John Weisman is one of a select company of writers to have had books on both the New York Times fiction and nonfiction best-seller lists. His best-sellers include Rogue Warrior (written with Richard Marcinko) and Rogue Warrior's eight fictional sequels. A former journalist, Weisman has worked in more than three dozen countries. His latest work, the Black Ops novel SOAR, is now available through HarperCollins/William Morrow. He is currently completing the second Black Ops novel, Jack in the Box, for release in 2004. He can be emailed at: blackops@johnweisman.com
It's the middle of winter. But you couldn't tell it from the huge mass of hot air blowing out of Washington, DC. The source of this global warming is a bipartisan chorus of Congressional solons as they posture, bluster, and hyperventilate about the breadth, width, and depth of the latest "independent investigation" on the causes behind the CIA's Iraqi WMD intelligence failure.
Well, that's to be expected. It's an election year, and the best Congress money can buy is looking for some way to demonstrate how committed it is to ensuring the efficiency of our intelligence community.
But here's a dirty little secret few in Washington will tell you. Uncovering the truth about CIA's 9/11 and WMD failures would be devastating -- devastating to a Congress that has for decades abdicated its intelligence oversight responsibilities.
A sanctimonious February 8 op-ed by Rep. Jane Harmon (D-CA), the ranking member of the House Permanent Committee on Intelligence (known as HPSCI and pronounced "HIP-SEE"), is hard evidence of the delusional state on Capitol Hill. "Senior intelligence and political leaders." Harmon writes self-righteously, "must immediately end their state of denial" about the state of the US intelligence community. "President Bush," she insists smugly, "should announce specific steps now to improve intelligence and restore its credibility."
Get real, Jane. You want to see world-class state of denial about our intelligence community? Lift the Capitol dome and peek inside.
Year after year HPSCI and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (known as SSCI and appropriately pronounced "SISSY"), have held oversight hearings without making any serious demands on CIA's leadership despite undeniable evidence that the Agency was in trouble and its clandestine service dysfunctional. Instead of demanding results, setting timetables, and smacking heads when they were not achieved, HPSCI and SSCI have continually accepted the status quo.
HPSCI and SSCI often seem more concerned about political correctness than in dealing with the unhappy reality that for years CIA has lacked the ability to perform the core mission for which it was created: uncovering the capabilities -- and more important, the intentions -- of America's adversaries. Instead of probing, committee members have stuck their heads in the proverbial sand, accepting and even trumpeting the official line from Langley.
Hyperbole, you say. Where's the beef? Let's go to the videotape for one quick example:
The Washington Post, June 26, 2001. Headline: U.S. Has Bin Laden 'On the Run,' Sen. Shelby says. "Back from a six-country tour of the Persian Gulf, [SSCI vice chairman] Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-AL) believes U.S. counterterrorism officials are winning the war against Saudi extremist Usama Bin Laden..."
There are only two logical conclusions to draw from Shelby's incredible quote. Either the senator is hopelessly naïve -- a truly frightening thought. Or he was lied to by his CIA handlers -- an equally frightening thought. Either way, his public assessment of the bin Laden situation less than three months before the 9/11 attacks betray the fact that his briefings during that "six country tour" did not reflect a grim reality: we had no idea what Usama Bin Laden's specific capabilities or intentions toward the United States might have been.
Moreover, it has been apparent for some years that the Directorate of Operations, or DO, lacks the aggressive leadership necessary to run risky but potentially valuable operations. Leadership is the key. As Roy Henry Boehm, the maverick mustang Navy lieutenant who helped create the SEAL program back in 1961, has often told me, "Leadership can be defined in two words: 'Follow me!'"
But there has been precious little from-the-front leadership, either at CIA, or up on Capitol Hill. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, as many as one-third of the estimated three dozen case officers at the CIA's Paris Station resigned or retired because they were disgusted and disillusioned with DO's leadership. But no one at HPSCI or SSCI changed the DO's culture, forcing it back into the spying business by demanding audacity, risk-taking, and out-of-the-box thinking.
Things deteriorated precipitously after William Jefferson Clinton was elected president. Clinton's first DCI, R. James Woolsey, might have meant well. But he was seldom able to even see the president one-on-one. Into that intelligence vacuum stepped the National Security Council, which began telling the DO what it could do and what it couldn't. I have been told by one CIA veteran that Agency brass allowed the Clinton NSC to terminate at a minimum three ambitious DO operations in several of the former Soviet republics between 1996 and 1997, because they might have interfered with American business interests in the region; business interests that had ties to several operatives on Clinton's NSC.
According to one former intelligence community source in a position to know, the most ambitious of those cancelled operations was to be a clandestine inspection of a former Soviet nuclear site in Kazakhstan. The mission objective was to calculate the number of warheads that the site had been capable of handling. The reason to risk the op was that CIA's estimates of Soviet-era missiles were known to be inaccurate -- by as much as thousands of warheads -- and by measuring a specific portion the site's repair facility in a specialized manner, and then combining that finding with other, technical intelligence gathering methods, it would be possible to calculate how many warheads the Russians might currently be holding. The CIA's inspection team was to be guided by a Kazak national who had been recruited by the CIA station in Almaty, the Kazak capital. He had a way of accessing the site that would allow him to get the CIA team in and out unobserved. But the NSC vetoed the plan. Shortly after it did so, the Kazak agent missed a scheduled meeting with his CIA case officer. Shortly after that, so the story goes, the agent disappeared altogether.
Neither HPSCI nor SSCI took anyone to task for what appears to have been a monumental security leak. Nor did either committee probe the causes behind that, and many other significant intelligence-gathering failures during the Clinton era.
But enough about Clinton. Let's go back to 9/11 and Iraq's WMD. Here's something that needs to be said loud and clear. As much as some of George Tenet's critics would like to argue the case otherwise, Tenet is not the root cause of the DO's disintegration or its current state of disrepair. The decline began long before Tenet was sworn in. Tenet's problem -- and why he must be replaced -- is that he refuses to see the Agency's 9/11 and WMD failures as failures in the first place.
According to Agency insiders much of the DO's internal rot can be traced to the stewardships of CIA directors Stansfield Turner (1977-1981), Judge William Webster (1987-1991) and his successor, intelligence analyst Robert Gates (1991-1993).
According to Joshua R. EDKINS [a CIA-style pseudonym for a retired supergrade clandestine service operative], each of these DCIs changed the underlying principles that governed the clandestine service. Turner had no stomach for espionage. Under his stewardship, CIA hemorrhaged a slew of experienced case officers, leaving a young generation of American operatives without mentors. Webster's muzzling of the clandestine service (he committed so little policy to paper that he became known around Langley as "The Stealth DCI"), may have been rooted in his bureaucrat's fear of a rogue DO in the wake of the Iran/Contra controversy. And lifelong analyst Gates? According to Antony Q. JEDDLER [pseudonym], a retired senior-level DO officer who knew him well, "It seemed to me he detested spying. Bobby Gates distrusted the DO and its methods."
One result of this attitude, says JEDDLER, was that both Webster and Gates forced the DO to accept unqualified outsiders as case officers and station chiefs. According to J, Gates called the process "Cross-fertilization."
"When I joined CIA," says Robert Baer, a former case officer who spent 21 years recruiting foreign spies in such garden spots as Delhi, Beirut, and Khartoum, "promotions were based on results. 'How many recruitments did you have? How productive were they?' But by 1988, it had all changed. By then they were shuttling analysts, reports officers, even former secretaries through the case officer course and sending them willy-nilly into the field."
And it wasn't just Webster and Gates, either. The DO's downward spiral actually accelerated during John Deutch's tenure as DCI (1995-1996). Neither Deutch (a former MIT professor), nor his executive director Nora Slatkin (a former assistant secretary of the Navy), nor his deputy director George Tenet (a former congressional staffer and National Security Council aide), had any experience in clandestine operations. The situation worsened more after Deutch named David Cohen, a career intelligence analyst in the Robert Gates mold, to head the DO.
It was during the Deutch/Slatkin/Tenet/Cohen administration that case officers working the counterterrorism area were forbidden -- on pain of firing -- to recruit any agents who might have unsavory backgrounds, even though, according to EDKINS, the clandestine service supergrade, "it takes a terrorist to catch a terrorist."
According to veteran case officer JEDDLER, the CIA's extensive database of agents, developmentals, contacts, and other individuals who had criminal backgrounds was purged to make it politically correct. "We lost about half our data under Deutch and Tora-Tora Nora," claims JEDDLER.
The problem was that analysts and reports officers lacked the "people skills" necessary to spot, assess, develop, and recruit agents. Many also lacked language capabilities, meaning they were limited to dealing with English-speakers. And what did HPSCI and SSCI do about the problem? The answer seems to be nothing.
In fact, as late as December of 2003, HPSCI chairman Porter Goss (R-FL), a former DO operative himself, complained to the Washington Post about CIA's "unsatisfactory response to Congressional directives to improve its language capability."
Goss's public complaint was unusual in that it actually pinpointed a real problem. Normally, Congressional sound bites create a lot more heat than light, doing more damage than good. From the sensationalistic Church and Pike Committee hearings of the 1970s, to the 1990's congressional leaks that CIA (horrors!!) actually recruited drug dealers, criminals, and human rights violators as spies, the record shows that Congress has historically pressured CIA to maintain a politically correct approach to the amoral world of espionage.
"The DO's culture reacted to these restrictions by treating Congress like mushrooms. By which I mean we'd feed 'em lots of manure, and keep 'em in the dark," claims Robert Baer. Neither HPSCI nor SSCI ever seemed to be aware of the change in their diets.
Moreover, given congress's PC structures, many case officers stopped recruiting altogether. Instead, they relied on the liaison services in the countries in which they served to provide them with information, and agents. DCI George Tenet said as much in a February 5 speech at Georgetown University. "We did not ourselves," he admitted, "penetrate [Saddam's] inner sanctum...[but] we had a steady stream of reporting with access to the Iraqi leadership come to us from a trusted foreign partner."
No unilateral sources inside Saddam's inner sanctum. And yet, Iraq had been a primary target for more than a decade. Incredible. Did HPSCI or SSCI ever bang heads when Gates, Woolsey, Deutch, or Tenet admitted this... deficiency during oversight hearings?
In fact, from Turner's SNAFUs, to Webster and Gates's TARFUs, to Deutch and Tenet's FUBARs, scores of intelligence oversight hearings were conducted by the nation's Congressional mushrooms -- the members of HPSCI and SSCI. And where are the tangible results of all that oversight, you'd like to know. The awful truth is that you and I and the rest of the world saw the consequences of their delusional oversight efforts on the morning of September 11, 2001.
Believe me, if the president's "independent inquiry" is truly independent -- and it wants to do more than issue yet another boilerplate report -- it will issue subpoenas to every past and present member of HPSCI and SSCI, put them under oath, and force them to testify about their intelligence failures before the first CIA employee is called.
