Ask Clinton.
B
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/cm/main/viewArticle.html?id=9866
What Became of the CIA
By Gabriel Schoenfeld From issue: March 2005
My first personal encounter with the CIA came in 1989. I was living in
Washington, D.C., editing a new publication about Communist affairs under
the auspices of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. There
had been a spate of violence directed against the Communist authorities in
Russia; I was among the first to discuss and analyze these events,
publishing my findings not only in my own research bulletin but also, to
wider attention, in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.
Shortly after my articles appeared I got a phone call from a second
secretary of the Soviet embassy. He was fascinated, he told me, by what I
had written, and he wanted to talk. I understood at once that a Soviet
diplomat with an interest in American views of political violence in his own
country would in all likelihood be a KGB officer. When we met at my office a
few days later he turned out to be younger than I had expected, perhaps in
his mid-thirties, with a broad smile and heavily pockmarked skin. His
English was heavily accented but fluent. We had a pleasant talk for an hour.
I described my findings in somewhat greater detail, and together we
speculated about the future. And that seemed to be that.
Several days later I received another call, this time from someone who,
explaining that he was with the CIA, said he had heard through the grapevine
that I had met with a Soviet diplomat. The agency was interested in
obtaining further information about him. Would I agree to get together?
Despite not having much to say, I readily assented.
At the suggestion of my new acquaintance, we met at Tiberio, a posh Italian
restaurant on K Street. The agency man, who was perhaps the same age as my
KGB contact, had a studied nondescript appearance. Before his present
assignment, to a unit debriefing Americans who had had contact with
foreigners of interest to the government, he had been stationed in Rome for
two years; he could not, he told me, say anything more about what he had
been doing there. After a few minutes of such talk, we opened our menus. As
he perused the choices, a question sprang from his lips that, when its
implications sank in, shocked me to the core: "What's prosciutto?"
It is, of course, easy to sneer at the CIA, at its blunders in recent years,
and at the revealing cluelessness of a junior employee fresh from two years'
immersion in Italy. In fairness, though, the task the agency has been
assigned is next to impossible: to observe what is happening inside nearly
200 national governments, to follow internal developments in thousands upon
thousands of potentially hostile sub-national groups around the world, and
to make sense not only of such discrete information but of broader trends in
global politics and society that bear on our national security.
For those in charge of this vast enterprise, the ultimate issue is
necessarily one of resource allocation: on what targets should
reconnaissance satellites focus their lenses; which communications lines
should be intercepted; on which strategic problems should the best
analytical minds be brought to bear? And even if resources are always
allocated with optimal savvy and thoughtfulness, the unlimited scope of the
task, the extensive bureaucracy needed to perform it, and the necessary
secrecy in which the work is wrapped virtually guarantee periodic lapses.
Unfortunately, in the age of global terrorism, lapses are unacceptable. The
price of intelligence failure was borne in on all of us on September 11;
and, given the very real prospect that terrorists will manage to acquire
weapons of mass destruction, that price could rise much higher. The question
is thus whether our intelligence services can be made to perform better than
they have been doing; and, if so, how.
In thinking about this problem, the 9/11 Commission and other observers have
pointed to a series of bureaucratic deformations within the agency. These
fall under such headings as "stovepiping" or excessive compartmentalization,
turf battling, information hoarding, group think, mirror-imaging, and many
other terms familiar to readers of textbooks on organizations in disarray.
Another line of inquiry, pursued in a still classified and only partially
leaked report prepared by the CIA's inspector general (IG), focuses on a
different kind of breakdown: the failure of the agency's leadership to
direct adequate resources to the prevention of terrorism.
To address all of these shortcomings, President Bush has installed a new CIA
director, Porter Goss, who against fierce resistance has been reshuffling
the senior ranks. Congress, for its part, has moved with celerity and with
White House support to follow the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission,
enacting the most far-reaching restructuring of the intelligence community
since the founding of the CIA itself. Among the concrete measures now being
set in place, one calls for a new inter-agency center for counterterrorism,
another for a national intelligence director with cabinet rank who will both
preside over the CIA and coordinate its work with the other fourteen
government bodies that make up the U.S. "intelligence community."
Will these reforms make a difference for the better? A perusal of those
portions of the 9/11 Commission report devoted to the actual performance of
the CIA does not inspire confidence. To the contrary: from that report, from
congressional documents, and from a number of new books, it seems evident
that the agency's problems originate in realms deeper than can be addressed
by a reconfiguration of the organizational chart.
Exhibit A in any discussion of these matters should be Imperial Hubris,* a
best-selling book by "Anonymous," who is described on the dust jacket as "a
senior U.S. intelligence official with nearly two decades of experience in
national-security issues." As became known not long after the book's
publication, "Anonymous" is Michael Scheuer, until his resignation in the
fall of 2004 a member of the CIA's senior intelligence service. Between 1996
and 1999 Scheuer was in charge of "running operations against al Qaeda."
After leaving that post, he became a high-level manager in the agency's
counterterrorism center, the perch from which he wrote his book.
Imperial Hubris is subtitled Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror. This
poses a loaded question from the start, since it is hardly self-evident that
the West is losing the war on terror. But Scheuer is strongly convinced-and
stridently insistent-that we are. Surveying U.S. counterterrorism policy in
the period leading up to and following September 11, he adduces several
major reasons why.
In the first place, he contends, American policymakers have failed to grasp
the character of our adversaries' enmity. Here our intellectual weakness
begins with a faulty appraisal of Osama bin Laden himself. We have tended to
caricature the mastermind of September 11 as a "deranged gangster," someone
"prone to and delighting in the murder of innocents," and an "apocalyptic
terrorist in search of Armageddon." But, in reality, bin Laden is a
strategically astute "practical warrior"-as well as "the most respected,
loved, romantic, charismatic, and perhaps able figure in the last 150 years
of Islamic history." Far from seeking the fiery destruction of the West, he
is pursuing a series of narrow and tangible objectives.
A related misconception, according to Scheuer, is that bin Laden and his
fellow Islamists hate the West for what it is rather than for what it does.
Not so, he maintains. Al Qaeda does not want to destroy our liberal
democratic institutions, our open society, or our freewheeling way of life.
Rather, it is engaged in a "defensive jihad." Many Muslims have a "plausible
perception" that the things they hold most dear-"God, Islam, their brethren,
and Muslim lands"-are being "attacked by America." We are thus not enmeshed
in a clash of civilizations but in something much less grand. The "key
causal factor in our confrontation with Islam" is "a few, specific U.S.
policies."
Scheuer has a short list of these policies, beginning with our general
stance in the Middle East. There, in the aftermath of World War II, the U.S.
moved "from being the much-admired champion of liberty and self-government
to the hated and feared advocate of a new imperial order." This drive for
hegemony, exemplified most recently by President Bush's "avaricious,
premeditated, un-provoked war" against Iraq, bears many of "the same
characteristics as 19th-century European imperialism: military garrisons;
economic penetration and control; support for leaders, no matter how brutal
and undemocratic, as long as they obey the imperial power; and the
exploitation and depletion of natural resources."
A major outpost of our neo-imperial ambitions is the state of Israel. Or is
it the other way around? All over the Middle East, writes Scheuer, the
United States is now seen as a country that has "abandoned multiple
generations of Palestinians to cradle-to-grave life in refugee camps" while
"arming and funding [Israel's] anti-Muslim violence." It is, indeed, a
wonder how Israel, "a theocracy-in-all-but-name of only about six million
people . . . ultimately controls the extent and even the occurrence of an
important portion of political discourse and national-security debate in a
country of 270-plus million people."
The key to this puzzle, Scheuer contends, lies in Israel's crafty use of
"diplomats, politicians, intelligence services, [and] U.S. citizen spies,"
along with "wealthy Jewish-American organizations," in order to "lac[e]
tight the ropes binding the American Gulliver to the Jewish state." But even
to raise this subject, he warns darkly, is perilous to one's health: our
"political and social landscape is littered with the battered individuals .
. . who dared to criticize Israel, or, even more heretically, to question
the value to U.S. national interests of the country's overwhelmingly one-way
alliance with Israel."
Sentiments like these mark the author of Imperial Hubris as something of a
political hybrid-a cross, not to put too fine a point on it, between an
overwrought Buchananite and a raving Chomskyite. This alone, one might
think, should have unfitted him for a high position of trust within the CIA.
But that is not the end of it. Even as he lambastes the United States from
his isolationist position, reserving special fury not only for America's
alliance with Israel but for our "hallucinatory crusade for democracy,"
Scheuer also swivels to assail Washington for being insufficiently hawkish
in waging the war on terror. "
An Unprepared and Ignorant Lunge to Defeat" is how Scheuer titles his
chapter on Afghanistan. What appears to exercise him most is the fact that,
after September 11, the United States waited almost a month to respond to al
Qaeda's attacks. Instead of a "savage, preplanned U.S. military response,"
there was "inexcusable delay" and "supine inaction." This had the effect of
turning the "human-economic calamity" of September 11 into a "catastrophe"
and a "full-blown disaster."
The same passivity supposedly on display in Afghanistan is, Scheuer asserts,
undermining the broader war on terrorism. To our lasting peril, we have
ignored the maxims of General Curtis LeMay, who taught us that war is about
killing people and that "when you have killed enough of them they stop
fighting." What we need to do, and immediately, is to "proceed with
relentless, brutal, and, yes, blood-soaked offensive military actions," and
these should not cease "until we have annihilated the Islamists who threaten
us."
Whence this peculiar congeries of views, advanced with supreme
self-confidence and heedless inattention to fact? The workings of Scheuer's
mind owe much, he discloses, to an early supervisor who taught him that the
key to "framing and solving intelligence problems was to first 'do the
checkables.'" The "checkables," he explains,
are those parts of a problem that were knowable, the things on which there
were classified archival records, pertinent and available human experience,
current human assets to consult, or even the results of media and academic
research. . . . The supervisor's recipe was to exploit to exhaustion the
"checkables" . . . and thereby identify the information we need to acquire
before acting to resolve the problem.
This approach, whether dressed up in agency jargon or simply called basic
research, would seem obvious enough. But, to the distress of Scheuer,
virtually everyone in the U.S. government, except him, has shunned it. In
Imperial Hubris he hammers this theme incessantly, and always in the same
words. Here is a very partial selection from a single chapter:
"it is time to look at some of the easily checkable checkables that were
obviously not checked";
*
*
*
"therein lies another example of the cost of not reviewing the
checkables";
*
*
*
"something that could have been readily forecast if the checkables
had been checked";
*
*
*
"to make matters worse, the checkables were available in local
public and university libraries";
*
*
*
"a perfect example of the unnecessary mess that always ensues when
time is not taken to review and digest the 'checkables'";
*
*
*
"the list of 'checkables' was immense . . . and yet tragically. . .
almost no checking seems to have been done."
*
*
* And so forth. It is, then, on the basis of his own, contrasting
"willingness to review the checkables" that Scheuer asks us to accept his
judgment of Osama bin Laden as a "gentle, generous, talented, and personally
courageous" leader, his assessment of our campaign in Afghanistan as
"wretchedly ill-conceived," and his conclusion that the collapse of that
country's government is guaranteed to happen, perhaps not "tomorrow, the day
after, or even next year . . . but come it will."*
*
* All of which leaves only two questions. How did a person of such
demonstrable mediocrity of mind and unhinged views achieve the rank he did
in the CIA, and how could so manifestly wayward and damaging a work have
been published by someone in the agency's employ? To the second question, at
least, an answer of a sort is ready to hand, if one that raises disturbing
questions of its own.
Last summer, CIA censors took the unusual step of permitting Michael Scheuer
to publish Imperial Hubris in the middle of the presidential election
season. This move, along with several simultaneous leaks of classified
intelligence studies painting a grim portrait of the American campaign in
Iraq, struck many as a blatant intervention by the agency into electoral
politics, with Scheuer being used as a proxy. According to the Washington
Post, however, the decision had an entirely different motive. Four top CIA
managers had given Scheuer a green light out of fear that, if blocked, he
would resign from the agency, thereby "earning even more attention for a
work they viewed as partly ludicrous."
Whether the decision was a CIA calculation or (yet another) miscalculation,
we are still left with the question of how, for a period of years, a man of
this caliber had been given primary responsibility for the effort to
understand and counter Osama bin Laden. But the bad news is that the
presence of such a figure in a pivotal position within the CIA was not a
fluke.
For helpful light on this subject, among others, we can turn to another new
book, Denial and Deception by Melissa Boyle Mahle. Until 2002, Mahle was an
Arabic-speaking field operative in the CIA's clandestine service. With
degrees from Berkeley and Columbia, she also served as an agency recruiter,
visiting college campuses in search of suitable candidates for the
directorate of operations. At some point in her career, she herself became
the object of a counterintelligence inquiry and was eventually forced to
resign. The details of her dismissal remain classified; her only comment
here is that "it was not a friendly departure. I made a mistake, to which I
admitted freely, accepting responsibility for a poor decision."
But Denial and Deception is by no means the work of a disgruntled
whistleblower. Like Scheuer, Mahle had a bird's-eye view of CIA
counterterrorism operations in the period leading up to September 11. Unlike
Scheuer, she is a calm and thoughtful writer, and her book is a
dispassionate attempt to probe "why the agency failed to accurately predict
the nature of the threat, comprehensively warn of the breadth of the threat,
and effectively disrupt the planning, preparation, and execution of the
attacks."
In addressing this subject, Mahle draws on her personal experiences running
CIA operations in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and other Middle Eastern
locales. She also ranges widely over the recent history of the agency,
recounting the attempts by successive directors to reshape its internal
workings.
As Mahle is not the first to show, and as can be pieced together from other
sources, including declassified CIA documents, a bureaucratic sclerosis
seems to have gripped the agency over the course of the 1980's and 90's. It
was on especially vivid display in the case of the Soviet mole Aldrich Ames.
Despite the agency's claims that it recruits only the best and the
brightest, Ames was hired after earning a B.A. in history from George
Washington University with a middling grade average of B-. This, moreover,
seems to have marked the high-water mark of his career. Before being
arrested in 1994 and unmasked as a traitor, he was widely regarded by his
colleagues and supervisors as having (in the words of a subsequent internal
report) "little focus, few recruitments, no enthusiasm, little regard for
the rules and requirements, little self-discipline, little security
consciousness, little respect for management or the mission, few good work
habits, few friends, and a bad reputation in terms of integrity,
dependability, and discretion."
Yet, despite these scathing assessments; despite his well-known habit of
sleeping off his "liquid lunches" at his desk in the afternoon; and despite
a "potentially very serious security violation" in which he left a suitcase
full of classified documents in a New York City subway car, Ames was not
only retained in the CIA's employ but was consistently promoted upward until
he became chief, successively, of two branches focusing on the USSR. There
he gained unfettered access to the agency's global efforts against the
Soviet Union. In exchange for cash, he proceeded to betray almost every
asset the CIA had in place in the USSR, an act resulting in the deaths of
numerous Russians who had risked their lives to help the United States.
If the Ames case revealed a near-incomprehensible sloth in the area of
personnel management, its aftermath went damagingly to the opposite extreme.
Because the unthinkable had occurred, and the KGB had been allowed to
penetrate the CIA's inner sanctum, the internal-security branch was
unleashed to ensure there would never be a recurrence. Among other measures,
polygraph testing of employees was instituted with a vengeance. Since Ames
himself had managed to deceive polygraph examiners, more aggressive
techniques were introduced.
The new approach, explains Mahle, entailed exposing loyal officers to
hostile interrogation:
Gone was the collegial relationship between examiner and examinee where
"concerns" were discussed, with the examiner saying, "Gee, you are showing
discomfort on that question . . . can you tell me why?" The post-Ames
approach was "You are lying. I know you are lying. The machine shows you are
lying. Admit your guilt now or your career is over."
Subjected to such grueling exams, some 400 officers flunked. Their names
were then reported to the FBI for mandatory investigation, setting in motion
a process that could take years to resolve. These agents, many of whom were
deprived of their right to travel abroad on official business or to work
with classified materials, were thrust into a limbo status and came to be
known within the agency as "ghosts."
Wreaking havoc on morale, the polygraph machine also created a major
bottleneck in recruitment at the very moment when the agency was facing a
crippling shortage of new blood. According to Mahle, nearly three-quarters
of CIA applicants are now rejected on the basis of polygraph results, a rate
suggesting that an astonishingly high proportion are engaged in unacceptable
levels of "immoral, criminal, or counterintelligence [i.e., potentially
traitorous] behavior." In explaining this puzzling phenomenon, she offers up
a crucial detail: investigators successful at "catching people who lie"
during their polygraph exams are awarded bonuses.
If the deformities caused by the CIA's peculiar culture of internal security
have taken a toll, of equal significance are intrusions of a much less
discussed kind that have subtly corroded the organization's self-image and
morale. The cumulative impact of these intrusions on recruitment and
ultimately on performance-especially in the area of counterterrorism-may not
be precisely measurable, but is undoubtedly profound.
>From the start, our national spy agency was designed to operate in a
radically different manner from every other government organization. How,
after all, could it engage successfully in the black arts of
espionage-breaking the laws of other countries, recruiting agents, stealing
secrets-if it were not allowed to conduct itself, at least to some extent,
outside the rules? But, in important respects, Congress, the executive
branch, and the agency's own leadership have conspired over the decades to
turn the CIA into a government bureaucracy like any other, its managers and
employees preoccupied with endless reams of restrictive regulations and
simultaneously caught up in many of the newfangled pathologies of the
American workplace.
In Denial and Deception, Mahle identifies the "old boy network" as one
important source of dysfunction. Whether or not that is so, the effort to
dislodge it created another and perhaps greater problem. Though the agency
had begun to recruit many more women in the 1980's and 90's, their ability
to move into senior positions, writes Mahle, was limited by the "dinosaur
brains" who ran the show. In 1991, a CIA-commissioned "glass ceiling" study
found that women were not achieving "at the same pace of or [to] the same
degree as men," and were receiving "proportionately fewer awards" while men
were still being "given the choice assignments." The report also noted that,
"in order to be accepted," female officers tolerated widespread sexual
harassment.
When the Clinton administration came into power, combating sexual harassment
and the "glass ceiling" became part of a much broader campaign to
reconstitute the agency workforce. Mahle tells part of the story, the part
about "the old boy network"; congressional documents supply the missing
pieces concerning the hiring and promotion of minority candidates.
Upon assuming his position as Clinton's first CIA director in 1993, R. James
Woolsey-who tried valiantly, and failed, to get the President to focus on
the threat of terrorism in the aftermath of the first bombing of the World
Trade Center-announced an ambitious affirmative-action plan. Although he was
careful to state that "we have not and will not set down quotas," Woolsey
conformed to the new administration's mandate by requiring the agency's
deputy directors "to identify the top 50 positions in their directorates"
and to collect data on "the percentage of minorities who apply, and the
number selected" for these slots; he also pushed forward a mandatory program
aimed at preventing sexual harassment.
By 1995, under John Deutch, Clinton's second director, the effort to remake
the agency in the name of "diversity" had intensified markedly. Deutch began
his tenure by advancing a "strategic diversity plan" and installing a
forty-year-old Pentagon official, Nora Slatkin, in the agency's
executive-director slot to carry it out. Slatkin soon formed a Human
Resources Oversight Council (HROC) aimed "at improving the agency's efforts
to hire and provide career development for women, minorities, the deaf, and
people with disabilities." The need for such measures, according to HROC,
was clear from its own study of shortfalls in "recruiting, hiring, and
advancement":
[M]inorities in the agency's workforce-particularly Hispanics and
Asian-Pacific employees-remain underrepresented when compared with Civilian
Labor Force (CLF) guidelines determined by the 1990 census. Hispanic
employees in FY 1995 accounted for 2.3 percent of the agency workforce; CLF
guidelines indicate Hispanics nationwide account for 8.1 percent of the
nation's workforce. Asian-Pacific employees comprised only 1.7 percent of
the agency's workforce; CLF guidelines indicate Asian-Pacific minorities
comprise 2.8 percent of the nation's workforce.
To reduce these statistical discrepancies, Slatkin declared "a goal that one
out of every three officers hired in fiscal years 1995-97 be of Hispanic or
Asian-Pacific origin." She moved no less aggressively to alter the ethnic
and sexual complexion of the CIA's higher levels. In just six months, she
was able to report, "42 percent of officers selected for senior assignments
ha[d] been women or minorities."
Inevitably, working relationships were affected by these shifts. According
to Mahle, some male officers became "very supportive of the diversity
program and ma[d]e a point of mentoring female officers under their
command." But there was also "a perception among some male officers that the
CIA now use[d] a quota system for assignments and promotions." And this
perception, she adds, was "probably true."
By 1999, the agency's top leaders were actively engaged in the campaign for
greater diversity, or, in plain English, quotas. Clinton's third director,
George Tenet, issued a major statement deploring the fact that
"[m]inorities, women, and people with disabilities still are
underrepresented in the agency's mid-level and senior officer positions,"
and asserting his determination to end this state of affairs. It was, he
said, incumbent on "supervisors and managers" at all levels to understand
that diversity is "one of the most powerful tools we have to help make the
world a safer place," and he declared that they would be held accountable
for "ensuring that this agency and community are inclusive institutions."
Today, after more than a decade of submission to this powerful tool, CIA
employees can take pride in being part of a very inclusive institution
indeed. One measure of this, as the agency itself boasts on its website, is
the number of "affinity groups" it supports within its ranks. There is, for
example, the Asian Pacific American Organization, which "assists in
recruiting, mentoring, counseling, and monitoring the advancement of Asian
American officers to insure that equity is occurring." The Black Executive
Board functions to advance the "multicultural environment" and provides
guidance "to senior management on all matters affecting recruiting, hiring,
retention, networking, assignments, promotions, and career development
opportunities." The Hispanic Advisory Council "provides input" on Hispanic
issues, while the Native American Council serves as "a champion of diversity
in the [CIA] workplace." There is also ANGLE, the Agency Network for Gay and
Lesbian Employees, which is "geared toward fostering the principles of
diversity and creating opportunities" for the agency's "gay, lesbian,
bisexual, and trans-gendered employees."
These, then, have been the fruits of an effort going back well over a decade
and consuming a large quotient of the agency's senior-level attention-the
same period in which al Qaeda was gathering force and training thousands of
Islamists, and when the CIA's overriding need, conspicuously unmet all those
years, was the hiring of more officers capable of speaking and reading
Arabic.*
The misplaced internal obsessions of the CIA are rightly an issue of major
concern. But fully to grasp the difficulties enveloping the agency, one must
enter into an area that the 9/11 Commission, perhaps in order to retain its
facade of bipartisan comity, was at pains to avoid-namely, the political
dimension of things.
To put the matter at its simplest, American elites have become increasingly
discomfited over the last decades by the very existence of a clandestine
intelligence service in a democratic society. Beginning with the Church
Committee hearings in the aftermath of the Vietnam war, and with the
collapse of the anti-Communist consensus, the CIA has thus come under
regular assault from both Congress and the media for real and alleged
transgressions of its mandate. At times, the White House has weighed in with
strictures (and purges) of its own.
The net effect has been to create a climate inside the agency in which
employees at all levels, and particularly in management positions, have
become fearful of aggressively performing their jobs. After all, the price
of stepping over the line in the service of one's country could now mean not
only the end of one's career but being hauled before a congressional
committee or, as happened in the Iran- contra fiasco, indicted by a criminal
court.
A salient victim of this ultra-cautious mood has been counterterrorism. In
1996, the agency established an Osama bin Laden "issue group" within its
counterterrorism center. According to Mahle, the unit was considered a
bureaucratic Siberia by those on the agency fast track and was left
"critically short of experienced analysts." It was also presided over by a
less than sterling mind: Michael Scheuer. Only in 1998, after al Qaeda had
blown up U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and after bin Laden
had issued a second fatwa (a first in 1996 had been largely ignored) urging
all Muslims "to kill the Americans and their allies, civilians and
military," was the CIA goaded into action-if action is the proper word.
After the embassy bombings, Mahle recounts, George Tenet "declared war
against bin Laden. He really did. Those words came out of his mouth-multiple
times." But, she goes on, it was not really a war at all. Instead, the CIA,
"which typically operates in crisis-management mode, just added one more
crisis to the pile." Between 1998 and 2000, only three officers were focused
exclusively on al Qaeda. Beginning in 2000 the number was increased to
five.86 And this was evidently the way Tenet liked it, for "if CIA
management wanted a fully staffed, powerhouse counterterrorism center,"
notes Mahle, "all it had to do was speak."
Tenet's aversion to effective action against al Qaeda is not all that
difficult to comprehend. As Mahle (a self-acknowledged Clinton voter)
emphasizes, Tenet was working in the service of an administration that was
itself risk-averse, that regarded foreign policy as a distraction, and that
therefore considered the CIA "potentially dangerous to the White House and
need[ing] to be controlled tightly, kept on a very short leash." A political
creature to his core, Tenet was bent on keeping "CIA activities within
Clinton's comfort zone."
But if Tenet was "successful in not getting caught out in front of Clinton,"
he was also successful in "not getting out in front of rapidly emerging
terrorist threats." Typical was the way in which the CIA pursued bin Laden
in the late 1990's. Although the agency was operating under a
government-wide ban (imposed in the Reagan era) on participating in
assassinations, the ban had now come to be construed by CIA higher-ups in
the most stringent form imaginable. An operation had to be immediately
halted, writes Mahle, if CIA lawyers "caught a whiff of anything that could
be interpreted on the most liberal basis as practicing assassination,
condoning assassination, or assisting indirectly in assassination." Indeed,
the agency even concluded it had a "duty to warn" individuals who were
targets of assassination, leading to "absurd situations" in which it found
itself firing agents it itself had hired to eliminate terrorists and
alerting "its own enemies" of threats against them.
One such absurd situation, as we learn from the 9/11 Commission report,
occurred in 1998, when CIA officers in the field developed a well-formulated
plan to ambush and capture Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan as he traveled
between Kandahar and his terrorist training facilities at Tarnak Farms.
Though the agents judged the plan to be highly promising, headquarters was
discomfited. In the words of the 9/11 Commission, the proposed operation
"brought to the surface an unease about paramilitary covert action that had
become ingrained." One senior manager "expressed concern that people might
get killed."
Not long afterward, the operation was called off. As a result, people did
get killed-thousands of them-and not on the road from Kandahar but in lower
Manhattan, at the Pentagon, and in rural Pennsylvania.
The CIA is an organization that grew out of the American role in
extinguishing the military conflagration that swept the world beginning in
1939. Its roots lie in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a wartime
intelligence unit that truly did draw upon some of our country's best and
brightest, accomplishing, with scarce resources and often under desperate
conditions, heroic feats of action and analysis. The establishment of the
CIA in 1947 was based upon a recognition that in the atomic age, and with
the rise of a nuclear-armed Communist adversary, another surprise attack
like Pearl Harbor could not be allowed to happen.
Across five decades, the CIA performed its intelligence mission with varying
degrees of proficiency and success. It had its major operational debacles,
as in the Bay of Pigs, and its no less significant analytical failures, as
in its persistent misestimates of the size and composition of the Soviet
economy. It also accomplished awe-inspiring deeds, including the development
of the U-2 spy aircraft and the recruitment of a number of highly placed
Communist-bloc spies. Yet increasingly, as the cold war wore on, and in its
aftermath, the agency went downhill.
The Clinton administration greatly accelerated this process, not only by
sharply cutting the CIA's budget but also by reining in almost all
risk-taking operations and browbeating the agency into becoming a showcase
for the Clintonian brand of affirmative action. And showcase is the right
word: if the CIA typically shrouds itself in secrecy, when it comes to
racial and gender preferences, few government agencies have made their
internal workings quite so visible. The drive to hire more "Asian-Pacific"
and Hispanic officers at the very moment the CIA was facing a critical
shortage of Arabic speakers, and at the very moment when Islamic terrorism
was emerging as the most significant threat to our national security, speaks
volumes about how and why the agency failed in its mission of safeguarding
the United States.
Just as there is no single cause of the CIA's manifold shortcomings,
however, so there is no single solution that can put things right. The
United States is today once again at war, and contrary to the CIA's leading
expert on Osama bin Laden, we are facing not a "gentle" adversary but one
that has already demonstrated its capacity to murder large numbers of us. In
this war, intelligence is the most important front-which means that fixing
the CIA or, if it cannot be fixed, replacing it with something different and
better, remains the government's most pressing task. Unfortunately, grafting
a new layer of bureaucracy on top of what exists, as Congress has just done,
does not even begin to grapple with the real weaknesses of the present
system.
* In light of his obsession with checking the checkables, it is positively
bizarre that Scheuer seems constitutionally unable to spell, or to check the
spelling of, figures in and out of government who appear in his book-L. Paul
Bremer III, the first U.S. proconsul in Iraq, is rendered as L. Paul
Bremmer, General Curtis LeMay as General Lemay, the foreign-policy analysts
Edward Luttwak and Adam Garfinkle as the duo of Lutwack and Garfinckle, etc.
* According to the report of the joint congressional inquiry into September
11, "the intelligence community was not prepared to handle the challenge it
faced in translating the volumes of foreign-language counterterrorism
intelligence it collected," and was at "a readiness level of only 30 percent
in the most critical terrorism-related languages used by terrorists." 86
These are Mahle's numbers; congressional documents offer several different
figures. The still-classified CIA IG report may resolve the matter.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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