In a time of war, foreign agents are at work on American soil. They blow up buildings and munitions factories. They sink ships at sea with explosives hidden in the cargo. In a campaign of sabotage and terror, they kill hundreds of U.S. citizens. Spies and fifth columnists -- some American-born, some recent immigrants still loyal to their native land -- hold clandestine meetings in New York and other major cities, plotting violence against the United States. Overmatched police officers, unused to fighting an enemy they can't see, struggle to identify the terrorist cell's ringleaders before more havoc and unleashed and more innocents are killed.
Sounds like a pretty good espionage thriller, doesn't it? Or the plot of every Die Hard movie ever made? In fact, it's nothing less than authentic -- albeit long-forgotten -- American history, brought to vivid life in Howard Blum's latest book, Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America. A hundred years after the chilling events it describes -- events that will strike an eerily familiar chord with anyone who pays even cursory attention to the vagaries of America's War on Terror -- Dark Invasion reminds us, as Blum put it in a recent conversation with LIFE.com, that "the past is never past."
"When I first read about these events in the CIA's in-house journal," Blum says, discussing how he came upon the story of German saboteurs in America in the first place, "I thought, now this is really something. New York cops hunting a terrorist cell in the midst of World War I? Here was the birth of American homeland security, in a sense. But in order to tell the story, I knew I needed to find a character who could drive the story along, and I had to get inside that character's head. I couldn't make up anything he said or felt or thought -- but I'd still have to portray all of that in a way that keeps the reader involved."
When he learned that a central figure in the tale, New York City police captain Thomas J. Tunney, had once written a memoir, and that the German naval officer and spy who masterminded so many of the often-deadly acts of sabotage -- Franz von Rintelen, the self-styled "Dark Invader" -- had penned a two-volume memoir, Blum knew he had what he needed to structure a cohesive, suspenseful and, above all, accurate story.
Posted by: Au Auric ||
02/06/2014 00:00 ||
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#1
I read it last month or so in advanced edition (Amazon Vine) - It was fascinating! The shenanigans carried on by the German government and the various agents they recruited are a story that has pretty much been memory-holed in the last few years. I posted a review here at Chicagoboyz.
#2
When the liner Normandie was sabotaged, burned and sank in February 1942, the USG (particularly the FBI) came to a tacit understanding with organized crime groups that ran the New York waterfront.
[GO FOR 3] If You Believed The Altruism of That Hero Ad, Youre The Mark Theyve Been Waiting For
Rare is the moment when the great brain trust at GF3 dedicates itself to anything but the endless toil of bringing you the wisest college football news and opinions your $0 entry fee can buy you. This is one such moment.
Provided you do not live in Soviet Russia, you are no doubt familiar with the Budweiser ad which showed the surprised young LT receiving an unexpected heros welcome home. A ticker tape parade greeted this young warrior, who was picked from among many deserving entrants to ride triumphantly atop the Budweiser wagon. Teevee advert campaign deception, props, politicians, big money.... who knew.
On Tuesday, the New York Times ran a report essentially uncovering the motivation for Karzai's intransigence in signing the Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) with the United States and his generally acerbic disposition towards American interests: his government has long been engaged in backchannel negotiations with the Taliban without the approval or knowledge of the United States. Shortly after he said "maybe I'll join the Taliban" he did. Maybe it was before.
U.S. diplomats and Karzai's government have attempted (with little success) to coordinate their approaches to the Taliban since the failed Doha process began.
According to Aimal Faizi, a spokesman for Karzai knowledgeable about the backchannel contacts, He was the guy who was relaying Hamid's "belief" that the U.S. was responsible for the latest wave of Taliban attacks.
"The last two months have been very positive." He adds that "These parties were encouraged by the president's stance on the bilateral security agreement and his speeches afterwards." This was contradicted by other officials, both Afghan and Western; according to skeptics, "whatever the Taliban may have intended at the outset, they no longer had any intention of negotiating with the Afghan government." An absolutely shocking turn of events.
It may seem like the U.S.-Afghan back-and-forth on the BSA has been a long-term feature of relations between the two countries, but as recently as October 2013, the passage of the BSA appeared to have been a fait accompli. So when Karzai refused to sign the BSA, even after a strong mandate from November's loya jirga, observers assumed that he was trying to score political points and safeguard his post-election future by appearing hard on a foreign troop presence in Afghanistan. Karzai additionally stated that he felt that the BSA should be a matter reserved for his successor. No problem, we'll take the back door. All roads lead to outta here.
According to the Times report, the Taliban approached Karzai in November, roughly around the same time his public disposition towards the U.S. went rather sour. Hamid sez he hasn't talked to B.O. since last June. I'm guessing relations "went sour" about then, and are now actively fermenting. He expected the jirga to turn the agreement down, since the Taliban was threatening to kill the members. He expected the legislature to turn it down. At the moment he appears to be the sole impediment. I think even Rassool Sayyaf is in favor of it.
For the Taliban, luring Karzai -- long a believer in a negotiated peace between the central government and the Taliban Kind of like an Afghan Taliban Khan. Except that the Taliban never claimed to have hanged Imran Khan.
-- meant frustrating the U.S. by means of delaying the BSA. The Times writes that "Karzai seemed to jump at what he believed was a chance to achieve what the Americans were unwilling or unable to do, and reach a deal to end the conflict." Very difficult to sue for peace and conditions when you're not winning the fight.
Ultimately, the detour appears to have been very costly for Karzai and for Afghanistan's overall security. The backchannel appears to mostly have been a wild goose chase and has borne little real progress on leading Afghanistan to a sustainable peace. About as successful as the Paks have ever been trying to negotiate peace with their "strategic assets."
Additionally, since October, Karzai's intransigence on the BSA has strained already-thin public support for a continued U.S. presence in the country post-2014. The Pentagon recently recommended to the White House that should it find itself unable to station at least 10,000 troops in Afghanistan, it should consider a contingency where no American troops remain in the country following the general drawdown this year.
With just two months left in office, the backchannel appears to have been a final attempt by a desperate Karzai to resuscitate moribund peace talks. Scenario: Karzai continues pissing off the U.S., who pull all their troops out of Afghanistan. Talibs take Kabul again. Hamid might make it to Peshawar, but stands a good chance of having his own Najibullah Moment®. Because he's the head of state, nobody's going to feel sorry for the Tadjiks, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Hazaras, and such, who actually make up the majority of the Afghan population. It'll be back to Pakhtunkhwa for the lot of them.
Instead, the Taliban managed to cast doubt on the entire security situation in Afghanistan next year. In the process, Karzai, the Afghan people, and the United States all grew increasingly frustrated. This issue will likely become a major one for Afghanistan's eleven presidential candidates, who began campaigning on Sunday. In general, several of the more technocratic candidates are more pro-Western than Karzai (definitely so compared to Karzai over the past four months).
Now that the cat's out of the bag, Karzai has two options facing him in his final days in office: he could acquiesce and sign the BSA, ending a headache for the United States and the region, and meeting the demands of the Afghan people, or he could twist the narrative and accuse the U.S. of undermining what was surely a promising peace process with the Taliban. I'm leaning toward option #2.
[Atlas Shrugs} No worries: Obama says, al Qaeda is on the run! More on Al Qaeda and Obamas favorite Muslim terror group, The Muslim Brotherhood.
Matthew Levitt On Jan. 22, Israeli officials announced that they had disrupted an advanced al-Qaeda terrorist plot in Israel that was traced back to al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri. Ariv al-Sham, a Gaza-based al-Qaeda operative who worked for Zawahiri, recruited three men to take part in attacks. No doubt a very familiar and closely monitored pattern for Israeli intelligence.
Iyad Khalil Abu-Sara, from the Ras Hamis neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem, volunteered to carry out a sacrifice attack on an Israeli bus traveling between Jerusalem and Maale Adumim. The plan was for gunmen to shoot out the bus wheels and overturn it. After that, they would gun down the passengers at close range. Sham and Abu-Sara also sketched out simultaneous suicide bombings at the Jerusalem convention cent er, where a second suicide bomber would target emergency responders, and at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv. Advance planning [vs the standard, Junior Varsity pick-up game] for a U.S. embassy attack ?
In preparation, Sham sent Abu-Sara computer files for a virtual bomb-making training course. Abu-Sara was to prepare the suicide vests and truck bombs, and to travel to Syria for training in combat and bomb-making. He had already purchased a ticket on a flight to Turkey by the time he was arrested. Sham had two other recruits. Rubin Abu-Nagma planned to kidnap an Israeli soldier from Jerusalems central bus station and bomb a residential building in a Jewish neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem. He, too, learned to manufacture explosives online. Ala Ghanam, who lived near Jenin in the northern West Bank, was tasked with establishing a Salafi jihadi cell that would carry out future attacks.
Events in Syria are quickly changing the nature of the jihadi enterprise. Its epicenter is no longer Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, or Yemen, but in Syria. Today, the jihadi centers that are drawing new recruits, donations, and foreign fighters are not run by al-Qaeda. Knowing that, Zawahiri perhaps felt the need to be able to claim something big that jihadist fighters could rally around. What better than an attack on Israel? The writer is director of the Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. I do not see Syria as a localized "jihadi epicenter" as a necessarily bad thing for the west. What am I missing ?
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
On Tuesday, the New York Times ran a report essentially uncovering the motivation for Karzai's intransigence in signing the Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) with the United States and his generally acerbic disposition towards American interests: his government has long been engaged in backchannel negotiations with the Taliban without the approval or knowledge of the United States. 
With just two months left in office, the backchannel appears to have been a final attempt by a desperate Karzai to resuscitate moribund peace talks. 
