He gave this speech on 11/16/02. Here is a link that includes his replies to two followup questions.
QUESTION 1:
Mr. Woolsey, there’s been a lot of criticism of the CIA and its performance and calls for the resignation or the dismissal of George Tenet. How do you assess the performance of the CIA and what should it be doing?
James Woolsey: I’d kind of put the CIA in the pre-September 11th world at maybe a grade B and the FBI at kind of a B- and the rest of the country flunking. They didn’t do everything they should do. A culture built up over the years best described, I think, in Bob Baer’s book, See No Evil, of sort of political correctness at the agency in which it was hard to get risk-taking behavior by case officers, which as Bob points out is essential.
Some of that political correctness was self-imposed, but a lot of it was imposed by law or regulation. My successor adopted some guidelines under pressure from then Congressman Torricelli, happily no longer with us, that would have -- it did discourage necessary security policies. They didn’t bar, but they discouraged the CIA from recruiting asset sources, spies, if those spies might have had some violence in their background. Hello. There’s nobody in terrorist groups except terrorists. That would be like telling the FBI to please penetrate the Mafia, but don’t put any actual crooks on your payroll as informants.
Some of what the CIA didn’t know was, however, imposed by law. For example, until the U.S.A. Patriot Act was passed, it was illegal for the FBI to obtain information about terrorism in a domestic investigation pursuant to Grand Jury subpoena. It was illegal for them to share that with the intelligence community. So some of the connections, for example, with Iraq and by at least one, and maybe two, of the World Trade Center bombers in 1993, were, you know, sealed up in the courthouse basement until after the trial three years later.
So there were a number of things that kept the agency from doing as much as it should, and some of it was self-imposed. But, I’d have to say that they did at least start focusing very hard on bin Laden by around ’97, ’98. They had a special unit focused on it. They got extra money for terrorism in 1999 because counter terrorism -- because people were worried about the millennium celebrations and terrorism. The morning after the millennium was over, more or less peacefully, the money was taken away by the Office of Management of the Budget and by the Congress and it went back down to a lower level of spending.
I think there are some special problems at the FBI because it was a very decentralized organization. So if you had a smart agent in Minneapolis worried about Moussaoui and a smart agent in Phoenix worried about training in flight schools, they were never able to contact one another and they didn’t know one another existed.
So neither the Agency nor the Bureau covered itself with glory before 9/11, even though both were responsible for rolling back and stopping a number of terrorist attacks.
But, the real problem was that the country was at a beach party, just as we were in the 1920’s. We thought we’d won the war to make the world safe for democracy so, hey, Henry Stimson, Secretary of State, wonderful man, says gentlemen don’t read one another’s mail and closes down the code breaking in the State Department in 1929.
Same kind of phenomenon in the 1990’s. Everybody thought “the Cold War’s over.” Hey, we can relax. The professionals, some of them, were doing a decent job working hard at it. Most of the rest of the country was taking it easy.
Question 2:
Jim, you adverted to the possibilities of regime change in Iran. The President has talked a lot about regime change in Iraq. What do you think the possibilities for and the desirability of regime change in the area currently known as Saudi Arabia?
James Woolsey: Well, I think American opinion shifted decisively from moderately positive to rather negative about Saudi Arabia when it became clear that 15 of the 19 people who undertook the hijackings of September 11th were Saudi. Indeed, it suggests a wry quip about the suggestion of Sean Wilentz, a professor at Princeton, that it’s important to understand the root causes of terrorism. If you look at who attacked us September 11th, you’d have to say the root causes of terrorism were wealth, status, and education.
There is a special problem in Saudi Arabia because after 1979 when the ruling royal family got very frightened, both because of Khomeini in Tehran and because of the siege and the assault on the great mosque in Mecca by the Islamists, and the fact that the king was nearly assassinated. It was a very, very shocking sequence for the royal family. Although, they have from time to time kept the Wahhabis somewhat in check, by ’79, they were scared enough that I think they more or less made a pact with their Wahhabi sect to `give them all the money they could ever want to go set up in Pakistan and print text books saying Christians and Jews were the enemy for Indonesian schools and so on if the Wahhabis and Islamists would just leave them alone.
And I think that the problem is that we don’t yet have a Saudi ruler with the backbone to reverse that course. Now, it’s not impossible that it will be reversed. But, I haven’t seen it yet. And I think that it does present an extremely serious problem.
I don’t think it’s in our interests to see in the near term a regime change in Saudi Arabia. But, I do think it is very much in our interest not to need them. I think the only way that we are going to get any kind of help at all from them in a Gulf War again, a war in Iraq, even permission to use their airspace, is if they’re absolutely certain we do not need them.
The last way to get their support is to go to them hat in hand and say, please help us. A lot of this has to do with the power of oil. I had a piece in Commentary magazine in September called “Destroying the Oil Weapon.” It’s too long to go into here, but I commend it to any of you who might be interested. We have a serious problem with Saudi Arabia. But, first things first. And I think the most dangerous regime in the Mideast is clearly Iraq, with Iran, close behind. But for the reasons I said I think Iran is not likely or not wise to be a target of American military force. In Iraq, I think that’s the only thing we can do.
Interesting article.
Any chance someone can put paragraphs to this thing by the time I get back??? hehe
Here is the link for it.
Formatted differently with about 13 comments at the end.
"we need to say to both the terrorists and the dictators..., this country is on the march and we are on the side of those whom you most fear - your own people."