CIA running on empty


	October 17, 2001	atimes.com

Front

CIA running on empty
By Marc Erikson

If some US senators and members of the House of Representatives get their way, one of the belated victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US may turn out to be the CIA.

On September 26, US President George W Bush visited CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and told a cheering crowd at the building named after his father, former president and former CIA director George Bush, "I've got a lot of confidence in him [Director of Central Intelligence George J Tenet] and I've got a lot of confidence in the CIA. And so should America."

But not surprisingly, after the September 11 attacks by 19 anonymous men, unforeseen and unforestalled by the CIA, not all agree. Indeed, the Bush Langley visit and morale booster came right after the ranking Republican on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Richard Shelby, had said, "I personally like George Tenet, and he has done some good things, but there have been too many failures on his watch and this is a big failure ... I believe the job is getting away from him." Prior to that he had spoken of a "colossal intelligence failure". Ohio Democrat Rep James Traficant's comment was even more scathing: "I believe the CIA and the FBI have been not only negligent, but ... I don't think we have much of an intelligence program," he said.

Tenet himself has acknowledged major problems. In a strongly worded memorandum, dated September 16 and titled "We're at War", he told senior officials at the CIA and other intelligence agencies that it was time to end past squabbles over turf and to begin immediately to coordinate their efforts and share information in the US's new war. The memorandum also called for an immediate end to peacetime bureaucratic constraints on the CIA. "The agency must give people the authority to do things they might not ordinarily be allowed to do," the memo said. "If there is some bureaucratic hurdle, leap it."

Much of what comes next in the effort of improving US intelligence performance is in the hands of Rep Porter J Goss, the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, a former CIA case officer viewed by many as the next director of central intelligence. Goss and his committee - in the context of authorizing intelligence spending for fiscal 2002 - issued a strongly-worded report on recent failures to warn against threats, to share information, to hire spies and train analysts, even to read mail in the in-box. "Thousands of pieces of data are never analyzed, or are analyzed after the fact ... They may "sit for months, and sometimes years," the report said.

Proposals now before the Goss and the Senate intelligence committees - many of them echoing far-reaching intelligence reorganization ideas in a 1996 House intelligence committee staff study, "IC21: Intelligence Community in the 21st Century" - range from simply hiring more intelligence officers to removal of restrictions on agent recruitment (including recruitment of "some very unsavory characters" in the words of US Vice President Dick Cheney) to giving cabinet rank to the director of central intelligence. But the proposal least likely to find favor with the CIA is the one voted by the House on October 5, ie, "to consider the establishment of a separate Clandestine Service" for mounting covert actions outside the country.

At present, most foreign covert US intelligence operations are carried out by the officers of the CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO). In addition, the US military and other departments and agencies of government (treasury, justice) have limited covert action capabilities. Several of those would be combined with the DO's to form the new clandestine service.

Calls for such a service have been prompted by long-perceived and now painfully obvious deficiencies in human intelligence (Humint) collection. Since the early 1990s, nearly half of all US spies have departed from the CIA, leaving little more than a thousand in place at this point. Moreover, many of those who departed were precisely officers with ample experience in the Middle East and South Asia who had successfully recruited and run agents there, but were either told they were no longer needed or left in disgust over ever tighter restrictions put on their activities and the increasingly risk-averse, bureaucratic nature of DO operations. One such former operative is Reuel Marc Gerecht who wrote in the July/August issue of The Atlantic Monthly in an article datelined Peshawar (Pakistan): "Even in the darkness I had a case officer's worst sensation - eyes following me everywhere ... No matter where I went, the feeling never left me. I couldn't see how the CIA as it is today had any chance of running a successful counterterrorist operation against bin Ladin in Peshawar, the Dodge City of Central Asia." In the same article, Gerecht quotes a former senior CIA Near East Division operative as saying, "The CIA probably doesn't have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist ..."

Another former officer (un-named) recalls his experiences in Egypt, South Asia and Muslim countries in Southeast Asia: "We knew how to do it, recruit and run agents, get inside information. But it all became more and more bureaucratic ... Long forms on agents' backgrounds, were they human rights violators and what not ... Everything had to be vetted and approved by [CIA] management ... It was safer to just drop contacts."

So, contacts were dropped, qualified officers were let go or told to go; eventually the ball was dropped by the agency - and then came September 11 and now the scramble is on to rectify what years of neglect have wrought. But that won't happen in the short-run, says Norbert Garrett, a former senior CIA official and president of Kroll Associates, a global security firm, quoted in the New York Times of October 7: "Creating a more ruthless, back-alley, street-spying clandestine service won't happen overnight ... And it's dangerous to do it in reaction to a tragedy."

Meanwhile, the CIA has reportedly made little progress in Afghanistan in organizing resistance to the Taliban among the Pashtun tribes in the south of the country, nor is it working with all of the factions that make up the Northern Alliance of Taliban opponents. You can't just walk back into a situation on which you closed the doors a decade ago.

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