World-Welcoming Holiday Gifts for Kids

Creative Hanukkah, Christmas and Chinese New Year gifts present an opportunity to welcome kids to their world. Although the illustrated, 32-page My First Atlas of the World from National Geographic and a squishy fabric Hugg-A-Planet Globe come as a $42 set for kids 3 and older from The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (STORE.METMUSEUM.ORG), bookstores also carry child-appropriate atlases, globes and world wall maps separately. The World Wildlife Fund caters to the love kids have for animals that roam over the world. A $50 donation for worldwide conservation efforts comes with a choice of a plush animal from 50 species, from the popular Tiger to a Narwhal. For additional animal-related gift ideas, visit WWFCATALOG.ORG. Adults would have to do a little explaining to show kids how they can help the world with a gift to Heifer International, World Vision or kiva. Using the HEIFER.ORG/CATALOG online, kids and adults would learn how a $10 or $25 donation for an alpaca, goat, sheep, pig, flock of chicks/ducks or water buffalo would help a foreign family. World Vision (worldvisiongifts.org) offers a similar way to provide needy families with livestock, plus medicines, bed nets to prevent malaria. school supplies, soccer balls, fishing kits, fruit trees and clean water. Older computer-savvy students, with only a little adult guidance, could put their own $25 kiva gift card to work online by choosing to make a loan to someone in one of 80 countries. Go to Kiva.org to purchase the gift card a student would use to make a loan. Finally, in what has become a trying year, a child might like to be able to transfer or forget concerns about school, friends and other matters. UNICEF helps children and adolescents in 190 countries and territories with funds from sales of a variety of items, such as a set of six handcrafted worry dolls from Guatemala, who are ready to receive all the concerns kids transfer to them, and a wooden handcrafted 3D Tic Tac Toe set from Thailand, that kids can use to demonstrate their ability to overcome a challenge. The dolls and wooden game are each $29.95 at unicefmarket.org or by calling 800-553-1200.

4 Problems of U.S. Intelligence

In the process of describing the directors responsible for leading the Central Intelligence Agency since its inception after World War II, The Spymasters by Chris Whipple lays bare at least four systemic problems that affect the intelligence that supports policy decisions affecting U.S.national security. 1) Conflicting attitudes toward analysts, covert operators, technology, a mole/spy (Rick Ames and earlier, James Jesus Angleton's search for spies within CIA) and women affect the agency's morale, hiring, firing and intelligence reports. President Nixon's CIA director, James Schlesinger, purged covert operators left over from the Vietnam era; President Reagan's CIA director, William Casey, himself a covert operator during World War II, hired 2000. Casey ended up in the scandalous plot, where contra guerrillas, funded from arms sales to Iran that were used to free U.S. hostages, fought to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Presudent Carter's CIA director, Stansfield Turner, favored using technology rather than human intelligence collection methods. James Woolsey, President Clinton's first CIA director, however, recognized the value of integrating technology and human intelligence. Until relatively recently, CIA was "white, male and Yale." Appointed by President Trump, Gina Haspel, the first female CIA director, came up through the covert Directorate of Operations. Jennifer Matthews, who joined the CIA in 1989, was one of the analysts in the secret unit, Alec Station, that had warned President George W. Bush's administration of an impending Al Qaeda attack on the United States. At age 45, Ms. Matthews told family and friends she needed an overseas covert assignment in order to progress professionaly. As chief of base in Khost, Afghanistan, she was killed in a suicide bombing in December, 2009. 2) Turf wars, at a time when available information abounds, prevent innovations capable of capturing, evaluating and distributing relevant information, the lack of which can have dire consequences. On paper, responsibilities of the CIA, FBI, other U.S. agencies and departments, embassies and foreign intelligence services seem clear. But in the U.S. alone, the CIA and FBI have conflicting responsibilities, and there are conflicts between the FBI's need to collect evidence to prosecute offenders in court cases and the CIA's need to take timely action on intelligence information. For example, the CIA's Jose Rodriguez justified use of waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" as the fastest way to get Al Qaeda terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, to disclose plans for additional attacks that required immediate prevention. He had no respect for the interrogation method of the FBI's Ali Soufan, who, as an Arabic-speaking Muslim, gained information by establishing personal rapport with terrorists. (See Lawrence Wright's very different positive profile of Ali Soufan in The Looming Tower). Both the CIA and FBI knew Al Qaeda was behind the October, 2000 attack on the USS Cole destroyer in Aden, Yemen, but the Clinton administration's failure to react emboldened Osama bin Laden's September 11, 2001 attacks. What surfaced as one of the consensus reasons for 9/11 in the postmortem was a lack of intelligence sharing. As a remedy, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was designed to integrate not only the CIA and FBI, but also the National Security Agency, Department of Energy and another 10 contributors to U.S. intelligence. Of course, even this cumbersome Office does not collect, evaluate and coordinate intelligence information supplied by other sources, such as NATO, the UK and Israel. A year before the August, 1998 Al Qaeda attacks on U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, for example, the FBI learned CIA discounted the warning of a bombing plot an Egyptian member of Al Qaeda provided at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi. In contrast, acting on a tip from Jordan's General Intelligence Directorate, CIA relied on a would-be double agent, Human Khalil al-Balawi, who presented a video showing he could get close to Al Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al Zawahiri. On December 30, 2009, Balawi, who turned out to be a suicide bomber and triple agent working for Al Qaeda, set off the explosion that killed Jennifer Matthews and her team in Khost, Afghanistan. 3) CIA and Presidents navigate a difficult relationship. Separating those who provide and those who use information is a mistake, when collaboration is likely to produce a much better conclusion. Within the administrations of U.S. Presidents, policy decisions are based on political calculations, incomplete intelligence information, the clash of personalities and opinions and often an attempt to provide deniability and avoid blame, if a decision launches an action that goes wrong. Political suspicions linger, for example, regarding President Clinton's reluctance to retaliate for Al Qaeda's attack on the USS Cole. Acknowledging Al Qaeda crippled a U.S. destroyer could have made Democrats look weak a month before the 2000 election. Plus, with President Clinton's Monica Lewinsky affair fresh in the minds of voters, a retalitory strike on Al Qaeda could look like an effort to distract from the affair, an imitation of the film plot in Wag the Dog. The experience of CIA directors and their staffs is too valuable to exclude from the policy-making loop. Consider the positions held by these CIA directors. James Schlesinger: Secretary of Defense George H. W. Bush: U.S. President William Webster: FBI director Robert Gates: Secretary of Defense John Deutch: Deputy Secretary of Defense George Tenet: Deputy CIA director Michael Hayden: National Security Agency director Leon Panetta: Member of Congress, President Clinton's White House Chief of Staff and OMB director, Secretary of Defense Mike Pompeo: Member of Congress, Secretary of State Yet, the principals in positions to take control during a new crisis may fail to give sufficient attention to a looming problem, if their attention is focused on erroneous information about a different threat and/or if they fail to understand the country or group involved. After George W. Bush won the 2000 presidential election, the CIA continued to voice grave concern about the growing Al Qaeda threat, but the president's advisors: Vice President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz at the Defense Department and National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, were preoccupied with Iraq. Pretending Iraq's Saddam Husein was connected with Al Qaeda and had weapons of mass destruction led to a disasterous war. From their positions of power, Presidents often try to use the information and tools CIA can provide to implement their will. During the Vietnam war, Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon asked CIA director, Richard Helms, to violate the CIA's lack of authority to engage in domestic police activities by beginning a domestic surveillance program, MHCHAOS, designed to identify the communist connections of anti-war protest leaders in the United States. After I left CIA in 1967, I lived in Honolulu for a time. While I was on a date with a Hawaiian assistant attorney general, he asked if I were willing to compile a list of anti-war leaders at Hawaii's East-West University, if the government paid for my Ph.D. studies. I was unwilling. Just as CIA directors need to avoid being intimidated by Presidents, they need to be careful not to use their own power to intimidate their staffs. When a crisis erupts, the CIA hierarchy has a tendency to leave analysts who monitor a country or subject out in the cold, while over and over again the same top tier officials assemble to consider options. After Russia invaded the former Soviet Union's Republic of Georgia in August, 2008, CIA director, Michael Hayden, asked (I hope, in jest.), if CIA had an expert on Georgia. Clearly, the Georgia analyst who followed the country every day was not the first person asked for an assessment. John Brennan was an Irish Catholic and White House counterrorism advisor before he became the CIA director. To confine him to an information-only lane would not make sense. National security depends on a CIA that provides information it knows to be true(and legal), not to robotically go along with every request from Presidents and their administrations. 4) Just as political considerations play a role in the relationship between presidents and CIA directors, they also affect Congressional relations. The title, Playing to the Edge, of the book by George W. Bush's CIA director, Michael Hayden, captures the intelligence community's mindset. Compared to covert operators determined to stretch the legal limits to complete a mission, most legislators are attorneys schooled in a strict rule of law. Blame for poor CIA-Congressional relations, cannot be assigned to CIA alone, however. By August, 2016, Russian interference with the U.S. election process was clear. But when President Obama's CIA officials asked Congressional leaders to warn their State election commissions about foreign tampering, they were told to stop being played by Moscow. Wavering views on assassinations can serve as a proxy for understanding complex Congressional and CIA positions. In 1973, Congress looked at CIA's involvement in plots to assassinate four foreign leaders: Fidel Castro, Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem, the Congo's Patrice Lumumba and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. As a result of these investigations, Congress established oversight by House and Senate Permanent Committees on Intelligence. In the 1980s, the Middle East's unsettled Israeli-Palestinian conflict and U.S. support for Iran's Shah inspired vengeance by Islamic fundamentalists. A CIA manhunt eventually killed an elusive terrorist leader of Iranian-backed Hezbollah, Imad Mughniyah, who promoted effective suicide bombings and the kidnapping and torture of U.S. citizens. When pressure against what was perceived as torture by CIA operatives gained public support after 9/11, Congress condemned the "enhanced interrogation techniques" used on Al Qaeda terrorists and passed the "Detainee Treatment Act" in 2005. But, even as early as 2001, assassinations began to go unchallenged, when they could be accomplished from afar by drones. And crowds gathered outside the White House to cheer the assassination of Osama bin Landen in May, 2011. The U.S. public and Congress agreed to take action for Saudi Arabia's role in the dismemberment of Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, in Iran's Saudi Arabian Embassy, but President Trump was reluctant to lose a $450 billion sale to the Saudis. Yet, President Trump authorized the murder of Iranian general, Qassim Suleimani, head of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Quds Force. How Congress and the public will view future assassinations remains unclear. Although eliminating a dangerous leader appears to accomplish a mission, such a short-term remedy often poses worse long-term consequences. President Clinton's first CIA director, James Woolsey, recognized the dilemma. He described how a giant, after slaying a dragon, suddenly can discover he is surrounded by poisonous snakes. The death of one kingpin does not prevent more than one from taking his place. Finally, no one book provides a complete review of the tools, procedures, limitations and capabilities the U.S. intelligence community uses to protect national security. As Chris Whipple surely knows, the CIA directors and others he interviewed for The Spymasters are motivated to protect their legacies and the integrity of the Central Intelligence Agency. Their perceptions also reflect their personalities and loyalty to and chemistry with associates. Predictably, CIA's current director, Gina Haspel, and Michael Pompeo, the current Secretary of State and Ms. Haspel's predecessor, declined to be interviewed, since anything they would say could have repercussions related to their ongoing responsibilities. It was unfortunate to see the good ol' white, male and Yale CIA boys use Ms. Haspel's lack of response to an interview request as an opportunity to take their long knives to her experience, decisions and behavior. In the final analysis, however, The Spymasters reminds citizens of democracies how free they are to discover the way their governments work and how free they are to correct what they dislike.

Don't Make A Choice; Choose "And"

Framing solutions as either/or options ignores the power of "and." What R. Edward Freeman, Kirsten Martin and Bidman L. Parmar prescribe for business in their book, The Power of And provides structure for the expression, "Think outside the box." Just as executives are invited to imagine ways to satisfy stockholders, customers AND employees, those in other fields also can achieve greater benefits by creative thinking. How can the U.S. cut federal spending on space exploration and reach Mars? How can public education improve teaching methods and deal with student medical and emotional problems? Women loved Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg but they never challenged her assertion that they could not be full participants in civic life without the option of abortion to prevent motherhood. Yet, Senator Tammy Duckworth lost both legs serving in the military in Iraq and gave birth while she served in the U.S. Congress. What can help people in any field learn to think creatively? The authors of The Power of And suggest tuning into the arts. Each objective is like a note in a symphony, one color in a painting or one step in a dance. Integration can produce harmony, a composition or a ballet. Even something out of place can lead to a new solution, the way a different note leads to jazz. By combining journalism and fiction Tom Wolfe created a new literary genre. Improv comedians keep a gag going by simply saying "and" after each other's statements like "I went to the store, and...." Try converting "I'm going to visit my grandmother on Thanksgiving or stay home?"