Government Executive - Authors - Steve Hirsch

CIA effort to beef up recruiting begins to pay off

Steve Hirsch — Fri, 29 Aug 2003 00:00:00 -0400

Moreover, the CIA is conducting that effort in a way that seems to reflect the concerns of a broad spectrum of agency and intelligence veterans, many of whom have been quite critical of the CIA and its hiring practices in the past.

The agency had been blasted in the aftermath of 9/11 for having too many WASPs as case officers and for playing down the importance of recruiting foreign sources of intelligence-real human beings in other countries who can tell U.S. agents what is going on in those places. Leading former senior U.S. security officials struck just such a note in a July 12 Economist article headlined, "America Needs More Spies."

The quantity and quality of intelligence acquired from foreign informants is more important than the quality of analysis, according to the authors: former Deputy FBI Director Robert Bryant; former Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre; former Drug Enforcement Administration Administrator John Lawn; former Associate Deputy CIA Director for Operations John MacGaffin; former FBI General Counsel Howard Shapiro; and former CIA General Counsel Jeffrey Smith. "There certainly was a lack of dot-connecting" before the attacks, they wrote. "But more important was the fact that the blizzard of information available for analysis was of such poor quality. There were too few useful dots." Concentrating on analysis "distracts attention from the real need: improved espionage, to provide the essential missing intelligence," the former officials said.

The CIA would not allow an on-the-record interview about recruiting, but Deputy Director for Operations James Pavitt told a Duke University Law School conference last year, "Today, the year 2002, I have more spies stealing more secrets than at any time in the history of the CIA.… I ask you to take me at my word," he said. "We're stealing more secrets, providing our leadership with more intelligence than we've ever done before."

The CIA also refused to provide precise figures for this article, but it is apparent that the agency is working harder to bring more and different kinds of people into its ranks. A U.S. intelligence official, speaking without attribution, said 9/11 did not necessarily change the direction of the CIA's general recruitment efforts-meaning in all areas, from carpenters to computer specialists, not just for spies. But the terrorist attacks did boost the number of people being hired.

The CIA's hiring requirements are more than 80 percent above what they were before 9/11, with the largest number of openings in clandestine services and such support areas as analysts. CIA spokesman Tom Crispell was quoted last year in The Christian Science Monitor as saying that the agency expected the number of clandestine officers to jump 20 to 25 percent in the coming four years. The intelligence official said that figure is still valid.

The agency now gets 2,800 to 3,000 résumés online a week, which "far outweigh" the number of openings, the official said. About 88 percent of those who receive conditional offers of employment accept, up from 70 percent last year, the official said. In addition, the attrition rate is fairly low, about 5 percent, he said.

Despite the accelerated hiring efforts since 9/11, it will take some time for this jump-started effort to have an effect. New CIA officers must first go through processing and training, often including language training, before they receive interim assignments at headquarters and their first overseas jobs. Only then will they be considered seasoned operatives. CIA alumni interviewed estimated that it takes several years to turn a successful applicant into a tested officer. In the interim, veterans noted that the agency has brought in a large number of retirees to fill the ranks.

One former CIA operative estimated that there are hundreds of the newly rehired "green badgers"-retirees who have been called back because they already have clearances. (Regular employees have blue badges.) Many of the green badgers, generally in their mid-50s and up, he said, left the CIA but did not do well on the outside. They have come back to work in "all the hot areas," including Afghanistan and Pakistan, as case officers, support officers, the whole range of operations jobs.

The CIA is also much more open now about its interest in attracting a more ethnically diverse group of employees, including officers, and it has produced a series of print ads obviously aimed at drawing a varied pool of applicants. The ads include pitches to professionals and nonprofessionals ("Intelligence Secretary. Why work for a company when you can serve a nation?"), as well as various ethnic groups. One ad celebrates Chinese New Year, saying, "Just as the Year of the Ram is centered on a strong and clear motivation for peace, harmony, and tranquility during challenging times, we are equally intent on our mission to safeguard America and its people. You, too, can play a key role in this important responsibility."

Other ads, not surprisingly, are aimed at people with Middle Eastern backgrounds. "For over 100 years, Arab-Americans have served the nation," one says. "Today, we need you more than ever." Another says, "Your heritage is Arab-American. Your citizenship is All-American," before inviting applicants to check out the CIA Web site.

An ad in Amtrak's Arrive magazine aims directly at recruits interested in the clandestine service: covert agents who recruit and run foreign spies in dark alleys. ("Possibly, the most demanding job in the world," says the ad.) The people pictured in the ad could just as easily be squeaky-clean lawyers or accountants; the main photo shows the back of a man and a woman striding across the CIA seal set into the floor at the entrance to agency headquarters. The various ads have yielded résumés from applicants claiming proficiency up to native-level fluency in Mandarin Chinese and Korean, as well as in Middle Eastern languages, the official said.

At the same time, the CIA is not overplaying its search for ethnic diversity. Although the U.S. intelligence official said the CIA is obviously looking for knowledge, experience and expertise in the Middle East, and for language ability, he echoed the comments of some CIA veterans who stress that potential foreign spies have preconceptions of what American CIA officers should look like.

There is a "certain image of the United States that's prevalent internationally," the official said, one that is "predominantly the white male." Otherwise, when a potential spy sees someone who does not conform to that image, "they may or may not be comfortable" engaging in a relationship.

One former senior CIA official concurred with that assessment, saying that potential foreign spies will sometimes only respond to someone who fits their image of the CIA-someone who looks "American." This is particularly the case with Spanish-speaking or Russian targets, he said, or potential sources in the Middle East, who might suspect a CIA officer who looks Arabic of being a provocateur.

Current and former CIA operatives and officials interviewed also agreed on the need for a renewed emphasis on hiring officers who can successfully recruit more foreign spies. After all, not every CIA agent possesses the skills to parlay an ostensibly accidental meeting with a foreign national into the sustained contacts necessary for the would-be spy to give up secret information about his country or a terrorist group. "Spying is common sense, and a lot of people aren't born with it," a former CIA operative said.

A former senior officer in the Operations Directorate, the agency's espionage branch, cited problems the CIA has had attracting black and ethnically Chinese candidates and those of Arab descent who have fluency in important languages. This could be the most serious problem the agency faces in recruiting officers, given that two years of training are needed just to bring someone up to intermediate language fluency. This former officer said he would like to see at least 20 percent of CIA officers come from non-Western European ethnic groups, compared with the 2 to 4 percent now.

At the same time, though, some of the CIA veterans interviewed said that language and cultural background are secondary to the salesmanship skills that CIA agents need to recruit foreigners as American spies. In some cases, emphasizing language and cultural background ignores the realities of spy recruitment.

The CIA refused to discuss any efforts it makes to ascertain potential officers' abilities to recruit foreigners as spies, but a quiz on its Web site for potential applicants is revealing. Intelligence veterans say that recruiting foreign sources is in many ways like wooing a customer. Interestingly, emphasizing or de-emphasizing sales experience on the CIA quiz can make a difference on whether a quiz taker shows an aptitude for the espionage track. Checking the box for having had sales experience can, for example, change a reasonably honest middle-aged male reporter's quiz results from indicating an aptitude for "professional positions" to an "excellent match" for clandestine service.

Overall, the former CIA operatives interviewed for this story were generally supportive of the kinds of efforts included in the CIA's current recruitment drive. One said the agency is doing "exactly" what it should be.

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CIA performance disputed as Congress plans hearings

Steve Hirsch — Mon, 01 Apr 2002 00:00:00 -0500

The question is important not just because the terrorist threat looks to be long-term and because al-Qaeda is apparently interested in weapons of mass destruction, but also because House and Senate intelligence committees are planning hearings on the intelligence community.

Three former CIA officers--Milt Bearden, CIA station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989, Vincent Cannistraro, former CIA chief of counterterrorism operations, and Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer who resigned from the agency in 1997 after 21 years--described the September attacks as an intelligence failure. Neither they nor anyone else interviewed, however, said Sept. 11 could necessarily have been prevented even if prescribed steps had been taken.

The September attacks eluded the whole U.S. intelligence community, according to Bearden, who said "the entire $30 billion package missed it," and described Sept. 11 as a "failure of the entire system worldwide."

"The Brits didn't get it, the French didn't get it, the Hungarians didn't get it, the Jordanians, who are very good, didn't get it, none of them got it, nor did the Russians pick up on it. Nobody had it. So if you're talking about a failure of intelligence, you are talking about one that is geometrically expanded beyond what everybody's [complaining] about down on Capitol Hill," Bearden said.

Bearden compared the airliner attacks on U.S. landmarks to Pearl Harbor, as did others, saying it is always difficult to combat a new, previously unthinkable, threat.

Cannistraro cited a "major shortfall" in intelligence gathering, and Baer was sharply critical.

"You can't describe it as anything but a failure," Baer said.

The three struck similar chords on the roots of what they see as CIA weaknesses, calling for changes in how the agency does business, including how it collects information and selects and trains agents.

Bearden called for changes in how the agency collects U.S. intelligence, including working with such other countries as Jordan, Israel and Egypt, and perhaps Syria and Sudan.

"The only way we're going to go after this thing is not with a bunch of blond-haired, blue-eyed white boys and girls, but we're going to have to have some of the people that can get into these circles," he said.

"You're talking about penetrating a group of six guys, three cousins and three brothers," he said.

Baer, author of See No Evil, The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism, slammed what the agency for what he sees as weakening of its training, particularly in languages, and de-emphasis on operational experience.

Whereas CIA operatives in past years spoke native Russian, French or Farsi, Baer said CIA officers are now put into fast language courses and rotated among assignments. He said that as a result of overall weaknesses in the CIA, overseas officers are more likely to spend their time waiting for sources to walk through the door than to leave U.S. embassies to dig up information. He also faulted the CIA for spending more time on liaison with foreign officials than going out on its own.

Cannistraro criticized CIA understanding of the current terrorist threat and also criticized what he said has been too much CIA reliance on liaison with other countries' intelligence services.

"Sitting back, passively collecting information from liaison services from allied countries, whether it's Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or Jordan … you're subject to intelligence collected by a third country on a subject you should be able to collect in the first hand," he said.

Although there are some places U.S. intelligence cannot gain first-hand intelligence, he said, "when we're totally dependent on another country as we were, for example, on Pakistan, then you're hostage to the political situation in that country, with disastrous results."

"ISI [Pakistan's Interservices Intelligence agency], as we know now … set up the Taliban … and, to a certain extent, had dealings with [suspected terrorist leader Osama] bin Laden and utilized some of the training camps to train Kashmiri terrorists, using Pakistani commandos to do this training.

"So if they had an interest in continuing this political relationship … and they also had their fingers dirty, their hands dirty, on some of the camps because Kashmiris were being trained in bin Laden camps with Pakistani instructors, then their willingness to share accurate, fulsome intelligence with the United States at the very least is suspect," he said.

Baer was also enthusiastic about more agents for current threats.

"Biochem, nuclear, you've got to stick yourself in the middle of this or have somebody else do it," he said.

Gregory Treverton, a RAND analyst who previously served as vice chair of the National Intelligence Council, said he "wouldn't be too hard on the community," given the difficulty learning about an operation such as Sept. 11.

He added that "still, given that we were very focused on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, given that we understood a lot about him and the organization, it still is a surprise that we did so badly."

"It wasn't our finest hour," he said.

Some of the criticism of the CIA is justified, according to R. James Woolsey, who served as CIA director from 1993 to 1995, and who cited language training and willingness to hire first-generation Americans who can speak Middle Eastern languages as areas where the CIA has failed.

"The government as a whole made a big mistake" in not moving substantially toward having more FBI agents and CIA case officers and analysts reading and understanding Arabic, Farsi and the other Middle Eastern languages, he said.

At the same time, he described Sept. 11 more as a security failure than an intelligence failure. He said the CIA was fairly well attuned to the terrorist threat, but said it is unclear whether the CIA could have done a better job of alerting people to be generally aware if it had been more attuned to the Islamic fundamentalist terrorism threat to the continental United States.

Terrorism, particularly terrorism with weapons of mass destruction, was cited by three national commissions, including one Woolsey served on, as the biggest national security problem facing the United States, he said, but many still thought terrorism was not much more than a nuisance, although he said the CIA was trying to alert people to the problem, even though some of its information was less than perfect.

Woolsey said that even with changes advocated by critics, the odds that the CIA could have penetrated al-Qaeda and learned about last September's attacks "would have been awful slim for the obvious reasons."

"Only a handful of people knew, their operational security was good, they traveled and talked to one another instead of talking over telephone lines," Woolsey said.

Woolsey said that while the attacks were "a security failure for the United States," he would not call it "an intelligence failure in the narrow sense that there was a secret out there that would have been easy to steal if they'd just been doing their job right and they didn't steal it and find out about a specific operation."

"I think that's an unfair charge," he added.

Woolsey criticized the Clinton administration's "almost total law enforcement-focus look at terrorism" and various barriers that had been erected "sometimes for stupid reasons, sometimes for good and sufficient reason," including limits on recruiting agents and bars on FBI sharing of information obtained under grand jury subpoena.

It would have been smart, Woolsey said, to have gone through all the barriers and looked at things like language training and removed the barriers where they related to information related to terrorism.

Paul Pillar, currently the U.S. intelligence community's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, however, said the September attacks do not point out weaknesses in the CIA, but "the inherent difficulty in collecting the kind of very specific information about terrorist plots that would enable one to roll up the plots."

"That's an inherent difficulty that has to do with the nature of the target and not the nature of efforts to learn about the target," according to Pillar, formerly deputy chief of the director of central intelligence's Counterterrorist Center.

Although there may be weaknesses or shortcomings in current CIA practices, Pillar said he could not think of anything with regard to Sept. 11 that the intelligence community specifically missed, misinterpreted or mishandled. It is impossible to expect U.S. intelligence to learn of every terrorist plot in the works, he said, but a more realistic goal is to use every channel available and make every effort to minimize the number of things that escape U.S. attention.

Pillar said radical Islamic terrorism generally--and bin Laden and al-Qaeda particularly--have headed the intelligence community list of terrorist concerns for years, at least since the 1993 World Trade Center attack. In the mid-1990s, he said, a Counterterrorist Center unit was set up to concentrate on bin Laden, his activities and organization.

That work, Pillar said, allowed the government to gain an understanding of what became al-Qaeda and determine bin Laden's responsibility for the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa and for Sept. 11.

Pillar says most of the changes and adaptations that have to be made to meet current threats, as opposed to the Soviet threat or previous threats have already been tried and done.

"It's important to understand that the intelligence community's procedure and organization for going after terrorism has evolved now for quite a few years," he said, citing the 1986 creation of the Counterterrorist Center, which was among the results of a report by a White House task force led by then-Vice President George Bush.

Establishment of that center was a "revolutionary development in terms of cutting across bureaucratic lines," he said, and its real innovation "was bringing the operators and the analysts and the technical experts and the reports officers and other counterterrorist specialists all in one organization where they could work together and the synergy would be maximized."

"Since then other refinements and improvements have been made," he said, citing creation during the 1990s of a permanent corps of analytical counterterrorism specialists and increased emphasis on interagency coordination that has included bringing considerable numbers of non-CIA people into the Counterterrorist Center.

"The nexus between intelligence and law enforcement has been particularly emphasized, and that has included such things as having senior officers at the deputy center chief level, in essence, exchange between the FBI and CIA as well as a lot of people at lower levels," he said. It has also involved such other law enforcement agencies as the Secret Service and Immigration and Naturalization Service, regulatory agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration, and other intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency, he said.

"In short, you'll note most of the rethinking, restructuring, revision of priorities and procedures has already been done," he said.

"It's not as if the intelligence community just woke up on Sept. 11 or within the past couple of years to this particular problem," Pillar said.

On language training, for example, Pillar cited the importance the intelligence community attaches to it, saying its value has been a "leitmotif" in CIA and intelligence recruitment for some time. At the same time, though, he pointed to limits improvements in this area might have.

Most intelligence jobs, he said, do not require language skills, and some of the most important contributions will continue to come "by piecing together disparate bits of information" from various types of sources. Much of that work, Pillar said, mostly done by analysts, is less dependent on language or ability to operate in a particular milieu overseas than is the case with CIA field officers.

Pillar said many of critics' points "are valid points with regard to the principles by which you have to operate a sound intelligence operation - the importance of language, the importance of cultural familiarity, the importance of using more than one operational methodology to get at difficult targets."

"It's not that what the critics are saying is invalid as a way of doing business, it's just there's very little out there that identifies something new and different, different from what is already being done," he said.

Since Sept. 11, he said significant resources have been added to existing counterterrorism efforts, including supporting military operations in Afghanistan, exploiting information uncovered there and using it to go after al-Qaeda operations outside Afghanistan.

Moreover, he said, the CIA and Counterterrorist Center have continued "the same painstaking cell-by-cell, terrorist-by-terrorist work of disrupting terrorist infrastructures worldwide that they have been doing for some time." Favorable results, he said, have come more rapidly mainly because of increased foreign cooperation.

Congress may have a share of any blame, according to some of those interviewed.

Any problems in the CIA have "at least two unindicted co-conspirators and they happen to be the oversight committees, because almost nothing goes on that they're not involved with" according to Bearden.

Baer was dismissive of congressional oversight. "There is no congressional oversight. There is none unless there's a scandal," he said.

Woolsey blamed Congress for some of the problems the CIA is facing now.

"Congress isn't going to go back and look at itself, but the public ought to focus on the fact that there have been problems in getting some of these things funded through OMB and through the Congress, things that should have been funded a long time ago," he said.

"In '99 they got worried about Y2K and terrorism at Y2K so they ginned up a lot of work, they did thwart some things in Jordan and so forth at the end of '99, beginning of 2000, and beginning early in 2000, Congress and OMB took the money back down again," he said.

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Senior CIA official says war on terror will go on indefinitely

Steve Hirsch — Mon, 28 Jan 2002 00:00:00 -0500

In 1999, Pillar left the center on sabbatical to write Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy, which was published before September 11 by the Brookings Institution Press. In his book, Pillar outlines the failures-and successes-in U.S. anti-terrorism policy. He concludes that fighting terrorism has to be viewed as a long-term struggle, much like protecting the public health from communicable disease, and that there will be both victories and defeats.

Pillar is now the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia in the CIA. Steve Hirsch, editor in chief of Global Security Newswire, interviewed Pillar on a range of terrorism-related subjects.

National Journal: Is this really a war on terrorism?

Pillar: There are some unfortunate aspects of the "war" terminology and analogy, the most unfortunate one being that this isn't going to have a clear beginning and clear end, like World War II did, or the Cold War, for the most part, did. [Defense] Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld has said the right things in reminding us that this is not going to end with a surrender on the deck of the battleship Missouri, but I'm not certain that we have all, as Americans, absorbed the implications of what the Secretary said.

I am disturbed by how often I hear references to "as long as the emergency lasts" or "as long as the war on terrorism is going on." I think that's the wrong frame of mind. What we are doing has an indefinite run.

National Journal: How has terrorism changed in recent years, in terms of who is conducting it, and the spectrum of international activity?

Pillar: I think the main trend I would highlight is the trend away from state involvement and state sponsorship. If you compare international terrorism today versus what it was like, say 15 years ago, the role of states is much less, even though some of the states that are much less active today, such as Libya, are still listed as state sponsors.

Another major dimension I would point out is the increasing lethality of terrorism, and the fact that more major terrorist incidents today than 15 or 20 years ago are designed to kill a lot of people, as opposed to being aimed at more-specific political objectives, or practical objectives, like freeing comrades from prison.

And the third trend I would highlight is the extension of the geographic reach of terrorist groups, and the fact that their infrastructures have grown literally worldwide; so you have Middle Eastern and South Asian groups that are quite capable of conducting major operations in the Western Hemisphere, like September 11.

National Journal: The United States, up until now, has pretty much been free of terrorism, but now we're not. What has changed that has increased the danger to the United States?

Pillar: First of all, I'd put my finger on the earlier attack on the World Trade Center, the 1993 bombing, as a real wake-up call in that regard. That was the first major act of international terrorism on U.S. soil. What has changed? The main thing that has changed has been that extension of the geographic reach of terrorist groups, which means infrastructures that have grown, and cells that have been set up on multiple continents, as well as the increased movement of international terrorist operatives.

That all has to do with globalization-the greater quantity and ease of movement of people and ideas and money-which legitimate businessmen have been the larger part of, but which terrorists have made use of as well.

It also has to do, once the World Trade Center attack in 1993 broke the ice, with demonstration effects. I think that attack, as well as the bombing in Oklahoma City two years later-even though that was the work of domestic perpetrators-showed foreign terrorists that it wasn't really quite as hard to pull off a major operation in the United States as they probably thought before that.

National Journal: One of the things that people talk about frequently with regard to terrorism is the potential for the use of weapons of mass destruction. Is there a likelihood of jumping to that level of danger?

Pillar: There is a risk, and I would expect to see more attacks along the lines of the anthrax letters that we've seen in the past few months. That said, I believe that the specter of terrorists, especially international terrorists, using chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear means has been overhyped, in the sense that it has diverted our attention from what, in my view, will continue to be the main threat, which is the infliction of loss of life through conventional means.

This, in fact, is what I would identify as one of the things that affected our thinking in this country, that caused us-the collective "us," Americans in general-to be so surprised by September 11. There had been so much attention to chemical and biological mass-casualty scenarios that we had tended to equate terrorism against the U.S. homeland with chemical or biological terrorism, and just about every domestic preparedness exercise revolved around some chemical or biological scenario.

We also tended to equate chemical or biological terrorism with mass-casualty terrorism, which disregards the fact that, just like the anthrax letters and previous use by terrorists of chemical or biological agents, we are far more likely to see incidents with a few casualties rather than many casualties.

So here we've had, last autumn, two attacks on the United States. The one that used box cutters and aircraft hijacking is the one that killed almost 4,000 people; the one that used the biological agent, anthrax spores, has so far killed five. We ought to reflect on that; I can assure you the terrorists will reflect on that.

National Journal: Where is the main, proper venue for U.S. action in the fight against terrorism?

Pillar: The main venue for fighting international terrorism is behind countless closed doors in scores of foreign countries where individual terrorists and cells and branches of groups do their business of recruiting and raising money and making plans. The biggest form of support we need is the cooperation of foreign police and intelligence and internal security services, and what they can do in those scores of foreign countries by way of arresting, investigating, reporting, confiscating, and all those other steps that I would put under the heading of "disruption of terrorist infrastructure." It is the main front on which this war on terrorism has to be waged. It will not be a front that you and I can read about in the newspapers as we look at maps of Afghanistan or similar measures of progress.

National Journal: On the executive branch side, you are fairly critical in your book of centralization of counter-terrorism functions. What are your doubts about it?

Pillar: At a time of crisis like this, there are a couple of natural tendencies that you hear all the time. One is that we've got to reorganize somehow-that the old organization failed us, so we've got to make a change for the sake of making a change. That's a natural reaction, but it's not necessarily the most useful reaction.

Two, there's always this issue, whether it's on terrorism or something else, about whether information is being "stovepiped," whether it's being shared, whether there are conflicts between different agencies. This is the stuff of which dramatic congressional hearings are held. I don't want to belittle the subject and imply that we don't actually have some real problems along those lines, but most of what we hear on this subject are just natural reactions to the felt need to do something about a major problem.

With regard to counter-terrorism, the fact is, many things we have to do get to the core missions of a number of different government departments and agencies-law enforcement; intelligence; regulatory bodies; the State Department, which conducts foreign policy; and so on. There is no perfect way to rearrange this particular bureaucratic map in a more centralized sort of way than what we have now that would not do certain forms of violence to the necessary intradepartmental coordination.

If, for example, you were to somehow combine everything that the FBI does and the CIA does on counter-terrorism, that would mean ripping one or the other or both out of its parent agency in a way that would work to the detriment of law enforcement or intelligence, or both.

National Journal: In your book, you said that you felt that the claims of what can be accomplished by going after terrorists' money have been oversold. What did you mean by that?

Pillar: There is a contribution, to be sure, to be made in attempting to freeze or interdict terrorist funds. But sometimes-and this is what's oversold-one hears somebody speak about the lifeblood of terrorism being money, and if we can only dry that up, we'll dry up terrorism. That's an overstatement of the contribution to be made. It's an important front in the war on terrorism, but one where we have to realize the limitations-the main limitation being that terrorists are very adept at hiding the money trail, using multiple channels, using false names for accounts, and using informal methods like the so-called hawala system you've read about, which is an informal means of transferring funds that don't go through the banking system at all. Also, there is the fact that for most terrorism, you don't need a whole lot of money. The September 11 hijackers evidently used, according to some estimates, as much as half a million [dollars], but the great majority of the terrorism we face costs far, far less than that, and so even if you dry up most of the funds, it won't stop most of it from happening.

National Journal: Newspapers have been talking about "after Afghanistan"-Yemen, Sudan, Colombia. You and others say this is more than Afghanistan, this is more than Osama bin Laden. Are these likely places where we are also going to have to be?

Pillar: If you're talking not necessarily about military action, all of those countries you mentioned, and many more, will be fronts in this war on terrorism, mainly the less visible kinds of front that we talked about before, in which the people on the front line are police and security agents, and not armed forces. Afghanistan, with particular reference to the use of armed force, really is sui generis. There isn't any other place that has played, over the last several years, the role that Afghanistan has played as the premier safe haven for international terrorists, with the Taliban being the regime that has been more closely allied with terrorists than any other regime. Our use of military force there now is also unique. It is going beyond our previous uses of military force, such as against Libya in 1986, or Iraq in 1993, or even against the bin Laden targets in 1998, in which we were making retaliatory strikes with some hope of causing some damage.

What's going on with U.S. and British forces in Afghanistan today is no less than the overthrow of a regime and the wholesale cleaning out of the world's premier safe haven for terrorists. So, to the extent that we're successful in Afghanistan, that will make a far-greater difference than any other previous application of military force. But I don't see any other place right now where military force could-or, in my view, should-be used in a comparable way.

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