The Death of Intelligence

Be honest. Do you think this intel "reform" bill will reform intel in any meaningful way — i.e., by reforming what's the near 100 percent failure rate of recent years down to, oh, 93, maybe 86 percent?

I don't, and I don't know anyone from the sharper end of the "intelligence community" who does, either. But who cares? The Democrats are in favor of it, because reshuffling the bureaucracy is their preferred way of demonstrating that they're not soft on national security. And that means the media are in favor of it, and so, as we're constantly told, are "the 9/11 families," as if it's some kind of national-security Megan's Law on which they have an inviolable proprietorial claim.

I don't think U.S. intelligence can be reformed in any meaningful way without abolishing the principal agencies and creating entirely new structures with none of the baggage. Like their fellow intelligence operative, Austin Powers, in The Spy Who Shagged Me, the CIA seems to have lost its mojo, and nothing proposed by Tom Kean and the other showboaters is likely to help get it back. And, in fairness to the Dems, the CIA's present incarnation as a seething swamp of obstructionist desk-jockeys is far more useful to them than the old cloak-and-dagger types ever were. Consider, for example, how many of Bush's election-year difficulties derived, one way or another, from Langley — WMD, lack thereof; uranium from Niger, Iraqi acquisition thereof; Joseph C. Wilson IV, absurd media over-inflation thereof; Valerie Plame, likewise thereof; August 6th 2001 Presidential Daily Brief, Bush's irresponsible ignoring thereof. Take the CIA-derived material out of the Democratic Bush-bashing of the last two years and there wouldn't be a lot left. The old Left were paranoid about the CIA. The new Left have cheerfully let the CIA make them paranoid about the president. They've finally found a CIA they can love...

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On NPR the other day, a member of the intelligence community was recycling for the umpteenth time the line that the Islamist terrorist groups were simply too tightly-knit to penetrate: They're motivated by ideology, so you can't bribe them, and you can't infiltrate them because they're all cousins from the same tribe. That is, as they say in England, bollocks on stilts. For over a decade, anyone could sign up with Osama: Throughout the Nineties, tens of thousands of young men graduated from his Afghan terrorist training camps, and hardly any were Afghans, never mind cousins. They were Algerian and Sudanese, Chechen and Indonesian. Quite a few were British and French. Some were of Arab Muslim background, but others were converts. You didn't have to be called Ahmed or Bashir. "Richard Reid" would do nicely. So would "John Walker Lindh." Young Mr. Lindh was such a mountain of Marin County clichÈs you'd think the savvier Talibs would have instantly assumed he was a CIA plant, but no, he simply strolled over the border from his Pakistani madrassa and within 24 hours was sharing the executive latrine with the A-list cave dwellers. Young men from London and Marseilles and Toronto make the same pilgrimage to the Hindu Kush, year after year after year. But Americans are expected to be content with the assurance that the Islamist terror structure is impenetrable.

Some weeks before 9/11, in The Atlantic Monthly, Reuel Marc Gerecht quoted a young CIA man explaining the problem: "Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen." Not when there's a nice air-conditioned office in Virginia where you can monitor e-mails by satellite all day long. How ya gonna keep 'em out in the field after they've seen Langlee? As was made plain soon after Gerecht's article appeared, for the next few years much of the intelligence action will be in Diarrhea Central.

In their defense, the "intelligence community" say, well, the British and French missed most of this stuff, too. But the difference is they got things wrong for a lot less money. The famous Presidential Daily Brief of August 6th 2001 that Bush is supposed to have acted on gives the game away. The most lavishly funded intelligence agency in the Western world led off its analysis with a piece of "classified" "intelligence" summarizing four-year-old TV interviews bin Laden had given, followed by a couple of tidbits from foreign intelligence agencies, one lone piece of CIA-generated "intelligence" which turned out to be wrong, and a bland assurance that the FBI was conducting 70 bin Laden-related "full field investigations," which also proved to be false. Old TV shows, tips from MI6 and the Egyptians, and an inability even to find out what other federal agencies are doing: In terms of value to the U.S. taxpayer, the ethanol subsidy's a better deal.

Even if you accept that the neutered CIA of the last 30 years are perforce desk-bound bureaucrats, they could at least be better at it. If they're going to sit around the office all decade, maybe an analyst or two could have spotted some of the long-term trends — the Wahhabi funding of radical madrassas in Yemen, Pakistan, the Balkans, and, gosh, Virginia, too. No diarrhea involved there. But no: The Central Intelligence Agency grew so centralized it had no room for the intelligence. Meet the new secret agent, licensed to kill time. September 11th revealed something extraordinary: In the most powerful nation on earth, the culture of intelligence has simply died.

http://www.ivanyi-consultants.com/articles/warriordec.htm

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