The Krongard Brothers: Going from the Sublime to the Ridiculous

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Washington Post Redux: Going from the Sublime to the Ridiculous

By Melvin A. Goodman
The Public Record
Aug 31st, 2009

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I imagine that few readers of the mainstream media have heard of the Krongard brothers and, since I first met them on the asphalt basketball courts of Baltimore nearly 50 years ago, perhaps I should fill in the blanks on the Washington Post’s key source. Pincus and Warrick describe Krongard as a “retired CIA officer,” which of course he isn’t. Krongard never had his finger on the pulse of the CIA workforce, although he did have an impact on morale when CIA director Porter Goss suggested to Buzzy that he should leave the Agency after his six-year “career.” When Buzzy left, morale zoomed skyward.

CIA director George Tenet brought Krongard into the Agency and told Newsweek that “Buzzy is perfect. He’s my right hand.” (Remember that Tenet called his deputy, John McLaughlin, who drafted Secretary of State Colin Powell’s fraudulent speech to the UN in 2003, the “smartest man I’ve ever met). Tenet admired the tough-talking Krongard, who liked guns, fought sharks, and did all the martial arts. Krongard owns a Walther PPK pistol, James Bond’s handgun of choice in the 1960s.

As one CIA insider noted, Buzzy “talks tough, but he’s never been there.” At Alex. Brown & Co., a Baltimore-based investment firm, Krongard told his troops to dress casually and hang out in bars patronized by industry executives in order to catch unguarded comments. Perhaps he had “been there” after all. In any event, Krongard is the only Agency official who believes that “we’re better off with Osama bin Laden at large,” because if something happened to him “you might find a lot of people vying for his position and demonstrating how macho they are by unleashing a stream of terror.”

Buzzy became Tenet’s executive director in 2001; Buzzy’s deputy was John Brennan, the Agency’s cheerleader for secret prisons and renditions, who President Barack Obama hoped to make director of CIA. When Buzzy left, his successor was Dusty Foggo, who is currently serving a three-year prison sentence for bribery and fraud, making him the highest-ranking CIA official convicted of a federal felony.

Buzzy and Dusty, such harmless-sounding sobriquets, were harsh critics of the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and big supporters of CIA director Michael Hayden’s investigation of the OIG. And Buzzy was particularly dismissive of any criticism of Hayden’s investigation: “The perception is like in a police department between street cops and internal affairs.” In fact, Buzzy wanted to stop OIG investigations of CIA secret prisons, renditions, and detentions.

It is particularly noteworthy that Buzzy left CIA and immediately joined the board of Blackwater, which was only fair in view of the fact that Krongard gave Blackwater its first Agency contract. Krongard was joined by J. Cofer Black, the former head of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Center, which negotiated the assassination program with Blackwater. Black eventually became the vice chair of Blackwater and ran Total Intelligence Solution, which was Blackwater founder Erik Prince’s private CIA.



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http://pubrecord.org/torture/4394/washington-redux-going-sublime/
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Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.