Review: The Valley by John Renehan

 I picked up this book for $1.00 at Dollar Tree.  It was worth forty times that.  It was extraordinary. I had a terrible time putting it down. Terrific blend of mystery, investigation, spy and war story.  Shades of Heart of Darkness.

 

The Valley was a long ribbon of ever narrowing gorge leading to the Pakistan border. The furthest outpost from the FOB Omaha was known as Vega and was manned by a platoon under almost constant fire.  It was supplied weekly and Lt. Black, relegated to administrative desk duties for some as yet unspecified violation of Army tradition or protocol, has been randomly assigned to investigate a case of a warning shot that had killed a farmer's goat. Black is universally despised by the rest of the troops.  His commander, Lt. Colonel Gayley wasn't a bad commander, as things went. He was classic army and Black's description is priceless:

 

   True, the beating bureaucratic heart of the Army had a slobbering crush on officers like Gayley. Somewhere in a lab at West Point his instructors had mixed him in a bowl. whipping into him the precise proportions of accountability. flawless attention to detail. chipper optimism, and bold cooperativeness. folding in a hardy tolerance for paperwork and a relentless professional ambition, with a dash of tanned physical perfection for flavor. They had tried and  failed many times before, but when they poured Gayley into the mold and pulled him from the oven, they saw what they'd made and cried, 'That's it!' its' then hugged one another and drank reasonable amounts of sparkling cider to celebrate.

    He was a little of everything and a little of nothing. He yelled at the right people, didn't yell at the wrong people, didn't fail in his duties, didn't cause surprises or embarrassments. He was just so.

 

When Black arrives at Vega, he's met with hostility. The soldiers know Black doesn't have a clue what they go through almost on a daily basis. He thinks the 5-16 is bullshit.  They know it's bullshit  Just the day before his arrival, a new soldier had lagged just a few feet behind his squad on patrol in the fog and disappeared, to reappear the next day, ball-less, intestines hanging out, tied to a tree in front of the outpost, and alive. But he didn't cry out because he knew anyone who came to help would be shot by snipers in the hills overlooking their post. And they know the villagers they are there to help participate and help the Taliban. Shades of Vietnam.  It's all so fucked up.

 

But.... so they all think. 

 

Note:  The attack on COP Vega bears a striking resemblance to a real event, the attack on COP Keating in 2009.  Renehan has referred to it as well as Jake Tapper's book about COP Keating.  or Red Platoon by a Medal of Honor winner who was there. For a summary of that battle see https://mohmuseum.org/copkeating/.  Who builds a base at the bottom of a valley surrounded by mountains?

 

 

 

Observations on Peter Strzok's book Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump

I have begin reading this book, it's fascinating, but several of these observations come after listening to a Lawfare podcast and other reviews.  My full review will follow when I finish the book.

 

The author, Peter Strozek, former FBI agent, lays out the case that Trump has put himself into a compromised position with regard Putin and Russia in a way that gives them leverage over him.  One prosaic example is Trump's repeated statements that he had no business dealings with Russia.  At the same time he was making those statements, Michael Cohen and others on his behalf, as documented by both Cohen's book and the Mueller Report, we know that Cohen et al, were trying to make a deal with the Russia for business. Now Putin knew that Trump was lying when he said that and could prove it if he wanted to.  That gave him a hold over Trump.  Eric Trump is also on record as saying they could get all the money they needed from Russia.  David Enrich's book about Deutsche Bank also cited instances of the bank laying off Trump's personally guaranteed loans to a Russian bank run by the KGB. All of these factors make it clear that Trump is beholden to Putin and explains why he refuses to say anything negative about Russia or its dictator.

 

This has implications way beyond just ethics. It undercuts national security. Pulling troops out of Syria which is buying weapons from Russia and undercutting the Kurds was not in America's interest, rather Russia's.  Draw your on conclusions about leverage.

 

Now imagine a foreign power who has access to emails, taping conversations, sophisticated cyber abilities, and who can get access to all sorts of things Trump is trying to hide and the leverage on his policies and behavior becomes enormous.

 

The compromised figure acts behalf of the adversary rather than his country because it's also in his own interests as well. He dare not provide Putin. Strzok points out that investigations are questions to which they seek answers. They never investigated Trump.  They were always seeking to find out what the Russians were doing to subvert our country, especially through the electoral process. But they kept finding links to the Trump campaign almost wherever they looked.  Several of those people are now in jail.

 

It's important to remember that the FBI told the "Gang of Eight" (House and Senate leaders) that they were about to open an investigation into Trump. They presented the reasons why, and none-- none -- of them raised any concerns.  It's also clear that the Intelligence Committee, full of Republicans and Democrats signed off, with nary a concern, on their report, that detailed much of the potential leverage points.

 

To concerns that the FBI was interested only in minutia and process crimes, i.e. obstructions, and it doesn't amount to much, Strzok replies you have to start with Russia, and they intervened in 2016 to help Trump and hurt Clinton; the Trump campaign knew about it and encouraged it, causing the ultimate result given the slim margins in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. I would quibble with that given that Jill Stein's campaign about the same difference in votes (80,000 or so) and that Clinton ran such a miserable campaign, totally taking those states for granted.  Comey's October charges about the email server, which ultimately led nowhere, might have also made a difference.

 

After Decades of public service in the FBI working in counter-intelligence Strzok was Investigated by the Department of Justice and assailed by President Trump for the  texts Strzok, he lost his privacy, reputation and job. “After a quarter of a century in pursuit of the nation’s enemies,” he writes, “I had been deemed an enemy myself.” The early part in which he details the investigations into Russian assets in the U.S. (The Americans TV Series was based on these investigations)  reads like a spy novel. He apparently says little about the affair, but is anger at the DOJ for leaking the private emails is obvious. James Stewart has more to say. (see below).

Was all this a sophisticated conspiracy?  Strzok says not.  Instead it was a bunch of incompetent bumblers, but it's precisely that which gave the Russians so much leverage.  The business connections weren't enough; it was the lying about them that gave the Russians power. “The compromised liar need not be told what to do,” Strzok explains. “It all unspools without anyone’s ever having to say a word.” Trump’s extramarital affairs, his uncharitable charities and his murky financial background — all such deceptions also compromise him “badly and in a myriad of ways,” Strzok contends.

 

This is an important book and in another of those great ironies would never have been written or read had not the Trump people make such a fuss over a couple of personal emails he wrote to a close friend. They made no such fuss over similar emails that supported Trump. Just because Trump and his folks can't made decisions without personal animosity entering into it, doesn't mean that thousands of professionals go about their business in a non-partisan manner. Of course, had Trumpites nothing to hide it would have made no difference anyway. But the FBI probably failed, in my book, by allowing Comey to politicize the investigations: revealing the Clinton email server (the technical discussion about that server make me laugh hysterically -- it shows such technical ignorance on the part of the media), but said nothing about the Trump investigations.

 

Note that James Stewart has a book with details of the affair Strzok had with Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer. He notes that with regard to bias on the part of Strzok,

"We had this extraordinary situation where the FBI is investigating both major candidates. One of the questions I wanted to answer in the book was, why was the Clinton one public, but we never heard about Russia?

But if they had wanted to derail Trump, one leak would have crushed that campaign — not only a leak that it was going on, but a leak of some of the salacious details, which we now know were being investigated.

 

  The DOJ report about the emails said: "

“The lapses in judgment embodied in those messages and others like them risked undermining public confidence in two of the Bureau’s highest-profile investigations,” the DOJ told the court on Monday. “And even more broadly, those lapses in judgment risked damaging the public trust in the FBI as a nonpartisan, even-handed, and effective law enforcement institution — trust that is essential to the FBI’s ability to vigorously enforce the nation’s laws without fear or favor.”  All true but hard to take seriously when Trump has shown even worse lapse in judgment and his clear bias probably had more to do with the firing than anything on Strzok's part.  It was, after all, the release of the emails that might undermine confidence of the public, not their mere existence.

 

see Deep State byJames Stewart (a favorite author) and The Washington Examiner's story. 

Strzok filed a wrongfultermination lawsuit against the DOJ that claims his First Amendment rights were violated.

 

Review: Bridge of Spies by Giles Whittell

 I've been reading several books about the U-2 incident, Francis Gary Powers, and the incident's effect on U.S. policy.  Fallout from the debacle was considerable. Khrushchev was eager to spend less on the military. He wanted to bring the fruits of capitalism, washing machines, etc. to the USSR, and they would not be able to if military spending continued apace. The Summit with Eisenhower was coming up, and he and Eisenhower (who had his own suspicions and pressure from the "military-industrial complex" he was to warn about) both wanted to cool things down. When Power's plane was shot down, the Russian's suspected the flight was a deliberate provocation to prevent the Summit. Indeed, after that the pressure on Khrushchev increased. Kennedy had been elected on a bogus missile gap charge, and he was also anxious to prove he "had balls."  So it's not unreasonable to suggest that the Berlin Wall and moving missiles to Cuba were a direct result of pressure on Khrushchev to be tougher on the U.S.  

I just had to read this book after seeing Tom Hank's brilliant performance in the eponymous movie (a must-watch.) The movie focuses primarily on the role of James Donovan, Abel/Fischer's, lawyer, while Whittell's excellent book looks at events from the perspectives of other participants: Powers' wife, his relatives, espionage in the fifties and sixties, the technology of the U-2, and Vogel, the East German lawyer, who played a key role in getting not just Powers exchanged but also Fred Pryor, a PhD economics student who got caught up in East Berlin just as the wall was going up.

A depressing feature of the book is the information that defense in both countries had an interest in keeping the Cold War alive since they profited from it greatly.  The book also points out the need for accurate intelligence to help make informed decisions, although here, that intelligence was made available by the U-2, but its use was thwarted by the incident because of pressures from the military.

The technology has changed dramatically since then, more importantly, we no longer need pilots for our intelligence-gathering aircraft. Satellites, drones, and cyber warfare are far more important. Spy satellites are able to discern minute details of anything on Earth from their orbits high above Earth. Whether all that raw information is processed and used properly and without undue influence is another matter.

A fascinating, page-turner of a book.

Review: Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction by David Enrich

 

This is the book Trump should have tried to ban. Forget Bolton et al. It reveals the incestuous relationship between a bank, Russia, money laundering, and its most famous client. The bank that Donald Trump came to rely on to subsidize his shrinking empire after banks in the US refused to loan him money, having been stiffed  by him too often.  He had a habit of just not repaying the loans.(A running joke is that Donald had written many books on making deals and business, but they all ended with Chapter 11.)

 

The bank itself, after having been taken over by US traders, was getting into trouble by emphasizing short-term profits through ever-increasing levels of risk. Traders were paid by the estimated return on a bet, usually using derivatives which formerly had been better used to lower risk. They would often over-estimate the return knowing that their compensation would not be adjusted downward if the bet failed to return their estimate.  Many were earning millions every year in bonuses.

 

Steve Bannon, quoted in Fire and Fury, noted that the Trump family was all about cash. Eric Trump had been quoted as saying they could get all the money they needed from Russia, and Bannon (who himself has been charged with stealing money from Wall donors) saw the insatiable appetite for money that the Trump family had. Bannon"s story was interesting in itself. He had been a trader at Goldman Sachs, but his father had suffered financial collapse in 2008 and that turned Bannon into a flaming revenge artist vowing to get the eastern bankers, i.e. a standard economic populist. He allied himself with Trump's populist rhetoric.

 

It gets even messier as Enrich lays out the connections between Justin Kennedy to the Trump family. In case anyone has forgotten, Brett Kavanaugh clerked for Anthony Kennedy, Justin's father, who interceded with Trump on Kavanaugh’s behalf. The banks affairs became so entangled that there were several suicides of bank officers and lawyers who despaired of unethical and illegal machinations. Greed and money laundering would appear to be at the heart of much modern finance and Trump was right in the middle.

 

The all consuming emphasis on profit meant that traders would go anywhere, to any country, that needed hard currency.  Since most of the world's trades were conducted in US dollars, much of those transactions occurred through New York. And since Deutsche was trading with rogue countries under US sanction, like Iran, Syria, and Russia, interest was aroused in intelligence and legal quarters.  When it became apparent that US soldiers were being killed in Iraq by weapons used by terrorists being supported by Iran, the families of the dead soldiers filed suit against Deutsche.  Following the fall of the Soviet Union, money laundering became endemic and an audit revealed that Russian mafia money was pouring into the US through Deutsche's Eastern Europe connections, most of it being washed in New York's lucrative  luxury real estate market. Guess who was a big player in that market?

 

After the crash of 2008, caused in large part by the risky bets using unusual financial instruments of big banks, especially Deutsche, country leaders looked to those bank leaders for advice.  In Germany, Merkle went to Ackerman, head of Deutsche whose advice profited no one more than Deutsche itself.

 

Without going into too much detail and having no desire to spoil a great story, thousands of emails from a Deutsche banker who had committed suicide fell into the hands of reporters.  They revealed that the loans Trump had personally guaranteed (meaning the bank could go after his personal wealth should he default on the huge number of loans he had with them) had been layered off to a Russian bank, meaning that the loans were actually coming from the Russians.  (Remember that Eric Trump had bragged his family could get all the money they wanted from the Russians.)  So you had a situation where a new American president owed millions of dollars to a Russian bank that was controlled by the KGB.

 

A fascinating, if disturbing, read.  Stay tuned, the story continues.

 

Review: Baptism: A Vietnam Memoir by Larry Gwin

 

It seems that recently there has been a flood of Vietnam memoir books.  Those of you born after 1965 can now turn your interests elsewhere.  For a baby boomer, like me, born in 1947, Vietnam was an all-consuming, ever-present, presence. We could not escape it effects. It permeated our lives, dictated careers, education, relationships, everything. We worried about getting drafted, philosophized about religious beliefs not to mention our feelings about imperialism and war and America's role in the world. (Obviously, we learned nothing, and the chickenhawks went onto rule and then make more mistakes than the "best and the brightest."

 

Anyway, I'm pleased that publishing one's memoirs and recollections has become so much easier.  Most are not literature although there are some very good books o come out of all wars, I expect, like Matterhorn, Red Flags,and many others.  I've been reading many. Obviously each GI's experience was different so to look for an"average" experience is ridiculous. All of them are fascinating. This one was no exception.

 

Gwin had joined ROTC at Yale, mostly because all of his predecessors had fought in an American war, even if one had been on the Confederate side. Commissioned after graduation he was sent to Vietnam as part of the advisors (this was in 1965+) before things got totally out-of-hand. I graduated in 1969 when things were definitely murky, but as you'll see the quagmire was already forming in '65.  Anti-vaXXers take note, you will not like the military.  They give shots for everything. "We got our gamma globulin shots the next day, at the naval hospital across town. Five cc's in each cheek for the big guys like me. I spent the afternoon in bed, on my stomach, waiting for the pain to go away. We'd received by that time the full gamut of immunizations, shots for cholera, typhus, yellow fever, and plague." Unfortunately, no shots for malaria.

 

After six boring weeks with ARVN (filled with the need for Kaopectate, otherwise known as GI cement, for his dysentery) that conveyed a sense that the Vietnamese army was doing its best to avoid the enemy, Gwin was transferred to the 1st Air Cavalry Division, not a pleasant new job, as he had witnessed how vulnerable helicopters were.

 

Larry Gwin was not a sniper, not tunnel rat, nor anything unusual. "He was a conventional soldier in a conventional unit doing conventional things. His story will hit home with the vast majority of readers who, like him, are more or less conventional."* But perhaps that makes him, and those like him, extraordinary.

Gwin is unsparing in recounting events you'd never see in a John Wayne book or movie. On one mission the plane ferrying his entire 3rd platoon, some forty plus men, crashed on take-off, everyone was killed, and Gwin was tasked with trying to help identify bodies that had been reconstructed by the unsung heroes of the GRU (Graves Registration Unit). A searing memory.

 

The strategy was unsustainable.  Send patrols out to scour for the enemy, i.e. get used as bait, call in artillery and air support to kill them, and then return to base, leaving the enemy to return to where he was. If you run across a hamlet, destroy it, after sending all those of fighting age back to base. "It made me angry. Who the hell were we to march in and disrupt this hamlet—march in, tear it up looking for weapons, drag everyone out of their homes like Gestapo in the night, and send the men off somewhere to be interrogated? Maybe it was necessary. Maybe not. Who knew? ... After the Hueys flew away, we picked up and continued southward, leaving the village behind us. But the wailing of those poor, terrified women seemed to stay with me all day. ...A young boy, four or five years old, stood motionless near the door of a burning hootch. He stared at me as I walked by. His face expressionless. No tears. Nothing. He just stared. I'll never forget the look on his face." Perhaps not the best way to win the hearts and minds of the locals.

 

As an appalling aside, this is what President Bone Spurs said about Vietnam. "Trump sometimes bantered about Vietnam with radio host Howard Stern. He referred to trying to avoid sexually transmitted diseases on the dating scene as “my personal Vietnam.” “It’s pretty dangerous out there,” he said in 1993. “It’s like Vietnam.”  That is probably the most egregious insult to Vietnam Vets I have ever read.

 

Note that Gwin makes an appearance in Harold Moore's We were Solders Once and Young and there is a Youtube documentary on LZ X-Ray.

 

If you are looking for a company level commander memoir, I highly recommend  Company Commander by Charles B. MacDonald. 

 

*https://www.historynet.com/book-review-baptism-a-vietnam-memoir-larry-gwin-vn.htm