Posted on 12/15/2003 1:07:14 PM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 - For American intelligence agencies, the capture of Saddam Hussein is a much needed vindication after many months of failures and frustrations, Bush administration officials and members of Congress said Sunday.
The agencies' standing was brought to a low ebb by a long line of setbacks, including the failure to anticipate the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001; the unsuccessful search for unconventional weapons in Iraq; and the inability to find Mr. Hussein or Osama bin Laden. But that string has ended in the dirt hole where Mr. Hussein was finally found, not far from his birthplace.
Although it was American soldiers who unearthed Mr. Hussein, it was the intelligence community, including the Central Intelligence Agency and its military counterparts, that set them on the right path, beginning with a new analytical effort begun in late November to draw up a list of just who might be hiding him.
As American generals, diplomats and President Bush himself announced the capture in Washington and in Baghdad on Sunday, intelligence officials, including George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, were nowhere to be seen. But Mr. Bush himself used his televised address in part to praise what he called "the superb work of intelligence analysts who found the dictator's footprints in a vast country."
Behind the scenes, the C.I.A. and its counterparts have scored some important victories, including work that has led to the killing and capture of high-ranking members of Al Qaeda. But since the Sept. 11 attacks, the intelligence agencies' public record has been checkered at best, beginning with what a Congressional review called a failure to connect the dots in analyzing intelligence that could have provided warnings of the hijackers' intentions.
Mr. bin Laden, the Qaeda leader, has succeeded for more than two years in eluding a hunt by the military and intelligence agencies.
The intelligence agencies are now widely seen as having overestimated the threat posed by Mr. Hussein's government before the war, in particular saying that it had stockpiled prohibited weapons, which so far have not been found. During the war itself, two failed attempts to decapitate Iraq's Baathist leadership with airstrikes aimed at Mr. Hussein on March 19 and April 7 underscored the limitations of information provided by the agencies.
Against that backdrop, senior members of Congress who have been critical of the C.I.A. in recent weeks went out of their way on Sunday to give the intelligence agencies what they called their due.
"Saddam's capture is a direct result of unprecedented cooperation and joint effort on the part of our intelligence analysts, operators in the field and our military," said Senator Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He said they "deserve a great deal of credit and our gratitude."
Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, described the capture as both "a remarkable achievement" and "a classic intelligence operation of persistence and analysis."
C.I.A. officers have played a major part in the supersecret military Special Operations teams, including Task Force 121, that were given the leading role in tracking down Iraqi leaders. In recent weeks, the information gathered by the C.I.A., the Defense Intelligence Agency and the intelligence arms of the military services has been closely shared among the agencies through a new cooperative arrangement in Baghdad.
It was human intelligence, rather than the kinds of information gathered by spy satellites or eavesdropping, that led the United States to Mr. Hussein, the senior American officials said.
Human intelligence was always the weakest link for the United States in Iraq, American officials say, and that capability deteriorated during the 1990's as a result of deep budget cuts. Before the United States invaded Iraq last March, the agencies drew up lists of the Iraqi officials whom they most hoped to capture. But it was apparently not until last November, after months of work in developing new intelligence about Iraq, that a new list pointed the American search effort in the direction that finally proved fruitful.
"I suspect that it will be some time before a settled peace resides in Iraq," said Representative Porter J. Goss, a Florida Republican and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. "Nevertheless," he said of the insurgents, many of them loyal to Mr. Hussein, who have been attacking Americans, "this is the beginning of their end."
From Bill Gertz's book "Breakdown" ***Gertz describes how this dysfunctional atmosphere festered throughout the final years of the Cold War, only to be destructively reinforced by the Clinton administration, and particularly by John Deutch, Clinton's first Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). Deutch damaged the Agency in many areas, from his ill-advised personnel policy "reforms" to his own scandalously lax security practices. His worst legacy, at least in light of 9/11, is the infamous "Deutch Rules," which made it almost impossible for the Clandestine Service to recruit spies with unsavory or criminal backgrounds - precisely the sorts of people one must recruit in order to penetrate terrorist organizations.***
If this is true (I only saw this version on one thread) we need to PONY UP the REWARD MONEY to this farmer.
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