_usnews/legendaryspycharlieallenknowstheciassecrets


Legendary Spy Charlie Allen Knows the CIA's Secrets
By Alex Kingsbury Alex Kingsbury Thu Apr 23, 4:11 pm ET
For a young CIA analyst in the fall of 1962, it was a heady assignment. With President John F. Kennedy contemplating an invasion of Cuba to neutralize the threat of Soviet nuclear weapons on the island, the CIA began planning. At age 27, Charles Allen was a junior intelligence analyst tracking the names of Soviet missile technicians. "I was put on a team assigned to plan a new Cuban government, which would be put in power after the U.S. invasion," says Allen. He quickly began sorting through dossiers to determine which Cubans would be suitable to place in power.


Those plans remained on the shelf, but for Allen, it was the first of many times that he would find himself at the center of historic national security crises. From the height of the Cold War and the Yom Kippur War to Iran-contra and the aftermath of 9/11, Allen has had an extraordinary 51-year career in intelligence. Now 74 and privy to perhaps a broader array of the CIA's secrets than anybody else in history, the tireless Allen officially retired on Tuesday. For those on the inside, it's hard to believe that the man famous for holding 6:30 a.m. meetings, working 80-hour weeks, and rarely taking vacations is leaving the spy world.


In his final weeks of government service, he's been compiling a résumé for the first time. Unsurprisingly, there are some pretty large gaps, like the period from 1980 to November 1982, when he was the "program manager of a major classified project." That was a top-secret effort to ensure the continuity of the U.S. government in an emergency, colleagues say, but he can't talk about it. Intelligence, he says, "is not given a lot of credit in public, and many people talk about the intelligence community without really understanding it. There are many successes that I know about that are highly clandestine, but they will never be public. That's the way it should be." [Read about how Charlie Allen and a band of reformers tried to change America's spy agencies.]


The chapters of his career that he can talk about span from the secret CIA tunnel under East Berlin to using Twitter to monitor last year's Mumbai terrorist attacks. His name first made the newspapers during the Iran-contra affair as the CIA analyst who blew the whistle on the Reagan administration's illegal efforts to fund antileftist rebels in Nicaragua. Allen had been working on the Iran portion of the operation--the clandestine sale of missiles to Tehran in exchange for the release of American hostages--when he learned that something wasn't right in the accounting. Allen was praised for blowing the whistle, but the CIA reprimanded him for not having disclosed more information sooner. He later fought successfully to have the sanction removed from his record.


Allen joined the CIA in 1958 fresh out of college. "I was about to graduate and realized I needed a job," says Allen, who wears a gold class ring from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. "I went to the university employment office, and someone said, 'You should consider working for the Central Intelligence Agency.' And I said, 'That sounds like an interesting profession.' " The Cold War was in full swing. Less than a week into his job, Allen was poring over intelligence from the Berlin tunnel, a clandestine operation in which the CIA dug under East Berlin and tapped into Soviet communications cables. Neither he nor the CIA knew at the time that the Soviets were aware analysts like Allen were monitoring their every word. [Read about how divided Berlin was a playground for spies.]


These days, Allen is known throughout the intelligence community for his clarity of purpose as much as his epic work habits. His friends describe him as one of the most driven men they have ever met, neither particularly religious nor partisan but intensely patriotic and committed to "the mission." After the 9/11 attacks, Allen stayed at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., for days, sleeping on an inflatable mattress in his office. In the past three years, he took only two weeks of vacation to be with his wife, four children, and a clutch of grandchildren. The rest of that time, he worked from 5:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays, with a half-day on Saturday and six more hours on Sunday. So how does his family feel about that? "They do understand," Allen insists.


Other than a three-year overseas liaison posting, Allen never really worked in the field. "I do wish that I had done more of that type of thing," he says. By the early 1970s, he was the head of production in the CIA's Office of Strategic Research. But even with access to the nation's most prized secrets, it was hard to make all the right calls. In the fall of 1973, the Egyptian and Syrian armies were massing along their borders with Israel. On the night of October 5, Allen put the finishing touches on the CIA's President's Daily Brief for Richard Nixon the next morning. "I left the office at CIA and saw some reports that [Arab] forces were going on high alert," he recalls. "I should have picked up the phone and called my superiors, and I didn't." Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack against Israel the next day. Nixon would later fault the CIA, saying the conflict "took us completely by surprise." As Allen puts it, "I missed the [Yom Kippur] War, and that still sticks in my craw today."


Nearly 20 years later, when Saddam Hussein deployed the Iraqi Army near Kuwait's border, Allen wouldn't made the same mistake again. He was the national intelligence officer for warning, akin to the CIA's chief sentry. For several weeks that summer, he sent out a series of alerts about a pending invasion, culminating in an official "warning of war" message. But he was largely ignored. When Allen's last warning reached the State Department, analysts there dismissed it as typical CIA exaggeration. A few hours later, Iraq invaded Kuwait. "People either dislike Charlie or they admire him, and for the same reason--he's usually right," says Richard Clarke, a longtime colleague and a former presidential counterterrorism adviser.


This incident was a prelude to one of the most difficult moments in Allen's career. In 1991, six weeks into the air campaign against Iraq, he was working with Air Force planners to select targets. Allen and his CIA colleagues were suspicious of a building called Public Shelter No. 25, in the Amiriyah neighbor-hood of Baghdad. According to CIA maps, it was a secret operations center used by the Mukhabarat, Iraq's intelligence service. At Allen's urging, the Air Force dropped a pair of laser-guided bombs on the bunker.


Hundreds of civilians who had taken cover inside were killed. "It was a very difficult moment. We thought it was Mukhabarat, and there were some there," Allen says, casting his eyes to the ceiling. "But we did kill innocent people, a lot of them," he adds after a short pause. "I carry those lessons around every day, but I never lost heart or a sense of mission."


By 1998, Allen was spending more and more time on terrorism issues. Then CIA Director George Tenet tasked him to coordinate the intelligence community's efforts against Osama bin Laden, whose organization bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa that August. Allen and Clarke set up a meeting of the nation's top al Qaeda experts and came to the conclusion that bin Laden's most likely hiding place was an Afghan valley where U.S. spy satellites could not peek into the caves. The area was called Tora Bora, which later became famous when al Qaeda leaders took refuge there after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.


Two years later, frustrated by the lack of intelligence about bin Laden, Allen walked into Clarke's White House office holding a picture of a small unmanned aircraft. "Ever heard of something called a Predator?" he asked. Allen said that getting the Predator deployed over Afghanistan was "a bloody struggle," but in the fall of 2000, one of the drones captured hours of video footage of a tall, bearded man who analysts believe was bin Laden. For the next year, Allen fought to arm the Predator with missiles. "We need to hit him," Allen told colleagues in the summer of 2001, "before he hits us." Weeks after the 9/11 attacks, armed drones were finally deployed, and today they are one of the chief weapons against al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. [Read about the fight inside the U.S. government to deploy the Predator.]


By this time, Allen was coordinating collection efforts for the entire intelligence community. First for the director of central intelligence and later for the new director of national intelligence, his job was to determine how to deploy a network of spy satellites, eavesdropping sensors, and human spies to go after targets from terrorists to nuclear-armed dictators. He called it being "the night watch for central intelligence." The post came with limited authority, but the man dubbed "Charging Charlie" by colleagues wielded his formidable reputation to get things done. "When Charlie Allen comes to you demanding answers, you got them," says retired CIA veteran Robert Grenier. "He is unique in the agency because he commanded so much respect."


Though Allen speaks excitedly about his final government job--running the nascent intelligence office at the Department of Homeland Security--others say it was a thankless assignment. "I never felt that I was just part of the bureaucracy," he says. "You can't assume all the world's burdens, but if you have a sense of mission for keeping the country safe, one person can make a difference." DHS was in chaos when Allen arrived in 2005. He brought along some CIA colleagues to help manage intelligence analysis and began coordinating the efforts of countless other agencies, from local police departments to the Coast Guard. Even though he never figured out how to stop getting pulled aside for additional screening at airport checkpoints, Allen says that DHS and the nation have become more sophisticated at dealing with the threat of terrorism since 9/11. Of course, the work remains unfinished. "We have learned," he says, "to take nothing for granted."


His departure from government means that he is losing his encrypted telephone, a device that has been in Allen's Northern Virginia home for decades. "He is one of the few people I felt comfortable calling at home with a tough job at 10 p.m., because we all knew Charlie never really stopped working," says John McLaughlin, a former acting CIA director.


Allen can't list many hobbies, though years ago he enjoyed fishing. "I've still got a memory and a strong mind," he says, an hour after the CIA physician gave him a clean bill of health. He plans to continue working, this time for himself. "I'm going to do some consulting work," he says, "but no more 80-hour weeks."


--Read about Charlie Allen and a small band of reformers who tried--and failed--to change America's spy agencies.


--Read " Declassified: the Secret Soviet Documents of a Leading CIA Spy."