The CIA and the War on Terror
October 22, 2003
New York Sun
Michael A. Ledeen
It is no surprise that the CIA is not up to speed on the terror network. Ravaged by more than two decades of devastating leaks, ever-more-restrictive guidelines from Congress reacting to the latest account of wrongdoing in the popular press, and a series of directors who were either mediocre or ignored by top policy makers, the agency and its satellite organizations within the intelligence community were predictably unable to get the goods on Al Qaeda and the others who had long since declared jihad on us.
The core of the problem was, and is, neither organizational nor "human." There is no shortage of exceptionally smart, brave, and patriotic people in the CIA, and there is nothing about its structure--aside from the need for better exchange of information among the various "boxes" in the vast intel community - that needs dramatic overhaul. The problem is cultural, and that cannot be fixed overnight.
There is now a commission looking into what went wrong prior to September 11, but it has not addressed the core issue, which is a systematic refusal to look into certain matters of great importance. Put simply, there are things the CIA does not want to know, and it acts to ensure that it will not know them.
Of these important things, the most important is Iran. For 25 years now, we have had bad intelligence on Iran. At the time of the fall of the shah, the "crisis group" in the CIA had no full-time, Farsi-speaking expert working on the impending Islamist revolution. Things were so bad that the agency's experts told Senator Henry Jackson's committee that texts of the Ayatollah Khomeini's sermons and writings--texts that clearly showed his murderous intentions--were most likely forgeries. During Iran-Contra, when American officials went to Tehran, there was still no full-time Farsi speaker available, and they dragooned a retired intelligence officer to serve as interpreter. And in the last few years, the CIA has repeatedly missed the vital Iranian role at the heart of the terror network, typically chanting the false mantra that "Sunnis and Shi'ites don't work together." That nonsense prevented them from seeing that, as the Washington Post wrote on Wednesday, and as I had written as early as April, 2002 and reiterated in The War against the Terror Masters, Iran was in cahoots with Al Qaeda. Their working relationship dates back to 1996, Osama bin Laden fled to Iran during the liberation of Afghanistan, and top Al Qaeda terrorists are still operating from Iran.
The CIA does not seem to have accepted this intimate relationship. If they did, it would be impossible for the State Department to believe, as it clearly does, that we can enlist Iran in the war against terrorism, or that Iran would ever deliver to us top Al Qaeda leaders.
Yet that information was not hard to obtain. Much of it was on the public record, including official court transcripts from Germany and Italy. Other pieces came from European intelligence services, with whom the CIA's relationship is surely better than mine or the Washington Post's. Over the past two years, the CIA has repeatedly refused to take seriously information about Iran's financing of international terrorism, Iran's close working relationship (often brokered by the royal family of Dubai) with Saddam Hussein, and, as the Associated Press has just reported, the claim that there is a cache of enriched uranium in Iraq, a portion of which was transported to Iran several years ago. Although the CIA protests that they do not like the channel through which this information arrived (Manucher Ghorbanifar, a man they have wrongly characterized as a "fabricator" out for money, when in reality he has been an extraordinary source of understanding and has sacrificed a substantial personal fortune in the cause of Iranian freedom), they could easily have verified the uranium story through others, or by simply looking. But they didn't.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that the CIA does not want to know about these things. They have learned over the years that our policy makers do not want information that gets in the way of the dream of good working relations with the Iranian government. How else can one explain that the State Department and the CIA forced the termination of discussions with Iranians that had yielded information that saved American lives in Afghanistan?
It will be difficult and slow to change this deeply imbedded culture, but it is the most important task facing the intelligence community. One urgent step is the opposite of current efforts: Instead of merging the various components into a single structure, we should create competing groups, a la "Team B" that helped rethink the Soviet strategic threat in the last decades of the Cold War. The competing groups should be encouraged to rethink the conventional wisdom and take a fresh look at useful sources of information.
The intel community will not embrace this, but the president should. Otherwise, we will continue to lose lives in the Middle East that could be saved, we will continue to be ignorant of the actions and intentions of our greatest enemies in the terror war, and we will scratch our head wondering if there really is a supply of enriched uranium buried somewhere in Iraq.
Michael A. Ledeen holds the Freedom Chair at AEI.
http://www.aei.org/news/newsID.19338,filter./news_detail.aspDuring the years of the Shah, CIA was not allowed to cultivate contacts with the opposition including the religious groups. Michael Leeden can probably dig out some documents that verify this. The most stupid thing a President can do is to politicize intelligence, this will cause biased NIE that in the long run is a recipy for disaster.
One example is when in 1973 a lot of text was deleted as it was contrary to the American policy towards Iran, it contained warnings that the policies by the Shah were sowing the seed for popular dissidence.
Put simply, there are things the CIA does not want to know, and it acts to ensure that it will not know them. Well, duh.
Bill Gertz just wrote this in the Washington Times, and it's in his Breakdown and Robert Baer's See No Evil.
CIA should be called CYA: it's purely partisan, out to embarrass Bush with the Alan Foley-Valerie Plame-Joseph C. Wilson tea-sipping crapola.
As well as its institutional denial that Atta met with Al-Ani.
Iran an ally in the war on terror? And the big bad wolf will help protect Little Red Riding Hood.
Of course the work of all the Torricellis, Church's, Schweikers, Dodds, Leahys has hurt.
As has the Stansfield Turner annihilation of 800 case officers.
The obscene compromising of 17,000 files by Deutch.
The undoing of security by Nora Slatkin.
Now we have Tenet who is not with the program at all vis a vis our president--and should therefore be toast, histoire, ash heapville.
It ain't no disco--it's war.