Operation Chaos was the result of J. Edgar Hoover’s fervent
belief that 1960s anti-war radicals were controlled by the Soviets.
Established under Lyndon Johnson’s orders, this domestic
intelligence operation violated the law that established the CIA as
a foreign intelligence organization. When some of the alumni got
themselves caught breaking into the Democratic Party Headquarters
in the Watergate Hotel, the CIA became a pariah, so shackled by
congressional action that its ability to recruit, train and use
spies was neutered. The damage left in the wake of Operation Chaos
still hampers our spycraft.
After Watergate, our intelligence community became dependent on
“elint” — electronically-gathered intelligence — swept up by huge
radio antenna farms, spy satellites, and wiretaps implanted on
Soviet undersea cables by submariners. Because of the intelligence
failures leading up to 9/11, the enemy achieved strategic surprise.
We knew very little about what was coming and where it was coming
from, too little to do anything to stop it. Now, one of the most
important challenges we face is how to change our intelligence
community — the CIA, the FBI, No Such Agency and the National
Reconnaissance Office and, ah, Other Agencies — to prevent this
from happening again.
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the HPSCI,
is called the “hip-see” in Hill jargon. According to a report it
published last week, “The most lethal chemical, biological and
radiological devices are not easy to make, but non-state actors
have demonstrated the ability to acquire or fabricate chemical and
biological weapons, materials, components, and complete weapon
systems.” What that means is that al Qaeda and other terrorist
groups have an ever-growing ability to attack us in utterly
devastating ways. The President is right to say that we must strike
at them preemptively. But before we can do that, we need to know
where they are and what they’re doing. Right now, our intelligence
agencies aren’t up to the job. The HPSCI report shows how serious
the problems are.
In his tenure as CIA Director Clintonoid John Deutsch imposed
some amazingly impractical rules on CIA operations. For example,
anyone who has a naughty past can’t be a paid CIA informer. Which
reduces our ability to deal with any informers who are not
currently enrolled in the Girl Scouts. By 9/11, Deutsch was long
gone, having resigned in disgrace for violating regulations on
treatment of highly classified information. Congress — which is
capable of doing things correctly — passed a law ordering repeal
of the Deutsch rules.
But as of July 17, the date of the HPSCI report, the current CIA
Director — Clintonoid holdover George Tenet — has still not
canceled Deutsch’s rules. Why is Tenet — whose only claim to fame
is failure — still employed? He — and fellow Clinton traveler
Norm Mineta, famed opponent of guns in the cockpit and profiling —
should be exiled to academia where, come to think of it, Deutsch
came from.
And there’s worse. The HPSCI describes the CIA’s “no threshold”
policy on reporting terrorist threats. This policy — which
apparently kicks everything upstairs, without saying which reports
are important or reliable — is both cowardly and self-defeating.
The President must be able to rely on intelligence analysis, and
not have to do it for himself. One reason the CIA doesn’t have the
courage to do more than just report is that it fears what other
information may be out there, and coming to the President from
other agencies. The unknown can make it look foolish, so its people
often “vague up” their analyses and recommendations, as do the
other agencies for the same reason. But why not take that fear
away? We know how to do that. It’s called “intelligence fusion,”
and it’s something we need to get done now, not next year.
The concept of intelligence “fusion” means that the CIA, NSA,
FBI, and NRO would all have to share information with one another,
and coordinate their analysts’ skills to help each sort out the
masses of information it gets, and produce usable intelligence
analyses. Through fusion, we can combine the strengths of our
intelligence agencies, rather than keeping them divided among
agencies that don’t even talk to each other. If you want someone to
connect the dots, you have to have all the dots on the same page.
The current system prevents that. If we change the law to mandate
intelligence fusion, the president should get more than data dumps
from scared bureaucrats.
In the President’s Homeland Security plan, the new department
would collate, analyze and decide action on the fused intelligence.
That’s the wrong way to do it (because it divorces analysis from
operations). Sen. Joe Lieberman — whose committee has seized
jurisdiction over the issue — has decided that we won’t change the
laws to deal with issues such as intelligence fusion before the
joint House-Senate investigation of intelligence failures is done
in January ‘03. The HPSCI, which is part of that investigation,
didn’t even mention the problem. Lieberman’s decision inexplicably
faces no White House opposition. In the face of it, the President
should be telling Congress to set aside the rest of the Homeland
Security legislation and deal with this question first. If he
doesn’t, the next round of intelligence failures will lie at his
doorstep. If the agencies aren’t told to cooperate, and given the
legal permission to do so, no one will connect the dots, and
someone may well erase them all with a weapon of mass
destruction.
Churchill said that you can always count on Americans to do the
right thing, but only after they try everything else. The snail’s
pace at which Congress is trying to reshape our intelligence
community proves him right once again. But the threat environment
that exists today doesn’t give us the luxury of time. We can’t wait
for whatever the bigger congressional investigation may show. We
know how to mandate intelligence fusion right now. Congress may not
want to have to go through two rounds of intelligence reforms, with
a partial fix now and a more elegant one later. But if Congress has
to spend the time to do two rounds of reforms, that’s a personal
problem for congressional members who might have to sacrifice their
usual four-day work week. Ain’t that just too bad?
• • •
P.S. My good friend, Gen. Paul Vallely, just returned from Israel.
He sent me a photo of the flags flying at the U.N. compound on the
Israel-Lebanon border. The picture shows U.N. and Hezbollah flags
flying side by side. For those of us who have forgotten, Paul
points out that Hezbollah was the group that murdered 283 Marines
in the Beirut bombing almost twenty years ago, and also murdered a
CIA station chief. This was in their spare time between bombings to
kill Israeli women and children. Last week, U.N. Secretary General
Kofi Annan said he still insisted on dealing with Yassir Arafat
despite President Bush’s refusal to do so. Please, tell me again.
Why do we put up with this?
