Gertz: CIA Had No Officers in Afghanistan (Interview)

Bill Gertz of the Washington Times is one of America’s most respected reporters on intelligence and national security matters.

His new book, Breakdown—How America’s Intelligence Failures Led to September 11, will be released this week by Regnery Publishing, a sister company of Human Events. (Gertz previously authored the 1999 bestseller, Betrayal—How the Clinton Administration Undermined American Security, also a Regnery book.)

On August 20, Human Events Editor Terence P. Jeffrey interviewed Gertz about some of the many revelations in Breakdown.

Human Events: In your reporting, did you discover how many CIA-recruited spies the United States had in Iraq back in the years following the Persian Gulf War?

Bill Gertz: I don’t know the number, but I know they did not have case officers—that is, professional intelligence officers—in the country. Whether they had the ability to call on individual agents who might have walked in is another story. But for all intents and purposes, the people that I talked to, the sources for my research, said that there were none.

Gertz: "Agent" is a term of art in the sense of someone who is recruited to be a spy. What my sources referred to were professional "case officers"—who are trained U.S. intelligence officers who are put inside a country to recruit spies.

HE: So in the years following the Persian Gulf War the CIA had no case officers inside Iraq trying to recruit people inside the government of Iraq to give us information?

Gertz: This was partly the result of the debacle of the covert action program in 1995, when the CIA worked to foment an insurrection against Saddam Hussein and failed miserably—with the result being that Saddam was allowed to drive his forces north and at some great expense the U.S. ended up evacuating a number of Kurdish separatists in the northern part of the country to save their lives.

HE: At that time the Kurdish sanctuary in northern Iraq would have been the only base of operations for a CIA case officer inside Iraq?

HE: Given that the United States had an embargo on Iraq, which meant there wasn’t a lot of U.S. business going on there, and that we did not have diplomatic relations with Iraqi government, so there wasn’t a U.S. embassy in Baghdad, how would the CIA be able to operate in that environment?

Gertz: The way it would operate in any place where we don’t have diplomatic relations and that is through the use of non-official cover, and institutionally there has been a huge reluctance inside the CIA to using non-official cover. Non-official cover, by the way, means sending out case officers who are not attached to an embassy and who do not have the luxury of diplomatic immunity. That’s really grass-roots spying, and that’s what’s required in the war against terrorism, and that’s something I found to be completely deficient in the CIA

HE: In other words, to get in a position where the CIA can even recruit a spy in Saddam Hussein’s government we would have to have someone who is a CIA person who is operating as a businessman or a journalist or something like that so he could actually get into the country and try to recruit somebody?

Gertz: I wouldn’t say they don’t do it at all, but I would say that 95% to 98% of all of their operations involve official cover. That would be a rough estimate. And that is pre-September 11.

HE: And that put us at a significant disadvantage in Iraq where we don’t have an official presence. But, then, when you look at the events of September 11, we’re talking about a terrorist group, al Qaeda, that at that time had its leadership located in Afghanistan. Wouldn’t we have had the same difficulty in Afghanistan—another country where there was no U.S. embassy and very little U.S. business activity?

Gertz: At its root the ultimate intelligence failure of September 11 was a human failure. That is, we knew who the enemy was, but we have an intelligence system that has been designed since World War II to deal with nations, states, foreign militaries and especially people with vast communications resources. It’s not a system that’s well suited to going after stateless groups that don’t communicate in the ways this system was structured to penetrate.

It was clear, I think, to the CIA, that the source of al Qaeda terrorism was Afghanistan. We know from the pinprick attacks by President Clinton in 1998 that they actually attempted to do something about it. Yet at the same time they were not willing to use the most effective method, which is penetration, disruption, and destruction.

HE: Do you know if, in the years leading up to September 11, the CIA had case officers on the ground in Afghanistan?

Gertz: No, they didn’t. In fact Bob Baer, who was a CIA officer, told me that there were none. The CIA wouldn’t even allow case officers to go into Afghanistan. They feared that case officers who entered Afghanistan would be tailed and would lead terrorists to CIA bases in neighboring countries. So there were none in Afghanistan.

HE: Even though we had had this string of al Qaeda-related attacks against the U.S., going back to the Khobar Towers, and the embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam, and the U.S.S. Cole that all indicated that al Qaeda was at war against the United States—even though we knew al Qaeda’s leadership was hiding out in Afghanistan—the CIA made a policy decision not to put a case officer on the ground in that country, not to even try to recruit human intelligence assets in that country?

Gertz: Not only did we not have people based there, we did not allow CIA case officers to actually go into the country.

Gertz: That’s right. And that also highlights another major problem I uncovered in this book: our over-reliance on foreign liaison intelligence services. The CIA made a strategic decision that it was going to rely on so-called friendly foreign intelligence services to provide them with information. And in the case of at least one country, Saudi Arabia, that has proved to be a disaster, because the Saudis, in the case of the Khobar Towers bombing, for example, provided little or no useful information to U.S. intelligence.

HE: Isn’t it true that we were also relying heavily on the Pakistani intelligence agency in that part of the world?

Gertz: The CIA has traditionally had close ties with the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, as the Pakistani service is known. And, yes, this became a problem especially in the case of al Qaeda because of the ISI’s close relationship with both the Taliban militia in Afghanistan and their surrogates, al Qaeda. So that was a major problem for U.S. intelligence in the months and years leading up to September 11.

HE: Prior to September 11, in order to get human intelligence about al Qaeda or anything else that was going on in Afghanistan, we had to rely on intelligence agencies in Muslim countries that in fact were riddled with people who might be sympathetic to al Qaeda and the Taliban?

HE: Given that we had no human intelligence assets inside Afghanistan where al Qaeda was operating prior September 11, and we knew they were out to get us, does that mean that our only real direct source of information about them would be electronic intelligence gathering?

Gertz: There are a variety of methods you could use. I would say the majority of it was technical—meaning communications intercepts, bearing in mind that that could include intercepting intelligence reports from foreign intelligence services. My experience has been that U.S. intelligence is extremely good at gathering intelligence by electronic communications and they did get a lot of information that way.

HE: You believe they did get a fair amount of information about al Qaeda through intercepting electronic communications.

Gertz: Right. But these are relatively sophisticated people and because of their sophistication in communicating with each other a lot of experts believe they were not just amateurs acting on their own but had to have state support. Their operational methods showed training and a keen sense for maintaining security.

They didn’t discuss the details of their operations electronically because they knew that the National Security Agency had very good monitoring capabilities. Although we did get some valuable information that way, ultimately it was not the sort of information that would lead to unraveling the plot before it took place.

HE: In Breakdown you describe the relationship between the Iranian government and al Qaeda. What was that relationship?

Gertz: According to an official of the Defense Intelligence Agency, there was a connection between al Qaeda and the Iranian government that was revealed through monitoring in the country of Malaysia in January of 2000. That was when there was a meeting of al Qaeda people there. At the time of that meeting, two of the al Qaeda people who would later become involved in the September 11 attacks actually stayed at the residence of the Iranian ambassador in Malaysia.

HE: That suggests a very high degree of coordination between the Iranian government and al Qaeda.

Gertz: Any intelligence service worth its salt is not going to leave a very visible trail of its clandestine support, but you have to assume because these people were staying at the Iranian ambassador’s residence that that was a clear indication there was some clandestine support. So there are these signs that al Qaeda was getting backing from the Iranian government. The support is believed to have come through the ministry of intelligence and security and also through the section of the Iranian revolutionary guards that has been known to support terrorists groups around the world

HE: This connection between Iran and al Qaeda was ongoing at the time al Qaeda was perpetrating attacks against the United States?

Gertz: Yes. In fact, to come full circle on this issue, the official U.S. intelligence community view was that the perpetrator of the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing was Iran. In Breakdown, I disclose that there is clear evidence from someone who was in the room with Osama bin Laden that he in fact was the perpetrator of that bombing and in fact took congratulations for that bombing when it occurred.

HE: You believe the Khobar Towers bombing was an al Qaeda-Iranian collaboration?

HE: Now inside the U.S., the responsibility for tracking al Qaeda falls to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You believe the original World Trade Center bombing in 1993 was in fact an al Qaeda operation?

HE: Why didn’t the FBI pick that up and link it to ongoing al Qaeda operations?

Gertz: In general, and I make this point in the book, the FBI has fundamentally been out of the intelligence-gathering business since the 1970s. When Congress and the attorney general put restrictions on its ability to do intelligence gathering, the FBI basically got out of the domestic intelligence business. The FBI doesn’t have a domestic intelligence capability any more.

Law enforcement information-gathering is not the same as domestic intelligence. It’s completely different in the sense that the basis for law enforcement intelligence-gathering is to prosecute someone, whereas intelligence-gathering does not necessarily lead to prosecution. It could develop information that is used to take other kinds of action—economic, diplomatic or political against a group. Today we do not have a domestic intelligence capability.

HE: The communications between the people who perpetrated the 1993 World Trade Center bombing were, of course, in Arabic. How many FBI agents were able to read and decipher those communications?

Gertz: The problem there is that there just aren’t enough interpreters and translators who can go through this material, sift it out and gather intelligence. I don’t know the actual number, but it’s a very small group. A number of FBI officials that I talked to in research for the book said that they needed more and they couldn’t get more. They had huge stacks of Arabic language documents, including material that may have been seized in investigations as well as intercepted communications, that sat around and weren’t translated.

HE: There might have been very important intelligence information in there, but they had no way of finding out what is was?

HE: Has that changed since September 11? Do you know if the FBI has hired a cadre of Arabic-speaking people?

Gertz: Yes. In fact they have established what they call exploitation centers. But there are some security problems associated with this. I’m told they’ve actually hired cab drivers who don’t have security clearances—just because they have this urgent need to translate this material. So, they’ve been making some effort to improve their Arabic language capability, but according to my research they still need a long way to go.

HE: You have said that the CIA did not have case officers in Iraq or Afghanistan during much of the 1990s. What did Clinton CIA Director John Deutch do to help or hinder the ability of the CIA to gather human intelligence in those places?

Gertz: According to people that I’ve talked to both inside and outside the CIA, Deutch took on the agency’s Directorate of Operations with a vengeance. His approach was to cripple what he considered to be a negative culture within the Directorate of Operations, which is the agency’s clandestine service.

This had a tremendously negative impact on the ability of the CIA to carry out its intelligence-gathering function, as it relates to this discipline known as Human Intelligence, or Humint.

The most damaging measure was the imposition of what became known as the "Deutch Rules." These were restrictions imposed on CIA case officers overseas that basically said that anyone with an unsavory background or anyone who was considered to have violated human rights could not be recruited as an agent.

When it comes to dealing with terrorist groups that makes it very, very difficult to recruit agents. Now the CIA has defended these rules by saying they have not inhibited the recruitment of any agents. But there was a terrorism commission in 2000 that was headed by L. Paul Bremmer that found that these rules had a severe debilitating impact on the ability of case officers to recruit agents. Case officers weren’t going to take the chance of running afoul of their superiors at CIA headquarters in Langley by recruiting someone who later could be found to have abused someone’s human rights.

HE: It seems like it would be pretty hard to recruit an al Qaeda terrorist to be a spy for you if you couldn’t recruit unsavory people.

Gertz: It’s impossible. Also, I would point out that contrary to published newspaper reports, the CIA has not rescinded the Deutch Rules. It has modified the rules in the wake of September 11, but it has not rescinded them. It continues to hold onto these rules despite the fact that Congress passed legislation last year calling for the rules to be rescinded.

HE: Even now, a year after the September 11 attacks, CIA case officers trying to recruit spies among al Qaeda and other terrorist groups cannot recruit unsavory characters, unless what?

Gertz: It’s not that they cannot do it. It’s that if they do, they have to report the recruitment to headquarters and have it approved—which puts a bureaucratic filter on the ability of people in the field to take advantage of an opportunity to recruit someone. The implicit message for the case officer in the field is that if you recruit the wrong person your career is over.

HE: If you’re out there in the field taking huge risks to meet with and recruit someone who may be a member of al Qaeda the idea that your recruit might be rejected by a CIA bureaucrat must be chilling.

Gertz: Absolutely. It has a chilling effect. It’s also part of what I would call the risk-adverse culture within the entire U.S. intelligence community. This is somewhat of a reflection of the no casualty approach to warfare that has been very prevalent within the Pentagon and the military services

HE: Part of Deutch’s strategy to change the CIA was actually implemented by Democratic staffers that he brought over and put in charge of key elements within the agency?

Gertz: Deutch heavily politicized the CIA when he came over from his position as deputy secretary of Defense. And he brought a couple of staffers who were known anti-intelligence community advocates, including Michael O’Neill, who worked on the notorious Boland Committee, the intelligence committee headed by the late Rep. Edward Boland [D.-Mass.] that fought the Reagan Administration’s effort to provide covert assistance to the anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua.

Gertz: Yes. Tenet was staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee and then he went to the National Security Counsel during the Clinton Administration as the key NSC staffer for intelligence policy.

HE: Do you believe Tenet’s changed the culture at the CIA since the Deutch days?

Gertz: To me it’s amazing that George Tenet is still the director of central intelligence, meaning that we have a Republican administration with a Democratic CIA director—someone who has a checkered record of intelligence failures as the CIA director.

Gertz: To me it’s amazing that George Tenet is still the director of central intelligence, meaning that we have a Republican administration with a Democratic CIA director—someone who has a checkered record of intelligence failures as the CIA director.

Perhaps Mr. Tenet knows things the Bush and Cheney families wouldn't want the public to know? Just a guess. I am absolutely baffled by his continued employment. I can see no rational basis for keeping him at the helm.

Based on this we are still blind about what might happen!

Probably gonna take another horror to get the politicians to change things!!!!!

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