Caught Off Guard, Part II: Why We Don't Spy
Matthew, a few pieces I wrote in the wake of September 11 might help further fill in the picture for you. I was appalled by the intelligence failure and set out to figure out, as best I could, how such a thing could have happened. I received a lot of cooperation from Agency insiders who were just as dismayed as I was. Here's what they told me.
I wrote Why We Don't Spy for the Weekly Standard:
In the early 1990s, Baer, who reads and speaks Arabic, noted an unusual efflorescence of radical Islamic tracts in the bookstores of Central London. These pamphlets, written in Arabic, openly advocated violence against the United States — and were, in fact, so inflammatory as to be banned even in most Middle Eastern countries. "One glance at the bold print," writes Baer, "and you knew what they were about: a deep, uncompromising hatred of the United States. In the worldview of the people who wrote these tracts, a jihad, or holy war, between Islam and America wasn't just a possibility; for them the war was a given, and it was already underway." What was the CIA doing, then, to monitor the authors and publishers of these tracts? According to Baer, it was doing nothing whatsoever. Why not? For one thing, not a single CIA officer in Britain spoke or read Arabic. Moreover, the CIA feared the British would be annoyed were its officers to recruit sources — even Islamic fundamentalists — on British soil.
At the same time, CIA offices in Bonn, Paris, and Rome were shrivelling. In the decade before the attacks, Baer reports, the CIA had no agents in the mosques of Germany who could have informed them of the increasing radicalization of European Moslems or Mohamed Atta's efforts to recruit young terrorists for his obscene plot. In the Middle East itself, things were not much better; many countries were staffed in their entirety by only one or two CIA officers; more often than not, these officers could speak no Arabic, nor any other language spoken by Islamic extremists.
In the wake of the Aldrich Ames scandal, the agency turned instead upon itself. Offenses as trivial as bouncing a check served to end careers. Many of the agency's best trained and most experienced officers were impounded at CIA Headquarters for years, their lives under microscopic examination, while terrorists operated throughout Europe and the Middle East free from scrutiny. ...
It is worth noting that Baer is part of an emerging cohort of disillusioned case officers, among them, for example, the prescient Reuel Gerecht (a frequent Weekly Standard contributor), who wrote in a now-famous Atlantic Monthly article that "America's counterterrorism program in the Middle East and its environs is a myth." Gerecht's perspective corroborates Baer's in substance and detail: "In my years inside the CIA," Gerecht writes, "I never once heard case officers overseas or back at headquarters discuss the ABCs of a recruitment operation against any Middle Eastern target that took a case officer far off the diplomatic and business-conference circuits. Long-term seeding operations simply didn't occur."
The arguments made by Baer and Gerecht are supported by many other officers who decline to make their views public. They argue that a risk-averse, bureaucratized CIA was unable to predict the events of September 11 because it did not have enough linguistically trained case officers in the field, refused to develop cadres of specialists to focus on particular countries or terrorist groups, and had no interest in any operation that could lead to a flap or embarrassment. Stories like Baer's are multiplying rapidly, and they are disturbingly alike. If Baer's book is even partially true, the CIA's management must be called to account.
Then I wrote True Lies, for Arabies Trends:
The agency is a sclerotic bureaucracy, and like all bureaucracies it behaves in predictable ways. Free from the pressures of a market economy, the place attracts the kind of people bureaucracies everywhere attract: slow-moving time-servers who fill out forms, shuffle papers and count the years until retirement. Like all bureaucracies, it is riven by grudges and rivalries among its various internal organs. But unlike other bureaucracies, it is protected from scrutiny by a cloak of secrecy, justified by the appeal to national security. Nowhere are these liabilities more of a handicap than in the agency's Middle East operations, and nowhere is the discrepancy between the agency's real power and its perceived power so great. ...
The DO and the DI regard each other with hostility, like lions circling the body of a fresh antelope. Insiders say that the DO spends as much energy keeping information from the DI as it does sharing it. Usually, they say, the members of the DI are better educated, more knowledgeable and more likely to speak Arabic. Despite this — or perhaps because of it — members of the DO view members of the DI with grave suspicion.
In fact, members of the DO who fail their training or are for some other reason considered unfit for their jobs are encouraged to seek work in the DI, which the DO imagines to be a safe warehouse for those who "can't handle" the DO. The DO has greater prestige within the agency — they are the real spooks, the action men or so they like to imagine it — and the DO is thus able to force this policy through.
In consequence, the DI has remarkably poor quality control; among its learned specialists are a significant minority of DO dropouts who know absolutely nothing about the Middle East — including, for example, one official, whose duties included the Arab-Israeli account, and who did not recognize any of the following terms: Ottoman Empire, Balfour Declaration, Sykes-Picot, Suez War.
And finally, I wrote English Only Spoken Here for the Weekly Standard:
The intelligence community has almost no knowledge of the rebarbative languages spoken in or around Afghanistan--Pashto, Farsi, Dari, Tajik, Azgari, Uzbek, Turkmen, Berber, Aimaq, Baluchi, Ossete, and Yaghnobi. Dari and Pashto were taught at the CIA in the 1980s, but the people who speak them are now retired. Until recently, the Defense Language Institute in Monterey did not teach the Dari variant of Farsi, the primary language of Afghanistan. U.S. Customs employs one Pashto speaker. The INS has almost no Arabic speakers. For now, intelligence officers and military personnel in Afghanistan are relying for translation on the Pakistani intelligence service--which created, supplied, and funded the Taliban.
The CIA's open-source translation arm, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, was gutted following the fall of the Berlin Wall. FBIS used to translate a wealth of otherwise unobtainable primary documentation. Now it limits its efforts to wire service copy and articles from foreign news websites. Its translators are overtaxed: Last November, puzzled analysts endeavored to limn a translation from a Palestinian newspaper in which the authors appeared to charge Israeli defense officials with the use of "phlebotomized uranium." After some consideration, readers realized that the uranium in question was, in fact, depleted rather than skillfully drained of its blood. ...
In the 19th century, British soldiers and administrators studied classical Pashto as a matter of routine. The United States is now the leading world power, but its efforts to understand what the rest of the world is saying have by comparison been purely desultory. Now we are paying the price.
From what I understand, there's been no improvement since then. We can expect a lot more intelligence failures until someone gets serious about addressing these deficiencies.
And of course, for a fictional perspective on the CIA, there's Loose Lips--which I understand is a pretty accurate representation of the culture.
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Comments :
Aug '10
Re: Caught Off Guard, Part II: Why We Don't Spy
As I check the copy of The Human Factor to see where the bookmark is, p. 47, I ask if I need to change books . I think they got down with the first 30 pages so I am requesting some guidance , s'il vous plait .
May '10
Re: Caught Off Guard, Part II: Why We Don't Spy
A sign was noticed on the desk of a CIA case officer in Rome:
BIG OPS, BIG PROBLEMS.
SMALL OPS, SMALL PROBLEMS.
NO OPS, NO PROBLEMS.
That's from Thomas Powers Intelligence Wars. I used that quote in paper I wrote on Citigroup's culture of "keep dancing" for my business class. Management was more obsessed with Sach's quarterly reports and performance numbers than figuring out how to make profit. Incidentally, how many intelligence agencies are we up to now?
The 2009 Khost bombing comes to mind. Station chief Matthews was an al qaeda expert who had rarely stepped outside DC and tragically paid for her inexperience with her life.
Edited on Mar 6, 2011 at 5:02pmSep '10
Re: Caught Off Guard, Part II: Why We Don't Spy
The DVD for the entertaining movie Red (not to be confused with the communist hagiography Reds) has commentary by Robert Baer.
Jul '10
Re: Caught Off Guard, Part II: Why We Don't Spy
I think with few exceptions, the intelligence agencies of the United States are beyond incompetent. The disease is at the top considering the repeated gaffes of Mr. Clapper. America, more than any other country in the world, has the best pool of potential spies probably in human history given how diverse and multi-lingual her citizens are who immigrate.
Are we utilizing all our resources to infiltrate the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Brotherhood? Do we have agents in mosques and MSA meetings? Maybe. Maybe not. Given the stunning political correctness, if infiltration is even happening at all, it's probably lackluster.
We should take a page out of the Czarist secret police force who were expert infiltrators. The Okhskrana (sp?) was so good that its agents were in charge of several Bolshevik underground organizations.
Dec '10
Re: Caught Off Guard, Part II: Why We Don't Spy
Notice the dates and their significance. There used to be a good mix of DO and DI types and gentle tension between the two (somewhat). It all changed in the late 1970s and that is unlikely to have been purely coincidental, after the Church Committee.
Here's an anecdote. Both of my parents were Americans of several generations, but I was born and raised overseas. I was born in Ecuador and we moved to Spain, several years later. Then we moved to Southeast Asia, etc. I was once fluent in the languages in all of the countries we lived in, plus I studied Russian language, history, and poetry in college.
I am a scientist, now, but I realized something upon reading Claire's post; never at any time when I was an undergraduate student, a graduate student, or a young scientist traveling about, did the CIA ever attempt to recruit me.
A poly-linguistic person with good grades, staunch identification with America, and a person they had "known" since birth, whom lifeguarded their children at community pools, with a natural lefty cover as a biologist. A person living on Soviet ships, for a time. The CIA isn't even trying.
May '10
Re: Caught Off Guard, Part II: Why We Don't Spy
Thanks for this. I had no idea our intelligence agencies had become so unreliable.
Might they be better off if politicians didn't directly appoint the heads of these agencies? Is an alternative even possible?