Of human intelligence, at CIA and White House

They are getting ready to play one of the favorite games in our nation's capital -- a political version of pin the tail on the donkey. In the case at hand, the donkey is the Central Intelligence Agency and its director, George Tenet. The trouble is that all the donkeys eligible for the tail won't be in the corral when the game begins.

The powers on Capitol Hill want someone to take the fall for all the bad prewar intelligence on Iraq, and since the Republicans will make certain that their President isn't the fall guy, and make certain the bad news doesn't come out until after Election Day, George Bush is willing to let them have at it.

There's no question that the CIA got at least part of the intelligence on Iraq wrong, especially on weapons of mass destruction. If a few heads roll over this at the agency headquarters, so be it. But it should be noted that the idea that Saddam Hussein both had and sought WMD was conventional wisdom in this town for at least 10 years.

Bill Clinton and his wonks talked about Saddam Hussein and the threat his chemical and biological weapons posed during much of their eight years in office. It became an article of faith. Given that Saddam had actually used poison gas to kill a whole town full of Kurds, no one had trouble believing he still had the stuff and was working to get other, deadlier weapons, including nukes.

Remember, too, that this isn't the first time the CIA got something terribly wrong, or failed to see a very large train coming down the tracks. Remember the fall of the Soviet Union? Remember, if you are old enough, the Bay of Pigs?

It seems as though every time the agency stumbles, it is due to a lack of any decent human intelligence ("humint") product. The people who control the money on Capitol Hill -- and every administration since before Jack Kennedy -- have been bedazzled by the product of the very expensive National Security Agency -- satellite cameras that can read over your shoulder from 200 miles up, and tapes of the phone calls of almost everyone in the world. National technical means, they call it.

"Now everyone is saying George Tenet put too much reliance on humint and we need to go back to national technical means," one senior administration official told me. "What was wrong was not humint but specifically the humint we got from Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress people and their defectors -- who have all proved to be either totally wrong, or worse, double agents putting out a line straight from Saddam or his intelligence people."

That human intelligence was not foisted upon the decision-makers by the CIA or the NSA. It came out of Vice President Dick Cheney's office and out of the Office of Special Plans, run by Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, in the office of the secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Feith has not been heard from much of late. "They are really laying low, hoping the CIA takes all the hits while they skate," the senior official said. "But they had much more impact on how the intelligence was read and acted on."

Because the bosses, Rumsfeld and Cheney, didn't like the intelligence product and analysis they were getting from CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, they created Feith's happy kingdom. He crafted reports much more to their liking, based largely on Chalabi's wishful thinking and Israeli intelligence that had the aim of pushing us to take on Iraq and take out Saddam.

None of these folks will be in the pen when the bipartisan blue-ribbon investigative commission begins waltzing around the truth and pinning the tail on a target chosen by acclamation. Not the vice president, not Feith, not Rumsfeld, and certainly not Chalabi.

It is equally unlikely that anyone will get around to looking at the larger truth: Our national intelligence apparatus is broken. The country spends $45 billion a year on that machinery and gets little of what it needs in return. We buy spy satellites that cost $4 billion a copy and everyone in the world knows how to beat them; knows when they are going to be overhead; knows how to spoof them.

We can count the sheep behind a mud hut in Waziristan and eavesdrop on a prime minister's phone-sex with his mistresses, but somehow we haven't been able to find Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar in more than two years. That requires human intelligence, and that is in short supply. And not just in the Middle East either. It is occasionally quite lacking in Washington, too.

Joseph L. Galloway writes for Knight-Ridder and is co-author of 'We Were Soldiers Once .. And Young.'"

Our national intelligence apparatus is broken. The country spends $45 billion a year on that machinery and gets little of what it needs in return. We buy spy satellites that cost $4 billion a copy and everyone in the world knows how to beat them; knows when they are going to be overhead; knows how to spoof them.

This is the core of the classic Democratic argument, that, "Hey, we squander all this money on intel and still get surprised. Boy, that money would sure be a great 'intel dividend'." (Remember what they did with the post-Cold War "peace dividend?" Pissed it away like a gambler with a jackpot...)

Actually, we get quite a lot from our intel agencies. Galloway falls into two traps here:

Expecting intel collectively to meet JD Power quality standards like a new Lexus. Ain't happening; unlike technical means, humint is not easily approved by vigorous application of money. It needs you to apply skill, and this skill cannot be mass produced. Parts of it can't even be manufactured, but must be sought and found.
Failing to account for enemy attempts to beat us, which, given resourceful and intelligent enemies, may well succeed. Unlike manufacturing quality, we're not competing primarily with ourselves -- and our competition with our enemies is not benign. For one thing, this product has enemies unscrewing its parts even as it comes down the line.

Also, liberals and democrats seem to believe that intelligence agencies are improved by turmoil and exposure. Not the case.

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F

It's like this: the Soviets were able to penetrate us, and we never penetrated the Soviets.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1071814/posts

The Victories of the CIA
New York Times February 2, 2004 William Safire

Intelligence shortcomings, as we see, have a thousand fathers; secret intelligence triumphs are orphans. Here is the unremarked story of "the Farewell dossier": how a C.I.A. campaign of computer sabotage resulting in a huge explosion in Siberia — all engineered by a mild-mannered economist named Gus Weiss — helped us win the cold war.

Weiss worked down the hall from me in the Nixon administration. In early 1974, he wrote a report on Soviet advances in technology through purchasing and copying that led the beleaguered president — détente notwithstanding — to place restrictions on the export of computers and software to the U.S.S.R.

Seven years later, we learned how the K.G.B. responded. I was writing a series of hard-line columns denouncing the financial backing being given Moscow by Germany and Britain for a major natural gas pipeline from Siberia to Europe. That project would give control of European energy supplies to the Communists, as well as generate $8 billion a year to support Soviet computer and satellite research.

President François Mitterrand of France also opposed the gas pipeline. He took President Reagan aside at a conference in Ottawa on July 19, 1981, to reveal that France had recruited a key K.G.B. officer in Moscow Center.

Col. Vladimir Vetrov provided what French intelligence called the Farewell dossier. It contained documents from the K.G.B. Technology Directorate showing how the Soviets were systematically stealing — or secretly buying through third parties — the radar, machine tools and semiconductors to keep the Russians nearly competitive with U.S. military-industrial strength through the 70's. In effect, the U.S. was in an arms race with itself.

Reagan passed this on to William J. Casey, his director of central intelligence, now remembered only for the Iran-contra fiasco. Casey called in Weiss, then working with Thomas C. Reed on the staff of the National Security Council. After studying the list of hundreds of Soviet agents and purchasers (including one cosmonaut) assigned to this penetration in the U.S. and Japan, Weiss counseled against deportation.

Instead, according to Reed — a former Air Force secretary whose fascinating cold war book, "At the Abyss," will be published by Random House next month — Weiss said: "Why not help the Soviets with their shopping? Now that we know what they want, we can help them get it." The catch: computer chips would be designed to pass Soviet quality tests and then to fail in operation.

In our complex disinformation scheme, deliberately flawed designs for stealth technology and space defense sent Russian scientists down paths that wasted time and money.

The technology topping the Soviets' wish list was for computer control systems to automate the operation of the new trans-Siberian gas pipeline. When we turned down their overt purchase order, the K.G.B. sent a covert agent into a Canadian company to steal the software; tipped off by Farewell, we added what geeks call a "Trojan Horse" to the pirated product.

"The pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines and valves was programmed to go haywire," writes Reed, "to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds. The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space."

Our Norad monitors feared a nuclear detonation, but satellites that would have picked up its electromagnetic pulse were silent. That mystified many in the White House, but "Gus Weiss came down the hall to tell his fellow NSC staffers not to worry. It took him another twenty years to tell me why."

Farewell stayed secret because the blast in June 1982, estimated at three kilotons, took place in the Siberian wilderness, with no casualties known. Nor was the red-faced K.G.B. about to complain publicly about being tricked by bogus technology. But all the software it had stolen for years was suddenly suspect, which stopped or delayed the work of thousands of worried Russian technicians and scientists.

Vetrov was caught and executed in 1983. A year later, Bill Casey ordered the K.G.B. collection network rolled up, closing the Farewell dossier. Gus Weiss died from a fall a few months ago. Now is a time to remember that sometimes our spooks get it right in a big way.

E-mail: safire@nytimes.com

E-mail between Dr. Laurie Mylroie & Matchett-PI

"I saw you on FOX Friday with John Gibson and noted what you said about what a former CIA agent told you in Fox's Green Room shortly after 9-11, just before you were to go on the air: "[We] can go to war [in Iraq] on the basis of WMD, but not on the basis of terrorism.".

The enemy within is much more dangerous than the enemy without."(snip)

Laurie gave me written permission to post her response:

From: "Laurie Mylroie" sam11@erols.com
To: [Matchett-PI]
Subject: Re: Subscription to Iraq News Newsletter Please
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 12:52:30 -0400

Dear [Matchett-PI],
(snip)

I'm most appreciative that you picked up that remark: You can go to war on the basis of the WMD, but not on the basis of terrorism.

That is why Bush has been unable to explain why we fought this war. You're absolutely right about the enemy within.
(snip_
Free Republic is a great place--a lot of people read it. This is a very important issue and I appreciate you're doing what you can to make people aware of it.

Best wishes,
Laurie Mylroie

Of course, when the retired CIA agent told her that "we can go to war on the basis of WMD, but not on the basis of terrorism", the implication (and reality of the matter) is that if we went to war on the basis of terrorism it would open a huge can of worms about our ineffective intelligence agencies and the Clinton Administration.

Matchett-PI Posted on 07/29/2003 11:31:38 AM CDT

"Bush -vs- The Beltway - How the CIA and State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror" by Dr. Laurie Mylroie
MPI,ALL, call for review please, before I buy.

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