This article by Steven Plaut at Frontpage Magazine is extremely interesting in light of all the intelligence failures connected with 9/11 and the frightening examples of terrorism and domestic terrorists who seem to be traveling about unrestricted.

The Left has long painted the CIA as a far-Right neofascist bogeyman, dominated by reactionary Dr. Strangeloves, and paranoid “neoncons.” The reality, of course, has long been very different. In fact, the CIA has long been dominated by liberal ideology and the left-leaning, blame-America mindset. Those who are skeptical of this last assertion should read one of the most important books ever written about intelligence services: Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century by Angelo Codevilla. In this book, to which I cannot do full justice here, he shows how the many failures of the CIA trace back to its kneejerk liberalism and politically correct delusions. (See a more detailed review here.)

The liberal mindset of the CIA has not only led to a long series of grave errors in judgment and gross misreadings of many international situations; it has also led it to hire large numbers of radicals into its ranks. The extent of the damage done by such people can only be guessed, but a good idea of the dimensions can be gleaned from observing the behavior of the growing number of far-left ex-CIA employees running about in the anti-America movement today.

Leftists emerging from the shadows of the American intelligence community are of course nothing new. The most famous postwar example was no doubt Daniel Ellsberg, who has spent his later years as a button man for the far Left. Ellsberg, however, was never actually employed by the CIA, but by RAND. Others, at least as radical as him, were. Of those, the worst is arguably Philip Agee, who left the CIA and published the seditious Covert Action Information Bulletin, with the help of both the KGB and the Cuban DGI, a magazine dedicated to promoting “a worldwide campaign to destabilize the CIA through exposure of its operations and personnel.” Agee told Swiss journalist Peter Studer, “The CIA is plainly on the wrong side, that is, the capitalistic side. I approve KGB activities, communist activities in general. Between the overdone activities that the CIA initiates and the more modest activities of the KGB, there is absolutely no comparison.” Today Agee runs a website from his home in Havana, Cubalinda.com, and is a dedicated communist.

In recent years, veterans of the CIA who were employed by the Agency have emerged as some of the most extremist bashers of America in the ”antiwar movement”. One well-known example is Michael Scheuer, who anonymously penned Imperial Hubris, a book critical of the conduct of the war on terrorism since the mid-1990s. Scheuer had been assigned to create a “bin Laden desk” at the CIA. After resigning from the Agency, he went on a campaign against the US invasion of Iraq, warning that Moslems worldwide were growing to hate the US because of its “policies”, and in particular he blamed US support for Israel for anti-American terrorism. He considers bin Laden to be a “great man”.