The hunting of the snark

National Catholic Reporter, May 20, 2005 by Richard Thieme

AMERICA'S SECRET WAR: INSIDE THE HIDDEN WORLDWIDE STRUGGLE BETWEEN AMERICA AND ITS ENEMIES By George Friedman Doubleday, 341 pages, $25.95

The truth may indeed set us free, but if there is one lesson to be learned from reading George Friedman's America's Secret War: Inside the Hidden Worldwide Struggle Between America and Its Enemies, it's that truth is a snark glimpsed vaguely just as it disappears into a misty glade.

And those who claim to have photographed the mythical beast had better provide more than their own word in support of the claim.

George Friedman is founder of Stratfor (Strategic Forecasting), a private intelligence organization. Friedman "leads a team of analysts with an unparalleled record for accuracy and clarity in its forecasts. With its own proprietary network of on-the-ground sources around the world, Stratfor has been called 'a private quasi-CIA' by Barren's, and cited by the mainstream media for its uncanny accuracy and ability to uncover the globe's best-kept secrets and predict world-changing events in ways that no one else can" (www.stratfor.com).

That's a pretty heady claim, and it raises serious questions. As the old joke concludes, calling a lamb's tail a leg doesn't give a lamb five legs, and being cited by mainstream media for "uncanny accuracy" doesn't make the claim credible. In fact, in a world of managed perception, subtle propaganda and effective disinformation, one expects documentation when someone claims to out-CIA the CIA. Neither Stratfor nor Friedman provides it.

To evaluate America's Secret War means evaluating Stratfor to some extent and that means evaluating George Friedman. The credibility of each nests within the credibility of the next.

It is true that The Wall Street Journal and Barron's, both owned by Dow-Jones, followed after hedge fund managers promoting Stratfor's successes and ran stories about Stratfor, but Wall Street is a herd animal and investment managers are seldom fired for following the crowd. Stories in those publications often follow rather than lead their constituencies, so that alone doesn't tell us much. In addition, The Wall Street Journal noted that Mr. Friedman had some big misses too, which raises two key questions: Before predictions have been tested by time, how does one evaluate a private intelligence organization and its claims? Is the data available for doing solid forensic analysis?

The answers, to date, are 1) With difficulty, and 2) No.

The formal structure of America's Secret War doesn't help. Written in a journalistic style (Mr. Friedman is a Hungarian refugee who learned to have his weighty academese translated into a breezier style), the narrative demands acceptance at face value as it sweeps us along. In the old days, journalism meant documentation--footnotes, bibliographies, named sources. We don't get any of those in America's Secret War.

Mr. Friedman himself warns, "It is important to understand how the CIA, or any intelligence agency, evaluates intelligence. Every bit of intelligence has a source and every source has a history. Whether the collection method is from a woman picking up a man in a bar in Beirut or a satellite intercepting cell phone calls, intelligence comes from someone.... The value of the information depends on two things: First, who the source is and where he is placed--is he a cabdriver or a government minister? Second, what is the source's track record?"

But does he provide that either for Stratfor's analyses or his book's sources? No. He implies that his sources and methods are better than the CIA's, but there is no documentation, so how would anyone know? Because he relies on the historical analysis that makes up the bulk of the book to support implicitly the book's more controversial claims, we are left looking outside the book itself for points of reference. The book is, in effect, a black box.

Controversial claims

Let's choose two of the more controversial claims to illuminate where Mr. Friedman moves onto shaky ground.

The first is Mr. Friedman's claim that "[Pakistan's President Pervez] Musharraf had actually shifted Pakistan's nuclear weapons and materials to six new locations in mid-October, soon after the U.S. air attacks on Afghanistan began." He adds: "The United States could not tolerate the existence of nuclear weapons or facilities that were not under the verifiable control of a government in which the United States had confidence." Two pages later, Mr. Friedman writes: "What emerged in American thinking ... was a strategy for a global covert and overt assault, taking out all of Al-Qaeda and all dangerous nuclear facilities in one fell swoop.... In an extreme case, the United States was prepared to make a preemptive nuclear strike on an unsecured nuclear facility if that was the only way to destroy it."

Mr. Friedman says U.S. officials were concerned about the reliability of the ISI, Pakistan's secret service, and told President Musharraf: "Unless U.S. observers, to put it politely, were given access to Pakistani facilities in order to guarantee that nuclear materials were not being taken out by nuclear scientists and technicians close to ISI, the U.S. would have to take steps to destroy those facilities, steps that would, if no other way was available, include nuclear strikes."