Shock and Awe at CIA
By streiff Posted in User Blogs — Comments (23) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Promoted from the diaries.
The long simmering guerilla war the CIA has conducted against the Administration has finally burst into the open.
Today's Washington Post reports breathlessly in a frontpage splash Deputy Chief Resigns From CIA: Agency Is Said to Be in Turmoil Under New Director Goss. The fact that two reporters with a long running vendetta against the Administration, Walter Pincus and Dana Priest, [okay, okay, I know that "Washington Post reporter" and "vendetta against the Administration" is a redundancy] get the byline reeks of a political hit.
Read on . . .The CIA apparently never really accepted that the Clinton Administration left and as the 9/11 Commission Report documents complacency was widespread. In the Army we referred to this as the "happy loser syndrome." They were getting their butt kicked at every turn but there was no punishment for losing so losing became their comfort zone. For those interested borrow Steve Coll's Ghost Wars from your local library -- I say borrow because I certainly don't encourage anyone to give Coll any money by purchasing the book-- for a damning indictment of an inept and sclerotic organization unable to organize a two-car funeral. A Cliff Note's version would be Robert Baer's See No Evil. Buy this one. Baer seems like a pretty good guy.
Everyone knows the backstory here. The Valerie "I'm really a secret agent but I work at the CIA as cover" Plame affair (and if anyone thinks the NYT's Judith Miller is willing to go to jail to protect a member of the Bush White House I'd like a few kilos of what you're smoking).
The shifting stories on the apparent WMD fiasco. Tenet told the president it was a "slam dunk." Now unnamed "officials" claim the intelligence wasn't conclusive. Did someone leave Tenet out of the loop?
The CIA's desk officer for the Near East, Paul Pillar, giving a speech in which he claims he warned the Administration of Armageddon if it invaded Iraq.
In an unprecedented action, the CIA allowed a covert agent, Michael Scheuer, director of it's pretty ineffectual bin Laden unit (read Coll's book for details on it's ineptness), to publish Imperial Hubris. Under the nom de plume "Anonymous" Scheuer mounted a direct attack on the Administration's counterterrorism strategy during the height of a presidential campaign. And the CIA allowed Scheuer to go on a book tour to promote the book. That's right. A "covert" agent writes a book attacking the Administration and the CIA not only allows him to do this, it allows him to go on a book tour.
Scheuer resigned on November 11, after the CIA suddenly forbade him to have contact with the media. No media contact? After a book? And a book tour? What gives?
Scheuer said in an interview with The Washington Post on Monday that he believes the agency silenced him after CIA officials realized he was blaming the CIA, not the administration, for mishandling terrorism. "As long as the book was being used to bash the president, they gave me carte blanche to talk to the media," he said. "But this is a story about the failure of the bureaucracy to support policymakers."
The confirmation of Porter Goss as DCI seems to have been the casus belli that brought the war from underground to full fledged range war.
The CIA appeared to interpret Goss' appointment as heralding a long overdue purge of obstructionists.
This didn't take a team of analysts to figure out. The team Goss brought with him had authored a very critical report of the CIA saying, among other things:
There is a dysfunctional denial of any need for corrective action... The clandestine service suffers from "misallocation and redirection of resources, poor prioritization of objectives, micromanagement of field operations and a continued political aversion to operational risk."
Again if you read Coll or Baer's books, you'll see this description is spot on.
The CIA career staff launched a pre-emptive strike by leaking that one of Goss's aides, Michael Kostiw, had been arrested two decades earlier for shoplifting a package of bacon. Note the Walter Pincus by-line. Allegedly someone who was familiar with the even leaked the story to the press. Reading this story it is pretty obvious that a CIA personnel officer leaked Kostiw's personnel file to the Washington Post.
In one of those confrontations, on Nov. 5, Murray raised the issue of leaks with the associate deputy director of counterintelligence. Referring to previous media leaks regarding personnel, he said that if anything in the newly appointed executive director's personnel file made it into the media, the counterintelligence official "would be held responsible,"
The leak, far from a harmless prank, was a violation of the Privacy Act of 1973... at a minimum.
Despite Goss' olive branch to CIA managment in suppressing a CIA Inspector General's report that was widely expected to recommend a series of high (and low) profile firings, reassigments, and demotions the CIA has decided that the danger to the ancien regime presented by Goss and his new team is too great.
Now a blunt warning to someone who is obviously suspected of a lack of loyalty has resulted in the laughable situation where a senior manager is threatening to resign and allegedly the White House and Goss are crawling to him begging for him to reconsider. Personally, I don't believe this story. I think that the guy is out of a job and is spinning his departure so it will look like he left on principle rather than being fired as unprincipled.
I have been skeptical that Goss was a good choice because of my longstanding belief that service in a legislature for any period of time makes you unsuitable for any substantive line of work. This gives me hope that I was wrong.
I wish Goss the best. A purge of the top ranks of the CIA is four years overdue. The damage of the Church and Pike Commissions have struck much deeper at the soul of the CIA than one would have thought possible and the world is much too dangerous for us to be saddled with the CIA of 9/10.
. . . and about time, too!
Frank Church, Ted Kennedy et. al, in the Senate and Jemmak Cahter accompanied by his USNA classmate Stansfield Turner literally gutted the CIA HUMINT capability in the 1970s.
An entirely new culture dependent upon 'National Technical Means" of collection was instilled in the CIA. No more James Jesus Angleton's ferreting out the internal bad apples. The miasma spread throughout the entire Intelligence Community.
Analysts and information managers and political dissidents bubbled their way to the top in the new environment. 'Field operators' (what remained of them) were eschewed as the unterclasse in the newly neutered Intelligence COmmunity.
Had Carther, et. al. undertaken to repair the damage they did, and began THE DAY AFTERWARD - damage could not have been repaired in more than a generation.
The so-called 'intelligence failures' we hear so much about are the residual affect of a truncated HUMINT capability as well as an entire generation of intelligence professional prima donnas. (I hate making that distinction because I still know SO MANY very good intell-types. My apologies to them here, now. It's just that policy-making and upper level management has been assumed by the 'careerists').
Goss must not only re-install (or try to re-install) a more balanced collection capability in the CIA and (hopefully) Intelligence Community - he must also pry lose the Kareerist Kulture inside and bring serious, multi-faceted intelligence professionalism back into the community.
The individual covered in the Post story is, I suspect, among the first to flee of a large number of internal contraires. His (and his like) days were numbered. And it was about time!
This activity is not indicative of any huge internal Intelligence Community cultural war - no matter how much the MSM would love to have it appear as such. Just look upon it a good, thorough spring cleaning - 25 years overdue.
I thought I remembered something about humint in Laos beginning around 1965 or so that experienced a treadmill of failures with the various cadre available there. And many more of these groups were failures from the cold war era as well. Many were successful though.
Do we know which people he may bring and what the records are? Or is it like the article says, promotion of mid-level personnel?
What always appalled me about 9/11 is not one single person was fired, reprimanded, demoted or resigned in disgrace. Not one.
Reading this story makes you think that CIA stands for Clowns, Idiots and A--h---s.
This is the best we can do to protect the country?
But I just had to when I read this. All of the commentary here is incisive and this is a piece of supporting evidence inre: policial hit piece...
Michael Moore (I won't link to him) is running this story in its entirety on his website. It seems that Mike is now a bonafide extension of the WaPo. He's using their graphics, too.
These guys do seem biased. In general, I thought the election stuff in the WaPo was much less biased than the NY Times.
Damning with faint praise, I guess.
Between the stories and the presentation of the online version of the Washington Post and the New York Times and their print versions. The NYT offers a link to the version of the front page of the print newspaper, AFAIK the WaPo doesn't do that.
I do know that the online version of the Washington Post is a separate division with its own executive editor, and I wouldn't be surprised if the NYT is the same; in both cases, I'll wager over the long term that both present more liberal views in the online than the print versions.
Certainly the advertisement at WaPo online in the last two months of the campaign were heavily slanted pro-Kerry. I didn't see a single pro-Bush ad on the online WaPo until about two weeks before the election, and even then it wasn't run 24/7. The liberals have bet heavily that their base is now on the Internet, IMHO.
In fact, both NYT and Washpost offer links to the front page of their print editions, which is good, because it makes for a useful comparison.
And there are many others...right now the WaPo online is running a Greenpeace ad against ExxonMobil.
...was one of the more successful paramilitary operations that the Agency ever ran. They tied down the equivalent of two NVA divisions in Laos with a few battalions worth of Hmong tribesmen under Vang Pao.
Unfortunately, there were also leaders like "White Powder" Ma that the CIA dealt with. Does any one care to guess what business he was in?
Time for a good blood purge at CIA. Personally, I think Goss needs to go through that gaggle of assclowns like Laverenti Beria on a really bad day.
Anyone know any out of work KGB First Directorate officers looking for work? They come cheap, they never had fear-of-Church-Committee to live with, and even if some of them do keep up with their old employer, God knows they have Islamist problems of their own so a little sources-and-methods cooperation might not be too far out of line.
Hell, I'd say try to find some WWII OSS types who aren't six feet under yet, too bad most of them already are.
Having worked in the intell. business for many years I can say you are right on the money. This has been a long time coming. The CIA with their elitist attitude alienated all the other intelligence gathers. Nothing was worth any thing unless it came from Langley; all were put down as insignificant "sources". Their communications was always one way, to them and never down. It took the FBI years to finally figure out why they were not getting cooperation from local PD's because of their elitist culture. Maybe a shake up at the "Pin head farm" will do the say. Lets hope.
First off, it was monumentally stupid for the CIA to try to kneecap the Bush campaign and fail. The idiots who tried that deserve whatever they get.
In addition, the whole post-Church-comission idea that we should only work with operatives of lilly-white purity was insane, and it's a good thing we're getting over that.
OTOH, a return to Angleton's "All Soviet defectors are actually a trick" approach would be worse than bad. A healthy dose of paranoia is good, but we also need a CIA that can credibly separate the threats from the non-threats.
Oh, and why hasn't GW rescinded the executive order against assasinations?
Oh, and why hasn't GW rescinded the executive order against assasinations?
Can you imagine 1) how long the recission would remain secret and 2) what the headlines would be in a dozen major papers and five news networks.
The fact is that the president can sign a "finding" allowing assassinations if he wishes. The Executive Order is his own order, after all. Why pick an in-your-face fight if you don't have to?
Because that's another area of the "permanent govt" that seems to have trouble remembering just who it is they're supposed to be serving at times...
"that's another area of the "permanent govt" that seems to have trouble remembering just who it is they're supposed to be serving"
Who does the "who" in the previous sentence refer to?
Thanks -
"who" = president and secretary of state.
State, CIA, and to a lesser extent Defense career staff have in the past 20 or so years decided that their job is to make policy, not execute it. A misapprehension of their role to say the least.
The State department hasn't served US interests well in a long time. It didn't help Clinton out particularly, the fiasco surrounding the breakup of Yugoslavia and the subsequent wars in Bosnia and Kosovo being exhibit A. It nearly inarguably precipitated the first Gulf War single-handedly (the April Glaspie statement). It set up the "visa express" system that allowed Saudi hijackers to obtain visas without being interviewed by consular staff.
Good and concise answer. Thanks, streiff.
I'm curious about the role of State in the Yugoslavia situation, I'm not familiar with the events you refer to. That is, I'm familiar with the events in Yugoslavia, but not how DoS was involved. If you have time to forward a pointer to more information, I'd appreciate it.
Cheers -
Can't find a link or source - but I've heard that Goss is trying to bring back a cadre of Cold War spymasters for 2-3 years and attach them at the hip to as many committed Middle East culutural experts in an attempt to revitalize the HumInt capability of the Agency. Seemed like not only a good idea - but one bound to piss people off.