Intel Wars

by Matthew M. Aid

  Although DHS has a congressional mandate to protect the U.S. homeland, the FBI remains, as it was before 9/11, the lead agency of the intelligence community responsible for protecting the United States from terrorist attack. In the years since 9/11, the FBI has used its considerable political clout in the White House and on Capitol Hill to strengthen its control over the homeland security mission at the expense of DHS. Not surprisingly, the current relationship between DHS and the FBI can best be characterized as tense and hypercompetitive. While intelligence analysts from the two agencies work closely together on domestic counterterrorism issues, the higher up the chain of command of both agencies you go, the less cordial the relations become. According to two congressional sources, in closed-door hearings FBI officials have never missed an opportunity to denigrate the Department of Homeland Security as part of their never-ending campaign to further strengthen the bureau’s stranglehold on domestic security and counterterrorism functions in the United States.

  It is an open secret in Washington that if a reporter wants a negative comment about DHS, there is no shortage of current or retired FBI officials who will happily oblige—albeit on a “not for attribution” basis. For instance, when asked for his assessment of DHS, a recently retired FBI official quipped over a beer at a downtown Washington, D.C., eatery that the “the place is literally falling apart. That’s why we call it the Department of Homeland Insecurity.”

  During the Bush administration, DHS was so badly managed that even the staunchest of the White House’s supporters on Capitol Hill despaired. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), a former chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, was so despondent about DHS and its inability to perform its domestic intelligence analysis mission that he told the 9/11 Commission that DHS was a “disaster” that was incapable of conducting its statutory domestic intelligence mission because of its “inability to stand up any kind of intelligence function.”

  The department’s senior management was renowned for being intensely political, in large part because a large number of Bush administration political appointees were given senior management positions in the agency, none of whom were particularly well qualified for their jobs.

  According to two former senior intelligence officials, DHS frittered away its resources during the Bush administration on a host of wasteful and unnecessary programs that did little to protect America from attack. For example, Vice President Dick Cheney was so concerned for his personal safety that he had the U.S. Secret Service, on orders from DHS, maintain continuous helicopter surveillance over his residence at the Naval Observatory in northwest Washington, D.C., at a cost to the taxpayers of tens of millions of dollars each year. Dozens of complaints from local residents about the noise made by these helicopters were studiously ignored by the Secret Service.

  Cheney also had the Secret Service order the Internet giant Google to digitally “fuzz” the satellite images of his residence that were available on the company’s Google Maps Web site, despite the fact that these same satellite images were widely available elsewhere on the Internet. No one seems to have told the Secret Service that anyone, including foreigners, could purchase these aerial photographs online for a nominal charge from the U.S. Geological Survey. Only after the Obama administration was inaugurated was the practice of “fuzzing” the satellite images of the vice president’s residence halted.

  Interviews with over a dozen former and current DHS intelligence officials and analysts have confirmed that the agency’s intelligence organization has always been somewhat dysfunctional. The DHS’s intelligence branch, known as the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, had a troubled track record during the Bush administration. One former DHS official referred to it as “the gang that could not shoot straight.”

  Two U.S. intelligence officials independently recalled an incident in 2006, when the Department of Homeland Security’s classified daily intelligence summary carried an item that mistakenly identified the Saudi national oil company Aramco as a terrorist organization known to be linked to al Qaeda. How this item appeared in the department’s daily intelligence summary without being caught in the editorial process before publication is still a source of considerable embarrassment within DHS, as evidenced by the number of robust “no comment” responses I received from government intelligence officials when I asked about the incident.

  The department’s intelligence organization has been beset from the beginning by weak leadership at the top and by a cadre of less than stellar middle-level managers, some of whom were castoffs from other intelligence agencies. Its young and relatively inexperienced intelligence analysts were often found to be poorly trained and got very little support from the rest of the intelligence community. DHS has been unable to effectively control the six subordinate intelligence units under its command, such as the intelligence activities of the Transportation Security Agency, Customs Service, and Border Patrol. No wonder that the rest of the U.S. intelligence community has tended to view the DHS intelligence organization like an illegitimate stepchild.

  Since taking over as head of DHS intelligence in February 2010, Caryn Wagner has slowly been trying to right the ship. A number of notable improvements have been made in the way the DHS intelligence organization performs its mission, but the problems she faces are considerable. Plagued by a combination of poor management, constantly changing missions, heavy personnel turnover, and the continuing challenge of attracting and retaining talented people, morale among DHS’s intelligence workforce has remained at or near rock bottom, and the DHS intelligence organization routinely comes in near the bottom of the surveys of government employees conducted annually by both the Office of Personnel Management and the director of national intelligence.

  Nowhere have the problems been more apparent than with the centerpiece of the DHS intelligence organization, the network of seventy-two state- and local-run intelligence fusion centers, which are supposed to be the frontline soldiers in the war against terrorism in the United States. Each of the fifty states has its own intelligence fusion center. Twenty-two of America’s largest cities also have their own, which essentially duplicate what the state fusion centers are doing.

  For example, there are four intelligence fusion centers in California, all of which are to some degree duplicating each other’s work. So why does California have four fusion centers? The answer is bureaucratic power politics. The Los Angeles and San Francisco mayor’s offices and police departments demanded their own fusion centers because they said they needed one. It did not hurt that millions of dollars of federal and state money came with the centers, which the L.A. and San Francisco police departments desperately needed to make up for budget shortfalls. No one in Washington or in the state capital in Sacramento apparently bothered to ask if the redundancy was necessary.

  California, according to a former DHS intelligence official, is just another example of the fact that “there are too many vested interests now perpetuating an entire layer of inefficient, ineffective resources.” The official asked a trenchant question, “Why did Idaho need a whole FC [fusion center] devoted to terrorism issues? Montana? New Mexico? They all jumped on the bandwagon in a race to get federal and state homeland security dollars. But terrorism only keeps them busy for about fifteen minutes a day.”

  DHS is nominally responsible for helping fund the centers. Since 2004, it has pumped over $425 million into them. But because the fusion centers are controlled by the states or municipalities where they are located, DHS has had very little say in how the money it gave them was spent—or misspent, as has often been the case. A number of senior DNI and DHS intelligence officials admit that the money that has been spent on the fusion centers is but a fraction of what is needed to allow these units to perform their mission. DHS’s budget is limited, and the states and cities are so strapped because of the current financial crisis that they are being forced to make cutbacks in funding for the fusion centers in order to keep police stations open and cops on the beat. Two California state l
aw enforcement officials admitted in recent interviews that their state’s depressed financial status means that they are going to have to cut back on spending on their fusion centers unless DHS can somehow make up the difference.

  As originally envisioned, DHS was supposed to feed the fusion centers with high-level intelligence information derived from national sources about terrorist threats to their communities. But state and local intelligence officials interviewed for this book acknowledge that the quality of the intelligence information they received from DHS was usually not germane to their localities. A Las Vegas police official admitted at a recent national conference of state and local law enforcement officers that the daily intelligence bulletins that he got from DHS in Washington rarely had any items that were pertinent to his department’s concerns. “I get better intel from the casino security chiefs than from Washington,” he said.

  Intelligence officials in Washington admit that some of the fusion centers have proven to be better run and to produce better intelligence than others. The well-funded New York State Intelligence Center in Albany generally gets high marks for the above-average quality of its work. A number of senior intelligence officials in Washington heaped considerable praise on the reporting and analysis produced by the New York Police Department Intelligence Division, headed by David Cohen, the head of the CIA’s clandestine service from 1995 to 1997. Studies produced over the past several years by the NYPD on how European countries are combating Muslim radicalization and how the Israeli police and security services handle counterterrorism were rated as being particularly insightful by DNI officials in Washington.

  But since the first fusion center was opened in 2006, DHS has failed to regulate them. A number of senior intelligence officials admit that the quality of the intelligence reporting emanating from the fusion centers leaves much to be desired. At times it has been of such poor quality that it has proven to be embarrassing for intelligence officials in Washington. A senior DNI intelligence official recalled an incident in 2009, when one of his aides brought him a secret intelligence report produced by one of the Texas intelligence fusion centers that was lifted almost word for word from an ultraconservative Web site that openly advocated harsh measures to stem the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States. The incident was particularly mortifying for the official because his boss had earlier that day testified before the House intelligence oversight committee about the dramatic improvements that had been made in the quality of the analysis coming out of the U.S. intelligence community.

  The crux of the problem is that these state and local intelligence fusion centers are not subject to the same rigorous fact-checking and editorial quality-control standards that are the norm in the U.S. intelligence community. According to a senior DHS official, the biggest problem that he has experienced is that these centers are run by cops who have little if any prior intelligence experience. “They don’t know it; they don’t understand it; and they don’t want to do it,” the official stated in a recent interview. According to the DHS official, many of the state and local law enforcement officials who are in charge of the fusion centers have ruthlessly taken the money they get gratis from DHS and then, without informing Washington, have converted their centers from counterterrorism analysis to criminal investigation in clear violation of the intent behind the creation of the fusion centers.

  The result is that much of what passes for intelligence coming out of the fusion centers has nothing to do with counterterrorism whatsoever. For example, the August 6, 2010, daily intelligence report issued by the Central Florida Intelligence Exchange, a state-run fusion center in Orlando, reported on its front page that Dondi, an Asian elephant, had died suddenly at the Southwick Zoo outside Boston, Massachusetts, at the ripe old age of thirty-six. The center reported Dondi’s passing because during the winter months she performed at an establishment known as Flea World in Sanford, Florida, and the fusion center was using the report to alert state and local police that animal rights activists might stage protests at Flea World to mark her death in captivity.

  * Its wartime counterpart, the President’s Emergency Operations Center, located in the basement of the East Wing of the White House, is the ultramodern nuclear war bunker that houses many of the same command and communications systems found in the Sit Room.

  * A July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism found that “the arrest and prosecution by U.S. law enforcement of a small number of violent Islamic extremists inside the United States—who are becoming more connected ideologically, virtually, and/or in a physical sense to the global extremist movement—points to the possibility that others may become sufficiently radicalized that they will view the violence here as legitimate. We assess that this internal Muslim terrorist threat is not likely to be as severe as it is in Europe, however.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Distant Battlefields

  Mission Creep and the U.S. Intelligence Community

  All the business of war, and indeed the business of life, is to endeavor to find out what you don’t know by what you do; that’s what I called “guessing what was on the other side of the hill.”

  —ARTHUR WELLESLEY, 1ST DUKE OF WELLINGTON

  On June 5, 2010, just two weeks after Denny Blair had vacated the DNI’s office at Liberty Crossing, President Obama appeared in the White House Rose Garden with his new pick to head the nation’s intelligence community, retired U.S. Air Force Lt. General James R. Clapper Jr. Clapper and the president had met for the first time only a month earlier in a May 6 private meeting in the Oval Office, where Obama asked the general if he would take over as DNI. Clapper said yes, subject to the president letting him run his organization in his way.

  Genial and easygoing, the sixty-nine-year-old Clapper had spent his entire forty-five-year career in intelligence, beginning as an air force lieutenant flying airborne signals intelligence collection missions over Laos and South Vietnam during the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Renowned for his sense of humor, Clapper hated bureaucracy and was not afraid to mix it up with his superiors. While head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Clapper clashed repeatedly with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for advocating that his agency and the rest of the Pentagon’s intelligence organizations be placed under the command of the newly created office of the director of national intelligence. Rumsfeld, a fierce opponent of the creation of the DNI’s office, and intelligence reform in general, rejected Clapper’s proposal and forced him out of his post as head of NGA in June 2006.

  Clapper did not have to wait long to get back into the game. In November 2006, President Bush forced Rumsfeld out of office and replaced him as secretary of defense with Robert M. Gates. Among Secretary Gates’s first decisions was to completely overhaul the Pentagon’s massive intelligence establishment, which was headed at the time by Stephen A. Cambone, whose reputation within the intelligence community left much to be desired. Cambone resigned in January 2007, and within days Gates nominated Clapper to replace Cambone as undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

  With the exception of a few members of Congress who wanted a career civilian official at the helm of the intelligence community, President Obama’s decision to nominate Clapper to be the new DNI was met with approval by the Washington establishment because of his long experience in the intelligence world. A now retired senior intelligence official who served under Clapper during the Bush administration said of him, “Jim’s a really great guy. Funny, sharp-witted, completely apolitical, and smart as hell … He knows the intelligence business better than just about anybody I know.”

  But there were those within the intelligence community, many of whom were angry about Denny Blair’s firing, who were not happy with Clapper’s nomination, largely because they viewed him as too committed to keeping the Pentagon’s intelligence resources divorced from the control of the office of the DNI. One of Denny Blair’s former aides warned, “Don’t overestimate him [Clapper]. He seems warm and cuddly. But he’s not the expert t
hat everyone makes him out to be.”

  Clapper inherited the same predicament as his predecessor sixteen months earlier, only he had more resources to play with. The U.S. intelligence community was slightly larger (210,000 people), and its annual budget had risen to $80.1 billion, equal to the combined amount spent by the U.S. Departments of Transportation and Education. Other government departments were having their budgets slashed, but not the intelligence community, which continued to get pretty much what it wanted. A May 2011 report to the president revealed that in addition to the money spent on intelligence, the U.S. government was spending $10.1 billion trying to keep its classified information a secret, which included the hefty sums currently being spent to upgrade the security of a variety of computer systems holding classified information in the aftermath of the massive leak of classified Pentagon and State Department documents to WikiLeaks in 2010.

  But the intelligence community was still failing to get its sometimes contrarian views taken seriously within the Obama administration. For instance, the White House and the Pentagon were still locked in a contest of wills with the intelligence community about how the wars in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan were going. The intelligence community’s view in the summer of 2010 was that they were not going well. The intelligence analysts at Liberty Crossing took the position that the military situations in both countries were largely locked in a stalemate, which was not what the White House or the Pentagon wanted to hear. Having promised to begin withdrawing U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan in July 2011, the Obama administration urgently needed some proof to demonstrate that progress was being made on these fronts. According to intelligence insiders, the White House and the Pentagon began following the Bush administration’s penchant of ignoring or suppressing any information from the intelligence community that reflected negatively on how the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan were progressing, while at the same time spinning a message that dramatic progress was being made on the battlefield.