[War] Who knew what when? What isn't being seen?

Redeye · May 22, 2002

This is indeed another in the ongoing "who knew what when" series of threads. However, in the process of this thread I hope to get a little farther along in the what has to change category, let alone with the who are we really up against? subjects.

One perspective on this very complicated set of subjects is presented quite ably in the series of three Debka articles, posted into Front Page by Jer48N10 into the thread <a href="http://pub16.ezboard.com/fthedailyfrm1.showMessage?topicID=208.topic">What Bush and Clinton Could Have Known</a> and into TB into the <a href="http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=30569">moles</a> thread. Those are must-reads, in my opinion also.
Of note is that the kind of intelligence service penetrations enumerated and hinted at by Debka were not done by Al Quaeda. Those penetration operations bear the hallmarks of major intelligence services.
It is also of note that certain of the intelligence leaks bear unmistakable evidence of complicity by certain high-level U.N. officials.
There is one more continuing facet of note of the war on terror that merits consideration: there are no reports of at all recent successful interception of non-tactical Al Quaeda electronic communications.

I would ask this of you: if you have a substantive contribution, please feel free to weigh in.
I am however not interested in rants on this thread. Not in the least. Thank you.

This thread is parallel to the <a href="http://pub16.ezboard.com/fthedailyfrm1.showMessage?topicID=242.topic">Front Page thread</a> of the same name.

Fair Use is invoked as and where appropriate.
R

From <a href="http://www.stratfor.com/fib/topStory_view.php?ID=204520">Stratfor</a> under Fair Use
R

<center><h4>Sept. 11: What Did Bush Know and When Did He Know It?</h4></center>
20 May 2002

Summary

Reports last week that the U.S. government received warnings about possible airline hijackings before Sept. 11 put the White House on the defensive. Despite the obvious desire by his opponents to use the issue against him, President George W. Bush cannot be blamed for not reacting to a few vague reports. However, he can be blamed for not yet making fundamental changes to a U.S. intelligence system whose divisions and emphasis on information collection over analysis led to Sept. 11.

Analysis

Nothing was more predictable than the crisis that blew up in Washington last week when it was revealed that the CIA had warned President George W. Bush prior to Sept. 11 that members of al Qaeda appeared to be plotting a series of airline hijackings. At the same time it was revealed that an FBI agent in Phoenix, Arizona, had written a memo stating that members of al Qaeda were receiving flying instructions in the United States.

Then, to show that such information was available during the Clinton years as well, a 1999 study was released asserting that al Qaeda might try suicide attacks on U.S. installations. Washington, which had grown torpid over the war, was suddenly galvanized. The question was, as Sen. Hillary Clinton put it: What did Bush know and when did he know it?

On Sept. 16, shortly after the attacks, STRATFOR wrote: "We have no doubt that, after the databases have been searched, it will be found that U.S. intelligence had plenty of information in some highly secure computer. The newspapers will trumpet, 'CIA knew identity of attackers.' That will be only technically true. Buried in the huge mounds of information perhaps once having passed across an overworked analyst's desk, some bit of information might have made its circuit of the agencies. But saying that U.S. intelligence actually "knew" about the attackers' plots would be overstating it. Owning a book and knowing what's in it are two vastly different things."

We expect that, over time, it will be discovered that far more was "known" about al Qaeda and its intentions than what has been released so far. It will be discovered that agents in obscure places had in fact discovered parts of the plot; that National Security Agency intercepts contained clear indications of al Qaeda's plans; that even more memos had gone to various federal agencies, including the White House, with bits and pieces of the puzzle.

Then someone will claim that the U.S. government "knew" all about the plot and that it either willfully disregarded the facts or deliberately refused to prevent it, for reasons not altogether clear. All such charges will be true and at the same time utterly unreasonable.

It is difficult to blame Bush for not noticing a vague report on potential hijackings amid the almost limitless stream of other warnings. He cannot be blamed for not seeing the Phoenix FBI field report that never left the FBI. Nor can Clinton be blamed for not reacting to the highly speculative report on the possibility of suicide bombers. Bush has taken a great deal of flak about issuing vague alerts against which no practical action can be taken. What could he possibly have done with the CIA warning?

What Bush can be blamed for is that, over the eight months following one of the worst intelligence failures in U.S. history, fundamental changes in how the United States carries out its intelligence mission have not even begun. Certainly some senior officials in the counterterrorism area have been dismissed, but the failure that led to Sept. 11 was not personal; it was systemic. It flowed directly from the fundamental architecture of American intelligence.

The Central Intelligence Agency, as the name suggests, was founded to centralize the intelligence function of the United States. It was a good idea then and it is a good idea now. Unfortunately, it is an idea that has never been truly implemented and from which, over time, the government has moved intractably away. A centralized intelligence capability is essential if the United States is to have a single, integrated, coherent picture of what is happening in the world. A bureaucratically fragmented intelligence community will generate a fragmented picture of the world. That is currently what we have.

The problem begins with the division between the CIA's Directorate of Operations (which carries out espionage and covert missions) and the Directorate of Intelligence (which is charged with analyzing the information provided). Perhaps this is good for security -- although the case of convicted spy Aldrich Ames indicates otherwise -- but it is not very good for integrated thinking. A wall between the collectors of information and the analysts of information is like a wall between the senses and the brain. It leads to stumbles.

The problem does not end there. The CIA is an intelligence organization, and its counter-intelligence frequently is given to another agency -- the FBI -- to keep them both honest. The FBI is primarily a police force. It deals with law enforcement on issues from kidnapping to narcotics to embezzlement.

The mindset of counter-intelligence and the mindset of law enforcement are very different. Getting these two cultures to coexist under a single umbrella does not necessarily increase the efficiency of either. One can imagine how, in a field office dealing with drug smuggling and interstate car theft, a report on al Qaeda might have gotten lost in the shuffle.

But such divisions are just the tip of the iceberg. The CIA is tasked with human intelligence. Signal intelligence -- intercepting electronic messages -- is the purview of the National Security Agency, which is not only huge but now is developing its own analytic cadre to make sense of the messages it intercepts.

Image intelligence -- from satellites to U-2s -- is handled by the National Reconnaissance Office (which operates the satellites) and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (which interprets images and also now makes maps). The latter organization is the result of a merger between the National Photographic Interpretation Center and the Defense Mapping Agency, which were integrated into a single structure because … well the reasons aren't clear, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

And still the list goes on. The Defense Department has its own intelligence service, the Defense Intelligence Agency, which focuses primarily on military matters. Of course, the CIA also has a unit focused on military intelligence, but that's fair enough since the DIA also runs Defense Human Services -- which is a human intelligence organization doing what the CIA is supposed to be doing. On top of this, each of the armed services maintains their own intelligence services, replete with signal, image and human intelligence.

Given this incredible tangle of capabilities, jurisdictions and competencies, it is a marvel that a finished intelligence product is ever delivered to decision makers. It is unclear whether any of these agencies completely understand their own internal vision, let alone that they are able to transmit a comprehensive picture to the CIA (which is supposed to integrate all this into a coherent world view and serve it up to the president and other senior officials for action).

Which brings us to the deepest and most intractable problem. As STRATFOR has said before, the U.S. intelligence community is obsessed with the collection of data. Apart from the Directorate of Intelligence at the CIA and sections of the DIA, the rest of the U.S. intelligence system is overwhelmingly geared toward the collection, rather than the analysis, of information. The result is inevitable: a huge amount of information is gathered, but it is never turned into intelligence.

To turn information into intelligence, it must be collated with other information, integrated into a coherent picture, interpreted and used to forecast actions. The current architecture of the intelligence community makes collation and integration structurally impossible. It is not merely a matter of sharing but also a matter of culture.

The FBI collects huge amounts of human intelligence. It has an extremely small analytical staff. Its administrators evaluate the significance of intelligence. Some administrator in the FBI decided that the Phoenix report was not worth pursuing. The facts are not in on this, but it is highly likely that no one provided him with any guidance as to what was significant and what was not, and it is almost certain that he did not have an appropriate context for drawing judgments himself.

Between the labyrinthine structure of the intelligence community and its obsession with collection over analysis, it is inevitable that vast amounts of information never coalesce into intelligence. The collection capacity of the United States, both technical and human, is vast. But it is deliberately and institutionally compartmentalized in such a way that prevents a coherent perspective from emerging.

Even more important, the analytic capability is dwarfed by the collection efforts. Information collected but not analyzed is the same as information that never existed. Continued increases in spending on collection is wasted money unless the analytic program grows faster to make up for tragically lost time.

The CIA failed to bring critical information to the president because it did not know that information. We remain certain that if we searched all of the databases and memos we would find that the U.S. government had collected much of the information that would have been necessary to prevent Sept. 11. It was there. But it wasn't collated, integrated, or analyzed and therefore could not be disseminated.

Bush cannot therefore be faulted for not reacting to reports he never saw nor for failing to react to vague threats. He is, however, entirely responsible for not having taken dramatic and decisive steps toward reorganizing the intelligence community after Sept. 11. He has permitted business to go on as usual, in spite of the manifest failure -- not of the individuals in the community, but of the architecture in which they worked.

The current proliferation of intelligence agencies wasn't the intention of those who conceived of a CIA. There is no reason the United States must endure the proliferation of agencies that leads, regardless of intent, to non-cooperation and non-communication.

Most important, there is no reason at all why the obsession with extraordinarily expensive collection technologies and methods should not be shifted to a more balanced approach between collection and analysis. Intercepting all cell phone conversations out of Afghanistan is great -- but only if someone who understands the Pushtun language is available to translate them and someone with knowledge and imagination is standing by to try and understand what the phone calls meant. Having every phone call in the world sitting in a database isn't worth the price of the computer.

Redeye · May 22, 2002

From <a href="http://www.financialsense.com/stormwatch/geo/analysis.htm">Financial Sense.com</a>:

Tuesday, May 21, 2002
<center><h4>"The Dots That Weren't Connected"</h4></center>
by J. R. Nyquist

National unity has finally given way to recriminations. Last week it was learned that the CIA briefed President George W. Bush last Aug. 6 about a potential hijacking threat from Osama bin Laden. The Aug. 6 briefing, however, was tentative and incomplete. It did not contain information from FBI agents in Phoenix and Minneapolis about bin Laden operatives enrolled at U.S. flight schools (where they were eager to learn how to fly without knowing how to take off or land).

The sad fact is, the FBI did not look closely enough at the U.S. flight schools. Analysts did not put two and two together. In terms of the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. officials at all levels and in all departments had no feel for the looming threat. Even more egregious, there was no sense of urgency about the matter.

It would seem that a culture of negligence pervades our national security establishment. Consider the facts: The CIA failed to provide specific information that would have led to effective counter-measures; the FBI failed to investigate Islamist networks here on American soil (see "American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among us," by Steven Emerson); the Immigration and Naturalization services issued a student visa to a deceased Sept. 11 terrorist; and the Federal Aviation Administration took no meaningful steps to prevent aircraft hijackings after President Bush warned of the threat.
Today we are witnessing a replay of the Aug. 6 warning. Once again we have intelligence of an impending al Qaeda strike. Once again, the warning is non-specific. We are only told to expect an attack involving mass deaths. Vice President Richard Cheney offered the following statement during an interview on NBC's Meet the Press: "In my opinion the prospects of a future attack against the U.S. are almost certain. It's not a matter of if, but when."

On Friday U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters, "The likelihood is - because it's not possible to defend at every place at every moment - that there will be another terrorist attack. We should just face that reality."
The New York Times recently reported that U.S. intelligence suspects a significant terrorist strike is being prepared. An intensification of terrorist activity has been detected in recent weeks. Messages between terrorist camps referring to mass U.S. casualties have been intercepted. But without specific information what can U.S. officials do? Will the attack be biological, nuclear or chemical? Will it involve truck bombs or random shootings?

The problem of Aug. 6, the problem of not having enough to go on, the problem of not knowing how to put the various pieces together, remains before us. Our national mindset has not changed significantly since Sept. 11. Instead of thinking like a nation at war, instead of focusing our minds on thwarting the enemy's deadly intentions, we have fallen into petty bickering.

Last week Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota) said he was "gravely concerned" that the president failed to act after receiving the Aug. 6 warning about bin Laden. "Why was [this warning] not provided to us, and why was it not shared with the general public for the last eight months?" Daschle wants full disclosure on the subject. House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Missouri) called for an investigation, as did Sen. Hillary Clinton. The egregious Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Georgia) stepped forward to claim her vindication. She had previously charged Bush with allowing the Sept. 11 attacks to occur in order to guarantee huge oil profits to key supporters. "I've been told to 'sit down and shut up' over and over again," said McKinney. "Well, I won't 'sit down and shut up' until the full and unvarnished truth is placed before the American people."

The Bush administration was not amused. Vice President Richard Cheney warned Democratic politicians during a speech last week in Manhattan, saying, "They need to be very cautious not to seek political advantage by making incendiary suggestions … that the White House had advance information that would have prevented the tragic attacks of 9/11." The vice president added that, "Such commentary is thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national leaders in time of war."

Other Republican politicians suggested that the Democrats were using the Sept. 11 tragedy as an opportunity to bash a Republican president. House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) expressed disappointment at the "deplorable, unconscionable way the Democrats are trying to make this a political issue." Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, (R-Mississippi) said, "For us to be talking like our enemy is George W. Bush instead of bin Laden, that's not right." National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice publicly stated that only a vague warning about a hijacking threat was relayed to the president on Aug. 6. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer offered a similar statement. "There's a sniff of politics in the air," the president told Republican colleagues.

Last August it was no secret that Al Qaeda's was planning to attack America. In early 1998 Osama bin Laden told ABC News that he intended to attack American targets. The director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, Yossef Bodansky, wrote a whole chapter on "The Bin Laden Plans" in his 1999 book, "Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America." According to Bodanksy, U.S. officials believed that terror strikes were being prepared against New York and Washington. According to Bodansky, "The terrorist leadership was laying the ground for the implementation of the 'bin Laden plans' when the December [1998] U.S.-Iraqi crisis occurred." Even earlier, in 1998, Time Magazine reported that bin Laden was preparing to strike Washington and New York. ABC correspondent John K. Cooley, in a 1999 book titled "Unholy Wars," quoted testimony from 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, who told FBI agent Brian Parr about a planned "kamikaze-type suicide attack on CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia." In September 1999 a CIA-commissioned report warned the Clinton White House that a bin Laden "martyrdom battalion" was planning to hijack commercial airliners and crash them into the Pentagon, CIA headquarters and other government buildings. The report was titled, "Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a terrorist and Why?"

It is a fact that U.S. officials from the Democratic side were told that commercial airliners could be hijacked and employed in suicide strikes. But no initiative from either party was undertaken to prepare Washington or New York's anti-air defenses or to improve airport security. As a matter of course, and in the best American tradition, the lax approach of the Clinton administration was passed along to the Bush administration; and this is normal. This is the way America goes about its business.

Former President Clinton admitted knowing about the possible use of airliners in a kamikaze role, but he discounted the CIA-commissioned report as "nothing to do with intelligence," adding that the U.S. analysts were merely speculating. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer pointed out that the 1999 report was also available to members of Congress. In other words, Democrats on Capitol Hill had full access to information about bin Laden's attack strategy. In fact, the American people had full access - at bookstores everywhere. Knowledge of the full range of threats to the United States is out there. It is available to anyone who cares. The reality is, however, that Americans take their security for granted. They assume the competence of their intelligence services. They assume the Pentagon is fatted with high-tech Napoleons. But reality is not so convenient. In a republic the leaders are often "the first to follow." Woe to any politician who finds himself interested in something that bores the public. The truth is, America is all about business and entertainment. It is about buying and selling and having fun. America's social system now runs on economic optimism. Any attempt to tell the truth about the vulnerability of our vast economic machine is met with blinking incomprehension. Those smart enough to climb into positions of authority know on what side their bread is buttered. And that is why the Sept. 11 attacks were not thwarted.

The failure of U.S. intelligence is a systemic failure, rooted in America's commercial orientation. In our culture strategic thinking is dismissed as "speculation" or "paranoia," security concerns are viewed as inconvenient. As a society we do not encourage strategic thinking. Instead, we encourage economic thinking. Mao's dictum that "political power flows out of the barrel of a gun" leaves us cold. Americans believe that power is based on dollars (i.e., green paper). One must have billions in green paper to be powerful. To make matters worse, there are politically correct obstructionists in the national security establishment. These are the folks who refuse to take threats seriously because the business of national security is inherently xenophobic if not racist. Such people would rather accept the risk of a successful enemy strike (and thousands of casualties) rather than take a hard line against illegal aliens, Arab extremists or "persons of color."

In 1999 a military advisor to the House Armed Services Committee told me that the Democratic members of the committee refused to attend hearings where former GRU Col. Stanislav Lunev testified about Russian preparations to plant weapons of mass destruction on U.S. soil.
"What reason did they give for refusing to attend," I asked.
"They called it stupid paranoia," he replied.

Consider the experience of a Chicago FBI agent who claims his superiors ignored vital warnings prior to Sept. 11. Agent Robert G. Wright, Jr. has filed a complaint with the Justice Department, alleging the FBI stifled warnings about an internal Islamist threat. "FBI management failed to take seriously the threat of terrorism in the United States," says Wright's lawsuit. "FBI management intentionally and repeatedly thwarted and obstructed Wright's attempts to launch a more comprehensive investigation that would identify terrorists , their sources and methods of funding before they attacked additional U.S. interests, killing more U.S. citizens." Wright has written a manuscript with the title "Fatal Betrayals of the Intelligence Mission."

It seems that the "conservative" right, with its economic orientation, is too focused on economic prosperity to give its full attention to national security. At the same time the "liberal" left, with its political correctness, is too focused on social justice to take a hard line against internal subversives and terrorists. Caught between the two opposing political camps, the country is told to spend the summer shopping or traveling (preferably by air).
American culture - political and intellectual - is headed for the chopping block. The tragic events of Sept. 11 did not change our basic mode of thought. We are yet committed to an economic optimism that indulges political and military fantasy.

© 2002 Jeffrey R. Nyquist <http://www.jrnyquist.com/>
May 21, 2002

Redeye · May 22, 2002

Please note the date of this article.
Please also note that it has been seperately reported that when Bin Laden stopped using his satelite cell phone in 1998, we lost a crucial set of communications intercepts.

From <a href="http://www.stratfor.com">Stratfor</a>, under Fair Use.
R

<center><h4>U.S. Faces Islamic Radical Network</h4></center>
16 September 2001

Summary

This week's terrorist attacks demonstrate clearly for the first time the existence of a multinational, global network of Islamic radicals and their sympathizers. The United States is gearing up for war against an enemy that may span half the globe and is comprised of thousands individuals and different organizations.

Analysis

The United States has declared war on international terrorism. In his weekly radio address Sept. 15, U.S. President George W. Bush warned Americans to brace themselves for "a conflict without battlefields or beachheads," and called on U.S. military personnel to get ready for battle. The president earlier met with his top security advisers at Camp David in order to hammer out a U.S. military response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

Identifying the enemy, however, will be neither simple nor straightforward. Several officials including U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell have named Saudi exile Osama bin Laden as the chief suspect. But evidence suggests that while his umbrella organization Al-Qa'ida was involved at some point, bin Laden himself isn't likely the mastermind behind the attacks. The skill and scope of the operation indicates that more than one base of support was necessary.

The operational resources required to pull off last week's attacks suggest the existence of a much larger threat, a multinational radical Islamic network with operatives and sympathizers all across the globe. Such a network likely connects a variety of Islamic radical and terrorist groups.

Understanding this is critical for Washington's war-fighting strategy. In aiming to dismantle the infrastructure supporting terrorist groups, the United States will now have to focus efforts on identifying members and supporters of this global network. Bin Laden and Al-Qa'ida will likely be only the first targets.

As the world's most notorious terrorist leader, bin Laden has provided training, logistics and support to a host of Islamic radicals including Algerian, Egyptian, Jordanian, Pakistani, Sudanese, Syrian and Yemeni nationals. His training camps in Afghanistan teach the tools and techniques of terrorism. Bin Laden could be thought of as the president of a university devoted to the education of radical Islamic terrorists.

But taking out bin Laden won't end the threat of more terrorist attacks against the United States because logic dictates that Al-Qa'ida could not have been the only organization involved in the Sept. 11 strikes.

Like any business venture, no one group would be able to supply all the resources. Instead, various aspects of the operation would be farmed out to different groups or individuals within the network. Al-Qa'ida as an umbrella organization is but one group within a network of radical Islamic groups that stretches from Cairo to Manila, from Kabul to Algiers.

The sheer scope and skill with which the operations were carried out required several levels of planning, organizing, intelligence and operational experience and capabilities.
The masterminds behind the Sept. 11 operation began forming their attack plan years ago. They would have needed to locate funding and likely turned to sympathetic financiers who could arrange for aid from sympathetic donors. The planners also would have set up separate departments with directors to handle counterintelligence, logistics, training, diplomatic covers and passports, finances and recruitment. At the same time, security likely was maintained by isolating each department from the others so that the organization was not compromised.
Each division would have required support from a variety of sources, which neither bin Laden nor his network could provide. In fact, to say bin Laden himself masterminded the assault overlooks some important limitations under which he is currently operating.

For one he is trapped in Afghanistan and is limited in what he can do. The Saudi dissident cannot even make phone calls and has had to resort to courier services in order to communicate with his associates.

For years, the United States tracked his communications and listened in on his phone conversations made over the Immarsat-3 satellite telephone network. Directing an operation like that of Sept. 11 requires flexible management that can adapt to a variety of situations, necessitating quick and reliable means of communication.

Even financing the operation would have required resources beyond bin Laden and Al-Qa'ida's ability. According to U.S. officials quoted by United Press International, Washington had bin Laden's financial and operational networks almost "completely mapped" by mid-1997.

This suggests bin Laden's finances have been at most severely limited and at least under constant surveillance. It would have been impossible for his bankers to wire money to operatives in the United States without tipping off U.S. intelligence agencies. Clearly, bin Laden could not have financed the Sept. 11 operation alone.

Al-Qa'ida could easily have provided training and perhaps even recruits. But there are several other organizations that could also be tapped for intelligence, logistical assistance, operational planning and financing. For example, the Egyptian group Al-Gama'at al-Islamiyya orchestrated the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and has experience operating in the United States. It also has links to Egyptian intelligence and business leaders who travel frequently and could provide information on airline security standards in the United States.

Another example of the diversity of the network comes from the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen last October. The group blamed for that attack has been linked to bin Laden, but there is no evidence that it acted directly under his command. That group, like the recent attackers, employed crude tactics and weapons in a sophisticated manner to cause massive damage. It managed to severely damage a U.S. destroyer, not to mention the U.S. sense of dominance, with an inflatable rubber boat.

Indeed, there are hundreds of radical Islamic organizations operating around the world, all individual and distinct from each other, that could have provided support. Although in the past most of these focused on local issues and did not operate beyond their national borders, a new picture is now emerging.

This picture is one of a global network tying all Islamic militant groups together in a loose coalition. Like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, this network comprises organizations and sympathetic individuals from all over the Muslim world, including financiers and aid donors, government officials and diplomats, former and possibly current military officers, intelligence agents, former and current guerrilla and militant groups, information technology specialists and operational commanders and their lieutenants.

It is then quite possible that the group that masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks is composed of individuals from several different countries. Indeed, the FBI's list of suspects reads like a student roster from the renowned Al-Ahzar University in Cairo. The operatives who carried out the attack came from countries across the Middle East, including possibly Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. There was no local issue tying them all together.

The United States thinks it is going to war with bin Laden, Al-Qa'ida or the unnamed group directly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. But taking down the infrastructure supporting these groups will require the United States to identify and dismantle the larger, global network. That, like dismantling the drug trafficking networks in Latin America, West Africa or Europe, will be a monumental task.

Redeye · May 22, 2002

Please note the date on this article also.

What factors enable the continued operation of this network?
Money certainly is one; since 9-11 we have seen massive efforts expended in attempting to deny Al Quaeda the ability to transfer funds around the world for obvious reasons.

From <a href="http://www.stratfor.com">Stratfor</a>, under Fair Use.
R

<center><h4>No Easy Battle</h4></center>
14 September 2001

Summary

In the wake of this week's terrorist attacks in the United States, the U.S. government is trying to decide how it can defeat its new style of enemy. The key to victory is finding the enemy's center of gravity, or what enables it to operate, and destroying it. But what has worked for the U.S. military in the past may not be enough this time around.

Analysis

The foundation of any successful military operation is defining and attacking the enemy's center of gravity: the capacity that enables it to operate. A war effort that does not successfully define the enemy's center of gravity, or lacks the ability to decisively incapacitate it, is doomed to failure.

The center of gravity can be relatively easy to define, as was the Iraqi command and control system, or relatively difficult to define, as was Vietnam's discovery of America's unwillingness to indefinitely absorb casualties. In either case, identifying the adversary's center of gravity is the key to victory.

In the wake of this week's terrorist attacks in the United States, this question is now being discussed in the highest reaches of the American government. The issue, from a military standpoint, is not one of moral responsibility or legal culpability. Rather, it is what will be required to render the enemy incapable of functioning as an effective force. Put differently, what is the most efficient means of destroying the enemy's will to resist?

This is an extraordinarily difficult process in this case because it is not clear who the enemy is. Two schools of thought are emerging though.

One argues that the attackers are essentially agents of some foreign government that enables them to operate. Therefore, by either defeating or dissuading this government from continuing to support the attackers, they will be rendered ineffective and the threat will end.

Such a scenario is extremely attractive for the United States. Posing the conflict as one between nation-states plays to American strength in waging conventional war. A nation-state can be negotiated with, bombed or invaded. If a nation-state is identified as the attackers' center of gravity, then it can by some level of exertion be destroyed. There is now an inherent interest within the U.S. government to define the center of gravity as Iraq or Afghanistan or both. The United States knows how to wage such wars.

The second school of thought argues that the entity we are facing is instead an amorphous, shifting collection of small groups, controlled in a dynamic and unpredictable manner and deliberately without a clear geographical locus. The components of the organization can be in Afghanistan or Boston, in Beirut or Paris. Its fundamental character is that it moves with near invisibility around the globe, forming ad hoc groups with exquisite patience and care for strikes against its enemies.

This is a group, therefore, that has been deliberately constructed not to provide its enemies with a center of gravity. Its diffusion is designed to make it difficult to kill with any certainty. The founders of this group studied the history of underground movements and determined that their greatest weakness is what was thought to be their strength: tight control from the center.

That central control, the key to the Leninist model, provided decisive guidance but presented enemies with a focal point that, if smashed, rendered the organization helpless. This model of underground movement accepts inefficiency -- there are long pauses between actions -- in return for both security, as penetration is difficult, and survivability, as it does not provide its enemies with a definable point against which to strike.

This model is much less attractive to American military planners because it does not play to American capabilities. It is impervious to the type of warfare the United States prefers, which is what one might call wholesale warfare. It instead demands a retail sort of warfare, in which the fighting level comprises very small unit operations, the geographic scale is potentially global and the time frame is extensive and indeterminate. It is a conflict that does lend itself to intelligence technology, but it ultimately turns on patience, subtlety and secrecy, none of which are America's strong suits.

It is therefore completely understandable that the United States is trying to redefine the conflict in terms of nation-states, and there is also substantial precedent for it as well. The precursor terrorist movements of the 1970s and 1980s were far from self-contained entities. All received support in various ways from Soviet and Eastern European intelligence services, as well as from North Korea, Libya, Syria and others. From training to false passports, they were highly dependent on nation-states for their operation.

It is therefore reasonable to assume the case is the same with these new attackers. It would follow that if their source of operational support were destroyed, they would cease to function. A bombing campaign or invasion would then solve the problem. The issue is to determine which country is supplying the support and act.

There is no doubt the entity that attacked the United States got support from state intelligence services. Some of that support might well have been officially sanctioned while some might have been provided by a political faction or sympathetic individuals. But although for the attackers state support is necessary and desirable, it is not clear that destroying involved states would disable the perpetrators.

One of the principles of the attackers appears to be redundancy, not in the sense of backup systems, but in the sense that each group contains all support systems. In the same sense, it appears possible that they have constructed relationships in such a way that although they depend on state backing, they are not dependent on the support of any particular state.

An interesting development arising in the aftermath is the multitude of states accused of providing support to the attackers: Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Algeria and Syria, among others, have all been suggested. All of them could have been involved in some way or another, with the result being dozens of nations providing intentional or unintentional support. The attackers even appear to have drawn support from the United States itself, as some of the suspected hijackers reportedly received flight training from U.S. schools.

The attackers have organized themselves to be parasitic. They are able to attach themselves to virtually any country that has a large enough Arab or Islamic community for them to disappear into or at least go unnoticed within. Drawing on funds acquired from one or many sources, they are able to extract resources wherever they are and continue operating.

If such is the case, then even if Iraq or Afghanistan gave assistance, they are still not necessarily the attackers' center of gravity. Destroying the government or military might of these countries may be morally just or even required, but it will not render the enemy incapable of continuing operations against the United States.

It is therefore not clear that a conventional war with countries that deliberately aided the culprits will achieve military victory. The ability of the attackers to draw sustenance from a wide array of willing and unwilling hosts may render them impervious to the defeat of a supporting country.

The military must systematically attack an organization that tries very hard not to have a systematic structure that can be attacked. In order for this war to succeed, the key capability will not be primarily military force but highly refined, real-time intelligence about the behavior of a small number of individuals. But as the events of the last few days have shown, this is not a strength of the American intelligence community.

And that is the ultimate dilemma for policymakers. If the kind of war we can wage well won't do the job, and we lack the confidence in our expertise to wage the kind of war we need to conduct, then what is to be done? The easy answer -- to fight the battle we fight best -- may not be the right answer, or it may be only part of the solution.

Redeye · May 22, 2002

As I wrote above:
What factors enable the continued operation of this network?
Money certainly is one; since 9-11 we have seen massive efforts expended in attempting to deny Al Quaeda the ability to transfer funds around the world for obvious reasons.

What would the sources for such funds be in general? The answer, in generalities, would be various individual players in the network, nation-states either as such or very covertly via their intelligence services, and finally, international organized crime.
How might some of the logistics of transporting people and supplies -- including ordinance -- be handled? Again I suggest that international organized crime be considered.

Below are several articles. Each is posted under Fair Use.
R

<a href="http://www.csis.org/goc/">Article link</a>
<center><h4>CSIS Global Organized Crime Project</h4></center>

Program Overview

"While organized crime is not a new phenomenon today, some governments find their authority besieged at home and their foreign policy interests imperiled abroad. Drug trafficking, links between drug traffickers and terrorists, smuggling of illegal aliens, massive financial and bank fraud, arms smuggling, potential involvement in the theft and sale of nuclear material, political intimidation, and corruption all constitute a poisonous brew-a mixture potentially as deadly as what we faced during the cold war."
R. James Woolsey Former Director of Central Intelligence and Global Organized Crime Project Steering Committee Member
With these words, then-Director of Central Intelligence R. James Woolsey issued a clear warning of a new threat to U.S. national security and laid the conceptual foundation for the Global Organized Crime project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Since then, the Global Organized Crime project has been a leader in assessing the breadth, depth, and impact of transnational threats (crime, terrorism, information warfare, weapons of mass destruction proliferation etc.) and in bridging expertise throughout the government and private sector in order to recommend concrete policy solutions aimed at the government and business to better prepare and respond to these challenges.

The problem of transnational crime and terrorism has become a central focus of United States foreign policy concern in the post-Cold War era. The rise of transnational organized crime is an unfortunate by-product of globalization, through which technological advances and lower barriers to trade have created a seamless electronic environment and empowered new classes of actors which bypass nation-states. Like legitimate business, transnational criminal enterprises are embracing globalization by adopting new communications and transportation technologies which allow them to pursue global markets. The criminal organizations are not monolithic, but act as networks, pursuing the same types of joint ventures and strategic alliances as legitimate global businesses.

The diffuse and dynamic nature of transnational operations makes criminal enterprises such as Russian organized crime groups, or the Columbian and Mexican narcotics cartels, difficult to identify and counter. Non-state actors such as terrorist organizations also benefit from transnational operations and access to advanced technologies, providing them with greater destructive power, greater ease of movement and concealment, and the means to spread their message globally.

Responding to these transnational threats blurs the traditional diplomatic, military, law enforcement, and intelligence roles and missions within the U.S. government. President Clinton highlighted the dangers of transnational organized criminal activity in his September 1995 address to the United Nations, recognizing "the growing nexus between terrorists, narcotics traffickers, and other international criminals that has been fostered by developments in international communications, travel and information-sharing, and the end of the Cold War." Through our Task Forces </goc/task.htm>, Publications <pubs.htm>, and Transnational Threats Resource Center </goc/threatsrc.html>, the Global Organized Crime project is developing policy recommendations that incorporate these new realities.

From <a href="http://www.stratfor.com">Stratfor</a>, under Fair Use...

<center><h4>Russian, Ukrainian Crime Groups Set To Corner Global Drug Market</h4></center>
8 April 2002
Summary

The Bush administration's new national counter-drug advertising campaign tells the U.S. public that consumers of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other illegal drugs are financing international terrorism. What the ads don't say is that most of the professional criminals who increasingly dominate the global narcotics and weapons trade where organized crime and political terrorism cross paths are Russian- or Ukrainian-born citizens of Israel.

Analysis

Russian and Ukrainian crime syndicates have been deeply involved in drug trafficking and illegal arms deals with militant organizations and insurgent groups around the world for years. However, the U.S. war against al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the escalation of the Colombian conflict, and the recent fall of several top Mexican drug kingpins have combined to create a window of opportunity for these lesser known syndicates to quickly become the dominant players in the global cocaine and heroin trade.

Recent reports from the Western Hemisphere and Central Asia indicate that this process has already begun. Russian mobsters are reportedly increasing their control of drug-smuggling routes from Afghanistan through Turkey and the former Soviet republics into Russia. It appears they are also developing strategic partnerships with drug traffickers in Colombia and Peru to grow poppy and export heroin to the United States and European Union.

As Russian and Ukrainian crime syndicates become the dominant actors in a global drug trade stretching from Central Asia to the Western Hemisphere, the U.S. government will likely be slow to adapt its counter-drug and counter-terrorism policies. So far, the Bush administration has not publicly identified Russian and Ukrainian syndicates as targets in the war on terrorism -- despite ample evidence that these rings have supplied huge amounts of weapons, armor and explosives to Islamic militants for years, and that they are substantially involved in drug trafficking and multiple other criminal enterprises in dozens of countries (the United States included).

The slow U.S. government response could be a reflection of a creaky American bureaucracy saddled with too many foreign policy crises simultaneously. It is also possible that the U.S. administration has yet to develop a policy for attacking international crime syndicates headquartered in politically difficult countries like Israel, Russia and Ukraine.

Another possibility is that the Bush administration has not directly addressed the issue of how to deal with these crime syndicates that are supplying weapons to militant groups because the majority of the Russian and Ukrainian crime lords that would be targeted are Jewish citizens of Israel. According to former State Department official Jonathan Winer, all 75 of the top Russian and Ukrainian crime kingpins the U.S. government was tracking worldwide at the end of the 1990s were citizens of Israel.

Robert I. Friedman -- a Ukrainian-American investigative reporter who is also Jewish and has written extensively about the Russian and Ukrainian mafia -- claims that efforts by U.S. federal law enforcement officials to investigate suspected mafia leaders have been blocked internally for years by higher-ups in the U.S. government, or have been hindered by negative publicity asserting that the investigations were motivated by anti-Semitism.

NEW CHALLENGES IN FIGHTING CRIME

U.S. policymakers given the task of developing a policy to interdict and dismantle the Russian and Ukrainian syndicates will confront a host of new challenges they have not faced while fighting Colombian and Mexican drug cartels.

For example, despite these organizations' international reach, the leaders of the top Colombian and Mexican cartels have always been based in their respective countries. They were able to escape detection and arrest for years by doling out bribes and laying low inside their own borders. However, the Medellin and Cali cartels were dismantled in Colombia during the 1990s, and now the leaders of Mexico's top rings are also being taken down.

In contrast, Russian and Ukrainian crime syndicates are borderless. Instead of being geographically confined to a single country, they operate out of multiple hubs in dozens of countries, linked by sophisticated computer and communications technologies and rapid commercial air travel. This broad geographic dispersal and multiplicity of command/control hubs, combined with the demonstrated ability of Russian and Ukrainian mobsters to build and dissolve strategic partnerships at will with other ethnic crime groups, will make it more difficult for U.S. counter-drug and -terrorism agents to track, interdict and dismantle the senior hierarchies.

Attacking these crime syndicates effectively means the U.S. government would have to negotiate new law enforcement partnerships with the governments of Israel, Russia and Ukraine, for starters. Tel Aviv, Moscow and Kiev are important command/control hubs for the international activities of Russian and Ukrainian mafia, according to U.S. and international law enforcement sources.

The U.S. government could not pursue these syndicates effectively without the full cooperation of the Israeli, Russian and Ukrainian governments, but securing such cooperation could be difficult. Israel will not extradite citizens, and it is believed that mafia groups are deeply entrenched in the Russian and Ukrainian governments.

DIVERSIFIED INDUSTRIES

Published U.S. and international reports indicate that other important hub cities in the global organizational map of the Russian and Ukrainian syndicates include Berlin, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Dublin, Geneva, Glasgow, Karlsbad, London, Los Angeles, Macao, Madrid, Miami, New York, Prague, Quebec, Sydney, Toronto, Vancouver, Warsaw and Washington.

The FBI has identified Russian and Ukrainian organized crime syndicates operating in 50 countries and 30 U.S. states. Other mafia experts, including investigative journalist Friedman, estimate that more than 250 major Russian and Ukrainian crime syndicates are operating worldwide today, and at least 30 of the largest are operating from within the United States.

In addition to geographic dispersal, many Russian and Ukrainian syndicates are reportedly led and crewed by individuals with master's and doctorate degrees in mathematics, physics, economics and engineering. Some are former KGB or military officials with backgrounds in special operations, intelligence and espionage. They are significantly more educated and worldly than their Colombian, Mexican or American counterparts, and they have access to financial and technological resources in Russia and Ukraine not readily available to Colombian, Mexican or Cosa Nostra criminal organizations. Russian and Ukrainian mobsters are also much more violent than their Colombian or Mexican counterparts, according to U.S. law enforcement sources.

Numerous published news reports, congressional testimony in Washington and official statements from governments and law enforcement agencies around the world paint the following picture of the Russian and Ukrainian mafia:

In the United States, these groups already have pulled off some the biggest insurance, Medicare and stock frauds in history. They also run sophisticated Internet credit card scams, deal in counterfeit currencies and launder money, traffic narcotics and weapons, run gambling and protection rackets, manage prostitution and sex slave industries, and steal gasoline and other fuels. Ukrainian Jewish mafia kingpins also reportedly laundered about $9 billion through the Bank of New York during Russia's financial meltdown in 1998, and are believed to be fixing games in the National Hockey League.

Outside the United States, these crime syndicates are supplying weapons to insurgents, paramilitaries and drug traffickers in Colombia, Brazil and the Andean region. For example, Ukrainian mobsters operating from Tel Aviv and Kiev are believed to have participated in the shipment of 10,000 AK-47s to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 1998 through former Peruvian spy chief Vladimir Montesinos.

Mafia groups based in the North Hollywood district of Los Angeles and Brighton Beach in New York City have also negotiated strategic partnerships with Mexico's Tijuana cartel in Baja California, and with drug traffickers in Colombia, to ship hundreds of tons of cocaine to North America. In fact, Russian and Ukrainian syndicates have been swapping weapons for drugs with Colombian drug traffickers, guerrillas and paramilitaries since the early 1990s.

These groups also have sold huge amounts of weapons -- including tanks, armored personnel carriers, field artillery, helicopters and fixed-wing combat aircraft -- to clients such as the Taliban in Afghanistan and combatants in Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Sierra Leone, Congo, Rwanda, Angola and Chechnya. There, separatist Chechen rebels use Russian weapons supplied by Russian mobsters to kill Russian soldiers.

Mafia syndicates are said to have also sold cargo aircraft and helicopters to the Colombian drug cartels, provided them with sophisticated weapons and communications equipment and laundered Colombian and Mexican drug money in Russia, where organized crime syndicates are believed to own or control more than 80 percent of the country's banks. On two occasions, Russian syndicates also tried unsuccessfully to provide Colombian drug traffickers with submarines to ship multi-ton loads of cocaine.

In Canada, the mafia completely disrupted the diamond industry with moissanite faux-stones smuggled from Russia that are difficult to distinguish from real diamonds. Crime groups are moving into Vancouver in an effort to corner the city's booming marijuana industry and build strategic partnerships with ethnic Chinese gangs running criminal rackets along the U.S. West Coast.

Mafia syndicates reportedly control cigarette-smuggling and prostitution in Britain's Midlands region, run counterfeit passport operations out of Ireland and are buying up choice real estate on Australia's Gold Coast while they simultaneously build arms and drug distribution networks in the Asia Pacific region.

Russian organized crime syndicates have also reportedly made drugs-for-weapons business with Islamic extremist groups for years, including with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization. For example, the newspaper Scotland on Sunday reported Sept. 16, 2001 that bin Laden built his fortune in part by working with Russian mafia operations in Qatar and Cyprus. Russian mobsters also reportedly bought weapons for bin Laden in Ukraine and shipped them secretly into the Persian Gulf and Horn of Africa, and laundered money for bin Laden through mafia-owned banks in Central Asia and Eastern Europe.

Additionally, on Oct. 4, 2001, the Ottawa Citizen reported that Russian and Central Asian organized crime syndicates had close ties with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, an extremist Muslim group that allegedly swaps heroin for weapons with the Russians. The IMU is tied to al Qaeda, the newspaper report added. Two weeks later, on Oct. 16, the Czech News agency quoted arms control expert Friedrich Steinhausler saying in an ARD Television interview that al Qaeda tried to obtain nuclear material with the help of Russian organized crime syndicates.

FOCUS ON ISRAEL

Any concerted global strategy by the United States to take down the most dangerous Russian and Ukrainian crime lords would have to include Israel very early in its execution.

News reports in the United States, Israel, Europe and Russia indicate that many Russian and Ukrainian crime syndicates view Israel as a vital and secure hub from which to conduct their shady international enterprises, including arms smuggling, drug trafficking and money laundering. In fact, Israeli law enforcement officials estimate that Russian and Ukrainian syndicates have invested between $4 billion and $20 billion in the Israeli economy since the 1970s. Some Israeli law enforcement officials also believe that up to 10 percent of the more than 800,000 Russian Jews who settled in Israel during the past 30 years are involved in organized criminal enterprises, mainly in other countries.

Moreover, in June 1996, the chief of Israeli police intelligence, Brig. Gen. Hezi Leder, reportedly prepared a classified intelligence assessment in which he concluded that Russian crime groups had become a "strategic threat" to Israel's existence.

Investigative journalist Friedman says some of these crime syndicates are so entrenched in Israel's economic and political establishment that in the mid-1990s they ran several handpicked candidates for local and national office. Mafia leaders are also believed to have contributed more than $1.5 million to former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's campaign in 1996, with introductions arranged by Russian-born Natan Sharansky -- leader of the Russian Yisrael Ba-Aliya and interior minister in Ehud Barak's government.

Sharansky has admitted publicly that he accepted political contributions and aid from Grigori Loutchansky -- who, according to the U.S. State Department and CIA, is a longtime bridge between Russian organized crime and foreign governments -- in return for resettling Russian Jews.

Netanyahu denied the allegation that he accepted any contributions from Russian crime figures. However, as prime minister he terminated an investigation of Russian and Ukrainian crime syndicate penetration of Israel's economy and government, which had been launched as a result of police Chief Leder's June 1996 intelligence assessment. The investigation has not been revived.

Redeye · May 22, 2002

Among the largest of players in international organized crime, both in size and in number of groups, are what is collectively known as the "Russian Mafia".
The question of to what degree the Russian Mafia runs Russia, or vice-versa, cannot be ignored.
Has Putin been attempting to make progress in regaining control from OC? Good question indeed.

This 1997 article reporting the testimony for Congress is pertinent background on the Russian OC situation and its international implications.
Under Fair Use, of course.
R

<center><h4>Russian Organized Crime</h4></center>
Arnaud de Borchgrave </html/4deborch.html>
Director, Global Organized Crime Project </goc/>

<center>Testimony before the U.S. House of Representives Committee on International Relations</center>

October 1, 1997

On September 24, President Yeltsin said that "criminals have today brazenly entered the political arena and are dictating its laws, helped by corrupt officials. They can penetrate everywhere unless the whole of society, from top to bottom, joins in an effort to eradicate this scourge. Our policy on this will be very tough."

This was Mr. Yeltsin's seventh crackdown in six years against organized crime and corruption. Three years ago, President Yeltsin called his country, the Russian Federation, with 150 million people and over 20,000 nuclear warheads, "the biggest mafia state in the world... the superpower of crime that is devouring the state from top to bottom." The situation has not improved since then.

Grigory Yavlinsky, the leader of the reform "Yabloko" party, and a declared candidate for the presidency in 2000, was in Washington last week when he said, "A corrupted system of criminal power has been established in Russia and now poses the main threat to the economy... Not a single widely publicized [contract] murder, including of well-known journalists and the deputy governor of St. Petersburg, was successfully investigated in Russia over the last five years. A political will rather than the criminal code is needed to break the stranglehold of crime and corruption."

While there are numerous investigative stories by reporters covering Russian organized crime (OC), there is no comprehensive study assessing the breadth and depth of the threat, the extent to which (OC) and corruption are undermining privatization and Russia's transition to a market economy -- and perhaps most important of all, examining the implications for U.S. policy toward Russia.

CSIS released such a study </goc/pubs.html> September 29 (1997), the result of two years of work by a Task Force made up of experts drawn from the intelligence, law enforcement, corporate and academic communities. The report's key findings and a summary of its recommendations are attached to this testimony.

The CSIS report focuses on more than simply the organized crime problem in Russia. Much of the Russian state and economy is now on the verge of becoming a criminal oligarchy dominated by:
1. Corrupt officials at all levels of the bureaucracy, from government Minister to tax collector and low-level bureaucrat;
2. Successful, full-time professional crime syndicate bosses;
3. Businessmen for whom existing Russian law and Western norms of commerce are simply obstacles to be overcome in one way or another.

Russia's deputy Military Prosecutor, Lt. Gen. Stanislav Gaveto, captured the crime crisis well when he said Russia is faced with "the wholesale criminalization of the life of our entire society, every pore of the state mechanism is steeped in corruption and abuse..."

About two-thirds of the Russian economy is under the sway of OC, including 40% of private business, 60% of remaining state-owned enterprises and more than half of the country's 1,740 banks. Those are estimates of the MVD, Russia's Interior Ministry. Crime syndicates enjoy the protection of the ruling oligarchy which consolidated its power during Mr. Yeltsin's illnesses in 1996 and early 1997.
200 of Russia's largest crime gangs are now global conglomerates.

There are some 280 ongoing criminal investigations of Russian organized crime involvement with U.S. counterparts.

Former First Deputy Minister of the Economy Vladimir Panskov recently wrote in Pravda that $250 billion "leaked from Russia over four years." The Bank of France estimates that in 1994, Russians invested $50 billion in 30 western countries. Interior Minister Kulikov's own estimates range from $150 billion to $300 billion. By way of comparison, total western aid to Russia from all western countries, principally Germany, and from international institutions, since 1992 is $74 billion.
In his speech to the upper house of parliament last week, Mr. Yeltsin said he was considering an amnesty for those who have squirreled their ill-gotten gains abroad, with a levy of 10% to 15% of the sums involved to be paid to the state.

The old Soviet nomenklatura, with the help of criminal organizations, privatized the economy into their own hands, selling off state assets, rather than creating new ones, and exporting capital, rather than creating it.
The rule of law has been displaced by criminals and gang chieftains who are de facto adjudicators; "krysha," or roof, are the protection rackets that have replaced legal functions and safeguards.

The first round of privatizations supervised by Anatoly Chubais, now a First Deputy Prime Minister, consisted of rigged auctions in favor of pre-selected individuals or banks, with crime syndicates the principal beneficiaries. The Analytical Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences estimated that "55% of the capital and 80% of voting shares were transferred during the privatization process into the hands of domestic and foreign criminal capital." Prosecutor General Yuri Skuratov reported 2,000 privatization crimes in 1996 alone. His military counterpart said he had 6,000 major cases of corruption in the military last year, most of them committed by officers.
But Mr. Skuratov says he is "greatly troubled by the extremely incoherent official policy of counteracting crime. Practically no money has been allocated to anti-crime programs." and he concludes that "the fight against crime is a facade." Law enforcement agencies, according to Mr. Yeltsin's own Kremlin analytical service, "have been thoroughly compromised by organized crime."

In 1997, Russia's central bank reported that three commercial banks between them had diverted some $500 million in federal budget funds into high-yielding securities markets. The banks claimed market losses, the money vanished, and the government was powerless to get its money back.
Today, Boris Nemtsov and Chubais, both First Deputy Prime Ministers, are engaged in mortal combat to wrest control of the economy from a semi-criminal oligarchy. A plot to assassinate Chubais was uncovered two weeks ago. His close ally, Mikhail Manevich, the deputy governor of St. Petersburg, was gunned down this summer on the city's main thoroughfare. He was scheduled to go public the next day with names and places of OC's involvement in privatization scams.

The limited successes of Chubais and Nemtsov are invariably matched, or even exceeded, by developments engineered by the oligarchy they are powerless to cope with. It should be noted these two reformers do not control the security services or law enforcement.

The broad impact of the crime-dominated state for U.S. foreign policy is illustrated by ~recent, allegations that Russian Space Agency Director Yuri Koptev was involved in transferring missile technology to Iran. Going against official Russian policy, Koptev was allegedly motivated by personal financial considerations.

The CSIS report, the second in a series of seven under the Center's Global Organized Crime Project, dispels the widely held perception that Russia is a market economy run by a hot team of reformers. Many have argued that Russia's struggle against OC and corruption is the primitive accumulation stage of early capitalism, much like the American "robber barons" of the late 19th century.

A World Bank report says this is a dangerous assumption that does not hold up to critical analysis. America's early entrepreneurs rode roughshod over laws and created huge industrial enterprises that were of enormous value to society as a whole. Profits were ploughed back in the U.S., not sent abroad for safekeeping in anonymous bank accounts.
In the U.S ., a self-correcting political and legal system curbed the excesses of the robber barons and capitalism matured.

In Russia, former Communist Party officials, KGB operatives, and OC syndicate chiefs, sold off state assets, did not create new ones, and moved scores of billions of dollars of plunder abroad, instead of reinvesting in Russia. 

According to knowledgeable intelligence sources in several countries (U.S., Russia, the U.K. and Germany), the plunder began in early 1986 during the glasnost/perestroika phase of the Gorbachev regime. That is when certain key figures of the CPSU's Central Committee- concluded that omnipotence could soon turn to oblivion.

So they began advanced planning for the redistribution of the funds and resources of the Soviet Union. These plans included transferring what was then under the control of the Property Section of the Central Committee (CC) -- the entire wealth of the country -- to new commercial structures outside the control of whatever followed glasnost and perestroika policies.
This overall plan required the creation of scores of banks hundreds of new commercial firms that could then be granted total control of state property at bargain prices. The banks later gerrymandered auctions for the privatization of major state-controlled enterprises, thus consolidating the oligarchy spawned by the CC's plan.
Lacking personnel experienced in banking and business, the CC's Administration Department turned to the KGB for additional manpower. By late 1986, the CC's informal planning committee delegated implementation of the plan to two senior officers of the KGB's First Chief Directorate whose assignments had included moving funds abroad for the CC's International Department and for their own operational purposes.

Planning meetings were chaired by CC Treasurer Nikolai Kruchin. Only two copies of the minutes of these meetings were made -- one for the CC official in charge of Administration for the Politburo, the other for then KGB Chairman Viktor Chbrikov.

The plan was carried out in four stages:
1. Suitcases and diplomatic pouches of cash, diamonds, gold and icons were sent abroad to generate the funds needed to sustain the new commercial- enterprises abroad and their foreign bank accounts.
2. Once the foreign infrastructure was in place, state enterprises, factories and organizations were ordered to transfer state funds to head offices in the Soviet republics -and thence to the west.
3. Trading firms were created to act as intermediaries to sell Russian resources, such as oil, non-ferrous metals, chemicals and cotton. These new trading entities received these materials at state subsidized "internal prices" and then sold abroad a few points below western prices. At one stage, oil prices in the west were ten times the "internal" Soviet price. Profits from these highly lucrative operations were deposited in tax havens in Cyprus, Switzerland, the British Channel islands, Ireland, the Cayman Islands, Antigua, Aruba, Panama, and Hong Kong. These funds, in turn, were available for so-called western investment" in Russia and the ex-Soviet republics under the cover of being "Western Joint Ventures." Such joint ventures were denounced by President Yeltsin in 1994 as "criminal enterprises." Most of them were created between 1989 and 1992.
4. In the final stage (1994-present), the new oligarchy built and consolidated highly sophisticated global conglomerates. Former agents of the KGB's Sixth Directorate, which was in charge of combating crime in the Soviet Union, resurfaced as key players in OC's business ventures.

A Russian businessman who was framed and coopted by OC and then betrayed when a scapegoat was needed under the guise of U.S.-Russian law enforcement cooperation spoke on condition his name would not be disclosed. "Today," he said, "to all intents and purposes, the mafia, the government, law enforcement agencies, the economy and the media are one and the same."

Grigory Yavlinsky, for his part says, "The path which Russia is traveling cannot be hidden forever. and the longer it is concealed, the higher the price will be -- for everyone... The false political picture of what is going on in Russia is creating the climate for business failure..."

The CSIS report sets out to shed light on this false picture. The big battles that remain to be fought will determine whether Russia follows the road to the rule of law of the U.S. and Europe, or the one that leads to further consolidation of crime-dominated oligarchies.
Boris Nemtsov argues that those who defend the monopolies in their current form are consciously or unconsciously defending OC and corruption. On the economic front, the battles that lie ahead are for tax reform, breaking up the monopolies, establishing transparency in commercial practices, improving corporate governance. For any of these battles to be won, a reliable enforcement and regulatory regime must be created to replace the "krysha," and other forms of private intimidation and extorsion as the means for settling business disputes. Interior Minister Kulikov estimates that one third of business expenses go to bribing officials. His MVD Ministry issued a 30-page report which says "the main conclusion of criminologists and economists who compiled the report was that the state of law and order in the area of organized crime offers no ground for optimism."

Prosecutor General Yuri Skuratov said that "the growing scope of organized crime and the overall crime situation in the country are so complicated and dangerous that if we do not take decisive steps in the near future we shall be forced to concede the victory of the criminal communities."
Russian OC operates with criminal counterparts in some 50 foreign countries. Law enforcement is faced with a new breed of transnational criminals with hightech methodologies. The scope for large-scale international fraud to flourish undetected grows in tandem with the power and speed of computers, which now doubles every nine months.

The "European Union Bank" established itself in Antigua in the mid-1990s. It advertised itself as the first full-service Internet bank and drew depositors from all over the world. This summer it suddenly went off the 'Net and its two Russian owners took off with all the depositors' money. The bank, it now turns out, had been established by a Russian OC syndicate.

In a digitalized global economy, income streams can no longer be linked to geographic locations. Our policy-planners and decision-makers are yet to come to grips with a highway on which traffic moves at the speed of light, which spans the globe, without road sips, traffic lights or speed cops; without international borders, with no need for customs, immigration officers or tax collectors. and, more alarmingly, an environment that tends to leave law enforcement in the dust.

Bob Weaver, the head of the Secret Service's Electronic Crimes Division, stated the obvious when he said that our laws are behind the eight ball; that the explosion of technology and the Internet give criminals the advantage to do more, better and faster, with instant global capabilities. Law enforcement agencies, he added, simply do not have the resources, the training and the equipment to target cyber criminals.
The coming wave of cyberterrorism will present an even greater challenge. New, highly educated, computer literate generations of terrorists are not thinking in terms of truckloads of explosives, nor briefcases of sarin gas, nor dynamite strapped to the bodies of fanatics, as Hamas and Islamic Jihad do today. Tomorrow's hightech terrorists are plotting attacks with one's and zero's, at a place where we are most vulnerable -- namely the point at which the "physical" and the "virtual" worlds converge, the place where we live and function and the place in which computer programs function and data moves.

The National Information Infrastructure (NII) is extremely vulnerable to disruption from either physical or logical attack. This insecurity has created what DOD calls "a tunnel of vulnerability previously unrealized in the history of conflict."
Would-be terrorists have been experimenting with the 'Net. They clearly perceive a global reach for their activities as they train themselves with the tools of information~mat warfare. Last January, the Defense Science Board's Task Force on Information Warfare issued a little noted report that called for "extraordinary action" because "current practices and assumptions are ingredients in a recipe for a national security disaster." It predicted that by 2005, attacks on U.S. information systems by terrorist groups, international crime syndicates and foreign espionage agencies would be "widespread."

The CIA treats information warfare as one of the two main threats to national security -- the other being NBC weapons of mass destruction. The myth persists that we have not been invaded since 1812. Yet cyberattacks are now a daily occurrence. The fact is that four out of five of our major corporations have been successfully intruded -- but only 17% of them admit in confidential surveys that they have alerted law enforcement agencies. Firstly, they do not wish to undermine consumer confidence and shareholder value by exposing themselves to possible leaks, and secondly, they believe there is little law enforcement can do about it given its meager resources.

Foreign espionage agencies, including some of allied countries, have used hacker networks brazenly to overcome triple electronic firewalls and sniff out proprietary secrets from some of our hightech firms. Today there are already eight hostile or potentially hostile nations have developed the required technology and skills to wage information warfare by means of electronic sabotage and lethal destruction. and 120 nations have developed computer attack capabilities.

Meanwhile, cybercrime pays -- big time. The Chaos Computer Club (CCC), a German hackers group based in Hamburg, demonstrated on national TV that they can use Microsoft Internet technology to steal money from one account and put it into another without the use of personal ID or PIN number during an online banking transaction.
Law enforcement's capabilities are now from five to ten years behind the transnational crime curve. Its agencies should be given authorization to order state-of-the-art computer systems as soon as they become available, thus bypassing the 49 months it now takes to order, acquire and install a new system (vs. 9 months in the private sector).

Redeye · May 22, 2002

I hesitate to lay out more of the scope of Russian OC's involvement in Israel, yet I also feel that that information is necessary to understand the global OC picture and its implications on our war on terror.

The qualifications of the author of the article below are strong indeed. However, it bears remembering that like so many single-subject experts, he may be seeing the problems of the world through only one lense.

From <a href="http://www.freedomsite.org/pipermail/fs_discussion/2000-June/000433.html">FreedomSite</a>, under Fair Use.
My apologies for the less-then-desirable formatting of some of the below.
R

<center><h4>Red Mafiya: How The Russian Mob Has Invaded America</h4></center>

By Robert I. Friedman

Of all the nations where the Russian mob has established a presence, none has been more deeply compromised than the State of Israel, America's staunchest ally in the volatile Middle East. More than 800,000 Russian Jews have made aliyah or settled in Israel since the first massive wave of immigration in the 1970s. The Russians took advantage of Israel's most sacred law--the Right of Return, which guarantees Jews the right to return to their ancestral home land, where they would receive citizenship and live as free men and women outside the odious yoke of anti-Semitism.
"The Russians are a blessing," said Israel's top political
columnist Nachum Barnea, who stands in public awe of their brilliant intellectual gifts in a variety of fields.

But just as in Brighton Beach, Russian immigration to Israel has brought a more unwelcome element--the vor v zakonye and their criminal minions. Ten percent of Israel's five million Jews are now Russian, and 10 percent of the Russian population "is criminal," according to NYPD notes of a briefing in Manhattan by Israeli police intelligence official Brigadier General Dan Ohad.

"There is not a major Russian organized crime figure who we are tracking who does not also carry an Israeli passport," says senior State Department official Jonathan Winer. He put
the number at seventy-five, among whom are Mogilevich,
Loutchansky, Rabinovich, and Kobzon.

Many of the mobsters who have Israeli citizenship, such as Eduard Ivankov and Sergei Mikhailov, are not even Jewish. In the mid-1990s, an Israeli police sting-- code-named Operation Romance--netted, among others, a high-ranking Interior Ministry official who was taking payoffs from Mikhailov and convicted KGB spy Shabtai Kalmanovitch to issue passports to dozens of Russian gangsters, according to Brigadier General Hezi Leder, the Israeli police attache in Washington, and classified FBI documents. (Kalmanovitch, after serving time in an Israeli prison for treason, became one of Moscow's most notorious mobsters and frequently returns to Israel.)

Russia's criminal aristocracy covets Israeli citizenship "because they know Israel is a safe haven for them," said Leder. "We do not extradite citizens."

"The Russians then use the safe haven to travel around the world and rape and pillage," added Moody.

The country has also remained attractive to gangsters because "Israel is good for money laundering," explained Leder. Under Israeli law, banks can accept large cash deposits with no questions asked. In one instance, a corrupt
ex-deputy prime minister of Ukraine smuggled $300 million of illicit cash into Israel in several suitcases, and deposited it into a bank, as Israeli Minister of National Security Moshe Shahal told a gathering of intelligence heads in June 1996.
"I've watched Russian mobsters exchange suitcases full of
cash out in the open at the Dan Hotel's swimming pool," laughed an American underworld crime figure. "Israel is a
country that encourages people to come and invest money,"
said Leder. "There is no mechanism to check the origin of
the money."

Israeli police officials estimate that Russian mobsters have poured more than $4 billion of dirty money into Israel's economy, though some estimates range as high as $20 billion. They have purchased factories, insurance companies, and a bank. They tried to buy the now defunct, pro-labor Party Davar daily newspaper, and the pro-Likud Maariv, the nation's second largest newspaper. They have even put together a koopa, or a pool of money, for bribes and other forms of mutual support. One of Leder's greatest fears is that the Russians will compromise Israel's security by buying companies that work for the military-industrial complex. The mobsters, in fact, attempted to purchase a gas and oil company that maintains strategic reserves for Israel's military. "They could go to the stock market and buy a company that's running communications in the military sector," he complains.

Insinuating themselves throughout the country, Russian dens have bought large parcels of impoverished development towns, taking over everything from local charities to the town hall. For instance, Gregory Lerner, a major Russian crime boss who arrived in Israel with huge amounts of money, allegedly owns everything from fashionable restaurants to parts of several port city waterfronts.

"Do you know what Gregory Lerner did in Ashkelon!" Leder asked me during an interview in New York. "His mother was three times in the hospital there. He bought new medical equipment and dedicated it to his mother! It's the way the mobsters wash their name." They do so, he explains, in order to build up grassroots support and openly influence politicians -- or even run for elective office. Leder worries that one day three or four Russian gangsters who have bought their legitimacy will win Knesset seats, take over a key committee, and be in an ideal position to stop an
important piece of anti-crime legislation, such as a proposed
bill to criminalize money laundering.

One of Leder's worst fears came true when Russian gangsters handpicked several candidates to run for local and national offices, according to the minutes of a classified Israeli cabinet meeting held by the Committee of the Controller in June 1996. And in May 1997, Israeli police launched a probe into allegations that Lerner attempted to bribe former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, among other Knesset members and cabinet ministers. The investigation was inconclusive, however, and no charges were filed.*

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*Succumbing to persistent pressure from the Russian
government, the Israeli police finally arrested Lerner in May
1997 as he was about to board a flight to the United States.
He was charged with attempted bribery, defrauding four Russian banks of $106 million, and attempting to set up a bank in Israel to launder money for the Russian Mafiya. Lerner pleaded guilty to bank fraud and bribing government officials on March 22, 1998, after having fiercely maintained for months that he was a victim of an Israeli government plot to discredit Russian emigre entrepreneurs.
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One politician already ensnared in the web of organized crime is Russian-born Natan Sharansky, the head of the Russian Yisrael Ba-Aliya and minister of the interior in the government of Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Because of his resistance to the Soviet regime and his strong and open identification with Judaism, he suffered a long, brutal confinement in the Gulag before international pressure led to his release. In Israel, the charismatic dissident was lionized by the Jewish people, and he became a power broker for the large and growing Russian
emigre community, whom he helped integrate into a rigid society that sometimes seemed jealous of the talented new Russians.

However, Sharansky has publicly admitted that his party has accepted campaign contributions from NORDEX president Grigori Loutchansky. Officials from the U.S. Congress, the State Department, and the CIA pleaded with Sharansky to sever his ties to Loutchansky. "We told Sharansky to stop taking money from Loutchansky," says Winer. "We told him about [Loutchansky's] MO: bribery, influence peddling, that he was a bridge between foreign governments and traditional organized crime."

Sharansky simply refused, arguing that he needed the money to resettle the tidal wave of Russian emigres. "When we warned Sharansky," says the congressional investigator, "to stop taking money from Loutchansky, he said, 'But where am I going to put them,"' referring to the huge influx of Russian Jewish refugees. "'How am I going to feed them! And them jobs!"' He figures Loutchansky is just another source of income.

"Sharansky is very shrewd," the congressional investigator
continued. "He knows better. It was a cynical [decision]. He did take money. Then he asked, 'Why shouldn't I!' The CIA warned him that Loutchansky was trying to buy influence through him and his party for [the] Russian Organized Crime/Russian government combine. We told Sharansky that Loutchansky is a major crook." (Sharansky declined to comment.)

Ignoring all the warnings, Sharansky introduced Loutchansky to Benjamin Netanyahu prior to Israel's 1996 national elections. The Israeli press reported that Netanyahu received $1.5 million, in campaign contributions from Loutchansky, a charge the prime minister hotly denied. "The Likud is corrupt, and Bibi [Netanyahu] is disgusting," says Winer. "He's had meetings with Loutchansky and Kobzon -- criminals promoting their own interests."

Kobzon's influence in Israel may exceed that of even Loutchansky and Mogilevich. "Kobzon has big [political]connections in Israel," says Leder. For instance, in January
1996, Kobzon was detained upon his arrival at Israel's Ben Gurion International Airport "because of his ties to the Russian Mafiya, " Labor Party Knesset member Moshe Shahal said in his cramped Knesset office in Jerusalem. Shahal, at the time the country's security minister, intended to send the mobster back to Russia, but then the phones started ringing in the chambers of high government ministries. Kobzon's friends in Israel petitioned the minister of the interior, the minister of transportation, and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, who finally ordered the airport police to free Kobzon and let him enter the country. Peres, who was being pressed by the Russian ambassador, told Shahal that he relented to avoid a messy incident with the Russian government. (The following year, Kobzon flew to Israel in his private jet to pick up Marat Balagula's eldest daughter, who lives in Netanya, to bring her back to Moscow to celebrate his sixtieth birthday.)

With two decades of unimpeded growth, the Russian Mafiya has succeeded in turning Israel into its very own "mini-state," in which it operates with virtual impunity. Although many in international law enforcement believe that Israel is by now so compromised that its future as a nation is imperiled, its government, inexplicably, has done almost nothing to combat the problem. In June 1996 Leder, then chief of Israeli police intelligence, prepared a three-page classified intelligence assessment that concluded: "Russian organized groups [had] become a strategic threat" to Israel's existence. He documented how they were infiltrating the nation's business, financial, and political communities. Shahal used the report to brief Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Shin Bet, Israel's FBI, and Mossad, and provided his own recommendations on how to uproot the Russian mob.

Before Rabin had a chance to act on the Plan he was assassinated by a right-wing Jewish religious zealot in Tel Aviv following a peace rally. Shimon Peres subsequently set up an intra-agency intelligence committee on the Russian mob
after reading Leder's report, but did little else. Leder's report
was shelved by Netanyahu, according to Shahal.

"Israel is going to have to do something," says James Moody. "They could lose their whole country. The mob is a
bigger threat than the Arabs."

Leder agrees: "We know how to deal with terrorist
organizations. We know how to deal with external threats. This is a social threat. We as a society don't know how to handle it. It's an enemy among us."

Redeye · May 22, 2002

If you've made it this far in this lengthly series of articles, you deserve credit indeed. Not all of the above has been either easy reading or obviously pertinent to the What isn't being seen? question.

Now that the roles of the Russian Mafia in Russia have been to some degree established in the recent past, and now that connections between, for example, the Russian Mafia and Al Quaeda have been established, one question becomes the degree to which the Russian Special Services and the Russian Mafia continue to operate hand-in-glove.
The article below by Lunev may shed some light on that question.

I should make clear at this point that I am not making a case that Al Quaeda is run by Russia per se. The situation is, I think, rather more complex than that.

Under Fair Use, of course.
R

<a href="http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/3/19/212847.shtml">NewsMax article link</a>

<center><h4>Russian Mafia Has Kremlin Connections</h4></center>
Col. Stanislav Lunev
Wednesday, March 20, 2002

Last week, a Swiss prosecutor found former Kremlin aide and present Secretary General of the Union between Russia and Belarus, Pavel Borodin, guilty of money laundering. Prosecutor Bernard Bertossa convicted Borodin and ordered him to pay a fine of 300,000 Swiss francs ($177,000).

Switzerland issued an international arrest warrant for Borodin in December 1999 on suspicion of laundering up to $30 million linked to a lucrative Kremlin renovation contract awarded to two Swiss-based construction companies.

He was arrested in New York in January 2001 and extradited to Switzerland in early April. After spending a few days behind bars, he was freed on $5 million bail, which was paid by the Russian Federation government.

As the Russian press reported, the bail was paid under the direct order of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who in 1996-1997 worked in a Kremlin office as Borodin's first deputy before his appointment by former President Yeltsin as chief of the Russian Federal Security Service (the main KGB successor in domestic spying).

According to reports, at the time Putin himself was directly involved in money laundering connected with the Kremlin restoration project and in other criminal activity on behalf of Boris Yeltsin and his family members.

If the reports are true, it is no surprise that last year the Russian government decided to pay the $5 million bail to free Borodin from the Swiss jail.

It was feared that if kept behind bars he might release information about corruption at the top level of the Russian government, including data about Putin's connections with criminal activity in the Kremlin and prior to that in the St. Petersburg administration, where he was in charge of international business operations.

In an effort to keep secret the Kremlin leaders' connections with Mafia operations, Russian authorities will not surrender alleged arms dealer Victor Bout, now wanted on an Interpol warrant for trial in Belgium, to international law enforcement agencies.

Mr. Bout and his associates reportedly have supplied arms to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, some of which are now being used against the U.S. and allied forces in the eastern Afghan town of Gardez.

According to the Russian media, the evidence compiled against Bout is overwhelming and confirms that his group is probably the largest arms trafficking network in the world. Besides Afghanistan, it delivers large and small weapons to all of Africa's major conflict zones and has worked on behalf of the terrorist Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines as well as for Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

The Bout group operates or has operated in criminal cells in the United Arab Emirates, Belgium, Russia, the U.S., Rwanda, South Africa, Swaziland, Uganda, Angola and Liberia, among other places.

An interesting point: At the exact time Russian law enforcement officials were claiming that Victor Bout was not even in Russia, he himself was publicly proclaiming his innocence at a press conference very near the headquarters of the prosecutor general.

We know that since the end of the Cold War, the most powerful Russian criminal organizations – some with many thousands of members – have emerged on the world stage.

They are engaged in numerous forms of criminal activity, ranging from the trafficking of drugs, people and arms, to large-scale money laundering, financial crimes and embezzlement. 

Russian organized crime is also involved in the smuggling of nuclear, radioactive and biological materials, and has known associations with international terrorist organizations dedicated to the destruction of the United States.

In the last three years alone, Russian authorities report that they have broken up 600 nuclear-smuggling deals, many involving established criminal syndicates. But until now we did not have any idea about how many other such deals may have succeeded.

There is no doubt that this criminal activity could not continue without the support of the highest-level bureaucrats in Russia's political establishment, people who are building their wealth on the blood of innocent Americans and other people.

The danger emanating from Russia's Mafia to the civilized world is no longer merely a Russian domestic problem. It needs to be handled in the same way we are handling international terrorism.

Redeye · May 22, 2002

The picture is rather more complex...

What did we know in the months and years prior to 9-11? And what aren't we seeing yet -- or perhaps more properly, what are our percentions being managed so that we Americans do not notice until it is finessed?
Was Al Quaeda acting alone? The below article from NewsMax presents some strong arguements to that it was not in the case of 9-11.

Under Fair Use.
R

<center><h4>Cuba's Lourdes Radar Base, Terrorist Mohamed Atta and the Kremlin</h4></center>
Dr. Alexandr Nemets and Dr. Thomas Torda
Thursday, Dec. 20, 2001

1. New Data 

According to the Russian news agency Ria-Novosti and the Pravda-run website, on Aug. 14, 2001, Russian Deputy Prime Minister (in charge of defense industry and arms trade) Ilya Klebanov and Minister of Defense (MOD) Sergei Ivanov denied media reports of a possible closure by December 2001 of the Russian radar data processing center – a well-known spy hub – in Lourdes, a suburb of Havana.

During his visit to Cuba this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin, accompanied by Fidel Castro, visited the Lourdes center of the Russian MOD. At a meeting with center specialists, Putin noted that their work is very much needed, "not only by the military, but also by the political leadership of the country."

Putin said at a press conference in Havana that both Russia and Cuba are currently interested in continuing the operations of the Lourdes base. According to Putin, this center serves the interests of the Russian military and also provides some information obtained for appropriate Cuban government agencies.

In a separate report, published by NewsMax and widely carried on U.S. websites, Orlando Gutierrez-Boronat of the Center for the Study of a National Option wrote on Sept. 20, 2001, that Cuban President Fidel Castro, during a visit to Iran, Syria and Libya in May 2001, held talks in Tehran with Iranian Supreme Spiritual Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Castro stated that "America is extremely weak today" and promised students at Tehran University that "the imperialist king will finally fall" because "Iran and Cuba have reached the conclusion that together they can tear down the USA."

The Castro regime, this report continues, has continued to harbor international terrorists, pursued a strategic alliance with terrorist states to create an 'anti-Western' international front, and directly engaged in terrorist attacks and espionage against Americans. In particular, Cuba's close relationships with Iraq and some Middle Eastern terrorist groups are well known.

Cuba today, Gutierrez-Boronat writes, continues to serve as a base for coordination and mutual support among trans-national terrorist organizations, including Colombian and some European-based groups.

It is also known that Cuba is active in bioweapons development. In October 2000, Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage and the Iranian Vice-Minister of Health participated in the groundbreaking for a biotech R&D facility outside Tehran. Experts expressed doubts about the supposed medical objectives of this installation.

The report says that there are links between Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, the Iranian government and the Castro regime. Castro and bin Laden have worked hard to build a common front to bring down the U.S. and to develop biological weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

In February 1998, bin Laden announced the creation of an "international front" against the U.S. According to a document obtained by the PBS program "Frontline," bin Laden "regards an anti-American alliance with Iran and China as something to be considered."

But there may be more to the Castro-bin Laden connection than the Iran link. In a story dated March 4, 2000, the Associated Press reported that a young Afghan who had trained during the previous winter at a camp in Kunar Province, in northeastern Afghanistan, said he saw men from Chechnya, Sudan, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Cuba and North Korea. "The North Korean," he said, "had brought chemical weapons."

A third report, from the December 2001 issue of Moscow-based Sovershenno secretno (Top Secret), excerpted here, indicates that al-Qaeda has sleeper agents and sleeper cells all over the world. This organization has copied KGB tactics and has high-ranking protectors in several "countries of concern."

The following points from this report are of particular importance:

a. Baghdad protectors – For many years, Saddam's regime was the most serious supporter and protector of al-Qaeda. Baghdad knew everything about the Sept. 11 attacks in advance.

b. Iran has supported al-Qaeda in the following areas: joint planning of terrorist actions; training of al-Qaeda fighters in camps in Iran, Syria and Libya; financial support; and providing fake documents, telecom gear and explosives.
Ayman Al-Zawahiri, leader of the Iran-financed extremist organization Egyptian Islamic Jihad, became not only the closest associate of bin Laden, but also his successor and – as judged by U.S. investigators – chief planner of the 9-11 terrorist attacks. CIA analysts now have no doubts: Tehran knew in advance about the 9-11 attacks.

c. The Balkan track and "Borodin dungeon" – The notorious "Pal Palych" Borodin, long a Kremlin insider, also has had a definite connection to al-Qaeda, via a Swiss businessman of Albanian origin named Bedget Pakkoli.

d. Why did they close Lourdes? The Lourdes spy center was the largest such base in the Western Hemisphere. It allowed Russia and Cuba to keep the entire North American continent under electronic surveillance and to have access to phone conversations, other telecommunications, and the databases of the U.S. and its neighbors.

Former Russian Presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin were much more pliable than Putin, but they didn't give up the Lourdes spy center. Putin himself, as a member of the intelligence community, knows perfectly well the value of the Lourdes base, but he had very strong arguments in favor of closing this station. The decision to close the center was taken just after the 9-11 terrorist strikes and wasn't accidental by any means.

American special services have information that terrorist Mohamed Atta, the key figure behind the 9-11 attacks, had connections to the Cuban intelligence services and in spring 1999 met with their high-ranking representative in Miami, Fla. – not far from the site where the future suicide squad got its flight school training.

The Lourdes base, in addition to secret missions, was also tasked with active tracking of air flights of all kinds throughout the U.S. The center had a full set of flight codes for the U.S. Air Force and civilian airlines. Once, in 1999, the center broke into the U.S. air traffic control system and sent – with the help of a powerful, 1,500-kilowatt transmitter – a fake flight signal, which almost caused a serious accident in the air.

In short, the Lourdes center had accumulated a huge database on U.S. civilian airline routes, schedules and procedures. Cuba very likely shared this information with al-Qaeda – which may explain the devilish professionalism behind the 9-11 attacks.

It seems that Putin understood that U.S. investigative teams could acquire – or had already acquired – data on the "Lourdes/Castro/al-Qaeda" connection, which became the decisive factor in the closure of the Lourdes facility. It should be mentioned here that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has close ties with Saddam's regime – as well as with Putin and Castro – and has been known to exchange warm greetings with leading terrorist Carlos "The Jackal," originally from Venezuela.

2. Conclusions

The following conclusions are clear: Information needed to carry out the 9-11 attacks went from the Lourdes center, via Cuban secret agents in Miami, to Atta and other members of his suicide squad. This became the decisive factor in the successful realization of the 9-11 strikes. The Kremlin knew in advance of this horrific plot and blessed the operation. Tehran also knew everything in advance – from its agents in al-Qaeda and from Castro himself.

In September-October the authors published in NewsMax, articles showing that the Kremlin and Russian Duma (lower house of Parliament) knew about the forthcoming terrorist strikes on the U.S. as early as July, and that the Duma's Economic Commission held hearings to prepare Russia for the "fall of America" – the title of an article published by Dr. Tatyana Koryagina in Pravda on July 12, 2001 – and to get as much benefit as possible from this foreknowledge.

(See <a href="http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/9/16/103951.shtml">Expert: Russia Knew in Advance, Encouraged Citizens to Cash Out Dollars</a> and <a href="http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/10/3/212706.shtml">Russian Expert Who ‘Predicted’ Attacks Warns of New Ones</a>.)

Now it is easy to find the source of the Kremlin's knowledge. Moreover, we conclude that Putin, Castro and Ayatollah Khamenei knew everything about the coming terrorist attacks by May 2001 or even earlier. And what of the source of the anthrax letters that terrified America for months?

The authors feel that now, with the Afghan war almost over, the Baghdad regime should become the next target of the global anti-terrorist campaign. It remains for Putin and Co. to show where their real support lies – behind President Bush, or behind Saddam.

Dr. Alexandr V. Nemets is a consultant to the American Foreign Policy Council. He is co-author of "Chinese-Russian Military Relations, Fate of Taiwan and New Geopolitics."

Dr. Thomas J. Torda has been a Chinese linguist specializing in science and technology with FBIS, and a Chinese/Russian defense technology consultant with the Office of Naval Intelligence.

Redeye · May 22, 2002

Next, China's role.
To conclude that China is blameless in the events of 9-11 simply because few direct links between Al Quaeda and the Chinese government have surfaced strikes me as sadly lacking.

The Middle Kingdom is a culture thousands of years old, and to this day very insular indeed. One result of that insularity is that we can look back into China's history for lessons for today and tomorrow.

What role did the Chinese government or intelligence services play in the events leading up to 9-11?
What role did the forest of Chinese companies controlled by the PLA play in those events?

Those questions indicate the direction where, after a bit of a break, I'd like to proceed next.

R

Redeye · May 22, 2002

Why bring an article in at this point about the cooperation of the Russian and the Chinese Special Services?
For two reasons: to examine those current relationships, and to examine the role which OC may be playing in both cases.
Oh, and for one more reason: follow the money...

<a href="http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/2/28/125407.shtml">NewsMax.com article link</a>
<center><h4>Cooperation of Chinese and Russian Special Services</h4></center>
Dr. Alexandr Nemets
Thursday, Feb. 28, 2002

According to multiple sources, the Communist Chinese intelligence machine was created with the help of the Soviet Union.

Ties between Russian and Chinese intelligence were forged during China's Civil War, when Mao Tse-tung was based in the mountains of Yan'an province in Northwest China.

In fact, the most experienced Soviet intelligence officers in political and military operations were assigned to Mao's headquarters, and these agents set the groundwork for future Chinese espionage.

This special relationship between China and Russia lasted until the beginning of the 1960s. During this period, the two countries worked closely together against the U.S., and their joint efforts proved extremely effective during the Korean War.

All high-ranking operatives in the Chinese secret services have been upgraded in the USSR, mostly with KGB assistance.

In 1993-94, the author had a series of interviews with Ivan Arkhipov, Soviet general adviser in China in 1950-57 and deputy prime minister of the USSR in 1984-86.

Mr. Arkhipov gave astonishing details of successful cooperation between Soviet and Chinese secret services in 1950-53, during the Korean War, in northeast China (counterintelligence) and in Korea (intelligence).

When the USSR collapsed in 1991, Russia and China began to restore their military intelligence ties. In the late summer of 1992, Yevgeni Primakov, then director of SVR (Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki – Foreign Intelligence Service, subordinated to the KGB), went to Beijing as a special envoy of Russian intelligence to sign a top-secret intelligence agreement with China.

This secret treaty involved the Russian Military Strategic Intelligence (GRU) and SVR itself. These two Russian agencies started coordinating their operations with the Military Intelligence Directorate of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA).

The formal agreement of cooperation between Chinese and Russian intelligence was signed, in a package of 14 Chinese-Russian framework cooperation agreements, during the first visit by Russian President Yeltsin to China in November 1992.

Several months after that, the author had a chance to glimpse this agreement. It contained mostly common phrases about "cooperation," "mutual assistance" and "information exchange." However, the base for Chinese-Russian intelligence cooperation was re-established and even upgraded.

This cooperation was additionally upgraded and expanded in April 1996, when Chinese President Jiang Zemin and Russian President Boris Yeltsin declared in Beijing the "strategic cooperation" of the two countries and signed a new series of agreements for military, military-technological and intelligence cooperation.

Primakov, then foreign minister and former SVR chief, played a special role in promoting intelligence cooperation between the two countries. 

In 1997-98, this cooperation was additionally expanded by efforts of PLA Deputy Chief of General Staff Xiong Guangkai, in charge of PLA intelligence, and his Moscow counterparts, particularly Deputy Chief of Russian General Staff Valery Manilov, who visited Beijing in July 1998.

The Russian default in August 1998 directly resulted in (a) undermined Russian relations with the West, (b) further and rapid development of strategic-military ties with China and (c) appointment of Yevgeniy Primakov to the position of Russian prime minister.

The environment for Chinese-Russian cooperation on intelligence was now excellent.

According to indirect data, the two sides concentrated major effort on getting all the information available about the U.S. national missile defense project and the East Asian theater missile defense project.

In the spring of 1999, after the U.S.-U.K. "Desert Fox" operation in Iraq and the start of the Yugoslav war, the Chinese and Russian leadership decided to upgrade their informal strategic-military alliance to a formal one. Naturally, the intelligence services of the two countries appeared to be in the vanguard of this movement.

The first-ever visit of Chief of the General Intelligence Department (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye – GRU) of the Russian Army General Korabelnikov to Beijing at the end of May 1999 perfectly reflected the new situation.

An "epochal visit" of Col.-Gen Zhang Wannian, first deputy chief of the China Central Military Council, to Russia took place on June 9-15, 1999. Gen. Zhang was accompanied by several PLA top brass, including Gen. Xiong Guangkai.

The first day of the visit Gen. Zhang and Gen. Xiong spent in negotiations with then-FSB chief Vladimir Putin. On June 10-11 the Chinese guests met Gen. Manilov and Gen. Korabelnikov. These talks laid a solid base for strong ties between the intelligence agencies of the two countries for the coming years.

The establishment of the "Yeltsin-Putin" regime in Russia, in August 1999, additionally promoted Chinese-Russian cooperation in this area.

Here are excerpts from the article "Nostalgic Spies Unite," published in September 1999 in the "Moscow Times" daily, by Konstantin Preobrazhensky, ex-KGB lieutenant colonel and specialist on the Chinese secret services:

"Currently, every series of [official] talks between Russia and China includes on its roster a representative of those countries' respective intelligence agencies."

"Getting things going in such a joint effort would be easy. After all, both intelligence agencies grew from the same root. Right up to the beginning of the 1960s, the leading posts in Chinese intelligence were held by people from Lubyanka [KGB headquarters in Moscow]. Relations cooled, and the Soviets went home. But the same people who wanted them there in the first place are in power in China to this day."

"The cooperation between Russian and Chinese spies would be easy from a psychological point of view as well. After all, the Chinese spies are communists. The Russians are all former members of the Communist Party, and they maintain great nostalgia for communist times, when their pay and their prestige were higher. They don't hide their communist sympathies. In Russia, that Stalin-era form of address 'comrade' peppers their speech like a pet name. It would be very easy for the Russians to find a common language with the Chinese. At the same time, Russian spies don't like America at all, and blame it, as the bulwark of world capitalism, for all the misfortunes that befell Russia after the fall of the KGB."

"The striking similarity of Chinese and Russian intelligence communities [also played a role]. Chinese and Russian intelligence communities are like twin brothers. Nearly everything coincides – their methods, their thought and even the number of departments. ... Now, such a state of affairs between the two intelligence agencies could be used to deploy cooperative intelligence against a common enemy [the U.S.]. ... Friendly meetings of like-minded opponents of the United States will take place in Moscow and in Beijing. What can Moscow expect to get from this? For Russian agents, sweet nostalgia is probably enough."

[end of excerpts]

Almost simultaneously, in September 1999, AP and Reuters published the following report:

"U.S. Customs Service officials have charged a naturalized U.S. citizen from Belarus and his Russian partner with attempting to purchase and smuggle sensitive U.S.-made avionics to a customer in Russia. Peter M. Leitner, a senior strategic trade adviser at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, said Russian buyers of avionics made specifically for Japan and Taiwan 'suggests they've got either a Chinese or a North Korean customer.'

"Customs officials identified the two men as Edward A. Batko, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Belarus, and Mikhail Press, a Russian national in the United States on a temporary visa."

[end of the report]

It would seem the intelligence services of Russia and Belarus tried to fulfill the order of their Chinese colleague. They failed in this case, but very probably succeeded in many others. We are dealing with a real "underground kingdom" that threatens the most vital interests, if not the existence, of America.

It is possible to conclude that, from the second half of 1999, Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies have once again combined their efforts to penetrate America's military-industrial complex and computer networks, especially to gather information on advanced weaponry, and are pooling their best available intelligence.

By the way, accumulated information of this kind could easily be used for new terror strikes against key components of the U.S. financial-economic, military and technological infrastructure.

Remarkably, Chinese intelligence now surpasses Russian intelligence, particularly on the technological level. An article published by the Segodnya paper, in May 2000, is titled "Russian Special Services Will Take Lessons From Their (Former) Chinese Students."

In January 2002, Russia evacuated the spy base in Lourdes, Cuba. In October 2001, just after President Putin's decision to close the spy base, China started negotiations with Havana to transfer the Lourdes facility to its own intelligence structures.

China substitutes for Russia in the abandoned cells of the spy network; the cells merely change owners. Or should we consider it to be a joint venture working against their perceived common enemy, the United States?

Redeye · May 22, 2002

Yes, yes, follow the money...
So, who stands to gain (or perhaps I should say, gain most and fastest) if the U.S. can be brought down more than a few notches?

I particularly direct your attention to the section 2. Coastal China in the article below. I also draw your attention to the major sources of foreign investments in that Triangle area.
One quote from near the end of this article:
If American stagnation and the rapid development of China coincide for two to three more years, the power balance in the world could change greatly. This would become the real defeat of America – both in the war against terror and in the global geopolitical competition.

So where would international OC fit in?
Since when doesn't OC make money off of increased economic activity, just for starters?

Fair Use is invoked.
R

<center><h4>America in a Trap </h4></center>
Dr. Alexandr Nemets
Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2002

1. Life Oppressed by Fear

Almost every week the FBI or some other government agency sends us a new warning: "According to reliable information, a group of terrorists from Yemen [or another Middle Eastern country] is preparing a new large-scale terror action, probably more destructive than the 9-11 strikes. Everybody should be on highest alert!"

The last warning of this kind was issued on Feb. 11.

No doubt the messages are based on reliable information. Moreover, though no other large-scale strikes have occurred, attempts at such strikes are no doubt taking place continually.

No doubt, also, preparations for the next huge "suicide strikes" are already under way.

Recently the New York Post published the full text of the letter written by 15-year-old Charles Bishop, who at the beginning of January flew a Cessna aircraft into a Bank of America building in Tampa, Fla.

The major theses of the letter are as follows:
1. Charles admires bin Laden and praises him and his supporters for the 9/11 strikes.
2. Bin Laden intends to blow up the Super Bowl with an old nuclear bomb left over from the 1967 Middle East war.
3. Charles met with al-Qaeda members several times, though he didn't join al-Qaeda himself, and "they [al-Qaeda] are behind me [in the forthcoming action]."

It is very easy to understand that al-Qaeda used Charles Bishop to test how the U.S. security system – at least in regard to skyscraper protection – had changed in the months since the September strikes. And they discovered that the security system hadn't really improved!

By the way, terrorist organizations and the related secret services are eagerly using women and children for terror action preparations.

America is feverishly anxious. America continuously expects new strikes using "civilian aircraft warfare," bioweapons, chemical weapons, cyber-warfare, etc. This fact dramatically influences all aspects of our socioeconomic reality:

a. Large and small U.S. investors, in addition to foreign investors, are reluctant to invest their money in stocks as well as in business renovation or expansion. The U.S. economy is in a recession, with no light at the end of the tunnel. Both Dow Jones and NASDAQ still cannot reach the "humble" level of December 1998.
b. With airplanes as major objects of terror, airlines are particularly depressed.
c. Normal recreational activity has been suspended for millions of Americans. This influences the tourist sector, hotels, etc.

2. Coastal China

The stagnation of the U.S. economy is accompanied by "mushroom-like" growth in other parts of the globe. On Feb. 7, Shijie Ribao (World Journal), the most popular Chinese-language newspaper in America, published an article by its Beijing correspondent: "Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen [the famous Special Economic Zone bordering Hong Kong] Forms Innovative Economic Triangle of Mainland China."

The article describes rapid economic development in the three cities, as well as in the entire huge geographic "triangle" shaped by these cities, on the basis of skyrocketing high-tech industries.

Indeed, this triangle – more precisely, Chinese coastal cities and provinces from Liaoning in the northeast to Guangdong in the south – are transforming into a single economic entity of vast economic and technological potential.

This zone, with about 400 million people, provides about 60 percent of the Chinese GDP and industrial production (if some comparatively poor and backward towns and counties of these prosperous provinces are excluded).

In 2000, the "triangle" GDP – if measured in "international prices" (based on the purchase power parity of local currency) and in current U.S. dollars – definitely surpassed the GDP of Japan. The author is basing the figure on reliable data and estimations.

The economy of the "triangle" continues to expand at an annual rate of about 9 percent, thus fueling the growth of all of China. Huge foreign investment from the entire developed world, including the U.S., is one of the major factors behind this astonishing rate of growth.

And now, when the developed countries are frightened by the terror threat, the investment attractiveness of China is increased even more. 

If American stagnation and the rapid development of China coincide for two to three more years, the power balance in the world could change greatly. This would become the real defeat of America – both in the war against terror and in the global geopolitical competition.

Taiwanese business already leans toward mainland China. At least 30 percent of the Taiwanese, according to recent polls, dream about "good employment in Shanghai" or some other prosperous city between Shanghai and Shenzhen, and believe that "in five years the economic gap between Taiwan and China's southeast coast will vanish."

This means that after 2005, the Chinese People's Liberation Army would be able to take over Taiwan without a shot, with the moral support of a significant part of the local people, just as the German army took over Austria in 1938.

In addition, South Korea, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, all of Southeast Asia and the eastern regions of Russia and Mongolia are drifting toward a "greater China influence zone" even more rapidly than Taiwan.

The geopolitical map of the globe is on the brink of great change.

3. Urgent and Unavoidable Measures

America desperately needs a victory in the war on terror, a return to normal life, and the resumption of healthy economic-technological development. 

Smashing al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in October-November 2001 was only the first step in this direction, followed by successful actions against al-Qaeda cells and related organizations in many countries. Even so, some senior officials estimate that thousands of al-Qaeda fighters are still at large.

And what about the secret services of Iraq, Iran, North Korea and other "countries of concern," let alone China and Russia, these self-declared new friends of America?

It is possible to understand, from recent administration statements, that Saddam Hussein's regime is doomed. That will become one more step in the right direction. However, terrorism extermination both outside and inside the U.S. should proceed simultaneously, with the inside struggle probably the more important one.

The situation at the "internal front" is especially worrisome.

At the beginning of February, the author visited the local FBI office, met the official responsible for counterintelligence and gave him all the data about the Russian secret services involvement in the 9-11 strikes (known already to NewsMax readers) as well as the copies of original sources.

At the same time, the author said several words about a local group of "friends from Russia" engaged in very suspicious activity. Particularly, in 2000-2001 the group did its best to terminate the author's research related to the Chinese-Russian alliance.

"They need to be caught red-handed," responded the official, "or we can do nothing, even if some respectable citizens could confirm your words."

It looks as if the FBI is still using old "pre-strike" methods, thus creating a comparatively beneficial environment for collaborators and assistants of terrorists.

The question is how to win on the "internal front." This is a life-and-death question.

Dr. Alexandr V. Nemets is co-author of "Chinese-Russian Military Relations, Fate of Taiwan and New Geopolitics."

Redeye · May 22, 2002

Now, to hopefully start bringing this together.

Remember Bush's State Of The Union address, the now-famous "axis of evil" typification?
We are seeing Henry Kissinger's realpolitic being played out on a global scale. We are seeing the three great powers of today jockeying for positions of power and control over resources. We are concurrently seeing radical Islam attacking both anywhere Christian and anywhere simply non-Islamic just as fiercely.
And we are seeing international OC operating very much as multinational corporations do every day, making money off of all sides and beholden to none.

The two articles below are also from Nemets and from NewsMax. They will bring forth strongly suggestive events during the days and weeks just prior to 9-11 in Russia. They will also illustrate that Russia does have its own problems with Al Quaeda and radical Islam.
Under Fair Use.
R

<a href="http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/2/5/170600.shtml">NewsMax article link</a>
<center><h4>Visualizing the Enemy, Part 1</h4></center>
Dr. Alexandr Nemets
Wednesday, Feb. 6, 2002

1. The Consequences of President Bush's Speech
President Bush, in his State of the Union speech on Jan. 30, used the expression "axis of evil" to describe Iraq, Iran and North Korea. The president also said that other nations should support the U.S. in taking a hardline against countries such as these, because their weapons of mass destruction could strike anywhere.

President Bush called Iraq, Iran and North Korea an "axis of evil" two more times, on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1. This was more than enough to demonstrate the seriousness of America's intentions.

North Korea and Iran still have some chance – though comparatively small – to escape confrontation with the U.S., but it seems "the hour of God's will" for Saddam Hussein has already come.

Some U.S. observers, such as former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, stated that the Bush administration made a mistake in calling the major enemies by name.

It wasn't a mistake. Such an approach allows America to "visualize" friends and enemies.

In one phrase of his State of the Union speech, President Bush mentioned India, China and Russia as participants in the global anti-terror struggle.

This wasn't merely diplomatic politeness. He no doubt intended to check the reaction of these three countries, primarily of Russia, to see if they really will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with America against the "axis of evil."

Moreover, on Jan. 31, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said that Russia is being asked to help "promote change" in Iran, Iraq and North Korea, the three countries denounced by President Bush as an "axis of evil."

And Russian reaction followed.

On Jan. 31, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov (presently in the U.S. to participate in the Global Economic Forum), after meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney, questioned whether there was enough evidence to label the nations an "axis of evil." Said the prime minister, "That is what has to be verified.''

Similar statements were made by representatives of the Russian Foreign Ministry.

Finally, President Putin himself, the same day, expressed displeasure at Bush's warning to rogue nations.

1. Putin "issued a thinly veiled warning to Washington against using strong-arm tactics," Agence France-Presse reported. Putin was apparently responding to Bush's condemnation of Iraq, North Korea and Iran as an "axis of evil" and his warning about their weapons programs.

2. Putin referred to U.S. hegemony when he complained that global difficulties were "based on the domination of one center of force." He said he wished American influence to be replaced by "a truly fair international system, based on law and respect for the interests of each state, and capable of ensuring equal security for all."

Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and Alexei Arbatov, a well-known expert on the Russian Duma, international relations and military policy, echoed Putin's statement on Feb. 1.
On Feb. 3, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov also challenged President Bush's declaration of an "axis of evil." And there is no need to even give the responses of the Russian papers, from Pravda to Nezavisimaya gazeta and Izvestiya.

One more member of the "evil axis," Russia, became visible. The Associated Press, on Feb. 2, summarized the situation this way:

President Bush's denunciation of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an "axis of evil" poses a challenge for Russia, which has strong ties to all three nations. ... Over the past week, senior Russian officials and lawmakers have warned that any unilateral U.S. moves to extend the anti-terror campaign beyond Afghanistan could jeopardize Russian support to the U.S. [in the anti-terror struggle]. ... Russia's close ties with Iraq, Iran and North Korea could stand in the way [of U.S.-Russian relations]. ..." 

To sum up, Russia is no ally of the U.S. in its struggle against the "axis of evil." Russia is no U.S. ally at all. Russia, in fact, is with the "axis of evil" and will do its best (very probably, jointly with China) to protect Iraq, Iran and North Korea from America and the West.
It definitely takes courage to recognize these facts. However, the readers of NewsMax are well prepared by the author's previous articles describing Russia's close relations with the "evil trio," the nature of the Putin regime and its role in the 9-11 attacks. This, of course, doesn't mean direct conflict with Russia in the near future. American diplomacy goes a long way. But the American people should know the truth.

Lord Byron, in his poem about the role of Russian czar Alexander I (1820-21) in the struggle of Greece against the Ottoman Empire, stated that "the open enemy is better than the fake lying friend." The same holds true for the Putin regime.

2. Is It a Real War?

Yes, no doubt. The "evil axis" and its hired guns (remnants of al-Qaeda, other radical Muslim organizations, etc.) are striking again and again. During the last 10 days:
* A new "shoe bomber" tried to enter the security zone of the San Francisco airport;
* A Wall Street Journal correspondent was kidnapped and perhaps murdered in Pakistan;
* Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld informed the U.S. public about possible terrorist strikes at major dams, nuclear power plants and water supply systems;
* The FBI had to admit that strikes even more harmful than those of 9-11 are on the way.

In addition, every day the American economy loses several billion dollars because of "terrorism-induced" crises; these crises won't end until the terrorism and its "axis of evil" sponsors are destroyed.
America is in a real war and has both the right and the duty to attack the major centers where terrorist strikes are being planned and prepared – Baghdad, Tehran and Pyongyang.

And what about Moscow? Immediate, broad-scale and merciless actions should be taken against Moscow-sponsored secret networks in North America. The Putin regime, i.e., KGB Incorporated, has strong and sophisticated affiliations with thousands of "fighters" here.

The long period of negligence and toleration (thank you, President Clinton!) is over. The destruction of these "Moscow affiliates" is the necessary, unavoidable precondition for victory in the war against terrorism.

<a href="http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/2/13/152802.shtml">NewsMax article link</a>
<center><h4>Visualizing the Enemy, Part 2</h4></center>
Dr. Alexandr Nemets
Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2002

Editor's Note: This article is a continuation of Visualizing the Enemy, Part 1.

3. General Patrushev Rushes to the East

The episode described below, which apparently provides additional clues to the Sept. 11 attacks, didn't appear at all in the Russian or world media – despite the fact that they normally track the movements of Russian FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev.

The little website Buryatia News (www.news.buryatia.ru), located in Ulan-Ude city (capital of the Buryat republic in the Trans-Baikal zone of Russia), to the east of Baikal Lake and covering the events in the Buryat republic and its western neighbor the Irkutsk region, managed to get some information. Excerpts from the website are given below.

(08.23.01) On the evening of Aug. 22, Plenipotentiary of Siberia (something close to a general governor of the huge zone between Omsk city in the west and the Chinese border to the east) Leonid Drachevsky, an FSB/KGB executive, came to Irkutsk from his residence in Novosibirsk city. On Aug. 23, he will participate in a special conference with FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev and regional FSB chiefs.

(08.24.01) The FSB conference took place on Aug. 23 in Irkutsk, in the Baikal sanatorium. Media representatives were not permitted to be present. According to unofficial information, the struggle against terrorism was the major (or only) theme of the conference. Patrushev and Drachevsky participated in the conference.

(09.05.01) At the end of August, a special anti-terrorist campaign was launched in Russia by the FSB and related organizations. In the Irkutsk region particularly, during the 10 days of this campaign, large quantities of firearms and explosives have been found and confiscated.

At the same time, citizens of the Irkutsk region who rent their apartments to foreigners living in Russia without permission (i.e., with no visa or registered foreign passport) are threatened with large fines.

(09.13.01) After the 9-11 strikes in New York, special security measures are being taken in the Irkutsk region and the Buryat republic. In particular:

* Civilian aircraft are being directed to land away from tall buildings.
* Flights of light aircraft and sport aircraft are forbidden.
* Russian army air force units are being put on high alert.
(end of excerpt)

In Moscow, the forthcoming terror strikes against America were already known about in May-June 2001. That's why the Russian Duma held a special hearing to prepare the Russian economy for the "after-strike environment" and Dr. Koryagina published the article "America and Dollar Will Fall on August 21."

The Duma and its consultants knew quite a bit, but it was only fragments of information provided by the Russian secret services, centered around the FSB.

FSB headquarters, on Lubyanka Square in Moscow, knew much more – from the Cuban secret services working with Mohamed Atta and providing the "suicide squad" with vital terror strike data from the Russian spy base in Lourdes.

And perhaps some of this information came from the FSB secret network in the U.S. itself.

Though the author has given this explanation of the 9-11 attack to NewsMax readers in past articles, some of you may still be unconvinced. This information about the FSB conference in Irkutsk, just 19 days before the strikes in New York City, should relieve your skepticism.

Consider that FSB Director Patrushev – a sinister person and the most influential among the "almighty ghosts" surrounding President Putin – left Moscow in deep secrecy and rushed to Irkutsk city, about 5,000 km to the east, to chair an all-Russian FSB conference aimed at launching an anti-terror campaign.

The conference was held in secrecy, with no coverage allowed by the Russian or foreign media. This trick would have worked – if Buryatia News had not reported the event.

FSB regional chiefs already had some common information about the forthcoming terrorist actions against America, as did thousands of wealthy Muscovites who, on the evening of Sept. 11, rushed to exchange their dollars for rubles at a discount rate.

In the author's estimation, Patrushev gave his closest associates some very specific data – maybe even the exact date – in regard to the forthcoming strikes and ordered them to take strong security measures in advance, particularly to reduce the amount of illegal explosives in circulation and to get rid of suspicious foreigners.

Don't forget, al-Qaeda considered both the U.S. and Russia (along with Western Europe, Israel, etc.) to be its major enemies. FSB had nothing against major strikes in America, but intended to prevent them in Russia. All gains and no losses!

That's how Russia managed to launch an anti-terror campaign two weeks earlier than the U.S., Japan, Western Europe and China. On Sept. 12, Russia merely strengthened its anti-terror campaign.

It should seem obvious by now that:

1. FSB/KGB already knew details about the forthcoming 9-11 attack in mid-August.

2. The Russian secret services have a powerful, sophisticated and very dangerous network in the U.S. and Canada.

4. The "Fifth Column," Psychological Warfare and New Terror Actions

Let's look now at some articles in the N.R.S. newspaper (the name is deliberately abbreviated), the New York-published Russian-language daily, with at least 50,000 copies issued on weekdays and up to 100,000 copies on weekends.

The paper is well known for its pro-Moscow sympathies and for its work aimed at transforming immigrants from USSR/Russia into a compact mass obedient to the Kremlin – i.e., the "fifth column."

It is also known – at least inside the American Russian-language media – that N.R.S. is financed by the Russian secret services.

The following is an excerpt from an article published by this paper on Dec. 20, 2001, the professional holiday of the Soviet/Russian secret services.

1. According to the report of FSB Chief Nikolai Patrushev, in 2001 FSB had great achievements in the struggle with foreign espionage, economic crimes and the illegal drug trade in Russia.

2. Any attempts to struggle against the FSB are doomed. Russian immigrants (examples are given) who tried to help the FBI or CIA in "playing against" the FSB/KGB are ending up in Russian and even American jails. The Russian secret services are always victorious!
(end of excerpt)

On Dec. 22, N.R.S. published another article, "Illegal Immigrants, in Asylums, in Vanguard of the Struggle Against Terror," which mocked the administration's appeal to include all citizens and would-be citizens in the struggle against terrorism.

The moral of these and other N.R.S. articles: Under no circumstances cooperate with the administration and the FBI.

And N.R.S. is not the only pro-Moscow Russian-language paper in this country.

The efforts of such papers are multiplied by hundreds of individual agents of the Russian secret services. These "masters of psychological warfare" are engaged in spreading rumors, deception and provocation.

The Russian-language immigrants who hate the Kremlin and FSB/KGB, who are eager to join the struggle against terrorism, are becoming the targets of the Russian secret services. FSB agents demonstrate unbelievable ingenuity in silencing their enemies.

These agents also send information about America's weak points to Moscow. This information, after processing in Moscow, returns to "sleeper cells" preparing the new strikes. What's interesting is that these agents until recently worked without any fear. To the contrary, other Russian immigrants are frightened of them.

It's time to exterminate this gang. This will destroy the "spell of fear" over Russian-language immigrants and will significantly increase the potential of America in its struggle against terrorism.

When the Moscow part of the "axis of evil" finally becomes visible, the "Moscow network" – earlier ignored and even tolerated – should be mercilessly eliminated.

The war against terrorism will not be won without destroying this network!

Redeye · May 22, 2002

As posted on that parallel Front Page thread by Meemur on 5/21/02 at 3:45:17 pm:

Redeye,

First of all, let me thank you for pulling this information together: it makes it a little easier to see the "dots" that could be connected.

I'm thinking about a lot of the points that were made, and I'm not ready to write a long public response, yet, but one part does stand out to me:

"There are no reports of at all recent successful interception of Al Quaeda electronic communications. None at all."

I'm not sure what to make of this statement, whether it's indicticative of the overall failure in intel gathering or one of the facets that has managed to remain confidential. Certainly, if there has been some success in intercepting communications, I wouldn't necessarily expect it to be widely reported in the media.

If it does, indeed, represent a failure in intel gathering, we are in serious trouble, and all the talk about moles takes on a new significance.

Redeye · May 22, 2002

Perhaps I should have qualified that assertion about communications. I should have made it clear that the well pretty much apears to have went dry in 1998 when Bin Laden broke his addiction to his satellite cell phone.

There appears to be the expected intercepts of phone conversations between cell members, and the occasional long distance intercept which does not use a prepaid phone card, all of which yield fresh information of some kind.
But insofaras intercepts of the higher-level communications between major figures in Al Quaeda, and especially Bin Laden's inner circle, I recall no mention. In addition, Debka has its credibility on the line by saying, multiple times, that those upper-level communications are essentially opaque to our intercept capabilities.

R

Redeye · May 22, 2002

This thread started with Stratfor's recent article about what Bush knew and when, so it seems appropriate to bring this to a close by focusing upon the U.S. and preventing large scale terrorism at home.
The Stratfor article below from last September is a nice presentation of the large-scale challenges involved.

Under Fair Use.
R

<center><h4>War Plan Series Part 3: North American Theater of Operations</h4></center>
26 September 2001

Summary

Although the United States has renewed its focus on homeland defense following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, true security will require the United States to implement a continental defense system with Canada and Mexico. In the meantime, Washington must face the challenge of countering what may be a more rapid tempo of terrorist operations.

Analysis

The Sept. 11 attacks on the United States effectively created a North American theater of operations. There are three goals in this theater: the identification and capture or liquidation of the remaining members of the attacking group; the determination of whether other attack groups are currently present within North America; and the prevention of penetration of North America by other groups.

A North American theater of operations is a more useful concept than focusing only on the United States. The United States has vast, virtually unprotected borders with Canada and a long, ineffectively protected border with Mexico. Access to either Canada or Mexico creates innumerable opportunities to penetrate the United States.

Any attempt to create an effective defensive perimeter along these two frontiers would, apart from issues of cost and economic efficiency, take an extremely long time to put into effect and would divert substantial manpower from other missions. Therefore, a perimeter defense of the United States is untenable.

In a sense this was already recognized during the 1950s, when the United States established its air defense system. It was understood that a defensive perimeter that began at the Canadian frontier would be entirely ineffective. Therefore, the United States induced Canada to join in the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), which move the air defense perimeter farther north to include Canada, essentially creating a continental perimeter.

NORAD is conceptually a model for the current situation. The significant entry points into North America are at airports where international flights are permitted to land. Those airports, along with some maritime facilities, are North America's interface with the world.

There are a finite number of such facilities, and it would be possible to reduce the number if need be. These airports are the control points through which attackers pass. They are the primary security screening point, and once past them attack teams can rapidly disappear into the general population and move into the United States almost at will.

If Canada and Mexico are unwilling to integrate their international arrival security systems with that of the United States, the situation rapidly becomes unmanageable. True frontier security is impossible in the United States in any meaningful time frame. Any airport that accepts international flights but is not part of an integrated screening process immediately obviates the ability of the United States to effectively screen attackers prior to entry.

Creating a notional North American theater of operations -- instead of focusing on a definition of homeland defense that is concerned mainly with the United States -- therefore removes any possibility of a perimeter defense. It is then necessary to think and operate continentally rather than nationally.

With the concept of NORAD as a model, a continental defensive system against Al-Qa'ida and other groups needs to be implemented. Obviously, this interacts with other issues dividing the United States and its neighbors. Canada is deeply concerned about protecting its sovereignty, while Mexico has fundamental issues concerning migration with the United States.

These are serious challenges in transforming the notion of continental defense into an operational entity. It may even become impossible to implement a full system because of these issues. Implementing such a system, however, will become the first test of the coalition the United States is seeking to construct. Inducing Canada and Mexico to create a continental screening system for entrants is the foundation of any workable system of homeland defense. It is unclear that such a model would be sustainable for an extended period of time without a substantial shift in Canada's and Mexico's political culture. Nevertheless, it is the essential prerequisite for American homeland defense.

Attacking North America

The first and most obvious question is whether Al-Qa'ida intends to launch further attacks against the United States and, if so, when these attacks might occur and what their targets might be. This is a question that involves not only intentions but capabilities, and also creates an interesting reversal. In warfare, capabilities are normally far clearer than are intentions. In this case, the reverse is true. Al-Qa'ida's intentions are fairly clear. Much less clear are their capabilities.

The most striking fact to consider is that the Sept. 11 attack involved 19 people who were prepared to go to their certain death. That is a large number of people demonstrating a willingness that is normally exceedingly rare. The operation was obviously risky. If defeated it could lead to the loss of all 19 to no effect. One would expect Al-Qa'ida to hedge its bets to some degree. Certainly, we would think that they would hold some reserves in place for alternative or follow-on operations.

If that assumption is true, then it would be reasonable to suspect that there are other groups available for follow-on operations, also manned by some number of suicidal operatives. The alternative theory, that this was a single-shot attack, does not cohere with the operational style we have observed from bin Laden in the past.

His previous strikes have utilized limited operatives and have been designed to use up all resources in one fell swoop. Thus, in planning for possible failure, Al-Qa'ida would have had to create multiple units. This is an unsettling thought, since if the additional units approximate the first unit in size and expertise, then we can assume that follow-on operations could be on the same order of magnitude.

On the other hand, in planning for a successful operation we would expect that the additional units were already in the United States. We know that the first cell entered the United States quite some time ago, married up with its cash supply and proceeded to obtain resources.

We also know, as Al-Qa'ida had to know, that entering the United States following a successful or even failed attack would become enormously more difficult. In addition, the time needed for planning follow-on operations meant that there could be little control over the tempo of operations.

Given this, there are two assumptions that must be made for North American defense at this time:

1. The first attack group, consisting of attackers and ground support elements, was not the only group tasked with attacking North America.
2. Additional units, numbers unknown, are already deployed in the United States or in North America.

It is not clear whether these groups were aware of each other at all or, if aware, to what degree they had contact with each other. It is similarly unclear whether they maintained ongoing contact with Al-Qa'ida outside the country.

Clearly they were able to evade U.S. security and intelligence during this operation. There are several potential explanations for this. One is a massive intelligence failure on the part of the United States. Another is that Al-Qa'ida has developed a sophisticated understanding of how U.S. intelligence works and has developed protocols for evading them. A final explanation is that communication between task forces and command centers were either totally eliminated or kept to an absolute minimum.

Undoubtedly all three are partially true. But the attackers could not count on an intelligence failure, nor could they trust their understanding of U.S. intelligence systems. The one process that they could rely on would have been severing contacts with their home base early in the process and then permitting contacts only on the most intermittent basis manageable.

In the extreme form, it is possible that after being deployed with a general mission no further contact was made with Al-Qa'ida. This would mean that personnel movements and money transfers took place months or even years ago. It is also possible that bin Laden knew that these groups were operational, but for security's sake he did not know precisely what they were going to do or even when they were going to do it.

There is evidence that indicates some degree of ongoing coordination, particularly the recent killing of Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Masood, which appears to have been coordinated with the attack. However, the basic assumption that the attackers escaped detection because they minimized interaction would still hold true.

Even more likely is the assumption that each task force was kept deliberately in the dark about the others. Each group may even have been told that it would become activated if and when a major and unmistakable action -- or two, or three and so on -- took place.

That would mean the current roundup of suspects would be the ground support team from the first group of attackers, along with others who had brushed up against them. The final mission of the ground support group might be to deliberately provide information leading to their arrest so that they could point the finger in several fruitless directions, overloading U.S. security forces and diverting them from the search for operational teams.

We have already dealt with some of the operational principles of the attackers in Part 1 of our special report this week. It is sufficient to point out that in the past attacks have been widely separated by time and place and have differed as to target time and means of delivery. However, in our view precedent is not a determining factor in this case. The prior missions were preliminaries. This is clearly the main bout. Different rules apply.

Al-Qaida's goals lead to the expectation of a strategic campaign that is designed not only as a terror campaign with a psychological warfare goal but also as an attack on American infrastructure, designed to degrade the functioning of the American economy and place pressure on U.S. national command structures.

It follows that two parallel campaigns will be waged:

1. A psychological warfare campaign built around deliberately random attacks designed to disrupt daily life and create distrust in the government.
2. A strategic bombing campaign designed to directly undermine the operations of the United States.

In parallel there will be a third campaign, which we might call a disinformation campaign. Al-Qa'ida has specialized in confusing U.S. intelligence by constantly signaling attacks where none came. One of the most effective of these has been permitting the capture of attack plans that either exist simply as contingency plans or planning documents, or which are deliberately fabricated to force high levels of alert along with defused attention.

One of the ongoing characteristics of bin Laden's attacks is that they are staged at completely unanticipated moments. The targets may have been signaled in the past but only in the context of endless additional signals, so that the truth is buried in a grave of lies. Therefore, there will be constant alerts and signals, but the attacks will continue to be unanticipated.

This is the challenge for Al-Qa'ida now. Truly unanticipated attacks require time so that defenders relax. The new groups of attackers know that there could be a security failure on their part and that they might not have time. They also want to maintain a tempo of operations that drives home the weakness of the United States in the Islamic world. That argues for a more rapid tempo of operations, covered by more intense disinformation. This also creates a massive challenge within the North American theater of operations.

Defending North America

In a certain sense, the North American theater is more an investigative and police operation rather than a military one. The three major countries in North America provide their citizens with legal rights and protections against state action. Apart from the inherent need to respect those rights, one of the obvious goals of any special operation is psychological warfare, to drive a wedge between a combatant state and its citizens. Using military methods to combat the threat would mean treating the population as potentially hostile. Apart from the public response to such a posture, using military rather than police methods would mean a transformation of the state's perception of its relationship to the public. That would have substantial long term consequences.

That said, an aggressive investigative methodology is required, one that can achieve extraordinary goals-identifying and liquidating special operations task forces hiding within the general population, as well as in identifiable sub-groups such as the Arab-American community. A high degree of discrimination and restraint is therefore required in all operations against the attackers, the type of discrimination that is normally in the sphere of the police.

Another reason for discrimination has to do with economic and social efficiency. Security and efficiency are in many respects competing values. The greater security measures there are in place, the longer it takes to carry out certain functions. For example, increases in security at airports can dramatically increase the time and cost involved in travel, since time is frequently money.

Indiscriminate security measures can be highly effective, but frequently at the cost of economic degradation. Since one of the strategic goals of the attackers is clearly economic degradation, each additional quantum of security must be measured against the resulting economic cost. This also argues against a broad security regime and for a highly discriminatory one.

This also obviously creates an environment in which the attackers have extensive opportunities to evade security forces and mount attacks. The central problem with a security approach is that it is defensive, reactive and inherently inefficient. It gives the attacker the initiative. It is also fiendishly expensive, both in direct costs and indirect costs of efficiency. Moreover, it is an interminable operation, since it does not definitively deal with the problem.

The initial response is to try to find the center of gravity in some state that can be subdued. This is certainly a more efficient war-fighting strategy. Bu the problem is that, as we have argued, it is not clear that attack forces already in the United States, or even those planning to infiltrate, are heavily dependent on outside support, once money is transferred into America. Eliminating the home base and the host country does not necessarily end the war-fighting capability of forces already deployed.

Money is the great enabler, and obviously the United States has targeted the cash supply of the enemy. The weakness with this strategy is that it will attempt to trace a path of money that is possibly several years old. In a sense, this strategy has more strategic than tactical promise.

Finding the large pools of cash is more likely than finding the small quantities that have been allocated to ongoing operations. That money has been moved so many times and so much of it has been turned directly into cash that it will be impossible to shut down launched operations using this tactic. Recall that some of the pilot-trainees used cash to pay for their tuition. The attackers also seem to have moved around quite a bit. Finding the money on a tactical level is extraordinarily difficult.

Thus, on a strategic level, over the coming years, attacking the money supply might well represent the elegant solution to the problem. However, on a tactical level, and in the immediate future, while it might yield some information on individuals and groups, it is unlikely to undermine operational capabilities. The cash may no longer even be in the banking system.

The central problem is that there are strategic solutions available that may not impact the tactical situation. That leaves the United States open to unacceptable threat levels without clear counters. At the very same time, successfully closing in on the attack forces increases pressure on them to act quickly, to use it, or lose it if you will. Since all attack groups, except the bombing group, are expended in the operation, the closer investigators come to the attackers, the more likely they are to trigger the attack they were hoping to deter.

Since the target set is elusive and elastic, a purely defensive posture is the best option, but we have already seen its limitations. This creates a double bind situation, in which strategic solutions do not yield tactical solutions, while effective tactical solutions increases the risk of attacks.

The likely solution will be a two-tiered strategy. The strategic tier, primarily located in the intercontinental theater of operations, will attempt to break the back of follow-on operations not yet deployed in North America. The tactical tier will focus on an aggressive attempt to break into existing attack forces already deployed in the United States, using information drawn domestically and from other theaters.

We expect that security will be a process rather than a solution. That is to say, the American mindset that is inherently casual about the dispersal and hardening of key infrastructure will shift over time. The tendency in the United States has been to create economies of scale by concentrating infrastructure, both military and civilian.

Petrochemicals, transportation hubs, power generation and endless other examples come to mind. The problem with concentration was made obvious on Sept. 11. It is a principle of security that dispersal and redundancy create a survivable system. That coupled with active security systems decreases, but doesn't eliminate the possibility of enemy attack.

It is not simply the immediate time cost of security procedures that will have to be absorbed by the economy, but also the costs of restructuring infrastructure to reduce vulnerability and increase the speed at which systems recover. Interestingly, the cost may actually stimulate rather than degrade the economy, which is not the case with purely passive security procedures that absorb unrecoverable time.

The most difficult issue will be determining whether follow-attack forces have been deployed and then identifying their members. This is not a random population. Previous attackers were all Muslims and, it appears, Arabic, drawn primarily from Egypt and Saudi Arabia. It is not clear that they were all using the cover of existing Arab communities. From reports, it appears that many moved away from intensely Arabic communities, moving into the broader population.

This makes them geographically harder to track. The locus of operations cannot be boiled down to six or seven defined areas. At the same time, it makes it possible to identify potential operatives. This immediately poses a fundamental moral dilemma. Most Americans of Arab descent are guilty of nothing but association: they share an ethnic identity. At the same time, it would be absurd to pretend that African-Americans or Swedish-Americans are as likely to be operatives as Arabs.

Without a degree of profiling, the entire process becomes immediately hopeless. If security forces must pretend that they don't know what they do know, which is that the most likely suspects are Arab, they will dissipate limited resources very quickly. The likely population must be targeted. It must also be understood that this will inevitably lead to excesses. Overzealousness and stupidity are as present in the FBI as in any public or private entity. There will inevitably be cases in which reasonable and decent boundaries are overstepped.

There will be an inevitable pushback from the targeted community. There will also be a pushback from other sectors of society as the inconvenience and cost of security is recognized. It is not clear that, over time, American society is capable of accepting the limitations of increased security. This will be particularly true if the tempo of operations remains at current levels and we see one major action per year. As Sept. 11 drifts into the past and if attacks abate, the sense of urgency needed for the security may dissipate.

Conclusion

In some important ways, operations in the North American theater will be the most difficult to carry out. Sealing off the continent is a daunting task, even with seamless cooperation from Mexico and Canada. Most difficult of all will be determining conclusively whether there are any other forces operating here and liquidating them if there are.

It is not clear that the first group had definitive knowledge of follow-on groups. It is not clear that conventional investigations will uncover more than the remnants of the first group. Indeed, it seems that the most important information for fighting the war in North America will have to be gathered outside of North America, in what we call the intercontinental theater of operations -- the back alley intelligence war -- where someone, somewhere, might know what is needed.

In the meantime, Al-Qa'ida, if its units are in place, retain the advantage of stealth, and therefore the advantage of determining the time, place and tempo of operations. It is imperative that this advantage be taken from them. It is not clear how the advantage can be seized, or as important, whether seizing the advantage will trigger a more intense response.

Redeye · May 22, 2002

Without good and timely intelligence of multiple kinds, all other efforts are doomed to success being happenstance.

The article below offers one perspective on what must be done to reform our intelligence agencies and capabilities.
There certainly are other well-considered suggestions and opinions afoot these days.
I am not necessarily wedded to all of what is offered below.

From <a href="">Insight Magazine</a>, under Fair Use.
R

<center><h4>Reforming the CIA Means New Leaders, New Ways of Doing Business and a Truckload of Pink Slips</h4></center>
By
Angelo M. Codevilla

To fight America's enemies, the U.S. government needs good intelligence. Our current war on terrorism is only the latest instance in which the CIA's ineptitude, incompetence, gullibility, prejudice, corruption and self-serving nature have made it a net detriment to U.S. national security. Hence, getting good intelligence must begin with the firing of most of the people now employed at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., starting with George Tenet, who burrowed into the directorship by renaming the place the George Bush Center for Intelligence.

Through the years, the CIA has done little but fail spectacularly. It underestimated Soviet strategic forces and overestimated Soviet economic and political viability. It missed the invasions of Afghanistan and Kuwait, the advent of every new nuclear power, the development of ballistic missiles by rogue states and every terrorist act against Americans. The few outsiders who are privy to the CIA's record know that it is not a trove of necessarily unsung successes, but rather that its work is on a par with that of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which certified Mohamed Atta for flight training six months after he killed 2,830 people in New York City. Only secrecy prevents the agency from being known as a national embarrassment.

The CIA is lucky that the officials who are supposed to oversee it are either like House Select Committee on Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss (R-Fla.), former employees who confuse patriotism with agency loyalty, or are intellectually unequipped, such as Brent Scowcroft, chairman of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, or are beguiled by social connections as is President George W. Bush. Hence, the high-level commission announced on Feb. 14 to investigate the CIA's performance regarding Sept. 11 surely will turn out like all other such commissions convened after previous intelligence failures. It will recommend some changes at the CIA (including personnel) and claim that many already are under way. Above all it will declare that the people who already are running the agency are just the right folks to implement these changes.

How do we know? Because this commission, which will spend $2.6 million, is yet another of the CIA's sweetheart arrangements. It is headed by Britt Snider, another former CIA inspector general and Tenet protégé. Who would bet that Snider will recommend undoing his own work and firing his friends?

A serious examination of the CIA's fitness for the war on terrorism would find that its many failures in collecting information about terrorism, checking it for fraud (i.e. counterintelligence), analyzing its significance and conducting covert influence exhibit the agency's congenital defects.

The agency successfully has fought for a monopoly of clandestine U.S. human-intelligence collection. But it is an old story that the CIA's "case officers," the recruiters and handlers of spies, are not clandestine at all and live abroad as well-known U.S. embassy personnel, at best stumble in foreign languages and are truly foreign to foreign cultures. This always handicapped them for any serious espionage. But it disqualifies them from even pretending that they could get close to anyone who knows about the inner workings of terrorism. This is basic ineptitude. The CIA defends its operatives' incapacities by asking rhetorically how even the most linguistically talented and well-disguised collectors could get inside six-man terrorist cells.

But the question wrongly presupposes that terrorism consists of autonomous (and, hence, spontaneous) cells. In fact the autonomy and spontaneity of terrorists, the "loose-networks" theory, largely is the self-serving invention of U.S. government officials who don't want to look into the role of Arab governments in terrorism. The CIA is somewhat more fit to gather intelligence from such sources, but does a lousy job of it. This incompetence amounts to malfeasance.

Perhaps the clearest example of malfeasance is the heavy use the CIA makes of "liaisons" with Arab governments' intelligence services. That is, lacking its own sources close to terrorists, the CIA uncritically takes what it can get from Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi, Emirate and even Palestinian and Syrian intelligence. These outfits' "unbiased" reporting has helped build for the CIA a picture of terrorism in which shadowy individuals slip in and out of the region's jurisdictions, and in which Arab rulers are responsible for nothing more than insufficient capacity and perhaps zeal in controlling them.

Thus, the CIA accepted the Saudis' self-serving report that al-Qaeda was responsible for the bombing of U.S. military barracks in 1996. (The Saudis beheaded the accused terrorists before they could be interviewed by U.S. officials.) Who is responsible for terrorism? According to this picture, terrorism rises spontaneously under the impulse of radical Islam in general and is organized by this thing called al-Qaeda, headed by the renegade Osama bin Laden. No Arab government is responsible.

By relying on such sources, the CIA sometimes makes U.S. officials look stupid. Thus the CIA was convinced that the Tora Bora area of northeast Afghanistan was honeycombed with caves housing sophisticated complexes filled with modern conveniences. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld confirmed this on national television. But when U.S. troops reached the area they found such things had never existed. Similarly, soon after Sept. 11, top officials from the president on down pledged that they would make public U.S. intelligence data showing the evidence of al-Qaeda's culpability. They never did, because it seems that the "evidence" amounts to the hearsay of unreliable sources. The highest U.S. officials seem to have a high embarrassment threshold.

Perhaps because of the poverty of its sources, the CIA has never been keen to check the validity of those sources or the veracity of its data. Hence, throughout the Cold War it accepted as true reports from agent networks in the Soviet Union, East Germany and Cuba that had been discovered and "turned" by hostile intelligence and were feeding us disinformation that confirmed what the agency wanted to believe. In 1975 the CIA disestablished its independent counterintelligence staff because it had raised uncomfortable questions about the reliability of sources. Since that time, it has institutionalized something akin to self-serving gullibility.

In the war on terrorism, the CIA rushed to validate as proof of bin Laden's responsibility for the Sept. 11 attacks the now-famous "confession" videotape miraculously found in Afghanistan in November 2001. Never mind that the video and audio were blurred, making impossible any physical identification. Never mind also that neither the taped meeting nor the tape had any apparent purpose, and that bin Laden's lead-in to his self- incrimination — his question as to how the folks back home had reacted to events two months earlier — was implausible for a man with instant communication. The CIA was sure it was genuine. But the CIA can reach outrageous conclusions even without disinformation.

The CIA's analysis is prejudiced to the point of dishonesty. Often, regardless of the information available, the agency sees only what it wishes to see. How else could it have concluded in 1987 that East Germany's per capita gross domestic product was roughly equal to West Germany's, or mistakenly judged 13 years in a row (1964-76) that the latest Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile deployed would be the last? From the agency's inception, CIA analysts have seen their mission as counteracting the bellicose tendencies of other parts of the U.S. government. As regards terrorism, the CIA has focused on discouraging the U.S. government from making war on Saddam Hussein.

Consider the question of who is responsible for Sept. 11. The CIA had paid no attention to Atta prior to that fateful day, despite the fact that Czech intelligence had passed his name along because of his contact in Prague in June 2000 with Ahmed al Ani — a known Iraqi handler of terrorists — prior to his coming to the United States and again on April 9, 2001. The CIA later learned that two weeks following the first meeting, Atta received the $100,000 wire transfer that financed his mission, and that two weeks after his second meeting the 13 "soldiers" in the hijacking left Saudi Arabia with new passports (scrubbed of previous travel and perhaps with altered identities) and visas to join him in the United States. The agency found that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) account from which the money had come had been professionally scrubbed of the owner's identity. It learned from communications aboard the hijacked planes that the hijackers used sophisticated chemical sprays and methods of rapid entry into the cockpits, that they had mastered navigation beyond what had been taught them at their U.S. flight schools and that they had turned off the planes' transponders — a skill that also had not been taught to them at the flight schools.

A reasonable person might have concluded from all this that the operation bore the marks of a professional intelligence service. If that person kept in mind that the professional intelligence handler who twice met with Atta is Iraqi and that, as the CIA knows, Iraq has a facility where terrorists train to take over Boeing aircraft, such a person might have concluded that Sept. 11 had been organized by Iraq.

But the CIA paid less attention to the trails that the hijackers had tried to cover than to the one they had left for it to follow. The CIA noted that on Sept. 9, Atta wired $15,000 back to a different account in the UAE. This one had an unhidden owner — an associate of bin Laden. This was enough for the CIA to be certain that Iraq had nothing to do with Sept. 11 — even though Saddam Hussein had used al-Qaeda for some of his dirty work in the past. Moreover, the hijackers were amateurs, they had learned all their skills at U.S. flight schools (had they not conveniently and uselessly rented cars with their own cards and left their flight manuals in them?) and the whole thing had been planned in one of those famous Afghani caves.

I suggest that the analysts who live at the George Bush Center for Intelligence make Arthur Andersen look foolproof.

The myth that the CIA is the bane of America's enemies abroad and the reliable upholder of our friends is just about the reverse of reality. Seeing itself as the promoter of "true revolution" in the world, the CIA has helped bring to power such progressives as Gamal Abdel Nasser, Fidel Castro and Manuel Noriega. It sponsored the granddaddy of Third World anti-Americanism, Franz Fanon (because agency elites liked his ideas), and has been the chief advocate within the U.S. government for Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority. The catchphrase at CIA is: "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." CIA's real specialty since the 1950s has been supporting pro-American forces enough for them to get into trouble with local dictators and then abandoning them to slaughter.

What covert activities can the CIA contribute to a war on terrorism? Its greatest contribution has been that it has spared the opposition to Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi National Congress, the burden of its support. Its greatest disservice has been its work within the U.S. government to shield Saddam and to promote the Palestinian leaders with whom Tenet has developed much closer personal ties than any previous director. That is, the CIA's most effective covert actions are inside U.S. policymaking. The notion that the CIA might help by going around the world fingering or assassinating terrorists is credible only to moviegoers.

None of this is to deny that there are some people at the George Bush Center for Intelligence who do useful work. The entire Foreign Broadcast Information Service is worth every penny, as are any number of archival functions. Everywhere there are pockets of talent. The next director of central intelligence should arrive on the job with plans for a new, worthy intelligence agency. This would include a small, diverse, truly clandestine corps of human collectors, a truly independent counterintelligence service dedicated to quality control and a structure for the production of competitive all-source analyses. But those plans would see the light of day only if the new director arrived with a truckload of pink slips.

Codevilla, a professor of international relations at Boston University and a former naval and Foreign Service officer, was a member of the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, overseeing the CIA's budget and operations.

Redeye · May 22, 2002

Just to muddy the waters a little more...

And please let me strongly, strongly suggest your not taking to heart implications of this quote from the below:
Enough time has not passed since September to prepare for another massive attack.
If you watched Dick Cheney on the Sunday morning news shows on Sunday, May 19th, would you evaluate his performance as suggesting that we're safe from another major attack for a good while yet?

From Stratfor, under Fair Use.
R

<center><h4>Is Al Qaeda Probing Itself for Weaknesses?</h4></center>
20 May 2002 

U.S. government officials have reported a recent upsurge in communication between suspected al Qaeda affiliates. Although the information about this increase in "chatter" is limited (and STRATFOR can only speculate) it's possible that al Qaeda is engaging in a form of counter-counter-intelligence.

Prior to launching its previous major attacks, al Qaeda established a pattern of disseminating false information about its intentions. This served to divert and distract U.S. defensive countermeasures and, over time, to induce a kind of 'alert fatigue.' The recent upsurge in al Qaeda communications has raised concerns in the United States that the network may be repeating its pattern of pre-attack false alarms ahead of another major strike.

However, while small-scale attacks are possible at any time, an operation of the magnitude of Sept. 11 requires a great deal of planning and coordination. Al Qaeda historically has taken two or more years to prepare for operations of this sort. Enough time has not passed since September to prepare for another massive attack, especially given the intense U.S. efforts to disrupt the al Qaeda network.

Furthermore, although al Qaeda historically has not developed multiple operations simultaneously, had the organization prepared a follow-on attack before launching the Sept. 11 strike, it would still need to evaluate how much of that planned operation survived the post-attack U.S. countermeasures.

As U.S. and allied military forces pummeled al Qaeda command centers and training camps in Afghanistan, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies -- in cooperation with foreign governments -- plowed broadside into the network's communications, transportation and logistical infrastructure across the globe. The United States and its allies arrested many identified al Qaeda suspects, but undoubtedly did not arrest them all. Instead, some suspected al Qaeda members likely were left alone to be monitored in the hope that they unwittingly lead authorities to the rest of the network.

Al Qaeda has always placed the highest priority on security in its operations. Without careful attention to security, the group could not have carried out an operation that took years to plan, train for and finance, involving personnel on at least four continents and team members residing for extended periods inside the United States. If it is to launch another major operation, even one planned prior to Sept. 11, al Qaeda must first identify who in the organization has been compromised.

This could explain the increased "chatter" within al Qaeda that is being picked up by U.S. intelligence agencies. The network now could be carefully targeting communications to their operatives in the field and listening to see which pieces of information wind up as non-specific threat warnings issued by the FBI. Since the U.S. government is paranoid about the possibility of an attack occurring again without warning, al Qaeda can count on it to broadcast any information that is intercepted.

Before now, al Qaeda's command structure was too busy dodging bombs to carry out a serious security evaluation of the organization. And as long as the United States was actively arresting people, al Qaeda commanders would not want to risk inadvertently exposing a secure asset by contacting him. But before al Qaeda can act again, it must determine which of its assets remain secure.

Redeye · May 22, 2002

As posted by Mutter on 5/22/02 at 9:04:34 am:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

wow, Redeye! so much good infomormation here to read and ponder. may take me a bit of time to digest it well enough to attempt an intelligent response to it......but in the mean time this jumped out at me. [perhaps due to this weeks signing of nuclear treaty with russia, and talks between bush and putin.]

[quote:To sum up, Russia is no ally of the U.S. in its struggle against the "axis of evil." Russia is no U.S. ally at all. Russia, in fact, is with the "axis of evil" and will do its best (very probably, jointly with China) to protect Iraq, Iran and North Korea from America and the West. ]

btt

Redeye · May 22, 2002

As posted by Meemur on 5/22/02 at 9:32:25 am
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Mutter, I'm feeling the same way.

It's also frustrating because there clearly are pieces of the puzzle that are missing, and several of my connect-the-dot scenarios just don't make sense without that info, some of which I really hate to consider at length too close to bedtime.

Let me toss out the investigative journalist's credo: Follow the Money Trail. To which I will now add: follow the "Power & Honor" trail, because in thinking about the motivations of some of the ME players, it isn't about money -- it's about power and family honor (or land, which ultimately is power -- I won't go there right now).

I agree with you about the Russian leaders, Mutter.

I sneaked the coffee pot back to Inner Conncections, but here's a plate of brownies.

The world may be on the brink, but we have chocolate!

Redeye · May 22, 2002

Mutter and Meemur, you two are to be heartily commended for even making it to this point in this thread!

The world is awash with what Henry K. used to call realpolitik. Nation-states have interests. Ethnic and religious groups have interests. Friendships and alliances can and do change as needed to support pursuit of those interests.

The next direction I intend to go with this thread is to examine a few suggestions for reform of the intelligence community.
As I wrote that sentence I was reminded of the anology of rebuilding a warship's propulsion systems -- including propellor work -- while the ship is in battle in the middle of the deep blue. The outcome of major reforms is an unknown until after the fact. Yet, the alternative choice offers both certainty and the continuation of our being blindsided, does it not?

R

Redeye · May 22, 2002

I went looking for information, resources and proposals for reform if the CIA and of the intelligence community per se.
Foolish me; should have anticipated that the usual D.C. practice must be, when in doubt, hire an academic or a retired spook or a writer as a consultant...and if they don't produce what you want, hire another... Yes, there is a plethora of reform plans and suggestions to be found.

How many passes have there been at reforming the CIA?
This <a href="http://intellit.muskingum.edu/intellsite/reform_folder/reformtoc.html">Muskingum.edu</a> page will show that the list is long indeed. Reading through some of those links will also betray the role of politics -- both party and organizational -- in so many of those reforms.And as we all should know by now, despite, or in part thanks to, that series of reforms and the consequent effects upon Agency personnel, high-level penetrations of the CIA continued unabated.
Some reform proposals, such as the <a href="http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/papers/cia/">CIA: The Need for Reform</a> by Melvin Goodman from February, 2001, a professor of international security at the National War College, seem to presume that the need for covert action ended with the fall of the Soviet Union.
<a href="http://www.fas.org">FAS.org</a> -- The Federation of American Scientists -- has an <a href="http://www.fas.org/irp/gentry/">Intelligence Reform</a> section which, though dating from June, 1995, is one of the best presentations that I have found thus far. That analysis's <a href="http://www.fas.org/irp/gentry/chapter4.html">Chapter 4: Elements of Institutional Reform</a> is worth reading, but be aware ahead of time that it does not present out-of-the-box thinking. For example, that plan calls for strengthening the actual role of the DCI to control over most U.S. intelligence assets. The reality in D.C. is that literal control over assets that are now under, for example, the Pentagon, is both not going to happen and not all that wise in the first place (because the military's needs for specific types of intelligence can be much different from what national policy makers might find useful for years to come).
I kept coming back to the below analysis of why the CIA and the larger intelligence community needs reformed.

One has to know history, or one is doomed to repeat it, right?

Please remember that the below is from 1995.
Fair Use is invoked.
R

<a href="http://www.fas.org/irp/gentry/chapter3.html">FAS.org Framework For Reform, Chapter 3</a> link
<center><h4>A Framework for Reform of the U.S. Intelligence Community</h4></center>
<center>Chapter 3: Internal Decay -- The Real Reason for Reform</center>

The major reason for the nation to mandate reform of the Intelligence Community is that for many years it has not performed well. The reason is not the demise of the Soviet regime. Taxpayers have not been and are not getting their money's worth from this part of government. And, if history is the good guide it usually is, some people in uniform will pay heavy prices in blood one day for the errors of the Intelligence Community and its elected masters in the Executive Branch and overseers in Congress unless major reforms are promulgated soon. The ravages of years of bad leadership will take years to undo under the best of circumstances.

Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture

The strengths and weaknesses of intelligence agencies have major cultural components. Just as there are corporate cultures that financial and business management pundits say contributed in recent years to corporate successes (like Microsoft) and failures (like IBM and Digital Equipment in the early 1990s before more recent recoveries), so intelligence agencies' cultures are behind many of the problems plaguing intelligence in the mid-1990s. These cultures in some cases were created with greater or lesser degrees of pre-meditation by specific individuals. The president and Congress must understand the culture--the disease--before they can prescribe remedial medicine. Reorganizational band-aids will only briefly ameliorate symptoms. They must also understand the disease causing agents--the senior responsible executives--and remove them from the organs of intelligence agencies to prevent reinfection. Former DCI Woolsey said culture was a problem at CIA--the first DCI to do so--but he showed little understanding of it and its manifestations other than those related to the Ames episode. He also did little to change it before his departure. DCI John Deutch noted the importance of changing the culture of the DO in the remarks he prepared for his confirmation hearing (37). He also said after his confirmation that he did not contemplate a "bloodletting (38)."

The Congress and the Commission cannot micro-manage the agencies or make many personnel decisions, but they can clearly identify problems and note areas that require strong remedial action by the president and the DCI. The Congress can make clear that significant improvement in areas of leadership and accountability will play roles in funding decisions for intelligence and administration priorities; that should get the president's attention.

The cultural problems at CIA are severe, and arguably are more serious than elsewhere in the Intelligence Community. Because of the critical roles that CIA performs and the severity of its troubles, CIA should receive the bulk--but not all--of reformers' attention to the dysfunctional aspects of the culture of intelligence.

CIA's Directorate of Operations 

The culture in CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO) contains a streak of independence and contempt of accountability has become so strong that radical changes are needed to restore it to status of team player in the Intelligence Community.

Perhaps only the United States Navy rivals it as an organization that collectively considers its interests to supercede those of the nation as a whole. A senior Congressional intelligence committee staff member told me in 1991 that the DO is the worst organization in the Intelligence Community at representing its interests on the Hill because it transparently regards Congressional personnel as targets to be recruited. In early 1995, senior DO managers directed their people to try to influence Capitol Hill, through "personal ties" or "working relationships."(39) While the DO claimed its effort was educational, David Holliday, special Assistant to SSCI Chairman Senator David Boren in 1986-91, called the effort "lobbying" and current SSCI Chairman Senator Arlen Specter said:
The C.I.A.'s directorate of operations [sic] would be better advised to improve its reputation and standing by real performance, instead of attempting to rely on factors like personal, school or family ties (40). 

Lobbying is in fact an established CIA institution. Indeed, in its extreme forms it might be considered domestic covert action--which is illegal. In 1991, CIA spokesman Peter Earnest called DCI-designate Robert Gates "uniquely qualified," and said "we need him." (41) The Agency reportedly also regularly briefs the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) on issues it wants brought to public attention, and has financial and personnel exchange ties with ostensibly independent groups through which it tries to curry favor and good publicity. These organizations include universities, "think tanks," and the print media, at least. CIA also regularly provides press briefings that contain spin as well as fact (42). Reformers should examine these activities--including their costs, goals, and connections--and recommend procedural or legislative remedies as needed.

The DO jealously guards its information holdings, including those that could be of use to the analytic community. At the same time, in the late 1980s at least, it provided some of this data directly to portions of the policy community because it believed CIA's Office of Soviet Analysis and Office of European Analysis were distorting the contents of its reports to satisfy the ideological views of the offices (43). The offices then were headed by Doug MacEachen and George Kolt, respectively. However reasonable the DO's concerns about politicization were in this case, freelancing of this sort is not appropriate.

The DO often treats its people miserably. I believe this reflects in part a contamination of its own personnel management system by the outlook of an organization devoted to manipulating and using people. This treatment of people generally probably accounts for part of what in 1994 broke into the public domain as a lawsuit alleging sex discrimination by a female former station chief; CIA settled that case in December 1994 with a $410,000 payment to Jeanine Brookner (44). CIA in March 1995 settled another suit involving over 250 other women case officers for nearly $1 million and 25 retroactive promotions (45). But by June, the agreement was on the verge of falling apart as some of the plaintiffs decided they were unhappy with terms of the settlement (46).

Some DO people believe it was miserable internal treatment of Edward Lee Howard that drove him to work for the Soviets after he left CIA--and that senior DO officers fabricated Howard's alleged character flaws after they alienated him. The alleged problems of Aldrich Ames fit the pattern, despite the apparently rigorous investigation of Ames by Inspector General Hitz and the Congressional oversight committees (47). Some senior DO officers, such as former Soviet/Eastern Europe (SE) Division chief Burt Gerber, were involved in both cases.

The DO continues to treat its people poorly--in ways that hurt efficiency and damage already poor morale. In early 1995, despite plenty of warning about impending budget cuts, the DO was recalling case officers in mid-tour and simply telling them, in essence, to cruise the hallways to find a new job. There will not be jobs for everyone, however. Woolsey in mid-1994 said 700 case officers would be cut from a staffing level The New York Times reported in early 1995 to be 6,000 (48). Operations work can be tough, but it need not be made more difficult by poor leadership. The entire DO personnel system warrants evaluation and reform.

Sometimes outside forces cause internal problems. Congress and President Ronald Reagan forced the DO to make a decision that was highly damaging to the whole culture of CIA during the very public and therefore misnamed Nicaraguan Contra "covert" action. As is well known, Reagan directed CIA to support the Contras in their quest to overthrow the Sandinista regime. At the same time, Congressional Democrats opposed the action. The DO's Latin America division and other DO components thus faced contradictory objectives: to fulfill the president's directive; and, to satisfy its normal mission of providing accurate intelligence information to the analytic community.

The conflict arose because satisfaction of the second mission meant providing information to Congressional critics--through the DI and its publications that went to the Congress--that could be used to thwart the first. The DO resolved the conflict by "cooking" its submissions to the DI's Office of African and Latin American Analysis. It was abetted by senior DI officials. ALA analysts' eventual discovery of the deception caused major unhappiness--at both the DO and their own leaders--and a major flight of analysts out of ALA and into other DI offices in the mid-1980s.

The episode is another reason not to conduct public "covert actions." The DO will not refuse to conduct such operations. Congress and presidents thus need greater understanding of the implications of putting CIA in internally contradictory positions.

CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology 

The Directorate of Science and Technology (DS&T) has its own set of problems, particularly in the area of personnel management. In early 1995, an employee rated as a middle-level performer received separate visits from two division chiefs who asked her how she was coming on her search for a new job. Alarmed, she went to her own deputy group chief with a point blank question: do I have a job? The manager responded "no." There had been a cutback in authorized strength and a refocus of mission; her skills were no longer wanted. She should look for another job within the Agency. Once again CIA middle managers showed abysmal leadership traits. The woman received no notification, except through the grapevine, and no help in securing a new position. She, like others, was left insecure, preoccupied by job security rather than performing a job, and unhappy by her treatment. It is a wonder that morale is not worse.
The DS&T operates against managers in somewhat different ways. In 1994, a deputy division chief discovered that senior management had filled out paperwork in her name for an application to a rotational assignment to another agency. This manager learned of the move soon enough to retract the "application." In early 1995, a division chief was not so lucky. He was involuntarily reassigned to an assignment that was not to begin until September 1995. He lost his division and had nothing to do for seven months. In response--in a variant of the children's story about the emperor's new clothes--he continued to pretend that he was a real division chief.

CIA's Directorate of Intelligence

CIA's analysis directorate has become so dysfunctional that massive changes are needed. These reflect problems of leadership, management, ethics, integrity, and even the notion of what the DI's mission is. While many fine DI people often do very good work, their efforts have been overshadowed by the problems. Nothing less than thorough institutional change is required. The problems are so deeply ingrained that change will come slowly even if DCI Deutch acts vigorously.

Change in the DI is critical because it has the largest and, in aggregate, finest analytic capabilities in the Intelligence Community, as well as the broadest range of responsibilities and consumers. Analysis organizations filter and evaluate raw intelligence information for consumers. Thus, the overall performance of intelligence depends critically on good analysis. CIA has the largest, most diverse, and arguably best analytic unit in the whole Community--despite its many problems.

Lack of leadership. Most importantly, the DI lacks leadership. The word "leadership" itself is rarely used. The principles of leadership that military people learn in their basic courses are absent for the most part from the DI's executive suites. There is no commonly recognized sense of integrity--either at individual levels or organizationally. Loyalty is uni-dimensional--upward--and heavily oriented towards individuals. Thus, the finding and cultivation of mentors is critical to career "success."

Altered de facto mission. In the 1980s, the DI's de facto mission changed from national service to the advancement of the interests of the organization and its senior officers. While all senior officers of the last decade have denied and presumably will continue to deny this accusation, DI employees widely believe it to be true. So do many consumers.

Perverse incentive system. To further the altered mission of the DI, senior managers changed the personnel system. Loyalty to individuals assumed a much greater role. Attention to intellectual orthodoxy established in offices like the Office of Soviet Analysis became much more important. Those who bucked the prevailing opinions of senior managers, particularly the office directors, learned that they could expect their careers to be ruined. Those who adapted to the new rules, in contrast, experienced often meteoric rises. Many of these "team players" now occupy senior positions in the DI, the Community Management Staff, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), and throughout CIA generally. They remain significant obstacles to genuine reform and improvement in the performance of U.S. intelligence.

Origin of the mess. The most serious institutional problems of the DI began in the early 1980s, shortly after Robert Gates became Deputy Director for Intelligence (DDI). Gates had heard policymakers' complaints about CIA during his tour on the National Security Council Staff in the late 1970s and determined to make changes in DI practices, procedures, and products. In a blunt speech to the DI in January 1982, he outlined the DI's shortcomings and announced a series of changes designed to improve performance (49).

However well intended these changes were, they quickly degenerated into serious problems. Some of the better initiatives--like mandating quick review of analysts' papers--were just ignored by managers. Others were altered in ways that impeded efficiency or allowed senior managers to enforce their analytic opinions through the personnel system. By the late 1980s, Gates' "reforms" had become institutionalized into a new analytic paradigm of tailoring analysis to gain personal and institutional kudos--one that DCIs Casey, Webster, Gates, and Woosley showed no inclination to alter. The decade of growing internal troubles finally broke into the public domain at Gates' 1991 confirmation hearings; dozens of current and former DI people rose to oppose Gates and he felt obliged to note many mistakes in a eight-point mea culpa (50).

Nevertheless, with few exceptions, senior management continues to refuse to accept that serious problems in the DI occurred. One of the exceptions is former DDI Doug MacEachen. While careful not to criticize Gates by name, MacEachen, who was pressed to defend Gates in 1991 against charges of politicization and did so with obvious nervousness, wrote in 1994 about how the Gatesian process of reviewing analysts draft papers and making them into CIA products (the "review process") worked in practice in the 1980s:
Similarly, the complex system of reviewing products was arguably an appropriate tool used by management to impose accountability and greater rigor on the products. Yet, the way that these factors came together should make all of us who were in the DI through it all find some sympathy with the Alec Guiness character in The Bridge On the River Kwai (51).
There is a small but growing literature on the causes and internal effects of these problems (52). I thus will not repeat the history here. Prospective reformers need to be sure they understand the problems before they make reform recommendations. 

Reformers should also read a book by Sam Adams called War of Numbers (53). Adams, who left CIA in 1973 after 10 years as an analyst, wrote a critique of the agency based mainly on his unhappiness about intelligence assessments, including those of CIA, of Viet Cong troop strength numbers in the late 1960s. Yet for all of his venom directed against CIA and DCI Richard Helms, Adams portrayed an analytic culture open to discussion and at least moderately encouraging of controversy. The culture Adams vilified was one remarkably open by the standards of 1995--and one that most DI analysts would be very happy to have.

The point bears repetition. Institutional, cultural troubles are heavily at the root of performance complaints about CIA. Any reform effort must understand and address these systemic troubles if "reform" is to have any serious chance of success. Even with a vigorous effort, the challenge of reversing over a decade of institutional shortcomings is enormous--and not certain. It must overcome the opposition of the decade's worth of personnel decisions that have enshrined partisans of the new paradigm throughout management. And it must overcome the opposition, spin, and outright falsification of former intelligence officials who helped create or preserve the mess and are defending their personal reputations. 

Identify Responsible Individuals. It is essential that the persons responsible for the ethical, management, and leadership problems at CIA be identified and removed from positions of authority. Some should be punished and a substantial number should be fired. This is an extreme proposal for a federal government agency, but nothing less is essential if CIA is to regain effectiveness and the confidence of policymakers and its own employees. Given the legal attacks on the once-strong powers of DCIs to terminate individuals' employment, special legislation may be desirable to give the DCI short duration powers to fire or force early or involuntary retirement for the many Senior Executive Service (known at CIA as Senior Intelligence Service, or SIS) and GS-15 personnel who must go before real change can occur. A modest variant of the State Department and military officers' "up-or-out" policy is an option for managers, at least.
Barring outright dismissal and the legal messiness that firings might generate, a second-best solution is transfer to innocuous positions physically far from centers of organizational power. CIA has need of receptionists, loading dock personnel, physical security guards, and motor pool stock clerks, for example. Care should be taken, however, not to denigrate the service of regular employees in these areas who do good, respectable work.

The removed and punished individuals should be internally publicly identified. That is, CIA people should know who was removed for cause, and why, even if security or other concerns preclude disclosure of the names to the press. Such internally "public" statements of accountability are essential if any responsible executive, particularly the DCI and president, is to claim any improvement is ethical performance and persuade by now demoralized and skeptical CIA employees that its leaders mean real reform.

CIA will continue to resist calls for such accountability. Tradition has it that senior miscreants are not held accountable for misdeeds. Tradition has it that ascension to managerial ranks means that failure to perform adequately simply means a transfer, not punishment. DCI Gates appointed many of the current managerial problems. He selected for promotion many senior DI managers when he was Deputy Director for Intelligence in 1982-86. DCI Woolsey, despite the revelation of the 1991 Gates hearings, accepted both Gates' appointees and the tradition of minimal senior executive accountability his own discredit during the Aldrich Ames investigation in 1994. Woolsey's acceptance of this part of CIA's culture contributed to his own downfall by alienating many members of Congress. 

The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has abided by the tradition of non-accountability for years as well. Deputy Inspector General Americo Cinquegrana told me in 1991 that Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz's office would hold no "public hangings" to punish anyone. Further, he confirmed that the OIG would conduct all inquiries to legal standards of investigations. Thus, "proof" was needed to indicate a problem. By maintaining such rigorous standards, the OIG effectively abdicated the traditional role of an inspector general to monitor the general effectiveness of the whole organization and to recommend remedial action when problems became evident. But this decision was not new. Inspectors general had been very ineffective for years (54).
Hitz may never have intended any new performance-related role. According to a DI analyst, word passed through the one DI office's chain of command shortly after Hitz took office in late 1990 that he had told senior DI managers that he wanted a cooperative relationship with them--instantly recognizable code language for a variant of "don't worry, I'm not a threat." Business at usual would continue.

The extent to which Hitz and his office are regarded as irrelevant--or part of the problem--is demonstrated by the OIG's own survey of employee perceptions of CIA's grievance mechanism published in 1992:
The perception that the grievance system favors management surfaced in a substantial number of interviews, according to the inspection team's report to the DCI. Coupled with the perception of bias was a strong dose of fear. The team's report noted that "the eleventh but unspoken commandmant in this Agency is 'thou shalt not whine.' As an organization of doers, employees are loathe to use a grievance system to redress a wrong." (55) 

The team's random survey vividly reflected fears and concerns about using the system. It showed that 41 percent of the employees who were aware of the Agency's grievance system had at least one complaint they thought would qualify for grievance action, but that four out of five never took the complaint to a grievance officer (emphasis added).
Reflecting the fear of employees, an economist in the Office of Resources, Trade and Technology--then headed by Rick Stakem--told me in 1990 the DI analyst corps was a bunch of "sacred rabbits." He included himself in that characterization. It should be obvious that fearful employees who believe their bosses are biased are not adventuresome, productive employees. This OIG admission is a powerful indictment of both CIA managers and the Office of the Inspector General.

Even the accused sometimes lament the lack of OIG-imposed accountability that remains an established tradition for senior officers. Then ACIS-chief Douglas MacEachen--a recurrent object of internal criticism and complaint who DCI Woolsey promoted to DDI in 1993--told the SSCI at Robert Gates' 1991 DCI confirmation hearings:

But it's right out of Franz Kafka. Because once you are accused, the Inspector General will never come back and say you're absolved. You will never be definitely acquitted. They will say we found no evidence to substantiate it. Charged but not indicted. Ostensibly acquitted. (56)

Hitz's persistent unwillingness to seriously address management problems--an apparently decent report on the Ames affair notwithstanding--and his concomitant chronic willingness to condone management problems through inaction, has destroyed his credibility as a defender of either CIA personnel or the Agency's integrity. He should be relieved.

Magnitude of the Problem 

CIA in early 1995 is in turmoil. Roiled by internal genetic rivalries, external attacks on its mission and budget, and plagued by poor leadership, the agency is adrift. It has a palpable malaise. The unhappiness level of employees well into management ranks is very high. Senior officers are floundering as well. In a rare admission of inadequacy, Executive Director Leo Hazlewood in early 1995 told senior DS&T people that the seventh floor was paralyzed and that their offices should do things that make sense on their own--without senior level permission. While this mess presumably was due in part to the exit of DCI Woolsey and the lack of a permanent DCI, it also reflects the existence of a corps of senior officers so devoid of real leadership skills that it is largely incapable of independent creative action. This lack of leadership is a direct result of the now-common practice--accelerated if not started by Robert Gates--of promoting people adept at sycophancy. With a president reportedly content to get his "intelligence" from CNN, and NSC and White House staffers adroit at keeping the DCI off the president's calendar, there was no one left to pander to. The servants who cloned themselves into the dominant class group of managers had no one to follow. So they, too, floundered. 

CIA's problem managers have prospered for so long that they are ubiquitous in senior executive suites and common throughout middle management as well. In the DI, virtually all office directors and deputy office directors should be removed, division chiefs should be thoroughly examined for ethical taint, and some branch chiefs should be removed. The upheaval would be considerable, but it would be relatively short-lived. Some temporary disruption is far preferable to the ongoing malaise that has plagued the DI for a decade.
The other directorates have serious management problems as well, and should have significant turnover. So should the National Intelligence Council. The total number of individuals removed for cause probably should eventually number in the low hundreds. Surgical removal of any fewer will not eliminate the core of the ethical cancer that is eating away CIA--and it would not indicate a serious effort to eliminate management problems. I believe the disease analogy to be a good one to use in the context of CIA culture. Indeed, "cancer" is the word Senator Ernest Hollings used in 1991 to describe CIA's troubles (57).

Identification of these problem managers would be easy for a dedicated group of Congressional or Commission investigators. Despite its reluctance to act, the Office of the Inspector General for years has received volumes of data on troubles through its own "investigations" and employees' complaints directly to it. The files presumably still exist. Random interviews with Agency employees quickly would put investigators on the trails of many miserable managers. Former employees can identify many of the problems without fear of retribution. The establishment of an investigatory staff that could gain the confidence of employees--that is, they would trust its objectivity and the promise that there would not be retribution for contacting the group--would elicit large numbers of complainants. A listing of names and incidents is beyond the scope of this monograph.
It is difficult to overemphasize the extent of unhappiness of CIA employees about their management. The symptoms are legion. In just one manifestation, CIA people are talking to the press in unprecedented numbers, reflecting an evident hope that the Congress will note their frustrations and act further pressure the administration to act competently and decisively. Talking to The Washington Post in early 1995 after Woolsey's resignation, one middle manager put the wide-spread view succinctly; the person said the new director "has to come in with his own team and wipe out the whole top layer." (58) Other internal critics the Post talked with agreed. This view is common among CIA people.
But if there is a purge of senior officials, who will take their places? There are many good people still at CIA who could be elevated to take over vacated executive positions. There also is good reason to bring in a large number of capable leaders from outside the Intelligence Community--with or without intelligence experience. A new senior managerial corps is needed to shake up the established culture. The job will be easier if at least a fair number have no IOUs to pay, friends to protect, or recent heritage to defend.

Other Agencies' Problems 

Other intelligence agencies have cultural problems as well. Some are internally dysfunctional. Some translate into overt inter-agency competition that is debilitating to the overall mission of the Intelligence Community. 

At the National Security Agency (NSA), for example, bureaucratization has broken into open conflict with CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology. Competition in the areas of functional overlap have crippled cooperation and led, I understand, to significant waste of resources as well.
Perhaps no better tangible example of venal bureaucratic rivalry exists than a poster widely displayed on walls of the National Security Agency's headquarters complex at Ft. Meade, Maryland in early 1995. The 17 inch by 22 inch color poster features a frontal photo of Aldrich Ames in manacles (on the right) with (on the left) a quotation of a Russian intelligence officer: "There are friendly states, but no friendly intelligence services." (59) The poster is so transparently anti-CIA--it features Ames and not any of the several NSA personnel convicted of working for the Soviet Union--that some embarrassed NSA personnel apologized to visiting CIA people who saw it.

At DIA and the military services, there is an element anti-CIA feeling that probably reflects portions of jealousy, lack of understanding, turf consciousness, and animosity toward civilians doing national security work. At the same time, in my experience, most uniformed personnel have little understanding of CIA's capabilities. If anything, the military's view of INR is even more negative--for even less reason.
In the security realm, the conflict between CIA and the FBI is legendary. It goes back years, and has major cultural elements. CIA is mainly "offensively" oriented --that is, toward the recruitment of agents and the gathering of information--while the FBI is mainly "defensively" focused. The mind sets of the functions are very different.

While the details of stories vary and individuals have different perceptions of the root causes of the strife, there is an element of constancy in the anecdotes. Intelligence agencies with different mandates, structures, and cultures fight each other and damage the collective intelligence effort. The nation should be outraged at the inefficiency of this organization and the often small-mindedness of the Intelligence Community's leaders.

Outside Pressure Essential 

Presidential, Congressional and public pressure is critical to ensure that these inefficiencies are minimized. Congressional and public scrutiny now is especially important as the Clinton Administration continues to flail in its intelligence policy.

President Clinton, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, Deputy NSC chief Sandy Berger, and former DCI Woolsey all seemingly have failed to understand the nature of the problem or the importance of its solution. In any case, they rather clearly allowed American intelligence to wallow for the first two years of the Clinton Administration.

New DCI John Deutch initially showed greater understanding of the Intelligence Community's internal problems and said at his confirmation hearing that "ignificant change is needed in the intelligence community."(60) This is a good start. But more popular, Commission, and Congressional pressure--as well as better general understanding of the Intelligence Community--is needed to prevent more of what Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the SSCI, aptly called intelligence "mumbo jumbo" coming from the White House (61).

37. John Deutch, "Statement of John Deutch," delivered to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, April 26, 1995, p. 8.
38. R. Jeffrey Smith, "Deutch Is Confirmed Without Senate Dissent," The Washington Post, May 10, 1995, p. A6.
39. Tim Weiner, "C.I.A. Mission: Strengthen Ties On Capitol Hill, The New York Times, February 21, 1995, p. A1.
40. Ibid.
41. Gentry Lost Promise, p. 136. See also Walter Pincus and George Lardner, "Panel May Place Gates in Confirmation Limbo," The Washington Post, July 12, 1991, p. A16.
42. See, for example, Bob Woodward, Veil (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), and Codevilla, Informing Statecraft, p. 206.
43. DO officers in positions to know told me of these actions and their motives.
44. James Adams, Sellout: Aldrich Ames and the Corruption of the CIA (New York: Penguin, 1995) pp. 250-53.
45. Walter Pincus, "CIA Agrees to Settle Discrimination Charges by Female Case Officers," The Washington Post, March 30, 1995, p. A11.
46. R. Jeffrey Smith, "Female Officers Reject CIA Bias Settlement," The Washington Post, June 5, 1995, p. A1.
47. See, for example, the SSCI's An Assessment of the Aldrich H. Ames Espionage Case and Its Implications for U.S. Intelligence, November 1, 1994.
48. Tim Weiner, "C.I.A. Mission: Strengthen Ties On Capitol Hill, The New York Times, February 21, 1995, p. A1. See also R. James Woolsey, "National Security and the Future of the Central Intelligence Agency," speech delivered at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C., July 18, 1994, p. 17.
49. Robert M. Gates, "Remarks to DDI Analysts and Managers," January 7, 1982.
50. United States Senate, Transcript of Proceedings Before the Select Committee on Intelligence, Nomination of Robert M. Gates to be Director of Central Intelligence, Morning Session, October 3, 1991, pp. 46-49.
51. Douglas J. MacEachen, The Tradecraft of Intelligence: Challenge and Change in the CIA (Washington, D.C.: Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, 1994), p. 6.
52. See, for example, John A. Gentry, Lost Promise: How CIA Analysis Misserves the Nation (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993); Gentry, "Intelligence Analyst/Manager relations at CIA," to be published in October 1995; the transcript and summary report of Robert Gates' 1991 DCI confirmation hearings; and, Douglas J. MacEachen, The Tradecraft of Intelligence: Challenge and Change in the CIA (Washington, D.C.: Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, 1994).
53. Sam Adams, War of Numbers (South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 1994). This is a remarkable book in many respects, including the actions of its publisher. Steerforth Press assembled and published without modification the unfinished notes Adams left upon his sudden death in 1988. The book thus has gaps, but its paints a compelling story of the internal workings of an intelligence agency. It is valuable for that reason independent of Adams' main purpose in writing--to show some of the tragic errors of American perceptions about Vietnam.
54. For a few examples, see Gentry, Lost Promise, pp. 111-16, 147, and 164.
55. Central Intelligence Agency, "IG Issues Report on Grievance System," What's News at CIA, No. 17, November 5, 1992, pp. 1-2.
56. 102nd Congress, 1st Session, Senate, Exec. Rept. 102-19, "Nomination of Robert M. Gates to be Director of Central Intelligence," October 24, 1991, p. 207.
57. Walter Pincus and George Lardner, "Gates Strikes Back at Critics in CIA," The Washington Post, October 4, 1991, p. A8.
58. Walter Pincus, "CIA Waits Anxiously for New Chief," The Washington Post, January 25, 1995, p. A15.
59. The quote is from Yuri Kobaladze, press spokesman, Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, March 1994. The poster carries the identifying label "Security Awareness Poster A95."
60. R. Jeffrey Smith, "Deutch Vows to Clean Out Top of CIA," The Washington Post, April 27, 1995, p. A16.
61. Ralph Z. Hallow, "Mexico's problems threaten NAFTA," The Washington Times, January 27, 1995, p. A1.

Redeye · May 22, 2002

When I spoke earlier that the idea of real control over all national intelligence assets being centralized under the DCI is not realistic, this chapter's material is what I also had in mind.

There are however other ways to get near to accomplishing the same thing. The inter-agency working group now in place under the National Security Advisor (Condi Rice) is the vehicle. How well that works in practice depends very much upon the personalities and orientations of those involved, and it depends upon the needs and goals of the President. Clinton's goal appeared to be to make the CIA into a politically-correct agency.

Under Fair Use.
R

<a href="http://www.fas.org/irp/gentry/chapter4.html">FAS.org article link</a>
<center><h4>A Framework for Reform of the U.S. Intelligence Community</h4></center>
<center>Chapter 4: Elements of Institutional Reform</center>

Several key reforms need to be made. The most important relate to leadership and integrity issues, but some organizational changes are also desirable. They should improve efficiency, while lending institutional support to improvement and maintenance of high performance standards.

Strengthen the DCI

The Director of Central Intelligence has a number of importance powers and responsibilities, but he does not control the Intelligence Community in any meaningful way. This has been the fact for years. Former CIA officer Victor Marchetti described DCI Richard Helm's reaction to recognition of his limited powers:
In the wake of [previously described bureaucratic] defeats, Helms gave up on attempts at managing the intelligence community. At one point, months later, he observed to his staff that while he, the DCI, was theoretically responsible for 100 percent of the nation's intelligence activities, he in fact controlled less than 15 percent of the community's assets--and most of the other 85 percent belonged to the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Under such circumstances, Helms concluded, it was unrealistic for any DCI to think that he could have a significant influence on U.S intelligence resource-decisions or the shaping of the intelligence community (62). 

This lack of centralized control has had the predictable effect of leading to inter-agency rivalries, needless functional duplication, and a complicated structure that leads to consumer confusion about just what the Intelligence Community is doing and what it thinks. An organizationally stronger DCI would be able to resolve some of these problems. Legislative reforms should include:
Increasing the portion of the Intelligence Community directly under the DCI's control, and simultaneously giving him more control over the budget of the areas he operationally manages.
Unification of national-level collection and analytic agencies under the DCI to give him maximum control over the assets. This control should ensure their most efficient, coordinated efforts, and give the DCI access to the best judgments possible in fulfillment of his responsibilities as statutory advisor to the National Security Council. This unification would require amendment of Public Law 102-496, which gives the Secretary of Defense authority over some "national" intelligence capabilities, imagery, and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) (63).

Unification of the collection agencies, in particular, could help rationalize the "system" of collection programs run by NSA, NRO, the military, and CIA. Even with the coordinating committees maintained at the the community management level, the organizational structure is Byzantine, disjointed, and not really controlled by anyone. Turf motives are strong. Some agencies have overlapping functions; inefficiencies thus are greater than necessary. Former SSCI staffer Angelo Codevilla described the management of a "system" of a large number of semi-autonomous programs:
The Intelligence Community Staff contains committees to coordinate the various agencies' plans with regard to technical collection, and the Congressional intelligence committees also sometimes prod the system toward coherence. Yet coherence is elusive, because coordination is ex post facto to budgetary planning. Each program is driven by distinct purposes, and each has its own constituencies (64). 

As with any organization, a real head is needed to assure control, efficiency, and accountability. The logical head is the DCI, whether he retains that title or is called Director of National Intelligence--as former Senator David Boren and others have proposed. There may be real financial savings associated with elimination of redundant activities and better managing the remaining programs.

DCIs need to be stronger leaders as well. DCIs William H. Webster (1987-91) and R. James Woolsey (1993-95) were very weak, and Robert M. Gates (1991-1993) was a major creator of the Intelligence Community's problems. Leadership skills and presidential wisdom in picking a good DCI cannot be legislated, but Congress and the president can make clear that they expect strong leadership and management from directors. The DCI must establish clear ethical and performance standards, and hold all Intelligence Community personnel under his control to those standards. This leadership is essential.

Collection and Analysis: Complements or Adversaries?

The reorganizational debates have at times focused on whether analysis should be co-organized with collection agencies. This issue particularly has concerned analysis and human intelligence (HUMINT) collection. Opponents of location within the same agency point to the dirtying of analysis through co-habitation, of opportunities for politicization, of the need for clear organizational boundaries. However, there are major advantages to close coordination between collection and analytic organizations that I believe overwhelm the negative aspects of such collaboration:
Better collection guidance. Analysts who closely coordinate with collectors--who have such coordination as a performance directive--can guide collectors toward areas of current as well as long-term interest. If analytic organizations monitor consumer needs and anticipate them--the old "over-the-horizon" mission--they can push HUMINT collectors, especially, to begin the time-consuming process of developing assets that may provide critical warning intelligence and eventually information to meet current intelligence requirements. Without analytic guidance about possible long-term needs, collectors may not know how to best allocate their limited resources. Similarly, analyst guidance can help designers of technical systems make equipment best suited to meet policymakers' informational needs, not engineers' fancies.
Better quality collection. Analysts can help "reports officers"--the DO officers who guide field "case officers" in targeting, grade their reports, and interface with analysts to ensure an internal firewall of security for operators and their assets--to assess the quality of collection. They can offer advice for improvements in collection. Analyst guidance would reduce the much (and perhaps too much) criticized tendency of case officers to collect on issues easily collected on in order to improve production numbers. Clear quality determinants of performance--inherent rigor, completeness, and so on, as well as clear instructions from reports officers to case officers about consumer priorities as identified by analysts--would help make human collection more valuable and cost-effective.
Better analysis. Better collection begets better analysis. In a similar vein, the ability of analysts to talk with DO reports officers can gain them insights into the quality of reports and the reliability of assets. They can get oral expressions of confidence, concerns, or suspicions that reports officers will not commit to paper in their final disseminated reports. These affect the weight analysts place on such reporting. Thus, the value to analysts--and to reports officers and ultimately to consumers--of a good DI/DO working relationship can be very great indeed.
Good leadership can overcome or minimize the few disadvantages of proximity. Clearly objective analysis, ensured by good leadership, will reduce policymakers' concerns about "slant." An accurate representation of the relationship between analysts and "spies" will boost understanding of the linkages between the two functions--and their significant differences. There is little purpose served by pretending no relationship. The fiction of "separateness" intended by the Carter Administration's renaming the DI the "National Foreign Assessment Center" fooled only people ignorant of intelligence.

Unite NSA and CIA 

The National Security Agency and CIA should be unified under one head--the DCI. There are some reasons as well to integrate the organizations more formally into a single agency. These have performance as well as efficiency elements.

First, NSA serves national intelligence needs--just as CIA does. There is no reason for NSA to be formally part of the Department of Defense and to have as its head a serving military flag officer. NSA ought to be headed by a civilian and be part of the Executive Office of the President, just as CIA long has been. Such a reorganization would in no way diminish NSA's role in serving the intelligence needs of combat commanders. Military personnel could continue to work in many NSA positions, just as they now also serve in CIA and with the NIC.
Signals intelligence (SIGINT) and related technical collection is a significant complement to the HUMINT effort housed mainly at CIA. National-oriented collection is resource constrained and needs better coordination. Reorganization of the Intelligence Community could help accomplish this by integrating NSA's SIGINT and other capabilities better with the DO's HUMINT collection. These include, for example, joint targeting and better use of one agency's assets to pinpoint areas for exploitation by the other's capabilities. The current organizational fragmentation and bureaucratic competition work to reduce mutually beneficial joint work.

Analysts working directly with both collection services could help improve the efficiency of overall collection. For example, co-location of NSA's collection with CIA's analytical strengths would foster better NSA targeting and better NSA understanding of future targeting needs--and thus improve its technical development. This coordination could become still more important if technological changes--possibly including failure to employ clipper chips, growing use of encrypted Internet communications, and more widespread use of fiber optics, for example--inhibit NSA's ability to collect information and ultimately threaten its viability as a collection agency.

Linking CIA's analyst corps more closely to NSA would improve CIA's understanding of SIGINT--and thus also its ability to judge the value and reliability of NSA's information. It would improve the requirements process, which is now so formalistic and complex that many CIA analysts do not bother to task NSA (65).

Unification of the DI and NSA's more modest analytic staff would tend to improve the analysis of SIGINT, while freeing NSA analysts of the needless fetters that now restrict them to assessment of world events based only on NSA's collection--that is, which prohibits them from all-source analysis. It also would allow assessment of the mass of data that NSA has collected but long has been unable to adequately process.

Unification would tend to reduce, if not eliminate, the petty bureaucratic squabbling between NSA and CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology, in particular, which have some overlapping responsibilities. This is a serious problem that warrants high-level evaluation in a classified context.

Reform Military Intelligence 

The complex of Defense Department intelligence organizations needs substantial additional reorganization and reform. Such reform would be complicated by the Byzantine bureaucracy that is the Department of Defense, however. The end of the Cold War and some vigorous leadership has prompted a number of consolidations and closing of intelligence units focused mainly at Warsaw Pact forces, but more can be done to refine the military's intelligence effort. Ignoring in this section NSA and the NRO, the major reforms should rationalize the work of DIA--the intelligence arm of the Joint Staff--and the four service intelligence operations.
Each service has an intelligence headquarters, analytic functions, its own printing shop(s), schools, doctrine, personnel policies, and service-specific duties to support assigned missions. Moreover, the continued independence of the services in training, logistical, and other support functions, combined with bureaucratic turf interests to defend, means that the Joint Staff has little direct authority over the services' intelligence (or any other) functions.

Thus, there is little prospect for real efficiency gains in military departmental intelligence until there is substantial reform of the Defense Department itself. In particular, there must be a sharp diminution of service power before parochial interests can be subsumed to the greater good of the military as a whole--and the nation. This probably means adoption of a general staff-type structure--something that now seems to be a remote prospect.
Barring such reform, the Secretary of Defense could mandate somewhat greater powers for DIA, or legislation could give it more authority. Reasonable objectives here would include placement of certain analytic functions entirely in DIA's hands, for example, while reducing the size and scope of service organizations. It also could mean better coordination of DIA's work with that of the intelligence organizations of the unified and specified commands, and more specialization of functions. In the absence of legislation (and probably with it if the Goldwater-Nichols Act experience is a guide) there will be service resistance to diminution of the services' budgets, staffs, and responsibilities.
Consolidation efforts might mean, for example, elimination of the Marine Corps' modest intelligence function in favor of a modified joint Navy-Marine or an Army-Marine capability. The former makes some bureaucratic sense, given history and the organization of the Department of the Navy, while the latter makes functional sense in that Marine and Army units often are deployed together or placed in similar situations--such as recent joint deployments to Haiti and Somalia, for example. The Army now handles much training for the Marines in skill areas like armor, airborne, artillery, and civil affairs, for example. It could do more. The Marines are virtually certain to oppose such consolidation for turf reasons and because it would tend to reduce further the credibility of their claims that the Marine Corps adds unique value as a second American army.

The military intelligence analytic effort is large indeed, yet its contributions are arguably modestly cost effective. According to a Georgetown University study in early 1995, DIA and the services had some 13,000 people conducting analysis, versus 1,500 analysts at CIA (66). (Note the discrepancy between this figure and those on page 6--another indication of recurrent misperceptions and/or differing definitions of "analysts.")
These people often reprocess reports received from DIA, CIA, and NSA for the periodic briefings they give their commanders and senior staff officers. Because packaging is important to commanders, military intelligence organizations often spend a good deal of their time making visually appealing viewgraphs and maps, and writing for in-house journals specially tailored to meet narrow commanders' or senior staff officers' desires. Because the content and graphical requirements are specific to each G-2, J-2, or commander, they must be redone at each headquarters. More reasonable presentational requirements alone would make substantial savings possible, and there are additional opportunities for consolidation of functions.

Despite the large number of military intelligence personnel, there is continuing need for intelligence personnel to brief commanders, collect local HUMINT in tactical situations, and disseminate information to tactical unit commanders who need it. Arguably, these tactical intelligence duties are under staffed, and such personnel perform more poorly than they should. This reflects heavily the services' personnel policies that require officers regularly to rotate--meaning that they cannot become intelligence experts. There seems little high-level interest in remedying these problems. Indeed, they are a consequence of consciously chosen career development policies.

At the other extreme, defense-related technical collection efforts are large and expensive. Some critics claim they are much more expensive than necessary. Yet while their technical powers are often very impressive, the services and CIA have had trouble figuring ways to get "national-level" technical collection to users in the field. Even senior, priority customers like Desert Storm commander General H. Norman Schwarzkopf complained about the speed of getting such information to him (67). Lower ranking officers with smaller support staffs have sometimes more scathing critiques. A common one is that such capable intelligence is useless to them because it is so highly classified and thus protected that it is unavailable in timely, convenient venues.

All of these problems present major obstacles to accomplishment of the military intelligence portion of the "revolution in military affairs" that Andrew Marshall of the Secretary of Defense's Office of Net Assessments, and others, have postulated (68). Even if the formidable hardware and computer software problems associated with creation of a much more complex tactical military intelligence support system are solved, the system seems unlikely to be able to address anything but the conceptually simplest of military situations--the presence of battlefield threats. Complex questions of motive, intent, and most situations below high intensity conventional combat will be difficult to address because the Defense Department and the Intelligence Community have not invested in the knowledge and the human effort needed to create wisdom about such matters.
Thus, there are major procedural, doctrinal, training, organizational, and procurement issues facing Department of Defense intelligence. One sure way not to resolve the issues is to add another star to the shoulders of the head of DIA--as Robert Gates and others have suggested as part of their effort to create a "Director of Military Intelligence" to consolidate military intelligence. A four-star J-2 (or head of DIA) would rank the three-starred J-3, or operations officer, who normally is the ranking staff officer. The suggestion thus would upset nearly 80 years of military tradition, rendering its acceptance by service personnel unlikely. The DMI idea is sound, but linking it to the idea of a promotion for the director of DIA would not be helpful.

Revamp the National Intelligence Council

The National Intelligence Council for years has been a weak body that neither advises the DCI extensively nor performs very many essential coordination functions. While DCI William Casey used the NIOs a good deal, William Webster paid little attention to the NIC in 1987-91. Deputy DCI Richard Kerr reduced its staffing levels and influence, evidently to increase the relative power of the DI, immediately after he became DDCI in 1989 (69). The NIOs' roles as drafter/coordinators of National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) also have been modest and they have little independent authority over judgments or analytical resources--despite the publication in recent years of a small series of NIC analyses under its own letterhead.
The NIC or a successor organization should be expanded to include a substantial staff of respected experts--from within and on temporary assignment from outside the Intelligence Community--and it should have expanded NIE drafting authority. A more capable NIC would serve several valuable functions. It could be:
A more intellectually potent body of advisors immediately accessible to the DCI. This is important if the DCI is to serve as a true intelligence adviser to presidents and the National Command Authority consistent with his/her status as statutory adviser to the National Security Council. In-house expertise is important because the DI, although also subordinate to the DCI, regards the NIC as a bureaucratic rival and has its own distinct agendas. The DI for years has scrupulously reviewed the written material its subordinate offices prepare for both the NIC and the DCI and monitors contacts of all sorts between NIC and DI people very carefully.
Capable of conducting independent research and concluding respected judgments that would make it a genuine center of independent assessments. This would serve as a check on the propensity of agencies to generate official analytic lines and to hold them in inter-agency debates for bureaucratic rather that substantive reasons. This has been a recurrent problem. The Intelligence Community may need restoration of a variant of the Board of National Estimates--the 1960s vintage predecessor of the NIC that was replaced because it developed problems as well.
A better clearinghouse of ideas and an inter-agency coordinator for the DCI or the head of national intelligence, whatever new name may be chosen for the position.

At the same time, at least two current practices should be eliminated. The NIC in recent years has been to some extent a dumping ground for failed senior executives. George Kolt, for example, became NIO for Russia and Eurasia after he finally was terminated as head of the DI's Office of Soviet Analysis in 1991--a rare firing for cause. He is a good example of the failure of DCIs to ensure that good leaders and people with sound judgment occupy positions of authority. Indeed, he is a good example of the many judgmental errors Robert Gates made in selecting senior officers who continue to cause CIA major problems (70).

Second, as is by now well known, NIEs are too often lowest-common-denominator documents that are wishy-washy or confusing or both. They too often contain collections of contradictory "footnotes" of dissenting opinions from members of the National Foreign Intelligence Board (NFIB)--the committee of agency heads that approves NIEs. Part of the problem is the extensive sub-division of the Defense Department's intelligence interests to service representatives who have parochial service interests at heart.

This sub-division should be eliminated in favor of a unified Defense Department position on NIEs. There is no reason why as many as six Defense Department organizations--DIA, NSA, Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines--should have voices on estimates at the final coordination level of the NFIB.

The handling of NIEs is itself a major issue that warrants additional, special attention. NIEs have not consistently provided what consumers consider to be adequate intelligence service. The NIC is well aware of this perception and has periodically tried to improve performance. None of the efforts seems to have worked, and some have been silly. In the late 1980s, for example, then-NIC Vice Chairman Dave Gries ordered NIOs to include summaries of the Key Judgments of NIEs--in essence summaries of summaries for busy policymakers. Gries mandated that the summaries be no more than four sentences in length. The dictum was arbitrary, especially for complex subjects, and led the NIOs to use semi-colons extensively in effective circumvention of the spirit if not the letter of Gries' dictum. Some "sentences" contained two semi-colons and were the length of normal paragraphs. One reasonably can wonder what kind of policies are likely to be made by a senior government official who wants four-sentence synopses of NIEs because he will not devote time to read a two-page summary of an already watered-down, lowest-common-denominator paper. It is an unflattering commentary on the consumer community the NIC tries to serve.

Establish Genuine Intellectual Competition 

It is essential that reform of organizations and ethics acts to assure objectivity of analysis. While this can be accomplished for short periods within single agencies through the strength of individual leaders, a better solution is creation of multiple analytic organizations that genuinely compete intellectually and create an institutional framework of checks and balances to ensure that bias is not systematized in any agency--or in the Intelligence Community as a whole. This was one of the intents embodied in the creation of DIA, of course. Few intelligence professionals believe DIA has been fully successful on the intellectual level, although it and CIA certainly have engaged in bureaucratic battles. Multiple analytic organizations entail some costs, but analysts and their support equipment are inexpensive compared to technical collection hardware. Leaked budget data indicate that DIA's total budget--not just the part that performs functions similar to those of CIA--is about $600 million annually. The DI has a quite small part of CIA's reported $3 billion budget, and INR's budget is tiny (71).

I believe that one of the key institutional changes that led to the serious denigration of CIA's analytic performance in the 1980s was the elimination of key competing centers of analysis within the DI.
This happened in two stages within four months of each other. In October, 1981, the Directorate of Intelligence was reorganized along geographic lines. This meant that primary responsibility for regions of the world was placed in the hands of a single office director. He oversaw the formulation of assessments within his area of responsibility and could overrule the judgments of his political scientists, economists, military analysts, and so on.
The office directors could and often did enforce their analytic preferences through control of their offices' "career services" or personnel management systems. Those subordinate managers and analysts who cooperated received promotions and other preferential treatment, while those who resisted often received internally well-known punishments. This created internally well-known intellectual orthodoxies. It was another part of the transformation of much of the analyst corps into what the Office of Global Issues economist in 1990 called "scared rabbits."
This conduct contrasted markedly with previous practice, which held that the heads of the political, economic, and military offices all had to concur on assessments of major issues before a DI position was established. This assured a thorough review of issues and a check on bias, albeit at a slight cost in terms of narrowly defined "efficiency."
In January 1982, new Deputy Director for Intelligence Robert Gates persuaded DCI William Casey to remove the Senior Review Panel (SRP) from the DI and place it in support of the National Intelligence Council (72). The SRP was a distinguished, senior group of retired military officers, diplomats, academics, and scientists who offered independent assessments of the DI's work on part-time bases. Gates obviously did not want independent review of the work he would direct, control, and approve. Gates "replaced" the SRP with the Product Evaluation Staff that reported directly to him alone. It quickly showed itself to be little more than a support center that kept production statistics, however. It had no role in ensuring product quality at any level of review. Gates himself assumed that role. He announced that he was to be the final arbiter of "quality:"
I am the final approving official for all of CIA's daily production of current intelligence that goes to the president and other senior government officials. The director [sic] of Central Intelligence sees it at the same time as the policy-maker. I also approve all longer-range assessments. (73) 

There was no role for an activist Product Review Staff that truly reviewed product quality and would lay blame for a failure on the doorstep of the boss.

Note, in addition, that Gates effectively absolved William Casey of direct responsibility for the growing politicization of analysis then afflicting the DI. This effectively and accurately contradicts the now-conventional wisdom that Casey directly politicized analysis to suit his ideological beliefs. Casey was remiss in not effectively monitoring Gates' actions, however. He did not notice or countermand the growing DI practice of studying his public and private comments for policy views or geo-political beliefs to pander to. 

The loss of these two checks on objectivity arguably is largely responsible for the deterioration of the quality of CIA analysis. The loss is thus also a major cause of CIA's diminished standing with Congress, policymakers, and with the American citizenry. 

There are a number of ways that checks and balances on analytic quality can be ensured. They must be systematized, however. Establishment of competing centers within DI offices is one way. These would cost money but might be well worth the cost. Restoration of the pre-1981 organizational structure would help in some ways, but would restore some of the inefficiencies that prompted the restructuring in the first place.
Another is an internal DI equivalent of the NIC Analytic Group--which provides analytic support to the NIOs and is a smaller version of the staff of the Office of National Estimates of the 1960s and 1970s. Along with cutting NIO positions, then-DDCI Dick Kerr reduced the size of the NIC/AG early in 1989 after his promotion from DDI--another move NIOs generally believed at the time was a move to advance the DI's interests over those of the NIC (74). A variant of this would be to return the Senior Review Panel to the DI or, better yet, to place it in the Office of the DCI with responsibility for reviewing DI products and mandating changes where problems were found. Just the existence of such an oversight body would help prevent the sometimes arrogant injection of personal beliefs by reviewers, particularly the office directors, that blew up into the "politicization" issue at Gates' 1991 DCI confirmation hearings.
Former NIC Chairman Joseph Nye tried another approach in mandating his "Parallel Estimates Project" that was designed as a latter day Team A/Team B exercise. Nye envisioned outside organizations making assessments on selected topics while the Intelligence Community internally conducted its own study of the subject. One such project was a Hudson Institute prognosis for Europe through the year 2005. But Nye departed for the Defense Department shortly after the initiation of this project and his successor--CIA careerist Christine Williams--let it die by not appointing people to do the NIC half of the exercise. It was an unwanted challenge that offered potential embarrassment but little gain. The Nye approach, while potentially useful, was fatally flawed in that it had no institutional permanence.
Still another way would be to separate the now combined functions of managers who both judge the worth of analysts and make promotion and assignment decisions through control of the career services. This dual authority has made it easy for managers in politicized offices like the Office of Soviet Analysis and the Office of European Analysis in the late 1980s to use bureaucratic incentives to push judgmental preferences. Creation of separate product review and management chains of authority would reduce sharply the danger of sanction- or incentive-generated bias. The alternative review chains could be groups of peers, other managers, or combinations of the two.
This approach would not eliminate legitimate managerial prerogatives, however. An analogy is the organization in some corporate research centers where researchers--the brains who produce the ideas that translate into new products and profits, command high salaries, and receive peer review--are supported by sometimes less well paid managers who keep their hands off laboratory work but assure overall efficiency and accountability of the research effort.

It matters little what the actual organization, so long as the reviewers have independence, resources and authority to replicate analyses, power to interview analysts, powers to intervene with management at analysts' requests, and power to appeal to senior management those cases of questionable office management conduct. There must be independence of competing analytic activities to ensure corporate analytic integrity and to bring out the very substantial best the Intelligence Community has to offer.

It is critical to distinguish competing analytic functions--a critical part of intelligence--from organizational competetion using analytic judgments as weapons. The latter is little more than turf fighting. Unfortunately, such bureaucratic struggles have been the norm for part of Intelligence Community dealings for years--especially in the Soviet military area between CIA on one side and the DIA/military agency complex on the other (76).

Some significant reform in this area is essential if the culture of the DI and the Intelligence Community as a whole is to change and if CIA analysis is to regain the confidence of policymakers. Identifying mechanisms that can restore this confidence should be a key objective of the reform effort.

State/INR Performs Well 

The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) serves a valuable role as a producer of competitive, alternative analyses, and may be the most cost-effective agency in the entire intelligence structure. It should be left alone. INR is small and inexpensive, yet its judgments generally are well respected within the Intelligence Community and with policymakers (77). Secretaries of State have legitimate need for an internal, controlled, and responsive analytic unit. It thus would be foolish to eliminate INR in the name of modest cost savings. State would just create a replacement under another moniker.
INR's punchy writing style--particularly that of its daily Morning Summary--gain it the advantage of readability that regularly bests CIA's National Intelligence Daily in reader surveys, despite CIA's chronically massive efforts to make the NID user-friendly. (As an aside, it bears reflection that consumers--smart, sophisticated, and senior ones--judge an agency's worth heavily by the ease with summary, newspaper-format publications can be read. How much does this say about the consumer community? And how far does this go toward explaining why CIA spends so much time and effort trying to coddle stylistically demanding consumers? In some instances the medium has indeed become the message.)

INR has problems, but these are internal ones that merit the attention of the Secretary of State, not lawmakers. Perhaps chief among them is the relative bureaucratic status of a tour of duty in INR. The bureau's personnel include both Civil Service personnel and Foreign Service Officers (FSOs), who have different career track incentive systems. While INR's personnel generally are quite good, State could move to enhance the promotional worth of an INR tour for FSOs, for example, to get good people to do intelligence/policy support work for the department and the White House. It also could move to equalize the status of FSOs and generally less well regarded Civil Service personnel.
Indeed, the Commission and Congress might want to assess the extent to which INR's performance is enhanced by the fairly easy transitions of FSOs between policymaking tours in regional bureaus, policy implementing tours at embassies, and intelligence/policy support work at INR. There may be lessons for other analytic agencies whose analysts are to some extent accurately accused of being isolated from their policymaking consumers. The inaccurate corollary is that it is analysts' fault that they are so isolated. In fact, in my experience, the main reason is that analysts' managers insert themselves between analysts and policymakers to ensure control. Analysts would be happy to have closer contact with their clients.

Reinvigorate Inspectors General

Legislative action probably is needed to improve the performance of intelligence agency inspector general staffs. These should be tasked explicitly with performance-related oversight duties--not just investigation of criminal activities or adjudication of minor squabbles. The lack of authority of inspectors general is a problem not restricted to intelligence agencies, but the closure of intelligence from normal public scrutiny places a special responsibility on IGs that they have not always satisfied.
Legislation to modify the responsibilities of CIA's statutory IG is needed to redress the chronic failures of CIA's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) to perform the role of guardian of the performance of the Agency. The enactment of statutory IG legislation that took effect in 1990 did virtually nothing except generate another Senate confirmation hearing and vote. The OIG continued during the tenure of Frederick P. Hitz to rubber-stamp poor managerial decisions and conduct, and to ignore the growing institutional malaise.

The institutional reason, regardless of Hitz's personal preferences, is that the Inspector General has no real authority other than that granted to him by the DCI. To make matters worse, the OIG traditionally has been staffed by older managers with vested interests in the status quo. Even those relative few who are energetic know that they have little real power--making a spirited objection to problems futile but career-damaging. And, because many OIG personnel are on rotations from home offices that may have problems themselves, "troublemakers" on the OIG staff are subject to retribution by vindictive office chiefs. It is a formula for OIG impotence.

Reform of CIA's Office of the Inspector General should cover several areas:
* The Inspector General should receive instructions to expand the scope of his concerns to address the performance of CIA as a whole. In the past, the office has taken a legalistic approach that largely ignored performance of the organization as a whole.
* The Inspector General should have enhanced powers to mandate remedial action, to impose sanctions unilaterally on perpetrators of inappropriate actions, or to go to directly--that is, to bypass the DCI--to either the president or the Congressional oversight committees with notification of problems. This unsual power would give OIG real authority to enforce accountability. It would be especially important if, as happened in the last decade, senior management itself was the Agency's key problem.
* There should be a separate "career service" for OIG personnel so that they can have satisfactory careers in the inspections area. OIG people would therefore not be held hostage by potential retribution from line office chief heads of the career services to which they belong. They also would not be ignored as detailees "out of sight and out of mind. (78)"

Revamp Security Procedures 

The entire security apparatus warrants review and reform. Heading the list of priorities is the abysmal working relationship CIA long has had with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mutual dislike and turf fighting have been legendary. Both parties undoubtedly are partly to blame; the FBI also has poor relations with the Secret service, I understand. The fall-out of the Ames affair and Presidential Decision Directive 24 issued in mid-1994 to better coordinate counter-intelligence may help, but remedies certainly are cultural--because the problems are largely cultural--and may require legislation as well as determined senior leadership and effective Congressional oversight.
Within CIA, the Office of Security (OS) merits substantial reform and a purge of senior managers. OS has relied excessively on the polygraph, despite widely known and well publicized failures to identify problems. OS and many CIA people are well aware of other problems that are not yet public knowledge.

Yet, in response to criticism of the polygraph as a result of its repeated failure to catch Aldrich Ames, OS apparently has responded by using the "box" still more. In early 1995, OS reportedly was disqualifying some 80 percent of applicants due to failure to pass the polygraph. These vetos come at the end of processing--after much time, effort, and money has been expended. According to a CIA person, the Agency was having trouble filling new Career Trainee (CT) classes due to polygraph disqualifications. Senior OS managers evidently are having a hard time learning from their mistakes and moving to more productive security approaches.

Overzealous use of the polygraph has several negative effects. It undoubtedly rejects many perfectly loyal citizens who do not do well at polygraph testing--that is, who are innocently nervous during the exam. It rejects people whose breadth of experience makes simple "yes" or "no" answers difficult. Yet it is these very people whose foreign area expertise is much needed. The result is that young, inexperienced and poorly traveled people often pass; they have done and know too little to make them suspicious.

And, knowing that security processing is a time consuming, troublesome and/or random part of the application process, many good prospects simply do not apply. The lack of regular injections of such experienced, mature, mid-career people arguably has been a major contributor to the establishment of intellectual orthodoxy in some offices and the allegations of poor performance that recurrently has dogged CIA analysis in recent years. Columnist Jack Anderson claims documentary evidence that CIA purposefully recruited obedient conformists (79). The Congress and the Commission should investigate this matter--from the standpoints of security and the Agency's de facto mission.

In addition, overzealous CIA application of the polygraph simply makes no sense for overall national security when State and Defense do not require polygraph tests for all employees. Foreign governments interested in acquiring U.S. secrets including intelligence judgments and policies--as opposed to data on agents and operations--would be far better advised to try to breach security at those agencies or Congress. Even better might be the White House where, for example, former Clinton campaign operatives turned senior government policymakers saw little reason for most of 1993 even to bother applying for security clearances.
It makes little sense to add more bolts to the front door--to the point where access by the home owner is negatively affected--when numerous back doors are left unlocked or wide open.

Recall that Israeli agent Jonathan Pollard was a U.S. Navy employee and the Soviets managed to recruit numerous NSA officers over an extended period; these people were under Defense Department security rules. Foreign governments, especially nominal friends and major aid recipients interested in internal U.S. Government deliberations about policies toward them, might even put penetration of CIA fairly low on their priority lists. Again, much better choices are the White House, Congress, and State, which have relatively easy security standards and a relatively large flow of political appointments greased by modest campaign contributions. Turnover and therefore access is further increased by the willingness of many people to take temporarily small salaries in return for a coveted resume line. It is a wonderful opportunity to slip agents into positions with access to sensitive information.

CIA's security apparatus also needs reform because it has become a mechanism for ensuring internal orthodoxy--not just security. In the 1980s, OS used its powers to turn on internal critics of Robert Gates and his proteges. At least one law suit is in process over this issue. The Office of Medical Services (OMS) collaborated in the effort, by evaluating internal critics for alleged psychological problems. Unable or unwilling to handle all the "investigations" internally, OMS contracted with a psychiatrist in Reston, Virginia and a psychologist in Washington, D.C., at least, to handle the work. The magnitude of the misuse of authority is unclear to me, but it has begun to leak into the public domain (80). This issue warrants serious investigation and significant remedial action.

What Place the Intelligence Budget?

The perceived poor performance and lack of accountability of intelligence agencies in recent years has prompted additional calls for publication of the Intelligence Community's annual appropriations. This long has been a staple of civil libertarians' demands, but recently has gained support among mainstream observers and the Congress as well. Intelligence agencies have resisted such publication on the grounds--which have some merit--that publication of budget figures would provide adversary nations and their intelligence agencies with information about resource allocations and thus a glimpse at sacrosanct "sources and methods."

However reasonable the security argument, CIA especially has lost enough credibility that some publication of intelligence budget figures seems needed to reassure the citizenry and its Congressional representatives that the organizations are performing adequately and in an accountable manner. Moreover, from a practical perspective, there simply is such dissatisfaction with intelligence that aggregate figures at least are bound to continue to leak. Figure 2 is my summation of figures that appeared in but one newspaper article in mid-1994. Furthermore, senior Congressional and intelligence officers regularly quote percentage figures on staffing cuts, quantities of resources devoted to the Soviet Union or open-source collection, for example. These individually innocuous figures allow moderately astute citizen observers, and certainly curious foreign intelligence services, to put together the tidbits into a fairly accurate mosaic picture of the U.S. intelligence effort.
There also are some additional advantages of release of budget figures that can help clear up serious misperceptions about intelligence and its performance held by Americans who do not study intelligence very much. These can help debunk the now common variants of public moans to the effect that "we spend $30 billion a year on CIA and all we get is a bumbling drunk like Aldrich Ames."
Figure 2

Intelligence Community Budget -- 1994

Budget Share

Agency ($ billion) (percent)

CIA 3 11
State/INR --- ---
NRO 7 25

Defense

NSA 4 14
DIA 0.6 2
TIARA 12 43
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
TOTAL 28 100

Note that the sum of line entries do not total $28 billion or 100 percent. "DMA" refers to the
Defense Mapping Agency.

Source: Walter Pincus, "White House Labors to Redefine Role of Intelligence Community," The
Washington Post, 13 June 1994, p. A8. These figures were leaked to the press. Actual figures
are classified.

Chief among the misperceptions is the notion that CIA takes the lion's share of intelligence funding. In fact, as all accounts indicate, Defense Department agencies use the bulk of the money, and Tactical Intelligence and Related Activities (TIARA) takes the biggest share of that. TIARA funding and the monies provided under the General Defense Intelligence Program (GDIP) go for intelligence support of the war-fighters. These programs include expensive items like aircraft and radars. Much of the effort is as essential to conducting combat operations as guns, bullets, and food for soldiers. It is inherently part of the Defense establishment and should be accounted for as such--as well as funded by the Defense Department.

A new accounting scheme should separate defense intelligence--that narrowly used by uniformed personnel--from national intelligence which supports the president, Executive Branch civilian agencies, and the Congress as well as some strategic intelligence needs of the Defense Department. This latter account is where the citizenry generally believes "spying" to be conducted. It amounts to much less than the $28 billion annual figure cited above by The Washington Post. The release of some figures by no means requires detailed listings of all operational accounts. To the extent that newly categorized national programs serve defense needs on a significant or recurring basis--as with imagery and other technical collection--the NRO and NSA, presumed now to be part of the Executive Office of the President and subordinate directly to the DCI alone, should "bill" the Defense Department in the sense that an appropriation for this activity should be placed in the Defense Department's intelligence budget (81).

The separation of aggregate figures would serve a valuable governance function. It could help resource allocators in Congress (including the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office), the Office of Management and Budget, for example--as well as the Defense Department--better understand how much the government is spending on what--and thus help improve the efficiency of resource decisionmaking. Even the reporting of aggregate figures would help the citizenry and the press keep tabs on government decisionmakers without compromising sensitive information. HPSCI chairman Larry Combest has made the point similarly:
If a project is done specifically for the military, I don't know if we should have that lumped into our [intelligence] budget (82).
He properly suggests that the military weigh the merits of tactical intelligence systems versus weapons versus other defense activities and make decisions within the context of the defense budget--independent of the needs for national level intelligence systems and programs that serve non-military consumers of intelligence information and judgments.

Exempt Intelligence From Affirmative Action

The Congress should enact legislation to exempt the Intelligence Community--and particularly agencies' subcomponents that operate abroad--from affirmative action policies and laws. I do not suggest elimination of fair employment treatment or equal opportunity. However, the now major preoccupation with sexual and racial percentages has cast a pall throughout CIA and reduced sharply the once-strong sense of fraternity and unity of purpose. In my experience, it is now becoming a problem in the military as well. Just as in society as a whole, promotions are seen in the context of quotas, leading to suspicions about the fairness of promotions and reverse discrimination.

Age and sex discrimination suits by CIA personnel are now with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or recently have been settled. An age grievance in the DS&T had origins in the dismissal of older white men to make managerial room for young blacks. Recall that former station chief Jeanine Brookner won a rare $410,000 settlement in late 1994 and another suit by women DO officers was resolved by a cash settlement and retroactive promotions in March 1995. Unhappiness with management remains pervasive, suggesting that the Agency will continue to be torn by allegations of discrimination unless there is significant remedial action--in both leadership and appeals arenas.

However well motivated, affirmative action has become a national curse--creating competing groups that alternately feel discriminated against and want remedial discrimination at someone else's expense--that is particularly ill-suited to international intelligence work. It may make little operational sense to send a woman, for example, to try to recruit agents in an Islamic state that prohibits women from traveling alone or freely. (Or to establish a station of blacks in Scandinavia. Or to send six foot six inch blond weight lifters to southeast Asia.) We can assuage some moral national sense by sending women into such operational environments anyway. But foreigners are under no such real or imagined obligation to accept our moral codes; they will behave as their cultures tell them to behave. If women case officers are likely to be ineffective in such operational environments, the CIA effort will be damaged with uncertain impact on national security; the women's presence there also would be a waste of government resources. Moreover, poor performance--in terms of the usual criteria of recruitments made and reports submitted--is likely to show up at promotion time. The result may be low aggregate promotion figures for women--ostensibly evidence of actually non-existent sex bias.

The point is simply to recognize that efficient field work requires operations in accordance with foreign cultural norms. We foolishly spit into the wind--as sailors might say--by demanding that CIA operations managers make assignments in accordance with domestic American standards of "fairness."

This is not to say that CIA managers are fair--or that there is not a need for substantial improvement. The needed improvements are for all aspects of personnel management, however. I vividly recall a senior DO officer--a white male--who visibly shook at the mere discussion of crossing the executive who headed DO operations in Europe in the late 1980s. White men are treated poorly, too. They just do not have sex or race so often to hang claims of bias upon. Reforms need to be in at least three areas: selection of better managers; improved internal grievance mechanisms; and, a more effective Office of the Inspector General. There can be no healing of the breaches caused by affirmative action until the Intelligence Community, and CIA in particularly, accept a policy of genuine equality of opportunity consistent with mission requirements and the operational environment. The latter may be important for the DO and the DS&T, but is virtually irrelevant for the primarily U.S.-based Directorate of Intelligence.
The Congress thus should give the agencies authority to act as common sense and operational efficiency dictate--and to keep social engineering out of U.S. intelligence. HPSCI Chairman Larry Combest put the point well, saying that intelligence:
... [P]robably has more of a need for multiracial individuals because we're dealing all over the world with people... We need to show balance, but the priority has to be on national defense and security. (83) 

Combest added:
I think we had better be very careful not to use [the intelligence agencies] as areas of social experimentation. That should not be the goal. (84) 

Improve Congressional Oversight 

Congress should move to strengthen its understanding and oversight of intelligence. The Intelligence Community's problems developed over an extended time, and the citizenry and members of the Intelligence Community itself can understandably conclude that the lack of serious Congressional concern about the problems until 1994 indicates that Congress conducted its oversight responsibilities poorly. Better oversight does not mean micromanagement--at least of a healthy intelligence community--but it does mean better understanding of the performance and problems of intelligence. My own experience in dealing with the SSCI in 1991 in connection with the Gates confirmation hearings was that staffers, although inherently capable and apparently well-intentioned, simply did not understand the problems of CIA. Members were in worse shape. A Congressional staffer quipped in 1992, "'Oversight' has two meanings."(85) I believe his comment applied accurately to both oversight committees for years, and that, while there has been improvement since 1991, both have yet to reach optimal levels of understanding and staff expertise.

Former SSCI Chairman Dennis DeConcini recognized the point in a May 1993 speech. Responding to comments by Robert Gates about the lack of expertise on the oversight committees, DeConcini said:
CIA has not always played it straight with the oversight committees. Now part of that can be our fault. Mr. Gates pointed out there are very few members on the oversight and appropriations committees who appear to devote a lot of time to the process, and there is not a broad knowledge by many--I think he said he could count them on one hand. Well there is some truth to that ... (86) 

I therefore agree with Gates' proposal that Congress strengthen the oversight committees by removing term limits (87). It should also take steps to improve staff expertise. Several actions could help improve the performance of staffers:
* Selection of more personnel with intelligence backgrounds. There is no substitute for experience.
* Rotations for Congressional staffers to intelligence agencies, and possibly, vice verse. Care should be taken to ensure that possible intelligence agency personnel on rotation to the committees are not simply agents on information collection and recruitment missions.
* Staffers' dealings with offices of agency inspectors general should be strengthened. This could help improve staff understanding, and also help oversee (and encourage) the internal overseers of agencies. In CIA's case, as mentioned, the Office of the Inspector General has been a major problem in recent years.

Presidential Leadership Critical

And finally, the firm involvement of the president in intelligence matters is essential to the coherent conduct of the agencies (as well as his own conduct of foreign policy). President Clinton's evident disinterest in intelligence matters and his difficulty in securing a willing replacement for DCI James Woolsey in early 1995 bode poorly for the success of the Aspin Commission and of any Clinton Administration DCI (89). Any DCI will be weakened by the absence of strong, public presidential commitment to reform. Intelligence professionals are adept at nothing if not obfuscation and bureaucratic infighting. Still, new DCI John Deutch has a good reputation for management in some quarters and has access to a large and growing body of evidence about the Intelligence Community's problems. I hope he will act strongly on his own initiative--independently but in concert with the Congress and the Commission. Certainly he promised the SSCI at his confirmation hearing that he would do so. Congress and the knowledgeable citizenry can, in many ways, help focus the president's attention on this essential component of America's foreign policy establishment; they can remind Deutch of his promises as well.

62. Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), p. 99.
63. See L. Britt Snider, "Assessing the 1992 Intelligence Reorganization Legislation," National Security Law Report, Volume 15, Number 5, May 1993, p. 1.
64. Angelo Codevilla, Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century, (New York: The Free Press, 1992), p. 117.
65. This is a serious problem. NSA long has required written "requirements"--requests for information before the agency will gather data. These must be submitted in specific ways through specified channels. Because CIA analysts usually believe that actual responses may or not come, they are reluctant to spend the time learning how to work the system. This lack of "user-friendliness" contrasts markedly with the willingness of many parts of the DO to tailor collection to support on-going or project-specific analyst needs.
66. Walter Pincus, "Military Espionage Cuts Eyed," The Washington Post, March 17, 1995, p. A1.
67. See: Molly Moore, "War Intelligence Flawed," The Washington Post, June 13, 1991, p. A1; George Lardner, "In a Changing World, CIA Reorganizing to Do More With Less, The Washington Post, July 5, 1991, p. A9; and, U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Armed Services, 103rd Congress, 1st Session, "Intelligence Successes and Failures in Operations Desert Shield/Desert Storm," August 1993.
68. See, for example, James R. FitzSimonds, The Revolution in Military Affairs: Challenges for Defense Intelligence, (Washington D.C.: Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, 1995).
69. Shortly after Kerr became DDCI in early 1989, then-NIC Chairman Fritz Ermarth held several NIC staff meetings (that I also attended) during which NIOs expressed fears about Kerr's designs to reduce the role of the NIC, and thus their responsibilities, in favor of the DI. Shortly thereafter, the several NIO positions were abolished. At the same time, the already small NIC Analytic Group, then a small group of roughly five senior analysts, was also reduced in strength. These people were largely refugees; several had run-ins with DI management, despite or perhaps because of their consid erable abilities, and were in bureaucratic exile under the personnel system of the Office of the DCI.
70. George Kolt entered CIA directly at Gates' behest. In the early 1980s, Kolt was a serving U.S. Air Force colonel on rotational assignment to the NIC as an assistant NIO. NIC chairman Gates made him a full NIO--a position normally reserved for major generals. When Kolt was passed over for promotion to brigadier general, he retired and immediately became DDI Robert Gates' director of the Office of European Analysis.
71. Walter Pincus, "White House labors to Redefine Role of Intelligence Community," The Washington Post, June 13, 1994, p. A8.
72. Robert M. Gates, speech to DI personnel entitled, "Remarks to DDI Analysts and Managers," January 1981, p. 9.
73. Robert M. Gates, "Is the CIA's Analysis Any Good?" The Washington Post, December 12, 1984, p. A25.
74. Then-chairman of the NIC Fritz Ermarth addressed the issue repeatedly in NIC staff meetings in early 1989. I attended some of the sessions.
75. This was the name given to a 1970s-vintage exercise in which CIA and outside experts separately examined some Soviet military issues.
76. It is important to distinguish institutional turf battles from those of smaller offices and between individuals. Often the relations between individuals of different agencies are far better than those between their parent organizations. At the individual level, there often is useful sharing of views and mutual help.
77. Several National Security Council senior staff officers have told me they prefer INR's Morning Summary to CIA's current intelligence publications.
78. See also Gentry, Lost Promise, pp. 193-94 for a discussion of possible reforms of OIG.
79. Jack Anderson and Michael Binstein, "CIA has an Image to Lose," The Washington Post, May 15, 1995, p. D20. Major parts of the article are wildly inaccurate and some are simply nonsense, but the authors claim a 28-page manual for recruiting called the "Personality Assessment System" dates from the 1970s.
80. See Walter Pincus, "Intelligence Panel to Study Discrimination Charges," The Washington Post, July 25, 1994, p. A11. I know several people who experienced such treatment.
81. The idea of one government agency "billing" another is not remarkable or new. Indeed, the Defense Department itself has pressed some of its subordinate agencies, particularly the arsenals and repair facilities, to conduct near private-sector contracting within the department. The goal was a good one worth emulating: to foster efficiency and sound decisionmaking. Similarly, some Pentagon offices distribute funds to the unified commands, which then implement their programs.
82. Walter Pincus, "A 21st Century Intelligence Test," The Washington Post, February 20, 1995, p. A27.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid.
85. For observations on Congressional oversight, see Gentry, Lost Promise, chapter 5, pp. 123-42.
86. Remarks of Senator Dennis DeConcini to the American Bar Association Standing Committee on Law and National Security, reprinted in "DeConcini Responds to Gates Remarks on Oversight," National Security Law Report, Volume 15, Number 5, May 1993, p. 1.
87. Robert M. Gates, "A Leaner, Keener CIA," The Washington Post, January 30, 1995, p. A15.
88. Gentry, Lost Promise, p. 203, and Gates, "A Leaner, Keener CIA."
89. Multiple published reports claimed in late 1994 and early 1995 that choices such as Deputy Defense Secretary John Deutch and retired Admiral William Crowe rejected feelers. Clinton himself said, in naming the 17-member Aspin Commission, that its work was his "highest personal priority"--a claim hard to believe. See Walter Pincus, "President Launches 13-Month Review of Post-Cold War Intelligence Needs," The Washington Post, February 3, 1995, p. A20.

Redeye · May 22, 2002

This chapter presents it's author's evaluations of what to avoid.
I would certainly suggest being aware that James Woolsey and his perspective will play a significant role in what develops insofaras intelligence community reform.

Under Fair Use.
R

<a href="http://www.fas.org/irp/gentry/chapter5.html">FAS.org link</a>
<center><h4>A Framework for Reform of the U.S. Intelligence Community</h4></center>
<center>Chapter 5: Reform Ideas to Avoid</center>

While the Intelligence Community needs many reforms, some ostensible reform/reorganizational proposals are poorly conceived and should be rejected. These include some from prominent individuals.

CIA Must Continue to Exist

Reformers in both Congress and the Executive Branch must understand that the national missions that CIA performs are essential to the well-being of the nation and that they must be maintained. There is no substitute for this work. The functions could be performed by another, newly-created organization composed of entirely new individuals, but that step would be time-consuming and expensive. The by now well-known lapses of the Agency do not argue for the CIA's elimination, but rather for a thorough house-cleaning. The misinformation and hysteria on this issue is enormous. Spread by even ostensibly responsible individuals like former SSCI member Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who has introduced legislation calling for the dismemberment of CIA, these extreme views do not contribute to the national debate about how to improve the performance of intelligence.

A further confusion continues to stem from the popular myth that CIA was created to "fight" the Soviet Union in the Cold War and that, with "victory" in that "war" having been declared, there is no more need for CIA. In fact, the National Security Act of 1947, which created CIA, was largely a result of dissatisfaction with the fractured military command, control, and intelligence system of World War II. During the war, the Army and Navy operated with often dysfunctional independence. (Read for example, of the bitter personal battles between Admiral Chester Nimitz and General Douglas MacArthur in the Pacific campaigns for a glimpse of the problem.) There was need for a Defense Department (created in 1949 after the National Military Establishment formed by the 1947 Act proved ineffective) to coordinate defense issues. A stronger foreign policy establishment in the White House was created in the form of the National Security Council. And, the Air Force finally won separate service status.

The emergence of the Soviet Union as a prospective adversary spurred changes, but the United States had a primitive national security structure that was not well suited to serve the needs of a new world power. Other countries long had formal civilian intelligence services. We periodically had military intelligence services. General George Washington had one during the Revolutionary War, which was disbanded after independence. During World War II, despite the fractured Army/Navy relationship, our military signals intelligence service made a major contribution to the war effort by breaking Japanese military codes. The formation of CIA as a national intelligence agency was only our belated joining of international norms.
Keep the DO and DI Separate

DCI Woolsey's major organizational initiative--the physical integration of the CIA's analytic and operations directorates is a terrible idea that should be reversed. Toward the end of his tenure, Woolsey announced plans to create a "partnership" but not, I understand, a full fledged merger between the organizations. Officers from the Directorate of Intelligence and Directorate of Operations were to be physically co-located in some cases--ostensibly to improve cooperation between the components. But the idea has major drawbacks (90). It:
* Increases the opportunity of a mole, especially in the DI, to gather a broad range of sensitive operational information.
* Puts together very different cultures, with different missions, that require different managerial styles. In the DO, for example, a more hierarchical military command and control system is appropriate, while the best DI units operate under a system of relatively loose management that guides analytic priorities but which encourages debate and controlled internal controversy.
* Puts covert operators, who are policy implementers, together with DI officers ostensibly working only to provide information and objective analysis. The mix would taint the perceived objectivity of already suspect analysis. In ethics, the U.S. Government cares about the appearance of impropriety, whether or not actual actions are inapproriate. It should do the same in intelligence.

Analysts and collectors need to be in regular and close communication, but they work in different ways and do not need to sit next to each other.

But some distance between operators--acting as either collectors on covert action missions--and analysts does not require separate agencies, as some have proposed. Melvin Goodman, for example, cites British practice--which separates operators (MI6) from analysts (in the Ministry of Defence and the Joint Intelligence Committee)--as a good model (91). While such a separation presumably would reduce somewhat the likelihood of Ames-like counter-intelligence scandals, it has efficiency problems and surely would not prevent another of Goodman's suggested advantages: elimination of advancement of parochial opinions to the White House and State Department. There is no reason why separation would make any difference in this area. As we have seen, DO operators lobby Congress on their own behalf, and a DCI or DDI with a policy bent could try to influence the NSC through force of opinion, judgment, wisdom, or the slant of his analysts' papers. Good senior leadership alone can prevent unwanted intrusion of intelligence into the policy process.
No Military Control of Covert Action

The U.S. military should not assume control or conduct of paramilitary covert action, as Robert Gates and some others have proposed (92). I say this for two main reasons: the military cannot handle the job; and, there are major diplomatic and domestic political risks associated with use of uniformed military personnel in such activities. I make these comments as a U.S. Army reservist who has spent most of his military career in intelligence and special operations assignments (93).
The military--despite the elevation of special operations in stature and funding as part of the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 and growing involvement in non-traditional roles--still thinks conventionally. Conventional force commanders run the services and the Joint Staff, despite the elevation of one special operations officer to four star rank as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Special Operations Command. Even though there are personnel who are sophisticated in "operations other than war"--the current term for what once was called low intensity conflict--there is not an adequate base of personnel experience to develop sophisticated plans or conduct sophisticated operations of the scale a president might ask CIA to perform. There is not the money or the time to prepare such forces. The military personnel management system mandates that people, including intelligence officers, rotate too quickly to develop area expertise. Despite some successes, I also doubt that the military could maintain security as well as CIA does. Moreover, the military's success in covert operations in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s was poor--for reasons that Defense Department reforms have not ameliorated. This subject warrants significant discussion--about these and other issues including CIA's own very mixed record in conducting covert operations--in closed-door sessions.

There are several major political reasons to keep the Defense Department out of covert operations:
* It is important to be able to maintain plausible deniability. Use of American citizen-soldiers, poorly able or untrained in concealing their national heritage, sharply reduces our ability to conceal involvement.
* Families of soldiers lost in battle are more likely to complain publicly that they sent their loved ones to "defend the country"--not participate in some "dirty" war only tangentially related to America's immediate defense.
Unhappy mothers and wives of servicemen lost in covert actions are much more likely to demand "accountability" than the families of intelligence officers who know the rules of the game. The POW/MIA cottage industry of the post-Vietnam War period is more likely to "reinvent" itself to find soldiers lost in covert actions than it is to seek out missing or dead intelligence operatives or agents.

It seems inevitable that uniformed military involvement in covert operations would raise questions related to the War Powers Act or related questions about whether the nation is at war or at peace. These would increase the likelihood of yet another oxymoronic public debate about the conduct of "covert" action.
Military involvement in covert actions could cause complications with our allies. In particular, it would raise yet more questions about our judgment and concerns about whether treaty terms that require foreign allies to assist each other are in danger of being triggered. Foreign countries may be less willing to ally themselves with us if they sense increased chances of being dragged into a war they do not want.

Use of U.S. soldiers in covert actions reduces our moral authority and our diplomatic assertions that negotiations, multi-national organizational fora, and legal proceedings should be the foundations of conflict resolution.
And, successful covert para-military actions may benefit from or even require the access, sources, and tradecraft of the clandestine service of CIA that the Defense Department cannot match. All of these problems are avoidable through continued separation of the Department of Defense from traditional CIA para-military covert operations.

No National Imagery Agency

There is nothing unique about imagery as a source of information that warrants its placement in a separate collection or analytical agency. Indeed, the best imagery analysts are good all-source analysts who rely first on imagery. CIA years ago gave up the idea that "photo interpreters" only look at pictures. It created the Office of Imagery Analysis, which gave full analyst status to imagery analysts. Separation of such analysts into another agency would almost certainly reduce coordination with other analysts, cut overall analytic quality, and lead to yet more organizational turf fighting.

The range of imagery analysis runs from analysis of the products of national level systems--that is, satellites--to specialized air-breathing platforms' output, to photographs and other images taken by tactical fighters on bombing runs, to ground photographs taken by infantrymen. This work is done at the field level in support of targeteers and tactical commanders who, like General Schwarzkopf in 1991, had to decide if the fire support provided by aircraft has inflicted sufficient damage to allow other tactical initiatives against Iraqi forces. The complexity, type, and time-sensitivity of such work is sharply different than that of the national-level imagery analyst now working at CIA's Office of Imagery Analysis or at DIA--who may be evaluating complex technical issues and conducting the imagery equivalent of basic research. While imagery analysis done as part of bomb damage assessments supports tactical commanders' decisionmaking, Washington work is often long-term and strategic in nature.

These many types of imagery analysis are not well placed under the same organizational umbrella. Military field commanders will not accept control of assets potentially critical to their tactical decisionmaking to be controlled by out-of-theater organizations--especially civilian ones. And, combatant commanders' concerns may differ sharply from those of the Departments of State or Energy. Still more different are the interests of Agency for International Development officials wanting to know if Landsat can tell them if drought conditions in the Horn of Africa have again worsened to the point where another complex humanitarian emergency looms on the near horizon.

There is room to streamline the collection of imagery, however. The unusual organizational structure of the NRO as a joint CIA/Air Force outfit is a testament to turf jealousy, not wisdom. If the NRO is maintained, it should come firmly under the contro l of a strengthened DCI, who needs such authority to balance the budgetary demands of the collection and analytic components and agencies against their roles in furthering the greater good of the Intelligence Community, and to ensure that funds roughly go first to meet higher national intelligence priorities, not to the organizations with the best lobbying efforts. The Air Force can continue to perform satellite launch and control functions on a contract basis--following the instructions of its client, the DCI, either directly or through the NRO.

The mechanism for tasking satellite imaging systems also merits review. The long-standing COMIREX structure was cumbersome. It featured too little strategic planning and too much ad hoc targeting based on the bureaucratic power of transient coalitions of consumer agencies fighting for control of limited capacity. A streamlined Defense Department requirements system funnelled through DIA would help. This issue--including an evaluation of recent changes in the requirements management system and the creation of the Central Imagery Office--deserves a thorough examination in a classified context.

No Separate Open-Source Agency

The growing body of publicly available information, the Internet, and talk of an "information superhighway" have spawned discussion of a need for separate organizations to handle this "open-source intelligence." Much of this talk is uninformed, however, and even responsible advocates of more use of public information sometimes make extravagant claims of its usefulness.
No separate agencies are warranted, although better collection and processing of such data seem appropriate. New equipment, operating procedures, internally modified organizations, and attitudes are needed to handle the new informational environment. The Community Open Source Program Office (COSPO), headed by CIA careerist Joe Markowitz, appears to be headed in the right direction. With about one percent of the Intelligence Community's budget, COSPO is developing ways to ensure better access of publicly available information to analysts and thus to polymakers--without compromising the security integrity of classified information systems or intellectual property protected by copyrights (94). A program to put new computer terminals on analysts' desks hardly warrants creation of a new agency.
It is worth remembering that open-source information has been a staple of intelligence collection for a long, long time. Contrary to now-conventional wisdom, intelligence analysts long have known of and used open source information extensively. Diplomats have collected such "intelligence" information for centuries.

More recently, CIA has had the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) as part of its Directorate of Science and Technology. FBIS conducts open source collection and translation of radio and television broadcasts, translates print media articles, and sometimes releases analytic pieces based on open source reporting. In addition, intelligence analysts regularly read, and for years have read, U.S. and foreign news publications, watch(ed) foreign television broadcasts, and subscribe(d) to a host of specialized publications. Subscription budgets at CIA have been enormous--for both periodicals and analytic services. (As an aside, recall that FBIS translations serve a host of non-government individuals and organizations as well as the intelligence community; CIA thus long has helped promote general American understanding of the world and American commercial interests.)
Moreover, CIA for years has had a formal program to collect information about foreign affairs, particularly in technically demanding areas, from knowledgeable U.S. citizens. Analysts talk with these non-government specialists in many areas, as well as prepare questions for the full-time collectors to ask. I have done it myself repeatedly. These contacts have been helpful, but rarely in my experience have they provided critical information. There is little qualitatively different about what has been done than that proposed by open source advocates like Robert Steele of Open Source Solutions, Inc. These contacts have been limited, however, and there may be opportunities for expansion of the program.
Any such expansion must address at least two major concerns of the citizens, however: confidentiality of information; and, the time and other burdens of talking with CIA. In the past, these contacts have been volunteer efforts by loyal citizens. A program to levy greater demands on the business and academic communities should be prepared to offer market rate compensation for professionals' and executives' time, as well as expense reimbursements. If this occurs, however, there is some danger that those individuals might attain unwelcome status as paid "agents"--and thus draw the attention of the counter-intelligence services of the countries in which they do business or have academic exchanges. This attention presumably would limit further the appeal of the program to such people and to their organizations.

The explosion of electronically transmitted information amounts to an increase in the volume of information made possible through improved technology. There is not, however, any qualitative difference from the open-source collection of the past. Intelligence agencies should continue the process of better gathering the information available and working to improve further ways of using it. There is no need for independent organizations to handle this flow. Open-source information should flow to analytic offices, just as the products of other collection efforts should. This collection should be as integrated as possible with all collection and analysis, not segregated by origin.
This is not to say that improvements cannot be made. FBIS, in particular, has borne some criticism for slow responses to technology changes. It appears to need substantial modification and enhancement. FBIS's analytic responsibilities might best be shifted to the DI.

It would be foolish to create analytic organizations that exploit only open-source information. This would cause needless and costly duplication while limiting the capabilities of the open-source-only analyst, and reducing the resources of other analysts presumably to be forbidden to use open source data. Such a proposal is akin to suggesting the replacement of an organization of able-bodied analysts with one having only deaf and blind ones who can use only their sense of touch to acquire information, and another with quadriparaplegic analysts who can only use their eyes to acquire information.

For insight into the likely effectiveness and reputation of an open-source only analytic group, we should look closely at the analytic clout of FBIS and NSA's current source-specific analytic units. I state these judgments after regular attendance at several dozen monthly "warning meetings" held by National Intelligence Officers in which analysts from throughout the Intelligence Community shared views and forecasts (95).
FBIS analysts cover limited subject matter and receive generally low weights within the analytic community because of the internal bureaucratic status of FBIS and the fact that the analyses are based on incomplete information. FBIS analysts normally are "wall flowers" at warning meetings. This occurs despite the often considerable abilities of FBIS personnel.

Recall that NSA's analysts are restricted to SIGINT-based analysis. They also have a relatively modest impact within the Intelligence Community's analytic corps because their informational and scope limits are so well known. I know of no significant consumer group that looks primarily to NSA for analysis, although there are certainly some topics that NSA collectors cover better than other collection agencies. This is not to say that NSA has poor analysts. As at FBIS, many are good people. But their mandate is highly restrictive for turf reasons, and the country gets less benefit from their services that it might with unified, all-source analysis. The clear lesson is that source limited analysts have carried less intellectual and bureaucratic clout than those from all-source analytic organizations. I see no reason why this pattern is likely to change.

We should be equally skeptical of the now-common claims that very high percentages--be they 40 or 65 or 80 or 90 percent--of "intelligence" comes from open sources. There are major methodological problems with such claims. How, for example, are such percentages calculated? Numbers of words? Numbers of paragraphs? Numbers of key points, whatever they are? And, critically, how are the numbers evaluated? There is a qualitative element to intelligence information and analysis that proponents of open-source intelligence rarely mention. All of the individual place names, nouns, verbs, and adjectives of highly classified intelligence reports are "open source"--they too are part of the English language--but their assembly into critical bits of timely data, insightful analysis, and persuasive logic make those collections of words into intelligence products and separate them from dictionaries and atlases. Indeed, there appears to be a loss in the ongoing debate about intelligence reform of the long-known fact that information alone is not intelligence; it becomes intelligence only after proper verification and assessment.

Beyond the accounting, there are concerns of bias that may be somewhat different than those analysts traditionally have encountered (97). Information enters the public domain because someone thinks others want to read or see it. That means there are selection processes that could reflect commercial or ideological interests and a variety of biases. There is no quality control on the information; it can reflect opinion, rumor, propaganda, or disinformation. Easily found information quickly and voluminously enters the public domain, while tough, complicated issues tend to be short-changed. And so on.
Intelligence agencies and academics need to do much more research to identify any new types of bias that may creep into the electronic transmission media--and their extent and magnitude--and identify processing mechanisms needed to best use the information. How, for example, is one to assess the usefulness of raw information injected into the Internet when it is phrased in haughty, disparaging language that also is designed to demean another Internet communicator? Are there psychological rules for cleansing the verbiage? Can it be taken at face value, or must it all be rejected as vain frivolity in the absence of corroborating information? How can this all be done when messages are anonymous? And so on.
Moreover, open-source "intelligence" has an ideological, anti-intelligence aspect that I suspect accounts for a significant part of its popular appeal. As is well-known, U.S. and other Western intelligence services have been assailed for years by some who believe that secret intelligence services are inherently threats to democratic institutions. To these people, the exaggerated claims of open-source intelligence proponents offer a convenient way not only to get more efficiency from government--the ostensible goal--but elimination of institutions they oppose for ideological reasons. If open-source is so good, the reasoning goes, there is no reason for the secret intelligence organs that have such onerous implications for civil liberties.
Open-source information can partly assume a role that painstakingly gained collection of hard-target intelligence information played 40 years ago--when CIA gathered basic data and published the National Intelligence Survey series of books on countries of the world. The series died in the late 1960s, I understand, as CIA moved away from basic data gathering to become more "policy relevant." But with the prospect growing that U.S. military forces may be deployed with little warning to provide humanitarian assistance or peacekeeping services, there is more need for basic information--maps, demographic data, biographical information, and so on--than traditionally has been collected on the Third World. The NIS books still may be useful for these purposes; I found some on the shelves of the library of Intelligence Center, Pacific during a 1989 Army Reserve tour at Camp Smith, Hawaii.

Much of the information that military planners need for at least initial planning is publicly available, but has been ignored in recent years. Thus, we continue to experience failures or embarrassments such as invaders of Granada having to rely on oil company maps to get around the island because, I am told, the Defense Mapping Agency did not bother with Granada. More recently, failure to have a basic understanding of the political situation in Somalia in 1993 led to the incompetently humorous spectacle of U.S. Marines in full combat gear "storming" ashore at Mogadishu at night only to be met by cheering Somalis and the bright lights of television cameras. This intelligence embarrassment was better than a hanger filled with full body bags at Dover Air Force Base, but it was a failure nevertheless.
Once in Somalia, I am told by participants in the operation, U.S. forces found neither the open sources they had nor national intelligence systems to be very helpful (98). Instead, the military quickly developed its own HUMINT collection system to support operations and to protect United Nations forces from attack. The national Intelligence Community was not well equipped to meet such needs. To make matters worse, there were embarrassments about improper sharing of information with some United Nations forces and simple abandonment of boxes of classified information that an American fortuitously found. Surely the United States can do better than this!
Certainly we can do better to serve expeditionary forces like Marines and special operations forces, including civil affairs troops, involved in operations other than war. But improving intelligence support for these forces requires little more than more attention to the issue. It does not necessitate a restructuring of the Intelligence Community or a vast increase in resources devoted to open source collection. It can mean, for example, generating short, timely, low-classification situation reports ("sitreps") that can be used by soldiers in the field with little ability to securely store more highly classified material. It should be clear, however, that more highly classified material virtually always is more valuable, and another option is finding ways to get more sensitive material to field users. Low classification material that is 85 percent correct--a figure Robert Steele has repeatedly cited as a good one--is not acceptable. Would you like an enemy who is shooting at you to miss only 85 percent of the time?

There are, however, some issues that are more fundamentally new about recent changes in information technology that have operational and legal elements. I have no answers to the following questions, and understand that they are not close to being resolved within the Intelligence Community:
* Can the Internet's public/private encryption characteristics be used to recruit sources? If so, what special security measures are needed? How can bone fides be established?
* Can U.S. intelligence set up a bulletin board for anonymous tips for information about terrorist activities, for example? If so, how can bone fides be established and pranksters identified? If the tips are anonymous, would CIA be violating U.S. law by unwittingly taking information from or about a U.S. citizen--abroad or in the United States.
* What are the counter-intelligence dangers of widespread access of U.S. personnel with sensitive government data or proprietary commercial technology to computers which may be offering rewards for treason or commercial espionage?
* What are the jurisdictional roles of CIA and the FBI when the communications are boundaryless?

Efforts are underway to create a secure electronic currency, or "digital cash," to spur international commerce (99). But real growth in this "money supply" would begin to raise questions of central bank control of money supplies, whether it could become another mechanism for "hot money" to contribute to financial instability, trade data reporting, income tax evasion, and so on. To what extent should intelligence be concerned with such issues and how aggressively should it target both the messages (as by NSA, for example) and the human beings and network control organizations (as by the DO, for example) that use them, have paper printouts, and control the hardware/software that accesses the systems?
Presuming that drug dealers, money launderers, criminals-for-hire, and terrorists will be active on Internet, what degree of sting activity is appropriate? How should coordination between intelligence and police agencies be handled? What communications law or civil liberties protection provisions might be relevant?
Treatment of these and undoubtedly other many other information technology-related issues properly resides with the organizations that handle the fundamental issues now. It makes little sense to create an entirely new intelligence community devoted to just one part of the information spectrum.

No Industrial Espionage 

American entrance into the burgeoning business of industrial espionage is a bad idea that the Intelligence Community properly opposes. I see several reasons not to emulate the former practices of Warsaw Pact states or to join France, Israel, and Japan in this on-going effort:
There is little for us to gain. Private sector analysts (and CIA as well) note that the United States continues to be the premier developer of technology in the world, despite the growth of development of good products and techniques throughout the world. We produce the most Nobel science prizes. Any decision to enter the fray in an offensive mode should weigh costs against benefits. We have comparatively few potential benefits against which to balance the risks and costs.
Americans cannot keep their mouths shut. Any decision to actively seek foreign secrets would soon become public knowledge. There would be public opposition, and international recriminations. The publicity costs would be considerable.
Implicit or explicit American claims to moral superiority, already suspect, would be still weaker. We would look yet more hypocritical.

There is no obvious way to distribute the "fruits" of industrial/commercial espionage to American firms. Their people, too, like to talk, and receipt of some information would become public knowledge. This, in turn, would virtually inevitably spark complaints of favoritism in the distribution of such ill-gotten gains. After all, we should be "fair" in distributing our stolen property. Would this not be a wonderful new arena for the trial lawyer community?
Asymmetric publicity about U.S. firms' receipt of intelligence information (but not the take of their foreign competitors) would almost certainly provoke some international retribution against American companies, whether they received intelligence data or not, further increasing the costs of such activities.

In the short run at least, most HUMINT collectors are poorly equipped to do this kind of work. As mentioned, the typical DO case officer's bag of tradecraft rarely includes the technical expertise needed to spot and recruit good prospects--or to assess the quality of their offerings.
While industrial espionage is a bad idea for us to adopt, there are plenty of economic missions for intelligence. Both major groupings have been around for a long time. CIA, and to lesser extents DIA and INR, have long examined foreign economic events as part of their assessments of activities abroad. These have ranged from macroeconomic studies of gross trends, to econometric model building, balance of payments assessments, and industrial policies, for example, to sectoral studies of defense industries, labor, agriculture, envronmental issues, and so on. Collection agencies have long supported this analytic work where possible and appropriate. Such work should continue.
Some of this work also involves studies of developed western countries that are friendly to the United States. This work primarily involves assessment of open source information. CIA does it because other U.S. Government agencies are not equipped to do it; they do not have the resources to do the work. The results are classified because the papers respond to U.S. Government queries which reflect U.S. concerns and therefore are sensitive (100). The fact that the DI assesses the economic prospects of the European Union countries, for example, by no means that CIA is "spying" on them, however. This is an important point. Surely all countries wonder what foreign initiative the American government is going to come up with next--an often difficult task--but their wonderment at and study of American political intricacies does not necessarily mean that they "spy" on us.

The second major area is counterintelligence. CIA and NSA legitimately defend US economic interests aginst attack from abroad. They can do this by alerting companies to attacks, or breaking up foreign governments' efforts to advance their national interests over American interests through circumvention of the relatively lax rules of international commerce. An example is exposure of a bribe a friendly government paid to a Third World government official to secure a lucrative contract. We do this already, and should continue to do it.

Put Ames in Perspective 

Americans generally, and critics of CIA in particular, have substantially overeacted to the Aldrich Ames affair. There is need for some perspective. Ames is a traitor who compromised some of CIA's operations and contributed to the deaths of some of CIA's assets. He did much damage. The Agency and Director Woolsey have received much justified criticism for their handling of the Ames affair.

Ames was a single individual, however. He did not destroy CIA or lead to the destruction of the nation. He was the only sitting CIA officer now known to have worked for Moscow. (Edward Lee Howard apparently passed information to the Soviets only after he left CIA.) Ames is not reason to dismantle the Agency; were this so, the KGB and other Warsaw Pact intelligence services that were riddled with western mole holes would long ago have been shut down. Nor is Ames the reason for the Congressional unhappiness with CIA and the Intelligence Community that led to creation of the Commission. This displeasure had been building for years. For a refresher, read SSCI transcripts of the 1987 and 1991 Gates DCI confirmation hearings.

I believe reformers should, however, remember that Ames went to work for the Soviets in part because of his disillusionment with CIA and its senior officers. Ames told his sentencing judge that CIA:
[W]as and is a self-serving sham, carried out by careerist bureaucrats who have managed to deceive several generations of American policymakers and the public about both the necessity and value of their work. (101)
While Ames was rationalizing, his comments suggest a bureaucratic alienation that many CIA people experienced--I experienced it myself--and which was the direct result of poor management. We should not reject the possibility that there are other moles now in the Intelligence Community--and that bureaucratic alienation was a motive for their treason. Or, perhaps more likely, alienation was one element that led to a reduced defense against more traditional ideological, monetary, or religious pitches. Better leadership can ameliorate though probably not eliminate this security risk.

Don't Eliminate CIA's Military Analysis 

Robert Gates and others have proposed removal of military analysis from CIA's charter (102). This is an idea that is seriously misguided for several reasons:
CIA serves as a valuable source of alternative assessments to those of DIA and the military services. In the many analytic (and bureaucratic) battles between Defense and CIA over Soviet weapons capabilities in previous decades, CIA often (but not always) was correct. Intelligence analysts who are directly subordinate to senior officers with parochial organizational or budgetary interests that spring directly or indirectly from intelligence judgments are not independent. Their judgments have been and properly should be subject to review and independent confirmation. There is a potential for conflict of interest, especially among the military intelligence agencies, that the Intelligence Community organizational structure should take into account.
The military services and DIA traditionally have not devoted much effort to areas of the world and issues for which there were not plans, priorities, and troops deployed. Thus, "surprise" deployments to places like Granada, Somalia, and Rwanda meant that there was little information or expertise on hand to guide troops as they deployed. Because we can expect senior commanders to require intelligence support to work on issues they now are concerned with--not possible contingencies or ones their successors in normally short-tenured command positions will face--we can expect continued Defense Department inability to adequately look over the horizon.
The Army, I am told, is de-emphasizing expertise among its uniformed intelligence personnel in favor of generalist training. It long has relegated its Foreign Area Officers (FAOs) to dead-end careers--a measure of the service's regard for intelligence expertise. Such steps put more responsibility for expertise on the shoulders of civilian intelligence officers, who must use persuasive judgment, not weight of rank, to influence commanders' decisions. The weakness of the Army's intelligence corps is particularly unfortunate because its personnel are most involved in the complex foreign interventions (such as Haiti, northern Iraq, and Somalia) that require sophisticated understanding of foreign cultures and political institutions. Marine involvements typically are short and relatively unsophisticated--a reflection of the Marine Corps' short logistical tail. It is a good thing, in my judgment, because the Marines lack adequate intelligence and civil affairs training and maintain a mindset that places much more emphasis on destruction than building (103).
Military decisions have political, economic, social, and other components--areas in which CIA's analysts often are very good. Separation by fiat of these analysts from military intelligence analysts and consumers makes no sense. It may be penny wise but would be pound foolish. Indeed, there should be much better coordination between CIA's non-military analysts and military personnel, particularly those employed in operations other than war (104).
Moreover, CIA itself in the 1980s and early 1990s devoted relatively little attention to traditional military analysis, with the prominent exception of the Soviet Union and high-interest conflicts like the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. In the late 1980s, for example, when the Office of Soviet Analysis decided to purge its files of information on non-Soviet Warsaw Pact countries, it simply dumped them on the literal doorstep of the Office of European Analysis. That office, sure that policymakers had concerns about the role of the Yugoslav military in internal political affairs but seeing no use for traditional military analyses of any East European country including Yugosalvia, directed that the files be destroyed. Most were. EURA's two East European "political-military" analysts became frustrated and left the office. Thus, when Yugoslavia unraveled in the early 1990s, CIA had no base of information or analyst expertise on the Yugoslav military. It therefore had nothing on the armed forces of the newly separate states either.
EURA took its myopic approach because it had adopted the directives of Robert Gates and his proteges to concentrate on issues that had more immediate pay-offs in terms of papers produced and kudos earned. Because mid-level and office-level officials did not foresee chaos on Yugoslavia, they declined to invest in expertise and data that would have been very handy just a few years later (105). This myopia was and is a sharp departure from the research-oriented work of the 1950s and 1960s, when CIA analysts labored to acquire information and expertise that was quickly deployable in crisis situations (106). Such work was denigrated in the 1980s, and analysts and managers who tried to preserve such work--and even the information--were castigated as relics. The new DI of the 1980s increasingly devoted itself to brief, pithy, short-horizon papers designed to cater to the immediate issues of policymakers' daily calendars. Expertise became bureaucratically much less important than it once was.
CIA also traditionally did little order-of-battle and other military analysis because it did not view support of the military to be a CIA function. DIA had turf jurisdiction. And, as former Chairman of the National Intelligence Council Christine Williams told me in the late 1980s, the military services were not legitimate customers of CIA because they were policy implementers, not policy makers. This view changed somewhat after General Schwarzkopf's stinging criticism of the performance of intelligence in post-war Congressional testimony--a new military liaison office was created, for example--but it continues to reflect some CIA people's attitudes (107). There should be much closer CIA/military analytic links--not an end to them.

No New Intelligence Paradigm 

Perhaps no current notion is more pernicious than the idea that the end of the Cold War requires a new way of thinking about intelligence and new organizations to suit. Such beliefs confuse the alteration of the old East-West geo-political paradigm--with the need for accompanying decisions about military force structures and doctrine--with alteration of the intelligence paradigm. In fact, the mission of U.S. intelligence remains exactly the same as it was a decade ago--to provide information and analysis that senior policymakers need to defend and to advance U.S. interests. Reformers may make serious mistakes in mandating new organizations, procedures, or threats if they do not keep this simple fact clearly in mind.
The point merits repeating. The mission of U.S. intelligence remains the same. Priorities, targets and resources have changed, but the mission has not. There is no need for a new paradigm predicated on the demise of the Soviet Union. Nor is there a need for one because budgets are leaner. Change has been a given in intelligence for a long time. Priorities regularly have changed. Reorganizations regularly have occurred. These are facts. The relatively large change caused by the collapse of communism in Europe is a change in magnitude--not in quality that merits designation as a shift in intelligence paradigm. Confusion about the state of some new world political/economic order among political scientists, politicians, and the public at large does not mean that intelligence officers are confused about their missions.
The problems of the U.S. Intelligence Community much predate the end of the Soviet Union. They developed massively in the 1980s when the Intelligence Community had plenty of money. They developed because of internal leadership and ethical lapses, not the Cold War or its end. Aldrich Ames says he became a turncoat in April 1985. These problems arose at CIA because senior Agency officers unilaterally, unknown to their policymaking bosses, changed the culture of intelligence from promoting selfless, objective service of national intelligence needs to the satisfying of perceived consumer wants. The ultimate goal, it seems clear to many CIA people, was the bureaucratic advancement of CIA and its senior officials.

This was a true paradigm shift. The de facto mission of the organization changed radically. Reformers of CIA and the Intelligence Community need to remake the now culturally entrenched paradigm promulgated in the early- and mid-1980s. They should not mistake the changed political/diplomatic environment of the post-Cold War period as a requirement for a systemic change in intelligence. The demise of the Soviet regime is irrelevant to the internal workings of CIA and the conduct of intelligence--though it clearly is important at the levels of targeting, priorities, and funding. Without fundamental internal ethical and cultural reform, all the reconfiguration of organization charts and banter about new targets, new threats, and new agendas will fail to address the key causes of consumers' and Congress' dissatisfaction with the performance of U.S. intelligence.

90. See Frank Gaffney, Jr., "Apres Woolsey... le deluge?" The Washington Times, January 3, 1995, p. A12, and Melvin A. Goodman, "We Need Two C.I.A.'s," The New York Times, July 21, 1994.
91. Melvin A. Goodman, "We Need Two C.I.A.'s," The New York Times, July 21, 1994.
92. Robert M. Gates, "A Leaner, Keener CIA," The Washington Post, January 30, 1995, p. A15.
93. I graduated from the Special Forces Officer Course and served my active duty tour as executive officer with the 1st Special Forces Group in Okinawa. I spent two months serving in a mildly covert operational training capacity in s outheast Asia in 1972. I did reserve tours with the U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida and the Army's 1st Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg. I now am Assistant G-2 with the 352d Civil Affairs Command, Riverdale, Maryland. For over ten years, I served in intelligence assignments.
94. For a summary of Markowitz's comments at luncheon in February 1995, see Open Source Solutions, OSS Notices, Volume 3, Issue 2, February 28, 1995, pp. 5-6.
95. In the period 1987-89, I was senior analyst on the staff of the National Intelligence Officer for Warning and was responsible for, among other things, compiling a monthly summary of the results of the warning meetings the regional and some of the functional NIOs held roughly monthly. To do this, I usually attended two or three of the meetings myself and summarized the notes of the others, which usually were complied by the assistant NIOs. These notes had agency attributions for comments and were similar to my own experiences. The dominant analysts came from the all-source agencies--CIA, DIA, and INR.
96. See Open Source Solutions, OSS Notices, Volume 3, Issue 2, February 28, 1995, p. 2, for example.
97. For a good treatment, see John W. Williams, "Intelligence Analysis and the Mass Media in the Age of CNN," paper presented at a conference on intelligence analysis sponsored by the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies, Ottawa, October 28-30, 1994.
98. This conclusion has attained some currency. See, for example, John Jandora, "Threat Parameters for Operations Other than War," Parameters, Vol. XXV, No. 1, Spring 1995, especially p. 57. Defense Department components are looking intensively at how to improve shortcomings in this arena.
99. See Timothy C. May, "Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities," at tcmay@netcom.com.
100. Other reasons are that CIA is sensitive about sharing its thoughts on many subjects, and is reluctant to release information on the topics it studies. In these cases, it places low-level classifications on its products, even th ough the topics and and many source materials can be found in good newspapers and magazines.
101. See Walter Pincus, "White House Labors to Redefine Role of Intelligence Community," The Washington Post, June 13, 1994, p. A8.
102. Robert M. Gates, "A Leaner, Keener CIA," The Washington Post, January 30, 1995, p. A15.
103. In Haiti in 1994, for example, Marine and Army units landed at the about the same time, but the Marines withdrew shortly thereafter, turning the job over to the Army. Before the withdrawal, a Marine patrol opened fire on a grou p of yelling Haitians, killing some 10 of them. Better trained Army units, through this writing, did not lose their composure to the point of shooting any Haitians.
104. Traditionally, CIA has provided little direct support to military commands. CIA representatives to the major commands have tended to be senior personnel, sometimes on retirement tours, who were diplomats as much as conduits of a series of published works. NSA, by contrast, employed more, comparatively junior personnel who worked in offices directly with military analysts. They provide insights, information, and advice on ways to acquire information from the world-wide NSA str ucture. There was also a much more user-friendly telephone connection to NSA, which facilitated communication.
Moreover, from the CIA perspective, for many years there was little incentive to serve military consumers because: the military were policy implementers, not makers, and thus unimportant; and, DIA for turf reasons stood in the way of better direct CIA/mil itary ties.
105. I noted this deficiency to EURA managers Ron Miller and John McLaughlin in 1987. They were unreceptive to my concerns. The Office of the Inspector General was similarly unimpressed.
106. During this period, DI analysts compiled basic data into standard format books, called National Intelligence Surveys, that were readily available for contingencies and contained data on harbor water depth and a host of mundane i nformation of little use to senior policymakers but of critical importance to military planners.
107. See Molly Moore, "Schwarzkopf: War Intelligence Flawed," The Washington Post, June 13, 1991, p. A1.

Redeye · May 22, 2002

Finally, a conclusion to this part of this thread!

Do I concur with all of the foregoing? No, certainly not.
What I can see clearly is that we desperately need to both learn from the intelligence community's past, it's history, and to bring in fresh thinking and new leadership.

Under Fair Use...
R

<a href="http://www.fas.org/irp/gentry/chapter6.html">FAS.org link</a>
<center><h4>A Framework for Reform of the U.S. Intelligence Community</h4></center>
<center>Chapter 6: Conclusions</center>

For many reasons, the Intelligence Community needs a large number of discrete organizational and cultural changes throughout its component agencies. The latter are the most dangerous to organizational effectiveness and are the most difficult to change. The institutional keys for Congress, the Commission, and the public to reaching national consensus meaningful involve, in the following order:

1. Learning about the Intelligence Community.

2. Understanding what parts have gone wrong and why.

3. Formulating recommendations for procedural changes--in the incentive and personnel managements systems, for example--to ameliorating the cultural dysfunctions. These matters cannot be left to DCIs alone. Several of them made or failed to recognize the mess we now have.

4. Enacting some legislation where appropriate in aggregate organizational and personnel areas that would modify national security acts, affirmative action laws and policies, and personnel management rules. Key organizational changes are: strengthening the DCI by giving him authority over NSA and the imagery complex; restricting the intelligence authority and budget of Secretary of Defense to narrowly defense-related programs of the GDIP and TIARA; and, reforming the structure of the defense intelligence complex.

5. Making clear to the president, the DCI, and Congressional oversight committees that strong remedial action is essential, is expected, and is demanded. Nothing less is acceptable. With its growing base of understanding, the press can help assure that intelligence performance and the effectiveness of the reform effort become points upon which politicians will be held politically accountable.

6. Trying to find ways to help improve the management of intelligence by the White House and National Security Council and working on ways to improve meaningful Congressional oversight that is not micro-management, meddling, or interference with presidential foreign policy initiatives through the "oversight" process.

7. After resolution of the on-going national debate about U.S. foreign policy interests in the post-Cold War period, fitting the desired size and focus of intelligence to meet perceived national needs. Finalization of this function, and the accompanying focus on budget and narrowly defined "threats" or "targets" should come only after the first five points are substantially complete.

The reason the last point can wait until the end is that virtually any coherent intelligence structure will be accordion-like in that it can be relatively rapidly altered in shape and size. While there are lead times--recruiting and training personnel in complex skills and designing and procuring sophisticated hardware systems, for example--a good intelligence apparatus is inherently flexible. The key is that it is a working "musical instrument." The nation has a long way to go to accomplish the latter goal.

Finally, I have two cautions, or two hopes. The first is that the reform effort not be hijacked by defenders of the status quo. Such people are numerous and are tenacious. They must not be allowed to divert attention from the second critical point--establishment of national awareness of the true magnitude of the Intelligence Community's internal crisis and the size of the effort needed to restore a national treasure to institutional health.

Beware of the "Wise Men"

Congressional and Executive Branch inquiries into the state of the Intelligence Community should, of course, consult with a broad spectrum of observers--intelligence producer, consumers, and academics among them. It should be careful to assure a mix of experience that includes recent intelligence work and empirical evidence in the form of documents, surveys, and interviews. This means that the advice of retired senior intelligence officers of former policymaking "wise men" whose knowledge is dated and whose roles in intelligence put them in line for culpability for the current state of affairs should be placed in proper context. Some of these persons are the people who were responsible for changes in the 1980s, who chose the people who made the changes, or who blessed the changes in Congressional testimony and through op-ed pieces.

With CIA's culture increasingly dysfunctional in some respects since the mid-1980s, an obvious question is why no one sufficiently powerful to identify problems or to mandate change did so. There are several reasons, but no good excuses. First, CIA forbids its personnel to discuss CIA with the press, academics, or the Congressional oversight committees without official approval. This requirement effectively muzzles employees at all levels below the very senior--who regularly have funnelled favorable information to former intelligence officers known to be friendly to management. These senior officials and the public affairs apparatus they control, of course, saw (and see) few problems worth mentioning.

Those relative few who do write and speak of intelligence matters tend to be retired senior officials who prospered and will not admit to causing problems, operations officers who never knew the DI and the rest of the Intelligence Community well, and persons who retired before the current analyst/manager institutional structure was created. These last people often are incapable or unwilling to accept that the agency they loved has changed so drastically. (Some receive regular briefings on intelligence matters from CIA officials and act as unofficial spokesmen for the agency to the press and academia, among others; some critics have argued that these organizations are de facto front organizations for domestic CIA covert operations designed to advance its agenda.) In a 1993 conversation with the late George Carver, for example, Carver told me he was unaware that significant institutional change had occurred; yet Carver had written and spoken at length to defend Robert Gates during his 1991 DCI confirmation hearings.

Former DCI William Colby, another op-ed page contributor, wrote in 1994 that the intelligence profession was a "fraternity"--a view common in 1976 when Colby retired but long gone by the 1990s (108).

Former DCI Richard Helms offered a rare exception in comments in 1994 to The Washington Post about the problems of CIA. He said the agency's problems stem from "a lack of direction ... There is no sense of mission." (109)

Reflecting on reform proposals, he said, "Jiggering with organizations will not do it. It's a matter of people." (110)

Another prominent exception is former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council Harold P. Ford who surprised Congressional supporters of Robert Gates' bid to become DCI in 1991 by opposing the nomination. Ford altered his views after talking with people who had seen Gates at work:
... it is my view, based chiefly on the confidences of CIA officers whose abilities and character I respect, that other of Bob Gates' pressures have clearly gone beyond professional bounds and do constitute a skewing of intelligence ...(111)

Most retirees and resignees of middle rank who are most aware of problems in the DI culture simply want to leave and forget. Few want to live again the situation they left. Yet these are the people investigators of the true state of the Intelligence Community must seek out and rigorously interview. Even those who want to describe it find the situation and the problems of intelligence to be enormously difficult to describe. An analogy is the difficulty soldiers have in describing combat to those who never served in the military. Former analyst Jennifer Glaudemans, describing the slanting of analysis in CIA's Directorate of Intelligence in the 1980s, put it another way:
... politicization is like fog. Though you cannot hold it in your hands, or nail it to a wall, it does exist, it is real, and it does affect people's behavior (112). 

The tendency of so many former, senior officials to impute the standards, ethics and culture of the CIA they knew--perhaps 20 or more years ago--to the CIA of the 1990s constitutes recurrent examples of the classic analytic mistake of mirror-imaging. This mistake obviously does not spring from national cultural differences, but rather it comes from: the passage of time; the veil of secrecy that insulates even retirees from developments at CIA; the briefings they receive from current senior officers that all is well; and, unwillingness to accept that the officers they chose to succeed them could have damaged the institution so badly. I call the phenomenon intertemporal mirror-imaging.

Conduct Real Research 

With recollections of former intelligence officers and consumers fading and agendas sometimes suspect, even the best of verbal arguments for change or maintenance of the status quo should be buttressed with sound, empirical research where possible. This is an area that intelligence officials and academic students of intelligence have traditionally done poorly, or not at all, for a variety of reasons. The crisis in American intelligence is so great, and the stakes so great, that the expenditure of time and resources on real studies of the Intelligence Community is worth making. And, perhaps for the first time, a significant body of data is available for methodologically sound academic research.

Because the ethical and leadership malaise is so severe, an early priority is professional, large-scale surveys of Intelligence Community personnel. These should be designed to seek out systemic organizational and procedural problems, to identify poor leaders, and to solicit suggestions for improvements from the many good people of the Intelligence Community who see solutions to obvious problems.
A second avenue of research is a review of the considerable amount of survey and other research data already accumulated in the Community. Within CIA, the Office of Training and Education and the Office of Medical Services collect data on CIA organizations and culture. OIG conducts periodic inspections of offices that lead to reports that come in variations for various consumer groups (113). Researchers should seek out the most candid version, along with the raw survey data collected.

A third approach is a review of grievance procedures and Inspector General inquiries that presumably fill much space, but which have sparked little action. These should be part of the evaluation of the grievance and oversight organizations themselves.

A thorough, methodologically sound investigation is essential for several reasons. Major work by credible researchers--including but not limited to consulting firms, academics, the Congressional oversight committees, OMB, and GAO--is essential if a body of knowledge adequate to overcome the many public and governmental misperceptions about intelligence. Such work would deflect concerns about biases among commentators. It would buttress the judgments of those who really know of what they speak, and lead to better public understanding about which pundits really know what they are talking about. With some of the information made public, the research could form a basis for better citizen understanding of their government--and help knowledgeable laymen, academics, and the press both keep intelligence accountable while helping the country maintain reasonable expectations about their intelligence agencies.
In principle I agree with the argument that secret intelligence services should be secret indeed. There are prices to pay for openness--reluctance of foreigners to work with us and occasional security breaches, among them. But the U.S. Intelligence Community has betrayed the trust the nation placed in it, and there seems little prospect that public confidence will return without both better understanding of intelligence and better public monitoring of its activities. Restoration of public trust in intelligence is the paramount challenge.

A Critical Window of Opportunity 

Finally, U.S. intelligence is in genuine crisis. DCI Deutch and his handful of outsiders have not, as of this writing, made signifcant changes. The self-destruction has damaged a critical pillar of the nation's defense/foreign affairs establishment. Leading intelligence back to sound service will require knowledge, vision, leadership, hard management skills, and no small dose of wisdom. It is a daunting task that will not be easy and cannot be completed quickly. The troubles took a decade or more to develop, and years will be needed to overcome the ethical and cultural problems now engrained at CIA and some of the other organizations.

This period of review and assessment is critical. It must be done properly. Failure to do the job well could have enormously negative consequences. And a failure to do the job right would delay essential reform indefinitely and make eventual resolution of troubles all the more difficult to accomplish.

108. William E. Colby, "The CIA: Everybody's Favorite Scapegoat," The Washington Post, August 5, 1994, p. A21. To his credit, Mr. Colby during our August 5, 1994 telephone discussion about the article recognized the possibili ty that CIA's culture had changed--a flexibility I have not found often in CIA's defenders among former senior intelligence officers.
109. Walter Pincus, "CIA Struggles To Find Identity In a New World," The Washington Post, May 9, 1994, pp. A1 and A9.
110. Ibid.
111. Harold P. Ford, "Statement to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, October 1, 1991, Concerning the Confirmation of Robert Gates as Director of Central Intelligence," p. 3.
112. United States Senate, Transcript of Proceedings Before the Select Committee on Intelligence, Evening Session, September 25, 1991, p. 96.
113. For a brief glimpse at a botched "inspection" of the Office of Soviet Analysis, see Gentry, Lost Promise, p. 113.

Redeye · May 22, 2002

At this point, this TB thread pretty well duplicates <a href="http://pub16.ezboard.com/fthedailyfrm1.showMessage?topicID=242.topic">the thread that has developed on Mutter's Front Page</a> site.

I was surprised at the amount of material that's been drawn into this thread just this far. Yet, either we're cognizant of some of the reasons why we got where we are, or we are (even more) doomed to repeat those same mistakes.

At this point I would suggest again that that recent Debka thread about <a href="http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=30569">our intelligence and political failures</a> be read carefully.
I could pull in quite a bit of material so support major points that Debka made, but at this point that seems redundant. I do admire Debka's (and Stratfor's) analysts and authors; in both cases their abilities to generate clear, concise articles is quite evident.

Suffice to say, Huston, we've got a problem!

Is the foregoing to say or to suggest that there are not forces both within and outside of this country who or which have their own agendas, agendas certainly including some form of new world order? No; those players and those (in some cases) ancient organizations do exist, and some of them have immense behind-the-scenes power indeed.

Meemur wrote above of the old adage, follow the money, and when one interchangably substitutes money and power and control, I feel that a very valuable approach indeed.

This thread could go in any number of directions from this point. I would like to see it generally stay in directions helping us to understand the fix we're in, ride it out, and perhaps even offer substantive suggestions for what has to be changed and how to get it done -- while right in the midst of this War On Terror.

R

Redeye · May 22, 2002

What can good intelligence work provide?

Perhaps this article from <a href="http://www.geostrategy.com">Geo-Strategy</a> will illustrate one kind of answer at least.
And yes, by posting this article I've given lie to an assertion I earlier made, the one about no successful other-than-tactical Al Quaeda communications having been intercepted. Some of what I sense that El Sirri was receiving and transmitting almost has to go well beyond the tactical level.
For example, I'd not be surprised if this fellow was involved in, if not central to, the setting up of web sites where the process called steganography was used, embedding messages within images (<a href="http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=21779&highlight=steganography">link</a>, <a href="http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10457&highlight=image%2A+and+message%2A">link</a>, <a href="http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7603&highlight=steganography">link</a>, and <a href="http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=9241&highlight=steganography">link</a>).

Under Fair Use.
R

<center><h4>British judge throws out extradition bid for figure U.S. considers key to Sept. 11 attack</h4></center>

Intelligence sources said that in the year before the Sept. 11 attacks, Sirri helped Al Qaida establish a worldwide communications network through the Internet.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yasser El Sirri
Age: 39
Organization: Islamic Observation Center
Nationality: Egyptian
Whereabouts: London
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yasser El Sirri is more than lucky. He is lucky, lucky.

The United States believes Sirri is the pinwheel of the Sept. 11 suicide attacks and has pressed Britain for his extradition. But a British judge has thrown out the charges and called Sirri "an innocent fall guy."

That means that at the least Sirri can continue to supply news and analysis on the most infamous Islamic terror groups. Western intelligence sources believe that Sirri, who sells Islamic books on how to kill Jews, will also continue to stay in touch with Osama Bin Laden and his allies.
More than perhaps any other Islamic insurgent, Sirri has taken advantage of the liberal asylum laws in Europe. He has turned the European, particularly British, resistance in cooperating with Arab dictatorships into an Islamic empire funded by a range of friends of Bin Laden. He is believed to have handled millions of dollars in Islamic funds to Al Qaida and Gamiat Islamiya.

Sirri, who was arrested as early as 1980 for suspected opposition activities, fled his native Egypt in 1989 and wandered through such countries as Jordan, Sudan and Yemen. In 1994, an Egyptian court sentenced Sirri to death for his alleged involvement in a failed assassination attempt of former Egyptian Prime Minister Atef Sidki. Sidki was spared in the 1993 attack, but a young girl was killed.
British authorities were convinced of Sirri's argument that he was guilty of being no more than a peaceful opponent of the Egyptian dictatorship. In London, Sirri established the Islamic Observation Centre in the fashionable neighborhood of Paddington. Sirri became a favorite source of Arab and Western journalists for news about such countries as Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Syria. The news followed the arrests of Islamic insurgents in those countries.

Western intelligence sources were warning in the late 1990s that Sirri was more than just a publicist. His exclusive information on Islamic dissidents and insurgency operations was based on nearly daily contact with terrorist groups such as Al Qaida, Egypt's Gamiat Islamiya and Jihad.

These groups were not so interested in bragging about their exploits, the sources said. Instead, they used Sirri to pass messages -- both public and private. Often, the messages were best relayed through the mass media. Sometimes, Sirri, who described himself as a human rights activist, was involved in embarrassing Egypt through Qatar's controversial A-Jazeera satellite television.

Egypt was furious with Britain's harboring of Sirri. President Hosni Mubarak issued repeated appeals to several prime ministers, including Tony Blair, and warned that Sirri was involved in Islamic terrorist plots in the West. At one point, British authorities were on the alert that Egypt had sent a hit squad to kill Sirri.

Intelligence sources said that in the year before the Sept. 11 attacks, Sirri helped Al Qaida establish a worldwide communications network through the Internet. Sirri set up websites that allowed Al Qaida to freely send messages to agents. Sirri also carried statements by Al Qaida leaders that contained both public and concealed messages.

The CIA believes Sirri played a key role in the Sept. 11 Islamic suicide bombings in New York and Washington. Sirri's alleged role was in the assassination of Afghan rebel leader Ahmed Shah Massoud. The assassination of the rebel leader, intelligence sources said, was a condition by the ruling Afghan Taliban regime for Al Qaida's attacks on New York and Washington.

In other words, Taliban, which for years harbored Al Qaida, told Bin Laden. "You get rid of our opponent and we'll allow you to use Afghanistan as a base to get rid of your opponent — the United States."
In the summer of 2001, Sirri sent a letter to Massoud's office requesting a television interview. In the letter, Sirri promised to provide a favorable interview of Massoud by "one of our best journalists, Mr. Karim Touzani."
Touzani obtained the interview and on Sept. 9, he and another Al Qaida operative entered Massoud's heavily-guarded compound. Several questions into the interview, Touzani detonated a bomb that killed Massoud. Two days later, Bin Laden struck New York and Washington.

Sirri has denied any connection to the Massoud assassination and the Sept. 11 suicide attacks. He acknowledges writing the letter of accrediation, but says he was duped by people who posed as independent television producers.

The British hesitation to deport Sirri to the United States reflects the anger that London had long harbored against Washington for its protection of the Irish Republican Army. Still even other European Union countries believe Britain has gone too far in its protection of Islamic dissidents. Intelligence sources have concluded that Britain has simply granted Al Qaida operatives a safe haven. London has become a transit point for Islamic insurgents on their way to Afghanistan or the Middle East. And, Britain has become the propaganda center for Islamic insurgents, even angering such countries as Saudi Arabia, long a supporter of Al Qaida.

For his part, Sirri is a happy man. He poses for Arabic-language newspapers with his daughter, Lina, who holds a victory sign, and predicts that he will prevail over the United States.

br0dyaga · May 22, 2002

I am thinking of the Dutch and Portugese and Scottish / English commercial organizations of the sort like the famous Hudson's Bay Company which invaded Asia 300 years ago.

as coroporations or joint adventurer companies they had the advantage of a dictatorship structure of decision making. consequently they were far more mobile than any government or national army could ever hope to be as they did not need any parlimentary debate before commiting to action. they were able to act effectively with greater speed and initiative and were able to adapt to changing circumstances on the ground with greater and more rapid innovation and imagination. and they were vastly more wealthy than any national treasury.

all of the attributes that we see now with the multi national corporations. the ability to rapidly mobilize and change direction, change location, move funds and organize labor irrespective of geography, and at relatively blinding speeds.

a national politician is a captive of his geographic constituency. his or her power base and influence is limited to a fixed area. he or she attempts to satisfy the needs and wishes of a limited pool of voters who are able to legitimize his ascent to a postion of power by promising to deliver to them a basket of benefits. but it is not his basket and it is a basket that he or she ultimately does not control.

commercial corporations, leaving aside for the moment the example above of the 17th century adventurers, were until the turn of the 20th century limited in charter and fixed in geography. their license to operate was a privilege granted by the local civil authority and was frequently revoked and the company bankrupted when the company failed for whatever reason to adhere to the strictures of its charter or when it materially harmed the interests of the general population or the state. commercial corporations were not synthetic indivuals enjoying all the organic rights of a natural person. over the last century the corporations have sucessfully lobbied for and amended the laws regulating corporations and have entirely slipped the leash. today corporate entities, as witness Haliburton rebuilding Iraq's oil pipeline and pumping infrastructure after Desert Storm, or the russian mafia selling arms to both sides of the Chechen and current Afghan conflicts; today's corporate entities are in practical terms states unto themselves. but unburdened by the need to form consensus or engage in endless debilitating parlimentary debates. having a small executive body embued with dictatorial powers and enormous wealth exceeding that of public treasuries they area able to plan, act, change direction, and move money and labor transparently across what is for them a borderless globe with a speed and ease that no political body can match.

being stateless it matters not to them which side of a conflict wins or loses. they profit equally by betting on both and supplying both. and then hoist the flag of the winner over their company's banner and "switch sides" temporarily. the international criminal class have learned the value of organizing themselves into the model of the commercial corporation and thus have gained an organizational and informational advantage over the organs of state.
but whereas the "innocent" commercial corporation's motive and purpose is to produce products and generate sales, the purpose of the criminal corporation is to produce high markup sales whose profits can be skimmed and diverted. they have no interest in maintaining a company for any length of time as it is a simple matter to conjure up and inflate another company when and as needed. much as the internet's commercial spam organizations know in advance that their accounts will be blocked and deleted when their spamming is traced back to them, and so they operate on the basis of mobility; opening a plethora of new accounts on multiple hosts on a daily or hourly basis as a simple fact function of their business model. the same now holds true for the transnational criminal corporations, they know that there is a short lifespan to any of their ventures and so they have developed the business model of the transnational corporation and are prepared at a moment's notice to collaps or fold an operation and set up it's clone hours or days later at any other location on the globe and get right back into business once again.

I believe that the political class in the advanced nations have discovered this inherent vulnerability and the frantic push for global business regulation, global government in all its multiplicity of facets, global police structure, is the political classes response to their own extinction. or at the very least the extinction of their ability to exercise real power in any signifigant sphere. it is their attempt to regain control over the tax base and the revenue stream and put the leash back on the neck of the commercial corporation. but I don't believe that it will be a sucessful attempt in the sense that the corporations have more legislative and real power than any political organization and that the predictable result will be a global government that is coopted in such a way that the political class is allowed to maintain the public illusion and image of exercising power, but which is an even more puppet class than it already is.

so long as a global information and transaction transfer system exists, and especially when that system is digital and nearly instantaneous in its function, it is nearly impossible for any political or civil authority to exercise any effective control or regulation for any but the briefest period of time, or for any but the most limited geography. so long as there is a global transportation system by which all geography is "here", in which any location on the planet is only a few hours from any other, it is nearly impossible for any political or civil authority to exercise any but the most limited control of physical objects in transit.

the problem of intelligence collection and analysis by the american political institutions is that they have failed to learn the lesson of the deviant corporate model as practiced by the criminal corporations, and they have instead adopted the model of the "innocent" commercial corporation and merged it with the traditional bureaucratic institutional model resulting in an organization with an inherent inertia and predisposition towards feudal compartmentalization and coverups and suppression of information. other national intellegence organizations, modeled on either the traditional national military structure or on the model of the criminal corporation are able to collect better quality information and process it into useable analysis and effective action faster and more productively.

given the natural inertial forces of political philosophy and the time and energy required to turn the intellectual, philosophical, emotional direction of large populations from whatever their present circumstance or course may be, it seems to me that further degradation must occur and further reverse of fortune, further destruction will be unavoidable before the momentum is sufficient to swing the pendulum the other way.

the answer to the problems lie in my comments above, to wit : gutting the entire american intellingence infrastructure and rebuilding it under the military umbrellas as a war fighting / national defense intel organization. rescinding all current laws regulating corporations and returning them to their historic subservient charters of operation, thus eliminating their political power and their ability to corrupt political actors and undermine the legitimate political will of the voters.

additionally were people so unwise as to make me "benevolent dictator" for a day, I would break the rice bowls and drive from the fire all those who now have comfortable burrows in the state department infrastructure and replace them with nationalists whose first and only loyalty is to the people of the united States of america. and finally I would exercise whatever influence as was at my disposal to rescind and elminate all tax incentives to businesses that make it more profitable to them to operate their factories and companies overseas and / or using foreign labor. and I would restore the Monroe Doctrine and america's political neutrality; potential friend to all, ally to none.

( you knew I'ld bite, didn't you sneaky pete. I am so easily baited. )

previewing this before I post it I see that you have added quite a bit more information while I have been busy typing this, and I will have to go back and absorb the new material.

Redeye · May 22, 2002

br0dyaga,

Were I you, I might also raise some havoc among the rice bowls -- and especially the gold-embroidered ones. I'd no doubt make it abundantly clear that, barring really severe cases, the worker bees could and should consider themselves safe for now. After all, the rice must continue to be harvested and processed, else the rice bowls matter not.

I'm glad that you found this monster interesting enough to pursue, but you are wrong if you really thought that this was put together as bait; I can surely think of far less onerous bait projects!

After all, I didn't even post into this thread today's Moscow Times article about <a href="http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2002/05/22/001.html">bribery being a $ 36 Billion a year business in Russia</a>!

R

br0dyaga · May 22, 2002

addendum

one further note : had I possession of the magic wand I would also immediately end this arrogant, presumptive, "nation building" crap. I've never met a man or woman who was converted at the point of a sword. such conversions are worthless and transient. to respect the rights of self determination is the signature not only of confidence, but of right itself.

if a proposition is so worthwhile and intrinsically self evident, why would it not then be obvious and desireable? if it must be imposed by external force it is immediately suspect on its face. and even if it is desireable and worthy, honest men and women will oppose it if for no other reason than a rational and G-d given right to resist the imposed influence.

if what we have to offer has merit it will be aped and copied an cloned by eager populations striving for their own self interest. if not it deserves to be ignored and abandoned by all. including its authors.

it is not merely the right and duty of a people to invoke the spirit of revolution from time to time, but it is a necessary purgative in the body of society. just as it is in the human body when that person has too long indulged in an excess of one type or another.
stasis is death.

and in the abscense of an external or artificial force, the body, whether it be the body of man or the body of society must from time to time indulge in such excess and resort to the purgative of change and alteration. equilibrium is an illusion and a fool's paradise. the best example, the best system will be copied and exported and amplified by the simple and irrepressible desire of the individual to better his lot.

br0dyaga · May 22, 2002

;-) naw, I didn't think you were really baiting me. I just wanted to nip at your trouser leg fer fun.

br0dyaga · May 22, 2002

another thing that occurs to me is the role of the judiciary. it may seem like a diression from the thread, but I think it has a subsidiary bearing.

the american judicial system was once based upon fact finding and punishment, followed by restitution and reintegration to society of the wrong doer. it was a system devised on the premise that society ought to be healed and recompensed and could only be so restored if the wrong was redressed and the injured restored, and the wrong doer readmitted after a period of repentance and active contrition.

today the american judicial system is a "winner take all" arena of mortal combat in which the presumption of an a priori morality; of right and wrong, have no automatic standing. it is a system in which "might makes right" has become the defining criteria. and one in which the political actors have exempted themselves from any standard of accountability or redress, and thus of any obligation to society at large. it is the institutionalization of a system of insulating the nobility for any consequences of their acts.

consequently political actors may act at their leisure and in their own interests without regard for the obligations of office, or any responsibility to their constituency. indeed without any concern whatsoever of any culpability for any actions they may commit. in such an environment C.Y.A. becomes the law and the standard. or as they say in russian : "you are not a thief if you are not caught." in such an environment one does not target oneself as a greek messenger, bring upleasant facts to the king. one tries to distance oneself from such dangerous knowledge.

in such an environment the brave and honorable few who dare to reveal the truth will be marginalized at best, penalized in all circumstances, and destroyed at worst. it is the realm of the saber-toothed ostrich.

Meemur · May 22, 2002

br0dyaga, I think the idea of multinational corps having a great deal of influence is a significant piece of all this -- I'm sure that's where the money trail leads in some cases. Further, it wouldn't surprise me if there are also close ties between some CEOs and the U.N.

Redeye has put together an interesting collection of articles. There's a lot to consider here.

Deb Mc · May 22, 2002

(((Meemur))),

Agreed! Though which one is the cart and the other the horse is still yet to be determined. (Perhaps each thinks they're in the "driver's seat", willing to "off" their partner as soon as the time is right...)

Multi-national corporations and their thugs plus sleezy politicians make a quite virulent brew...

br0dyaga · May 22, 2002

I agree with you, Meemur, that Redeye has done yoeman service. many of the sources he cites above are not easy to find for the unintiated and required much effort on his part.

let me make it clear to the flints of this world who read this, I am not laying all blame at the feet of corporations. I am not a leftist populist by any stretch of the imagination.

I am however mindfull of the part that the Hearst corporation played in instigating the Spanish American war, america's first imperial expedition. I am mindful of president teddy roosevelt ( Roosevelt the 1st ) in sending the USMC to quell the Nicarauguan / Salvadoran uprising that threatened Dole and United Fruit corporations. I am mindful that Ford Motors, and GE, and other american companies which contributed heavily to both the German Nazi and Stalin regimes. and there is a wealth of evidence to suggest that UNOCAL and Haliburton lobbied extensively for the US administration to overthrow the government of Afghanistan. Not to mention Loral helping the Chinese to steal critical missile guidance and control systems. and the lockup of Grande Staircase Escalante coal fields in favor of Clinton's indonesian partners.

neither is it any secret the amount of political influence and power wielded by the Exons, the ADMs and the Enrons and their ilk.

then again, perhaps ron brown died of a massive migraine.

Redeye · May 23, 2002

Yup, Ron Brown sure did die thanks to a massive migraine... 45 cal. version, I'd guess.
If further proof were needed of how far people at Clinton's level would go, Brown's assassination should have furnished it.

It was interesting to see portrayals of international organized crime as acting very much like the multinationals we know and love. That trend brings with it a whole new class of international players, and ones which survive by their wits rather than by using reams of lawyers and accountants and rocket scientists (in the Wall Street vernacular).
It has been alleged that certain of the Far Eastern OC outfits have progressed to the point of making serious efforts at large-scale weather engineering.
I obviously brought in information about the interplay of OC and intelligence services to illustrate on that aspect of the opposition. I've no doubt that I have understated the actual situation in that respect; why use client nation-states when just-as-capable and much more deniable resources are also at hand?
If the KGB/FSU quite regularly uses the Russian Mafia's services, as well as services of Far Eastern OC, and if the Chinese do similiarly, then I would be surprised to find that the Mossad does not.

The information about that Chinese coastal triangle and the economic activity trends to be seen were also illuminating. One region which is growing at 9% per annum, and which has already surpassed the GDP of Japan. No wonder the foreign investments have been pouring in.
That rapidly-growing economic powerhouse is going to require more and more of two things: resources and markets. It is taken for granted that Westerners will do business regardless of how otherwise-offensive Chinese conduct may be internationally, and especially so the greater the cost advantages of that area.
OK, how about resources? I find myself considering the implications of the Newsmax <a href="http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/12/11/123047.shtml">Yakutia</a> article as well as those of the TB thread <a href="http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=19047">Chinese in Russia's Maritime Region</a>.
The information in the threads <a href="http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2607&highlight=paracel">China: More Far East oil & nat gas "developments"</a> and <a href="http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1742">China: Oil & ngas Asian-area developments</a> also seem very pertinent insofaras petroleum resources which would not have to pass through choke points such as the Straits of Malacca.

One area that I did not get into was how the purportedly-independent companies actually controlled by China's PLA "play" in their various markets. My sense is that they operate very much as a combination of mutinationals and international OC organizations.
It is also of note that China's reported military budget is to grow at another 18% per year increase, and where some of that money is going -- witness the <a href="http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=24614&highlight=chinese+and+military+and+budget">Message From Beijing, Part II: Where's the money going</a> thread, is sobering indeed. As is the list of countries and multinationals so willing to do overt or dual-use military business with China.

It is sobering to consider that the nation-states, the multinationals, the international OC organizations, and the international terrorist groups, still are arguably not at the ultimate levels of global power.

R

Trasael Adnepos · May 23, 2002

Intelligence History

So long as we're learning from "intelligence history", Redeye, this document belongs here also. Here is the smoking gun for the likes of WTC from, that's right, 1962:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/doc1.pdf

Read it. Operation Northwoods. I trust it wasn't in there somewhere, as I scanned the thread fairly quickly.

Tras

br0dyaga · May 23, 2002

Justin Raimondo / antiwar.com has a screed up about the proposals for a 9/11 investigation. he is really outdoing himself this time. but be that as it may, he does hint at something regarding the 200 israeli art students that slipped my notice when the story was hot. ( and I don't think that he even noticed it himself when he wrote his rant ) at the time that this issue surfaced my only thought was that it didn't feel right, that something about it was lopsided or asynchronous. and now reading Raimondo's rant I know what it was that my subconcious was trying to tell me.

200 holders of israeli passports / id documents are not necessarily israeli.

Redeye · May 23, 2002

Tras,

I saw that Northwoods piece on the <a href="http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=30804">prior knowledge</a> thread and read it from there.
Thanks for posting that link here also, nonetheless.

What I am interested in is far more recent information on or indications of that kind of Reichstag Fire provocation. OKC in my mind qualifies. I'm not so sure about WTC.
The groups of players as outlined in this thread do exist, and their goals are fairly evident from their long-established patterns, and their methods of operation are also fairly evident both from their patterns and from their logistical contacts. None of which bode well at all for the U.S.A.

R

Meemur · May 23, 2002

BTTT for several folks who are too flustered to use a search engine.

[War] Who knew what when? What isn't being seen?

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