CIA, John Brennan, Gus Hall and that Polygraph Test

This is the same guy who defended Jihad as ‘Legitimate Tenet of Islam’.

John Brennan: The President’s strategy is absolutely clear about the threat we face. Our enemy is not “terrorism” because terrorism is but a tactic. Our enemy is not “terror” because terror is a state of mind, and as Americans we refuse to live in fear. Nor do we describe our enemy as “jihadists” or “Islamists” because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women, and children. More here.

CIA director fretted his vote for communist

CNN:John Brennan on Thursday recalled being asked a standard question for a top security clearance at his early CIA lie detector test: Have you ever worked with or for a group that was dedicated to overthrowing the US?

“I froze,” Brennan said during a panel discussion about diversity in the intelligence community at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual conference. “This was back in 1980, and I thought back to a previous election where I voted, and I voted for the Communist Party candidate,”

Brennan was responding to a question about barriers to recruiting diverse candidates for the intelligence fields, including whether past records of activism could hurt someone applying for a clearance later in life.

The CIA director said the agency’s mission is to protect the values of the Constitution — which include free speech.

“We’ve all had indiscretions in our past,” he said, adding neither some drug experimentation nor activism was a non-starter. “I would not be up here if that was disqualifying.”

He proceeded to tell the story of his test.

“I froze, because I was getting so close to coming into CIA and said, ‘OK, here’s the choice, John. You can deny that, and the machine is probably going to go, you know, wacko, or I can acknowledge it and see what happens,'” Brennan said.

He said he chose to be forthcoming.

“I said I was neither Democratic or Republican, but it was my way, as I was going to college, of signaling my unhappiness with the system, and the need for change. I said I’m not a member of the Communist Party, so the polygrapher looked at me and said, ‘OK,’ and when I was finished with the polygraph and I left and said, ‘Well, I’m screwed.'”

But he soon got his admission notice to the CIA and was relieved, he said, saying that though the agency still had long strides to make in accepting gay recruits and minorities, even then it recognized the importance of freedom.

“So if back in 1980, John Brennan was allowed to say, ‘I voted for the Communist Party with Gus Hall’ … and still got through, rest assured that your rights and your expressions and your freedom of speech as Americans is something that’s not going to be disqualifying of you as you pursue a career in government.”

By the end of his life he had become a lonely Communist stalwart in a post-Communist world. Those who sought him out for interviews at party headquarters on West 23rd Street in Manhattan found a genial white-haired man presiding over ”a museum of history,” as he put it. Pictures of his family shared space with a portrait of Lenin (a gift from Leonid I. Brezhnev); a wood sculpture from Fidel Castro and a tapestry of Karl Marx, courtesy of Erich Honecker, the former leader of East Germany.

”The struggle between those who own the wealth and those whose labor produces the wealth is one flaw in capitalism that will lead to socialism,” Mr. Hall said in 1996, repeating the familiar Marxist formulation.

Mr. Hall was first elected general secretary of the Communist Party, U.S.A., in 1959, when the federal government considered the organization an outpost of the Kremlin and all its members potentially dangerous subversives.

Yet, in the Communist world, Mr. Hall remained an important figure. He enjoyed the patronage of every Soviet head of state, from Nikita S. Khrushchev to Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and was received as a dignitary on his yearly pilgrimages to Moscow. A high point came in 1981 when he addressed the 26th Party Congress, at the invitation of Mr. Brezhnev, the Soviet leader Mr. Hall most esteemed. He was less admiring of Mr. Gorbachev, whose reforms a few years later, Mr. Hall said, ”literally destroyed the basis for socialism.”

As long as the cold war raged, however, Mr. Hall’s Soviet sponsors delighted in the presence of this unmistakably American comrade, an authentic product of the working class, nearer in spirit to Joe Sixpack, it seemed, than to Joe Stalin. A rock-jawed, barrel-chested six-footer, Mr. Hall weighed more than 200 pounds and had the powerful hands of the lumberjack and steelworker he had been in his youth. Simple in his tastes and habits, he was married to one woman, Elizabeth Turner, for 65 years, living with her in the three-bedroom house they bought in a middle-class neighborhood in Yonkers in 1962. She survives him, as do his two children, Barbara and Arvo, and three grandchildren.

To his adversaries, Mr. Hall’s rough-and-ready manner was a cynical pose that concealed a dedicated apparatchik. Even political associates sometimes found Mr. Hall’s obeisance to the Soviet Union excessive, and they grumbled, especially in his later years, that his inflexible views and dictatorial personality were hampering the party and isolating it from the wider political world.

”I told Gus 10 years ago that he should be grooming new leadership, but he would have none of it,” Carl Bloice, a former colleague, said in 1993. ”He sees himself as a man on a mission, the last holdout.”

Although Mr. Hall insisted that the American Communist Party was an independent organization, in 1992 the Moscow daily Izvestia reported that Mr. Hall had been the recipient of $40 million in Soviet assistance between 1971 and 1990.

Radical Roots Lead From Logging to Lenin

Gus Hall was born Arvo Kusta Halberg on Oct. 8, 1910, in Iron, Minn., one of 10 children reared by Matt Halberg, a miner, and his wife, Susannah. His parents were Finnish immigrants who belonged to the Industrial Workers of the World, the militant labor organization. Their son said that after Mr. Halberg was blacklisted from the mines for joining an I.W.W. strike the family grew up ”in semi-starvation,” in a log cabin Mr. Halberg built with his own hands.

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Mr. Hall left school after the eighth grade and found work in a logging camp. His parents’ radical teachings were reinforced, he later recalled, by the hardships of that experience, which once included bunking alongside the corpse of a man who had died on the job.

”When you work in the woods literally from sunup to sundown and it’s 50 degrees below zero and you eat slop and you make $30 a month, then what was said at home begins to make sense,” Mr. Hall once said.

In 1927, he was recruited into the American Communist Party by his father, a member of the organization since its inception in 1919. An apprenticeship in the Young Communist League qualified him to attend the Lenin Institute in Moscow, where he was trained for two years in sabotage and guerrilla tactics. He returned, in 1933, to a country devastated by the Great Depression. A growing number of Americans, convinced that the existing political and economic structures had become outmoded, were attracted to the Communist Party’s promise of a workers’ state. One of many who plunged into the labor movement, Mr. Hall made his name organizing union locals in the Midwest.

Militant and bold, he drew on some of the conspiratorial tactics he had learned in Moscow. One such tactic was the adoption of a sequence of aliases, all variations on his given name, before he settled on Gus Hall. He took the name legally in the mid-1930’s. More here from the NYT’s.