Time, different type of enemy work against U.S. intelligence services

[thedrifter]

By Ward Sanderson, Stars and Stripes
Stripes Sunday magazine, March 2, 2003


When Congress investigated what went wrong with U.S. intelligence prior to Sept. 11, a troubling anecdote surfaced: that of Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet raging around the Beltway the preceding summer, ?literally pounding on desks,? prophesying that the sky was about to fall.

History records that it literally did.

The problem, experts have said over and over, isn?t that the intelligence services had no clue that al-Qaida had declared war on the United States. The problem is that they didn?t have the assets or the ?human intelligence? ? good old-fashioned spies ? inside terror organizations to determine exactly what they were up to. Critics complained that spy agencies had become too dependent upon computers, too corporate and too competitive with one another.

American spying was less hard Sean Connery and more dapper Roger Moore, gadget-dependent and genteel. But gadgets couldn?t hack the mind of al-Qaida. And unlike either of the fluent Bonds, many in U.S. intelligence lacked the ability to understand a syllable uttered by these new enemies.

The government has acknowledged that spy agencies suffered from flaws, and now fights to fix them. What hasn?t been trumpeted, however, is just how long it will take before the United States has the sort of hooks into al-Qaida that it had into the Soviet bloc. Former spies and intelligence experts say that it could take a decade for America to have an edge on its radical opponents, and a generation could pass before enough speakers of Middle Eastern languages are hired to translate intelligence from groups like al-Qaida.

?You?re looking at literally years to penetrate this organization,? said Rusty Capps, a retired FBI supervisory special agent, Army major and current president of the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies. ?And we don?t have years.?

Capps and others believe that America?s dependence on electronic eavesdropping ? the result of technical leaps and a reluctance to see spies die in arid lands ? has handicapped its ability to track primitive foes. To compensate, services are revamping how they recruit informants, work on the ground and work together.

The CIA doesn?t discuss how long its efforts will take, according to spokesman Paul Nowack. But experts predict a protracted fight.

?I?m talking three to nine years to develop an agent network around the world that will give us some idea of what?s going on,? Capps said.

During the Soviet era, the capitals became sizzling synapses of intrigue, with both sides trying to recruit sources within the other?s ranks. The Soviets certainly became wise to this. So the United States turned to technology and platforms like the U2 spy plane, and eventually satellites.

Surveillance technology, for the most part, ?doesn?t break,? Capps said. ?You don?t get hammered. When it does break, it doesn?t risk human lives.?

People are quite different. ?Human sources can go bad. They can get picked up. They can get bribed. They can make mistakes.?

But technology is better at snooping out missile sites than it is at exposing compartmentalized plots like the one that leveled the World Trade Center.

?That?s why this problem is tougher [than the Cold War]. You have to track little groups of people who are trying to collect in a room or a cave,? said Peter Earnest, a retired senior CIA officer, former Marine and current executive director of the International Spy Museum in Washington. Earnest said intelligence services were wired for a different fight.

?We have been structured to track movement of large military forces,? Earnest said. ?People in tanks. Mass might. Now we?re talking about individuals running around with less than suits on, with the most primitive of weapons.?

A U.S. government official denied the intelligence challenges of Islamist terror are greater than those posed by communism. ?That would be overly simplified,? the official confided. ?Each has its upside and downside. But they?re both difficult.?

Robert Baer, a retired CIA field officer, is a critic. He acknowledges the agency became a formidable foe for the Soviets. But he said his efforts spying in the Middle East were often in vain because bosses showed little interest: Desert endeavors were pass?; desk jobs inside the Beltway were in. Officers with too much field experience were considered ?warped,? Baer said, and barred from senior positions. Such a policy would be analogous to an Army where officers from combat units were barred from becoming generals.

?They were more concerned about politics than collecting intelligence,? Baer said. ?It?s a rot that sets in in Washington.?

Old-fashioned spooking is inherently a political risk. Experts say the CIA became gun-shy as a result of very public uproars over its very secret roles in Chile, Laos and the Iran-Contra affair.

While many would argue that?s a good thing, Baer believes this political sensitivity backfired during the ?90s. The Soviets had evaporated, stocks were up and no one was sufficiently worried about a man named Osama.

Baer said that if a CIA operation peeved the king of Saudi Arabia, the station chief would soon learn the length of his leash. That?s when the U.S. ambassador would offer the advice: ?I don?t want the king ever to call me again, or I?m gonna kick your ass.?

Expect sore backsides in the future.

Analysts say the government needs more than ranks of patriotic FBI gumshoes or CIA spymasters reaped from the fertile Midwest. Rather, what the United States now seeks are contacts inside the Middle East ? true locals who already know the cultures, can move nonchalantly through them and can join radical groups without great suspicion. American operatives may go abroad to set up dummy companies to recruit these native agents, but most Yanks wouldn?t be too convincing in a burqa.

The Defense Intelligence Agency has announced it wants to hire ethnically diverse staff to ?provide deeper insight into the rest of the world.? The FBI has attempted to recruit Arab Americans at cultural events, often being greeted with suspicion.

?You still require people who can recruit other people,? said Earnest, who spent 20 of his 36 years with the CIA in clandestine operations. But recruited foreigners would be the real inside sources.

Keeping these agents convincing is a seedy business. ?For instance, in the Mafia, you don?t become a made man until you kill somebody,? Capps said. Gaining the trust of hunted thugs can require black deeds and ?takes a lot of time and money, and the willingness to lose some of your assets along the way.?

The reasons why this takes time are legion. Intelligence services, though veiled in a sexy secrecy, are still bureaucracies prone to institutional inertia. While Tenet and others called al-Qaida a threat, the CIA had only five people working full-time analyzing Osama bin Laden intelligence, while the FBI had just one, according to transcripts of a joint congressional intelligence hearing last year.

Spies are certainly focused on terror now, but it takes time to recover from the budget cuts of the early ?90s and a shift away from spying on traditional nation-states. Training new operatives takes even longer.

?It?s not a quick process,? said Andrew Koch, Washington bureau chief of Jane?s Defence Weekly. ?Most intelligence people say, ?You bring me a new recruit, and we can see the benefit in five years.??

For example, Koch said it takes a full decade on the job before the government trusts an image analyst to go it alone interpreting satellite intelligence.

And history ? from Sun Tzu to World War II ? shows that the most devastating spy operations are groomed over time. The KGB recruited the members of the Cambridge spy ring in the 1930s while all were fresh-faced graduates, full of socialist idealism. They went on to hold senior positions in British government, and the ring wasn?t broken until the 1950s.

The barriers between America spying on al-Qaida are not insurmountable, experts maintain. ?It just requires you to commit yourself to something other than instant gratification,? Capps said.

According to congressional testimony by Tenet, that?s exactly what al-Qaida did prior to Sept. 11: The kamikaze pilots had lived in the West for some time, dressed in Western clothes, shaved their beards and largely avoided mosques. Most of those involved in the plot had no record of extremist connections. Save for the occasional traffic ticket, they steered clear of the law.

http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?...&article=13341

Sempers,

Roger