The Clinton Administration's See-No-Evil C.I.A.
By JAMES RISEN
WASHINGTON -- When the Clinton administration began planning its
first major military campaign, the 1994 American invasion of
Haiti, the Central Intelligence Agency was left out until the
last minute, when administration officials suddenly asked for
help.
The C.I.A. complied, quickly printing up leaflets calling on
Haitians to remain calm and not resist, and using voodoo symbols
to help get the message across. When a senior administration
official saw the leaflets, he objected, saying that the Clinton
White House could not show support for one religion over another.
The C.I.A. destroyed the leaflets, but agency officials
shuddered over the notion of a politically correct covert action.
This spring, C.I.A. analysts were admonished to avoid any
intelligence surprises during the presidential campaign. The
lecture came from their boss, John McLaughlin, who later
explained that he just wanted to make sure there were no
embarrassing gaffes at a sensitive time.
While a lecture to steer clear of election- year controversy
might make sense at the Bureau of Land Management, the C.I.A.'s
job is to look for trouble, in order to warn the president and
Congress about it.
"I think it was kind of insulting to the analysts," said one
C.I.A. veteran. "We are in the business of surprises."
The spy agency has been struggling for its footing since the end
of the cold war robbed it of its core mission. But the two
incidents demonstrate how, under the Clinton administration, the
C.I.A. has suffered from two worsening trends: a skittishness
about politically sensitive intelligence and an aversion to risky
espionage operations.
Some officers who have left the agency in recent years say it is
dominated by play-it- safe bureaucrats and has become a
diminished force within the government.
"This is an intelligence agency, and it is supposed to do serious
things," said a senior C.I.A. officer who resigned during the
Clinton administration. "We should not be worried about image
and bureaucracy. We are not selling soap."
Senior intelligence officials say the C.I.A. has regained much
of its strength under George Tenet, who became its director in
July 1997. Still, its most glaring recent failure came in 1998,
when it was surprised by India's test of a nuclear weapon.
Certainly, the story begins with the fall of the Berlin Wall and
the implosion of the Soviet Union. Lacking a clear mission, the
C.I.A. became a target for budget cutting. The agency's
espionage arm shrank, and overseas stations in Africa and Latin
America were closed.
The C.I.A. was further traumatized in 1994 with the revelation
that Aldrich Ames, a longtime case officer, had been a Russian
mole for nine years. Reprimands in the case prompted a mass
exodus of bitter senior managers. By the mid-1990's, the
generation that had run the C.I.A. during the cold war was
largely gone, and with them went much of the agency's
institutional memory on managing spy operations.
But the administration's handling of intelligence has deepened
the agency's woes. President Clinton's lack of interest in
intelligence policy early in his term doomed his first director
of central intelligence, R. James Woolsey. Mr. Woolsey likes
to say that when a light plane crashed onto the White House lawn
in 1993, White House staffers joked that it must have been Mr.
Woolsey, trying to get a meeting with the president.
Haiti was hardly the Clinton administration's only half-hearted
covert action. The most spectacular failure was in Iraq.
C.I.A. officers involved in two failed operations against
Baghdad say the Clinton administration wasted resources � and
Iraqi lives � in efforts the agency knew were pointless.
One action, in northern Iraq, relied on the dissident Iraqi
National Congress and Kurdish ethnic groups. It was simply
overrun by the Iraqi Army. The other, based in Jordan, called
for sabotage and other minor acts of rebellion from the Iraqi
National Accord, which was made up mostly of former Iraqi
military officers. But Iraqi double agents penetrated the
operation, and about 100 of its members were arrested and
executed.
The appointment of John Deutch to succeed Mr. Woolsey in 1995
initially seemed likely to strengthen the agency, but Mr.
Deutch soon began angling to become secretary of defense. In
perhaps the most significant restructuring in the nation's
intelligence community in the last decade, he arranged a transfer
of spy satellite operations from the C.I.A. to the Defense
Department. Even White House officials acknowledge that the
shift has been a disaster.
Because the Pentagon has first call on the satellites, tactical,
short-range military targets have top priority, while
longer-range analytical problems � like monitoring the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction � get shorter
shrift. Many insiders believe that the C.I.A.'s failure to
predict India's 1998 test of a nuclear weapon was caused by the
satellite shift.
Fingerpointing over the India fiasco has led to the opposite
problem. Gun-shy analysts are flooding policy makers with
mountains of reports on every conceivable problem that seem
impossible to sort through.
Political demands from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue have also
increased the pressure on the C.I.A. Without an overwhelming
threat to national survival like the cold war, Congress and the
White House feel free to argue over intelligence on less
immediate problems, like corruption in Russia or the growing
power of China. Critics in the intelligence community complain
that the administration sometimes plays down or dismisses
intelligence analysis that conflicts with its policies.
Republicans in Congress, seeking to block Clinton initiatives,
have frequently exaggerated the significance of the same reports.
C.I.A. analysts then find themselves caught in the middle.
Gordon Oheler, who served as chief of the C.I.A.'s
counterproliferation center in the mid-1990's, has complained
that administration officials tried to block him from testifying
before Congress on politically sensitive proliferation matters.
On the other side, Republicans in Congress also intervened when a
1995 National Intelligence Estimate on ballistic missiles
concluded that the United States was safe from nuclear missile
attacks launched by small "rogue states" like North Korea, Iran
and Iraq. Republican lawmakers created an independent commission
to challenge the findings, helping revive the debate over
national missile defense.
The C.I.A.'s efforts to make its intelligence reports more timely
and relevant to current policy debates have only increased the
political pressures on the agency.
"We have gotten much more aggressive about getting to policy
makers on more issues and tailoring our intelligence to issues
they are dealing with," noted one senior intelligence official.
"And as you get closer to issues that are highly sensitive policy
matters, you are more likely to experience pressure, and you are
more likely to be challenged by policy makers. You do feel their
displeasure at times."
Senior intelligence officials insisted, however, that they had
never changed an analytical report because of such pressures.
Many insiders say there are concrete signs that the tide has
begun to turn under Mr. Tenet. They credit him with bringing
back Jack Downing, a cold war legend, who helped rebuild the
agency's spy service before going back into retirement last year,
and winning budget increases that have enabled the C.I.A. to
begin recruiting a new generation of case officers. Some closed
stations in Africa have been reopened, aiding in the agency's
increasingly successful penetrations of terrorist groups. And
senior officials say the agency's risk-taking spirit is beginning
to return.
"If the people who left a few years ago came back today and saw
what we were doing, I think they would be impressed," one senior
C.I.A. official said.
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Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day.
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