Rogue elephant's return?

The CIA fires Hellfire missiles from its version of the unmanned Predator drone aircraft and supposedly blows up innocent civilians in Afghanistan. Who picked the target? Who pushed the button? Will there be an investigation and perhaps a court-martial, which might be the case with a military officer whose mistakes killed innocents? Will the results of any such proceeding be made public?

Do ordinary Americans know how much freedom President Bush has given the CIA? Is the agency employing other high-tech weapons against suspected terrorists, including urban-warfare devices the U.S. military is banned from using, such as electronic beams designed to render a crowd of people unconscious but not kill them?

The CIA is reportedly running a number of small hit teams in Afghanistan as a part of America's war against terrorism. My e-mails from abroad assert that Army and Marine snipers are among those American warriors detailed to the CIA in Afghanistan. The agency is also said to employ foreign mercenaries who are not subject to U.S. law. Would American citizens ever find out about it if one of these CIA-funded teams went wild in the boonies and committed another My Lai, the infamous Army massacre of South Vietnamese civilians that occurred 34 years ago next month?

Do we know even at this late date about the effectiveness, if any, of the granddaddy of remote-control attacks--the U.S. cruise missile strikes President Clinton ordered launched in 1998 against terrorist training camps in Afghanistan? George Tenet, then and now the director of the CIA, refused to address the question when asked.

The answer to those and other troubling questions about the CIA's expanding warrior role is either no, or, at best, perhaps not. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have said repeatedly since Sept. 11 that, for the country's own good, they will not tell us about some American anti-terrorist operations. This is understandable, up to a point. The danger is that some CIA operatives will interpret Bush's "go do it" mandate as an "anything goes" license.

"It's not a risk-free situation," said former CIA Director Stansfield Turner when asked about this possibility. In an interview with National Journal, he said his feelings were "very mixed" about the freewheeling direction the agency is now taking. However, the retired admiral who directed the CIA for President Carter from 1977 to 1981 doubted that a My Lai-type massacre could be kept secret, because "the whole system is so porous."

As for public accountability for misdeeds, Turner agreed that the CIA is neither as structured nor as transparent in this regard as the American military. He noted, though, that the CIA director has the power to punish agency employees for wrongdoing in a disciplinary hearing that is similar to a U.S. Navy captain's mast, a proceeding from which the defendant has no appeal.

Intelligence officials past and present note that CIA Director Tenet has an unusually unrestricted presidential mandate in this war. It essentially amounts to: "You know what needs to be done; go do it," a former CIA executive said. Such a bright green light, the ex-agent continued, could inspire the agency to return to the risky operations of the 1970s that prompted then-Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, to call the CIA a "rogue elephant."

"It's already kind of scary when you have the CIA flying Predators around," a senior military intelligence officer who has operated in some of the world's hottest and darkest corners told me. "Who controls that? Who controls the targets? What are their rules of engagement? We in the military have to go by them; police officers have to go by them. What happens if some CIA operator in the boonies gets mad at an American general and decides to take him out? The CIA is becoming too technology-centric. It's not doing enough `humint' [human intelligence gathered by painstakingly planted spies in target countries and terrorist organizations abroad]. The whole thing is fraught with danger, CIA-military overlap, and confusion."

James Bamford, author of Body of Secrets, who has been studying America's intelligence agencies for more than two decades and is now a visiting professor at the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California (Berkeley), said the CIA has seized upon the armed Predator to regain some of the power it lost to the Pentagon, especially in overhead surveillance by satellite and aircraft.

"It's trying to flex its muscles after being neutered," he said. "But it's dangerous when they start overlapping with the military, because of the agency's lack of accountability. It should concentrate on collecting intelligence."

Bamford added that in the 1970s, Congress set up committees to oversee the CIA to protect the American people from agency excesses. "But the oversight committees have become cheerleaders."

Given the fact that our commander in chief is a President who delights in such cowboy talk as "Wanted, dead or alive," I think J. Kenneth McDonald, chief historian of the CIA from 1981 to 1995, had it right when he told National Journal: "I don't see a rogue elephant. But I certainly see the potential for one because of the open-ended nature of the war against terrorism."