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MR. BILL GERTZ
National Security Reporter, The Washington Times
PLENARY SESSION II
“An Eye on Consequences: The Military and
Security Threat”
Thank you. I want to note that when the CIA official threatened to send a cruise missile at my desk, I reminded him, please do not use the people who targeted the Yugoslav procurement office in Belgrade, who ended up blowing up the Chinese Embassy by mistake.
I would like to talk about intelligence in the war on terrorism in the context of our topic: the military and security threat. When September 11 happened, President Bush was heard to remark we are at war, but the question is, who are we at war with? It became clear very quickly that it was al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. But unlike previous wars, al-Qaeda did not have a military headquarters; it didn’t have a national capital. And this created unique problems for the first counterattack. I can remember on October 7, 2001, I was driving home from church and I got a call from a friend at the Pentagon who said, you might want to get over to the Pentagon, and that was an indication that something was going to happen. October 7, 2001, was the day that military operations began in Afghanistan. What occurred in the three to four months after that was a pretty amazing show of American military power going after the terrorist support network in Afghanistan. But in my view, the military battle against terrorism isn’t the first line of defense; it’s the last line of defense.
Al-Qaeda operations had been underway in Afghanistan for several years, yet at the time of September 11 the CIA had almost no officers in the country. I’m told the number was zero, but I can’t verify that. I am going to talk a little bit about how we ended up in that situation, because to me the war on terrorism has to be an intelligence war, and to understand how we were taken by surprise on September 11, we need to understand what went wrong with our intelligence community, and then I am going to offer some ways to fix the problem.
I traced the decline of our intelligence capability to 1975; that is when there was a series of congressional oversight hearings. In the Senate they were headed by Sen. Frank Church, and in the House they were headed by Rep. Otis Pike. These hearings, interestingly enough, were the outgrowth of a political dispute within the CIA. Believe it or not, even the intelligence community, as everything else in Washington, has its own set of politics. In this case, what you had, for lack of a better term, was a liberal faction versus an anti-communist conservative faction. The liberal faction reached out, outside of the agency, to try to undermine politically the conservative faction, and they did that by exposing some alleged abuses of intelligence. This really set off the Church and Pike committees, but it went far beyond anything that the liberal faction within the CIA had in mind and created what, for lack of a better term, could only be called an anti-intelligence hysteria.
This was really the first time that the American public was exposed to intelligence activity, and it was all done with the focus on abuses. The assumption was that at best intelligence activities were criminal and at worst they were a threat to the Constitution. Now you have to put this in the context of the era. This was the anti–Vietnam War era, as well as the Watergate period, and there was a lot of anti-American sentiment within the American public. Intelligence was seen in many ways as the power arm of the evil United States; it may sound like an exaggeration, but for the leftist lingo of the time that was pretty much the perception. What happened was that this series of hearings led to a number of restrictions on intelligence, but even more important it created a generation of officials that went into government and carried with them this anti-intelligence bias, this view that intelligence is bad. We saw, then, a number of restrictions, especially on the action element of intelligence.
If you look at intelligence today it is primarily an analytical function and a collection function, and within the collection function is the action arm, things like covert action, para-military, and of course spying, which is a relatively small component of what intelligence does, as far as human spying goes. My conclusion in my book, Breakdown, is that the fundamental failure of intelligence on September 11 was the human intelligence failure, not a technical failure or analytical failure, although those also had a role to play.
But it was a human failure. How did we lose the capability to do spying on the ground. That is what I outlined. Based on the Church and Pike committees there was a generation of officials that carried a bias. There was also a fundamental shift in intelligence away from human spying. It was looked at as something that was hard to do, that could disrupt your diplomacy overseas. It could get you in trouble, and in a lot of countries it’s illegal. So there was a major shift of focus to electronic spying.
This is where our technological edge came into play, and I can tell you that without a doubt American intelligence today is technologically the most superb in the world. We can move satellites anyplace in the world to intercept individual cell phone conversations of the bad guys, such as drug and arms dealers. But in the case of terrorism, as we were to find out in the 1990s, this high-tech system does not work. It will give you a good picture from the outside in, and you may get lucky and intercept bin Laden’s satellite conversations, which the National Security Agency did for a period up until 1998, when a disclosure led to the loss of that communication. The real problem was: how do we get people close to these terrorists who can find out what their support network is, how they communicate, how they are funded. That was the real deficiency. The problem was, in addition to this reliance on high technology and lack of human spying, there was an overreliance on friendly foreign intelligence services.
In the case of Pakistan this proved to be a disaster. One of the reasons the CIA didn’t have any people in Afghanistan on September 11 is because of the relationship between the CIA and the Pakistan Inter Services Intelligence, or ISI. The CIA relied very heavily on them for information about what was going on. The problem is, the ISI was deeply involved in supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan and the al-Qaeda terrorist network. This was a real problem. We did not have the unilateral capability, and it wasn’t in Pakistan’s national interest to provide us with the information that we needed.
In the case of the FBI this is also a big problem. I focused a little bit on the CIA and its operations directorate, which today is in dire need of reform. The operations directorate is hamstrung by rules, many of them imposed since the Church committee. During the Clinton administration they had what were known as the Deutch rules. These rules, imposed under CIA Director John Deutch, basically said that CIA officers are forbidden to recruit foreign agents who have a record of human rights abuses in their past. That is akin to telling the FBI you cannot recruit a Mafia informant because he is a thug. This was totally self-defeating.
Now the CIA will tell you in their spin that no recruitment attempts were ever turned down because of the rules. Well, of course they were not turned down, because none of the agents even bothered to make the attempt, knowing that some bureaucrat at CIA headquarters was going to second-guess them.
As it relates to the FBI, the problem is that al-Qaeda was allowed to operate freely in the United States without the FBI ever knowing that it had cells here. As a matter of fact, the ringleader, Mohammed Atta, traveled in and out of the country several times without being detected. This was just confirmed yesterday in testimony by FBI Director Robert Mueller.
How did the FBI get to that point? The problem was that the FBI, in a sense, took itself out of the human intelligence gathering business. It got them into trouble. During the seventies, it was sued by a leftist group that was a front for terrorists in El Salvador. Rather then challenge the case, the FBI settled. And as part of the settlement it agreed that it would not conduct spying against Americans. Instead, it foused on terrorism as a law enforcement matter. The way one FBI official put it to me was, if you treat terrorism as a law enforcement matter you are giving every terrorist one free attack against America.
That means that you will not try to disrupt the activity before it begins but can only really begin to investigate after a crime has been committed. This has been validated in hearings that took place last week. An FBI agent testified that he had identified two terrorists who had come into the U.S. who were al-Qaeda members and had been identified in January 2000. The CIA traced them into the country and never notified the FBI until months later. When the FBI was finally informed about it, it went to the CIA and in June 2001 had a meeting in New York. The CIA officer told the FBI agent, I cannot give you this information. He said why? And he answered, because of the wall. What is the wall? The wall was a bureaucratic restriction that was placed on intelligence information that could not be shared with law enforcement officials in the course of an investigation. This was done because the people in the Justice Department felt that this would somehow taint the prosecution process.
This agent was so frustrated. He wrote an email saying, I don’t know who put this wall up but because of it somebody is going to die. And he was right on target.
Let me just conclude with the way ahead. I am very critical in this book of U.S. intelligence, and I think that the criticism is justified. I was really upset yesterday when the former head of the CIA counterterrorism center went before Congress and basically complained that the CIA didn’t have enough money to staff its operation. This despite the fact that in 1998 the current CIA director, George Tenet, had declared war on al-Qaeda. What kind of a war was it? Only five CIA analysts were assigned to study the Taliban and al-Qaeda out of a community of several thousand.
So this kind of gives you a hint. I have just touched on a few of the issues here. What can be done to fix the problem? We need radical reform of our intelligence services if we are going to win the war on terrorism. The first thing we need is a new service, something that will be able to get at the terrorist network—to get at their groups, their support networks, everything. We can’t do it with the current structure; we need new people who are more diverse. We need Arabic speakers, Arab-Americans, whose whole mission is going to be the terrorist target.
Domestically, I am recommending the creation of a domestic intelligence service. The FBI, as I said, is out of the business. I think we need something like the British MI5 service. I think it can be done within the Constitution and with the protection of American civil liberties.
It can be directed at foreign nationals, which is what the al-Qaeda cells operating in the U.S. were. There will be an argument that this will be a threat to civil liberties, but I think you have to balance that against the fact that you have terrorists who have declared war on the U.S. and that they are willing to kill thousands of Americans in suicide attacks. I think that it is time for drastic action to tighten up domestic security.
As for the military, I think the focus has to be on strengthening the Special Forces and the Special Forces’ capability. We saw in Afghanistan that some 250 SF troops were able to help the Northern Alliance that was backed by the Soviet military equipment to get rid of the Taliban in a quick way.
Along with U.S. airpower, that is a good model and will require a new intelligence capability for the military as well. I didn’t mention our technical spying, but I think it’s in the best shape. At this point I will stop. Thank you very much.
