Rural Ruminations

[Originally published in The Valley News.]

The illegal, abusive handling of Iraqi prisoners clearly is connected to our failure to collect enough valid intelligence on the insurgents through classic clandestine intelligence operations. If we were getting sufficient, valid intelligence through such operations, there would be no need to “soften up” those prisoners through abuse.

It is obvious that the war in Iraq is going very badly. We have not been able to consistently predict or pre-empt insurgent attacks, and the environment there has become increasingly dangerous for our troops and civilian personnel as well as for our allies and Iraqi partners.

Furthermore, as we apply force in these difficult situations, the insurgents have become more numerous and more lethal, threatening what little security is left in Iraq. Simply put, the deteriorating situation requires more and better intelligence. We have to know who these insurgents are and what they are up to. It goes back to the old Cold War requirement of learning the capabilities and intentions of the enemy. Unfortunately, with extremely few exceptions, we cannot get that intelligence with technical collection systems. The only hope we have is in the acquisition of human sources. Yet we clearly are not being successful. If we were, we would see fewer insurgent successes.

Human source collection is the province of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. Unfortunately, the DO was the victim of the “peace bonus” that came with the end of the Cold War. Amid the euphoria about the new peace and in the belief that a clandestine intelligence service was less essential, the administration and Congress simply reduced the DO’s budget to the point where it lost its ability to do the job it is now being asked to do. The critically needed ingredients of a clandestine intelligence service are languages, area knowledge and, most of all, experience. Since 1990, those talents have been in short supply.

Reports indicate that the CIA station in Baghdad now is the largest station in the history of the agency, larger even than the Saigon station during the Vietnam War. It has also been reported that normal two- to four-year tours do not apply. CIA officers are there for 30- to 180-day tours. Very few speak proficient Arabic. Probably only slightly more know anything about the Arab world in general or Iraq in the specific. None will gain sufficient language or area knowledge on such short tours. Street experience is in short supply.

The physical dangers of being in Iraq are clear. Non-Arabs are in jeopardy everywhere. Yet, to be successful, a CIA case officer must be able to roam relatively freely in his environment to spot, assess and recruit agents. You can’t do that out of a Humvee. You need to do it discretely – at night, out of the way, when you can’t be seen. An American seen in contact with an Iraqi has put the kiss of death on him, yet you can’t run operations effectively through interpreters or Iraqi surrogates. Most of all, you can’t do it through emigre organizations. We tried that in the early stages of the Cold War and failed miserably. Emigres have self-serving agendas that usually do not jibe with our needs and goals. Just look at the “intelligence” provided by the Iraqi National Congress in the run-up to the invasion.

So what are those case officers doing there? They clearly are not fulfilling our most basic tactical requirements. If they were, we would see more successful pre-emptive intervention against the insurgents. How can they? They don’t know the people, country or language.

If on-the-street realities and case-officer inadequacies prevent you from operating, there isn’t much left to do. With extraordinary pressure from the Pentagon for more and better intelligence and in the absence of valid tactical intelligence, intelligence personnel have to focus on the only thing over which they have any control – captured Iraqis presumed to have information of value. In the absence of real intelligence on insurgent activity, you have to get everything possible out of those prisoners. There is little wonder that a climate that promotes abuse has been established in those holding facilities.

The problem is that information obtained through coercion can be inadequate, false, misleading or deliberate disinformation. You never know until you act on it and intimidation doesn’t produce good intelligence. Was the “Wedding Party” attack the result of disinformation? True or false, it sure has made us look bad in the eyes of the Arabs, and like it or not, that really does matter.

America is desperate for solid, tactical intelligence in Iraq. If the information coerced out of detainees is all we can hope for, that in itself could be the rationale for our unconscionable abuse of those prisoners. It could also easily explain why we do not seem able to get a handle on the situation there. It seems probable that we are being undone by our inability to collect the intelligence we need to succeed against the Iraqi insurgents

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief who served in Lebanon and Iran and as chief of the agency’s counterterrorism staff. He is retired in Williston, Vt.

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[Originally appeared in the Hartford Courant.]

Aldrich Hazen Ames is responsible for an unprecedented loss of CIA sources and methods that took years of effort and millions of dollars to develop. Worse yet, he has basely, callously and with premeditation caused the death of enough people to gladden the heart of a serial killer. This is an emotional issue for the CIA and the American people. We have all been rather crassly had, worst of all, by a mercenary.

Attempted long-term penetrations of intelligence organizations by hostile services, both socialist and western, are inevitable. Since World War II, almost every significant intelligence service in the world has suffered such penetration. For that reason, all intelligence services work compulsively both to penetrate hostile services and to protect themselves from such penetration.

During the post-war years, there were significant long-term Soviet penetrations of the British (Philby & Co.), French (Pacques), and German (Felfe) intelligence services, to mention but a few, as well as of American military intelligence services and the NSA. Those operations were defensive operations designed to protect the USSR from hostile services.

It is worth noting that until Ames turned bad in 1985, the only significant intelligence organization in the world that had not suffered long-term penetration was the CIA. That is an extraordinary accomplishment. Given the level of operational attention paid to the CIA by its adversaries, particularly the KGB, it is an absolute miracle that the CIA remained unpenetrated until 1985. That’s forty years of almost continuous high volume KGB operational activity against CIA employees around the world.

In the wake of the Ames disaster, Washington has become a hotbed of unhelpful suggestions and disingenuous political posturing: America should cut off aid to the Russians. All CIA employees should have to fill out personal financial statements. Russia should not be running operations against the CIA or presumably against any American targets.

Given the dangerously fluid political situation in Russia today, it is impossible to believe that we will suspend economic aid, or that we will stop running operations to collect positive intelligence on Russia or to recruit Russian intelligence officers to protect us against their operations. If we stop, we should have our heads examined.

The Russian world is simply too unstable, too dangerous and too innately given to secrecy to ignore.

Nor should the Russians quit operating against us. They have legitimate national interests here that cannot be satisfied with overtly obtainable information. We tend to protect secrets just as they do.

Col. Oleg Penkovskiy was an Anglo-American penetration of Soviet military intelligence who provided us with extraordinary positive intelligence and counter-intelligence on the Soviet military establishment. Purely objectively, he probably hurt the USSR far worse than Ames has hurt America and he was only one of a number of such penetrations. When the Soviets caught Penkovskiy they put the Colonel in front of a firing squad. They then assessed the damages, made the necessary changes and got on with their intelligence operations.

Given his rather conspicuous lifestyle and what seems to have been an almost suicidal lack of attention to his own operational security, Ames probably should have been caught much earlier than 1994.

However, the nature of our society makes warrantless monitoring of phones, bank and stock accounts, credit card transactions and our homes repulsive to all of us. CIA employees are no less citizens than anyone else. To single them out with special treatment will change for the worse the kind of people who might be attracted to work there.

What really hurts is that the CIA is the last of the major cold war players to lose its virginity. We lost it big time and we are shocked, angry and humiliated. However, since we lost it to the Russians, our operational effectiveness in the rest of the world should not seriously be diminished.

At least the Ames affair is over. Our next penetration of the Russian Intelligence Service will be the first day of a new era. It’s time to assess the damages and get on with intelligence work which has become much more necessary and important in the very dangerous new world we now live in.

Haviland Smith is a former CIA Station Chief who specialized in Soviet and East European operations. He served in Prague, Berlin, Beirut, Tehran and Washington, and has lived in Vermont since his 1980 retirement.

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