CIA performance disputed as Congress plans hearings

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks surprised the United States, but whether that was because of intelligence failure or the difficulties of snooping on terrorist plots is a matter of disagreement among former and current intelligence professionals.

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.