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Institutional
Affiliations
CBS News:
Consultant on Afghanistan, 1999-2000 (2)
Project
for the New American Century: Senior Fellow (1)
American
Enterprise Institute: Resident Fellow (2)
Government
Service
Central
Intelligence Agency: Middle East Specialist in Directorate
of Operations, 1985-1994 (1), (3)
Department
of State: Political and Consular Officer, 1985-1994 (2)
Corporate
Connections/Business Interests
Walsingham,
Inc: Risk Assessment Consultant on the Middle East, Central
Asia, and the former Soviet Union, 1999-2001 (2)
Education
Johns
Hopkins University:
B.A. in History (2)
University of Edinburgh, Muir Institute of Islamic Studies
(2)
American University of Cairo (2)
Cairo University (2)
Princeton University: M.A. in Islamic History (2)
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Highlights
& Quotes
Gerecht,
a former CIA analyst and recruiter, has led the neoconservative
fight to discredit the spy agency by arguing that it is soft when
it comes to interpreting intelligence (an argument which was used
to justify the work of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans,
led by Abram
Shulsky). According to the Washington Post’s Vernon Loeb:
“The Directorate of Operations, [Gerecht] wrote, using the
pen name Edward G. Shirley, had grown intellectually dishonest and
become an institution where case officers played a cynical ‘numbers
game’ to get promoted by recruiting large numbers of paid
foreign agents, regardless of quality. The ‘secrets’
these agents produced were often nearly worthless [he wrote] and
typical case officers either didn't care or didn't know better,
lacking language skills and much grounding in the culture in which
they operated. ‘America's national security would not be compromised
by temporarily shutting down the DO,’ Gerecht wrote. ‘A
Directorate of Operations that produces mostly mediocre intelligence
and egregiously stupid coup d'etat schemes against, for example,
[Iraqi President] Saddam Hussein harms the United States abroad.’”
(4)
Regarding
the then-impending war in Iraq, Gerecht said: "If President
Bush follows his own logic and compels his administration to follow
him against Iraq and Iran, then he will sow the seeds for a new,
safer, more liberal order in the Middle East.” (5)
Gerecht,
writing under the pseudonym of Edward Shirley, wrote the 1997 book
Know Thine Enemy: A Spy’s Journey into Revolutionary Iran.
In an essay about the book published in the The New York Review
of Books, Lars-Erik Nelson writes:"After
chafing at his embassy-based job in Istanbul, Shirley, who had an
extensive academic knowledge of Iran, quit the CIA and made a clandestine
trip across the border. He wanted, at last, to see the country for
himself and to write about it. He took no passport and was smuggled
in from Turkey by an unflappable truck driver and guide, whom he
calls Hosein. The trip lasted only five days, and Shirley seems
to have spent much of it in a state of near panic, hiding in a box
inside the truck and spending much of his short time in Tabriz in
bed rather than risking possible exposure on the street. Still,
he has a fascinating story to tell, and he recounts it, along with
a good deal of Persian history, through the artifice of half a dozen
suspiciously well-remembered conversations, interspersed with comments
on Iranian culture and psychology. I suspect that Shirley's story
is not a literally truthful account of what he saw and heard, but
it is spectacularly well told, providing a lesson in how to spin
out a yarn from limited material. The characters he met and the
drab third world winterscape through which he traveled are vividly
described." (7)
Gerecht
also contributed to the Kagan-Kristol volume Present Dangers: Crisis
and Opportunity in American Foreign Policy,2000. (1)
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