[Originally published in the Valley News.]
It has been thirty months since the 9/11 disasters and virtually nothing of any real substance has changed in the counter-terrorism intelligence structure that failed to save us from that tragedy. We still have two lead organizations dealing with the problem in the same old way – the FBI primarily with domestic responsibilities and the CIA with foreign responsibilities. We are still riding the same old horse.
The FBI is a premier police organization. It has the personnel, budget and technology to deal with just about any criminal matter. It is staffed with highly qualified officers who are trained to ferret out criminals, arrest them and put them in the courts. It hires employees who want to do that. The entire culture of the FBI is directed toward busting criminals and their operations. They are extremely competent in that task because it is consistent with their charter. Before 9/11, Counterintelligence and Counterterrorism operations, two disciplines that have major similarities, always were an FBI career graveyard, a backwater at best. The action, recognition and promotions were better on the “criminal” side.
The problem with the FBI in intelligence operations, most emphatically including Counterterrorist operations, is that you can’t run such operations successfully with a statutory “arrest ‘em and jail ‘em” mentality. When the FBI learns that a given resident of the US is or may be a terrorist, they are bound by Federal law to open a case designed to arrest that suspect. The FBI’s charter, its professional management and its law enforcement mentality do not provide the right basis for successful and imaginative counterterrorism operations.
Since the onset of our concern with modern day international terrorism in the 1960s, Federal law enforcement organizations have considered terrorism a criminal matter. As long as that view is held and represents the basis for our attempts to cope with terrorism, we will be in trouble. Terrorism is an intelligence issue and approaching it as anything else, particularly as criminal activity, will fail.
Policemen do not make any better intelligence officers than intelligence officers make good policemen. The mentalities and organizational cultures required for the work are completely different. Cops bust hoods. A good case officer is a persuasive con man. Understand that the FBI is a law enforcement organization that is most emphatically not an intelligence organization, and you will begin to see the problem. It does no good to train people for a task if that task is alien to the culture of the organization projected to carry out the task.
The CIA’s Directorate of Operations (DO) was and probably still is organizationally, statutorily and culturally capable of running successful operations against the terrorist target abroad. However, because of past budgetary restraints, they appear now poorly equipped to do so. The post-Cold War realities of no compellingly dangerous enemy and the DO’s inherently messy operations led to the decision in the early 1990’s to cut back severely on the budget and personnel of the DO. This was the “peace bonus” designed to save us money and embarrassment (The recruiting and running of spies always has had the potential for messy, embarrassing, noisy mistakes).
During the Cold War, the DO had a cadre of language- and area-qualified, experienced street case officers who could take on a clandestine task with minimal risk and maximum hope of success. It was recently reported that the CIA station in Baghdad is now the largest in CIA history and that it is essentially unstaffable because of a lack of experienced, language- and area-qualified case officers and managers. In the long run, you can’t recruit and run agents through interpreters. In addition, many of today’s CIA officers apparently are prone to turn down all but very short (30-60 day) tours in Iraq. No intelligence organization can operate on such a basis.
Unfortunately, it will take a good 10 years to reestablish a DDO. Spotting, assessing and hiring case officers is not the problem. For that matter, training in clandestine operational techniques and foreign languages only adds a couple of years to the process. What takes real time is getting that neophyte case officer to the point where his/her on-the-street experience turns him/her into a seasoned case officer capable of operating, as all such officers must, on his/her own with only indirect, minimal guidance. And all of this takes place in an intelligence organization that does not have sufficient qualified personnel, but that is charged with conducting major, successful clandestine operations right now against the very difficult terrorist target!
Even if after a decade the DO has reestablished its former competence, it seems unwise and unlikely that anyone would want it to operate domestically against terrorist targets. That is not now legal and should remain illegal. The CIA is designed to break other countries’ laws, not ours. The FBI and the CIA as they are statutorily, culturally and historically constituted, are the wrong organizations to deal with terrorism on US soil and wishing will not change that. If this Administration really wants to deal effectively with the terrorism at home, a threat it has itself defined, then it needs to break the mold and create an organization truly capable of doing that job. Unfortunately, that will be no quick fix, but at least it would be moving in the right direction.
In Britain, MI 5, a domestic intelligence organization without police powers, handles their focus on terrorism and does it quite well. However, MI 5 is a creation of British realities which are not necessarily applicable here in the United States. We should probably create something more in tune with our own American experience.
The idea that this new counterterrorism organization should be imbedded in the FBI is self-defeating and terrifying. We do not have the luxury of risking its success by lodging it in such an alien, culturally different, stultifying, and uncomprehending environment. To succeed, and we desperately need it to succeed, it has to be guaranteed unequivocal autonomy, independence and freedom from any kind of Bureau influence or intrusion. Without such a guarantee, it will never work.
Haviland Smith is a retired CIA Station Chief and former Chief of the Counterterrorism Staff who worked off and on from 1963 through 1980 in joint intelligence operations with the FBI in the United States against Soviet and Eastern European targets and lectured at FBI training courses at Quantico on Soviet recruitment operations. He served abroad in Prague, Berlin, Beirut and Tehran and is retired in Williston, Vt.
