October, 2001: Cover Story

By Greg Rushford
Published in The Rushford Report

Now they will learn how strong America really is.

The finger pointing at the CIA has already started.

“Why Was There No Warning?” the Washington Post editorialized on September 15. “The [terrorist] group’s size — not to mention the complexity of its endeavor — should have offered many opportunities for intelligence infiltration. Yet the conspirators proceeded unmolested.” Where was the CIA?

The Post was at least asking the right question. After all, the Central Intelligence Agency was created after World War II precisely to avoid the massive intelligence failure of Pearl Harbor, when U.S. intercepts of the Japanese attack plans remained untranslated in a low-priority “incoming” basket. “There are striking similarities between December 7, 1941 and September 11, 2001,” according to George Friedman, who chairs Stratfor (for strategic forecasting), a private-sector provider of intelligence analysis to corporations and governments. Seems that the last National Itelligence Estimate on the terrorist threat was back in 1997, although an update was in the works before September 11. (For a closer look at some of the similarities between September 11 and previous U.S. intelligence failures, see the Publius column at page two of this issue).

But first, the Monday morning quarterbacks in Congress and the press who have been critical of the CIA should point the fingers at themselves. If there has been another intelligence failure, it is a collective one.

The CIA has often served America well in a business where success stories are most often kept secret. There have been credible published reports that since 1998 the CIA has successfully foiled terrorist plots against the United States at the 2000 millennium New Year, and also plots against Jordan, Egypt, Kenya and in the Balkans.

Still, if you take an honest look at the agency’s track record over the years, there have been too many lapses to explain away. Something is clearly wrong — and that something is probably best explained in just one word: bureaucracy. Bureaucracy goes a long way toward explaining the weaknesses in both the clandestine Directorate of Operations and the intelligence directorate, where insightful analysis has been hampered for many years by a cumbersome bureaucracy.

I have more than a journalistic interest in this subject. As an investigator for the House Select Committee on Intelligence in 1975, I played a key staff role in probing a series of intelligence failures. We gathered up the CIA’s documents before six celebrated foreign-policy turning points: the January 1968 Tet offensive in South Vietnam; the August 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia; India’s 1974 nuclear explosion; coups in Cyprus and Portugal, also in 1974; and the October1973 attack on Israel by Egypt and Syria. U.S. intelligence missed every one. Despite the often heroic efforts of many unsung heroes who had collected much valuable information in advance, the common thread that connected each failure was — a cumbersome bureaucracy. Twenty-six years later, the questions that are being raised about what went wrong before the September 11 terrorist attack on America that resulted in more than 6,000 deaths are hauntingly familiar.

But certainly, Congress hasn‘t been much help to U.S. intelligence in the past quarter century. The members of the intelligence committee that I served — Republican and Democrats alike — were not serious about sticking around for the difficult business of improving the U.S. intelligence agencies. The House Select Committee on Intelligence disbanded in early 1976, leaving behind a wave of leaks, partisan acrimony, and sensationalism that is still a source of embarrassment. Our committee started by asking the right questions, but never got to the bottom of the bureaucratic problems that we had glimpsed. Over in the Senate, the celebrated investigation into attempted CIA assassinations against Fidel Castro that was headed by Frank Church (D-Idaho) was basically just cute theatrics. The tone was best illustrated when Sen. Church and Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) got their pictures on the front pages holding up a CIA poison dart gun, looking like delighted schoolboys. The Church committee created the political climate that in 1976 caused President Gerald Ford to issue an executive order prohibiting the use of assassination on “moral” grounds. Saddam Hussein and bin Laden are presumably grateful (but perhaps not for much longer).

Nor have the successor congressional intelligence committees displayed much more seriousness of purpose. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Alabama), for example, who is of lately calling for the head of Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, is the same Shelby who four months ago said that the CIA had Osama bin Laden “on the run.” The Saudi terrorist, Shelby said, was “hunkered down.”

And where were the best investigative reporters of newspapers like the Washington Post before September 11? The Post (like other American newspapers) has covered the CIA with a voyeur’s fascination with the secret world of the clandestine services, ignoring the un-sexy but absolutely vital analytic role of the Directorate of Intelligence. James Bond sells. Taking the time to try to understand the complex world of intelligence analysis has never appealed to journalists at the nation’s great newspapers.

Making fun of the CIA is something that journalists find appealing. On September 10, John Lumpkin of the Associated Press gleefully reported on a project dating to the Cold War called “Acoustic Kitty.” Seems that some declassified documents obtained by the anti-CIA National Security Archive revealed that the CIA had considered using “cats wired as mobile eavesdropping platforms.” Lumpkin reported that “in the first test of feline surveillance, the cat was run over by a taxi.” Pretty funny — and typical of a press mentality that thinks the CIA is a topic for titillation.

How much ink did the U.S. press give to the U.S. Commission on National Security? This commission, headed by former senators Warren Rudman and Gary Hart, issued a series of warnings between September 1999 and this February that the United States was not prepared to face the increasing dangers of terrorism. “The combination of unconventional weapons proliferation with the persistence of international terrorism will end the relative invulnerability of the U.S. homeland to catastrophic attack.“

For the press, this was basically a one-day story that was quickly forgotten.

The unserious press mentality is illustrated by a particularly stupid July 10 Op-Ed column in the New York Times. Written by Larry Johnson, a former State Department counter terrorism specialist, the column chided Americans for seeming “to believe that terrorism is the greatest threat to the United States and that it is becoming more widespread and lethal.” Johnson went on to say that it was not true that “extremist Islamic groups cause most terrorism.” Johnson added, “Nor are the United States and its policies the primary target.”

What’s the bottom line for those in the press and Congress who suddenly discovered on September 11 that there is something wrong with the state of U.S. intelligence? There was an abundance of evidence in the public domain pointing to the increasing likelihood of terrorist atrocities — and the critics sleepwalked. Perhaps the real comparison isn’t between September 11 and December 7, but between the 1990s and the 1930s. Bill Clinton, who was afraid to fight wars that might risk American lives, might have to answer to history.

In his September 21 address to a joint session of Congress, lawmakers stood and cheered when President George W. Bush declared: “We will come together to strengthen our intelligence capabilities to know the plans of terrorists before they act and to find them before they strike.”

Perhaps next time, America will get it right.

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