Posted on 10/02/2001 6:22:46 AM PDT by Liz
After more than two weeks of around-the-clock investigation into the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the American intelligence community remains confused, divided, and unsure about how the terrorists operated, how many there were, and what they might do next. It was that lack of solid information, government officials told me, that was the key factor behind the Bush Administration's decision last week not to issue a promised white paper listing the evidence linking Osama bin Laden's organization to the attacks.
There is consensus within the government on two issues: the terrorist attacks were brilliantly planned and executed, and the intelligence community was in no way prepared to stop them. One bureaucratic victim, the officials said, may be George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose resignation is considered a necessity by many in the Administration. "The system is after Tenet," one senior officer told me. "It wants to get rid of him."
The investigators are now split into at least two factions. One, centered in the F.B.I., believes that the terrorists may not have been "a cohesive group," as one involved official put it, before they started training and working together on this operation. "These guys look like a pickup basketball team," he said. "A bunch of guys who got together." The F.B.I. is still trying to sort out the identities and backgrounds of the hijackers. The fact is, the official acknowledged, "we don't know much about them."
These investigators suspect that the suicide teams were simply lucky. "In your wildest dreams, do you think they thought they'd be able to pull off four hijackings?" the official asked. "Just taking out one jet and getting it into the ground would have been a success. These are not supermen." He explained that the most important advantage the hijackers had, aside from the element of surprise, was history: in the past, most hijackings had ended up safely on the ground at a Third World airport, so pilots had been trained to coöperate.
Another view, centered in the Pentagon and the C.I.A., credits the hijackers with years of advance planning and practice, and a deliberate after-the-fact disinformation campaign. "These guys were below everybody's radar—they're professionals," an official said. "There's no more than five or six in a cell. Three men will know the plan; three won't know. They've been 'sleeping' out there for years and years." One military planner told me that many of his colleagues believe that the terrorists "went to ground and pulled phone lines" well before September 11th—that is, concealed traces of their activities.
It is widely believed that the terrorists had a support team, and the fact that the F.B.I. has been unable to track down fellow-conspirators who were left behind in the United States is seen as further evidence of careful planning. "Look," one person familiar with the investigation said. "If it were as simple and straightforward as a lucky one-off oddball operation, then the seeds of confusion would not have been sown as they were."
Many of the investigators believe that some of the initial clues that were uncovered about the terrorists' identities and preparations, such as flight manuals, were meant to be found. A former high-level intelligence official told me, "Whatever trail was left was left deliberately—for the F.B.I. to chase."
In interviews over the past two weeks, a number of intelligence officials have raised questions about Osama bin Laden's capabilities. "This guy sits in a cave in Afghanistan and he's running this operation?" one C.I.A. official asked. "It's so huge. He couldn't have done it alone." A senior military officer told me that because of the visas and other documentation needed to infiltrate team members into the United States a major foreign intelligence service might also have been involved. "To get somebody to fly an airplane—to kill himself," the official added, further suggests that "somebody paid his family a hell of a lot of money."
"These people are not necessarily all from bin Laden," a Justice Department official told me. "We're still running a lot of stuff out," he said, adding that the F.B.I. has been inundated with leads. On September 23rd, Secretary of State Colin Powell told a television interviewer that "we will put before the world, the American people, a persuasive case" showing that bin Laden was responsible for the attacks. But the widely anticipated white paper could not be published, the Justice Department official said, for lack of hard facts. "There was not enough to make a sale."
The Administration justified the delay by telling the press that most of the information was classified and could not yet be released. Last week, however, a senior C.I.A. official confirmed that the intelligence community had not yet developed a significant amount of solid information about the terrorists' operations, financing, and planning. "One day, we'll know, but at the moment we don't know," the official said.
"To me," he added, "the scariest thing is that these guys"—the terrorists—"got the first one free. They knew that the standard operating procedure in an aircraft hijacking was to play for time. And they knew for sure that after this the security on airplanes was going to go way up. So whatever they've planned for the next round they had in place already."
The concern about a second attack was repeated by others involved in the investigation. Some in the F.B.I. now suspect that the terrorists are following a war plan devised by the convicted conspirator Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who is believed to have been the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Yousef was involved in plans that called for, among other things, the releasing of poisons in the air and the bombing of the tunnels between New York City and New Jersey. The government's concern about the potential threat from hazardous-waste haulers was heightened by the Yousef case.
"Do they go chem/bio in one, two, or three years?" one senior general asked rhetorically. "We must now make a difficult transition from reliance on law enforcement to the preëmptive. That part is hard. Can we recruit enough good people?" In recent years, he said, "we've been hiring kids out of college who are computer geeks." He continued, "This is about going back to deep, hard dirty work, with tough people going down dark alleys with good instincts."
Today's C.I.A. is not up to the job. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, in 1991, the C.I.A. has become increasingly bureaucratic and unwilling to take risks, and has promoted officers who shared such values. ("The consciousness of kind," one former officer says.) It has steadily reduced its reliance on overseas human intelligence and cut the number of case officers abroad—members of the clandestine service, now known formally as the Directorate of Operations, or D.O., whose mission is to recruit spies. (It used to be called the "dirty tricks" department.) Instead, the agency has relied on liaison relationships—reports from friendly intelligence services and police departments around the world—and on technical collection systems.
It won't be easy to put agents back in the field. During the Cold War, the agency's most important mission was to recruit spies from within the Soviet Union's military and its diplomatic corps. C.I.A. agents were assigned as diplomatic or cultural officers at American embassies in major cities, and much of their work could be done at diplomatic functions and other social events. For an agent with such cover, the consequence of being exposed was usually nothing more than expulsion from the host country and temporary reassignment to a desk in Washington. Today, in Afghanistan, or anywhere in the Middle East or South Asia, a C.I.A. operative would have to speak the local language and be able to blend in. The operative should seemingly have nothing to do with any Americans, or with the American embassy, if there is one. The status is known inside the agency as "nonofficial cover," or NOC. Exposure could mean death.
It's possible that there isn't a single such officer operating today inside Islamic-fundamentalist circles. In an essay published last summer in The Atlantic Monthly, Reuel Marc Gerecht, who served for nearly a decade as a case officer in the C.I.A.'s Near East Division, quoted one C.I.A. man as saying, "For Christ's sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don't do that kind of thing." Another officer told Gerecht, "Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen."
At the same time, the D.O. has been badly hurt by a series of resignations and retirements among high-level people, including four men whose names are little known to the public but who were widely respected throughout the agency: Douglas Smith, who spent thirty-one years in the clandestine service; William Lofgren, who at his retirement, in 1996, was chief of the Central Eurasia Division; David Manners, who was chief of station in Amman, Jordan, when he left the agency, in 1998; and Robert Baer, an Arabic speaker who was considered perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East. All left with feelings of bitterness over the agency's procedures for running clandestine operations.
"We'll never solve the terrorism issue until we reconstitute the D.O.," a former senior clandestine officer told me. "The first line of defense, and the most crucial line of defense, is human intelligence." Baer, who was awarded a Career Intelligence Medal after his resignation, in late 1997, said, "You wouldn't believe how bad it is. What saved the White House on Flight 93"—the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania—"was a bunch of rugby players. Is that what you're paying thirty billion dollars for?" He was referring to the federal budget for intelligence. He and his colleagues aren't surprised that the F.B.I. had no warning of the attack. "The bureau is wonderful in solving crimes after they're committed," one C.I.A. man said. "But it's not good at penetration. We've got to do it."
Today, the C.I.A. doesn't have enough qualified case officers to man its many stations and bases around the world. Two retired agents have been brought back on a rotating basis to take temporary charge of the small base in Karachi, Pakistan, a focal point for terrorist activity. (Karachi was the site of the murder, in 1995, of two Americans, one of them a C.I.A. employee, allegedly in retaliation for the arrest in Pakistan of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef.) A retired agent also runs the larger C.I.A. station in Dacca, Bangladesh, a Muslim nation that could be a source of recruits. Other retirees run C.I.A. stations in Africa.
One hard question is what lengths the C.I.A. should go to. In an interview, two former operations officers cited the tactics used in the late nineteen-eighties by the Jordanian security service, in its successful effort to bring down Abu Nidal, the Palestinian who led what was at the time "the most dangerous terrorist organization in existence," according to the State Department. Abu Nidal's group was best known for its role in two bloody gun and grenade attacks on check-in desks for El Al, the Israeli airline, at the Rome and Vienna airports in December, 1985. At his peak, Abu Nidal threatened the life of King Hussein of Jordan—whom he called "the pygmy king"—and the King responded, according to the former intelligence officers, by telling his state security service, "Go get them."
The Jordanians did not move directly against suspected Abu Nidal followers but seized close family members instead—mothers and brothers. The Abu Nidal suspect would be approached, given a telephone, and told to call his mother, who would say, according to one C.I.A. man, "Son, they'll take care of me if you don't do what they ask." (To his knowledge, the official carefully added, all the suspects agreed to talk before any family members were actually harmed.) By the early nineteen-nineties, the group was crippled by internal dissent and was no longer a significant terrorist organization. (Abu Nidal, now in his sixties and in poor health, is believed to be living quietly in Egypt.) "Jordan is the one nation that totally succeeded in penetrating a group," the official added. "You have to get their families under control."
Such tactics defy the American rule of law, of course, and the C.I.A.'s procedures, but, when it comes to Osama bin Laden and his accomplices, the official insisted, there is no alternative. "We need to do this—knock them down one by one," he said. "Are we serious about getting rid of the problem—instead of sitting around making diversity quilts?"
SNIP......
CIA became the paradigm P.C. agency.
One analyst retired in disgust after the agency had appointed a person to become a lead analyst for a particular country. simply because she was black, a female, a graduate of an Ivy League college with a high GPA. She did not speak the language of the country she was to analyze, nor had she ever visited the country. However, she proved to CLinton worshippers that the CIA was diverse.
Diversity defined the CIA and was the buzzword that prompted the agency during the Clinton years. Diversity was the mission and the goal....not America's security.
As I said in an earlier post, the purpose of this thread is to engender discussion. We are not mind-numbed robots.
We recognize that Hersh's story is what he wants us to believe. I am not buying all of it. I realize
the CIA does not PR it's successes. And the media loves to trumpet its failures.
However, the CIA's failures as they relate to the Clintons' failures are, in my opinion, fair game.
And none of it is pretty. The question is how long can the Clintons keep the gullible
media elite - NY Times -suckups like Brokaw, Jennings and Rather - spinning for them.
Before you bash the CIA too hard, remember that unlike other government agencies they don't have a huge PR department promoting everything they do.
Other, of course, than The NY Times, CBS and NBC. How many people are up on the fact that Gen. Hitz admitted before Congress to CIA collusion in drug running by the CIA in the Fishman case? You'd think that would be news wouldn't you? As you would think the abject failure of the CIA to report the nature of the Russian threat just before the fall of the Berlin Wall would be on the front burner with such a similar failure regarding the WTC attack.
The CIA has stopped many terrorist attacks, ones that never happened and that we will never know about.
Well now, here's an argument from evidence we aren't allowed to see. How convenient for the CIA. This does not smell like an attack by Islamic fundamentalists. It smells like a CIA psy-op. If it is--they ought to be hung as traitors. If it isn't--they ought to be hung for incompetence that rises to the level of treachery.
Yes they did.
Read my profile. I wrote it last year when I first joined FR. Having previously worked in Intell, I can tell you that I am the least surprised person in the world that this attack happened.
Would that that were true...
I don't blame Clintons' voters who were duped by these master manipulators
although they should have been smarter but I do blame the cabal who knew of the
Clintons' criminal tendencies and promoted them and financed their rise to power.
That's looney.
So your saying if America retaliates then terrorist acts against the US will get worse?
Orwell went on to explain that if you can convince anyone not to fight or retaliate you have ultimate control over them.
And that is what the Liberals have been fighting for, ultimate control, since they choreographed the Vietnam protests.
This does not smell like an attack by Islamic fundamentalists. It smells like a CIA psy-op. That's looney.
Oh really? And it's sane to think that
1) Islamic fundamentalists attend flying school, live in western decadance for 5-6 years, and then party hardy the night before, then slam themselves into the side of a building. That is not how islamic fundamentalists work--they'd spend the previous day fasting and praying. These hijackers are from all over Islam, if, in fact, their ID's aren't stolen. And what sense does that make? Why would islamic fundamentalists be shy about claiming this victory for themselves? Why did they do just enough damage to justify a war on Afganistan, without also unleashing the suitcase nukes and the Anthrax? Ben Laden wanted to jump in the cage and bare his chest to the tiger, when he has a rifle?
2) The USA can get the skies cleared 30 minutes after the twin towers attack, but it can't locate and intercept vitually the only thing in the sky for another 15 minutes? Whereas some soccer players on the Pennsylvania hijack can figure it out with 2 cell phone calls to relatives? When it would take less than 20 minutes to assess the threat, and drop ICBM's on Russia?
Who profits from this act? The oil companies get to drill in the Alaskan Reserve, and they get to establish a regime in Afganistan which will be friendly to a pipeline to open up the Caspian Sea reserves. The CIA and the FBI get another smorgusbord of pre-prepared "anti-terrorist" laws so they can pee on whatever's left of the Constitution, just like they did right after the OK city bombing, and the defense industry gets a huge boost. There is plenty of motivation for this act here at home. In fact, this act looks a lot more useful to these forces, and rather puzzling as to Bin Laden, or the taliban's, or Islam's motivation. Unless Ben Laden still works for the CIA, which set him up, and trained his Al Quida operations arm in terrorist tactics in the first place.
On the public evidence, this could just as easily have been done by the CIA. It certainly wasn't stopped by the CIA, was it?
I'm not going to indulge or dignify your whacked-out worldview and strange superstitions....
Uh huh. What fact have I mis-stated? Who profits from the attack on the World Trade Center? Do you think the Teliban, or Ben Ladin have a vested interest in suicide? If you had plans in place for an Anthrax/nuke attack, would you run a comparatively toothless operation against a couple of buildings to wake up the enemy to the dangers so he could attack me and work up his defences before I could unleash the serious attack?
This is high bullpucky. If you want to understand an act of this complexity and preparation, you want to ask who profits, not whose insane.
Do you really think that it is the CIA's interest to look like a toothless and incompetent agency? Do oil companies profit when oil prices fall? The oil reserves in the ANWR aren't jack-squat compared to the vast fields of the Middle East and Central Asia. What oil company would wat to cause a war in the region in which its inventory resides? Think about it.
You, my friend, should think about who actually profits, rather than who you like to blame.
There is absolutely nothing worthwhile that this organization does, and certainly nothing worth 30 billion dollars a year. Reform is out of the question, as it is a closed organization. It should be shuttered and something new should be put in its place. Something much smaller, less expensive, and less anti-American.
BTW, if you believe the CIA to be anti-American, then I have a bridge to sell you.
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