The CIA Follies (Cont'd.)

Commentary Magazine ^ | July/August 2007 | Gabriel Schoenfeld

[gpapa]

Picture a large and very important federal agency. It happens to conduct highly specialized work that requires close and attentive management. One of its basic assignments, for example, is to collect intelligence. Toward that end, it relies on twelve major stations from which it gathers data. The information thus assembled has to be reliable, meaning that those who collect it, and those who organize the collection process, must be both trustworthy and highly trained. And once the intelligence is gathered, it has to be analyzed. This process, too, requires a high degree of organization, and the men and women who engage in it must be top experts in their field. Their final product, hugely influential, and released to the outside world only at specified intervals, is by necessity wrapped in secrecy. Indeed, unauthorized disclosure is punishable by law.

[Melchior]

One of the CIA’s major failings is that stations receive annually a set of tasks that it must address. During the Cold War the demands became traditional. In the post Cold War period less so, but tasks were time-consuming and difficult to accomplish given the drawdown in station personnel. Thus, agents could discern or discover new trends, some well off the beaten path, but they literally had no time to follow-up.

An example: two station chiefs in the Southern Cone of South America were informed that a surprising number of Muslim Arabs, including Hizbollah activists, were making an appearance in southern Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina, and their presence was beginning to frighten the large Christian Arab community in that region. The stationchiefs were warned that their presence boded ill. The center of activity was being directed from a meeting ground in Foz de Iguacu, Brazil. The answer was a “so what?” It would have been easy to use the Christian Arabs to birddog the Muslim activity, but the station chiefs had other priorities, they were understaffed, and, frankly, a certain esprit was missing. Later, the Hizbollah attacks in Argentina awakened the missions, but the situation is still not given the proper priority today.

Secondly, the CIA works for the administration and not the American people. Although this seems a contradiction, the agency considers academics to be generally untrustworthy. And though there may be reason to be wary, one wonders how many opportunities have been lost when academics and citizens at large have offered their help and the Agency has rejected their overtures?

An example: The fact that Muslim charities had been infiltrated by Islamists was known to individualls well before the CIA ever began investigation of the phenomenon. The subject itself was poisen in the agency because so many of the charities involved were Saudi founded and funded. (In the CIA Saudi Arabia is not the assignment an agent with integrity wants given the venality of American administrations, both Republican and Democrat, and the great number of important individuals who have been co-opted by the Sauds.) When an individual who had collected information on the subject and who had contacts within the charitable community approached the intel community with his concerns and offered to assist (in 1995), the reply was that the intel community was already collecting such data (in the Balkans as it turns out). In other words, “butt out”, and the person was shown the door. The CIA produced a paper on the Muslim charities in 1996, well after it was needed. The group that collected the material (which was very troubling) was then disbanded. The paper was never distributed to the public. Instead, it became part of that mile-high mountain of informtion stored away and forgotten — not even to be accessed by a Freedom of Information request.

Conclusion: The agency is given its tasks, and it will concentrate on its own molehills while mountains are being built. Unfortunately, most CIA employees, especially the higher echelon, think of themselves as something different from the American citizen. Sui generis. It would be nice if some of the spirit of OSS inclusiveness were injected in the modern CIA and serendipity were not viewed as some sort of fatal disease.

[neverdem]

It then failed to understand that the Chinese would come to the aid of the North Koreans if American forces crossed the Yalu river.

IIRC, American forces never crossed the Yalu river. Other than that, BTTT!