The Human Factor. Ishmael Jones
and financial accountability in the CIA cannot continue forever.
There’s a perception in Washington that the staffers on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees are former CIA employees who are beholden to the Agency. In fact, a minority of staffers are former CIA employees, and these people, having experienced the bureaucracy up close, are the ones most open to reform. The staffers on the Senate Intelligence Committee are more attuned to the democratic process because they work directly for individual senators. The staffers on the House Intelligence Committee, by contrast, are permanent employees of the committee and do not work directly for individual members of Congress. The reasoning seems to be that because a House member’s term is shorter, members’ personal staffs will have a harder time grasping complex intelligence issues and obtaining security clearances. The use of permanent employees without direct connection to elected politicians makes House staffers disconnected from the accountability that elections provide. They form a much more closed society, more closely linked to the CIA bureaucracy and resistant to intelligence reform.
Politicians can make a difference, although CIA dysfunction now thrives in the political conflict between left and right. Traditionally the CIA has been perceived as a gang of right-wingers seeking to topple leftist governments. Some regard it as the hand behind worldwide conspiracies and dirty tricks. The CIA actually encourages this viewpoint because underlying it is the assumption that the Agency is ruthlessly efficient. I wish it were efficient enough to aggressively confront leftist governments, but it’s not.
Many conservatives think the CIA just needs to be released from the confines of Democrat-imposed rules. In the last ten years, though, with its attacks on President Bush via the Plame incident, the Iraqi WMD, and leaks on interrogations/torture, the CIA seems to have become more a gang of left-wingers seeking to topple American conservatives. The torture issue is a good example of a left-versus-right conflict that prevents reform. When members of Congress attack each other over interrogation methods, they are unable to focus on reform of the main mission, which is to find spies who cooperate voluntarily. Politicians should come together and realize that CIA dysfunction means a failure to support presidents of either party.
Democrats tend to be less responsive to the need for intelligence reform because they have greater faith in the efficiency of government and are reluctant to believe that a top-down centralized bureaucracy can be dysfunctional. And for Democrats, the CIA has come to be a political ally and a lobbying group. Despite my efforts to make intelligence reform a bipartisan issue, nearly all of the articles I’ve written have been published in conservative media, and I have met mostly with conservatives politicians. Conservatives are quick to acknowledge dysfunction in government bureaucracy.
The difficulty in convincing people on the left of the importance of intelligence reform has been my biggest disappointment. It’s a shame because for President Obama, the uncertainties lie ahead. His success as a president, and whether he wins a second term or not, will depend, I believe, not on the economy or health care, but on the quality of human source intelligence he receives concerning threats to national security.
The second important group that can make a difference are journalists. Despite the growth of internet news and talk radio, the New York Times and the Washington Post retain enormous power. Their reporters have developed excellent sources among top CIA managers. These sources illegally provide classified information on such things as torture/interrogations and Iraq WMD intelligence failures, and the journalists in exchange will not attack the CIA bureaucracy because to do so would be to attack their sources. A member of the Senate Intelligence Committee told me that he met with CIA officials to propose improvements in clandestine operations, and the CIA fought back through a Washington Post column the very next day. By ignoring the issue of intelligence reform, journalists who cover the CIA build careers and win prizes, but the newspapers are failing their readers. The New York Times and the Washington Post are located in America’s two primary target cities for terrorism; they should help protect their readers by paying more attention to CIA dysfunction. The journalists who do write about the issue are nearly all political conservatives.
I’ve worked to bring recognition to the fact that the CIAʹs employees are good people, just poorly led. They are well-meaning, but they operate within a system that’s broken. A problem the CIA does not have is attracting talented, intelligent people; yet that is a problem the Agency claims to have. In response to criticism or to the latest intelligence failure, CIA management always says it just doesn’t have the talent it needs. DCI George Tenet said so repeatedly after 9/11. Leon Panetta said it shortly after his appointment as director, and then announced plans to recruit Arab Americans in Michigan.
But the CIA has always hired good people who want to do the best job they can. If the system were changed, they would get out and gather the intelligence we need, and they would start doing it overnight. Although few CIA officers actually speak foreign languages, most have a latent ability—some training, or a childhood language that hasn’t developed. It’s just that foreign languages aren’t necessary for advancement. Only English is needed at Headquarters and within American embassies.
With little operational or financial accountability, and little oversight from politicians or journalists, the CIA bureaucracy has evolved over the decades into a creature with its own priorities. Like any other life form, the CIA bureaucracy seeks first its own survival and growth. It’s a big, lazy creature, but it has the ability to leap up from its couch and viciously defend itself when it feels threatened. It doesn’t like to work hard, but knows that its survival and growth depend on creating the appearance of being busy. Any CIA operation that is revealed to the public shows the telltale signs: the Agency looks very active, a lot of people are involved, and large amounts of money are spent.
Often you’ll hear the CIA accused of being risk averse. I agree. Risk aversion is a complex concept, however. The Agency will sometimes conduct risky operations in order to achieve a more important goal: looking busy. An example of this type of operation is the Abu Omar operation, in which twenty-one CIA employees flew into Italy to abduct a single terrorist suspect who was already under surveillance by the Italian police. As an eminent scholar commented, it was “twenty-one people to get one fat Egyptian!” Those twenty-one people stayed in five-star hotels and chatted with Headquarters on open-line cell phones, all at great expense and with awful tradecraft. But it was a successful operation in that it spent a lot of money, made a lot of people look active, and suggested the CIAʹs willingness to take risk.
CIA officials are quick to deny that the organization is risk averse by pointing to risky operations that went wrong. This darker, passive-aggressive aspect of risk aversion seems to say: We can certainly do risky operations, but here’s what happens when you make us get off our couch and do them.
Take a look at any CIA activity that is revealed in the future and ask yourself: Was this a traditional, inexpensive operation involving a meeting between a CIA officer and a human source to gather intelligence? Or was this an operation designed to spend a lot of money, to make a lot of people look busy, and to give the appearance that the Agency is willing to take risks? Whenever we see CIA employees released from bureaucracy, we see success. The tactical intelligence production within Iraq is excellent. The early Afghan campaign—featuring no offices and a flat chain of command, just a few guys and some bags of money—was extraordinary.
Readers interested in improving the security of Americans and our allies through intelligence reform can write or call their congressional representatives, or set up appointments to meet them at their offices either in their home district or in Washington. Every member has a website posting contact information. They’re usually very accessible to constituents. If you have any connections to politicians or journalists, talk to them. If you think they’d be open to talking to me, send me an email via my website: www.ishmaeljones.com.
In this great country of ours, we solve our problems and look optimistically toward the future. We will solve the problem of CIA dysfunction, and in so doing will bring success to our presidents and safety and security to Americans and our allies, so we can go about our lives in peace.
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