Humble Pie

But here’s a blog I wish I hadn’t written: “El Baradei Now Says Iran Needs As Little As Six Months for a Bomb.”

That item was based on a misreading of remarks by the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed ElBaradei.

As one anonymous reader commented, “This is false. ElBaradei said Iran would take a min. of 6 months to ‘obtain highly-enriched uranium in sufficient quantities for a single nuclear weapon’ — not to build the actual weapon itself.”

Two weeks passed before I was able to get a comment from ElBaradei’s spokeswoman, who said, “Although it may have come across that way, he had no intention to revise any previous time lines,” which I posted immediately.

Another column that got a fair amount of negative attention was “We Rage, Europeans Yawn, Over Domestic Counterterrorism Ops.”

“Ever since I attended a conference on homeland security in Paris four years ago, I’ve been fascinated by how little the French, Italians, Germans and other continentals worry about violations of their civil rights by their spy agencies,” I wrote.

One of my examples was the common practice by French and Italian police (and perhaps others — I don’t know) to infiltrate mosques with bugging devices and spies. The idea of having to get a warrant was, well, foreign to them.

“This article simply gets the facts wrong,” one reader commented. “Holding anyone in jail for longer than some days without an accusation or without a lawyer is permitted nowhere in Europe (even without a written habeas corpus in France). Torture or any treatment resembling torture is forbidden. Of course, there have been some restrictions of freedoms in recent years (never forget that Europe has also seen terrorist attacks) but far less than in the US.”

Then there was the boner in July headlined: “Pakistan Alarm: 8,000 Foreign Fighters Helping al Qaeda in Tribal Areas.”

Alarming, it was, but alas, not true. Throwing wisdom aside, I’d merely picked up, without double-checking, a report in a Pakistani newspaper.

In truth, the number of Uzbeks, North Africans and Arabs from Gulf states moving into Pakistan in recent months was “dozens,” according to more reliable media reports.

Speaking of Pakistan, I wrote in September that it was “beginning to remind me of Cambodia.”

“Just as Pakistan gives shelter to the Taliban attacking us in Afghanistan, not to mention Osama Bin Laden, Cambodia in the 1960s provided a haven for the North Vietnamese Army, which was killing us across the border.”

Afghanistan’s parallel with South Vietnam, meanwhile, seems to grow with every passing month, so I’ll stick with what I wrote.

But back to boners. In October I chastised U.S. Marines Maj. Gen. John Kelly for seeming less than candid remarks about U.S. raids into Syria.

In an interview he gave before just such a raid that week, but which did not appear until afterward, Kelly said, “We don’t go across the border, for sure.”

I made a wisecrack about that, which was unfortunate. As it turned out, it was a CIA-led raid, not one involving Gen. Kelley’s troops in Anbar province.

I apologize, general. The beer’s on me the next time you’re in town.

And the boner of them all? Dismissing Hillary Rodham Clinton ’s chances at being named secretary of State.

“Hillary Clinton’s name was run up the nominations flagpole last week, and already it’s looking like the Star Spangled Banner in the red rockets’ glare,” I wrote.

“Notwithstanding that no less than President-elect Obama himself declined to rule out Clinton as his secretary of State last night, there’s growing skepticism that Hillary’s husband would accede to a confirmation process that would spotlight his messy finances, re-ignite rumors of sexual dalliances, and raise the specter of his ego hovering over State like the Met Life blimp at a World Series game.”

So much for predictions.

And finally, here’s one I hate to admit.

“In its 61 years as the nation’s premier intelligence outfit, the CIA has had 18 directors, only one of them a real spy,” I wrote in November.

“And that was a half century ago, when Allen W. Dulles, who had managed a top Nazi spy in Switzerland in World War II, ran the CIA under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.”

A few weeks later I got an e-mail from a reader who suggested I buy “An Idiot’s Guide to Intelligence, since clearly, that’s the IQ we’re dealing with here.” (Mine, he meant.)

It went on in that vein awhile longer.

I get crank letters from time to time, invariably at deadline time, when my patience is thinner than North Korean soup.

I usually reply in the next day or so, always thanking my correspondent for putting fingers to keyboard and, if appropriate, briefly stating my disagreement.

This time I drew an even crankier letter.

I repeated step one, adding that I’d done a stint as a spy handler (case officer, in the lingo) myself years ago.

Then came a third, even more caustic e-mail: “Good for you, Jeff, good for you. And I just bet you were a terrific case officer. . . Facts should never impede anyone, especially in this town.”

The writer went on to claim he had known three CIA directors personally, from whom he elicited their “spying careers.” And he made the case that another whom he did not know, Porter J. Goss, had worked as a spy as well.

The bottom line was that I was all wet, to put it more nicely than he had.

Oh, and by the way, this time he also identified himself as the head of a U.S. intelligence agency (not one of the majors, but nevertheless someone who I should have recognized but didn’t).

I wrote back saying I would have given his complaints more attention had they not been so rude, but that I certainly would now.

I didn’t hear back.

Well, over the holiday I did give his e-mails more attention.

And, as it turns out, he was right.

So I apologize, albeit through gritted teeth.

Keep writing.

Keep Jeff Stein on his toes in 2009 by writing to him at jstein@cq.com.