FACT
ANNALS OF NATIONAL SECURITY
WHAT WENT WRONG
The C.I.A. and the failure of American intelligence.
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Issue of 2001-10-08
Posted 2001-10-01
After more than two weeks of around-the-clock investigation into the September 11th attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the American intelligence community remains confused, divided,
and unsure about how the terrorists operated, how many there were, and what they might do next. It was
that lack of solid information, government officials told me, that was the key factor behind the Bush
Administration's decision last week not to issue a promised white paper listing the evidence linking Osama
bin Laden's organization to the attacks.
There is consensus within the government on two issues: the terrorist attacks were brilliantly planned and
executed, and the intelligence community was in no way prepared to stop them. One bureaucratic victim,
the officials said, may be George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose resignation
is considered a necessity by many in the Administration."The system is after Tenet," one senior officer
told me."It wants to get rid of him."
The investigators are now split into at least two factions. One, centered in the F.B.I., believes that the
terrorists may not have been"a cohesive group," as one involved official put it, before they started training
and working together on this operation."These guys look like a pickup basketball team," he said."A bunch
of guys who got together." The F.B.I. is still trying to sort out the identities and backgrounds of the
hijackers. The fact is, the official acknowledged,"we don't know much about them."
These investigators suspect that the suicide teams were simply lucky."In your wildest dreams, do you
think they thought they'd be able to pull off four hijackings?" the official asked."Just taking out one jet and
getting it into the ground would have been a success. These are not supermen." He explained that the most
important advantage the hijackers had, aside from the element of surprise, was history: in the past, most
hijackings had ended up safely on the ground at a Third World airport, so pilots had been trained to
coöperate.
Another view, centered in the Pentagon and the C.I.A., credits the hijackers with years of advance
planning and practice, and a deliberate after-the-fact disinformation campaign."These guys were below
everybody's radar—they're professionals," an official said."There's no more than five or six in a cell.
Three men will know the plan; three won't know. They've been 'sleeping' out there for years and years."
One military planner told me that many of his colleagues believe that the terrorists"went to ground and
pulled phone lines" well before September 11th—that is, concealed traces of their activities. It is widely
believed that the terrorists had a support team, and the fact that the F.B.I. has been unable to track down
fellow-conspirators who were left behind in the United States is seen as further evidence of careful
planning."Look," one person familiar with the investigation said."If it were as simple and straightforward
as a lucky one-off oddball operation, then the seeds of confusion would not have been sown as they
were."
Many of the investigators believe that some of the initial clues that were uncovered about the terrorists'
identities and preparations, such as flight manuals, were meant to be found. A former high-level
intelligence official told me,"Whatever trail was left was left deliberately—for the F.B.I. to chase."
In interviews over the past two weeks, a number of intelligence officials have raised questions about
Osama bin Laden's capabilities."This guy sits in a cave in Afghanistan and he's running this operation?"
one C.I.A. official asked."It's so huge. He couldn't have done it alone." A senior military officer told me
that because of the visas and other documentation needed to infiltrate team members into the United States
a major foreign intelligence service might also have been involved."To get somebody to fly an airplane—to
kill himself," the official added, further suggests that"somebody paid his family a hell of a lot of money."
"These people are not necessarily all from bin Laden," a Justice Department official told me."We're still
running a lot of stuff out," he said, adding that the F.B.I. has been inundated with leads. On September
23rd, Secretary of State Colin Powell told a television interviewer that"we will put before the world, the
American people, a persuasive case" showing that bin Laden was responsible for the attacks. But the
widely anticipated white paper could not be published, the Justice Department official said, for lack of
hard facts."There was not enough to make a sale."
The Administration justified the delay by telling the press that most of the information was classified and
could not yet be released. Last week, however, a senior C.I.A. official confirmed that the intelligence
community had not yet developed a significant amount of solid information about the terrorists' operations,
financing, and planning."One day, we'll know, but at the moment we don't know," the official said.
"To me," he added,"the scariest thing is that these guys"—the terrorists—"got the first one free. They
knew that the standard operating procedure in an aircraft hijacking was to play for time. And they knew
for sure that after this the security on airplanes was going to go way up. So whatever they've planned for
the next round they had in place already."
The concern about a second attack was repeated by others involved in the investigation. Some in the
F.B.I. now suspect that the terrorists are following a war plan devised by the convicted conspirator Ramzi
Ahmed Yousef, who is believed to have been the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Yousef was involved in plans that called for, among other things, the releasing of poisons in the air and the
bombing of the tunnels between New York City and New Jersey. The government's concern about the
potential threat from hazardous-waste haulers was heightened by the Yousef case.
"Do they go chem/bio in one, two, or three years?" one senior general asked rhetorically."We must now
make a difficult transition from reliance on law enforcement to the preëmptive. That part is hard. Can we
recruit enough good people?" In recent years, he said,"we've been hiring kids out of college who are
computer geeks." He continued,"This is about going back to deep, hard dirty work, with tough people
going down dark alleys with good instincts."
Today's C.I.A. is not up to the job. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, in 1991, the C.I.A. has become
increasingly bureaucratic and unwilling to take risks, and has promoted officers who shared such values.
("The consciousness of kind," one former officer says.) It has steadily reduced its reliance on overseas
human intelligence and cut the number of case officers abroad—members of the clandestine service, now
known formally as the Directorate of Operations, or D.O., whose mission is to recruit spies. (It used to be
called the"dirty tricks" department.) Instead, the agency has relied on liaison relationships—reports from
friendly intelligence services and police departments around the world—and on technical collection
systems.
It won't be easy to put agents back in the field. During the Cold War, the agency's most important mission
was to recruit spies from within the Soviet Union's military and its diplomatic corps. C.I.A. agents were
assigned as diplomatic or cultural officers at American embassies in major cities, and much of their work
could be done at diplomatic functions and other social events. For an agent with such cover, the
consequence of being exposed was usually nothing more than expulsion from the host country and
temporary reassignment to a desk in Washington. Today, in Afghanistan, or anywhere in the Middle East
or South Asia, a C.I.A. operative would have to speak the local language and be able to blend in. The
operative should seemingly have nothing to do with any Americans, or with the American embassy, if
there is one. The status is known inside the agency as"nonofficial cover," or NOC. Exposure could mean
death.
It's possible that there isn't a single such officer operating today inside Islamic-fundamentalist circles. In
an essay published last summer in The Atlantic Monthly, Reuel Marc Gerecht, who served for nearly a
decade as a case officer in the C.I.A.'s Near East Division, quoted one C.I.A. man as saying,"For Christ's
sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don't do that kind of thing." Another officer
told Gerecht,"Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen."
At the same time, the D.O. has been badly hurt by a series of resignations and retirements among
high-level people, including four men whose names are little known to the public but who were widely
respected throughout the agency: Douglas Smith, who spent thirty-one years in the clandestine service;
William Lofgren, who at his retirement, in 1996, was chief of the Central Eurasia Division; David
Manners, who was chief of station in Amman, Jordan, when he left the agency, in 1998; and Robert Baer,
an Arabic speaker who was considered perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East. All
left with feelings of bitterness over the agency's procedures for running clandestine operations.
"We'll never solve the terrorism issue until we reconstitute the D.O.," a former senior clandestine officer
told me."The first line of defense, and the most crucial line of defense, is human intelligence." Baer, who
was awarded a Career Intelligence Medal after his resignation, in late 1997, said,"You wouldn't believe
how bad it is. What saved the White House on Flight 93"—the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania—"was a
bunch of rugby players. Is that what you're paying thirty billion dollars for?" He was referring to the
federal budget for intelligence. He and his colleagues aren't surprised that the F.B.I. had no warning of the
attack."The bureau is wonderful in solving crimes after they're committed," one C.I.A. man said."But it's
not good at penetration. We've got to do it."
Today, the C.I.A. doesn't have enough qualified case officers to man its many stations and bases around
the world. Two retired agents have been brought back on a rotating basis to take temporary charge of the
small base in Karachi, Pakistan, a focal point for terrorist activity. (Karachi was the site of the murder, in
1995, of two Americans, one of them a C.I.A. employee, allegedly in retaliation for the arrest in Pakistan
of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef.) A retired agent also runs the larger C.I.A. station in Dacca, Bangladesh, a
Muslim nation that could be a source of recruits. Other retirees run C.I.A. stations in Africa.
One hard question is what lengths the C.I.A. should go to. In an interview, two former operations officers
cited the tactics used in the late nineteen-eighties by the Jordanian security service, in its successful effort
to bring down Abu Nidal, the Palestinian who led what was at the time"the most dangerous terrorist
organization in existence," according to the State Department. Abu Nidal's group was best known for its
role in two bloody gun and grenade attacks on check-in desks for El Al, the Israeli airline, at the Rome and
Vienna airports in December, 1985. At his peak, Abu Nidal threatened the life of King Hussein of
Jordan—whom he called"the pygmy king"—and the King responded, according to the former intelligence
officers, by telling his state security service,"Go get them."
The Jordanians did not move directly against suspected Abu Nidal followers but seized close family
members instead—mothers and brothers. The Abu Nidal suspect would be approached, given a telephone,
and told to call his mother, who would say, according to one C.I.A. man,"Son, they'll take care of me if
you don't do what they ask." (To his knowledge, the official carefully added, all the suspects agreed to talk
before any family members were actually harmed.) By the early nineteen-nineties, the group was crippled
by internal dissent and was no longer a significant terrorist organization. (Abu Nidal, now in his sixties and
in poor health, is believed to be living quietly in Egypt.)"Jordan is the one nation that totally succeeded in
penetrating a group," the official added."You have to get their families under control."
Such tactics defy the American rule of law, of course, and the C.I.A.'s procedures, but, when it comes to
Osama bin Laden and his accomplices, the official insisted, there is no alternative."We need to do
this—knock them down one by one," he said."Are we serious about getting rid of the problem—instead of
sitting around making diversity quilts?"
A few days after the attacks, Vice-President Dick Cheney defended the C.I.A.'s director, George Tenet,
on television, saying that it would be a"tragedy" to look for"scapegoats." President Bush subsequently
added a note of support with a visit to C.I.A. headquarters. In an interview last week, one top C.I.A.
official also defended Tenet."We know there's a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking going on, but
people don't understand the conditions that George inherited," he told me."You can't penetrate a six-man
cell when they're brothers and cousins—no matter how much Urdu you know." The official
acknowledged that there was much dissatisfaction with the C.I.A.'s performance, but he said,"George has
not gotten any word other than that the President has full confidence in him." He went on,"George
wouldn't resign in a situation like this."
I was informed by other officials, however, that Tenet's days are numbered."They've told him he's on his
way out," one official said."He's trying to figure it out—whether to go gracefully or let it appear as if he's
going to be fired." A White House adviser explained Cheney's public endorsement of Tenet by saying,"In
Washington, your friends always stab you in the chest. Somebody has to take the blame for this." It was
his understanding, he added, that"after a decent interval—whenever they get some traction on the
problem—he will depart. I've heard three to six months." Even one of Tenet's close friends told me,"He's
history."
Tenet's standing was further undermined, after September 11th, by what proved to have been a series of
wildly optimistic claims about the effectiveness of the C.I.A.'s Counter Terrorism Center, which was set
up in 1986 after a wave of international bombings, airplane hijackings, and kidnappings. The idea was to
bring together experts from every American police agency, including the Secret Service, into a"fusion
center," which would coördinate intelligence data on terrorism. In October, 1998, after four men linked to
bin Laden were indicted for their role in the bombings at the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya,
reporters for Newsweek were given a tour of the center. The indictments, Newsweek reported,"were
intended as a clear message to bin Laden and his fugitive followers: the United States knows who they are
and where to find them.... The story of how the C.I.A. and F.B.I., once bitter bureaucratic rivals,
collaborated to roll up bin Laden's elusive network is a tale of state-of-the-art sleuthing—and just plain
luck."
But in fact the C.T.C. was not authorized to recruit or handle agents overseas—that task was left to the
D.O. and its stations in the Middle East, which had their own priorities. The C.T.C. was bolstered with
more money and more manpower after the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, but it remained a
paper-shuffling unit whose officers were not required to be proficient in foreign languages. Many of the
C.I.A.'s old hands have told me that the C.T.C., despite its high profile, was not an assignment of choice
for a young and ambitious D.O. officer. The C.T.C. and two of the other major intelligence
centers—dealing with narcotics and nuclear-nonproliferation issues—are so consumed by internecine
warfare that the professional analysts find it difficult to do their jobs."They're all fighting among each
other," said one senior manager who took early retirement and whose last assignment was as the director
of one of the centers."There's no concentration on issues."
In 1986, Robert Baer, freshly arrived as a case officer from Khartoum, was drafted into the Counter
Terrorism Center, a few months after it was set up, by its director, Duane (Dewey) Clarridge. A draft of a
memoir Baer wrote, which will be published by Crown this fall, depicts what happened next:
The first few months was about as exhilarating as it can get in the spy business. Dewey had authority to pretty
much do anything he wanted against the terrorists. He had all the money he wanted.... It wasn't long, though,
before the politics of intelligence undermined everything Dewey tried to do.... It was too risky. A botched—or
even a successful—operation would piss off a friendly foreign government. Someone would be thrown out of
his cushy post. Someone could even get killed....
You'd ask [the C.I.A. station in] Bonn to recruit a few Arabs and Iranians to track the Middle East émigré
community in West Germany, and it would respond that it didn't have enough officers. You'd ask Beirut to meet
a certain agent traveling to Lebanon, and it would refuse because of some security problem. It was nothing but
bureaucratic foot-dragging, but it effectively hamstrung anything Dewey tried to do. After six months, Dewey
could put his hands on only two Arabic speakers—another officer and me.
Many people in the intelligence community, in their conversations with me, complained bitterly about how
difficult it was to work with the Directorate of Operations, even during a crisis."In order to work on a
problem with D.O.," a former senior scientist told me,"you have to be in D.O." Similarly, a congressional
observer of the C.I.A. came to understand the bureaucratic power of the D.O."To succeed as director of
Central Intelligence," he said,"you have to ingratiate yourself with the D.O." Other intelligence sources
have told me that the D.O.'s machinations led, at one point, to a feud with the National Security Agency
over who would control the Special Collection Service, a joint undertaking of the two agencies that
deploys teams of electronics specialists around the world to monitor diplomatic and other communications
in moments of crisis. The S.C.S.'s highly secret operations, which produced some of the Cold War's most
valuable data, are usually run from secure sites inside American embassies. Competence and sophistication
were hindered by an absurd amount of bickering. A military man who in 1998 was involved in a Middle
East signals-intelligence operation told me that he was not able to discuss the activity with representatives
of the C.I.A. and the N.S.A. at the same time."I used to meet with one in a safe house in Virginia, break
for lunch, and then meet with the other," the officer said."They wouldn't be in the same room."
If the current crisis does lead to an overhaul of the agency, the Senate and House intelligence committees
are not likely to be of much help. Lofgren, Smith, Manners, and Baer, among others, repeatedly met with
legislators and their staffs and testified before Congress in an effort to bring about changes. But nothing
was done.
Not surprisingly, Republicans and Democrats have differing explanations for what went wrong. One
Republican staff member said that Senator Richard C. Shelby, of Alabama, who was the committee's
chairman until early this year, understood that the problem was at the top of the agency."We do have
guys in the field with great ideas who are not supported by the establishment," the staff member said. But
none of the senior Democrats, he said, wanted to embarrass the director, George Tenet, by holding an
inquiry or hearings into the various complaints. (Tenet had spent years working for the Democrats on the
committee staff, and had served as a member of Bill Clinton's National Security Council staff before
joining the C.I.A.'s management team.)
One Democrat, however, blamed the process within the Senate committee, which, he said, neglected
terrorism in favor of more politically charged issues."Tenet's been briefing about bin Laden for years, but
we weren't organized to consider what are threats to the United States. We're chasing whatever the hell is
in the news at the moment."
Former Senator Bob Kerrey, of Nebraska, who served for four years as the Intelligence Committee's
ranking Democrat and is now the president of the New School, in New York, is one of Tenet's defenders.
But Kerrey also acknowledges that he no longer knows"how well we did our job" of legislative oversight.
"Nobody with any responsibility can walk away from this. We missed something here."
Kerrey remains angry about the U.S. policy toward Afghanistan in the years after its defeat of the Soviet
Union."The Cold War was over, and we shut down Afghanistan"—that is, ceased all intelligence
operations."From Bush to Clinton, what happened is one of the most embarrassing American
foreign-policy decisions, as bad as Vietnam," Kerrey said. He cited a botched 1996 C.I.A. plot to
overthrow President Saddam Hussein of Iraq:"We also had a half-baked Iraqi operation and sent a signal
that we're not serious."
Last June, Shelby, after a tour of the Persian Gulf and a series of intelligence briefings, told a Washington
Post reporter that bin Laden was"on the run, and I think he will continue to be on the run, because we are
not going to let up." He went on,"I don't think you could say he's got us hunkered down. I believe he's
more hunkered down." After the bombing, however, Shelby was among the first to suggest publicly that it
was time for Tenet to go."I think he's a good man, and he's done some good things, but there have been a
lot of failures on his watch," Shelby told USA Today. Tenet, he said, lacked"the stature to control all the
agencies. In a sense, he is in charge, but in reality he's not."
One friend and former colleague of Tenet's says that his refusal to urge the Senate leadership to deal with
the hard issues was symptomatic of his problems as C.I.A. director."He's a politician, too," that person
said of Tenet."That's why he shouldn't have been there, because he had no status to tell the senators, 'You
don't know what you're talking about.'"
In his memoir, Robert Baer describes the"fatal malaise" that came over the Paris station of the C.I.A. in
the early nineties:"Case officers weren't recruiting new agents. The agents already on the books were old.
They'd lost their access. And no one seemed to care." Many in the agency were shocked in early 1992
when Milton Bearden, the head of the Soviet-East European division—he had also played a major role in
the C.I.A.'s support for the Afghan rebels in their brutal war against the Soviet Union—informed his
overseas stations that Russia would now be treated like any other friendly nation, such as Germany or
France. The C.I.A. was no longer in the business of recruiting agents to spy against the Russians. In
addition, C.I.A. surveillance apartments were closed and wiretaps turned off throughout the Middle East
and Europe."We'll never know the losses we had in terms of not capitalizing on the Soviet collapse," a
retired official said. Former high-level Soviet officials with intelligence information or other data were
rebuffed."Walk-ins were turned away. It was stunning, and, as far as I knew, nobody fought it."
Little changed when Bill Clinton took office, in 1993. Baer, now assigned, at his request, to the tiny C.I.A.
outpost in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, near the Afghanistan border, watched helplessly as Saudi-backed Islamic
fundamentalists—the precursors of the Taliban—consolidated training bases and began to recruit
supporters and run operations inside the frontier nations of the former Soviet Union.
In 1995, the agency was widely criticized after the news came out that a paid informant in Guatemala had
been involved in the murders of an American innkeeper and the Guatemalan husband of an American
lawyer. The informant had been kept on the C.I.A. payroll even though his activities were known to the
Directorate of Operations. John Deutch, the C.I.A.'s third director in three years, responded to the abuses,
and to the public outcry, by issuing a directive calling for prior approval from headquarters before any
person with criminal or human-rights problems could be recruited. The approval, Deutch later explained,
was to be based on a simple balancing test:"Is the potential gain in intelligence worth the cost that might
be associated with doing business with a person who may be a murderer?"
The"scrub order," as it came to be known, was promulgated by Deutch and his colleagues with the best
of intentions, and included provisions for case-by-case review. But in practice hundreds of"assets" were
indiscriminately stricken from the C.I.A.'s payroll, with a devastating effect on anti-terrorist operations in
the Middle East.
The scrub order led to the creation of a series of screening panels at C.I.A. headquarters. Before a new
asset could be recruited, a C.I.A. case officer had to seek approval from a Senior Review Panel."It was
like a cardiologist in California deciding whether a surgeon in New York City could cut a chest open," a
former officer recalled. Potential agents were being assessed by officials who had no firsthand experience
in covert operations. ("Americans hate intelligence—just hate it," Robert Baer recalls thinking.) In the view
of the operations officers, the most important weapons in the war against international terrorism were
being evaluated by men and women who, as one of the retired officers put it,"wouldn't drive to a D.C.
restaurant at night because they were afraid of the crime problem."
Other bureaucratic panels began"multiplying like rabbits, one after another," a former station chief said.
Experienced officers who were adamant about continuing to recruit spies found that obtaining approval
before making a pitch had become a matter of going from committee to committee."In the old days,
they'd say, 'Go get them,'" the retired officer said. Yet another review process, known as A.V.S.—the
asset-validation system—was put in place. Another retired officer told me,"You'd have to write so much
paper that guys would spend more time in the station writing reports than out on the street."
"It was mindless," a third officer said."Look, we recruited assholes. I handled bad guys. But we don't
recruit people from the Little Sisters of the Poor—they don't know anything." He went on,"What we've
done to ourselves is criminal. There are a half-dozen good guys out there trying to keep it together."
"It did make the workday a lot easier," Robert Baer said of the edict."I just watched CNN. No one cared."
The C.I.A.'s vital South Group, made up of eight stations in central Asia—all threatened by fundamentalist
organizations, especially in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, with links to the Taliban and bin Laden—had no
agents by the mid-nineteen-nineties, Baer said."The agency was going away."
Unlike many senior officials at C.I.A. headquarters, Baer had lived undercover, in the nineteen-eighties, in
Beirut and elsewhere in the Middle East, and he well understood the ability of terrorist organizations to
cover their tracks. He told me that when the C.I.A. started to go after the Islamic Jihad, a radical Lebanese
group linked to a series of kidnappings in the Reagan years,"its people systematically went through
documents all over Beirut, even destroying student records. They had the airport wired and could pick the
Americans out. They knew whom they wanted to kidnap before he landed." The terrorists coped with the
American ability to intercept conversations worldwide by constantly changing codes—often doing little
more than changing the meanings of commonly used phrases."There's a professional cadre out there,Schlußsatz fehlt, zu lang
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