Aren't they supposed to be doing oversight on it?
Related:
Related:
"Top medal sought for forerunner of CIA; Lawmakers want OSS recognition" by Chris Carola | Associated Press, November 30, 2013
ALBANY, N.Y. — The men and women who spied on Germany and Japan for the United States during World War II parachuted behind enemy lines, led guerrilla raids, invented special equipment such as scuba gear, and established a counterintelligence network that endured into the Cold War.
Nearly 70 years after its agents played a key role in defeating the Axis powers, the spy organization that later became the Central Intelligence Agency could receive the highest civilian honor bestowed by Congress, the Congressional Gold Medal. Legislation introduced last week by Senator Mark Kirk, Republican of Illinois, and Representative Robert E. Latta, Republican of Ohio, would collectively award the medal to the members of the Office of Strategic Services, known as the OSS.
I guess the Church Committee hearings have all been forgotten, and honestly, this back-slapping self-adulation that I find in my paper day after is becoming sickening. It is here so you know what swill I'm being served as news, dear readers, and that's all.
As for the rest, this is another sign this country is so far gone in militarism to romanticize the CIA is disgusting. I shouldn't be surprised, but as a citizen I reject it. I don't think the assassinations, rigged elections, torture, false flags, insurgencies, and coups were or are a good thing for this nation wherever and whenever they occur. I hardly doubt Capitalism's Invisible Army served the public interest all these years, although I'm sure they served some certain intere$ts.
Along with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, it is the highest award the United States gives a civilian.
William Pietsch Jr. was personally recruited for the OSS by its leader, General William ‘‘Wild Bill’’ Donovan, a lawyer and World War I hero from Buffalo. After graduating from West Point in early 1943, the young Army officer was introduced to the OSS chief by William Casey, Donovan’s aide who would later become CIA director.
‘‘He turned to Bill Casey and said, ‘Tell this young man what his job will be,’ and that was it. He didn’t waste any time on superfluous conversation,’’ said Pietsch, 91, a retired Army colonel from Chevy Case View, Md.
Known for leading from the front, a trait that earned him the Medal of Honor — and his nickname — during World War I, Donovan left the administrative duties of running the OSS to others, Pietsch said. That may explain why many OSS operatives, considered the forerunners of today’s US special operations troops, never received the recognition they deserved during the second World War, he said.
‘‘Most of us were neglected, but not intentionally,’’ said Pietsch, a New York City native. ‘‘It wasn’t a spit-and-polish organization, it was a can-do outfit.’’
The original OSS members, a mix of military and civilian employees, numbered about 13,000. Only a few hundred are still believed to survive, according to Charles Pinck, president of the Falls Church, Va.-based OSS Society, whose membership includes about 150 OSS veterans.
‘‘We just think it’s terribly important to recognize their service while they’re still here,’’ Pinck said.
Pietsch eventually became a ‘‘Jedburgh,’’ the name of the Scottish town where three-man teams of Allied agents trained before being dropped behind German lines after D-Day. Pietsch’s team parachuted into Burgundy in central France in August 1944 and fought alongside the French Resistance. At one point, while the Gestapo was ‘‘hunting me down like an animal,’’ Pietsch sought sanctuary from an Italian Catholic priest known to be helping Jews evade the Nazis. According to Pietsch, the priest was Angelo Roncalli, who later became Pope John XXIII.
Looking back from where we are now it appears the wrong guys won that war.
‘‘He saved my life,’’ Pietsch said.
The Gold Medal legislation calls for the OSS medal to be given to the Smithsonian Institution for display and allows the government to produce bronze duplicates of the medal for sale to the public.
Oh, the money-grubbing Congre$$ is also hoping to make a few bucks of this ceremony, huh?
The awarding of a Congressional Gold Medal to the OSS would help keep Donovan’s memory alive in his hometown, said Representative Brian Higgins, a Democrat whose district includes Wild Bill’s old South Buffalo neighborhood. A former state office building being renovated into a hotel no longer bears Donovan’s name, and Buffalo’s new federal court house is named after western New Yorker and former US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson.
The OSS Society was among the supporters who pushed for the new court house to be named after Donovan, a former federal attorney in Buffalo.
Yeah, let's worship and memorialize all out terrorist war criminals. We have throughout our history so why would this be any different?
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"CIA officer with Mass. roots wins agency’s top heroism award" by Martin Finucane | Globe staff, December 05, 2013
A CIA officer from Massachusetts who was captured during the Korean War and held for two decades by the Chinese gave plenty of names and physical descriptions when they asked him to name his colleagues, but the names and descriptions all belonged to his onetime football teammates at Boston University, the CIA said.
Richard Fecteau, 86, was given the Distinguished Intelligence Cross, the agency’s highest honor for valor, the Central Intelligence Agency announced Thursday. John Downey, 83, who was captured with Fecteau, also received the honor.
Fecteau and Downey were captured in November 1952 when they were flying over China on a mission to pick up an agent. The agent had promised valuable information, but, unbeknownst to the CIA, had been compromised by the Chinese, the agency said.
The CIA officers’ plane was hit by antiaircraft fire and forced to make a controlled crash.
Related(?): Accepting Chinese Control of the East China Sea
Fifty years later the same thing happened with a surveillance plane.
The two pilots died, the agency said. Fecteau, of Lynn, and Downey, of New Haven, remained in captivity until the early 1970s.
Fecteau was 25 when he was captured; he was 44 when he returned home. He later returned to his alma mater, becoming assistant athletic director at BU before retiring in 1989, the agency said.
The two men received their awards at a ceremony last month at CIA headquarters.
“It has been 61 years since Dick and Jack took to the skies over North Korea and China during the Korean War, and their ordeal remains among the most compelling accounts of courage, resolve, and endurance in the history of our agency,” CIA director John O. Brennan said in a statement.
Their 20-year ordeal “was the crucible that brought out each man’s strength, ingenuity, and decency, virtues that enabled these two young Americans not only to survive, but to prevail,” Brennan said. “Ultimately, both of our honorees would emerge from two decades of relentless persecution with their spirits unbroken, their integrity untouched, and their patriotism strengthened.”
What's the point of reading this elitist slop anymore?
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After returning to the United States, Fecteau reconnected with his adult daughters, who were 2 years old when he was shot down. He also remarried his first wife, the agency said in an account on its website.
Fecteau told the Globe in 1983 that he did not have nightmares, but his ordeal had affected his personality.
“I have a twin brother, Phil,” he said. “When we were kids, I was outspoken, gregarious. He was quiet. Now we’re just the opposite. He’s the party type, and I’m the quiet one. When I returned home, I had difficulty conversing with people. I was so used to thinking of what to say before saying it, knowing that anything said, even to my cellmate, would be reported to the warden.”
He also said his football experiences — he played at Lynn Classical before BU — had helped him endure.
“Football teaches you not only how to win, but how to lose,” he said. “Believe me, that was a losing situation in China. I had no cards at all. If I couldn’t keep my head, I was in serious trouble. And athletics taught me that discipline better than any other experience.”
Yeah, everything comes down to football. Just don't rape anyone, 'kay?
I guess that's why my CIA operation known as a newspaper is big on the $elf-$erving sports, huh?
The Intelligence Cross is awarded “for a voluntary act or acts of extraordinary heroism involving the acceptance of existing dangers with conspicuous fortitude and exemplary courage,” the CIA said.
The BU football program was shut down in 1997. Fecteau could not be reached for comment Thursday.
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Related: New(man) Crisis in Korea
US veteran returns from North Korea
He turned down a ride with Biden (smile)?
Also see: Obama's Alphabet Scandals: At the Bottom of Benghazi
Yes, those courageous CIA men:
"Edwin Wilson, CIA agent convicted as arms dealer" by Douglas Martin | New York Times, September 23, 2012
NEW YORK — Part spy, part tycoon, Edwin P. Wilson lived large.
He claimed to own 100 corporations in the United States and Europe, many of them real and many of them shells. He had an apartment in Geneva; a hunting lodge in England; a seaside villa in Tripoli, Libya; a townhouse in Washington; and real estate in North Carolina, Lebanon, and Mexico. He entertained congressmen, generals, and CIA bigwigs at his 2,338-acre estate in Northern Virginia.
He showered minks on his mistress, whom he called ‘‘Wonder Woman.’’ He owned three private planes and bragged that he knew flight attendants on the Concorde by name.
His preferred habitat was a hall of mirrors. His business empire existed as a cover for espionage, but it also made him a lot of money. He had the advantage of being able to call the IRS and use national security jargon to get the details on a potential customer. And if the IRS questioned his own tax filings, he terminated the discussion by saying he was a CIA agent on a covert mission.
‘’Being in the CIA was like putting on a magic coat that forever made him invisible and invincible,’’ Peter Maas wrote in ‘‘Manhunt,’’ his 1986 book about Mr. Wilson.
For Mr. Wilson, who died on Sept. 10 in Seattle at 84, the adventure collapsed with his arrest in 1982 on charges of selling Libya 20 tons of powerful explosives.
During the next two years, he was tried in federal cases in four courts, accused, among other things, of smuggling arms and plotting to murder his wife. He was sentenced to a total of 52 years in prison. He served 22 of them, mostly in solitary confinement. Then the dagger of fate took a strange twist.
After studying thousands of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Mr. Wilson and his lawyer went back to court and demolished the government’s case....
Let me guess, they were in on it with him and knew about it the whole time.
Let me guess, they were in on it with him and knew about it the whole time.
In 1960, the CIA sent him to Cornell for graduate studies in labor relations, which he put to use against communism in unions around the world. In one assignment he paid Corsican mobsters to keep leftist dockworkers in line; in another, he released cockroaches in the hotel rooms of Soviet labor delegations.
In 1964, on behalf of the agency, Mr. Wilson started a maritime consulting firm so that the CIA could better monitor international shipping. By nudging up costs and skimping on taxes, he multiplied his own income.
Mr. Wilson left the CIA in 1971, at least publicly, to join the Office of Naval Intelligence. Again he formed companies in service of the government and took them with him when he left the government in 1976. He grew rich and lived lavishly.
Several years later, a top CIA official asked Mr. Wilson to go to Libya to keep an eye on Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as the Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal, who was there. That led to several weapons deals.
He also arranged for former Green Berets to train Libyan troops, and for airplane and helicopter pilots to work for Libya. He later maintained that all his activities had been done to gather information for the CIA.
Unknown to Mr. Wilson, investigators had been building a case against him since 1976....
