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COMMENT
US intelligence failure: Deja
vu
By B Raman
Immediately
after September 11, it was apparent to those with some
experience of intelligence and security management that
the intelligence and physical security agencies of the
US had let themselves be caught napping by al-Qaeda, and
that there had been major failures in collection,
analysis, assessment, dissemination and follow-up action
inside the US intelligence community, all of which
enabled al-Qaeda to successfully carry out the terrorist
strikes.
In the initial wave of patriotism, not
only the executive and Congress, but even large sections
of the media and the public refrained from criticizing
the agencies lest their criticism cause demoralization
at a time when all the energies and concentration of the
agencies needed to be focused on the war against
terrorism under the US leadership.
However, now
that the war has entered its second year, the need for a
professional critical analysis, which was earlier
overlooked, is receiving greater attention, resulting in
a Congressional investigation into the state of
knowledge of the intelligence community before September
11 and into the follow-up action taken on the basis of
the intelligence available.
This investigation,
which is still on-going, has already brought to light
serious deficiencies in the functioning of the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) which could be held to have
facilitated the success of the terrorists. These
deficiencies could be broadly categorized as follows:
Lack of serious attention by the senior
leadership of the agencies to concerns expressed by
their junior officers over matters such as the unusually
large number of Arabs enrolling themselves for flying
training in US institutions.
Lack of adequate communication among
different agencies - and particularly between the CIA
and the FBI - resulting in a failure to share promptly
intelligence about the movements of suspected or
confirmed al-Qaeda operatives inside the US, and to
place them under surveillance.
Lack of adequate linguists in the
technical intelligence agencies, resulting in a delay in
the translation of vital communications intercepts.
Lack of adequate analysis and
assessment of even the available intelligence, however
limited and imprecise it might have been, which
contributed to self-complacency and lethargy in the
follow-up action.
These deficiencies have been
taken seriously by President George W Bush, who has
already indicated his intention to order an independent
enquiry into the matter. As one reads the details of the
investigation coming out of Congress, one is reminded of
the famous Congressional inquiry into the case relating
to the betrayal of the CIA by Aldrich Ames, one of its
senior officers, who worked for years for Soviet and
Russian agencies and sent valuable US sources to death
without being detected in time by the
counter-intelligence set-ups of the CIA and the FBI.
The Aldrich Ames intelligence disaster took
place not for want of intelligence, but for want of
communication, trust and coordination between the CIA
and the FBI and for want of professionalism among the
senior intelligence officers of the two agencies.
Innumerable warning signals about deficiencies in the
personal character of Ames were overlooked, and when the
CIA's leadership realized that Moscow had a mole inside
it, it did not inform the FBI, whose responsibility it
was to investigate such suspicions. Instead, the CIA
chose to make its own secret investigation without
informing the FBI.
The FBI had in its records a
report from one of its officers that Ames had been
secretly visiting the Soviet embassy in Washington DC,
but it did not alert the CIA. Nor did it follow it up
with its own investigation. These are just a few of the
shocking instances of slipshod intelligence management
highlighted in the Congressional report.
The
Congressional investigation and the criticism of James
Woolsey, director of the CIA, during President Bill
Clinton's first term, for his shoddy handling of the
case, led to his resignation, which was followed by a
revamping of the US counter-intelligence apparatus. The
present investigation into September 11 shows that no
lessons were drawn from the systemic failure of the US
intelligence community as a whole in the Ames case and
that the necessary correctives were not enforced. It
should be as clear as daylight to anyone with an open
mind that the US counter-terrorism apparatus had been
functioning in as shoddy a manner as its
counter-intelligence apparatus was before 1995.
The US has more laws regulating the functioning
of its intelligence agencies, more Congressional and
other watchdog bodies to monitor their performance, more
governmental and private experts in intelligence craft,
it has had more blue-ribbon commissions to go into the
working of its agencies and spends more money (US$20
billion plus per annum) on intelligence collection and
assessment than any other country in the world. In spite
of all this, it has an intelligence community which does
not do credit to the sole superpower of the world.
The CIA is one of the most politicized agencies
in the democratic world. Very often, it tells the
president what he wants to hear and not what he ought to
hear. If Ronald Reagan looked upon the erstwhile USSR as
an evil empire, William Casey, his CIA director, and Robert
Gates, then head of its analysis division, went around
collecting intelligence and producing assessments which
would show that the president was right. Remember the
famous Senate hearing of the 1980s on the suitability of
Gates to succeed Casey, during which many instances came
to light as to how the analysis division of the CIA had
allegedly been politicized by Gates to produce
assessments acceptable to the president.
If Bush
calls North Korea, Iran and Iraq the axis of evil and
Saddam Hussein as great a threat as Osama bin Laden, the
CIA must be working overtime to prove how perspicacious
he is. During and after the Gulf War of 1991, Saudi
Arabia was looked upon as a stalwart ally, just as
Pakistan is today. The result: indicators of a Saudi
nexus with al-Qaeda brand terrorists were ignored, just
as similar indicators of a Pakistani nexus are not
receiving the attention they deserve today.
Reagan and Casey were fascinated by covert
action. During the Afghan war of the 1980s against
Soviet troops, more attention was given and more money
allotted to strengthening the covert action capability
and the disinformation apparatus of the CIA than for
improving its intelligence collection and analysis
capability. The result: The CIA went around creating an
army of pan-Islamic terrorists for use against the USSR
without realizing that one day they could become a
menace to the democratic world.
And when they
started doing so in the 1990s, there was a reluctance to
act against them firmly until September 11. Tons of
evidence collected and shared by countries such as India
and Russia to show that they had become Frankenstein's
monsters were rejected with disdain by the CIA's
counter-terrorism experts. Even pre-2001 evidence that
al-Qaeda brand terrorists based in Afghanistan and
Pakistan were systematically planning to carry their
jihad to US territory through Pakistani organizations
such as the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and the Tablighi Jamaat
was ignored.
The CIA's soft attitude towards the
pan-Islamic terrorists did not change even after the
assassination of two of its officers in Langley by Mir
Aimal Kansi and by the New York World Trade Center
explosion in 1993.The dramatis personae in both these
terrorist strikes were its sources and collaborators in
the 1980s in Afghanistan. Their past cooperation with
the CIA rendered it blind to the threat which such
elements could pose to the US in future. It is this soft
attitude which should explain the lack of action against
al-Qaeda operatives in the US.
The US
intelligence community as it has evolved since 1947 is
tailor-made for repeated systemic failures. It has a
plethora of intelligence agencies, but no independent
overall coordinator. The director of the CIA wears two
hats. As the head of the CIA, he is responsible for its
overall functioning. As director, Central Intelligence,
he acts as the adviser to the President on intelligence
matters and helps him in the coordination of the
functioning of the various agencies.
Not only
that. He often chairs the various committees of the
National Security Council Secretariat set up to review
intelligence policy matters. The tremendous influence
thus wielded by the head of one of the agencies of the
community over the entire community has often been
criticized in the past on the ground that it does not
encourage fairness and objectivity in coordination.
Rightly or wrongly, there is always a perception that
the director, Central Intelligence, tends to be soft and
over-generous towards his own agency. Suggestions made
in the past for separating the two posts and for making
the coordinating post of director, Central Intelligence,
tenable by an independent personality unconnected with
any agency had been rejected not only by many
presidents, but also by Congressional committees and by
the joint Harold Brown-Les Aspin congressional
commission, which went into the working of the
intelligence agencies during Clinton's term.
Before September 11, despite the New York World
Trade Center explosion of February,1993, the US
intelligence community always considered major threats
to the US from terrorist strikes as more likely to be
targeted at US nationals and interests abroad than
inside the US. As a result, the CIA, as the external
intelligence agency, was given the leadership role in
the multi-agency Counter-Terrorism Center, and not the
FBI.
The US was the only country in the
democratic world which did not have a separate
department dealing with internal security, similar to
the Home Ministry or Department in India and other
democratic countries. Nor did it have an internal
intelligence agency exclusively devoted to the
collection of internal intelligence similar to the
Security Service (MI5) of the UK. The FBI is a
hotchpotch agency which handles counter-terrorism,
counter-intelligence, investigation of organized and
federal crime and law enforcement. It is a mixture of
the UK's MI5 and Scotland Yard or India's Intelligence
Bureau (IB) and the Central Bureau of Investigation
(CBI). In this ill-assorted amalgam of responsibilities,
the focus on intelligence collection and analysis
relating to internal security tended to be diluted.
It took the catastrophic consequences of
September 11 to convince US policymakers of the need for
a Homeland Security Department to focus exclusively on
internal security. Having realized the need for it, the
Bush administration has been going about the task of
setting it up in an unwise manner. If and when Bush's
ideas are implemented, what the US will have is not a
lean, agile and well-motivated agency, but a security
leviathan, more cumbersome and much slower than an
elephant.
The US, which often criticizes the
bureaucracies of the developing world, has the shoddiest
bureaucracy in the democratic world. And nothing is
shoddier in its bureaucracy than its intelligence
community, which is the most pampered part of the
administration. US investigators - whether from the
executive or Congress - are often thorough in their
analysis of the failures of the intelligence community,
but lacking in wisdom and imagination in prescribing
correctives.
They invariably come out with stock
responses - more staff, more money, more gadgets and
more powers for the agencies. The CIA and the FBI have
flourished and bloated after each failure. What the US
intelligence community needs is less staff, less funds
and less gadgets, but greater professionalism, better
motivation, more perspicacity, better analytical
capability and linguistic skills, sharper intuition and
greater humility in accepting that there are others in
the world who understand terrorism better and that it
should learn from them.
If the present
Congressional investigation and the proposed inquiry by
the president do not lead to these results, it will be
another wasted exercise.
B Raman is
Additional Secretary (ret), Cabinet Secretariat,
Government of India, and presently director, Institute
For Topical Studies, Chennai; member of the National
Security Advisory Board of the Government of India.
E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com. He was also head of the
counter-terrorism division of the Research &
Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence agency,
from 1988 to August, 1994.
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