IP: The Trouble with the CIA

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

> From: "RV Head" <4whp@home.com>
>
> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15109
>
> The New York Review of Books
> January 17, 2002
>
> Review
> The Trouble with the CIA
> By Thomas Powers
>
> BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE
>
>
> by Paul R. Pillar
> Brookings Institution, 272 pp., $26.95
>
>
> by Yossef Bodansky
> Forum, 439 pp., $17.95 (paper)
>
>
> by Simon Reeve
> Northeastern University Press, 294 pp., $26.95; $18.95 (paper, to be
> published in June 2002)
>
> As the sun rose along the eastern seaboard of the United States on September
> 11, the Central Intelligence Agency was in a state of what might be called
> permanent medium alert to detect and prevent terrorist attacks on US
> citizens and property. For fifteen years the agency had entrusted this task
> to a Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) at CIA headquarters in Langley,
> Virginia, where as many as two hundred intelligence officers gathered and
> analyzed information from a wide range of technical and a somewhat narrower
> range of human sources. For five years there had been a separate task force
> within the CTC dedicated specifically to the danger posed by Osama bin
> Laden, the Saudi-born Islamic extremist believed to have been responsible
> for successful attacks on US troops in Saudi Arabia, US embassies in East
> Africa, and the USS Cole, almost sunk by a suicide bomber in Aden harbor
> only a year ago.
>
> The CIA was not alone in its efforts to prevent terrorist attacks. The
> United States has not been slack in voting funds for numerous interagency
> committees, offices, divisions, centers, and task forces with substantial
> budgets focused on the problem of terror, but none of these special-purpose
> entities has a clearer responsibility for "warnings and indications" than
> the Central Intelligence Agency, which was established in 1947 as a direct
> consequence of the failure to foresee the Japanese attack on the American
> naval base at Pearl Harbor. Terrorism is only one threat to American
> security tracked by the CIA, but the danger is not remote or abstract; the
> agency itself has suffered grievous losses from terrorist attacks, notably
> in 1983, when a suicide bomber in Beirut devastated the US embassy and
> killed sixty-three people, including all six members of the CIA station.
> Visiting at the time was a legendary CIA field officer with long experience
> in the Middle East, Robert Ames, whose death was confirmed by the wedding
> ring on a hand retrieved from the debris.
>
> The dead chief of station was replaced by another longtime CIA officer,
> William Buckley, who was kidnapped by terrorists in March 1984 and beaten to
> death over the following year. Four years later another CIA officer from
> Beirut, Matt Gannon, was killed when a midair explosion destroyed Pan Am
> Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Gannon's wife was also a CIA officer,
> Susan Twetten, daughter of the agency's chief of operations, Tom Twetten,
> now retired and a book dealer in rural Vermont. Other CIA officers have been
> murdered by terrorists, including two just outside the gates of the agency
> itself.
>
> The CIA thus has a visceral as well as a theoretical understanding of what
> terrorism is all about. The director of central intelligence, George Tenet,
> has often briefed Congress during his four years at the head of the CIA on
> the dangers of terrorism, on the threat posed by weapons of mass
> destruction, and specifically on the worldwide network commanded by Osama
> bin Laden from his protected refuge in Afghanistan. Less than a year ago
> Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee that bin Laden posed the "most
> serious and immediate threat" to the United States, and more recently still,
> probably in August or early September, three foreign intelligence services
> separately informed the CIA that bin Laden had urged one of his four wives,
> who was visiting Syria at the time, to return home to Afghanistan
> immediately-a suggestive sign that something was in the wind.
>
> Neither the United States government nor the CIA were snoozing at their
> desks as the sun rose along the eastern seaboard of the United States on
> September 11. Both fully understood the danger of terrorism generally and of
> Osama bin Laden specifically. Nevertheless, when Logan Airport in Boston and
> Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C., began boarding aircraft that
> morning, nineteen men dispatched by Osama bin Laden walked through security
> checkpoints as easily as they had entered and operated throughout the United
> States during the preceding months-encountering as little interference, and
> arousing as little alarm, as if the Federal Aviation Administration had
> never heard the word "hijacking" and the CIA had never heard the word
> "terrorist" or the name "Osama bin Laden." By mid-morning on September 11
> there can have been few Americans who had not watched-probably over and
> over -the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The reason
> for drawing heightened attention to this single greatest failure of American
> intelligence since Pearl Harbor is that no official steps have so far been
> taken to find out how it could have happened.
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----
>
> People who deal with terrorism professionally tend to think of it as doctors
> do diseases with no cure, or as police do crime-as an ill of the human
> condition to be addressed one case at a time. Paul Pillar, a former deputy
> director of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center, has thought about the
> subject long enough to have it in comfortable perspective as a problem to be
> managed, never solved. In a study for the Brookings Institution, published
> last April under the title of Terrorism and US Foreign Policy, Pillar argues
> persuasively that overexcitement is the enemy of sound counterterror
> practice. On some things, inevitably, September 11 has proved Pillar plain
> wrong; he cites, for example, "a drastic reduction in skyjackings" as a
> "major success story" and credits "a comprehensive security system." But
> most of what Pillar says holds up well, even when his common-sense approach
> is now tinged with irony. Put simply, his approach to managing terrorism is
> to proceed calmly, avoid inflating the significance of any single enemy (he
> includes bin Laden by name), and remember that, with coalitions, small and
> few is better than big and many since "limits...are set by the states least
> willing to cooperate." Pillar has much else to say. There is, he writes, no
> substitute for the local influence and expertise of foreign police and
> intelligence services. Bringing legal cases against terrorists takes time
> and dries up intelligence sources. International sanctions and resolutions
> work slowly when they work at all. You can't ask foreign banks to track
> financial transactions without providing account numbers. Military
> retaliation rarely hits the target intended, and for every terrorist killed
> two more aspire to take his place.
>
> In the weeks following September 11 it was often suggested that really
> vigorous efforts freed of hand-wringing restraint-assassination of terrorist
> leaders, use of torture in interrogation, shutting off terrorist funds to
> the last penny, telling allies to cooperate or else-would solve the problem
> with finality. Pillar's advice is to put no hope in drastic measures but
> remember the current facts of life. There are limits to power, America has
> become a lightning rod for hatred, we can't stop people from trying to hurt
> us, and sometimes they will succeed.
>
> But sensible as this advice is, it is undercut by one aspect of the attacks
> on September 11-their magnitude. In the counterterrorism business there has
> been a growing concern over the last two decades, and especially since the
> collapse of the Soviet Union, about the threat posed by weapons of mass
> destruction-what Pillar calls "the much-ballyhooed danger of chemical,
> biological, radiological, or nuclear terrorism inflicting mass casualties,"
> and referred to by professionals as CBRN. In Pillar's view such dangers are
> real but exaggerated; CBRN weapons are difficult to get and to deliver;
> talking about them only convinces terrorists "how much they frighten
> people." For Pillar the one quality essential to "sound counterterrorist
> policy" is perspective, and nothing undermines it more than lurid American
> fears of "catastrophic," "grand," or "super" terrorism-threats whose
> consequences are horrifying but whose probability is low.
>
> This would still be a sound point if not for the magnitude of the attacks on
> the World Trade Center, which killed several thousand people, destroyed
> billions of dollars' worth of property, pushed the United States deeper into
> recession, plunged us into a foreign war, precipitated a political crisis
> throughout the Middle East, and shattered the confidence of Americans that
> they are safe in their own homes and offices. The cost in dollars will be
> immense, probably many times the $30 billion annual bill for all American
> intelligence efforts. The psychic cost of terror cannot be measured, but it
> ticks up every time someone catches his breath on a plane, thinks twice
> about getting on an elevator to the eightieth floor, wonders what is in a
> package, is reassured to know that the FBI can now bug lawyers talking with
> their clients, or decides to move the headquarters of a Fortune 500 company
> out of New York City. Pillar, in short, and everybody else in his line of
> work, is going to have to put "catastrophic," "grand," and "super" terrorism
> at the top of the list because the other guys have a demonstrated ability to
> think and operate on the grand scale, and their efforts to obtain nuclear
> weapons could one day succeed.
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----
>
> Much about Osama bin Laden and his organization remains obscure. The son of
> a Yemeni-born construction tycoon in Saudi Arabia, bin Laden was one of
> fifty-three children and the seventeenth son, who inherited on his father's
> death a fortune variously estimated as $50 million or as much as $300
> million. The family dynamics among fifty siblings are difficult to imagine,
> but a hint to bin Laden's character can perhaps be found in the fact that he
> was his mother's only child, that she was the eleventh or perhaps the
> twelfth wife, and that his older brothers called him "the son of the slave."
> This bit of information comes from Simon Reeve, a British journalist who
> wrote an account of the first World Trade Center bomb attack in 1993 called
> The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism.
>
> After obtaining a degree in civil engineering-study that usually involves a
> course on "strength of materials"- bin Laden was recruited, apparently by
> the head of the Saudi intelligence service, Prince Turki al-Faisal, to
> support the Mujahideen in the war to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan.
> Swept away by that success, bin Laden broke with his homeland when it turned
> to the United States for protection after the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam
> Hussein, moved to Sudan, built an Islamic extremist network called al-Qaeda
> (Arabic for "the base"), and embarked on a campaign of terror.
>
> Under pressure from the United States in 1996, Sudan offered to extradite
> him to Saudi Arabia. Fearing that bin Laden was too popular to admit back
> into the country, Riyadh turned down the offer-something they told the
> Americans only months later- and bin Laden was allowed instead to fly back
> to Afghanistan where old friends in the Pakistani Inter-Services
> Intelligence (ISI) from the anti-Soviet war put him in touch with the
> Taliban, a religious party strongly backed by Pakistan in the Afghan civil
> war.
>
> A recent biography of bin Laden by the director of the Congressional Task
> Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, Yossef Bodansky, reports in
> great detail the outward facts of bin Laden's progress from a builder of
> hospitals and military barracks in Afghanistan to the world's most wanted
> terrorist. Included are the names of many obscure groups, the dates of
> meetings, reports of individuals getting on and off planes, financial
> transactions, the movement of arms-all that superstructure of corroborative
> information which intelligence services like the CIA build into case files.
> >From bin Laden's own writings and videotaped interviews we know that he
> wants the United States to pull its forces out of the Muslim world, he wants
> the UN to end the sanctions imposed on Iraq, and he is angered by the
> suffering of the Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis.
>
> But Bodansky's thorough book, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on
> America, tells us little about bin Laden's character, the people who shaped
> his thinking, how he came to embrace terrorism and build links with extreme
> Islamicist groups throughout the world. What the CIA and other intelligence
> organizations somehow missed between bin Laden's return to Afghanistan in
> 1996 and the attacks of September 11 was the transformation of al-Qaeda from
> an angry group of "Afghan Arabs" into a disciplined organization with the
> ability to hijack four airliners at roughly the same moment and fly three of
> them into what the Pentagon calls "high value" targets. At the time of the
> simultaneous attacks on the US embassies in East Africa in August 1998, the
> CIA officer Milt Bearden told a reporter, "Two at once is not twice as hard.
> Two at once is a hundred times as hard." What does that make four at once?
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----
>
> The CIA's failure on September 11 inevitably raises the question of what it
> may be missing now. This is not primarily a question of targets and means
> but of goals and strategies. In the absence of a secret bin Laden position
> paper one can still try to make sense of the attack on the World Trade
> Center, and Howard Hart, a retired CIA officer who ran operations against
> the Soviets in the Afghan war, has recorded his take in an eight-page paper
> privately circulated among friends. Hart resigned from the agency in 1991
> and has seen no classified information since. But drawing on twenty years of
> experience in the Middle East and South Asia, including operations targeted
> on terrorist groups, Hart believes that bin Laden is not driven by hatred
> but is instead pursuing an ambitious grand strategy. His ultimate goal, Hart
> believes, is "a 'reborn,' combative and vigorous Islam" in control of
> governments throughout the Arabic world.
>
> Bin Laden's initial targets, in Hart's view, are the conservative, highly
> centralized, relatively weak regimes of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the
> Gulf States, all of which drift uneasily between the allure of Western
> material culture and the resentments of the poor and devout, who have little
> access to wealth themselves and are called to reject the modern world by
> fiery mullahs. Next on bin Laden's list, in Hart's view, are the
> authoritarian, mainly secular regimes of Iraq, Syria, and Libya, whose
> populations have been cowed by their "savage and highly effective internal
> security services...."
>
> Bin Laden has no armies to achieve these great ends; his method is the
> ancient strategy of the weak, using terrorism to precipitate a political
> crisis which can be expected to drive a deepening wedge throughout the
> Islamic world between the godless allies of America and the champions of
> Allah. In Hart's view the furious American response to the September 11
> attacks was part of bin Laden's plan; he and his al-Qaeda companions
> expected that the US reaction would drive angry Muslims into the streets.
> Violent measures to suppress them would escalate a growing crisis
>
> until police and security forces will no longer be willing to fire on their
> own people, and the targeted governments will collapse. In short, a repeat
> of events in Iran in 1978- 79. Skeptics should remember that in January 1978
> no one in Iran- the Shah, his military, foreign observers, even Khomeini
> supporters -believed the regime could be toppled by "Islamic extremists."
> One year later the Shah's regime had been destroyed.
> Hart watched this happen in Iran, where he arrived in the spring of 1978 to
> keep tabs on the growing crisis, something the CIA had avoided for years for
> fear of offending the Shah. The situation he found is ably described by
> another retired official of the CIA's Directorate of Operations, William J.
> Daugherty, in the current issue of the International Journal of Intelligence
> and Counterintelligence, an indispensable scholarly journal devoted to
> intelligence history and policy. American policy was to support the Shah
> unconditionally, Daugherty writes, and following the forced exile of the
> Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1965 it was taken for granted in Washington
> that the opposition had been crippled beyond recovery and the CIA made
> little effort to reach its own judgment until Hart's arrival.
>
> Some of Hart's reports in the spring of 1978 were so pessimistic that the
> CIA's chief of station refused to send them on to Washington, where he knew
> they would arouse fury in the White House. For more than three months during
> the summer of 1978 the CIA labored to write up a special National
> Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of the strength of the Shah's government. But
> the estimators could never agree on what was increasingly obvious: the
> Ayatollah had won control of the streets and the royal palace was next.
> Eventually the CIA's director, Admiral Stansfield Turner, shelved the NIE
> because it was politically too divisive. The result: official shock when the
> Shah's government collapsed, and bitter enmity for the United States from
> the Islamic activists who seized power in Iran.
>
> Hart makes no facile claim that things might have gone the other way if only
> the CIA had sent a few agents into the souks. Khomeini had divined something
> the CIA had missed-the deep hostility toward the Shah's regime of a devout
> Muslim population being pushed too rapidly into the modern world. But not
> even Khomeini could foresee how events would unfold, Hart claims. By late
> 1978 the CIA had penetrated Khomeini's inner circle, and knew that the
> Ayatollah's closest advisers were still preparing to settle for some kind of
> power-sharing compromise. Having seen the fall of one regime built on sand,
> Hart is convinced that bin Laden, following a strategy similar to Khomeini's
> in the 1970s, can do it again. Whatever happens in the current American
> effort to hunt him down, he says, bin Laden has now been transformed into a
> hero of the Arab world. If he lives his charisma will shine all the
> brighter; if he is imprisoned or killed, others in the al-Queda network will
> carry on in his name. "The governments of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States
> are also built on sand," he says.
>
> Hart's interpretation is not easily proved or disproved. Pakistan, once
> thought vulnerable to Islamic revolt, seems to have survived the present
> crisis without great difficulty. Most scholars think Saudi Arabia is equally
> secure-but that is what they thought about the Shah of Iran, too, before
> 1978, and the CIA at the time went on claiming his throne was not in danger
> almost until the day he left the country. If the war against terrorism is
> going to persist for years, as the secretary of defense has said,
> governments in control today may be in trouble tomorrow. Hart knows that
> official policy and a CIA anxious to please can make it hard to spot-and
> even harder to report-the moment things start to deteriorate. He watched it
> happen in Iran, and the CIA's failure on September 11 makes him worried it
> could happen again.
>
> 2.
> Failure is not easily confessed by the CIA. "Though we did not stop the
> latest, terrible assaults," George Tenet said in a statement to the agency's
> estimated 16,000 employees on September 12, "you-the men and women of CIA
> and our intelligence community- have done much to combat terrorism in the
> past." Failure was not a word Tenet could bring himself to utter. His
> executive director, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard, came closer-a little-when he told
> a meeting of Washington investors in mid-October that the CIA had been
> worrying too exclusively about atomic bombs and other weapons of mass
> destruction. "Over and over again, in public testimony and private
> briefings, we have warned of a major attack by bin Laden," he said. "We had
> the scope correct. We missed the means."
>
> Like Tenet, most of the CIA people I have talked to in recent weeks have
> balked at the word "failure," struggling to say it without saying it. Their
> reading of the event, stripped to its essence, is that no intelligence
> service can be reasonably asked to predict every attack mounted by a
> terrorist group, and that the CIA's performance is more fairly measured by
> what has followed-identifying the likely suspects, mounting a major
> investigation, calling on friendly intelligence services for help in
> blocking further attacks, and playing a vigorous and conspicuous role in the
> US military campaign to overthrow the Taliban and capture Osama bin Laden in
> Afghanistan. The performance of the CIA, therefore, should be measured on
> what an intelligence service can do-respond quickly and accurately-and not
> on what it can't do, no matter how good it is. By any fair measure,
> therefore, the CIA did not fail.
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----
>
> Behind this defensiveness is a lively fear of the CIA's perennial
> nightmare -reorganization under the prod of Congress. Like all directors of
> central intelligence, Tenet has done some reorganizing himself; one of the
> first things his friend Buzzy Krongard did as executive director was to
> abolish the Directorate of Administration, thereby drawing under his
> immediate control the former DA's five separate offices for in-house
> management-finance, security, personnel, and the like-long famous for their
> independence.
>
> The history of the CIA is a record of constantly changing offices and lines
> of authority, usually to reflect shifting priorities in the White House.
> What the agency fears is not new decision trees but radical surgery. Until
> he retired a year ago Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan openly advocated doing
> away with the CIA entirely as an unwieldy relic of the cold war. Other
> would-be reformers have suggested splitting covert action from intelligence
> analysis, perhaps even going so far as to give covert action to the Pentagon
> and analysis to the State Department-despite the fact that neither wants it.
>
> Former director John Deutch, who ran the agency for eighteen months under
> President Clinton, published an article in Foreign Affairs in 1998 arguing
> that the agency's Counter-Terrorism Center should be transferred to the FBI.
> "Senators and congressmen all think they know what intelligence is all
> about," I was told by Richard Helms, who ran the CIA for six years until
> President Nixon sent him to Iran in 1973. "Reorganization is their main
> delight, but I myself don't think they're going to achieve anything by it."
> Most longtime intelligence professionals believe, like Helms, that basic
> intelligence work remains the same, however much the flow charts and
> diagrams are changed. President Bush appears to agree. Earlier this year he
> asked for a comprehensive intelligence review, still unwritten on September
> 11. But in the days following the attacks Bush made a point of being
> photographed in earnest discussion with his chief advisers-Vice President
> Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and George Tenet.
> The message appeared to be clear: the President is sticking with the agency
> and the director he has got.
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----
>
> But there is a group of intelligence dissidents in Washington who think this
> would be a historic mistake. They argue that the CIA's failure to grasp the
> scope of al-Qaeda's plans reveals deep structural problems within the agency
> that go far beyond ordinary questions of funding and who reports to whom,
> and that no attempt to identify weaknesses or correct problems can go
> forward while George Tenet remains in charge. The criticisms come not from
> think tanks or bureaucratic rivals of the CIA like the FBI, but from a vocal
> group of former intelligence officers-mostly young, mostly field officers
> from the Directorate of Operations (DO), mostly well-respected and destined
> for solid careers until they chose to leave-who believe that the CIA is in
> steep decline. The most vocal of these critics is Robert Baer, a twenty-year
> veteran of numerous assignments in Central Asia and the Middle East whose
> last major job for the agency was an attempt to organize Iraqi opposition to
> Saddam Hussein in the early 1990s-shuttling between a desk in Langley and
> contacts on the ground in Jordan, Turkey, and even northern Iraq.
>
> That assignment came to an abrupt end in March 1995 when Baer, once seen as
> a rising star of the DO, suddenly found himself "the subject of an
> accusatory process." An agent of the FBI told him he was under investigation
> for the crime of plotting the assassination of Saddam Hussein. The
> investigation was ordered by President Clinton's national security adviser,
> Anthony Lake, who would be nominated to run the agency two years later. The
> Baer investigation was only one of many reasons that the intelligence
> organizations resisted Lake, forcing him to withdraw his name in 1997, and
> clearing the way for George Tenet.
>
> Eventually, the case against Baer was dismissed with the help of the
> Washington lawyer Jeffrey Smith, who served as the agency's general counsel
> under John Deutch. But for Baer the episode was decisive. "When your own
> outfit is trying to put you in jail," he told me, "it's time to go."
>
> Baer's was one of many resignations in recent years; the dissidents'
> portrait of the agency which follows comes from him, from Howard Hart, from
> another veteran DO operator and former chief of station in Amman, Jordan,
> named David Manners, and from others who preferred not to be identified.
> They have differing career histories and views but on some things they
> agree. The Clinton years, in their view, saw a crippling erosion of the
> agency's position in Washington. Its leadership is now timid and its staff
> demoralized. Top officials, they say, worry more about the vigilantes of
> political correctness than the hard work of collecting intelligence in the
> field. The shock of discovering Aldrich Ames in 1994 was followed by a
> period of destructive self-criticism.
>
> "That was the beginning of the 'Shia' era in the agency," said Manners. He
> was referring to the branch of Islam, centered in Iran, which stresses the
> unworthiness and sinfulness of man. "We all had to demonstrate our penance,"
> Manners told me. "Focus groups were organized, we 'reengineered' the
> relationship of the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate of
> Intelligence." This meant dropping the bureaucratic wall between the
> analysts and the covert operators and introducing "uniform career
> standards." Henceforth a year in some country where it was dangerous to
> drink the water would get you no farther up the ladder than a year pushing
> paper in Langley. When John Deutch came in he appointed as chief of
> operations an analyst, David Cohen, who had never supervised an agent or
> even asked the chief of a foreign intelligence service to share information
> from his files. This was the era of "process action teams" which studied
> managerial questions like what sort of paperwork to use for agent handling.
> A committee of a dozen, split between case officers and analysts, might
> spend half a day wrestling with such questions twice a week for a year or
> more. "Navel gazing," Manners calls it.
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----
>
> In the reengineered CIA it was possible for Deborah Morris to be appointed
> the DO's deputy chief for the Near East. "Her husband was thrown out of
> Russia in 1994," said one of the dissidents, referring to James L. Morris,
> the Moscow station chief expelled during the Ames affair. "She worked her
> way up in Langley. I don't think she's ever been in the Near East. She's
> never run an agent, she doesn't know what the Khyber Pass looks like, but
> she's supposed to be directing operations-telling the operators if some
> pitch [i.e., plan] is a good idea."
>
> The dissidents argue that "uniform career standards" did nothing to improve
> intelligence analysis but hurt field operations badly. Many DO veterans
> resigned and others lost heart when they saw what happened to Richard Holm,
> the Paris station chief who was yanked back after an attempt to recruit
> French officials went awry in 1995. US Ambassador Pamela Harriman fumed that
> whatever Holm was after, "it isn't worth the embarrassment to me." The word
> went forth from Langley-no more flaps, which meant don't stick your neck
> out, which meant safe operations or none at all. When Deutch arrived, Holm
> left, a harsh back of the hand for one of the agency's legendary operators.
> To fill the gap came a new emphasis on "reports"-the number of separate
> pieces of paper forwarded to Langley, whatever their quality. "What use is a
> Cray supercomputer at the Counter-Terrorism Center," Baer asks, "if you've
> got nothing to put into it?"
>
> With the end of the cold war the agency cut back on recruiting agents,
> closed down many stations including most of those in Africa, and even quit
> accepting defectors from the old KGB in 1992-several years before the CIA
> uncovered Aldrich Ames and another DO spy, Harold Nicholson, less celebrated
> but almost as damaging-he was known around the DO as "Ranger Jim." At the
> same time the DO dismantled all the Counterespionage Groups, staffed mainly
> by "little old ladies" who knew the old cold war targets backward and
> forward but were no longer needed. Spies were a thing of the past; the new
> order of the day was to "manage intelligence relationships." In Morocco, the
> station chief told Baer he was crazy for trying to mount ambitious
> operations. "We were told to stand down," another dissident said. If you had
> checked the books you would have found just as many code names for secret
> agents, the dissidents say, but it was mainly window dressing-routine CIA
> informants puffed up in reports.
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----
>
> Along with the pullback in recruiting, the dissidents say, came a turn
> inward. Once operators had prided themselves on their grasp of local
> language and culture; now they stayed home watching American videos on TV.
> The CIA has long been wary of letting officers become too closely identified
> with any single country, language, or region; the British once called it
> "going native," the CIA calls it "falling in love." But the great operators
> in the past tended to speak languages like the natives, weren't afraid of
> the water, had a feel for the way national politics and culture were
> interconnected. That, at any rate, was what the dissidents had hoped to be
> when they joined the agency. Howard Hart, a graduate of the University of
> Arizona, was sent by the agency in 1966 to India, where he learned Urdu and
> Hindustani; later he added "passable German." Robert Baer learned French,
> German, Arabic, and even the Farsi dialect known as Dari when he was
> stationed in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. No Dari speakers served in
> Dushanbe after Baer left, and the agency has since closed the station down.
> "Do you know how many Pashto speakers the CIA has got?" he asks, citing the
> language of the principal ethnic group in Afghanistan, including most of the
> leadership of the Taliban. "The agency will tell you some imaginary number
> but I am telling you none. Do you know how many were sent to learn it after
> the embassy bombings? None."
>
> With the mass resignations from the DO in recent years the match between
> station chief and country got ever more arbitrary; one recent chief in
> Beijing, a dissident says, picked for the job by Deutch's executive
> director, Nora Slatkin, spoke no Chinese and suffered from a conspicuous
> skin disease which the Chinese find particularly offensive. The loss of
> language speakers was not limited to the agency; the National Security
> Agency, a dissident claims, has only one Pashto speaker-a problem solved by
> sending transcripts of intercepted communications to Pakistan for
> translation by the ISI, an organization with a long history of involvement
> with the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. Some intelligence officials even
> believe that it was the ISI who warned bin Laden to get out of Khost before
> American cruise missiles struck in August 1998 in retaliation for the
> embassy bombings.
>
> The dissidents say that the CIA is still staffed with hard-working people of
> talent and dedication and that it can still do competent work. They know how
> vast the agency's resources are and are familiar with the technical marvels
> which collect intelligence. Above all, they recognize that the apparent
> success of the military effort in Afghanistan seems to have reassured the
> public that things are now going well. But all the same the dissidents
> insist that things have gone badly wrong at the agency. Years of public
> criticism, attempts to clean house, the writing and rewriting of rules, and
> efforts to rein in the Directorate of Operations have all conspired to make
> the agency insular, risk-averse, and gun-shy. So have catch-up hiring of
> women and minorities, public hostility that makes it hard to recruit at
> leading colleges, complacency following victory in the cold war, the
> humiliation of the Ames case, even the long economic boom which put CIA
> salaries farther and farther behind routine offers to recent graduates by
> business and industry. The dissidents don't say that all of these problems
> are somehow the doing of George Tenet, but they do say they have undermined
> the CIA's ability to follow terrorists through the streets of the Arab
> world. A few months ago theirs was only the opinion of a group of
> disaffected officials; since September 11 it ought to be considered
> seriously.
>
> 3.
> It is hard to find anyone in the intelligence community who dislikes George
> Tenet. He is an open-faced, hefty man, a reformed cigar smoker, friendly in
> manner, a slapper of backs and a clutcher of arms, earnest, interested,
> quick to take a point, and open to new ideas. "The outgoingness is a genuine
> gift," said Helms, who has watched many directors of central intelligence
> come and go. "Who else could lecture Arafat on the Middle East-up close with
> his hand on Arafat's lapel-and get away with it?" Tenet's confirmation in
> July 1997 also brought a welcome end to the revolving door on the seventh
> floor of CIA headquarters, where Tenet replaced Deutch, who had replaced
> James Woolsey, who had replaced Robert Gates, with a number of failed
> nominations in between. Tenet has set a recent record for peaceful tenure of
> the DCI's long, wood-paneled office overlooking the imposing main entrance
> to the building which Tenet renamed (before the last presidential election)
> the Bush Intelligence Center. The Bush in question is the President's
> father, who was director for ten days short of a year in 1976- 1977 and is
> still remembered as the ideal intelligence consumer when he was in the White
> House.
>
> The bureaucratic clout of DCIs can be measured by how often they meet with
> the president. With some it's practically never; with most it starts often
> and fades off. In the case of Tenet and the current President Bush it is
> reported to be every day, with the arrival of the DCI at the White House
> carrying the President's Daily Brief, a printed document reporting much as a
> newspaper might the classified intelligence take and hot issues of the
> moment. Trust and personal liking of this sort is rare and CIA officials,
> happy to have the attention of the Oval Office, don't want to mess with it.
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----
>
> Tenet got the job by an unusual route through a succession of staff jobs
> dealing with intelligence issues for congressional committees. After several
> years as an aide to Senator John Heinz, Tenet joined the forty-member staff
> of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1985. Four years later he was
> appointed staff director and then in 1993 he moved to the White House, where
> he handled intelligence matters for the National Security Council and met
> John Deutch, who brought him out to Langley in 1995 as deputy director of
> central intelligence. Even Tenet's admirers concede he got the top job
> mainly because Clinton did not want to risk another confirmation failure
> after Lake bowed out, and Tenet had already been confirmed once by the
> Senate. "George is a service kind of guy," said an officer who worked with
> him at the agency. "He knew what congressmen wanted and needed and he dealt
> with the White House the same way." What is remarkable about Tenet's career
> is that he had no intelligence background or experience of the usual kind;
> his expertise was all learned in the corridors of power where the deciding
> question is what will fly. His largely trouble-free years at the CIA prove
> that he knows how to navigate the maze of a political town.
>
> Three years ago Tenet invented a new position-"counselor" to the DCI -and
> hired the sixty-four-year-old lawyer and businessman A.B. Krongard to fill
> it. A Princeton graduate and martial arts enthusiast, Krongard had recently
> retired after selling his share in a Baltimore stock brokerage firm to
> Bankers Trust for $70 million. Last March Tenet moved Krongard up into the
> job of executive director, where he is in charge of managing the agency,
> including its secret operations, while the director deals with broader
> issues of policy and strategy. The dissidents say that Krongard may know how
> to run a financial firm and make a pot of money, and George Tenet may know
> how to keep out of bureaucratic fights he can't win; but neither one of
> them, the dissidents say, really knows in any depth what effective
> intelligence requires, and on-the-job training isn't enough. It is
> impossible for any outsider to fairly judge what the dissidents are
> saying-and certainly not anyone as far outside as a journalist like myself.
> That is a matter for some official body.
>
> When things go awry in the intelligence business it is customary to do a
> damage report. The Ames damage report-a four-hundred-page document written
> by then CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz-in effect cost James Woolsey
> his job. In 1961, by the time the agency's inspector general, Lyman
> Kirkpatrick, got around to writing his assessment of the embarrassing
> failure of a CIA-trained and -financed rebel army at the Bay of Pigs, the
> DCI at the time, Allen Dulles, was already gone. That disaster was big
> enough to get a second report from a blue-ribbon panel headed by General
> Maxwell Taylor. The problem wasn't simply that the rebel army got shot to
> pieces as soon as it crossed the beach; it was that the agency had deceived
> itself about the real support throughout Cuba for Fidel Castro. The agency's
> plan couldn't work, and Taylor's job was to make sure that never happened
> again.
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----
>
> When I began to work on this article, the first person I called was the CIA
> officer I have known longest, a man who started his career during World War
> II, joined the CIA at its birth, and worked closely with just about every
> chief of covert operations until he retired after the first round of CIA
> scandals and subsequent reengineerings in the early 1970s. This man remains
> extremely active in retirement. He is a member of numerous study groups,
> panels, and commissions, and he rarely misses a conference on intelligence.
> He hates to criticize the agency he served all his life, but the failure of
> September 11 is not something he is ready to pass over in silence. "I don't
> think even Pearl Harbor matches this one," he said. "How often do you lose
> half a division in a day? Nothing has ever happened on this scale before.
> This was totally beyond anybody's beliefs or dreams. Nobody wanted to think
> the unthinkable."
>
> Was anybody talking about an investigation-a post-mortem to figure out what
> went wrong?
>
> "I don't understand it," said my friend. "There was a little talk but then
> it suddenly quieted down. Not even [Senator Richard] Shelby [former chairman
> of the Senate Intelligence Committee]-he knows he can't raise his head.
> Nobody is pushing for an investigation."
>
> Is it possible to handle the problem -whatever the problem-without an
> investigation?
>
> "No."
>
> What would an investigation require?
>
> "You need presidential and congressional authority. You can't just do it
> in-house."
>
> Could it be done while Tenet was still running the CIA?
>
> "If he's still there everybody will know he's watching. People won't tell
> you the truth. Everybody will be covering his ass, protecting his boss. They
> try to get rid of rivals. They hide paper and destroy evidence. I've seen
> it. You can overcome it by being a sonofabitch but only if the top guy is
> gone."
>
> There is nothing this man hates more than the way politics has torn apart
> the CIA over the years. I would say he about half agrees with the
> dissidents-not 100 percent on half what they say, but 50 percent on all of
> it. But he has little sympathy for people who talk out of school, and he
> knows how hard it is for investigators to keep political meddlers at bay,
> get to the bottom of what went wrong, and fix what isn't working. He was the
> first one to tell me, like someone describing a jewel, that Tenet had the
> President's ear, which meant the agency could do its job. To give that away,
> take your chances with someone new, open up a whole can of worms by asking
> how this could have happened... Talking about it he sounds like a man facing
> open-heart surgery.
>
> But?
>
> "It ought to be done. He ought to go."
>
> -December 19, 2001

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