Last weekend’s botched air strikes in Pakistan actually turned
out pretty well for a CIA operation. Sure the CIA failed to nail
its target — al-Qaeda’s No. 2 man Dr. Ayman al-Zawahri — and a
dozen or so civilians were annihilated, but the rockets apparently
took out four (or five) foreign terrorists. Maybe the intel the CIA
is purchasing from local tribesmen has improved from out-right
fabrication to mere goose-chase.
It’s easy to blame the CIA for much of what’s gone wrong
militarily and geopolitically in recent times, from Saddam’s
elusive nuclear weapons to al-Zawahri’s last-minute dinner plans.
But considering that there are — besides the CIA — 14
intelligence agencies, from the National Reconnaissance Office
(responsible for satellite programs) to the Defense Intelligence
Agency (provides military combat support), how justified are we to
pick exclusively on the CIA?
Well, Langley certainly has a lot to answer for. In his new book
State of War, James Risen portrays the Central
Intelligence Agency as an institutionalized version of the movie
Dumb and Dumber. Risen shows how the CIA idiotically gave
Iran the blueprints for a nuclear weapon, and provided President
George W. Bush pre-war information on Iraq that he — presumably —
wanted to hear, instead of what he needed to hear. And that’s just
for starters. The CIA also failed to predict the size and force of
the insurgency, or to warn about the influx of foreign fighters
into post-war Iraq. Indeed, finding a single CIA success story
proves more elusive than Iraq’s WMD. A few guys from National
Geographic magazine and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
can find the Titanic 10,000 feet under the frozen Atlantic Ocean,
but the CIA is unable to find Osama bin Ladin, Ayman al-Zawahri,
Mullah Omar, and (after a decade) Ratko Mladic and Radovan
Karadzic.
In his study of the CIA, Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New
Century, Angelo Codevilla concludes that with a few
exceptions U.S. intelligence has “usually failed.” (Granted the CIA
is unable to brag about its successes, so we hear only of the
failures; so many failures they could — and literally do — fill a
book.) The way the CIA bumbled through the Cold War is now
legendary; its consistent overestimation of Soviet economic
strength and blindness or indifference to Soviet cheating on arms
control agreements and Soviet empire-building objectives prolonged
the USSR’s collapse by at least a decade. This was complemented by
the agency’s inability to predict the fall of the Iron Curtain, or
the rise of Islamic fascism — beginning with its utter surprise at
the Iranian Revolution and U.S. hostage crisis. All of this has
carried over to the present century culminating in 9/11, during
which the CIA was — surprise! — out to lunch.
WORSE THAN ITS INCOMPETENCE is the ideology common among many of
its analysts. Codevilla paints a CIA dominated by liberal ideas and
an America the Bully mindset which have contributed to its bungling
(a willingness to trust the USSR at its word being just the most
blatant example of liberal naivete). It is easier for such analysts
to imagine “that the country one is studying is fundamentally
similar to one’s own and hence can be understood in the same
terms,” write Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt in Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of
Intelligence. Whereas an analyst devoid of liberal
tendencies would have been more likely to see the former Soviet
Union and Iraq for what they were: tyrannical regimes that had
little in common with the West. David Frum and Richard Perle reach
a similar conclusion in An End to Evil: “The CIA’s reports today
are colored by similar ideological biases, exacerbated by poor
understanding of the region’s culture and a politically correct
disinclination to acknowledge unflattering facts about non-Western
peoples.”
This sounds almost too perfect, like a scenario created by the
screenwriter lovechild of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter: a naive
and bumbling CIA run by neocon-hating liberals. And it is quite a
stretch from the usual depiction of the CIA: as bloodthirsty
assassins trained to kill communist dictators with poison pens,
when not training Central American death squads to heave nuns out
of helicopters. Yet if one doubts that the liberal ideology has
been very much in evidence in the CIA, one has only to peruse the
ghastly literature of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity, a group made up of 35 disgruntled, former high-level
spooks, including founder and former senior analyst Roy McGovern.
When McGovern tells Mother Jones that active members of
the intelligence community work with VIPS, Americans are right to
wonder what catastrophe awaits them.
THE NEW YORK TIMES’ David Brooks has another take on CIA
ineptitude. The culprit isn’t liberalism, says Brooks, but
scientism. In fact, “when it comes to understanding the world’s
thugs and menaces, I’d trust the first 40 names in James Carville’s
PDA faster than I’d trust a conference-load of game theorists or
risk-assessment officers,” says Brooks. In Brooks’ view
intelligence is more akin to philosophy than science, therefore you
need people, not drones, analyzing and interpreting it:
What kind of scientific framework can explain the rage
for suicide bombings, now sweeping the Middle East? What
technocratic mentality can really grasp the sadistic monster who
was pulled out of the spider hole…? Under Saddam, Iraqi society
seems to have been in a state of advanced decomposition, with
drastic consequences for its WMD program. How can corruption and
madness be understood by analysts in Langley, who have a tendency
to impose a false order on reality?
Brooks’s theory would explain why the CIA failed to anticipate
seemingly nonrational events like the Iran-Iraq war or the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan. “This false scientism was bad enough
during the Cold War…but it is terrible now in the age of terror,
because terror is largely nonrational.”
There’s a final explanation. Like all bureaucracies, the CIA is
prone to become bloated, sluggish, and risk-averse. Indeed,
conservative critics find the overly bureaucratic, overly cautious
CIA to be outright hostile to the President’s goals, particularly
the War in Iraq. I’m inclined to buy all of these excuses —
bureaucracy, scientism and liberalism. But more important I want to
know what’s being done about it. Latin America is going over to
Leftist-populist leaders. Iran is on the verge of creating nuclear
weapons. North Korea seems to be slipping further and further into
a paranoid nuclear isolationism. And need I mention the Middle
East? In such an atmosphere, the U.S. would probably be better off
without a CIA than the one it has now.
Pending substantial reforms, the Bush administration has set out
to minimize the damage the CIA can do. A year ago President Bush
named the first Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte.
The new director coordinates all 15 intelligence agencies, and is
principal intelligence adviser to the president and the National
Security Council. The administration has sacked George Tenet. And
it is sticking to its guns over the NSA’s wiretaps. Oh, and last
weekend the CIA was one place-setting away from taking out
al-Zawahri. Just maybe there is cause to be optimistic.
