23
" On June 20, 1951, less than four weeks after the Homer case broke, Hoover escalated the FBI’s Sex Deviates Program. The FBI alerted universities and state and local police to the subversive threat, seeking to drive homosexuals from every institution of government, higher learning, and law enforcement in the nation. The FBI’s files on American homosexuals grew to 300,000 pages over the next twenty-five years before they were destroyed. It took six decades, until 2011, before homosexuals could openly serve in the United States military. "
― Tim Weiner , Enemies: A History of the FBI
25
" The Republican Roosevelt wanted to fight plutocrats as well as anarchists. Their plunder of oil, coal, minerals, and timber on federal lands appalled him, in his role as the founder of America’s national parks. Corporate criminals, carving up public property for their private profit, paid bribes to politicians to protect their land rackets. Using thousand-dollar bills as weapons, they ransacked millions of acres of the last American frontiers. In 1905, a federal investigation, led in part by a scurrilous Secret Service agent named William J. Burns, had led to the indictment and conviction of Senator John H. Mitchell and Representative John H. Williamson of Oregon, both Republicans, for their roles in the pillage of the great forests of the Cascade Range. An Oregon newspaper editorial correctly asserted that Burns and his government investigators had used “the methods of Russian spies and detectives.” The senator died while his case was on appeal; the congressman’s conviction was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court on grounds of “outrageous conduct,” including Burns’s brazen tampering with jurors and witnesses. Burns left the government and became a famous private eye; his skills at tapping telephones and bugging hotel rooms eventually won him a job as J. Edgar Hoover’s "
― Tim Weiner , Enemies: A History of the FBI
27
" Putin had launched “a new form of warfare” in which the human mind was the main battlefront, a comprehensive assessment by the Modern War Institute at West Point concluded a decade later. Using disinformation and deception, “Russia created the time and space to shape the international narrative in the critical early days of the conflict.” The West Point study saw four essential elements of Russian information warfare on display in Georgia and thereafter: “First, and most benignly, it aims to put the best spin it can on ordinary news; second, it incites a population with fake information in order to prep a battlefield; third, it uses disinformation or creates enough ambiguity to confuse people on the battlefield; and fourth, it outright lies.” The overarching Russian strategy was “to degrade trust in institutions across the world. "
― Tim Weiner , The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020
28
" RT had paid him $45,000 for his appearance. His colleagues had warned him that taking Kremlin gold would fatally compromise him, and they also thought that he didn’t care. (Flynn’s twenty-seven-day stint as Trump’s White House national security adviser ended after he lied to the FBI about his conversations with the Russians.) Stein said her campaign paid for her trip to Moscow, but RT paid her back. It ran more than one hundred stories on its American channel supporting her bid for the White House, amplifying her positions—“a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for war”—which reliably corresponded with the party line of the Internet Research Agency. “She’s a Russian asset—I mean, totally,” Clinton said three years after the election, an intriguing and incendiary charge. "
― Tim Weiner , The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020
33
" American intelligence knew little about Iraq, and much of what it knew was wrong. The CIA didn’t begin to imagine that Saddam could be overthrown and then operate from underground, nor did it foresee the insurgency that followed, and the ripple effect of that fighting, inspiring jihadists across the Middle East and North Africa. The consequences of that ignorance have been immense. Roughly half a million people have died, including fifteen thousand American combatants and contractors, in the name of the war on terror. Estimates of the financial toll run from $3 trillion to $6 trillion; in today’s dollars, World War II cost about $4 trillion. And in Iraq, the only winners of the war have been Iran, whose military commanders gained political power and prestige in Baghdad while working with jihadists to kill American troops, and Russia, which has forged a regional alliance of convenience with the Iranians. "
― Tim Weiner , The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020
35
" Their World War Web would weaponize information and intelligence in ways few had imagined. They sought a moving picture of all foreign enemies and all the threats on earth, a God’s-eye view of the global battlefield. They wanted to know “everything of interest to us, all the time,” said Steve Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. “What we are really talking about,” said Art Cebrowski, director of the Pentagon’s Office of Force Transformation, “is a new theory of war.” That theory exponentially expanded the idea of information warfare. "
― Tim Weiner , The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020