Intel Wars

by Matthew M. Aid

  The tenor and tone of the Lavoy estimate also smacks of the “blame game” tactics that were employed forty years earlier, when the U.S. government began to publicly allege that the war in Vietnam would be going better if not for the rampant corruption of Ngyuen Van Thieu’s South Vietnamese government that American soldiers were fighting and dying to defend. For example, in October 1966 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara wrote a blistering top secret memorandum to President Lyndon Johnson wherein he admitted that the U.S.-led pacification program against the Viet Cong guerrillas in South Vietnam was stalled. But McNamara did not ascribe any blame to the Americans running the program. Instead, he rather disingenuously laid the blame for the lack of progress on the fact that “the GVN [government of South Vietnam] was ridden with corruption.”

  According to Harold P. Ford, a thirty-year CIA veteran who wrote many of the high-level National Intelligence Estimates in the 1960s warning that the war in Vietnam was not going well, “It has always been politically expedient in Washington to blame someone else for your own mistakes.”

  * The Pashtuns are the single largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. According to the CIA, there were an estimated eight million Pashtun tribesmen in Afghanistan in 2008, 42 percent of the country’s population. Most of the Pashtuns live in the southern and eastern parts of the country, which collectively are referred to as the “Pashtun Belt.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Liberty Crossing

  Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, HENRY IV, Part 2

  Within days of winning the November 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama surprised many in Washington by naming a sixty-one-year-old retired U.S. Navy admiral, Dennis C. Blair (“Denny” to his friends), to be the director of national intelligence, and as such the head of the entire U.S. intelligence community. What follows is a portrait of the massive enterprise that he inherited.

  When it came to intellect, Denny Blair was no slouch. A native of Kittery, Maine, he had graduated near the top of his class at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1968, where his classmates included the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen; Senator Jim Webb of Virginia; and Colonel Oliver North of Iran-Contra infamy. Blair went on to study Russian at Oxford University in England as a Rhodes Scholar, where his classmates included a future president of the United States, Bill Clinton.

  Blair spent thirty-four years in the navy before retiring as commander in chief, Pacific Command (CINCPAC), one of the top field command slots in the U.S. military. His only substantive exposure to the intelligence community during his career had been a brief posting to CIA headquarters in the 1990s as the agency’s associate director of operations for military support, which meant it was his job to make sure that the brass at the Pentagon got the intelligence they needed from the clandestine operators at Langley.

  Since his retirement in 2002, Blair had been biding his time waiting for something better to come along. He had spent four years as the president of an influential think tank, the Institute for Defense Analysis, in Alexandria, Virginia; then moved to Honolulu, Hawaii, to chair a department at the National Bureau of Asian Research, a lesser-known foreign policy research institute that former colleagues joked was created especially for retired generals and admirals who wanted to get paid to play golf.

  Within hours of Blair being nominated for the DNI post, a security officer arrived at his house in suburban Alexandria, Virginia, bringing with him a thick file of security clearance forms and financial disclosure statements that Blair was required to fill out immediately so that the FBI could begin the process of investigating his background for the plethora of security clearances he would need to perform his job.

  A few hours later, a team of workers arrived to install a huge safe and encrypted telephones and fax machines in Blair’s study so that he could communicate with his staff from home. They also installed cipher locks on the door to the room, completely soundproofed it and clad it with a special material called “TEMPEST shielding” that was resistant to eavesdropping devices, and put in a new alarm system to make sure that burglars could not get at the sensitive materials in the house.

  But Blair was not to be alone at the top. On January 5, 2009, president-elect Obama surprised many in Washington by naming President Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, seventy-year-old Leon E. Panetta, to be the next director of the CIA.

  Panetta’s nomination upset the incumbent CIA director, Michael V. Hayden, who had made no secret of wanting to keep his job. Hayden’s press spokesman at Langley had been calling Washington reporters since Obama’s election in November to float the idea that Hayden should remain at the helm of the CIA in the new administration.

  However, Obama’s advisers rejected keeping Hayden on because he was tainted by his involvement in a number of the Bush administration’s more controversial intelligence activities, such as the National Security Agency’s post-9/11 domestic eavesdropping programs and his defense of the CIA’s use of waterboarding on captured al Qaeda operatives. “We couldn’t keep him even if we had wanted to,” one of Obama’s advisers recalled in a 2009 interview. “He was just too toxic.”

  Blair’s first day on the job was January 29, 2009. Before sunrise an armored town car and a security escort picked him up at his home and drove him twenty miles through the abysmal D.C. rush hour traffic to the DNI headquarters compound known as Liberty Crossing in McLean, Virginia, located just a few miles up Route 123 from CIA headquarters at Langley.

  Blair’s nationally televised confirmation hearing a week earlier before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had been so banal and anticlimactic that one of his aides caustically referred to it as “puff pastry.” The carefully orchestrated and stage-managed hearing lasted just a little more than two hours, and Blair did not have to field a single tough question from the committee members. The only thing the committee was really interested in was eliciting from Blair a promise to keep them informed of what he was doing once he took office, something which Blair’s predecessors as DNI had pointedly failed to do on more than one occasion.

  Sadly, the fact that no one on the committee asked any hard questions of Blair came as no surprise. Increasingly divided by rancorous partisan politics, in the opinion of many longtime congressional staffers the House and Senate intelligence committees had ceased being effective overseers of the U.S. intelligence community a decade ago. No less a figure than Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), a former chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, found himself “dismayed about the work of the intelligence committees.” In his opinion, the committees were “not conducting hearings in any meaningful sense, much less oversight hearings,” and they were “swamped in backward-looking investigations and spending almost no time on future questions or the organization of the Intelligence Community.”

  What the House and Senate intelligence committees excelled in was giving the intelligence community money, lots of it, a fact that became apparent on Blair’s first day on the job. The DNI headquarters building at Liberty Crossing was brand spanking new. For the first three years of its existence (2005–8), the DNI staff had worked out of a suite of offices on the top two floors of the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center building at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C. Although the facility was spacious and ultramodern, the DNI staff made no bones about the fact that they didn’t like working at Bolling because it was located in a crime-ridden neighborhood where at night the crackle of gunfire could clearly be heard inside the base’s high-security perimeter.

  Ambassador John D. Negroponte, the first director of national intelligence, hated Bolling so much that he gave serious thought to moving his office to the location of the post–World War II headquarters of the CIA on the corner of 24th and E streets across the street from the State Department in downtown Washington. According to one of his aides, he was only dissuaded from following through on the idea by the decrepit state of the buildings on the site and the massive expe
nse that would have been required to bring them up to code.

  In 2008, the DNI staff quietly moved out of Bolling to their newly constructed headquarters at Liberty Crossing, a heavily guarded 51-acre parcel of land situated on the north side of Highway 267 across from the massive Tysons Corner shopping mall complex. If you take a taxi from downtown Washington to catch a flight at Dulles International Airport, you drive right by the innocuous-looking office complex.

  In the middle of the Liberty Crossing complex sit two office buildings that house 1,700 DNI staffers and 1,200 private contractors, most of whom are technical specialists, like computer network operators and software specialists, who keep the place up and running. The newer building, a six-story edifice called LX-2, was the home of Blair’s staff. Just to the west of it, the somewhat older seven-story X-shaped building called LX-1 held the offices of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and the National Counterproliferation Center (NCPC), which collected intelligence on those countries that were covertly trying to develop nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.

  Once settled in his spacious office suite on the top floor of LX-2, Blair took stock of the vast empire that he now commanded. Eight years earlier on 9/11, the intelligence community was a rudderless ship, a massive and fractious conglomeration of sixteen competing agencies, which, because of a combination of poor leadership and inattention from high-level policymakers, was short of funds, burdened with a bloated and stifling bureaucracy, and struggling to operate in an organizational framework left over from the Cold War that was entirely unsuited for the twenty-first century. Even senior intelligence officials like Carl Ford, at the time the head of intelligence at the State Department, thought that the intelligence community was “too big … an almost unworkable bureaucracy.”

  The intelligence community that Blair inherited in January 2009 was far larger, better funded, and, at least on paper, far more capable than what had existed eight years earlier. Thanks to the almost $500 billion that had been pumped into it by the Bush administration, the U.S. intelligence community had rapidly become the largest and most powerful conglomeration of intelligence agencies anywhere in the world, consisting of 208,000 civilians and military men, including about 30,000 private contractors, stationed in almost 170 countries around the world at a cost to the U.S. taxpayers of more than $75 billion a year.

  By comparison, Great Britain’s intelligence community consisted of about 11,000 intelligence officers and support staff with an annual budget of only $3.5 billion, according to the latest annual report of Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee. “I wish we had just a fraction of the money that Washington puts into intelligence,” a now retired senior British intelligence official said in a 2008 interview.

  But bigger was not necessarily better. The growth of the U.S. intelligence community during the Bush administration had been unregulated, with dozens of secret units being created after 9/11, mostly by the Pentagon, which were allowed to operate freely outside the community’s formal command structure.

  For example, in early 2009 a Pentagon official named Michael D. Furlong established an off-the-books intelligence-gathering operation run by the defense contracting giant Lockheed Martin with $22 million in secret contingency funds to collect intelligence inside Pakistan on al Qaeda. Although the operation was approved by the head of U.S. Central Command, General David Petraeus, a senior intelligence official confirmed that Blair and Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, were not told about the operation until shortly before it was publicly disclosed by the New York Times in March 2010, which reflected an alarming lack of transparency inside the intelligence community itself.

  Moreover, the House and Senate intelligence committees asked few questions about how the tens of billions of dollars they were giving the nation’s spies was being spent; and the internal checks and balances that had been put in place within the intelligence community to prevent abuses were pushed aside in the rush to respond to 9/11.

  Contrary to what one reads in the newspapers, there were two separate and quite distinct American intelligence communities. The first, which Blair personally commanded, comprised the 2,900 men and women who directly worked for him in the office of the DNI at Liberty Crossing and the more than 100,000 civilians, soldiers, and private contractors who made up the nation’s sixteen intelligence agencies, which together had an annual budget of $49.8 billion. Then there was a second, more secretive intelligence community, consisting of more than 100,000 soldiers, sailors, and airmen, who worked exclusively for the Pentagon and who had their own boss, retired U.S. Air Force Lt. General James R. Clapper Jr., who held the unprepossessing title of Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence.

  The Pentagon’s burgeoning intelligence empire had always been a prickly thorn in the side of the Director of National Intelligence. Not only did Blair have no control over the activities of the more than 100,000 military personnel performing intelligence functions around the world, such as in Iraq and Afghanistan, his staff at Liberty Crossing did not have much say about how Jim Clapper spent his $25 billion budget.

  “I wish to hell I knew what the hell they were doing over there [at the Pentagon],” a senior DNI official complained in a 2010 interview. “It would be nice if once in a while they would let us know what they are doing.”

  Admiral Blair’s new command included the venerable Central Intelligence Agency. While no longer the top dog of the U.S. intelligence community, the CIA had still grown from 17,000 people on its payroll on 9/11 to 25,000 in January 2009.

  The CIA’s 5,000-person National Clandestine Service (NCS), headed by Michael J. Sulick, was still the lead U.S. government agency collecting intelligence overseas using secret agents (in government jargon, this is known as human intelligence, or HUMINT). The NCS had come a long way from the dark days of 9/11, when it had fewer than 2,500 case officers deployed around the world. Pat Hanback, the CIA’s former assistant deputy director of operations, recalled that when she transferred to the agency in 2001, the Clandestine Service was a pale shadow of what it had been during the Cold War; it had “a depleted capability, was very lean, and faced draconian cutbacks because its budget had been decreased.” As a result, Hanback recalled, the CIA’s spies were “hard-pressed to meet its priorities.”

  The Clandestine Service’s performance prior to 9/11 had left something to be desired. General Montgomery C. Meigs, former commander of U.S. Army forces in Europe, recalled that during the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, the CIA’s clandestine intelligence gathering efforts were, in his opinion, “amateurish.”

  By 2009, the dark days were behind the Clandestine Service. Its budget had been dramatically augmented, and its personnel were now operating from stations in 250 U.S. embassies and consulates in almost 170 countries. These CIA stations varied in size from over 700 officers in Afghanistan to a single officer and a secretary in the smaller Pacific Island republics. And the NCS was still growing rapidly. Hundreds of newly minted case officers were being churned out at the agency’s 10,000-acre training center, colloquially known as “the Farm,” outside Williamsburg, Virginia, and sent to overseas stations as fast as orders could be drawn up.

  A small but growing number of these newly minted agents were NOCs, which stands for nonofficial cover. These agents are posted overseas without any diplomatic cover, pretending to be businessmen, financial analysts, technical translators, and the like. According to former NCS head Mike Sulick, these NOCs are becoming increasingly important because “diplomatic cover isn’t going to get you access to the targets you need to reach in today’s war on terrorism.”

  Senior intelligence officials are fond of repeating the truism that the CIA’s failures are well known, but its successes are not. Behind the scenes, the CIA was enjoying an unprecedented level of success not seen since the halcyon days of the Cold War. According to information contained in a number of leaked State Department cables placed online by WikiLeaks, as of 2009 the CIA was providing valuable intelligen
ce reporting from inside the governments of a number of America’s allies. For instance, in the Middle East and South Asia, the CIA had a plethora of high-level sources in countries such as Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, while in Latin America, the agency was operating high-level penetration agents inside the governments and security forces of countries such as Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Paraguay, and Venezuela.

  Occasionally news about the agency’s major successes leaks out. Prior to the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on May 1, 2011, the CIA’s biggest public success had occurred in June 2010, when the FBI arrested ten Russian sleeper agents the bureau had been watching for almost a decade. All ten of the agents and their families were sent back to Russia as part of a swap for a Russian scientist named Igor V. Sutyagin, who had been imprisoned for allegedly spying for the United States.

  Five months later, on November 11, 2010, the Russian newspaper Kommersant published an article alleging that the sleeper agents had been betrayed by a Russian intelligence official identified only as “Colonel Shcherbakov,” who had been the head of the North American illegals branch of the Russian foreign intelligence service (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, or SVR). “Shcherbakov” was in fact Colonel Alexander Poteyev, who had been recruited by the CIA more than a decade earlier when he was posted to the United States. According to a senior U.S. intelligence official, Poteyev had provided the agency with “extremely valuable” information about Soviet spying activities in the United States before he was exfiltrated from Russia by the CIA in June 2010.