Nation Topics - Covert Ops | The Nation

"Intelligence is an art, not a science," says Deputy Defense Secretary
Wolfowitz. Secretary of State Powell observes, "There are always debates
about intelligence subjects.

As the Pentagon scours Iraq for weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi
links to Al Qaeda, it's increasingly obvious that the Bush
Administration either distorted or deliberately exaggerated the

As quixotic searches for "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq continue
to yield little more than chagrin, the Washington establishment is
growing restive.

In these jittery times, many Americans see torture as justified.

Events do rush by us in a blur, I know, but let's not abandon Secretary
of State Colin Powell's February 5 UN speech to the graveyard of history
without one last backward glance.

Shortly after Ronald Reagan became President of the United States, the
nation's capital got a second morning newspaper. Eventually, Dr. Ronald
Goodwin, formerly the Rev.

Would-be intelligence watchdogs often lack the knowledge or the will to be effective.

The tax-supported Marshall Center offers more fun and games than war games.

In July the Washington Post, under the headline "Panel Finds No
'Smoking Gun' in Probe of 9/11 Intelligence Failures," reported that the
House and Senate intelligence committees jointly investigating the
September 11 attack had "uncovered no single piece of information that,
if properly analyzed, could have prevented the disaster, according to
members of the panel." With an implied that's-that, the committees then
went on to examine broader matters concerning systemic weaknesses within
the intelligence agencies. That was good news for the cloak-and-dagger
set and the Clinton and Bush administrations. Systemic problems tend to
be treated as no one's fault. The committees were signaling that there
would be no accountability for mistakes made by the spies before
September 11.

In the past year, numerous media accounts have revealed screw-ups,
miscalculations and oversights. The FBI didn't pursue leads on potential
terrorists enrolled at US aviation schools. The CIA had learned that a
suspected terrorist--who would end up on the flight that hit the
Pentagon--was in the United States after attending an Al Qaeda summit,
and it failed to notify the FBI. The CIA didn't act on intelligence
going back to the mid-1990s suggesting that Al Qaeda was interested in a
9/11-type attack. Time magazine noted recently that George W.
Bush's national security team did not respond quickly to a proposal to
"roll back" Al Qaeda.

Hints were ignored and the intelligence system failed, an indication
that reform is vital. To reform effectively, it is necessary to zero in
on specific mistakes as well as big-picture flaws. Yet the
committees--distracted by personnel disputes and a leak
investigation--have not indicated that this sort of comprehensive probe
is under way (the Senate Judiciary Committee did examine the FBI's
handling of its botched investigation into Zacarias Moussaoui, an
alleged 9/11 conspirator, and identified numerous incidents of
ineptitude).

While the meandering September 11 inquiry is far from done, in recent
months both committees released little-noticed reports (accompanying the
intelligence budget they approved) showing that the systemic stuff is
pretty awful. The Senate committee observed, "it is very difficult to
determine how much money the Intelligence Community has budgeted for
counterterrorism, counternarcotics and counterproliferation." It
complained that the CIA, the National Security Agency and other
intelligence bureaucracies are not "able to produce auditable financial
statements"; that thousands of intelligence slots in the military go
unfilled each year, including scores of analysis openings at the US
Central Command, which is responsible for the fight against Al Qaeda;
that the intelligence agencies' terrorist databases are a mess; that FBI
training for counterterrorism agents is inadequate. The committee also
groused that the "community" has repeatedly ignored Congressional
requests for information.

The House intelligence committee offered a grimmer assessment. It
maintained that extra funding is being put "into an organizational
framework that gives little indication of being prepared to produce
intelligence capabilities that can address the national security demands
of the future." The committee noted that "significant gaps in the
Community's analytical capabilities are widening, and present
opportunity for further surprise in national security areas." It
implored Bush to act on the findings of a commission led by Brent
Scowcroft, Bush Senior's National Security Adviser, which last year
recommended placing the Pentagon's three largest intelligence-collection
agencies, including the NSA, under control of the director of central
intelligence. With that plea the committee was urging the reversal of a
decades-long trend in which military imperatives--rather than political,
economic or diplomatic concerns--drive the collection and analysis of
intelligence. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, though, has thwarted
such a shift.

And a House intelligence subcommittee put out a brief September 11
report in July that cited fundamental flaws within the intelligence
bureaucracy. "CIA's problems," it said, "require more than just
expressed commitment from senior CIA managers...the subcommittee will be
looking for deeds rather than words." Did that mean that the
subcommittee, ten months after September 11, was still not persuaded
that the CIA was acting vigorously to correct the institutional defects
that led to the surprise of that day?

Those reports, produced by committees traditionally cozy with the
"community," hardly inspire confidence in the spies. They could cause
one to wonder whether the committees are throwing money (the several
billion dollars added post-9/11 to the classified $30 billion-plus
intelligence budget) at a wasteful and disorganized bureaucracy. And the
problems are probably worse than described. For years, the intelligence
community has been plagued with fragmentation and insufficient
coordination and dominated by military concerns as the bureaucratic
rigor mortis that inhibits unorthodox thinking (as in how to better
understand the world, rather than how to be like Bond) has deepened. Mel
Goodman, a senior CIA analyst for twenty-four years, maintains that the
"analytical culture" at the CIA has "collapsed" over time, leaving the
agency without the ability to conduct effective long-term research and
analysis. And Gregory Treverton, a senior analyst at the RAND
Corporation and former vice chairman of the National Intelligence
Council, notes that within the CIA "an emphasis to be fast and quick
drives out the ability to think longer and harder" about subjects not in
the day's headlines. He sensibly favors transforming the analytical side
of the CIA into a much more open shop that publicly interacts with think
tanks, academics and nongovernmental organizations. "We need to put
together unconventional sets of people to get a deeper understanding,
one with a more historical foundation," Treverton says. "But how that
gets done is the question."

Indeed. How do you get any bureaucracy--particularly a clandestine
one--to behave creatively and responsibly? Inertia and infighting have
often derailed well-intentioned intelligence reform (see Rumsfeld).
Whatever its chances, fundamental reform--including demilitarizing
intelligence, reshaping the bureaucracy and transforming internal
values--is unlikely in the absence of a thorough, as-public-as-possible
investigation into the errors of September 11, large and small.

Taking on the intelligence community (and forcing a transformation)
appears to be too much for the committees, which have been slow to hold
public hearings. They have politely issued complaints, but they mostly
have eschewed fingerpointing for handwringing. In a slap at the
committees in July, the House approved legislation to establish an
independent commission to examine September 11 intelligence issues. In
the Senate, Joe Lieberman and John McCain have been pushing an
independent review that would also dissect transportation security and
diplomatic and military matters. The less than impressive performance of
the intelligence committees "has made people in both houses look at the
independent commission bill again," says one Democratic Congressional
aide. The Administration opposes such a panel.

In February CIA chief George Tenet testified that the agency had done no
wrong regarding 9/11, and that the attack was not due to a "failure of
attention, and discipline, and focus, and consistent effort." The
committees ought to question his grip on reality. Yet they don't seem
eager to disprove Tenet or to probe or challenge the covert bureaucracy.
They show no signs of exploring all the intelligence and policy errors
related to September 11. And so, they are unlikely to fix them.

The $4.4 million damages award in June against FBI agents and Oakland
police for violating the constitutional rights of environmental
activists Darryl Cherney and Judi Bari, wrongly accused of terrorism in
1990, represents more than the culmination of a twelve-year struggle for
vindication. The case also highlights the risks of today's antiterrorism
measures and offers lessons both daunting and encouraging about the
years ahead.

In May 1990, an explosion tore through the car carrying Earth First!
organizers Bari and Cherney. Bari suffered a fractured pelvis; Cherney,
less serious injuries. They assumed the bombing was the work of
antienvironmentalists, meant to disrupt planning for the Redwood Summer
of civil disobedience against the logging of old-growth forest.

The FBI Joint Terrorist Task Force jumped to quite a different
conclusion. As soon as Bari and Cherney were identified, the FBI
informed the local police and leaked to the press that the pair were
terrorists. The authorities claimed that Bari must have made the bomb
herself and that it had accidentally exploded while the two were
carrying it to an unknown target. Bari was placed under arrest in her
hospital bed. Police and FBI agents searched houses in Oakland where
Bari and Cherney had stayed and questioned their fellow activists. Over
the next two months, until the government announced it would not charge
the two environmentalists, the local police and the FBI continued to
call them terrorists.

Only after years of litigation did the truth emerge: The FBI, before the
bombing, had been investigating Bari and Cherney because of their
political activism. When the bomb went off, the FBI shaded the facts to
fit an ideological presumption of guilt. It was also revealed that the
FBI, even after Bari and Cherney had been cleared, collected data
nationwide on hundreds of individuals and groups merely on the basis of
their association with the two Earth First! activists.

The case demonstrates how the truth will come out when the judiciary
fulfills its constitutional role. With patience, skill and funding,
committed activists and lawyers can bring accountability to the FBI.
Just as Bari and Cherney won, just as the secret evidence cases brought
after the 1996 antiterrorism law melted in the face of judicial
challenges, so the material witness detentions and other rights
violations of today will ultimately be held unconstitutional. But the
FBI and the Justice Department will resist oversight and use secrecy and
delaying tactics to evade accountability, prolonging personal and
political damage. Justice was too late for Judi Bari. She died of cancer
in 1997.

The most sobering lesson of the Bari-Cherney case may be this: The FBI's
focus on politics over hard evidence meant that the real bomber was
never captured. In the same way, the Attorney General's recent
announcement that the FBI can monitor meetings and groups with no prior
suspicion of criminal conduct is likely to take the FBI down the path of
investigations based on politics, ethnicity or religion, while real
terrorists escape detection.