Return-Path: <sentto-279987-3225-1003759960-fc=all.net@returns.onelist.com> Delivered-To: fc@all.net Received: from 204.181.12.215 [204.181.12.215] by localhost with POP3 (fetchmail-5.7.4) for fc@localhost (single-drop); Mon, 22 Oct 2001 07:14:07 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 25319 invoked by uid 510); 22 Oct 2001 14:12:11 -0000 Received: from n1.groups.yahoo.com (216.115.96.51) by 204.181.12.215 with SMTP; 22 Oct 2001 14:12:11 -0000 X-eGroups-Return: sentto-279987-3225-1003759960-fc=all.net@returns.onelist.com Received: from [10.1.1.220] by n1.groups.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 22 Oct 2001 14:12:41 -0000 X-Sender: fc@red.all.net X-Apparently-To: iwar@onelist.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_0_0_1); 22 Oct 2001 14:12:40 -0000 Received: (qmail 85667 invoked from network); 22 Oct 2001 14:12:39 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by 10.1.1.220 with QMQP; 22 Oct 2001 14:12:39 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO red.all.net) (65.0.156.78) by mta3 with SMTP; 22 Oct 2001 14:12:39 -0000 Received: (from fc@localhost) by red.all.net (8.11.2/8.11.2) id f9MECth04288 for iwar@onelist.com; Mon, 22 Oct 2001 07:12:55 -0700 Message-Id: <200110221412.f9MECth04288@red.all.net> To: iwar@onelist.com (Information Warfare Mailing List) Organization: I'm not allowed to say X-Mailer: don't even ask X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL3] From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net> X-Yahoo-Profile: fcallnet Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list iwar@yahoogroups.com Precedence: bulk List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:iwar-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com> Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2001 07:12:55 -0700 (PDT) Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com Subject: [iwar] [fc:OpEd:.Not.Just.a.Lack.of.Intelligence,.a.Lack.of.Skills] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit 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 ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Pinpoint the right security solution for your company- Learn how to add 128- bit encryption and to authenticate your web site with VeriSign's FREE guide! http://us.click.yahoo.com/yQix2C/33_CAA/yigFAA/kgFolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> ------------------ http://all.net/ Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : 2001-12-31 20:59:56 PST