Posted on 03/21/2003 9:48:32 AM PST by Stand Watch Listen
Fixing Intelligence: For A More Secure America. By William E. Odom. 230 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press. $24.95.
Talk to the counterterrorism officials assigned the unenviable job of heading off the next big attack, and a sobering consensus emerges: no amount of steely self-fortification -- no million-dollar airport scanners, no border watch lists, no new federal bureaucracies -- will be enough. Essential to any counterterrorism strategy is access to intelligence on the enemy. F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents have to be able to infiltrate suspected terror cells at home and abroad. Spy satellites have to track their movements. Money-laundering specialists have to trace the cash. Electronic eavesdroppers and code breakers have to listen in on conversations. And analysts have to piece it all together -- connect the dots.
William E. Odom's important and thought-provoking book, ''Fixing Intelligence,'' starts from the premise that America is failing miserably in these vital tasks. ''The events of 11 September 2001 cast a dark shadow over the intelligence community,'' Odom says. ''Why was there no intelligence available to warn of the Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? No intelligence failure since December 1941 has been as great.''
Odom should know. A retired general in the Army, he writes from an insider's perspective, having served in the 1980's as head of the National Security Agency -- the military outfit that operates the nation's spy satellites. And his subject matter couldn't be more timely: a joint Congressional committee is now finishing up its work on the intelligence failures surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks, an independent commission is starting its own investigation, and President Bush just last month announced plans to merge many of the counterterrorism and intelligence operations of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. under one roof.
The book builds on a study that Odom, an adjunct professor at Yale University and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, completed in 1997. He offers a cogent if sometimes labored primer on how the intelligence community works (and doesn't work) and why its labyrinth of competing agencies has impeded the flow of information within the government. He traces the roots of modern American intelligence to the fallout over Pearl Harbor and the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947. For the last 40 years, he says, the intelligence community ''has remained essentially unchanged,'' unwilling because of bureaucratic intransigence and proprietary turf wars to make the structural reforms needed to keep it relevant and effective.
Much of the problem, he argues, can be traced to the dual hats worn by the head of the C.I.A., who must run one of the spy community's most crucial agencies while at the same time overseeing intelligence operations elsewhere throughout the government. That dual role, Odom writes, has limited the director's ''ability to stand above and orchestrate the whole intelligence community.'' Add to the mix other deeply entrenched problems -- like the F.B.I.'s poor track record in catching spies, its mistrust of the C.I.A. and the government's insufficient use of spy technology like satellites in favor of human resources -- and the result, Odom argues, is a recipe for disaster.
He compares the modern-day intelligence officer to a worker in a mine, oblivious of what is going on in the tunnels around him. Compartmentalization makes penetration by outsiders harder but, in Odom's words, it also ''makes it possible for a career intelligence official to remain ill-informed, often totally ignorant, of the operations of other offices within his own agency, not to mention the workings of other intelligence agencies throughout the U.S. government.''
Odom demands wholesale changes, and his solutions will no doubt irk many inside and outside the intelligence community. Make the director of the C.I.A. into the czar of the nation's intelligence industry, he says -- an idea sure to unnerve civil liberties advocates, who worry that an agency with a history of abuses will be given free rein to trample on Americans' rights. Rename and restructure the C.I.A. to distance it from its record of embarrassments, he suggests. And strip the F.B.I. of its role as the nation's chief spy catcher. ''The F.B.I. has a disastrous record of finding and convicting foreign agents,'' Odom observes; its failures demonstrate the need for a wholly new national agency responsible for counterintelligence. Odom acknowledges that in writing this book he is trying to reach two different audiences: the policy makers and intelligence experts whom he seeks to influence, and the lay public that he seeks to inform. He may well succeed in lighting a fire under the first group. But his intended broader audience will probably want more than he gives. He teases readers with insightful glimpses into the problems in the intelligence community without providing many of the necessary details to bolster his case. Even as he promises ''to strip away much of the arcane terminology'' that the community uses, he relies too often on bureaucratic doublespeak and charts to make his point.
Part of the problem is that as a onetime insider, he thinks there is a lot that the public shouldn't know about the spy business. Odom maintains, for instance, that the United States might have been forewarned about Pearl Harbor had it not been for the publication in 1931 of ''The American Black Chamber,'' by Herbert O. Yardley, a former American intelligence official, which revealed new details about the country's decoding operations and prompted the Japanese to modernize their communication systems. ''The Puzzle Palace,'' a best seller by James Bamford in the 1980's, offered an unsparing look into the workings of the N.S.A.; it won't be found on Odom's list of favorite reading either. He writes that Bamford's work became ''the handbook for hostile intelligence services,'' and typifies the dangerous overexposure of intelligence practices, an overexposure that may have played a part in the N.S.A.'s failure to detect Al Qaeda's planning for the Sept. 11 attacks. These are harsh charges, and Odom never substantiates them. Nor does he disclose that he was a senior official at the N.S.A. when the agency threatened to have Bamford prosecuted for revealing classified secrets in his book. Ultimately, it seems, Odom believes that the very intelligence leaders whose work he so stingingly criticizes are in the best position to judge what the public should know.
Eric Lichtblau covers the Justice Department and terrorism issues for The Times.
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