Unless the U.S. intelligence community makes rapid changes in the
way it collects and processes information, the United States and
its allies may not be able to prevent future terrorist attacks of
the massive scale seen on September 11, experts said.
According to several experts interviewed for this article, U.S.
officials currently planning a global campaign against the Al Qaeda
terrorist network are relying on the same flawed intelligence that
failed to anticipate the violent acts that ultimately would kill
more than 5,000 people in New York and Washington, D.C.
The most widely voiced criticism of U.S. intelligence agencies
is its over-reliance on high-tech surveillance, at the expense of
human spying, known as Humint. Some critics observed that key U.S.
intelligence agencies are organized under Cold War-era bureaucracies
that no longer are suited to manage an asymmetric war against a
worldwide network of nimble enemies.
Among the harshest critics of U.S. government intelligence operations
is Steve Pieczenik, chief executive officer of Strategic Intelligence
Associates, a consulting firm. He describes the U.S. intelligence
community as “atavistic and rusty” and goes as far as
to advocate that intelligence work should be outsourced to private
industry. Retired intelligence officers currently working for political
campaigns, investment banks and corporations could provide valuable
assistance, Pieczenik said.
“The events of September 11, 2001 were the ultimate damnation
and clear statement of intelligence services failure and the self
delusion it has had for the past 20 to 25 years,” Pieczenik
said. He parcels out blame equally to the Central Intelligence Agency,
the Federal Bureau of Investigations and the Defense Department.
Since 1970, Humint capabilities have deteriorated steadily, he
said. He estimated that nearly 50 percent of the Humint resources
during that time have been reallocated to electronic signals collection
methods, known as Elint and Sigint.
During recent weeks, officials from the former Clinton administration
and Bill Clinton himself defended the current intelligence collection
methods and even catalogued instances of terrorist attacks that
were prevented, because they were able to gather good intelligence.
“They will tell you about all the attacks they allegedly stopped,”
Pieczenik said. “But make no mistake, the intelligence community
is completely ossified and out of sync with reality.”
Citing an old cliché, he added, “There’s no
thinking out of the box here, because there is no box when it comes
to intelligence”.
Pieczenik gained notoriety during his government career in the
State Department as a hostage negotiation and anti-terrorist expert.
He teamed up with the best-selling author of military high-tech
thrillers, Tom Clancy, to create the Op-Center and Net Force series.
“The private sector is 10 years ahead of government in gathering
intelligence,” Pieczenik said. “Humint definitely needs
to be outsourced.”
To fix the current problems in collecting intelligence, Pieczenik
argued, the intelligence community has to refocus on the cognitive
sciences or the psychological domain of warfare. “The very
essence of war is psychology,” he said.
Pieczenik added that the Defense Department leadership often fails
to take psychology into account. “The Pentagon views the most
important aspect of intelligence gathering, psychology, as a soft
science, so they want nothing to do with it when, in fact, it was
our use of Humint ... that was the sine qua non of what made this
country great.”
The so-called OSS model (Office of Special Services) was based
on the notion that effective intelligence gathering and the ability
to gain useful knowledge of the enemy require a potpourri of individuals
with both conventional and unconventional skills who came from different
backgrounds. Today, says Pieczenik, “our intelligence community
is not creative any more.”
Currently, he adds, “we don’t have people in the decision
making process or inner circles of government who are sophisticated
in intelligence matters.” People are placed in high-level
intelligence positions based on political affiliation, not credentials,
Pieczenik asserts. “There’s so much bureaucracy now.”
A CIA spokesperson, who did not want to be quoted by name, fervently
disagreed with Pieczenik’s assessment. “We hear a lot
of generalities from the so-called experts, but many don’t
know the field or what we’ve been doing,” the CIA official
said.
“We are very focused on Humint issues as a matter of course,
and we are focused on the issues that we need to focus on,”
the official said. “We are improving our linguistics capabilities
and recruiting in the hard target languages, such as Farsi, Pashtu,
Chinese and Korean.”
At the CIA, said the official, “we’ve been focusing
on getting the type of individuals for clandestine operations that
we need to get to the targets and, in fact, we have been recruiting
individuals from a variety of skill sets and different backgrounds.”
As far back as 1998, she added, “we moved to recruit more
clandestine officers with the goal of increasing 30 percent over
a seven-year period and eventually double the size of our clandestine
service.
“We are red-teaming and thinking about all the things that
need to be thought about over a multi-year period from both an operational
and analytical perspective.”
Steve Aftergood, who oversees the Government Secrecy and Intelligence
project for the Federation of American Scientists, said he believes
that no one, no matter how much Humint had been available, could
have predicted the events of September 11. “The attack was
so far below the radar screen that it was never realistic to expect
it to be detected,” Aftergood said. “We can’t
expect to have an agent in every group of 100 angry men around the
world. We are seeing now the limits of intelligence and, with that
in mind, it seems pointless to browbeat the CIA.”
Nonetheless, Aftergood noted that, given that the mission of the
U.S. intelligence community is to anticipate and prevent surprise
attacks, the terrorist acts of September 11 will go down in U.S.
history as an “enormous intelligence failure.”
Elaborating further, Aftergood said, “the interesting question
to me is what was the nature of the failure? It’s easy to
say bureaucracy is the problem, but what needs to be asked and answered
is at what point should U.S. intelligence have been able to detect
the planning for the September 11 attack?”
In Pieczenik’s opinion, one of the most difficult concepts
for Americans to accept is that those who carried out the attacks
were of sound minds. “One of the first things I have to do
when I’m asked to advise the U.S. government is to tell them
that they [the terrorists] are not crazy,” said Pieczenik.
Many are college educated. For example, some in Osama bin Laden’s
group are medical doctors and structural engineers. Bin Laden has
a degree in banking and finance, which raises the specter of terrorism
not for grievance but simply for profit.
“These are people who have a clear set of determinants, are
sophisticated and have exceptional analytical skills,” said
Pieczenik. “They calculated that a successful attack would
lead into an economic recession, they figured how many days it would
take for the U.S. to reconstitute the operations affected by the
attack and they understood all the human dynamics.”
The U.S. intelligence community, as well as the scholars who advise
the government, need to reexamine how they view terrorists, said
the authors of the groundbreaking article, “Talking to Terrorists.”
“The terrorism discourse is inherently pejorative and hostile
toward its research subject,” wrote David Brannan, Philip
Esler and Anders Strinberg. “To discuss a person or organization
within a terrorist framework entails a normative judgment. This
judgment disposes the researcher to prejudicial views and attitudes.
... Terrorism is in fact a social phenomenon, and terrorists are
human beings and groups of human beings with convictions, forming
parts of society, regardless of political or religious convictions.
The currently prevalent practice of refusing to take the subjects
seriously and approaching them with contempt and derision is harmful
to our knowledge of these groups.
“If researchers do not constantly seek to regenerate and
revise their views and beliefs through primary encounters with their
research subjects, the downward spiral of suspicion and violence
is set to continue. If it were possible to apply the expertise of
terrorism studies within a more constructive framework than is
currently the case, the benefits for academia, counterterrorism,
political outgroups, and victims of terrorism alike could be great.”
Pieczenik said he is pessimistic about the future. “I fear
that if we don’t act in an intelligent, professional manner,
some ill-advised decisions will be made sending things spiraling
out of control,” he said. “The greatest faith I have
is in the American public. They have incredible capability and intelligence
and yet the government is marginalizing the public, feeding them
pabulum.”
Rem Reider, editor of the American Journalism Review, expressed
a similar concern. “Information is so tightly controlled now,”
he said. “You have to remember that those controlling the
information in the war are the ones who were the architects of the
Persian Gulf War.” That means that the information the public
received is “spun heavily,” he said. Americans should
be “really, really careful” about the validity of the
information being reported by media organizations around the world
and handed out at government press briefings, said Reider.
In his opinion, the Internet is playing an important role in providing
the public alternative news sources during the current conflict.
He cautioned, however, that “you can’t jump the other
way and believe everything you read. ... There’s a lot to
sort through and you have to be careful about reliable information.”
One of the disadvantages of the Internet, Reider said, is that when
a false story begins to develop, “it’s hard to put a
stake through its heart.”
An example of the diversity of information that the public can
find on the Internet about the war in Afghanistan is Jerusalem-based
Debkafile, a multilingual electronic newsletter that that claims
to have “inside” sources on the ground in Afghanistan.
Debka Net Weekly editor Giora Shamis said he was “fed up
with the way that news establishments we worked for were gathering
information and reporting it. ... Many of us had experience in covering
intelligence activities, terrorism and counter-terrorism and we
felt there was much more to be told.
“A similar problem exists in U.S. intelligence agencies.
Since the early 1990s, intelligence gathering, like reporting, changed.
People never left their offices and gathered information from the
Internet, laptops and cell-phones. Organizations got larger and
more monolithic and bureaucratic. Many intelligence people I spoke
with in the United States saw the writing on the wall, but they
refused to read it closely.”
Debka caused a stir several weeks ago when it published an unconfirmed
report that Chinese troops were fighting along side the Taliban
and that as many as 15 were killed in U.S. bombing raids in October.
A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C. adamantly
refuted that story.
In the story, Shamis cited intelligence sources in Tajikistan,
Kyrgizstan, Pakistan and China, and reports by The Guardian of London
and the Times of India. “The Chinese have a lot at stake in
the region and they don’t relish the idea of Russian-American
cooperation or U.S. presence in Afghanistan or in Central Asia,”
Shamis said. In his newsletter, he wrote that American and Russian
military moves in the Indian subcontinent and in the oil and resource-rich
Central Asia are giving Chinese rulers “the jitters,”
because the war has dramatically changed the geopolitical “Great
Game” between Russia, China and the United States. The phrase
“Great Game” was coined by Rudyard Kipling in the 1800s
to describe the competition between Russia and Great Britain to
control Central Asia. The United States now is participating in
a modern version of the “Great Game,” Shamis said.