Posted on 11/01/2003 8:38:24 AM PST by Reagan Renaissance
Hon. Donald Rumsfeld
Secretary of Defense
The Pentagon
Washington DC
Dear Mr. Secretary:
I would like to add my voice to the chorus that is applauding your recent memo expressing concern about the war on terrorism and the war on Iraq: their progress, management, and cost implications. Given the present day situation, I do not think you could have selected a more opportune and relatively calm time for some “soul searching” thinking.
We now know how unfortunate it was that similar concerns were not raised early in the Vietnam War. Considerable expense, human lives, and American agony might have been averted if those in charge had raised probing questions early in the war.
I mention this because the similarities between the Vietnam War era and present events seem striking and troublesome. Specifically, there again seems to be an insufficient appreciation of the nature of the enemy, including his identity and motivation, as well as politics of too little substance and too little attention to the grim realities. Further, America’s real interests do not appear to be of first priority in the decision-making process.
One example of deep concern is reflected in Vice President Cheney’s guidance (quoted in Bush At War) on raising the possibility of state sponsorship associated with the anthrax terrorist events of October 2001. In a small meeting, CIA director George Tenet raised his concern about state sponsorship. Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis Libby, questioned the political wisdom of even mentioning the possibility of state sponsorship. Tenet quickly agreed that he was “not going to talk about a state sponsor” and Cheney said, “It’s good that we don’t because we’re not ready to do anything about it.”
This shadowy but, I believe, real cloud of state sponsorship – specifically, the potential behind-the-scenes role of Russia, China and others – is not limited to the anthrax episode. It is also present in both the war on terrorism and the war on Iraq. Major hidden state sponsors – Russia and most of its East European satellites – were present in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, but this presence was not taken into account. Indeed, their activities were often classified “Top Secret” and rarely brought out in the open in public discussions. Being honest about who we were fighting was avoided then and is avoided now when politically inconvenient. The usual explanation why is that serious complications would be raised were it to be seriously addressed. State sponsorship is avoided because it upsets the accepted perception of the situation and related threat assessments.
Consequently, many questions are not thoroughly addressed. How have bin Laden and Saddam Hussein eluded our efforts to “bring them to justice”? Are their survival instincts that good or have they received expert assistance from undisclosed state sponsors? Is the growing sophistication of the guerrilla attacks in Iraq strictly the result of home-grown terrorist operations or are there other assisting forces hiding in the shadows? What were high-ranking Russian political and military advisors doing in Baghdad during both of the wars?
When did Arab terrorism suddenly become free of state sponsors? Arab terrorism was brought out into the open and state sponsors were thoroughly recognized in the 1980s. Among the excellent 1981 sources, see Herbert Romerstein, Soviet Support for International Terrorists; Samuel Francis, The Soviet Strategy of Terror; Senate Judiciary Hearings on Terrorism: The Role of Moscow and Its Subcontractors; and Claire Sterling, The Terror Network. The Russians and their satellites were deeply involved in creation, organization, recruitment, training, support, and planning of Arab terrorism. Then, suddenly, beginning in roughly 1990, Russian state sponsorship dropped or was pushed down a black memory hole. Was this major change in the complexion of terrorism due to some dramatic breakthrough in intelligence or was it strictly politics coordinated with the dissolution of the Soviet empire? I will return to this point and its special relevance to the problems identified in your memo later in this discourse.
During recent media interviews with former U.S. officials and members of the House and Senate intelligence committees concerning U.S. intelligence failures, the point repeatedly stressed is how difficult the analytical intelligence problem is. However, that analytical problem may not be the whole or even main problem.
Consider the problem seen from a different, historical, perspective. Why has U.S. intelligence repeatedly suppressed information on Soviet/Russian intelligence operations, even within the national security community, and attacked those who correctly analyzed the problem and tried to speak out?
The history of intelligence biases to the detriment of the United States goes back many decades. During the Cold War, there was the grossly misleading intelligence estimate of when the Russians would explode their first atomic bomb (the CIA estimated this event was about ten years away) and the CIA’s subsequent efforts to discredit the civilian scientist who correctly estimated the nearness of the explosion (a few months) with embarrassing accuracy. In the 1960s, the CIA produced assessments of Russian nuclear strategy and stockpile that supported (or mirror imaged) U.S. policy but were simply wrong and the problem was not lack of information. They also buried intelligence on Russian chemical and biological warfare capabilities and long-range plans.
Intelligence malfeasance of this nature has been evident for over fifty years. U.S. intelligence silence concerning a whole host of major Russian intelligence operations (including narcotics trafficking, organized crime, terrorism, penetration of the media, and the Russian counterpart to the CIA’s project MKULTRA) has had devastating impact on the United States and many of our allies. The silence respecting Russian sponsorship of international terrorism now takes on special importance.
The CIA has worked harder to keep knowledgeable defectors from speaking out than it has to carefully debrief them. CIA director Richard Helms acknowledged this in Congressional hearings in the mid-1970s into the poor CIA treatment of defectors. Knowledgeable defectors have often been discredited when what they had to say ran counter to policy or institutional positions or when their knowledge raised questions about CIA competence.
CIA judgments in recruiting spies has been beyond incompetence. As explained to me by knowledgeable inside sources, when a review was conducted of recruited spies (that is, of their reliability in the sense of passing good information and not being controlled or recognized as spies by the enemy) following the acquisition of a cache of East German Stasi intelligence files in the early 1990s, the analyst concluded that 100 percent of recruited Cuban agents were actually double agents feeding the CIA false information, 100 percent of recruited East German agents were also doubled, and 90 percent of all recruited Communist agents should have been regarded as suspect enemy agents rather than properly vetted U.S. spies. The analyst was not rewarded for his valuable findings. Rather, he was reassigned to a position where he was unlikely to make more trouble. Did this “culture” operate to prevent an objective consideration of Iraq’s WMD capabilities or of the real threat Iraq posed or did not pose to the United States? Clearly, the “competence” of the CIA in evaluating the validity of human intelligence can not be trusted and this should be well known.
As indicated above, U.S. intelligence, especially the CIA, did its best to discredit any suggestion that the Russians had any role in sponsoring and organizing international terrorism. The CIA turned down Italy’s request for assistance in rescuing Aldo Moro (head of the Italian Christian Democratic Party) who had been abducted by Red Brigade terrorists in 1978 because there was “no evidence of Russian involvement.” This and some of the blatant evidence of Russian sponsorship of international terrorism that was well known at the time of Moro’s abduction is described in detail in Claire Sterling’s well received study The Terror Network. The CIA even attempted to discredit the highest ranking Communist official ever to defect to the West, even though he had first-hand knowledge (or because of his knowledge) of the Russian sponsorship of terrorism (and many other extremely important Russian intelligence operations as well). Fortunately, three senior DIA analysts debriefed this defector on the history and Russian role in international terrorism. They then were able to confirm everything he said using independent CIA and NSA sources. As described to me by one of the DIA analysts, the CIA, in turn, attempted to discredit even its own sources to keep the DIA findings of Russian terrorism sponsorship from being recognized in official estimates of terrorism.
The hardest part of intelligence analysis has not been the availability of information or its analysis. Rather, it has been the deliberate subversion of the intelligence process by various interests within the CIA and White House. Their mission appears to have been one of protecting various internal and external interests from exposure or embarrassment, including flawed U.S. policy. Discussions on the wars on terrorism and Iraq ignore these aspects of intelligence and threat assessment history.
Returning to the subject of Russian sponsorship of international terrorism, by the mid-1980s, the role of Russian intelligence as the motivating force behind international terrorism was finally acknowledged, even at the highest levels in the U.S. government, as is clearly evident in the 1986 book, Terrorism: How The West Can Win, edited by Benjamin Netanyahu. Of special relevance, this included Arab terrorism. The Russians had recruited and trained Arafat in the late 1950s and they also organized the PLO. The Russians were present and part of almost every terrorist group throughout the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and Europe. This was understood by experts on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and can be seen in numerous studies of terrorism in the 1980s.
What happened after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989-1991 is difficult to say because U.S intelligence directed toward Russia and neighboring areas was shut down in 1989 by direction. This was deplored at the time by U.S. intelligence analysts and collectors because it was precisely the time that intelligence collection directed against Russia should have been doubled or trebled to capitalize on the opportunities that temporarily existed during the chaos associated with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. U.S. intelligence, politicians, and the media suddenly “forgot” about the massive Russian atrocities perpetrated over the past seventy years – between 80 and 160 million deaths, untold suffering worse than anything imposed by Hitler and Hussein combined, and horrendous covert operations against the United States itself. For a documented study of the atrocities the Communists committed against their own subjects, see The Black Book of Communism. Beginning about 1990, why did top U.S. officials suddenly “forget” about Russian war crimes, atrocities and crimes against humanity and welcome top Communist crooks with open arms and gifts of billions of dollars out of the savings of U.S. citizens?
If ever one thing quickly became clear during the 1989-1991 metamorphosis, it was that neither the KGB nor GRU were “reformed” in any sense of the word. Russian foreign intelligence operations actually increased following the dissolution. There were some changes in tasking, but there is no basis for assuming, as those in the media and policy circles seem to be doing, that the bear shed its covert claws in subsequent years. The question of the continued role of Russian and Chinese intelligence in international terrorism and Iraq is highly relevant to your memo. Its consideration is most conspicuous by its relative absence in the public forum.
Another area your memo touches upon where some history is essential concerns the Islam teaching centers. Specifically, are they graduating ideologically-conditioned terrorists faster than we can kill them and should we perhaps do something like start a foundation to entice radical Islam schools into adopting “a more moderate course.” This is a valid question and a foundation might seem like a useful counter. Thousands of think-tank and academic intellectuals will undoubtedly applaud the idea. But, what do we really know about these teaching centers and who instructs the instructors?
Soviet/Russian KGB initiated intelligence efforts to infiltrate and turn all major religions to their use over sixty years ago. The three principal tactics they employed were to 1) sabotage or discredit principled religious leaders; 2) recruit as agents those existing religious leaders and clerics they could turn, compromise, or blackmail; and 3) recruit young men as agents whose mission was to enter various seminaries and teaching centers as students. These agent-students would diligently pursue their studies and following graduation would work their way up the leadership ladder. In recruiting and sending intelligence agents to such schools, the Russian objective was to develop a homegrown set of inside religious leaders – priests, ministers, imams and so forth – who would become teachers and church officials and influence the church and its membership, especially its youth, from within.
This operation was extremely effective and has caused havoc in many religions. Their progress can be seen by the mid-1950s when it was not at all unusual for 50 percent of the students in Catholic seminaries to be recruited Russian intelligence agents. (Additional details on the Russian strategy toward religions is contained in the book Red Cocaine: The Drugging of America. See also The Devil’s Final Battle by Fr. Paul Kraemer.) The same was true in other religions. The religion that the Russians had most easily penetrated was Islam. What we are seeing in the Muslim teaching centers is as much a Russian product as an Arab product.
To better appreciate the process, consider the Catholic Church in Latin America. Liberation Theology emerged in the late 1960s. It is a sophisticated blend of Christianity and Marxism. It is a revolutionary Christianity developed for Latin America. This is generally recognized by professionals who have studied this phenomenon. But, what is not understood is that Liberation Theology was not developed in Latin America. As explained by the top Czech defector, Gen. Jan Sejna, Liberation Theology was developed in Moscow in 1960-1962 for insertion into Latin America following Vatican II, which itself was strongly influenced by Communist agents who were present and exerted considerable control over the proceedings. (A number of their agents installed in seminaries had worked their way up in the system and were present as official Vatican II participants. Additionally, the Russians had over seven agent priests in the Vatican by 1957, three of which were Czech intelligence agents.) One might consider asking how many Russian agents infiltrated the Muslim teaching centers and how many are now teaching in the Islam teaching centers or leaders of the jihad? What chance would forming a U.S. style foundation have to entice moderate changes in teaching centers run or heavily influenced by trained Russian agents?
Of equal concern are some of the other aspects of the war on terrorism. When the U.S. war on terrorism commenced two years ago, terrorist financing and associated money laundering became a major target. The aim was to destroy this financial support apparatus. Two years later, the U.S. administration reports that we have seized or impounded terrorist funds in the neighborhood of $150 million. Yet, it has been reported in the press that the Taliban and al Qaeda just prior to the war had income of several billion dollars from narcotics trafficking alone. We have seized only a small percentage of their illegal funds. We evidently also have failed to locate Hussein’s reported billions. Clearly, there is a major support apparatus that we have hardly been able to touch.
Why? Certainly we must be aware of the supporting banks and money transfer channels. One of the efforts by NSA to track the terrorist funding back in the 1980s had no problem following a $600 million loan that was managed by the First National Bank of Chicago. The loan was cleared in London from where it went to the Aussenhandels Bank in East Germany and from there $60 million of the loan went to terrorist organizations around the globe. Did not this secret low-budget NSA effort to track the flow of money continue over the years? If not, why not?
Perhaps, again, it is because U.S. intelligence does not understand or want to understand the nature of the problem. Or, are there other interests that take precedence? When Commissioner William von Raab left U.S. Customs in 1989, he made it clear that the efforts of Customs to stop the flow of illegal drugs and associated money transfers were repeatedly blocked by elements of the U.S. government. He referred to the State Department as “the nation’s conscientious objector in the war on drugs.” As for stopping the flow of cocaine, he said this could never succeed “until we placed it above the problem of third world debt.” What he meant was that efforts to stop the flow of cocaine were opposed by other elements in the U.S. government because the cocaine was the source of cash flow needed in Latin America to service the debt owed to the large New York banks.
Terrorism is so closely associated with narcotics trafficking that we omit the drug trade from the war on terrorism at our peril. This is especially evident in Colombia. But, there are associated penalties. Is anyone in Washington D.C. interested in really exploring the issue of U.S. drug money laundering, associated institutional compromise, and its impact on internal security? Consider: Domestic U.S. marijuana production in 1992 measured around $30 billion per year, using DEA production estimates. Add in all the cocaine, heroin, PCP, et cetera and the annual amount of illegal drug dollars earned in the United States rises to the $150-$200 billion range annually, which is where it has been for over two decades. (This estimate is consistent with the Justice Department estimates in the mid-1980s and the Economist estimates in the early-1990s and the World Bank and UN organized crime estimates in the mid and late 1990s. The U.S Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates are unreliable estimates because they are based on household use statistics that understate the magnitude of the problem by a factor of two or three or more because they only look at household use as voluntarily reported.) An illegal business of $150 to $200 billion or more is unthinkable without tremendous and cumulative growing compromise and corruption within the law and order, justice, business, political, police and intelligence communities. It continues because it is, in effect, politically protected.
Consequences of the 9-11 attack were major – 3,000 deaths and $100 billion or more in damage. However, this is far less than the annual costs of illegal drugs – 50,000 deaths, over $200 billion in expenses, and hundreds of thousands of teenage casualties. This is the small part of the problem. Much more serious are the “spin-off” complications: untold but unquestionably horrendous impact of drug money corruption on our leaders in politics, law, criminal justice, business, and government; enormous economic destruction and hurt to tens of millions of families who have experienced the problems of having a drug addict in their family; the moral undermining of now three generations of future leaders; the impact on the workers, especially minorities, and on the traditional American pride and work ethic. Not one in ten million Americans recognizes these effects or the fact that they were all objectives of Russian and Chinese intelligence in their state narcotics trafficking operations that were initiated in 1949 (China) and 1959 (Russia and her subcontractors). Another Russian objective was to undermine the intelligence and thinking ability of American youth by getting them into drugs. We now recognize that illegal drugs, including marijuana, do damage to the mind and thinking process. For over two decades now, drug use in high schools has been way over fifty percent. How do you measure the consequences those statistics?
For over forty years, we have avoided facing up to this problem – understanding that narcotics trafficking is a deliberate, planned foreign attack on our country every bit as much as 9-11 and orders of magnitude more important – and devising a strategy to counter it. In light of this and similar attacks by organized crime how can we expect to defend our homeland let alone rid the world of terrorism? How can we suddenly sound the terrorist claxon with puffed out chests and not become serious about narcotics trafficking and organized crime?
Legislation in process (the Victory Act) intends to add another war on narcotics trafficking and money laundering to the war on terrorism. We can only hope that it will be managed better than the 40-year old “war on drugs” that was never fought. It was mostly political eye-wash. A good analysis of this fraudulent war during the Nixon Administration is presented by Edward J. Epstein in Agency of Fear; see also Red Cocaine.
Carrying this a step further, any serious war on narcotics trafficking and money laundering has to open a war on organized crime. Yet this, too, seems conspicuous by its absence. Narcotics trafficking represents 30 to 50 percent of organized crime’s take. Would anyone expect to wage war on money laundering, which presumably has been part of the war on terrorism since September 2001, without waging war on organized crime when money laundering is the heart and soul of organized crime?
Perhaps it is instructive to drop back three years and review the U.S. International Crime Threat Assessment interagency study. It is most instructive because of the monies involved. The annual money laundering portion was estimated by U.S. government experts to be a minimum of $900 billion. Its maximum was estimated to exceed $2 trillion. This is a tremendous amount of money and a significant portion goes to bribes and political elections. Examples of the consequent process of compromise and corruption at the highest levels are presented in the report. They involve political, government, business, law and order, justice, and intelligence services corruption around the globe. The report did not except the United States because it was somehow immune from such effects. Indeed, the United States is regarded as one of the world’s money laundering centers. Also high on the list are Russia and Israel. How much U.S. foreign “aid” feeds the coffers of organized crime and terrorism?
Building on this background, it is critical to dig into the genealogy of today’s international terrorism, international narcotics trafficking, and international organized crime. Are they independent although loosely connected or might they be related? Is narcotics trafficking, as the State Department testified to Congress in 1988, run by just a bunch of crooks whose only motivation is profit and is, as they also testified, there no evidence of Communist involvement – or are they just looking the other way? Ken deGraffenreid was on the NSC staff from 1981 to1987. He grew concerned that many U.S. officials opposed efforts aimed at combating Russian intelligence operations in the United States. Many State Department colleagues insisted, he explained, “that little serious effort, diplomatic or otherwise, should be directed at the KGB threat within the United States [because it] would upset U.S-Soviet relations. …the State Department, to my knowledge, opposed at least initially every one of the hundreds of recommendations for dealing with the hostile intelligence threat presented within the government.”
If one is concerned about what has led up to our current predicament, it is essential to understand that all these operations – narcotics trafficking, terrorism, and organized crime – were adopted by the Soviets in 1955 as major strategic intelligence operations to use against the free world, primarily against the industrialized West, with the United States as the main enemy. This was also clearly explained to me by Gen. Sejna and most of what he said has now been confirmed through other sources. Russian intelligence elevated these disjoint and disparate operations as they existed at the end of World War II into massive highly coordinated state intelligence operations. China was also in this game as a state participant since 1949, when it became a Communist state, although not in such an organized manner as the Russian operation.
Annual meetings were held to coordinate global operations and facilitate cooperation. The first meeting of international terrorism was called the Tri-Continental Conference. It met in Havana, Cuba, in 1966. The main body of the conference was focused on terrorism. A more secret component also present at the conference that nothing has been written about dealt with narcotics trafficking, organized crime, and money laundering. Today, these operations are intertwined and interactive. As described in detail in my book, Red Cocaine, covert “management” has been operated out of the strategic intelligence directives of the KGB and the GRU, with the KGB taking the lead in organized crime because of its proximity to politics and policy and with the GRU taking the lead in terrorism and narcotics trafficking because these are sabotage operations and, as a side benefit, they are designed to serve as a cover for infiltration operations to be initiated in anticipation of war.
All these linkages are very important to your task of devising a counter-terrorism strategy. For example, one of the most frightening developments of the past forty years that is almost never in evidence is the advanced technology developments in chemical and biological warfare agents. If it serves their interest, Russian military intelligence, the GRU, can make these available for use in narcotics, organized crime, and terrorist operations. The networks that support these operations (especially terrorism and narcotics trafficking) were developed also to serve the needs associated with CBW sabotage, which can be indistinguishable from terrorism.
The GRU and KGB planned their long-range operations and associated covert infrastructure carefully. Terrorist and narcotics operations were an integral part of these plans because they provided such excellent cover for sabotage operations. Unfortunately, no one in U.S. intelligence has ever wanted to consider the possibility of Russian long-range planning. The only Communist leader to defect who was part of the decision-making hierarchy, Gen. Sejna, told his CIA handlers that in his opinion the most important information he brought with him was detailed information on the Russian “Long-Range Plan for the Next Ten to Fifteen Years and Beyond,” but that he would not discuss it until the decision to grant him diplomatic immunity was made. After that happened, however, no one in the intelligence community debriefed Gen. Sejna on Russia’s “Long-Range Plan.” Certainly we can not blame that on the difficult nature of the analytic intelligence process.
Perhaps needless to say, no one in the U.S. government or intelligence community appears to have been interested in recognized this type of background information. Among other things, to look at such realities would be “politically incorrect.” This is still the case today and is implicit in many of the questions you raised in your recent memo. The point is: who will dare to comprehensively address the questions you raise? The success of your mission depends on it. How can one fight a war or even think about developing an effective strategy when the nature and presence of state-sponsored terrorism, narcotics trafficking, organized crime, and the magnitude of global compromise and corruption (the end result of a forty-year silence concerning the Russian and, to a lesser extent, Chinese intelligence activities) are not acceptable topics for discussion?
It is not that this intelligence is that hard to come by, as former Directors of Central Intelligence and members of the Senate and House intelligence committees have claimed. Rather, it is because of a policy not to look at the facts and, instead, to hide relevant information and discredit, even sabotage, those who try to expose them. That is, what is so hard in intelligence is not finding good information and analyzing it. What is hard is finding and conveying bad news. News is “bad” when it embarrasses existing policy by revealing fatal internal flaws or when it stands to upset a desired policy agenda. The nature of these politics is such that when bad news is conveyed, more often than people would like to admit, the “proper” authority is advised to bury the analysis and quit making trouble. This is precisely what President Nixon’s national security advisor told the CIA to do with a study that exposed Russia’s advanced technology CBW effort. This is described by former Intelligence Council deputy Herb Meyer in the proceedings of the Defense of Western Europe Conference, London, 1988. The study had to be suppressed because breaking the silence respecting Russian activities threatened to derail the U.S. CBW arms control and unilateral disarmament policy in 1970.
Incidentally, what happened to the massive stockpiles of illegal drugs, presumably mainly opium and heroin, that U.S. military forces reportedly captured during the Afghanistan War? Reports in the British papers said the stockpiles were not destroyed but rather were given to Afghani (Northern Alliance?). The U.S. papers have been silent, as has the Pentagon. Mr. Blair said the stockpiles were massive (twenty billion pounds worth) and a major target as we went to war. So, what happened? Were they captured or not and in either case, what happened to them?
What about Iranian and North Korean nuclear intentions? These are also part of the war on terrorism. According to Rumania’s former head of intelligence, Ion Pacepa, in a recent Wall Street Journal op ed piece, the Russians had a plan to hide and remove all evidence of weapons of mass destruction from Iraq. Pacepa is most credible and far more knowledgeable, it would seem, than the DoD staff or U.S. intelligence. One would like to believe the CIA would have thoroughly debriefed Mr. Pacepa years ago on this subject. Did they?
Why so much fuss over nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea and so little attention to the very real threat of advanced technology chemical and biological agents? Here is a threat that has existed for many years and could be used at any time – as we witnessed in October, 2001 – and in this respect is, indeed, one deserving attention.
The anthrax terrorist events of October 2001 did not seem to me to be a terrorist attack, as it has been portrayed. It lacked the essential attributes. Nevertheless, it did demonstrate how easy it was to launch what could have been a truly devastating attack and the perpetrators seem to have disappeared without leaving a trace. Why did the FBI try to find a U.S. citizen to blame rather than focus on the countries with the greatest incentive and means – or as indicated earlier was the situation as Vice President Cheney suggested and is this why the FBI chose to spin its wheels searching for a suspicious U.S. citizen to harass rather than consider the event as being state sponsored, which would seem to mean a direct attack by a foreign nation, not terrorism?
Additionally, why has the United States (including the DoD) been placing so much attention in the war on terrorism on anthrax and other old and not particularly sophisticated approaches? Advanced technology chemical and biological agents and their potential uses are nowhere on the U.S. threat analysis platter, as best I can see, yet they are far more frightening in what they can do than nuclear weapons. The Russians recognized this in 1965 when they began a massive R&D effort to develop qualitatively new families of such weapons in preference to nuclear weapons. Notwithstanding this, the U.S. intelligence and defense communities have swept relevant intelligence under the rug and denied there was anything to worry about since the issue began to surface in the public domain in the early 1980s. (See, for example, the excellent investigative series “Beyond Yellow Rain” by William Kucewicz in the Wall Street Journal in 1984.) The Russian defector, Col. Dr. Ken Alibek (who was deputy head of the massive Russian biological warfare R&D program BIOPREPARAT and who defected to the United States in 1992) expressed his amazement as recently as 1999 in the lack of U.S. interest in advanced technology Russian biological warfare capabilities and programs and in the advice he received from a top U.S. official: “Perhaps there are questionable activities going on; but, for the moment, diplomacy requires us to keep silent.”
There is no comparison worth drawing between nuclear warheads and advanced technology chemical and biological agents and their potential use in sabotage and covert intelligence operations. These advanced capabilities are also linked, it turns out, to both narcotics trafficking and terrorism insofar as they all work to accomplish complementary ends and are managed in Russia under the same institutional agencies.
Your memo expresses concern respecting the strategy and progress in the war on terrorism and the war on Iraq. This is most refreshing, as many news analysts and political figures have commented. I hope you will not let the issues fade but will “slog” after them with tenacity.
From my own experiences in this area, I believe that the first, last, and most serious bottleneck that your memo will encounter concerns two characteristic aspects of defense planning and strategy formulation: 1) the practice by those in charge of policy of being uninterested in the ideas of others, especially where they clash with the group wisdom and 2) a parallel lack of interest in how the enemy sees the world.
This culture is not new. Today’s policy and planning seniors in the wars at issue trace their roots back to the “Best and Brightest” of the 1960s. As you may recall, the best and the brightest were the civilian analysts, largely from RAND, who swept into the Pentagon intent on taking over and doing things “their way.” These best and the brightest had nothing but contempt for the military and military “thinking.” They openly deprecated the principles of military science and art of war. As they put it, “No one has fought a nuclear war so we know as much about it as the military. Indeed, we know more since we have studied it more.” The military were excluded from planning and strategy reformulation. (See, for example, the IDA-WSEG study The Conflict Over Tactical Nuclear Weapons Policy in Europe.)
Nor were the best and the brightest interested in Russian nuclear strategy. As they put it, “Just give the Russians time. In time they will recognize that our way of thinking is the right way.” The Russians had adopted war fighting and war winning as their objective and this clashed with the best and the brightest’s concepts of mutual assured destruction, which for the best and the brightest was the only way to look at strategy in the nuclear age. Not only that, but the best and the brightest worked hard to fabricate and interpret intelligence in a manner that would support their contention that the Soviets would change. The Soviets never did change. Rather, through intelligence deception operations they fertilized the U.S. misperceptions to the U.S. strategic disadvantage.
The CIA assisted in this charade and a variety of other efforts, all designed to lead the United States down the primrose path to vulnerability. Another example of this was the eminently successful Soviet deception in CBW that was designed to lead the United States out of the business. This is precisely what happened in the early 1970s. (The first American to recognize this, I believe, was Edward J. Epstein in his article “Incorporating Analysis of Foreign Governments’ Deception into the U.S. Analytical System,” in Intelligence Requirements for the 1980’s: Analysis and Estimates, 1980.) The CIA did not understand strategic deception then any better than it does now. I will never forget the National Intelligence Officer in charge of deception saying in 1984 “We have never been deceived” and then refusing to listen or budge an inch as example after example of successful Soviet deception were raised by others present at the meeting. Was this an analytical intelligence problem, institutional face saving, or ignorance-produced confusion and paralysis?
As our Middle East and terrorist war policies and strategy are re-examined in response to your memo, I would suggest there have been three serious omissions in the policy and planning process as portrayed in the open literature over the past two years. These have been an inability to listen to what the Arab leaders are saying, the evident lack of serious efforts to identify hidden state activities, and the failure to even remotely consider the possibility that there may be errors, some of them serious, in U.S. policy and behavior. Indeed, might this latter possibility be suggested by the strong anti-U.S. feelings that have been growing around the world and were blatantly in evidence at least a year before 9-11?
Finally, and related to the above, the most disturbing aspect of the wars on terrorism and Iraq from my perspective is the often repeated pronouncement that the war will be long and arduous. “We may not even see its end in our lifetime,” administration spokesmen have said. “The world has changed (that is, it is a permanent feature) and we must get used to it,” we are told. Why is this the case? We did not have any real problem before the mid-1960s, which just happens to be about the time that the Russian sponsored terrorism and narcotics trafficking were beginning to be disturbingly felt in many nations. It may be that the real reason that is integral to the “permanence” of international terrorism, which might be corrected if people begin to face up to what has been happening, is that we fail to comprehend the forces and interests behind international terrorism and especially the role of U.S. policy in facilitating and supporting terrorism by turning a blind eye to the forces responsible and supporting them politically.
As you said to the Wall Street Journal reporter in explaining the reasons behind your memo: “Hey, wait a minute. Let’s lift our eyes up and look out across the horizon and say, ‘Are there questions that we ought to be asking ourselves? Are there things that we ought to think about ways to do differently?’”
Well, Mr. Secretary, there certainly are. Thank you for asking the question. Good luck and God speed.
Respectfully,
Joseph D. Douglass Jr., Ph.D.
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