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Pentagon Isn’t Necessarily a Better Option Than the CIA

April 23, 2005 by Haviland Smith

[Originally published in The Valley News.]

About 25 years ago, some skeptical and cynical CIA officers in the clandestine service used to say, only half-jokingly, that we hoped there was a real clandestine service out there somewhere working for America’s interests abroad. If there was not, then we were in real trouble. We said that because some of us were realistic enough to acknowledge that we were not doing all we could do against our country’s enemies.

Now, in the wake of the report from the 9/11 commission and most recently a presidential commission headed by former Sen. Charles Robb and U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Laurence Silberman, we find that the Americans who have pushed for these reports and for reform, most of whom are politicians, have decided that the CIA is dysfunctional, suffering from a lack of competent employees and from stultified, unimaginative and cautious management.

It is the nature of a secret intelligence agency in today’s democratic America to be risk-averse. This has been more or less true since the CIA was implicated in the Watergate scandal, resulting in heavy congressional oversight and media scrutiny, which continue unabated today. When the CIA has moved away from such caution, as it did during the Iran-Contra scandal in the Reagan administration, it is reminded that caution is far safer than aggressive operations.

Now there are calls in Washington to “fix” or reform the CIA. Everything we hear and read in the press indicates quite clearly that the CIA is viewed to have lost its way sometime prior to the demise of the Soviet Union. What Americans now want the CIA to do is not completely clear, but a perfectly good case can be made that the CIA as now constituted, cannot be “fixed”. The real issue is whether or not America can or should create an organization capable of aggressively seeking out and clandestinely destroying terrorists abroad – the stated goal of the Bush administration.

The history of the CIA does not give hope that it can be changed into an aggressive, risk-taking organization. Even before Watergate, during the Cold War, senior managers of the Clandestine Service, that part of the CIA that runs our spy operations, were not consistently aggressive – managerially or operationally ó against the main Soviet target. If they were cautious against the Soviets during the Cold War, what could we have expected of them during the í90s?

In the early ‘90s, the “peace dividend”, implemented by a Republican-controlled Congress and a Democratic president, brought significant CIA budget cuts. The demise of the Soviet Union was seen as obviating the need for a large portion of the intelligence budget. By 2000, the Clandestine Service had become even more cautious and bureaucratic. It had atrophying management, too few officers who could speak the languages of the world of terrorism, and far too few who had the depth of experience needed to staff the CS. As always, CS leadership was risk-averse and tended toward self-perpetuation.

As organizations of all kinds grow older, they run the risk of stultification. Unless there are powerful, innovative forces at work within them that are either a part of, or at least supported and encouraged by management, the likelihood of failure is very high. Those innovative forces appear to have largely departed the CIA by the 1990s.

The CS has always been an inherently American organization, reflecting the American values of its time. It will never be a KGB or an Abwehr, Germany’s intelligence service during the two world wars. Anyone who wants to change that culture is on the wrong track. Can its work be improved? Possibly. However, if the job it will be asked to do will change materially, it will not be easy.

According to an article by Seymour Hersh in the Jan. 19 New Yorker, the Bush administration plans to switch from the CIA to the Pentagon for proactive, paramilitary, anti-terrorist operations simply because such activities if run out of the Pentagon, are viewed by the administration as outside the legal purview of congressional oversight. This would open new possibilities for more aggressive clandestine and paramilitary operations against overseas targets of the administration’s choice (“terrorist hunting”), presumably without congressional oversight. If the Pentagon shies away, as prudent military managers probably should, it could fall to the CIA, which, if you believe in our own American democratic values, is fortunately woefully ill-equipped to do that job and is likely to remain so.

In a perfect world, congressional oversight would prevent extra legal activities, but not inhibit activities consistent with American values.

“Terrorist hunting”, regardless of whether it is conducted by the CIA or the Pentagon, is the kind of activity that will mold world public opinion about the United States. As such, it is a very important issue that requires national debate before any significant change is implemented. Do we really want an intelligence service operating proactively without congressional oversight when oversight provides the balance between caution and over-aggressiveness? Do we want an intelligence effort that reflects American values, or do we want a KGB clone that is capable of assassinations and other “wet affairs”? If we do, do we really want our professional military establishment to carry out such activities? If not, will the CIA, or any successor organization, be up to that kind of task?

So far, we have lots of questions, little discussion and no consensus.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief who served in Prague, Berlin, Beirut, Tehran and Washington and as chief of the counterterrorism staff. He lives in Williston, Vt.

Posted in CIA, intelligence |

Maybe Neocons were right about unilateral preemption

March 5, 2005 by Haviland Smith

[Originally published in the Valley News.]

The twin tactics of the Cold War – containment and alliances – really helped me mature politically.  The policy showed me the advantages of having real constraints on both America and the USSR from their adversaries and allies. In the end there was no hot war and the tactics did succeed: The Soviet Union failed, and America prevailed.

As one who accepts containment and alliances as the absolute best way – the only way – to deal with enemies, I have found President Bush’s implementation of the radical new foreign policy of pre-emptive unilateralism frightening, wrongheaded and doomed. Along with others who have studied the Middle East, I couldn’t have imagined a more dangerous or less promising place than Iraq to try out this strategy. The objective conditions there could not have been more hostile to this foreign policy revolution.

Those of us who believe in containment and alliances quickly took over the winning side of the argument. Everything that could have gone wrong in the aftermath of a brilliant and imaginative military invasion did. Chaos reigned. Our generals and many military, political and foreign policy writers, myself included, said we needed more troops on the ground and that establishing peace would be the problem. The primary rationale for the invasion — the threat of weapons of mass destruction ó proved to be a farce. I am among those Americans who believe the WMD rationale was duplicitously fed to us when some other darker and far less acceptable reason was probably the real reason we went to war.

As our casualties mounted and the insurgency grew, I clung to containment and became more angry at this administration and more convinced that America, as we had all predicted, had made the first truly horrendous foreign policy mistake of the 21st century. The Bush administration had violated its own injunction against nation building by now asserting that the ultimate goal of the invasion had been the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. That, administration officials argued, would introduce democracy into the area and undermine all of the repressive regimes in that part of the world. But the situation in Iraq steadily deteriorated, and I found myself watching my old predictions come true.

Recently, however, it has become increasingly clear that things are not going as badly in Iraq as I feared and, to be brutally honest, not as badly as some had hoped. Yes, some Americans clearly hope that we will fail in Iraq. However, they have been disappointed by a successful election in Afghanistan, which now seems reasonably calm. The election in Iraq has been an unexpected success and that has had an almost immediate positive impact: It is possible that Iraq may move toward a peaceful solution of its ethnic and religious issues.

And as administration officials predicted, the repressive rulers of the Muslim world are clearly concerned. Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, who earlier eschewed WMD, now looks more compliant than ever. The Saudis and Egyptians are opening the door a crack to free elections. The Israelis and Palestinians are talking. Lebanon seems to have finally risen up against its Syrian yoke. Under increasing international pressure, the Syrians have just turned over Saddam’s half brother to U.S. forces in Iraq, potentially a major blow to the insurgency.

Even though these changes do not dictate that we will end up being successful, they are positive signs for America. I go to bed at night with the nagging worry that the crazy neo-con fathers may conceivably have been right in pushing pre-emptive unilateralism. Have I been stubbornly and stupidly wrong?

This is far from over. Pre-emptive unilateralism may still prove to be the curse of the 21st century. Virtually every Middle East expert I know believes that the inherent contradictions that have always existed in Iraq eventually will bring that country to civil strife. Powerful forces in the Middle East don’t want us to succeed in bringing democracy to the Muslim world. Supporters of the repressive regimes in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the Persian Gulf and Africa have the wherewithal and motivation, either because of their oil wealth or because of their simple desire to stay in power, to continue to support the Iraqi insurgency and try to disrupt any Iraqi move toward democracy. It is clearly in their own narrow self-interest to do so.

Frankly, I don’t know if this adventure with pre-emptive unilateralism has all been a horrible mistake, as it may ultimately prove to be. Certainly a successful outcome would be the best possible turn of events for the United States. But is it worth the monumental risks and costs involved? Perhaps. The conditions that support terrorism might begin to fade away with the departure of the region’s repressive rulers. The conflict between Israel and its neighbors could disappear with the creation of a Palestinian state and the resulting dissipation of Arab anger that supports terrorism. We could even withdraw our troops from the region, thus removing the last factor that supports terrorism, the stationing of “infidel” American troops on holy Islamic ground in Saudi Arabia. Success might conceivably even justify the costs. It is clearly in our national interest not to fail in Iraq.

On the other hand, I constantly ask myself if such success would embolden the Bush administration to engage in further such adventures, each time making all our military, economic, international and political problems worse and bringing the potential of further disaster. Any way you slice it, this incredibly revolutionary Bush foreign policy is a monumental gamble, with every facet of our national treasure at stake.

No one, least of all I, knows what is going to happen in Iraq. All we can do is wait and see. Only history can be the final arbiter of our success or failure. In the meantime, it does seem somewhat unseemly that so many Americans are waging their own battles against a policy that, although a long shot, could radically alter the situation in the Middle East in our favor and deal a major blow to those who would continue to try to do us harm.

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

Posted in foreign policy |

U.S. Has No Good Choices for Arranging an Exit from Iraq

January 22, 2005 by Haviland Smith

[Originally published in The Valley News.]

The first wish for Iraq has to be that the January election actually take place and that it be conducted in such a way as to make it clearly legitimate in the eyes of the world.  The second wish is that the election results lead to the formation of a government that avoids creating internal Iraqi instability and that is acceptable to all the Iraqis.

These wishes constitute our present exit strategy for Iraq.  This Administration, lacking any rational exit strategy at the onset of their invasion, has now gambled everything on the wildly optimistic premise that we can hold elections, see a “democratic” regime elected, get out and have democratic stability reign.  We plan to do this in a “country” that was not put together in the interest of its inhabitants in the first place and which today bears more resemblance to Yugoslavia than anyplace else.  It is not now and never was a country in our sense of the world.

The problem with these wishes is that there are so many daunting contradictions in them.  First, can we bring enough order to enough of Iraq to hold legitimate elections?  We are not going to get much help from the Iraqis we are training for the security job. They have proven themselves to be wildly unpredictable both in and out of battle.  We will have to go it alone.  Further, the actual elections will be a security nightmare. Consider the election opponents who have displayed beyond question their grisly willingness to blow up their own countrymen.  What will they do as the Iraqis queue up to vote?  That will certainly create a target-rich environment for insurgents of all stripes.

Even if we have an acceptable voting process, what possibility is there that Iraq, in its first-ever free election, will select a democratic government?   The Shia, who constitute the popular majority of about 60% in Iraq, hold the key to power.  They are numerically and probably politically capable of winning the election and then installing whatever kind of government they choose.  Is there anything going on the Middle East right now what would create optimism that after decades of ruthless and bloody domination by the Sunnis, the Shia will forgive and forget and treat the Sunnis according to the Golden Rule?  Unlikely, at best.

The Kurds are an even more complicated matter.  They have never wanted to be a minority in an Arab state.  They have always wanted to join in a Kurdish nation with their Kurdish brethren in Syria, Iran and Turkey.  For the dozen years since the first Gulf War, the Iraqi Kurds have functioned under UN and US protection as an independent state.  Prior to that, they were murdered, exiled and humiliated by Saddam and his Sunni cohorts.  They remain skeptical about the Arab Shia, as well.  They have not given up on their own Kurdistan.

Viewed on the basis of their diverse histories, there seems to be no combination of Iraqis (Shia, Sunni, Kurd), which would be likely to bring representative democracy to Iraq.   Quite the opposite, virtually every conceivable combination is likely to bring some sort of conflict.  This is not a new judgment.  It has always been true.

The Sunnis, used to wielding power, will not give it up willingly to a group of Shia, who are three times as large and whom they have historically mistreated and suppressed.  Hence their current insurgency.  Nor will they abdicate to the Kurds whom they murdered and humiliated for decades.  Any real internal peace will require some accommodations to the Sunnis.

There is nothing in a new Iraq to attract the minority Kurds, however democratic it might seem.  They want their city of Mosul, from which they were ejected and which was then occupied by Sunnis sent by Saddam, as well as their own country and the oil that goes with it.

The Shia, for their part, given their numerical superiority simply have to sit back and wait.  They are the only group in Iraq which wholeheartedly supports January elections and their numbers tell you why.  They will win.  The big question is what will happen when the Shia win.  A cursory look at the real estate argues strongly that such a result would seriously jeopardize stability in Iraq.  The Sunnis would feel threatened and defensive.  They would not want a new constitution which would codify Shia power.  The Kurds would be no more likely to want it.

We really are facing a Hobson’s choice here, simply because no one in the Administration listened to the experts who said from the start this invasion was a bad idea.  Having gotten to this point, there seem to be no good choices available to us primarily because democracy in Iraq appears to be the oxymoron of the moment.  All we can hope is that Iraq avoids internal conflict and disintegrates relatively peacefully into its component parts, perhaps in a federation. Even that seems unlikely if not impossible.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA Station Chief who served in Beirut and Tehran and as Chief of Counterterrorism.

Posted in Iraq |

Dubious Purge at the CIA

January 4, 2005 by Haviland Smith

[Originally published in the Washington Post.]

Porter Goss, the new CIA Director (DCI) and a devoted political ally of President Bush, has brought with him to Langley a Praetorian guard of hatchet men from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.  Against the backdrop of his hands-off management style, they are running wild.  They are said to be thoughtless, brusque, rude and intimidating.  What clearly is true is that they have come to shake the place up.

Whatever is going on, it is at the behest of the White House and probably does not involve faulty intelligence on WMD, but rather on the conduct of the Iraq war and its aftermath.  In that context, the Administration’s wrath seems directed primarily toward the Clandestine Service (CS), that component of the Agency that recruits and handles spies, not the component that publishes intelligence estimates.  Since Goss’ arrival in Langley, much of the senior management of the CS has been fired or has quit, reportedly to be replaced with more compliant officials.

David Brooks of the New York Times wrote in a scurrilous, vituperative column in mid-November that we were viewing a death struggle between the White House and the CIA.  He opined that the CIA had been trying to contribute to the President’s defeat in the election by systematically leaking classified material designed to bolster the idea that the Iraq policy was ill conceived and going badly.  Incidentally, it would now appear that idea was absolutely correct.

It appears that CIA, both the CS and the Intelligence Directorate, had been leaking a wide variety of secrets.  They could and should have been prosecuted for the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.  They were not.  Instead, it would appear that the Administration has found a welcome excuse for the collective punishment of the CIA.

Given the way the Bush White House has handled intelligence during the last three years, it makes sense that they are angry at the Clandestine Service.   CS officers are often required to give their opinions about policies in advance of their implementation.  It is unlikely that any CS officer, having spent a career in the Middle East, would see our current policy there as unflawed.  The White House probably sees the CS as a nest of enemies.  Consider the alternate possibility that they really are professionals who would like to save their country from the further embarrassment and potential difficulties of a truly flawed and dangerous Iraq policy.

Once a year, every CIA Station Chief writes a message to the DCI giving his or her analysis of how things are going in the country to which they are assigned.  These analyses are totally straghtforward and normally show extraordinary understanding of local, on-the-ground-realities.  They contain the kind of candor, which, if they were to get unvarnished to a Bush White House or to the press (as the most recent one from Baghdad recently did), it would likely infuriate this Administration.

After all, this is the President who will not acknowledge any shortcomings in either his policy or its outcomes in Iraq.  Given his dogged adherence to the righteousness of that policy, it makes sense that the President would be angry with the CS.  It seems quite possible that the CS is being punished for having been right, or at least unsupportive of Administration policy.

Would any President in touch with God want a CIA that told him that what he wanted to do was wrong? The Agency’s statutory responsibility is to speak the truth whether the truth supports the President’s plans or not.   It would appear that this concept is not shared by this Administration.

Porter Goss and his troops from the Hill are wreaking havoc on the best current line of defense we have against terrorism.  However angry this Administration is with the CS, whose officers run Human Intelligence operations, those operations are the last best hope we have to keep up with the terrorist problem.

But then, the White House is angry with the CS, presumably because of their position on Iraq, and the Bush Administration has always had trouble clearly separating Iraq from our real problems with Al Qaeda and its allies.   Purging the CIA at this unfortunate, badly timed moment when we need to be dealing with real issues of terrorism is like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA Station Chief who served in East and West Europe, the Middle East and as Chief of the Agency’s Counterterrorism Staff.

Posted in CIA |

Seeking the weak link

December 3, 2004 by Haviland Smith

Congress has so far failed to pass legislation reflecting changes in the intelligence community that were recommended by the 9/11 commission, but that may not be all bad.

The legislation before Congress reflects the frustration this nation has had with the inability to act on the clues that were present before Sept. 11, 2001. If they had been properly collated and interpreted, they might have led to the detection and neutralization of the al-Qaida cell that attacked New York and Washington.

The impetus for the passage of this bill has been the efforts of the 9/11 families who understandably want a law that will better equip the United States to deal with terrorism. They have suffered far more than most of the rest of us, but that does not make them experts on intelligence collection, analysis and production. Their eagerness to act may be precipitous. The premise that it is the structure of the intelligence community that is to blame for intelligence failures is not the core issue.

The legislation was drawn up on the premise that the intelligence community’s problems result from ugly, unacceptable interagency struggles. That may be partially true. But the real problems are not grounded in whether the CIA, the FBI and the Pentagon communicate sufficiently well together. Rather, they lie in interagency issues, in the cultures of the organizations involved, that can be approached only from within the management of each agency, not through the proposed reorganization of the intelligence community.

Interagency issues can be solved. The president has had the authority since 1947 to mandate cooperation among intelligence organizations, though he never has used it.

The Pentagon’s intelligence collectors never have been terribly effective; they are outcasts in a mission-hostile organization. The FBI is a law enforcement organization in which intelligence collection is alien to its core culture. The CIA, at least until 9/11, has not been interested in tactical military intelligence, thus fueling the Pentagon’s appetite and argument for gathering its own intelligence.

The CIA has been decimated since the 1991 demise of the Soviet Union by successive administrations and by a Congress bent on saving money at the expense of the agency’s ability to collect intelligence with old-fashioned spying. It also has been referred to recently as “risk-averse,” a quality that does not support the kind of aggressive intelligence operations we need in order to operate against terrorists.

A good first step might be to set up only one House/Senate oversight committee and eliminate all of the other committees so that everything would be codified under one manageable roof. It would concretely demonstrate Congress’ support of efficiency over turf issues.

It would be dangerous to create an intelligence czar to oversee the intelligence community. It is the diversity of positions in the intelligence community that makes intelligence valuable. To properly do their jobs, policy-makers must have a profound understanding of those differences. We should not expect or want the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon and the Homeland Security Department to have identical interests or positions.

When a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) is written and forwarded to the White House, much of its strength is in its diversity of opinion — its dissents, disclaimers and qualifications from the participating agencies.

Condoleezza Rice’s statement in a radio talk-show interview that no one in the White House read the State Department disclaimers in the August 2002 NIE on Iraq is either pathetic or willfully obtuse. The disclaimers warned of post-invasion hostilities.

The devils really are in the details, and the job of policy-makers is to read all of the details in those NIEs. That’s where the meat of intelligence is. Not to do so, whether because they are lazy or because they did not wish to consider information that argued (as the State Department did) against their predetermined Iraq invasion policy, can be exceedingly dangerous, as is evident in all of the negative ramifications of our Iraq policy.

If Congress creates an intelligence czar and if CIA Director Porter J. Goss becomes that czar, will he implement his stated position that the job of intelligence analysts and case officers is to “support the administration and its policies”? Given the indifferent performance of the administration on intelligence provided before the invasion of Iraq, we should not expect that much would change.

If administration policies continue to be formulated before intelligence is examined and then those policies are implemented despite the available intelligence, the creation of a czar may worsen the situation. If he is all-powerful and provides the homogenized intelligence sought by the administration, we stand the chance of losing the extremely valuable and important diversity of the existing intelligence community and its nuanced positions. That could really hurt us.

It could easily lead us into repeats of the Iraq debacle, which serves no purpose other than to set us back in the struggle with terrorism.

Haviland Smith, a retired CIA station chief who served in Europe and the Middle East, was executive assistant to Frank C. Carlucci when he was deputy director of the CIA from 1978 to 1980.

Posted in CIA, intelligence, terrorism |

U.S. Faces Long Odds in Creating Stable, Democratic Iraq

November 9, 2004 by Haviland Smith

[Originally published in The Valley News.]

The Bush Administration, having effectively dropped its claims about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction, now says that its primary goal is to see Iraq through to free elections leading to democracy. It insists that all is well in Iraq, and that we are marching not only toward democracy there, but toward democracy in the rest of the Arab world as well. Democratizing Iraq is certainly a worthy goal, but the real question is whether it is a reasonable one.

The key short-term issue here is bringing enough stability and security to Iraq to permit an election process that will be viewed as fair by all the participants in Iraq and interested parties around the globe. Having completely missed the opportunity to bring stability to Iraq from the start by not committing sufficient numbers of troops, the Administration now has only two options. It can send the additional 300,000 to 400,000 troops that should have been committed at the onset and hope it’s not too late. Or, as appears to be the case, it can try to eliminate the insurgency with the troops already in Iraq.

The Iraq insurgency is composed of unconventional fighters fighting an asymmetrical war. While we use tanks, planes and artillery, they use rifles, machine guns, mortars and car/suicide bombers. These are all highly portable weapons that, unlike ours, do not require fixed bases of operation and elaborate support mechanisms. The advantage that these insurgents have over our conventional forces is that they hit and run. They don’t have to engage us in prolonged conventional battles. Why then, since their war is going so well for them, would they want to open themselves to massive defeat in Fallujah by fighting our kind of war? The Vietcong didn’t fight our kind of war and defeated us. Every insurgency in the world looks at Vietnam as the premier lesson in how to fight conventional troops.

It would seem much more likely that as our troops storm Fallujah, the insurgents will simply fade away and regroup elsewhere in that vast country to fight us their way again. If they do it right, they will survive as a fighting force. We will demolish a city and, in so doing, push other Iraqis into the insurgent ranks.

In his first post-election news conference, President Bush said that he does not accept the premise that democracy can’t be brought to undemocratic states. All well and good, but has he considered a state that has a built-in belief system that is not familiar to most Americans or to him? The President says that he honors belief systems. Does that mean that he honors those Muslims whose Koran tells them exactly how to run their lives, including a description of what kind of system of governance they must have? And how will the president react if Muslims create a government that is not democratic in conventional American terms?

Doesn’t that mean that in order for many Muslims to accept our notion of democracy, they have to drop their belief in the Koran? If they do not accept our goals, does that mean that we will have to invade them as we have done in Afghanistan and Iraq and thus force them to accept our democracy? Is this how we are going to bring democracy to the world?

Let’s stipulate that we will create enough stability in Iraq to have an election. If majority rules, we will then see a government dominated by Shiites, who compose 60 percent of the population.

It will almost certainly be a theocratic government, since its leaders are all devout believers in the Koran. That raises the possibility of creating a government similar to the one established by the Taliban, which supported and facilitated al-Qaida in Afghanistan.

What would the Bush Administration do about that? Is it going to say that it is unacceptable, or renege on its statement that it needed a democratic government in Iraq? That is now the only remaining rationale for our invasion.

There are far too many things that can go wrong with Iraq. In the run-up to the war, this Administration ignored real intelligence, preferring to act on carefully selected information that supported the policy it had already decided on. It was wrong in its belief that we would be welcomed there. It clearly resisted real planning for what it would do after toppling Saddam Hussein. The Administration’s own plans have proven to be out of touch with objective reality. Can we logically expect that Iraq will turn into anything but a tar baby for the Administration and a disaster for America?

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

Posted in Iraq |

U.S. War on Terror has Advanced Al Qaida’s Campaign

September 23, 2004 by Haviland Smith

[Originally published in the Valley News.]

During this year’s presidential campaign, President Bush and his supporters constantly tell us that this country needs his leadership to successfully fight the War on Terrorism. We are now three years past 9/11 and can ask the question: How successful has that war been to date?

Al-Qaida’s major goals are to humble and destroy the Western world, beginning with its leader, the United States. The motivation for this is fairly straightforward: Al-Qaida members resent the stationing of U.S. troops on the holy ground of Saudi Arabia; they hate American policy for what they see to be its rigidly biased support of Israel over Palestine; they want to bring an end to American and Western support of the repressive regimes that rule and exploit Arabs and other Muslims; and they want to put the control of the politics and natural resources of the Muslim world in the hands of its people and in accordance with the dictates of Muslim law.

Certainly, one of the best ways for al-Qaida to accomplish some or all of those goals is to start and then perpetuate a holy war between Muslims and the West. However, for al-Qaida to be successful, the West, and particularly America, would have to respond in the right way: We would have to be inadvertently complicit with al-Qaida.

Al-Qaida has pushed the notion that Arabs hate American values. The Bush administration, curiously enough, has sporadically pushed the same line. But a May 2004 poll conducted for the Arab American Institute by Zogby International, an organization that conducts polls in the Arab world, shows the opposite. It found that, despite their dislike of U.S. foreign policy, many Arabs still admire American values, culture and products.  Arabs don’t hate America, they hate our current policies.

Since 9/11, we have (quite justifiably) invaded Afghanistan. For less cogent reasons, we then invaded Iraq and in doing so, disrupted our own efforts against al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Iraq, we found no weapons of mass destruction and no relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida or 9/11. We did, however depose Saddam Hussein, a goal shared by al-Qaida, which would like to depose all secular Arab leaders.

In the process of conducting this war and in its aftermath, we have been unable to restore any order to Iraq. That chaos has strengthened Arab hatred of and armed resistance to our policy. Our laissez-faire approach toward the hostility in Fallujah and, to a lesser extent, Sadr City has recreated conditions that existed under Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where foreign fighters are sufficiently safe to train angry, disenfranchised Iraqi youth for insurgent operations against U.S. troops. If we are lucky in post-invasion Iraq, the inherent chaos there will lead to some sort of stability, probably through a theocracy like the Taliban – a situation that will likely favor Islamic extremists. If we are unlucky, we will see continued ethnic, confessional and political chaos.

The balance of outcomes since 9/11 would seem to favor al-Qaida. We have severely reduced our pursuit of terrorists in Afghanistan. In our effectively unilateral invasion of Iraq, we have completely disrupted our traditional alliances and alienated our important allies, relationships that will become increasingly critical in the coming struggle with terrorism. With the exception of a reluctant Britain, our major allies in Europe are gone, to be replaced by the “coalition of the willing” of former Soviet-dominated European, lesser European and Third World countries, and alliance of the unimportant. Through our invasion of Iraq, we have probably enhanced al-Qaida recruitment. We have deposed one of the secular Arab rulers they hate. We have effectively increased Arab and Muslim hatred of our policies. In their optimistic moments, al-Qaida could even say we are helping out by slowly creating the basis of a new holy war.

Finally, we have weakened ourselves by creating record national debt and sharply dividing our country through the implementation of a radical foreign policy that so far seems to be unsuccessful and has only increased our problems with radical terrorism..

The one thing that could mitigate all these disasters would be the emergence of a democratic, free-market Iraq. Iraq has never known democracy and is deeply divided religiously and ethnically. The country is physically large and has lived for the past 30 years under a dictatorial form of state socialism – hardly a blueprint for a successful transition to a republic. Besides that, Muslims think the Koran provides a perfectly good model for governance (which by our standards is hardly democratic). We might better have concerned ourselves with those tangible institutions of government and commerce that can ultimately lead to democracy. Democracy, unlike carpets, is not something to simply be installed.

We need to fight terrorism, but not this way.  The invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with radical Muslim terrorism.  We have implacable enemies who have done and are doing us tangible harm and who are planning more.  They are probably lurking in Afghanistan and Pakistan and we need to eliminate them, yet we have given them a bye.  We need to reestablish and strengthen our traditional alliances.

By any truly objective standard and despite all the campaign rhetoric, it does not appear that we are even leading in, let alone winning, this “War on Terrorism”.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief who served in Beirut and Tehran and as chief of the counterterrorism staff. He lives in Williston, Vt.

Posted in terrorism |

U.S. intelligence agencies can’t beat Al-Qaida

August 17, 2004 by Haviland Smith

[Originally published in the Baltimore Sun.]

The British government recently complained quite clearly about the U.S. release of information obtained in Pakistan about planned terrorist activities. The complaint and the release of intelligence underline a key difference between the way terrorist threat information is handled in the two countries and points out a serious flaw in the American approach.

Intelligence on terrorist organizations like al-Qaida is hard to come by. Of course, the best intelligence would come from an ongoing human penetration of that organization at a level of sufficient importance to give access to continuing, important intelligence on the capabilities and plans of al-Qaida.

The acquisition of such a source requires either the tremendous luck to be there when a disgruntled terrorist chooses to volunteer to us or to find a sufficient number of American intelligence officers with the language skills, experience and knowledge necessary to recruit such a source. It would seem that we are not in that comfortable and desirable position.

Our ability to exploit technical collection — phone, fax, e-mail, etc. — has been increasingly denied to us because of al-Qaida’s awareness of our collection methods.

Instead, we seem to be relying, appropriately, on our relationships with friendly liaison intelligence and security services, particularly those in Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt and Turkey. Their employees have the languages, area knowledge and physiological characteristics needed to operate successfully in that part of the world. Can you imagine a blond, blue-eyed CIA officer working the mosques in Pakistan?

What we do when we get counterterrorist information underlines the difference between us and the British. The British will withhold that information from the public until they are sure there is no further exploitable intelligence in it.

If there is, they will continue to withhold until they have exhausted their ability to exploit the available leads even though there may be some risk of missing a terrorist operation. This gives them the chance to recruit terrorists, affording the opportunity to learn more about terrorist plans, thus protecting themselves even more fully in the long run. This was the reason for the British complaint about our release of the information, which precluded further such attempts.

We seem married to the concept of wrapping up these “operations” before we know whether they really do exist. In that sense, we are married to the color-coded terrorist alert system that so far has simply served as a self-protection mechanism for the Bush administration: release the information to the public regardless of whether it is valid. The thinking is, if you do, you’re on the side of the angels if the operation is real. If it is false, no immediately discernible damage will be done. If you don’t put it out and something bad happens, there will be all hell to pay.

While this has some short-term benefits for politicians and bureaucrats, there is no long-term gain. Rather than carefully and covertly investigating the alleged targeted sites to see if hostile activity is still going on, we blow the whistle and cover the exposed backsides in the administration.

To have identified or captured/arrested a terrorist in the act of planning or implementing terrorist activity could lead to the penetration of the terrorist organization and ultimately might give us access to things about which it would appear we know very little.

This American approach is a combination of our politicized system (which will not serve us well in counterterrorist operations) and the history and culture of our internal security organization — the FBI, which, unlike Britain’s MI5, has virtually no understanding of this kind of operation. This is, however, the way the FBI operates because it is a true police organization that really does not understand intelligence or counterterrorist operations.

These little things will haunt us in the struggle against terrorism. Ultimately, if we really want to win, we will have to take some risks here in the United States. There will be failures, but without those risks, it us unlikely that we will get the intelligence that we need to truly neutralize al-Qaida’s operations in our homeland.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief who served in Beirut and Tehran and as chief of the CIA’s counterintelligence staff.

Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun

Posted in intelligence, terrorism |

CIA Lacks Resources to Gather Good Intelligence in Iraq

May 29, 2004 by Haviland Smith

[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.

Posted in CIA |

FBI Ill-Equipped for Counterterrorism

April 20, 2004 by Haviland Smith

[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.

Posted in terrorism |

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