CIA DO Resignations

[Roguish Lawyer]

Originally Posted by NousDefionsDoc

From the way they talk lately, I think he means "corporate" as in "corporation" as in "I'm the CwhateverO and you can't fire me."

You think there is value to an experienced corps of NCOs? I think that's what he's talking about.

[Smokin Joe]

Never mind

[NousDefionsDoc]

Originally Posted by Roguish Lawyer

You think there is value to an experienced corps of NCOs? I think that's what he's talking about.

You are trying to equate a bunch of arrogant, Ivy League, bureaucratic, "hang on got my my 30 and Volvo" college boys with my NCO Corps?

I think what he is talking about is that they have been sitting on their asses, unquestioned because "Its classified and you wouldn't understand" and now they're out because they haven't performed. Hell Ray Charles can see that.

These people need to be graded just like everybody else. Another one is State. If we have to send troops, I would be looking really hard at the State team responsible for that country. You start holding them accountable, they'll get off their asses and start doing their jobs.

[Roguish Lawyer]

Originally Posted by NousDefionsDoc

You are trying to equate a bunch of arrogant, Ivy League, bureaucratic, "hang on got my my 30 and Volvo" college boys with my NCO Corps?

LOL -- no, but I think that analogy illustrates the argument that he was trying to make. I agree with you.

[NousDefionsDoc]

The Crisis in the CIA
Stratfor
Nov 18, 2004

By George Friedman

The CIA exploded in public rancor this week as two of the senior members of the Directorate of Operations resigned over the behavior of newly appointed Director Porter Goss and that of some of his senior advisers. As one report had it, some of Goss's people were "abrasive" and did not treat old-time CIA hands with appropriate courtesy. The real issue is who runs the CIA -- the senior professionals or the administration.

On the surface, the answer to this question should be easy. An intelligence service should be entirely independent, analyzing the world according to the highest professional standards. It's on the next level down that the problem appears. The CIA has not been doing a very good job in analyzing the world. It has been making some serious mistakes on some very important issues. Therefore, the question is this: What do you do when an intelligence service has failed and is incapable of repairing itself? Ultimately, the president is responsible for U.S. intelligence. It follows, then, that the principle of independence must submit to the principle of subordination when the organization has a systemic failure.

That is the argument in a nutshell. The chief lieutenants of former CIA Director George Tenet argue that the CIA has not failed. Rather, they argue, the failure was in the administration, which forced the agency to make dubious analytical calls for political reasons or, alternatively, ignored CIA analyses they disagreed with in favor of analyses they liked. The least grievous charge they make against the Bush administration is that it cherry-picked the analyses that fit with its world view and ignored the others. Therefore, not only is the CIA not a failed institution, but, to the extent it failed, it failed because of the administration that is now trying to repair it through Goss.

The administration counters that not only has the CIA failed consistently, but it has tried to cover up its failures by leaking classified documents that are designed to paint the administration in the worst possible light at the most sensitive political moment. So, for example, they charge that the CIA leaked a report indicating the agency had warned Bush about problems in Iraq -- and leaked it in a time and way that would cause maximum damage to the president. Similarly, they charge that the CIA floated a report that a Defense Department intelligence analyst was an Israeli spy, in order to damage Defense Department officials with whom it was at odds.

The Core Problem

This argument is certainly entertaining, and Washington lunches are being fueled by the cat fight, but it cannot be understood in the current context alone. The question of CIA effectiveness is a fundamental issue that has been on the national agenda since the agency was founded. This is merely the latest edition of arguments that raged in every administration -- from the Bay of Pigs to Rwanda. Who screwed up and when did they do it is an issue that has raged from the beginning.

The issue cannot be approached in a simplistic matter. It is essential to understand what the CIA is good at and what it is not good at. It is then necessary to determine what part of the CIA is most important and what part can be dispensed with at a particular historical moment.

The CIA has consistently failed to identify major historical events:

1. It failed to predict the North Korean invasion of South Korea or the Chinese intervention.
2. It failed to forecast or clearly understand the Sino-Soviet split.
3. It failed to understand the nature of the Cuban revolution until after Castro was in power.
4. It did not know that the Soviets had tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba and were prepared to use them in the event of an American invasion.
5. It failed to understand the probable course of the Vietnam War
6. It failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union.


This is far from an exhaustive list. Moreover, it isn't quite fair to say the CIA failed to predict these things in the sense that no one in the CIA had any idea these things were happening. Rather, it means that institutionally -- in the official guidance given by the CIA to policymakers -- the CIA failed to clearly and unequivocally forecast what was going to happen. As all of us in the intelligence game know, one should always hold a contrarian analysis in a file cabinet somewhere, which, when produced, demonstrates that you knew it all the time. But the fact is, the only analysis that counts is the one you brief to the president and the National Command Authority -- and on that basis, this is a sampling of the failures.

If we look at this list, there are two classes of events with which the CIA has trouble. The first are events that are discontinuities -- or, in other words, when something completely outside the box occurs. When we look at these six cases, we see that they share a common thread: They violate the conventional expectations of the time. Arguing that the Soviets and Chinese were enemies, or that the Soviet Union was going to collapse, went against the received wisdom of the time. All of these did. The CIA has difficulty imagining major historical discontinuities.

The second class of events it has trouble with are those that are not amenable to covert intelligence collection. Some of these were, of course, things the Directorate of Operations should have known, such as the Korean War or tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba. But the most important of these things, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union or the Sino-Soviet split -- things that really transformed history -- were not amenable to covert collections, because the decision-makers involved were not themselves aware of what was happening. The Sino-Soviet split emerged over time, even in the minds of the decision-makers. The last people to know that the Soviet Union was going to collapse were in the Soviet Politburo.

The greatest capability of the CIA -- and the intelligence community in general -- is covert operations that gather information from a nation's leadership. The CIA is not perfect at this, but it is outstanding. However, an event that involves non-nation-state actors (such as Castro, prior to the Cuban revolution) or more important, in which the leaders of the nation-state are themselves unaware, leaves the CIA helpless.

An event that breaks the paradigm of an era and that cannot be covertly sourced is what the CIA is worse at. Broad historical events that are visible to everyone, but which requires an ability to intuit the deep trend, is something the CIA simply doesn't do very well. When that broad historical event violates all conventional expectations, the CIA is fairly helpless.

[NousDefionsDoc]

The War

Al Qaeda was the classic failure for the CIA. Al Qaeda was not a national government but a small, apparently eccentric, collection of Islamists. This was already outside of the CIA's sweet spot. The Sept. 11 attacks were completely outside the paradigm that the CIA -- and others, including Stratfor -- was working with. The model of terrorism they had studied for a generation did not include an attack of this order. Therefore, since the CIA was dealing with a non-state group and with a historical discontinuity, the agency continued its record for getting it wrong.

The problem the CIA has is that it also failed in what was supposed to be its sweet spot -- covert gathering of intelligence from senior state officials in Iraq concerning a war that had been going on, in effect, since 1990. There were no surprises here, no discontinuities, no funky, off-the-wall groups. This was mainline intelligence-gathering.

It was here that the CIA made the core mistakes:

1. It did not tell either Presidents Bill Clinton or George W. Bush that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. It told both of them that it did.
2. It did not understand Saddam Hussein's war plan and did not warn Bush that the fall of Baghdad would trigger an organized guerrilla war. Warning of unrest is absolutely not the same as warning of a war plan.
3. It did not provide clear intelligence on the status of the Shia in Iraq and the degree of organization that had been achieved by Iranian intelligence.

The failure to predict the Sept. 11 attacks was ultimately a systematic failure hardwired into the CIA. The ways in which it collects intelligence and the way its analytic process works have consistently generated failures on this level. When an institution fails to do a certain type of work well for 50 years, it is hardly fair to condemn it when it repeats the failure. The failures it can be condemned for, however, are the mainstream collection and analytic failures that shaped the Iraq campaign.

This is what the debate has raged over. The Bush administration gave the CIA a pass over Sept. 11; they are not giving it a pass over Iraq. The CIA is responding by arguing (a) they were forced to skew data and (b) they did provide accurate analysis but were ignored. The administration is arguing (a) no one forced them to skew data and (b) the claim that they did provide accurate intelligence undermines the claim in (a). They say that the CIA was just dead wrong in its intelligence and then tried to cover it up by savaging the administration.

There are two conclusions here. First, the fact that the agency is being given a pass on Sept. 11 is the most serious problem. The consistent inability of the CIA to capture hard-to-source discontinuities is not a charming foible, but an unacceptable shortcoming. Being good in the small things doesn't matter if you can't do the big things. On that basis alone, the CIA should be rebuilt. But it is not on that basis that the administration is going after them.

Instead, they are going after the failure of the agency to do the small things right. We tend to agree that the CIA's failures in Iraq are too numerous to be explained by political pressure. The consistent inability to generate radical analysis is caused by the inherent conservatism of the complex process that Tenet put into place. Where committees rule, the product will be the lowest common denominator. On this, we side with the administration.

However, the problem is not simply to streamline a process that works well on small things. The administration doesn't appreciate the fact that the enormous failures of the CIA on the big things are the real problem. It is what gave us everything from the Chosen Reservoir to bafflement at the sight of the Berlin Wall coming down. The administration is missing its chance to rebuild American intelligence in fundamental ways -- and there is no better time to do it than during a war, as "Wild Bill" Donovan and the OSS showed.

[NousDefionsDoc]

http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Pu...4/953rougx.asp

"Nothing"
What Michael Scheuer has to say about bin Laden and Saddam--and what that says about the CIA's performance.
by Stephen F. Hayes
11/22/2004 12:00:00 AM

MICHAEL SCHEUER, head of the CIA's bin Laden unit and until recently a senior analyst, said something remarkable last week on Hardball with Chris Matthews.

Scheuer told Matthews that he "happened to do the research on links between al Qaeda and Iraq," and Matthews asked him, "and what did you come up with?"

"Nothing."

It was a strange and troubling response. As Thomas Joscelyn points out, Scheuer argued in his 2002 book, Through Our Enemies Eyes, that Iraq and al Qaeda worked together regularly. His claims were unequivocal. A few examples:


[Bin Laden] "made a connection with Iraq's intelligence service through its Khartoum station." (p. 119).

In Sudan, Bin Laden decided to acquire and, when possible, use chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) weapons against Islam's enemies. Bin Laden's first moves in this direction were made in cooperation with NIF [Sudan's National Islamic Front], Iraq's intelligence service and Iraqi CBRN scientists and technicians. He made contact with Baghdad with its intelligence officers in Sudan and by a [Hassan] Turabi-brokered June-1994 visit by Iraq's then-intelligence chief Faruq al-Hijazi; according to Milan's Corriere della Sera, Saddam, in 1994, made Hijazi responsible for "nurturing Iraq's ties to [Islamic] fundamentalist warriors. Turabi had plans to formulate a "common strategy" with bin Laden and Iraq for subverting pro-U.S. Arab regimes, but the meeting was a get-acquainted session where Hijazi and bin Laden developed a good rapport that would "flourish" in the late 1990s. (p. 124)

There is information showing that in the 1993-1994 period bin Laden began to work
with Sudan and Iraq to acquire a CBRN capability for al Qaeda. (p. 124)

Regarding Iraq, bin Laden, as noted, was in contact with Baghdad's intelligence service since at least 1994. He reportedly cooperated with it in the area of chemical-biological-radiological-nuclear [CBRN] weapons and may have trained some fighters in Iraq at camps run by Saddam's anti-Iran force, the Mujahedin al-Khalq. (p. 184)

In pursuing tactical nuclear weapons, bin Laden has focused on the FSU (former Soviet Union) states and has sought and received help from Iraq. (p. 190)

We know for certain that bin Laden was seeking CBRN [chemical-biological-radiological-nuclear] weapons . . . and that Iraq and Sudan have been cooperating with bin Laden on CBRN weapon acquisition and development. (p. 192)


So how can Scheuer now say Iraq and al Qaeda did not collaborate? Tim Russert noted that Scheuer seems "to lay out a pretty strong case of connection between al Qaeda and Iraq," and asked him about the apparent contradiction on Meet the Press. Here is the entire exchange:


Russert: So you saw a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden?

Scheuer: I certainly saw a link when I was writing the books in terms of the open-source literature, unclassified literature, but I had nothing to do with Iraq during my professional career until the run-up to the war. What I was talking about on "Hardball" was I was assigned the duty of going back about nine or 10 years in the classified archives of the CIA. I went through roughly 19,000 documents, probably totaling 50,000 to 60,000 pages, and within that corpus of material, there was absolutely no connection in the terms of a--in terms of a relationship--in the terms of a relationship . . .

[NousDefionsDoc]

Russert: But your book did point out some contacts?

Scheuer: Certainly it was available in the open-source material, yes, sir.


This is nonsense. Scheuer would have us believe that although he never saw an Iraq-al Qaeda connection in the classified intelligence as head of the bin Laden unit, he wrote a book in 2002 including numerous examples of that connection based solely on open sources. Is it true that Scheuer did not see classified intelligence about the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship before 2002? That seems highly unlikely.

The Clinton administration cited intelligence on Iraq-al Qaeda to justify its strikes on the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan on August 20, 1998. Those officials stand by their decision today. Former Defense Secretary William Cohen told the September 11 Commission that he saw intelligence that the head of the al Shifa plant traveled to Baghdad to meet with the head of Iraq's VX nerve gas program. Such intelligence also led the Clinton Administration to include the Iraq-al Qaeda connection in its first indictment of bin Laden.

Scheuer implies--but does not say directly--that he now believes the open source information is wrong. Would he have written that he was "certain" that Iraq provided WMD assistance to al Qaeda based solely on reports in an Italian newspaper or in other open sources? (I wonder if Scheuer plans to write a new introduction to that book to alert readers that he now considers several important passages to be dead wrong.)

Just for the sake of argument, let's take Scheuer's comments yesterday
at face value. Let's assume that he based the conclusions in his 2002 book solely on open sources and that he has since looked through 19,000 pages of classified material that gives not so much as a hint of an Iraq-al Qaeda connection. If he's right, then the intelligence failure on Iraq is far greater than we have thus far realized.

Consider what we have learned since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003. I will include in this list only those facts that are beyond dispute--things we've learned from captured documents authenticated by U.S. intelligence and in debriefings with senior Iraqi intelligence officials.

We know that Iraqi Intelligence officials reported in 1992 that Osama bin Laden was an Iraqi intelligence an "asset" that had "good relations" with the Iraqi intelligence station in Syria. We know that Sudanese government officials met with Uday Hussein at bin Laden's behest in 1994 to discuss cooperation on bin Laden's behalf. We know that deputy Iraqi intelligence director Faruq Hijazi met with bin laden, at least twice. We know that Saddam agreed to air anti-Saudi propaganda on Iraqi national television. We know that the Iraqis considered the numerous "contacts" with bin laden a "relationship"--as revealed in their internal documents. We know that in the mid-1990s an internal Iraqi intelligence memo revealed that Saddam sought "further cooperation" with al Qaeda. And we know that meetings between high-level al Qaeda terrorists and senior Iraqi intelligence officials took place throughout 1998.

Would Scheuer have us believe that there was nothing--"absolutely no connection in terms of a relationship," to use his words--in the 50,000 to 60,000 pages of classified intelligence that he recently reviewed? If so, the intelligence failures on Iraq are far greater than anyone has imagined.

One final point: Scheuer told Russert that he "had nothing to do with Iraq during my professional career until the run-up to the war." That is a jaw-dropping admission. And it might go along way to explaining why, despite the mounting evidence of a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, the CIA for years overlooked or downplayed it.

We now know that the CIA never penetrated the inner circle of either Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. We know this because senior U.S. intelligence officials have admitted it.

And now Scheuer tells us that in all of his analytical work on bin Laden he never looked at Iraq until shortly before the war.

Porter Goss has a big job to do.


Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.

[NousDefionsDoc]

Goss should sack the lot of them.

[magician]

this guy Scheuer is really beginning to look like a certifiable loony.

good riddance, I say.

unless....unless his talking is part of some sort of weird disinformation campaign....some bizarre, complex campaign meant to confuse bin Laden....

hell, he is confusing me.

I just do not get it.

[Jimbo]

Originally Posted by NousDefionsDoc

I would like to see the SOC take over the DDO.

That would be truely awful. Truely.

[Jimbo]

Also, be wary of anything George Friedman says on this subject. I hear he thinks HE should be the DCI. He's kind of the Hackworth or Ralph Peters of the intel community. I also like that Friedman tries to make hay out of CIA's record. Stratfor has been wrong a number of times as well, and has a much shorter history.

[Jimbo]

Scheuer is a nut. An unprofessional nut to boot.

[The Reaper]

Originally Posted by Jimbo

Scheuer is a nut. An unprofessional nut to boot.

I saw his interview and would have to agree.

Lots of disconnects in his statements.

Gets lots of play from the libs, though.

TR

[NousDefionsDoc]

Originally Posted by Jimbo

That would be truely awful. Truely.

Oh, I don't know. The Army guys did a pretty good job of running it in WWII when it was the OSS.