Word: langley
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...dramatic engine of Tearing Down the Walls, Monica Langley's biography of Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill, is his lifelong struggle for acceptance among Wall Street's elite. What a burden, we are repeatedly reminded, was Weill's background as a rumply Jewish kid from Brooklyn, N.Y.--he's even the wrong kind of Jew!--as he fought to overcome anti-Semitism and class prejudice to make it to the top, not once but twice. It's a nice story line but a somewhat artificial...
...shebang in 1981 to American Express. By 1985, when Weill lost a power struggle with white-bread Amex CEO James D. Robinson III and was ousted as president, it wasn't because Weill was Jewish. He was just outmaneuvered. And he left as a multimillionaire. It's difficult for Langley to set a good sob story at Weill's palatial New York City apartment, his Greenwich, Conn., mansion and his daily lunch table at the Four Seasons...
...resentment burns even more because the generals know that when it comes to special-operations soldiers, they have a deeper bench than the spooks at Langley. And in Afghanistan, the Pentagon was regularly asked to supply the CIA with people from that bench. The Defense Department already has 44,000 Army, Navy and Air Force commandos in its U.S. Special Operations Command, who are as skilled in covert guerrilla warfare as the CIA's operatives. In the basement vaults of the command's headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla., sit secret contingency plans to send military special-ops teams...
Over the years, the SOG has taken on some of the CIA's most dangerous work. Paramilitary officers account for almost half the 79 stars chiseled into the wall in the main foyer of the agency's Langley, Va., headquarters commemorating all the spies who have died since the CIA was founded in 1947. The newest star is dedicated to Spann. But the CIA suffered additional casualties in Afghanistan and some injuries that the agency has not yet publicly acknowledged. A CIA officer was wounded by a bullet in the chest during a fire fight in southern Afghanistan...
Once deployed, CIA operatives have fewer regulations to hamstring them than their military counterparts do. In Afghanistan, CIA cargo planes were dropping warm-weather clothing, saddles and bales of hay for allied Afghan foot soldiers and cavalry. One cable that officers in the field sent back to Langley read, "Please send boots. The Taliban can hear our flip-flops." Says Kent Harrington, a former CIA station chief in Asia: "If a military special-operations soldier parachuted in with $3 million to buy armies, he'd have to have a C-5 cargo plane flying behind him with all the paperwork...