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Human Events It is too early to even guess at the etiology behind the biggest intelligence failure in American history. We will know soon enough, and it will not be pretty. It is not too early, however, to start looking forward. In fact, it is imperative. The U.S. Intelligence Community, and particularly the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), must now go into battle against the gravest threat our nation has faced since Stalin stretched the Iron Curtain across Europe in 1946. In the coming months and years, we will depend on the men and women of the CIA as we have not done since 1989, when that same Curtain came crashing down. But the CIA is not its own master. It does not make foreign policy, and hence does not set its own agenda. That is the President's job. When serving a President with a brave and sober vision, as was generally the case throughout the Cold War, the Agency is fearsome. Without it, lethargy and drift seep in. In the 1990s, unfortunately, that brave and sober vision was absent. Our leadership saw a tame world, a 'Post-Cold War' world, a place in which America, though perhaps hated by some, was never seriously threatened. Our military became a police force, our soldiers melted into peace keepers. With talk, trust, and buy-in from the world community (whatever that was), seemingly intractable disputes - e.g., Israel and Palestine - could be resolved. And if things did get bloody, as they did in Somalia, we could always go back home to America, where life was safe. It was a child's view of the world, and on 11 September it came to a heartbreaking end. Now the grown-ups must take charge. Fortunately, President George W. Bush and his foreign policy team appear up to the task. Some of the weapons in the President's arsenal have been dulled over the past decade, but they can be sharpened. The CIA is one of them. Oddly enough, President Bush has yet to phone for my advice on putting the Agency back into fighting form - an oversight he will soon rectify, I am sure. Until then, I respectfully forward to the President three recommendations. Set priorities We are in a battle against radical Islamists, and their weapon is terrorism. Covert operations against Islamism and Islamist terrorism must therefore be the CIA's top priority. The second priority, whatever it is, needs to be a distant second. This is an obvious truth. But if the past decade teaches us anything, it is that this simple truth can be overlooked. During the Cold War, the Agency's top priority was the Soviet Union and its Eastern European client states. Everything else took a back seat. We had non-Soviet interests, to be sure, but most received their significance through their relation to the top priority. A particular African country might be a legitimate target, for instance, but only because it was seen as a potential Soviet foothold. The focus on the USSR and its communist satellites might have been too narrow at times, but it did provide vital bureaucratic direction. In the 1990s, however, the CIA was given myriad and capricious requirements from people who neither understood nor appreciated the craft of intelligence. Counter-terrorism was there, along with counter-narcotics, counter-intelligence, anti-proliferation, energy, economic trends, third world issues, regional developments (e.g., Middle East), support for U.S. military forces (e.g., in the Balkans), technology transfer, environmental issues - yes, you read correctly: we used the CIA to confirm that clear cutting really is bad for the rain forests - and on and on. This lack of direction from the top, this treating of the Intelligence Community as a handy source for anything about which policy makers might be curious, was debilitating and must not be repeated. The mission of the CIA is to steal secrets and engage in covert operations, and to do so only when no other option exists. It is not a toy. Keep the secrets Even if we leave aside the ridiculously lax security practices for which the Clintonoids were famed, the 1990s in general saw more interest in how to declassify secrets than in how to keep them. That must change. Nobody seriously argues against declassification per se, but a balance must be struck between the public's right to know and the ability of the CIA (and other intelligence agencies) to get the job done. Today, the pendulum has swung too far to the disclosure side, and must be forced back. Once-classified information is being routinely released through the Freedom of Information Act, the State Department's Foreign Relations of the United States series, and numerous special requests. Giving the release of intelligence information priority over its protection is another example of the childish worldview cultivated in Washington over the past decade, a view in which 'openness' has no downside and secrecy is always suspect. But sanity may be returning. Both the Executive and Congress are showing signs of a renewed seriousness and sense of responsibility when it comes to questions of defense and intelligence. Habits of security must be relearned in Washington, if we are to mount the kind of clandestine effort the war on terrorism will require. If it isn't broken, don't fix it Strong leadership and direction from the Executive Branch, coupled with a determination to ensure secrets stay secret, will go a long way toward arming the Agency for the war against terrorism. Incremental fixes and reforms will still be in order - a greater emphasis on fluency in Arabic, for instance - but we should resist the temptation to use these dangerous times as an opportunity to perform extensive surgery on CIA policies and procedures. For instance, one suggestion being floated is for the Agency to expand its use of non-official cover (NOC) officers - 'knocks', they are called. Most CIA officers are sent abroad under official cover, i.e., they pose as U.S. government officials, often diplomats or military personnel. NOCs, on the other hand, pose as something besides government employees, e.g., business people. Some critics are saying that if the CIA is going to recruit spies inside terrorist organizations it will require someone other than a button-down 'diplomat' to do it. One is not likely to bump into Usama bin Laden's lieutenants at an embassy cocktail party, after all. If we are serious about terrorism, the argument runs, we need officers who are not connected with an official U.S. government presence, and that means using NOCs. There are many reasons for keeping NOCs off extraordinarily dangerous missions (e.g., chasing after terrorists), not the least of which is that they have no official protection whatsoever. A black passport may not deter some al-Qaeda thug from beating information out of you, but it might stop a local policeman from doing it - far better than nothing. The main reason for not sending NOCs against the terrorist target, however, is that you do not need to. Instead, you recruit an agent with access to the terrorist circles you are targeting - the agent need not necessarily be a terrorist himself - and he, in turn, recruits the terrorists, who become his subagents. It's the classic spy ring. This is not to say there is no room for NOCs in the war against terrorism, but only that their role need not involve an entirely new paradigm. Conclusion The idyllic days of the past decade were pleasant, but they were an illusion. We pretended we had no enemies, but that did not make the real ones go away. It only emboldened them. St. Paul famously said, "When I was a child, I thought as a child; when I became a man, I put away childish things." It's time America did the same. |
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