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| Home Front: WoT |
| The Sorry State of the CIA |
| 2004-07-14 |
| Wretchard has blogged it, but I’m surprised this hasn’t turned up here. Below is a small snippet; RTWT. by Reuel Marc Gerecht I don’t suppose he’s angling for something at Langley... It is also absolutely true that George Tenet’s CIA failed to penetrate Saddam Hussein’s inner circle. It’s a very good bet that the CIA has not had a single penetration in the inner circle of any of its totalitarian adversaries. The same is probably true for the French, British, and Israeli foreign intelligence services. In other words, one simply cannot judge the caliber of a Western espionage service by its ability to penetrate the power circles of totalitarian regimes. The difficulties are just overwhelming. We’ve discussed this before. One can, however, grade intelligence services on whether they have established operational methods that would maximize the chances of success against less demanding targets--for example, against Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda, which is by definition an ecumenical organization constantly searching for holy-warrior recruits. It is by this standard that George Tenet failed and the CIA will continue to fail, assuming it maintains its current practices. But the odds are poor that the White House, Congress, and the press will condemn the Agency for its failure to develop a workable strategy and tactics against the Islamic terrorist target. The White House, we’ll see. The press, obviously. For them CIA is alternately a source of anti-Bush leaks and some locus of black magic. With the politicization of the Agency over Iraq, a helpful nuts and bolts discussion of operations just isn’t likely to happen. Yet a concrete discussion is precisely what is needed. Successful espionage operations against al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist organizations would be defined by the efforts of a small group of men who seed themselves into these organizations. Some, probably most, of these men would need to be actual case officers--CIA employees--not foreign agents the CIA has recruited. The CIA will be a serious espionage organization ready for the twenty-first century only when its professional ranks are dominated in numbers and influence by such officers, who operate far away from U.S. embassies and consulates. This is not likely to happen, of course. We can all be thankful that bin Ladenism will in the end be defeated not by the prowess of American intelligence, but by the democratization of the Middle East. Otherwise, we would be effectively defenseless against a small, tightly knit platoon of holy warriors who live to kill and die. |
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