In the months prior to the 9/11 attacks against the United States, the Agency and the FBI blundered repeatedly in their counterterrorism activities, from failing to investigate suspicious behavior by foreigners in the United States seeking flight training for large commercial airliners to mix-ups in tracking known terrorists who entered the nation in early 2001 and would join other 9/11 hijackers.120 Then the intelligence mistakes multiplied in 2002 with the poor collection of information and faulty analysis related to suspected WMD in Iraq. Examples include gullibility over the trustworthiness of Curve Ball and other assets, as well as toward the pro-war lobbying in Washington of a self-serving Iraqi exile group; confusion over whether Saddam Hussein had purchased large amounts of yellow-cake uranium from Niger; facile conclusions reached about how Iraqi fire trucks spotted in the Iraqi desert indicated the presence of a biological weapons capability; how UAVs that the U.S. Air Force firmly believed were conventional surveillance aircraft were seen by others as carriers for WMD; speculation on the likely progress of an Iraqi WMD program based on extrapolation (and overestimation) to correct underestimating errors in 1990; taking at face value Saddam's blustering that he had WMD, rather than considering the possibility (which turned out to be true) that his rhetoric was a hollow attempt at a deterrence posture designed to frighten Iraq's archenemies in Tehran and keep them at arm's length. The list goes on.121
Yet, despite mistakes – and even an occasional scandal over the years (see Chapter 5) – the U.S. Intelligence Community has consistently provided valuable data and insights to policymakers about world affairs, from accurate specifications on Soviet and Chinese weaponry to advanced details on the negotiation positions of foreign diplomats. The Aspin–Brown Commission summarized some of the successes that had occurred just since the end of the Cold War in 1991:122
discovering North Korea's nuclear weapons program;
blocking the sale of radioactive materials to renegade nations;
uncovering illegal WMD sales;
supporting battlefield operations in the Middle East;
backstopping many international negotiations with reliable information;
helping to break up drug cartels, among them the Cali organization in Colombia;
thwarting various terrorist activities, including the capture of Carlos the Jackal, as well as the ringleader of 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the leader of the Shining Path terrorist group in Peru;
providing information that supported diplomatic peacekeeping initiatives around the world;
disclosing and thus foiling assassination plots perpetrated by other countries overseas;
revealing unfair global trade practices, thereby improving the chances of success for U.S. business enterprises in the developing world;
pointing to countries that have violated trade sanctions, as well as alerting officials to approaching financial crises in foreign nations; and
collecting information about human rights abuses around the world, as well as warning about ecological problems and humanitarian crises.
This is only a partial list from the years 1992–95; since then, America's intelligence agencies have recorded many additional successes, including capture or killing of a large number of Al Qaeda's leaders in Pakistan (Bin Laden among them) and ISIS members in Syria, Iraq, and Libya; the tracking and countering of other ISIS- and Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist cells in such places as Somalia and Yemen; support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and surveillance assistance in the responses to a variety of natural disasters, not only abroad but (with special clearances from Congress and the White House) at home as well.
The United States and other democracies, as well as their adversaries, will continue to seek improvements in their knowledge of world events. On the collection side, this will mean spending more money on technical platforms and human agents to bring about greater transparency to the planet. On the analysis side, it will mean continuing to search for the brightest and most thoughtful citizens a government can find to work as analysts: smart, dedicated, patriotic individuals who can help decision-makers make better sense of history as it unfolds – especially those threats that could be dangerous for the democracies to overlook.
Vital for success will be cooperation among the intelligence services of the democracies through what is known as “foreign intelligence liaison” or “burden-sharing.” The world is too vast for any one democracy alone to monitor for threats and opportunities; they need cooperation from one another. Intelligence burden-sharing arrangements can be dicey, however, as the Curve Ball example underscores. Each of the democracies will have to be cautious about vetting information from one another. Moreover, as the relationship between the United States and Pakistan illustrates, nations can have mixed agendas. Pakistan has been helpful in some instances in providing intelligence to Washington about Al Qaeda and Taliban activities in the mountainous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Yet the Pakistani intelligence service, Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI, has also attempted to run double agents against the United States; and some ISI officers are known to have close friendships and ideological ties with the Taliban and perhaps Al Qaeda.123
Despite the need for caution, the United States and the other democracies have much to gain from sharing their intelligence findings. The common foes of terrorism, illegal drug dealing, and other forms of international crime, as well as the proliferation of WMD, should provide adequate incentives for the open societies to share their collection and analytic capabilities.
Notes
1 Loch K. Johnson, The Threat on the Horizon: An Inside Account of America's Search for Security after the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 219–20; this account draws on this source. See also Report of the Secretary of Defense to the President and the Congress (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1996).
2 Richard Helms, with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 234.
3 On the oversimplification of the cycle, see Arthur S. Hulnick, “What's Wrong with the Intelligence Cycle?” in Loch K. Johnson, ed., Strategic Intelligence, Vol. 2: The Intelligence Cycle (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), pp. 1–22.
4 R. James Woolsey, testimony, Hearings, Select Committee on Intelligence, U.S. Senate, 103rd Cong., 2nd Sess. (March 6, 1993).
5 Dean Rusk, remark to the author, Athens, GA (February 21, 1988).
6 Les Aspin, remark to the author, Washington, DC (July 14, 1994).
7 Mark M. Lowenthal, Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy, 6th edn (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2014), p. 76.
8 Author's interview (August 28, 1984), Washington, DC.
9 See William J. Broad, “The Rocket Science of Missile Threats,” New York Times (April 26, 2009), p. Wk. 3.
10 Douglas F. Garthoff, Directors of Central Intelligence as Leaders of the U.S. Intelligence Community, 1946–2005 (Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 2005), p. 240.
11 William E. Colby, remark to the author, Washington, DC (January 22, 1991).
12 Joseph S. Nye, Jr., and William A. Owens, “America's Information Edge,” Foreign Affairs (March/April 1996), p. 26.
13 Office of the Director of National Intelligence, The Inaugural Report of the Global Maritime and Air Communities of Interest Intelligence Enterprises (November 2009), cited in “Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy,” Secrecy News 89 (November 9, 2009), p. 2.
14 Questions & Answers on the Intelligence Community Post 9/11, Office of the Director of National Intelligence (July 2010), p. 3.
15 Remarks to the Aspin–Brown Commission, author's notes (April 28, 1995). The author served as Aspin's assistant during the Commission's inquiries.
16 Remarks in a speech cited by intelligence scholar Richard L. Russell, “Low-Pressure System,” The American Interest 2 (July/August 2007), pp. 119–23, quote at p. 120.
17 Michael Bronner, “
When the War Ends, Start to Worry,” New York Times (August 16, 2008), p. A27.
18 On the Glomar Explorer, see David H. Sharp, The CIA's Greatest Covert Operation: Inside the Daring Mission to Recover a Nuclear-Armed Soviet Sub (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012). When the operation leaked to the media in 1975, Senator Frank Church (D, Idaho) said: “If we are prepared to pay Howard Hughes $350 million for an obsolete Russian submarine, it's little wonder we are broke.” His Senate colleague Barry Goldwater (R, Arizona) had a different view: “Frankly, if they hadn't gone out and raised that sub, I'd be mad” (both quoted in the Boston Globe, March 20, 1975). Generally on the “ints,” see Mark M. Lowenthal and Robert M. Clark, eds., The 5 Disciplines of Intelligence Collection (Los Angeles: Sage and CQ Press, 2016).
19 Douglas Jehl, “New Spy Plan Said to Involve Satellite System,” New York Times (December 12, 2004), p. A1.
20 Steven Emerson, Secret Warriors: Inside the Covet Military Operations of the Reagan Era (New York: Putnam, 1988), p. 35. Recently released documents from the Carter Administration era included this revealing observation from NSC staffer Paul Henze about the limits of technical intelligence collection: “While we now enjoy nearly real-time photography from satellites…we are not much closer than we were thirty years ago to knowing what goes on in the minds of the top men in Moscow or Madrid, Peking, Algeria or Brasilia, what Arab leaders say to each other when they get together or how French elections are going to come out”: Organization and Management of Foreign Policy: 1977–80, Department of State, Vol. 28 (2016), document 63, p. 321.
21 Richard Kerr, Thomas Wolfe, Rebecca Donegan, and Aris Pappas, “Collection and Analysis on Iraq: Issues for the US Intelligence Community,” Studies in Intelligence 49 (2005), pp. 47–54, quote at p. 50.
22 Richard Barrett, “Time to Talk to the Taliban,” New York Times (October 19, 2010), p. 25.
23 See John L. Millis, staff member, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, “Our Spying Success Is No Secret,” letter, New York Times (October 12, 1994), p. A27; and Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 317.
24 Interview conducted by Amy B. Zegart (June 2004), cited in her Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 93. Given the hardships and risks involved in the life of NOCs in remote locations, the pay scale will have to be higher than the usual salary for intelligence officers if good recruits are to be attracted to this important challenge. According to several authoritative reports, those intelligence officers under official cover (OC) enjoy the comfort and safety of working under the auspices of the State Department overseas, as part of the embassy “country team” led by the ambassador. See, for example, William Colby and Peter Forbath, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), p. 336; John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 20; Lowenthal, Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy, 6th edn, p. 129; and Mark Mazzetti, “White House Sides With the CIA in a Spy Turf Battle,” New York Times (November 13, 2009), p. A12, as well as his “Pakistan's Public Enemy,” New York Times Magazine (April 14, 2013), p. 33.
25 See Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 560; and Bud Shuster, “HiTech vs. Human Spying,” Washington Times (February 11, 1992), p. F3.
26 CBS News, “Faulty Intel Source ‘Curve Ball’ Revealed,” 60 Minutes (November 4, 2007).
27 See Joseph W. Wippl, “The CIA and Tolkachev vs. the KGB/SVR and Ames: A Comparison,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 23 (Winter 2010–11), pp. 636–46; and a fictional account of the complicated relationship between assets and their handlers, Joseph Weisberg, An Ordinary Spy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), referred to in a blurb by a former DDO as “stunningly realistic.”
28 See, respectively, the Kean Commission's report, entitled The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (New York: Norton, 2004), p. 415; the Silberman–Robb Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, Final Report (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2005), pp. 410–11; and George Tenet, with Bill Harlow, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 24.
29 Author's interview with William E. Colby, Washington, DC (January 22, 1991). Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who served in both the Kennedy and the Johnson Administrations, has observed: “I regret our relying so heavily on technical intelligence, which produces limited information, at the expense of the old-fashioned spy on the ground who steals information, infiltrates groups, and eavesdrops on conversations”: see his As I Saw It, as told to Richard Rusk and edited by Daniel S. Papp (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 560.
30 Author's interview with Robert M. Gates, Washington, DC (March 28, 1994).
31 John L. Millis, speech, Central Intelligence Retirees Association, Arlington, VA (October 5, 1998), p. 6.
32 Max Holland, “The ‘Photo Gap’ that Delayed Discovery of Missiles in Cuba,” Studies in Intelligence 49 (2005), pp. 15–30, see especially p. 15.
33 On the U-2, see Gregory W. Pedlow and Donald E. Welzenbach, The CIA and the U–2 Program, 1954–1975 (Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 1998), with a section on the aircraft's use during the Cuban missile crisis (at pp. 199–210). On the missile crisis of 1962, see also Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2nd edn (New York: Longman, 1995); and James G. Blight, Bruce J. Allyn, and David A. Welch, Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse (New York: Pantheon, 1993).
34 Holland, “The ‘Photo Gap.’”
35 John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 262.
36 Sherman Kent, “A Crucial Estimate Relived,” Studies in Intelligence (Spring 1964), pp. 1–18, quote at p. 15.
37 Gaddis, We Now Know, p. 267; James G. Blight and David A. Welch, eds., Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis (London: Cass, 1998); and Raymond L. Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis, rev. edn (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1989), pp. 35–6.
38 Author's interview with McNamara (January 24, 1985), Athens, GA.
39 Dean Rusk, interview conducted by Professor Eric Goldman (January 12, 1964), Rusk Papers, Russell Library, University of Georgia, Athens, GA. See, also, Rusk, As I Saw It.
40 R. James Woolsey, author's interview, CIA Headquarters, Langley, VA (September 29, 1993).
41 Loch K. Johnson, “Evaluating ‘Humint’: The Role of Foreign Agents in U.S. Security,” Comparative Strategy 29 (September–October 2010), pp. 308–33.
42 See Jeffrey T. Richelson, “The Technical Collection of Intelligence,” in Loch K. Johnson, ed., Handbook of Intelligence Studies (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 105–17.
43 Respectively: Reuel Marc Gerecht, “A New Clandestine Service: The Case for Creative Destruction,” in Peter Berkowitz, ed., The Future of American Intelligence (Stanford: Hoover Press, 2005), p. 128; and Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2005, Report 108–558, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (the Goss Committee), U.S. House of Representatives, 108th Cong., 2nd Sess. (June 21, 2004), p. 24.
44 “The CIA and the Media,” Hearings, Subcommittee on Oversight, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, U.S. House of Representatives, 96th Cong., 1st Sess. (1979), p. 7.
45 Fewer than 10 percent of America's college students study a foreign language as part of their curriculum. An experienced former CIA officer notes: “CIA operatives are not particularly well prepared; they seldom speak foreign languages well and almost never know a line of business or a technical field”: Michael Turner, Why Secret Intelligence Fails (Washington, DC: Potomac Books
, 2005), p. 92. A risk associated with the placing of intelligence officers in the same foreign country for long periods of time is “clientitis” – that is, an intelligence officer “going native” and losing the capacity to appraise objectively the nation where he or she is serving. The solution is for CIA managers to remove an intelligence officer from another country when signs of this malady occur, not eliminating the opportunity for all intelligence officers across the board to learn foreign languages inside-out through more extensive periods of service in a single country or region. Another reason for longer service in one country: the recruitment and development of a local asset takes time.
46 See Robert Callum, “The Case for Cultural Diversity in the Intelligence Community,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 14 (Spring 2001), pp. 25–48. In September 2009, the new D/CIA, Leon Panetta, traveled to Dearborn, Michigan, to recruit intelligence officers in the Detroit suburb known for its large enclave of Arab Americans; David Carr, “Investment in a City Of Struggles,” New York Times (September 21, 2009), p. B1.
47 On the FBI's failure to share counterterrorism data in the lead-up to 9/11, see Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror: Radical Islam's War against America (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 304.
48 Foreign liaison can be tricky. Some of the liaison services abroad with which the United States has a relationship must be kept at arm's length, because they are embedded in authoritarian regimes with suspect motives and behavior; and even those that reside in friendly democracies must be dealt with gingerly, because they may have been compromised – as the CIA discovered during the Cold War when top-level MI6 officers proved to be Soviet assets (among them, Kim Philby, a case examined in Chapter 4).
49 Author's interview with a senior NSA official who quoted the NSA Director, Washington, DC (July 14, 1994). McConnell would later serve as the nation's second DNI (2007–09).
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