Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA

Introduction

LET ME START BY SAYING WHAT THIS BOOK IS NOT.

It is not an attack on the men and women of the Clandestine Service of the Central Intelligence Agency, the overwhelming majority of whom are dedicated, patriotic Americans working hard every day on behalf of their fellow citizens. God knows that they do not do it for the money nor do they do it for the recognition. They do it because they believe in the work and because they know, as I do, that there really are monsters in the world, and someone has to protect us from them.

It is also not an argument against the existence of a central human intelligence collection organization within the United States government. We desperately needed a central intelligence agency in 1947, when the CIA was created. We even more desperately need such an entity today. The threats facing us are multiplying and becoming more complex. The time horizons in which threats are emerging are shortening. Technology is evolving at an astonishing rate, and we are fast approaching the day when there will be dozens of groups and nations on this planet capable of threatening us with biological, chemical, radiological, and nuclear weapons. This is not pulp fiction. This is reality.

This book is an argument that the existing Central Intelligence Agency is no longer capable of performing the task for which it was designed and must, rapidly, be replaced.

Somewhere out there in the ether right now a terrorist organization is working hard on an anthrax program with the express goal of launching a biological attack on the United States of America. Such an attack, with even a moderate amount of the bacteria, if properly executed, could, without the use of any sophisticated technology, kill tens of thousands and force the evacuation of major American cities.

Several nations in the world, despite our best diplomatic efforts, have already succeeded in acquiring nuclear weapons. These include not just traditional powers such as Russia and China but also much less stable and predictable nations, such as Pakistan, India, and North Korea. Proliferation is real, and the threat is expanding. For all its dangers the Cold War was characterized by a great degree of predictability. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had in place elaborate command-and-control structures and could be counted on to act very deliberately and with due regard for long-term strategic interests.

The same cannot be said of the nations now fielding nuclear arms. A friend of mine used to say of the challenge of determining what India’s nuclear war plans were, that it was complicated by the fact that the Indians themselves did not know. Pakistan, which is engaged eyeball to eyeball with India in a nuclear standoff, is an even more fragile and unpredictable entity. The prospects for an actual exchange of nuclear weapons in the subcontinent in the next ten to twenty years are enormous. The consequences for all of humanity would be almost unimaginable. These are nations with huge populations, where hundreds of millions of individuals wrestle with poverty and disease on a daily basis. The aftermath of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan would probably most resemble the Dark Ages, and the survival of either nation as a viable entity in its wake would be problematic at best.

Russia has not gone away. The Russians are a great and proud people. I have known many, even some who were adversaries, over the years, whom I count as good friends. This does not mean that their national interests coincide with ours. They are rebuilding, and they are working to reassert themselves in areas of the world that they consider crucial to their national interests. They remain the second most powerful nation on earth, after the United States, in military terms. The nature of the government in Moscow, its plans and intentions, and the security of its nuclear arsenal are still of vital importance to our nation.

The Chinese are not our friends. It may or may not be a good thing that we can all go to Wal-Mart and buy televisions and DVD players at a fraction of the cost they would be if they were still produced in the United States. Regardless, it remains true that China is a Communist nation, that it denies basic human rights to its citizens, that it supports North Korea, that it is engaged in a massive military buildup, and that its explosive economic growth is placing its entire political, economic, and social structure under almost incalculable strain. We may find ourselves at war with China in ten years; we may witness a second Chinese Revolution in ten years. Regardless of what happens, given China’s size, its economic and military power, and its geographic position, anything that occurs regarding it will have huge ramifications worldwide.

Obviously, I could continue with a list of threats and challenges almost ad infinitum. I have said nothing about the implications of Hugo Chavez, an implacable foe of the United States, controlling Venezuela’s oil supplies; of Iran’s backing for Hizbullah; or of drug cartels in Mexico becoming so powerful as to begin to challenge the Mexican army itself to open, armed confrontation. The examples I have touched upon were selected simply to provide a flavor of the complexity and the severity of the threats that we face.

There are a lot of mechanisms for the collection of intelligence, and a great deal of it can be collected openly. We are a long way from the days when an operative might be sent to Vladivostok to acquire maps of shipping channels or cable home general atmospherics. A huge amount of information is openly available in print and on the Internet. This can and should be exploited.

There are other extremely valuable ways to collect intelligence. Massive amounts of information can be sucked off the airwaves, stolen from e-mail communications, or gleaned from imagery. This is being done and obviously must continue. SIGINT, ELINT, IMINT, MASINT, and others, are all crucial to our national security.

That said, at the end of the day, there are key things that only HUMINT is going to tell you. Imagery and signals intelligence may give you a very good picture of the movement of Russian forces toward the border of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia in the wake of Russian accusations that the Georgians unjustly arrested and incarcerated Russian citizens in Tbilisi. Only human intelligence is going to tell you what the president and prime minister of Russia discussed regarding this crisis in the meeting that took place last night. Only human intelligence is going to tell you whether the deployment of forces is intended as a bluff to secure political concessions or is, in fact, a precursor to war.

In 1941 the Soviet Union was invaded by Nazi Germany. The initial stages of the war were a disaster for the Russians, who were caught by surprise and rapidly overrun. By the time the Russian winter intervened to tip the scales, the Germans were literally at the gates of Moscow.

Surprise? The invading force numbered in the millions. The movement of men and material to the border had been ongoing for months. Even without satellites or other modern technical means, there was no way that the Soviets could not have been aware of the buildup. Everyone living within a hundred miles of the border in Poland could see firsthand what was unfolding.

And yet the Russians were surprised. They were surprised because they believed the buildup was a bluff done for political reasons. They had convinced themselves that the Germans would not attack, and they lacked the necessary human intelligence that would have told them that an invasion was imminent. The growth in the scope and capability of electronic forms of intelligence collection between the Second World War and today has not changed this calculus. The only way we are going to know the plans and intentions of our adversaries is by the use of well-placed human sources.

On May 11, 1998, the Indian government detonated three nuclear devices simultaneously at the Pokhran test range in western India. The Indian government did not announce its intention to detonate these devices in advance, and the United States received no warning from any source of intelligence regarding the impending detonations, despite the fact that the Indian nuclear program had been a focus of collection for decades. We were caught flat-footed.

The test range in question is located in an area of flat desert where the air is clear most of the year. The location of the range is known and has been known for many years. The movement of nuclear devices, scientists, and technicians to a range of this type in advance of a test is not something that can be done overnight. It requires careful preparation over a period of weeks, if not months, and involves the assembly at the range of individuals and items coming from all over India. It would be hard to think of a better target for technical collection. Certainly, it is difficult to imagine that such tests could be conducted without someone’s seeing something on imagery or someone’s noting message traffic regarding the movement of key scientific personnel.

And yet the United States was surprised and fundamentally for the same reasons that the Soviet Union was surprised when half the German army started its tank engines one morning and launched an invasion. The problem was lack of human sources in the right positions to provide the required intelligence. No one told Stalin what Hitler’s plan was. No one told the United States that the Indians intended to conduct their first full-scale nuclear tests since 1974.

Unfortunately, the situation has not improved for the United States in this regard. Despite herculean and often heroic efforts on the part of many individuals within the Central Intelligence Agency, we continue to suffer a series of failures that demonstrate that we are not recruiting and running the key sources we need to provide warning of threats to our nation.

On September 11, 2001, three airliners crashed into targets in the United States. Two hit the World Trade Center. One hit the Pentagon. A fourth crashed in Pennsylvania instead of Washington only because a group of men and women with almost unbelievable courage decided to take matters into their own hands. We spend billions on defense and intel collection, yet it came down to the passengers and crew on a civilian airliner to save the U.S. Capitol building from destruction.

A lot has been written about September 11. Many hundreds, if not thousands, of pages have been written about lessons learned. They are many. A lot of people, in a lot of organizations, contributed to this debacle. Many organizations within the United States government share the responsibility for the loss of life.

That said, first and foremost, September 11 was a failure in collection, and the organization most responsible for that failure was the CIA. The Central Intelligence Agency was created in 1947 for the express purpose of ensuring that we would never again suffer another Pearl Harbor, that we would never again be surprised by an adversary and forced to suffer the kind of losses and humiliation we did on December 7, 1941.

A little less than sixty years after Pearl Harbor, despite all the resources at its disposal, the CIA, and, more specifically, the Directorate of Operations within the CIA, failed in that responsibility. We lost three thousand American lives to a sneak attack on American soil. And frankly, the defeat was made that much more humiliating and incomprehensible because we were assaulted not by the armed might of Imperial Japan but by a small group of fanatics using box cutters as weapons.

In the summer of 2002, I took the first CIA team into northern Iraq in preparation for the pending invasion. I remained on the ground there in command of a CIA team for roughly the next year. Prior to the insertion of my team, we were briefed at length on a variety of subjects, including the CIA’s assessment of the status of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs. The overall scope of that assessment is now public record. While there was some dispute on a few issues, it was accepted that Saddam was continuing a variety of programs and was in possession of at least some quantity of chemical and biological agents.

During our time in Iraq, our team devoted a great deal of energy to the effort to acquire intelligence on WMD programs. This was not our central focus; the decision to go to war had already been made, but it was definitely on our list of targets to work. We never acquired intelligence confirming the assessment that had been given to us prior to our insertion. We never assumed handling of a single existing Iraqi asset. Every source we ran we recruited after we went in country.

As time passed, and as we continued to see the comments coming out of Washington, it became increasingly puzzling to us as to what sources of information were being used to form the assessment that Saddam had WMD. We were the only people inside the country. We weren’t telling anyone that we had conclusive evidence of the existence of such weapons, and we were unaware of the existence of any assets that were on the books before we went in country that had access to Iraqi WMD programs. So who was it that was telling the Bush administration that Saddam had the programs in question?

A full exploration of this topic is beyond the scope of this book and has been discussed, in any event, in many other places by individuals much more informed on the topic than I am. Let it suffice to say what we all already know: The WMD programs did not exist. Our assessments were wrong. Once again, despite the most capable technical intelligence collection systems on the planet, we were caught without the information we needed to make critical national security decisions. Perhaps we should have invaded Iraq anyway. It is certainly a great and wonderful thing that Saddam is gone. No matter what, though, we should not have been in the position of basing our decision upon faulty intelligence.

Let me come back to my original point. The failure of the CIA to collect the intelligence we needed in advance of September 11 is not the consequence of sloth or lack of dedication on the part of the workforce of that organization. We talk a lot these days about the war on terror and people that are on the front lines in that fight. I’m not sure exactly what all that means or where the front lines are, but I can tell you that the men and women of the Directorate of Operations of the CIA are way out beyond those frontlines, operating deep in enemy territory. They are out there every day, with very little support and no backup, putting their lives on the line for mediocre pay and limited, if any, recognition. And increasingly these days, the thanks they get from this nation for doing the dangerous work they do is to be subjected to investigation and insult. Every senior officer I know in the CIA carries personal liability insurance, because of the fear of being sued for actions taken in the line of duty.

The failure of the CIA is structural. The machine is broken, and it is broken beyond repair. It does not need mending; it needs replacing, and we need to move quickly in doing so before we discover that the next attack on American soil is an improvised nuclear device going off on the docks in New Jersey or the introduction of bubonic plague into a major city.

There are many factors that have contributed to the breakdown in the performance of the CIA. Some of them are internal. Many of them are not. The purpose of this book is to identify and explain those factors and then to lay out a roadmap for how, I believe, they can be addressed. The goal remains the same as it was in 1947—to create an entity that will maintain the midnight watch, so Americans can sleep well at night.

CHAPTER ONE

Donovan Would Not Make It

THE FOUNDER OF THE OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES (OSS) IN World War II was William J. (Wild Bill) Donovan. During action against the Germans in World War I, Donovan took a machinegun bullet to the knee. He refused to be evacuated, insisting instead on remaining on the field, leading the men under his command in an assault on German positions. His actions on that date won him the nation’s highest military honor, the Medal of Honor. By the end of the war, he had added three Purple Hearts, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Distinguished Service Medal, and a number of foreign decorations as well, making him one of the most highly decorated Americans of the war.¹

After the First World War, Donovan visited Europe, Siberia, and Japan. He became a Wall Street lawyer, assistant U.S. attorney general, and business executive. In 1935 he toured Italian battle lines in Ethiopia.² Beginning in 1940 he made a series of trips on behalf of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Britain, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean to gather information on the state of hostilities, Britain’s staying power, and how to improve American intelligence and covert-action capabilities. He created the Coordinator of Information (COI) in July 1941, America’s first peacetime national intelligence organization. In June 1942 this group would be renamed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).³

Donovan went ashore on the first day of the invasion of Sicily, advancing alongside the First Infantry Division and personally engaging enemy troops with a machine gun.⁴ Against the express orders of the Secretary of the Navy, Donovan also personally participated in the Normandy landings, at one point being pinned down by enemy fire.⁵ On one occasion he smuggled a silenced pistol into the Oval Office and discharged it into a sandbag behind the back of the president, as a demonstration of the effectiveness of the silencing mechanism.⁶ During a visit to Detachment 101, the OSS unit assigned to the Burmese theater, Donovan infiltrated 150 miles behind Japanese lines in an antique biplane flown by 101’s commanding officer. His purpose was to visit an OSS forward operating base and meet directly with Kachin Hills tribe leaders.⁷

Donovan recruited to the OSS a wide cross section of America, searching for the best and the brightest but also those with exceptional creativity and daring. OSS wanted out of the box thinkers—individuals who were unorthodox, brilliant, perhaps even eccentric. Recruits included Ivy League professors, safecrackers, former Communists who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, professional baseball players, actors, and paratroopers. They were all, in the words of Donovan, his glorious amateurs, and they lived by the same mantra he did: If you fall, fall forward.⁸

Donovan would not make it in the CIA today. He would be branded as too aggressive, a cowboy, and someone lacking the requisite corporate attitude. He would in due course, if he decided to stick it out, find himself riding a desk somewhere in a corner at headquarters, shelved, put someplace where he couldn’t do any harm. His performance evaluations would include the liberal use of such terms as aggressive and