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June
18, 2002 8:45 a.m. |
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hen
the September 11 postmortems are finished, one conclusion seems likely
to feature prominently: The Central Intelligence Agency, under George
Tenet, was part of the problem. It will then become clear that one of
President Bush's most grievous, if well-intentioned, mistakes upon taking
office was to extend Tenet's tenure — and that it's time for Tenet
to go.
To
do justice to the myriad reasons Tenet should be replaced would require
volumes. The case can be briefly summarized, however, as follows.
First of all, a man who does not understand what is wrong with his organization
is unlikely to be able to fix it. Tenet has insisted in the aftermath
of the 9/11 attacks that there was "no failure of intelligence."
Such a stance has become increasingly untenable, as more and more evidence
emerges that neither the CIA nor the FBI properly handled information
about threats of deadly aircraft-delivered attacks by Islamist operatives
against U.S. government facilities and/or other prominent sites.
What is troubling is not simply that the proverbial "dots" were
not connected before the attacks. This is, after all, a very difficult
thing to do without the benefit of hindsight's filter — the device
that enables important and interrelated threat information to be discerned
from the enormous quantity of less consequential or unrelated "noise."
But the task becomes nigh on impossible, under circumstances of the kind
that either were in place before Tenet became CIA director in 1996 and
that he failed to rectify during his first five years in office, or that
he brought about after he assumed the top job there. Of greatest concern
among these was the failure to invest adequately in the traditional espionage
techniques known as human intelligence, or "humint." This problem
has its roots in the deliberate emasculation of the agency's humint assets
and capabilities when Jimmy Carter turned the CIA over to Adm. Stansfield
Turner. But it has persisted and metastasized during the years since —
especially during the Clinton presidency.
This problem has become apparent in a number of ways — for example,
an over-reliance on technical means of collection (such as spy satellites
and electronic and other collection devices) that unfortunately are of
limited utility in combating terrorist cells. This is particularly true
when it comes to a group such as al Qaeda, which appears to have a sophisticated
understanding of such U.S. capabilities and, consequently, can defeat
them via disciplined operational security.
Such human intelligence as has been performed by the Tenet CIA has apparently
been undertaken largely by agents serving under "official cover"
— that is, as diplomats in U.S. missions overseas. Such individuals
are, by their nature, easily identified and often closely monitored. At
best, they have a very difficult time putting themselves in positions
where they can recruit others to work for the U.S.
These agents often do not speak the local language(s) — a shortcoming
that evidently also afflicts many of the CIA personnel back at headquarters
who are charged with analyzing the intelligence collected. The result
is an ill-advised reliance on foreign-country "liaison" services,
affording those whose loyalties may lie elsewhere opportunities to deny
or misrepresent information that they find inconvenient (for example,
about Saudi nationals involved in al Qaeda) but that we urgently need.
Matters were made considerably worse when, in 1995, congressional and
press criticism prompted the CIA (of which Tenet was then deputy director)
to direct its operatives to recruit and deal only with foreign nationals
like those you would be willing to introduce to your mother — certainly
not people connected to drug dealers, members of organized-crime units,
individuals with ties to terrorist cells, etc. Not surprisingly, since
most people who know what we need to know happen to be unsavory types,
or at least people who traffic with those who are, the effect on American
humint capabilities was profoundly harmful.
Another strike against Tenet is his dangerous politicization of the agency.
This has been a hallmark of his tenure, and it has had direct repercussions
on employee morale. Tenet has long declared the CIA to be an "independent
source of information for the President — a source that he or she
[!] can use to evaluate the policy positions being presented," but,
in fact, reports on topics ranging from Russian corruption to the threat
of ballistic-missile attack have been dumbed down or manipulated so as
to support preferred administration policies.
As a result, legislators and officials in the executive branch have repeatedly
been denied the unvarnished truth. National security interests have often
suffered: sometimes because far-reaching decisions were made on an unsound
basis, on other occasions because information that might have prompted
Congress to direct a different approach was withheld from its members.
This is a symptom of Tenet's unhealthy responsiveness to the mandates
of political correctness. In October 2001, for example, Insight
magazine cited a "current CIA manager who requested anonymity"
as saying that Tenet's team has gone so far as to subject "intelligence
professionals . . . to sensitivity-training classes and . . . role-playing
skits [on] politically correct social themes," and to compel them
to attend "workshops to make politically correct diversity quilts."
Strike three against Tenet is his simultaneous penchant for actions that
undermine the president's policies and goals. Although Tenet has clearly
endeared himself to Bush — obtaining the latter's loyal support in
the months before and since September 11 — there is much evidence
that he has engaged in activities (or at least tolerated them on the part
of his subordinates) that are injurious to Bush and his presidency.
For instance, even though President Bush has reportedly authorized Tenet's
CIA to bring down Saddam's regime, the agency has joined forces with State
Department Arabists opposed to such an action in a classic Washington
bank-shot strategy: relentlessly seek to discredit and otherwise undermine
the Iraqi National Congress (INC). The INC appears to be the only group
that has any chance of developing a broad-based anti-Saddam coalition
inside Iraq. To the extent that the critics can claim there is no Iraqi
equivalent of the Northern Alliance, they can make it appear as if the
U.S. military may have to do the job of liberating Iraq alone — precipitating
not-unreasonable worst-case scenarios involving hundreds of thousands
of American troops having to storm Baghdad, and leaks about the reluctance
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to undertake such a mission.
No less counterproductive from the point of view of the president's commitment
to Israel's security has been Tenet's effort to equip and train Yasser
Arafat's proto-army that provides protection to and active support for
terrorists operating from Palestinian Authority-controlled areas. To be
sure, the Bush administration has authorized Tenet to try to build on
his earlier, equally ill-advised meddling in the Middle East that began
during Bill Clinton's presidency. Still, a CIA director should understand
and insist that this sort of activity is wholly inconsistent with the
independence and non-policymaking character that is supposed to be his
agency's stock-in-trade — and is certainly essential to its ability
to function as an objective and authoritative intelligence-collection
and -analysis organization.
Then there is the matter of the CIA's August 6 Presidential Daily Briefing
— a highly secret and closely held document that was leaked to the
press for the transparent purpose of rebutting charges that the agency
was asleep at the switch on terrorism prior to 9/11. There are literally
only a handful of people who had access to this memo prepared for the
president's eyes only. It strains credulity that George Tenet, who was
one of them, would have been wholly unaware of the identity of the leaker.
When the leak came out in the papers, reports about the memo may or may
not have done much for the CIA's reputation, but they seriously damaged
the president's: The briefing was portrayed, wrongly, by his political
opponents as evidence that he knew about the coming attack and failed
to take steps to prevent it.
It was said when Tenet was campaigning to retain his post at the beginning
of the Bush administration that he sought only to stay on for a few months
to fulfill civil-service retirement requirements. Whether this was true
or not, he has lingered on far longer than that — to the detriment
of his organization, the president he now serves, and the country he is
sworn to protect. Not everything that has gone wrong is his fault; neither
will his replacement by a professional without his shortcomings necessarily
correct all that ails the U.S. intelligence community, let alone assure
that we are safeguarded against future attacks. Still, if Tenet's departure
is not a sufficient condition in these regards, it clearly seems a necessary
one. If he refuses to take federal retirement of his own volition, President
Bush should ask him to do so without further delay.
— Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy
in Washington and an NRO contributing editor.