[iwar] [fc:OpEd:.Not.Just.a.Lack.of.Intelligence,.a.Lack.of.Skills]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-22 07:12:55


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Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2001 07:12:55 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: [iwar] [fc:OpEd:.Not.Just.a.Lack.of.Intelligence,.a.Lack.of.Skills]
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By Frederick P. Hitz

Sunday, October 21, 2001; Page B03 

Former CIA director Richard Helms has always liked to tell the story of
the agency's early days, after World War II, when America faced the
challenge of cracking the enigma of the Soviet Union.  So desperate were
analysts for authoritative background information about the Stalinist
behemoth at the onset of the Cold War, Helms recalls, that they repaired
to the Library of Congress to do basic research. 

I'm reminded of that story as I listen to commentators and study the
fine print on bills authorizing future counterterrorism spending by the
intelligence community.  The talk is all of unleashing the "rogue
elephant" and letting the CIA be the CIA, of freeing the agency to do
whatever it takes -- including using human agents who may have committed
notorious crimes -- to acquire the information we need to root out the
extremist networks bent on terrorizing us.  But if that were all that
needed to be done, then the president, the Congress and the agency's
heads would long ago have made the necessary means available.  In fact,
we now know that following the 1998 bombings of U.S.  embassies in Kenya
and Tanzania, President Clinton did sign several covert action findings
to try -- unsuccessfully -- to bring down Osama bin Laden. 

What Sept.  11 actually revealed is that the solution to our
intelligence problem isn't going to be so simple.  America's new
terrorism target puts us in the same difficult and challenging
positionwe were in 55 years ago, when we were trying to penetrate the
Soviet Union with insufficient Russian language capabilities and little
understanding of the tough totalitarian hide we were trying to pierce. 
Inour war against terrorism, we are attacking an analogous kind of
closed society, whose members have committed their lives to the cause
and don't even trust their own families. 

Six years ago, when the CIA's then-deputy director of operations was
asked how he would cope with the intelligence challenges of the
post-Cold War world, he quipped, "It's the people, stupid!" This was
never truer than now.  To gather and analyze intelligence on our new
enemy, we will not only have to reach for the texts on our library
shelves, we will have to reach into the bazaars and the mosques of
Pakistanand Palestine.  And the only way to dothat is to recruit the
best people available, both from the great universities and from the
streets of America's ethnic enclaves. 

Our greatest deficit at the moment appears to be intelligence officers
who speak the languages and understand the culture of the Middle East
and Central Asia (as well as other critical regions, such as China).  We
will have to embark upon a crash program to recruit and train officers
in exotic and hard languages -- not only Arabic and its dialects, but
also Farsi, Pashto and others.  Language and culture competence should
be made a prerequisite to advancement in the spy corps and the sine qua
non of overseas service.  As difficult as it may be to recruit an
informant in a terrorist cell of individuals willing to expend their
lives in suicide missions, it's impossible if you don't speak or read
the language and understand the culture from which they come. 

At home, our intelligence analysts are ill-equipped to grapple with the
information that arrives on their desks by the bucketful each day from
new media outlets in the Middle East and all over the world.  Since the
Cold War ended, agency analysts have tended to be 18-month wonders who
hopscotch from subject to subject without developing anybroad, long-term
expertise in any one area.  Analysts should be expected to make a career
of their functional or geographic specialty so that the daily flows of
information are added to an already solid base of knowledge. 

But Americans should be aware that it will take 10 years or more to
build up a cadre of skilled officers in both the operations directorate
and the analytical corps.  In the meantime, we should recruit and hire
from the ranks of America's Islamic community.  After what happened on
Sept.  11, there must be many patriotic Arabic-speaking Americans
willing to enlist in the effort to combat the Muslim fundamentalist
cells seeking to destroy America.  This kind of effort can be highly
successful: During World War II, the U.S.  Army was able to recruit
Japanese Americans to serve in the ranks of the counterintelligence
corps, even though we had sent many others to internment camps.  I know;
I worked for a highly decorated Japanese American career officer in the
operations directorate of the CIA. 

Our intelligence officers serving abroad face new investigative and
technical challenges as well.  The agency hasn't had to deal much with
law enforcement procedures in the past, but it will now.  The CIA may
not be in the business of bringing suspected terrorists back to the
United States for trial, but it has to know how al Qaeda works as a
criminal network.  This means that officers serving abroad will have to
be trained intensively in the law enforcement skills of investigating,
following a money trail and interrogation. 

Officers will need to persuade local police and intelligence services to
provide help in pursuing the terrorist target in their own backyards. 
For this, they'll require some walking-around money; for instance,
they'll have to be able to offer assistance with sophisticated
information technology problems or share information acquired through
our superior skills or access, such as satellite photography or
sensitive signals intercepts.  When it comes to signals intelligence
gathering, however, we also have to recognize that the U.S. 
intelligence community is in many ways back in the pick and shovel era. 
Today's telecommunications systems the world over use fiber-optic cable
for land lines, which means that signals can be intercepted only by
tapping -- with some difficulty -- directly into the line itself.  And
cheap methods ofencrypting electronic signals -- as easy as scrambling
the number on your Visa card whenever you order online -- are readily
available to terrorists and criminals worldwide.  The National Security
Agency has been trying for several yearsto find ways to eliminate or
work around these technical hurdles, but the challenge is great, and it
will take a good many more years to meet it. 

There's some validity to the call to "unshackle" the CIA, but in our
rush to apprehend the bad guys, we shouldn't discard the procedures that
provide a sanity check in our dealings with questionable sources.  As
inspector general in the '90s, I'm sure to be regarded in some quarters
as one of the black hats who participated in supposedly tying the
agency's hands with the recommendations my office made after looking
into our practices in Guatemala.  At the end of the Cold War, we still
had on our payroll a senior police and intelligence official with a
notorious reputation for human rights abuses who was no longer providing
any useful information.My office simply recommended that our operations
directorate review its agent holdings worldwide and provide for a system
of oversight whereby field agents would report to headquarters on the
continuing value of their more notorious assets.  Such oversight is
necessary lest we work our way, in the dark of night, back to the
situation of agency abuses -- from assassination plots against foreign
leaders such as Fidel Castro to spying on Americans -- that led to the
formationof the Church Committee in 1975. 

Far more significant in restricting access to the intelligence we need
may be the prohibition against using members of certain professions,
such as U.S.  academics, clerics and journalists, for espionage
purposes.  In the fight against terrorism, it seems to make little sense
to regard these professions as sacred.  We can maintain the posture that
journalists, for instance, should not normally be approached; but if
their access to a terrorist group or connection is unique, and they are
willing to help, we should make use of their assistance on a
case-by-case basis. 

There has also been clamor to eliminate the current executive order
prohibiting political assassination.  This prohibition shouldn't govern
the targeting of terrorists in our current struggle, which will
presumably be controlled by the laws of war.  But in a non-wartime
situation, the ban should remain in place.  The reality is that,
although several U.S.  presidents had involved the CIA in coup and
assassination plotting in the '60s and '70s, the agency did not relish
these assignments.  CIA officers are civil servants as well as spies,
and assassination in peacetime is not what they sign up to do. 

Critics maintain that the CIA's operations directorate, which is
titularly responsible for all U.S.  human spying abroad, has become risk
averse, bureaucratic and underqualified to take on the challenges it now
faces.  There's no question that it has taken a long time for the
agency, and the operations directorate in particular, to make the
transition from the Cold War.  Likewise, leadership in the intelligence
community has suffered from a lack of continuity and consistency: Before
the appointment of George Tenet, the current director, there had been
too many changes at the top over too short a period (as inspector
general, I served under five directors in eight years), leading to a
precipitous drop in morale and a great deal of turnover in the ranks. 

But there's nomore time for excuses.  The fledgling CIA had a steep
learning curve in its struggle against the Soviets after World War II as
well, but it managed to get up to speed.  The time has come now to take
off the gloves, to loosen inappropriate restraints, and, even more
importantly, to acquire the skills to understand and penetrate bin
Laden's circle.  We're going to need those skills -- not only against
bin Laden, but beyond. 

Frederick Hitz, a lecturer in public and international affairs at
Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, served 20 years in the CIA
and was its inspector general from 1990 to 1998. 

© 2001 The Washington Post Company

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