Posted on 12/11/2004 8:49:56 PM PST by Dr. Marten
Twelve years of CIA discontent By Tomas Jones and Marc Erikson
For a dozen years or more, things have been going from bad to worse at the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Some, of course, may welcome this. They should note the following, however: for better or for worse, the United States - militarily and economically - is the world's most powerful nation. When its foreign-intelligence service stumbles from intelligence failure to intelligence failure, mis-assessment to mis-assessment, and, finally, a near-collapse of its discipline, integrity and morale, more than just US national security is put at risk. Avoidable, globally destabilizing catastrophic events occur. Unnecessary wars are fought. Were US public and private financial and economic leadership beset by the same degree of incompetence as witnessed at the CIA, the US and large parts of the world economy that depend on it would be in a shambles. (Some, of course, think they are.)
Take heart. US President George W Bush in August appointed Florida Republican Congressman Porter Goss as his new director of central intelligence (DCI). A month later, the US Senate overwhelmingly (77-17) approved the appointment. Goss is supposed to have what it takes to reform and revitalize an agency he once described as "dysfunctional" and which in a congressional report under Goss's signature in his former capacity as House Intelligence Committee leader is characterized as "a stilted bureaucracy incapable of even the slightest bit of success". Goss has also been ordered by Bush to come up with a concrete plan in 90 days for increasing the number of CIA field operatives and analysts by 50% - a large task considering the fact that the Directorate of Operations (DO; clandestine service) alone now has a staff of about 4,500, though only about one-third of those are estimated to be actively deployed as case officers running and recruiting agents.
More stars on the wall Goss's credentials for the job look impressive. After graduating from Yale University in 1960 with a major in classical Greek, he joined the US Army. After a brief brush with army intelligence, he shifted to the CIA in 1962, serving as a case officer until 1972 when his career in the DO was cut short by illness. He was first elected to Congress (Florida, 14th District) in 1988. From 1997 until 2004, he served as head of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. As a CIA field operative, he reportedly had some involvement with John F Kennedy's Bay of Pigs fiasco. Later he specialized in infiltration and subversion of labor movements in Central America (Mexico, Dominican Republic, Haiti) and Western Europe. Suffice it to say, when it comes to intelligence failures, he probably knows what he's talking about.
In his first months in office, Goss has taken the ax to the DO, the front-line CIA component in global intelligence operations. The deputy director of operations (DDO), Stephen Kappes, in office only for a few months, and his principal assistant, Michael Sulick, have (been) resigned. So, reportedly, have the undercover operations chiefs of the Far East and Europe divisions. Gone as well is interim DCI John McLaughlin. Rumor has it that deputy director of intelligence (DDI; analysis) Jami Miscik won't stay a whole lot longer. This year she told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that she had asked her analysts to "stretch to the maximum the evidence you had" connecting Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden. All in all, about 20 senior CIA officials have left the agency since Goss took over.
What do Goss and his new DDO Jose Rodriguez aim to do to fix the clandestine service? "More stars on the wall," said a DO officer, referring to the stars placed on the wall of the lobby in CIA headquarters at Langley for every CIA officer killed in the line of duty. What must change, according to Goss, is the agency's "culture of risk aversion". He wants the DO to "launch a more aggressive campaign to use undercover officers to penetrate terrorist groups and hostile governments" - a high-risk strategy to increase drastically the number and use of non-official cover (NOC) officers instead of the current practice of deploying the majority of DO officers as diplomats assigned to US embassies with the benefit of diplomatic immunity as they attempt to recruit and gather intelligence from foreigners.
Fatal errors under Tenet Such stratagems ("strategies" is too big a word) are not necessarily misplaced - though implementation is another, rather more difficult issue. We'll get to the latter. But take, for example, three different and crucial omissions and intelligence operations failures over the past several years that were avoidable, but arguably were at least in part responsible for letting the events of September 11, 2001, come to pass and for the outbreak and surrounding circumstances of the Iraq war 18 months later:
1) At the time of the Afghan mujahideen resistance to the Soviet occupiers in the 1980s, the CIA developed and for several years maintained close collaboration with individuals and organizations including Osama bin Laden and groups that later morphed into al-Qaeda. It should have been a straightforward matter to place agents into these groups that could later have informed on their activities and plans. Neglect and failure of foresight led to a situation in which the US was blind-sided not just to September 11, but to prior attacks on US personnel, installations and assets.
2) At the time of the Iran-Iraq War, also in the 1980s, the US had a working relationship with Saddam Hussein and his military. Again, agents and informants could/should have been put in place to spy on and possibly "take out" Saddam, avoiding both the Gulf and Iraq wars, but minimally to develop accurate information on Saddam's weapons programs.
3) In the 1990s, as the now-notorious oil-for-food scam evolved, it should have been an easy task to gather accurate and timely intelligence on details of the fraudulent aspects of the scheme, giving the US a stronger hand during prewar negotiations at the United Nations. As it was, pertinent documents were only discovered in Baghdad after the US invasion.
Many, though by no means all, of these types of operations and analysis failures can be laid at the doorstep of the man who, after his June resignation from the position of DCI, has raked in well in excess of US$500,000 for closed-door speaking engagements and, of course, has spoken about what went right (or unavoidably wrong) on his nine-year watch at the head or as deputy director of the "Pizza" company. George Tenet in numerous ways - his affable manner aside - exemplifies the bureaucratization, ossification, risk aversion, and lack of imagination and analytical acumen that now characterize most sections of the CIA. Forty percent of the agency's employees never had another big boss.
Tenet, now 51, was educated at Georgetown University and the Columbia University School of International Affairs. After serving for three years as legislative assistant to Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz, he joined the staff of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 1985 and subsequently held any number of jobs of the "assistant to ...", "special assistant to ...", "director for ...", "senior director for ..." variety in the national-security bureaucracy. In 1992, he was a member of incoming president Bill Clinton's national-security transition team. In July 1995, he became deputy director of central intelligence (DDCI); in July 1997 DCI - largely by default: Clinton's then National Security Council head Tony Lake, slated to become DCI, was sure to be rejected by the Senate and his nomination was withdrawn. Tenet's career as a consummate inside-the-Beltway operator, certainly not the spate of intelligence failures on his watch, explain why he became the second-longest-serving DCI in the CIA's 57-year history.
What went wrong at the CIA under Tenet didn't start with him. Nor do we blame him for intelligence failures as such. Spying and covert operations are a risky business. "Sh-- happens" is the short phrase for it. But what happened under Tenet is that practices and attitudes that lead to intelligence failures became institutionalized and ultimately made such failures the rule and no longer the exception.
From bad to worse Some CIA case officers overseas recall the period between Clinton's November 1992 election and the January 1993 inauguration as the "winter of despair". It was known in the agency that Clinton was not interested in intelligence and would demand budget cuts and set new priorities. After all, the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union were gone, Russia was in political turmoil and economically finished; even China, North Korea, Iran and a few other isolated places were no match, it was believed, for the one remaining superpower. It was the economy, stupid! And what had been expected soon came to pass. Budgets for intelligence collection were pared down to the quick. Programs were slashed even in advance of an in-depth Clinton team assessment under the theory that executive pencil-pushers in the agency could identify and cut fat, more effectively and with less long-term pain, well before the definition of and fights about new objectives.
Clinton named James Woolsey to head the CIA. Not a bad choice, perhaps; but within a short period of time Woolsey was facing a nightmarish crisis. Career operations officer Aldrich Ames was arrested and discovered to have been spying for the Soviet Union and, after the USSR's demise, Russia. The Ames affair was compounded by the investigation and later arrest of Jim Nicholson on similar charges. The counterintelligence repercussions over the next several years were pervasive and for several years would limit both the effectiveness of the agency and its credibility among policymakers. Morale was plummeting and ever-tighter budgets made the traditional recruitment of highly placed informants with access to significant information ever more challenging and difficult. Intelligence-collection priorities would be sent to the field only to be amended or questioned later. Agents would be signed up and terminated when the wind changed. Old-fashioned country-specific collection and analysis were out the window. Major blind spots began to appear despite the remaining large program initiatives in non-proliferation and counter-terrorism.
An additional factor impacting on performance and perceptions was Woolsey's inability to establish a good working relationship with the House and Senate Intelligence committees he was called in to brief. With the CIA's every move scrutinized and questioned by oversight, even senior CIA management looked to cover their collective behind to protect career and pension rather than engage in high-risk operations or stand up for the integrity of their analysis and conclusions. Where once it had been accepted as an axiom that, because field case officers had to use deception and misdirection as part of their toolkit to collect intelligence from foreign sources, honesty and integrity among case officers, analysts, and chiefs in headquarters were essential, such unquestioned codes of conduct began to fray at the edges and deception and mistrust crept into interaction at all levels. You cannot have a bunch of professional liars lying to each other at the office and assume the system will continue to function. It didn't, and more and more experienced operations officers and analysts began to look outside the agency for work.
When John Deutch, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology chemistry professor and defense-science specialist, but hardly a man with deep understanding of the intelligence business, succeeded Woolsey in May 1995 as CIA director, things went from bad to worse. He stated his intention of "cleaning up" the agency, in particular, moving away from the nasty and sordid business of having its case officers recruit spies who were not on their way to sainthood. Nothing of substance got done - except for the fact that the DO lost an additional large number of humint (human intelligence) resources across the board.
By December 1996, Deutch was out and the Tenet tenure (initially as acting director) was under way. Morale continued to flag, mission orientation was fuzzy, and with that, intelligence miscues began to multiply. We won't review details. But by 1998, the CIA had failed to anticipate Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests, was blissfully oblivious to the dealings of the Abdul Qadeer Khan nuclear proliferation network with countries ranging from Libya to Iran and North Korea, and had begun to miss opportunities (how many ultimately?) of taking bin Laden out of circulation. But Tenet readily survived all of that - and at the same time started to build new political connections as the Clinton era waned. In 1998, he acted to name CIA Langley headquarters after former US president and CIA director George H W Bush. As the 2000 election campaign rolled around, he took to personally briefing then Texas governor George W Bush on US intelligence operations and assessments. Against all odds - new presidents usually choose new CIA directors - Tenet managed to stay on as Bush's DCI, for four more years.
By early 2001, the agency and most notably the DO were mere shadows of their former selves as the events of September 11 that year would fatefully attest. Enter Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. The US was now at war and the secretary of defense and the vice president, both former chief executive officers of major corporations and used to throwing their weight around and getting straight answers to tough questions, wanted actionable intelligence - and didn't get it. Investigative journalist Robert Dreyfuss penned an article in The American Prospect (The Pentagon muzzles the CIA) in December 2002, in which he details how the Department of Defense created its own small intelligence outfit to "develop" the intelligence and analyses required in the run-up to the Iraq war. The upshot was that the CIA was increasingly sidelined and marginalized in national-security decision-making processes in advance of the Iraq invasion.
But there's no point in casting the Tenet CIA in the role of the aggrieved party. It had it coming. By early 2003, the Dreyfuss article was making the rounds among new and old hands in the US intelligence community. It was e-mailed, forwarded, re-forwarded, re-sent and debated among innumerable former and current CIA employees who thought (and may still think) it described damning details of how Rumsfeld and the Pentagon had staged an intelligence coup and used shaky intelligence and every other trick in the book to prop up their case for the Iraq invasion. Disgruntled CIA officers who had never questioned their oath to secrecy were suddenly speaking out or didn't care if their negative opinions carried over to anything from inter-agency discussions to family gatherings or casual meetings with friends. Leaks to the media became frequent. The perception - and hence, in Washington, reality - was created that the CIA was actively hostile to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and any number of other cabinet members.
Many intelligence officers undoubtedly were and are. But they ignored the fact that Rumsfeld's and Cheney's irritation with their CIA briefers was not - in the first instance - aimed at their considered opinions, but at the fact that the briefers offered no considered opinions at all and time and again proved unprepared and unable to answer pointed and difficult questions effectively . That the CIA had no answers rather than unpalatable ones was the issue. Years of abject failure to develop any humint sources in Iraq or in al-Qaeda rather than coming up with well-sourced but divergent information was the problem. And when CIA facts and analyses that differed from the Pentagon or White House view were presented, Tenet and his chief officers apparently lacked the intestinal fortitude and integrity to insist that only CIA-sanctioned intelligence be used in assessments. In a crisis, under the weight of a dozen years of political maneuvering, inattention, or non-existent leadership, the CIA caved in.
In testimony before congressional intelligence committees this year, Tenet opined that fixing the CIA would take at least five years. He shaped much of what the agency is now and hence should know. It may have escaped him that such a pessimistic view is also a telling indictment of his own stewardship. But the question now is whether new DCI Porter Goss has any realistic chance of fixing what so long has been broken in more timely fashion.
The Goss challenge Goss has fired/let go a couple of dozen senior CIA officers and managers. Any new CEO of a large corporation with some 20,000 employees would have done no less and insisted on appointing his own top management. Goss has the further advantage of a mandate to hire several thousand new workers, in this case representing an added investment of about half a million dollars per new DO recruit maturing in three to four years. The money may be there, but is the ability to make the necessary changes?
We are apprehensive, shading to cautiously optimistic. First and most important, Goss has a clear (and funded) mandate from his commander-in-chief. Second, as a former case officer from a time when agency morale was intact, he will have a sense of how to rekindle it. Cautions that partisanship and loyalty to the president he serves would influence his judgment are misplaced. The DCI serves the executive branch. A fiercely partisan DCI Bill Casey served Ronald Reagan well and got things done - some misdeeds notwithstanding. But one Casey precept was, we can do things more intelligently than going to a shooting war - with well-planned surprise covert operations. Ultimately, the issue there is administration policy. If Goss can help Bush accomplish specified objectives, whether in Iran or North Korea, with risks, but without another war, his mission will be accomplished. Chances, in our view, are better than even that Goss will succeed in reconstituting a capable DO.
But intelligence collection and targeted covert operations are only one part of the story. Careful analysis insisting on Joe Friday's "Just the facts, ma'am" must complement operations; and once the facts are established, they must not be tailored to fit preconceived policies and notions. There's the hitch.
Scary that the CIA may not be functional when we need it the most.
One hopes that Goss can bring some old hands in who retired in the early 90s because of the Clinton administration indifference and the end of the Cold War with Russia.
They may have a clue and enough reputation to put the Agency together again.
fyi
The article describes the problem in great detail but provides little or no analysis of *why* the CIA is so screwed up.
I am of course ready to blame it on Demonrats and liberals in the CIA, but I don't even see the evidence of *that* in this article.
Maybe the reason no blame is affixed, is that the author doesn't want to admit the origin of the problem?
Professional apologist needed. Stat!
bump
That's why I turned McCoy down when he made his pitch my senior year.
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