Getting Congress On Board for CIA Reform

One of the better young case officers summed it up admirably a few years ago by telling me that the prevailing motto in the Directorate these days was not "Who Dares, Wins" but rather "Big operations equal big problems, small operations equal small problems, and no operations equal no problems at all".

Now the very same Congress that created the little white mouse that defines the culture of the current Operations Directorate is taking the lead in criticizing the Directorate for the very same deficiencies (lack of human sources, passivity, lack of language-qualified Arabists and so on) that Senators and Representatives helped create over the past twelve years. They ought to be ashamed of themselves. But, as we all know, most successful politicians feel little or no shame. It apparently is part of their genetic makeup.

Congress, abetted by Quisling DCIs like John Deutch, tried its best from about 1989 until the 11 September attacks to crush the DO "Rogue Mouse" once and for all. To that end, just about anyone in the DO over 50 who had been involved in counter-insurgency or counter-terrorism got the clear message that the "cowboy" days were over and that those unwilling or unable to adapt to the new, kinder, cleaner, more "sensitive" approach were no longer welcome in the Agency.

That meant that people like myself, who had actually been responsible for the deaths of a number of our enemies in the course of implementing "lethal" presidential findings in exotic places, either retired as soon as they could or changed their ways. For the younger case officers, having seen what happened to the "risk takers" in the senior officer corps, it meant that the path to promotion was no longer to take chances but indeed exactly the opposite.

This is how one young case officer, who entered the service in the 1989-90 timeframe, summed it up for me in the mid-1990s. When I asked him what he did all day, he told me that had had concluded that the best and smartest way to look busy while staying out of trouble was simply to sit at his computer terminal all day and write messages. His favorite tactic was to arrive at his desk early in the morning, spend as long as possible reading his incoming mail, and the open a "dialogue" with Headquarters on some operational subject by e-mail. He would then send his message to Washington, as well as to five or six other stations. He would then go home to his wife and kids and, hopefully, when he came to work the next day he would have six or seven answers to his original cable. Then, in what was really just an operational Ponzi scheme, he would spend the next few days answering those messages. Hopefully his responses would generate similar replies from other ops officers, thereby insuring that neither he nor his correspondents ever had actually to take the risk of operating out on the street.

This sort of stuff went on for years and everyone seemed happy with it. The young case officer's superiors loved what he was doing since it generated so much message traffic without actually doing anything. And people at Headquarters loved it to since with all those messages flowing in and out and all those people still reporting to work every day the Agency could not possibly have been reduced to the kind of sham perpetual motion Rube Goldberg machine that its critics alleged it to be.

Well, then came September 11 and we found out a lot in the course of one morning. One of the things we found out was that the DO, which had been recruiting nothing but Sunday School teachers for years, had no human intelligence sources in Osama�s inner circle. Nor did they have a clue about how to develop such sources since the "risk takers" among them had all been purged years ago.

In desperation, people hauled out their phone books and started calling Retirees, pleading with many of the same ops officers who were disparaged, shown the door, etc. ten years earlier, to return to help them out of the mess they and Congress had created. Several senior officers I know who came within a whisker of being fired during the Iran-Contra affair and subsequently retired were welcomed back with open arms and are now key players in the effort to develop better human intelligence on al-Qaida and related groups. Why? They turned out to be the only people around who knew how to do this stuff.

Using the retirees does provide some short-term relief for the DO's problems, but longer term relief will necessitate new people, new leadership and a new oversight climate. First of all the hundreds of lawyers who have been feasting on the bones of the DO for the past ten or fifteen years will have to go. Second, many of the prissy, "do-nothing" ops officers who have been hired and promoted through the ranks during that period will also have to go. Many of them are incapable of rolling up their sleeves and getting out onto the street to recruit assets with terrorist connections. And - this is where Porter Goss comes in - the Agency needs a new leadership that can stand up both to the administration in power and to the Congress.

To be truthful, I am not very optimistic. This mess took ten to fifteen years to create, and even if we started repairing it today it would probably take us ten more years to get back to where we were in the late 1980s when the purge began.

And even then, we were not all that good at counter-terrorism. One example: in Latin America during the mid-80s we spent a lot of time and effort trying to insert sources into a Marxist terrorist group. Since the group in question was very wary and counter-intelligence conscious this was a difficult task and a number of our fledgling assets were unmasked and dealt with harshly. Nevertheless, we kept trying.

On one occasion, one of those brave young people we were dangling before the group told his case officer that he thought he had finally achieved a breakthrough. After months of trying to ingratiate himself with the local commander "Comandante Pepe", he reported that Pepe had finally asked him to hide a couple of hundred pounds of high explosives for his group for a couple of weeks.

We wrote this up and sent it to Headquarters and were astonished to get a response from some lawyer back there who virtually accused us of being terrorists. In his view, if we hid the explosives for Pepe and then the group retrieved them and used them to make bombs and kill people we would be at least partially responsible. Hence the only way Headquarters would approve our asset's hiding the explosives would be to send an expert to determine exactly what explosive was involved and substitute an inert look-alike material for it.

So according to Headquarters� script, our man hides the stuff and Pepe picks it up a couple of weeks later. Then Pepe and his merry men mold it into bombs, improvised grenades, mines or some such and - to their astonishment - none of it goes off. Pepe would have to be pretty darn stupid not to think that maybe, just maybe, our man might have something to do with this. In Ricky Ricardo's words, our guy would certainly have some "splainin" to do.

Today�s CIA is a broken Humpty Dumpty and Congress has helped break it. I don�t know if the Agency can be restored as an effective, clandestine organization. Part of the solution requires instituting a policy of accountability inside the CIA. The still classified report on the CIA�s culpability for 9-11 is a step in the right direction. It calls to account the CIA�s senior leadership for its sins of omission and commission that contributed to the failure to prevent the attacks of 9-11.

However, it is not just a matter of creating accountability inside the Agency, the Congress also must be accountable. One reason Case Officers have been very cautious about recruiting terrorist spies goes back to the witch hunt led by Senator Robert Torricelli against CIA officers who had recruited and run agents inside the Guatemalan Army who were guilty of human rights abuses. CIA officers who were doing their job legally and honorably had been asked to recruit sources in the Guatemalan military. There are murderers in the Guatemalan Army. The CIA officers did what they were asked to do and later found themselves vilified and fired for doing their job. This kind of after the fact crusading by members of Congress have helped create the current mentality in the CIA of people unwilling to take chances in seamy areas for fear of being scapegoated when the political winds change.

One thing the Congress can do immediately to assist with reforming the CIA is to come together and implement a single intelligence oversight committee that brings together members of both Houses and both parties. At the end of the day the Congress and the American people need to make a decision�are we willing to have a Clandestine service capable of carrying out secret acts and forced to deal intimately with murderers and criminals. Frankly, I am not sure we as a people have the stomach for this.

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