Front and center at the CIA

By: Darrell Laurant | The News & Advance
Published: November 09, 2009

Now that George Jameson has retired from the Central Intelligence Agency, is he free to spill the agency’s deepest secrets out on the lecture circuit?

I think you know the answer to that.

“Right now, there is a review of the proposed outline of my talk (at Lynchburg College on Wednesday night) to make sure I don’t reveal any classified information,” said Jameson, who spent 33 years in intelligence work.

Not as a spy, though. He’s a lawyer, trained at Harvard and William & Mary Law School.

“It (the CIA) was my first job out of law school,” Jameson said, “and I’ve been there ever since.”

The title of Jameson’s Veteran’s Day presentation (8 p.m.) will be “Ethics and National Security: Striking a Balance.”

“It’s an important subject,” he said in a telephone conversation over the weekend. “Things aren’t always black and white.”

You know how when the powers that be make a decision on the foreign policy level that you consider misguided, but then you comfort yourself by thinking: “They must know what they’re doing. They’ve got access to all that information”? Providing that information, or explaining its limitations, was a large part of Jameson’s job.

“At the time I retired, I was the policy coordinator,” he said. “That meant I met a lot with members of Congress, especially on certain committees.”

“Mr. Jameson has … had a front seat at the table with most of the main players and decision makers in that world,” said Paul Kelbaugh, instructor in business administration at LC and a former associate general counsel for the CIA. “Lynchburg College has the honor of hosting him here for his first public lecture anywhere since his retirement from an amazing career.”

One of the public misconceptions about the CIA, Jameson said, is that one of its primary goals is to keep Congress in the dark.

“It happens,” said Jameson, “but generally there is an aggressive, ongoing effort to make sure Congress gets the information it needs. One year, the CIA gave something like 1,000 briefings to Congress.”

Of course, the CIA often deals with secrets — and as we all know, the more people share a secret, the more compromised it becomes.

That’s part of the ethical dilemma, Jameson said.

Jameson didn’t travel overseas all that much during his service, he said, “working mostly at the agency.” So on the morning of Jan. 25, 1993, he just missed becoming involved in a shooting rampage by Mir Amil Kansi, who killed two CIA employees and wounded several others with an AK-47 while they waited in their cars to make a left turn onto the CIA campus in Langley.

“I went to work a different way that day,” Jameson said, “or I would have been right in the middle of it.”

Eventually, however, the Kasi case turned into a triumph for the U.S. intelligence forces — he was captured in Pakistan four years later and brought back to the U.S. to stand trial.

“That case,” Jameson said, “was a priority.”