Twelve years of CIA
discontent By Tomas Jones and Marc
Erikson
For a dozen years or more, things have
been going from bad to worse at the US Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA). Some, of course, may welcome
this. They should note the following, however: for
better or for worse, the United States - militarily and
economically - is the world's most powerful nation. When
its foreign-intelligence
service stumbles from intelligence failure to
intelligence failure, mis-assessment to mis-assessment,
and, finally, a near-collapse of its discipline,
integrity and morale, more than just US national
security is put at risk. Avoidable, globally
destabilizing catastrophic events occur. Unnecessary
wars are fought. Were US public and private financial
and economic leadership beset by the same degree of
incompetence as witnessed at the CIA, the US and large
parts of the world economy that depend on it would be in
a shambles. (Some, of course, think they are.)
Take heart. US President George W Bush in August
appointed Florida Republican Congressman Porter Goss as
his new director of central intelligence (DCI). A month
later, the US Senate overwhelmingly (77-17) approved the
appointment. Goss is supposed to have what it takes to
reform and revitalize an agency he once described as
"dysfunctional" and which in a congressional report
under Goss's signature in his former capacity as House
Intelligence Committee leader is characterized as "a
stilted bureaucracy incapable of even the slightest bit
of success". Goss has also been ordered by Bush to come
up with a concrete plan in 90 days for increasing the
number of CIA field operatives and analysts by 50% - a
large task considering the fact that the Directorate of
Operations (DO; clandestine service) alone now has a
staff of about 4,500, though only about one-third of
those are estimated to be actively deployed as case
officers running and recruiting agents.
More
stars on the wall Goss's credentials for the job
look impressive. After graduating from Yale University
in 1960 with a major in classical Greek, he joined the
US Army. After a brief brush with army intelligence, he
shifted to the CIA in 1962, serving as a case officer
until 1972 when his career in the DO was cut short by
illness. He was first elected to Congress (Florida, 14th
District) in 1988. From 1997 until 2004, he served as
head of the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence. As a CIA field operative, he reportedly
had some involvement with John F Kennedy's Bay of Pigs
fiasco. Later he specialized in infiltration and
subversion of labor movements in Central America
(Mexico, Dominican Republic, Haiti) and Western Europe.
Suffice it to say, when it comes to intelligence
failures, he probably knows what he's talking about.
In his first months in office, Goss has taken
the ax to the DO, the front-line CIA component in global
intelligence operations. The deputy director of
operations (DDO), Stephen Kappes, in office only for a
few months, and his principal assistant, Michael Sulick,
have (been) resigned. So, reportedly, have the
undercover operations chiefs of the Far East and Europe
divisions. Gone as well is interim DCI John McLaughlin.
Rumor has it that deputy director of intelligence (DDI;
analysis) Jami Miscik won't stay a whole lot longer.
This year she told the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence that she had asked her analysts to "stretch
to the maximum the evidence you had" connecting Saddam
Hussein to Osama bin Laden. All in all, about 20 senior
CIA officials have left the agency since Goss took over.
What do Goss and his new DDO Jose Rodriguez aim
to do to fix the clandestine service? "More stars on the
wall," said a DO officer, referring to the stars placed
on the wall of the lobby in CIA headquarters at Langley
for every CIA officer killed in the line of duty. What
must change, according to Goss, is the agency's "culture
of risk aversion". He wants the DO to "launch a more
aggressive campaign to use undercover officers to
penetrate terrorist groups and hostile governments" - a
high-risk strategy to increase drastically the number
and use of non-official cover (NOC) officers instead of
the current practice of deploying the majority of DO
officers as diplomats assigned to US embassies with the
benefit of diplomatic immunity as they attempt to
recruit and gather intelligence from foreigners.
Fatal errors under Tenet Such
stratagems ("strategies" is too big a word) are not
necessarily misplaced - though implementation is
another, rather more difficult issue. We'll get to the
latter. But take, for example, three different and
crucial omissions and intelligence operations failures
over the past several years that were avoidable, but
arguably were at least in part responsible for letting
the events of September 11, 2001, come to pass and for
the outbreak and surrounding circumstances of the Iraq
war 18 months later:
1) At the time of the
Afghan mujahideen resistance to the Soviet occupiers in
the 1980s, the CIA developed and for several years
maintained close collaboration with individuals and
organizations including Osama bin Laden and groups that
later morphed into al-Qaeda. It should have been a
straightforward matter to place agents into these groups
that could later have informed on their activities and
plans. Neglect and failure of foresight led to a
situation in which the US was blind-sided not just to
September 11, but to prior attacks on US personnel,
installations and assets.
2) At the time of the
Iran-Iraq War, also in the 1980s, the US had a working
relationship with Saddam Hussein and his military.
Again, agents and informants could/should have been put
in place to spy on and possibly "take out" Saddam,
avoiding both the Gulf and Iraq wars, but minimally to
develop accurate information on Saddam's weapons
programs.
3) In the 1990s, as the now-notorious
oil-for-food scam evolved, it should have been an easy
task to gather accurate and timely intelligence on
details of the fraudulent aspects of the scheme, giving
the US a stronger hand during prewar negotiations at the
United Nations. As it was, pertinent documents were only
discovered in Baghdad after the US invasion.
Many, though by no means all, of these types of
operations and analysis failures can be laid at the
doorstep of the man who, after his June resignation from
the position of DCI, has raked in well in excess of
US$500,000 for closed-door speaking engagements and, of
course, has spoken about what went right (or unavoidably
wrong) on his nine-year watch at the head or as deputy
director of the "Pizza" company. George Tenet in
numerous ways - his affable manner aside - exemplifies
the bureaucratization, ossification, risk aversion, and
lack of imagination and analytical acumen that now
characterize most sections of the CIA. Forty percent of
the agency's employees never had another big boss.
Tenet, now 51, was educated at Georgetown
University and the Columbia University School of
International Affairs. After serving for three years as
legislative assistant to Pennsylvania Senator John
Heinz, he joined the staff of the US Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence in 1985 and subsequently held
any number of jobs of the "assistant to ...", "special
assistant to ...", "director for ...", "senior director
for ..." variety in the national-security bureaucracy.
In 1992, he was a member of incoming president Bill
Clinton's national-security transition team. In July
1995, he became deputy director of central intelligence
(DDCI); in July 1997 DCI - largely by default: Clinton's
then National Security Council head Tony Lake, slated to
become DCI, was sure to be rejected by the Senate and
his nomination was withdrawn. Tenet's career as a
consummate inside-the-Beltway operator, certainly not
the spate of intelligence failures on his watch, explain
why he became the second-longest-serving DCI in the
CIA's 57-year history.
What went wrong at the
CIA under Tenet didn't start with him. Nor do we blame
him for intelligence failures as such. Spying and covert
operations are a risky business. "Sh-- happens" is the
short phrase for it. But what happened under Tenet is
that practices and attitudes that lead to intelligence
failures became institutionalized and ultimately made
such failures the rule and no longer the exception.
From bad to worse Some CIA case
officers overseas recall the period between Clinton's
November 1992 election and the January 1993 inauguration
as the "winter of despair". It was known in the agency
that Clinton was not interested in intelligence and
would demand budget cuts and set new priorities. After
all, the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union were gone,
Russia was in political turmoil and economically
finished; even China, North Korea, Iran and a few other
isolated places were no match, it was believed, for the
one remaining superpower. It was the economy, stupid!
And what had been expected soon came to pass. Budgets
for intelligence collection were pared down to the
quick. Programs were slashed even in advance of an
in-depth Clinton team assessment under the theory that
executive pencil-pushers in the agency could identify
and cut fat, more effectively and with less long-term
pain, well before the definition of and fights about new
objectives.
Clinton named James Woolsey to head
the CIA. Not a bad choice, perhaps; but within a short
period of time Woolsey was facing a nightmarish crisis.
Career operations officer Aldrich Ames was arrested and
discovered to have been spying for the Soviet Union and,
after the USSR's demise, Russia. The Ames affair was
compounded by the investigation and later arrest of Jim
Nicholson on similar charges. The counterintelligence
repercussions over the next several years were pervasive
and for several years would limit both the effectiveness
of the agency and its credibility among policymakers.
Morale was plummeting and ever-tighter budgets made the
traditional recruitment of highly placed informants with
access to significant information ever more challenging
and difficult. Intelligence-collection priorities would
be sent to the field only to be amended or questioned
later. Agents would be signed up and terminated when the
wind changed. Old-fashioned country-specific collection
and analysis were out the window. Major blind spots
began to appear despite the remaining large program
initiatives in non-proliferation and counter-terrorism.
An additional factor impacting on performance
and perceptions was Woolsey's inability to establish a
good working relationship with the House and Senate
Intelligence committees he was called in to brief. With
the CIA's every move scrutinized and questioned by
oversight, even senior CIA management looked to cover
their collective behind to protect career and pension
rather than engage in high-risk operations or stand up
for the integrity of their analysis and conclusions.
Where once it had been accepted as an axiom that,
because field case officers had to use deception and
misdirection as part of their toolkit to collect
intelligence from foreign sources, honesty and integrity
among case officers, analysts, and chiefs in
headquarters were essential, such unquestioned codes of
conduct began to fray at the edges and deception and
mistrust crept into interaction at all levels. You
cannot have a bunch of professional liars lying to each
other at the office and assume the system will continue
to function. It didn't, and more and more experienced
operations officers and analysts began to look outside
the agency for work.
When John Deutch, a
Massachusetts Institute of Technology chemistry
professor and defense-science specialist, but hardly a
man with deep understanding of the intelligence
business, succeeded Woolsey in May 1995 as CIA director,
things went from bad to worse. He stated his intention
of "cleaning up" the agency, in particular, moving away
from the nasty and sordid business of having its case
officers recruit spies who were not on their way to
sainthood. Nothing of substance got done - except for
the fact that the DO lost an additional large number of
humint (human intelligence) resources across the board.
By December 1996, Deutch was out and the Tenet
tenure (initially as acting director) was under way.
Morale continued to flag, mission orientation was fuzzy,
and with that, intelligence miscues began to multiply.
We won't review details. But by 1998, the CIA had failed
to anticipate Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests, was
blissfully oblivious to the dealings of the Abdul Qadeer
Khan nuclear proliferation network with countries
ranging from Libya to Iran and North Korea, and had
begun to miss opportunities (how many ultimately?) of
taking bin Laden out of circulation. But Tenet readily
survived all of that - and at the same time started to
build new political connections as the Clinton era
waned. In 1998, he acted to name CIA Langley
headquarters after former US president and CIA director
George H W Bush. As the 2000 election campaign rolled
around, he took to personally briefing then Texas
governor George W Bush on US intelligence operations and
assessments. Against all odds - new presidents usually
choose new CIA directors - Tenet managed to stay on as
Bush's DCI, for four more years.
By early 2001,
the agency and most notably the DO were mere shadows of
their former selves as the events of September 11 that
year would fatefully attest. Enter Donald Rumsfeld and
Dick Cheney. The US was now at war and the secretary of
defense and the vice president, both former chief
executive officers of major corporations and used to
throwing their weight around and getting straight
answers to tough questions, wanted actionable
intelligence - and didn't get it. Investigative
journalist Robert Dreyfuss penned an article in The
American Prospect (The Pentagon muzzles the CIA)
in December 2002, in which he details how the Department
of Defense created its own small intelligence outfit to
"develop" the intelligence and analyses required in the
run-up to the Iraq war. The upshot was that the CIA was
increasingly sidelined and marginalized in
national-security decision-making processes in advance
of the Iraq invasion.
But there's no point in
casting the Tenet CIA in the role of the aggrieved
party. It had it coming. By early 2003, the Dreyfuss
article was making the rounds among new and old hands in
the US intelligence community. It was e-mailed,
forwarded, re-forwarded, re-sent and debated among
innumerable former and current CIA employees who thought
(and may still think) it described damning details of
how Rumsfeld and the Pentagon had staged an intelligence
coup and used shaky intelligence and every other trick
in the book to prop up their case for the Iraq invasion.
Disgruntled CIA officers who had never questioned their
oath to secrecy were suddenly speaking out or didn't
care if their negative opinions carried over to anything
from inter-agency discussions to family gatherings or
casual meetings with friends. Leaks to the media became
frequent. The perception - and hence, in Washington,
reality - was created that the CIA was actively hostile
to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and any number of other
cabinet members.
Many intelligence officers
undoubtedly were and are. But they ignored the fact that
Rumsfeld's and Cheney's irritation with their CIA
briefers was not - in the first instance - aimed at
their considered opinions, but at the fact that the
briefers offered no considered opinions at all and time
and again proved unprepared and unable to answer pointed
and difficult questions effectively . That the CIA had
no answers rather than unpalatable ones was the
issue. Years of abject failure to develop any
humint sources in Iraq or in al-Qaeda rather than coming
up with well-sourced but divergent information was the
problem. And when CIA facts and analyses that differed
from the Pentagon or White House view were presented,
Tenet and his chief officers apparently lacked the
intestinal fortitude and integrity to insist that only
CIA-sanctioned intelligence be used in assessments. In a
crisis, under the weight of a dozen years of political
maneuvering, inattention, or non-existent leadership,
the CIA caved in.
In testimony before
congressional intelligence committees this year, Tenet
opined that fixing the CIA would take at least five
years. He shaped much of what the agency is now and
hence should know. It may have escaped him that such a
pessimistic view is also a telling indictment of his own
stewardship. But the question now is whether new DCI
Porter Goss has any realistic chance of fixing what so
long has been broken in more timely fashion.
The Goss challenge Goss has fired/let
go a couple of dozen senior CIA officers and managers.
Any new CEO of a large corporation with some 20,000
employees would have done no less and insisted on
appointing his own top management. Goss has the further
advantage of a mandate to hire several thousand new
workers, in this case representing an added investment
of about half a million dollars per new DO recruit
maturing in three to four years. The money may be there,
but is the ability to make the necessary changes?
We are apprehensive, shading to cautiously
optimistic. First and most important, Goss has a clear
(and funded) mandate from his commander-in-chief.
Second, as a former case officer from a time when agency
morale was intact, he will have a sense of how to
rekindle it. Cautions that partisanship and loyalty to
the president he serves would influence his judgment are
misplaced. The DCI serves the executive branch. A
fiercely partisan DCI Bill Casey served Ronald Reagan
well and got things done - some misdeeds
notwithstanding. But one Casey precept was, we can do
things more intelligently than going to a shooting war -
with well-planned surprise covert operations.
Ultimately, the issue there is administration policy. If
Goss can help Bush accomplish specified objectives,
whether in Iran or North Korea, with risks, but without
another war, his mission will be accomplished. Chances,
in our view, are better than even that Goss will succeed
in reconstituting a capable DO.
But intelligence
collection and targeted covert operations are only one
part of the story. Careful analysis insisting on Joe
Friday's "Just the facts, ma'am" must complement
operations; and once the facts are established, they
must not be tailored to fit preconceived policies and
notions. There's the hitch.
(Copyright 2004 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
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foreign-intelligence
service stumbles from intelligence failure to
intelligence failure, mis-assessment to mis-assessment,
and, finally, a near-collapse of its discipline,
integrity and morale, more than just US national
security is put at risk. Avoidable, globally
destabilizing catastrophic events occur. Unnecessary
wars are fought. Were US public and private financial
and economic leadership beset by the same degree of
incompetence as witnessed at the CIA, the US and large
parts of the world economy that depend on it would be in
a shambles. (Some, of course, think they are.)
