- Howard Hart
Howard Hart is a former
CIA officer. He worked as the CIA Chief of Station inIslamabad ,Pakistan from May1981 [Coll 57] until1984 . He was succeeded byWilliam Piekney in the summer of1984 .Hart studied Asian politics and the
Hindi andUrdu languages in theUnited States . He joined the CIA after finishinggraduate school in1965 . He spent two years atCamp Peary inVirginia , attending "the standard two-year course for...aspiring case officers." He joined theDirectorate of Operations after graduation.Coll 55]In 1978 Hunt began working the streets of
Tehran . His reports that, contrary to over 15 years of CIA estimates, the Shah's rule was far from stable or secure was suppressed by more senior personnel within the CIA. He was captured a few days after the Shah's fall by an armed group of supporters of AyatollahRuhollah Khomeini , and escaped summary execution by appealing asking to speak to a mullah, who agreed that the Koran did not sanction such punishment. [Tim Weiner, 2007. "Legacy of ashes" pp368-369.]Hart jump-started the CIA efforts to equip the Afghani resistance with weapons and supplies to allow them to mount an effective campaign during the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan . Hart was a weapons collector with a "passion for weapons and paramilitary tactics," making him a natural choice for the Islamabad post.In his words: "I was the first chief of station ever sent abroad with this wonderful order: `Go kill Soviet soldiers’. Imagine! I loved it.” “the mission was not to liberate Afghanistan,” “it was a noble goal,”1Currently, Howard Hart lives in the hills above Charlottesville, Virginia.
ee also
Notes
References
*Coll, Steve. "Ghost Wars : The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001". New York: Penguin, 2004.
[Reference]
1. Cold War II , Noam Chomsky.
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