Why U.S. Intelligence is Inadequate, and How to Fix It

Quality Control

If the flow of intelligence on terrorism were subjected to the discipline of counter intelligence and CIA were to reject all that was not secure, its analysts would have to come to terms with poverty. This would force policy makers to take responsibility for doing what they can on the basis of what they know. But in this field as in others, scarcity presses CIA to take what garbage comes its way and call it good.  It has always been so. From the 1950s to the 70s CIA treated James Angleton’s small, independent counter intelligence office as a pest, and spread accusations that 6 Angleton’s concerns for the integrity of sources amounted to aspersions on the loyalty of CIA case officers, or reflected his own paranoia. In fact CIA resented the obstacles that Angleton placed in the way of self congratulation -and self promotion – for passing on insecure information. And so in 1975 CIA got rid of Angleton and independent quality control. Since then each geographic division has judged its own integrity – more corrupting than having Arthur Andersen audit Enron.  As it turned out, Angleton was more correct than he feared. Every last CIA agent in or on Cuba was working for Castro’s intelligence. All but three in or on East Germany were working for the Stasi. This and much more was due to mere incompetence. The Soviet KGB’s total control of the human intelligence that reached the US government resulted from the treason of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hansson, in charge of quality control respectively for CIA’s and FBI’s anti Soviet espionage. None of these discoveries led to any serious efforts at quality control.

Nor did the discovery that Geoffrey Prime had told the Soviets about how US satellites were intercepting their communications affect the way in which those satellites were funded, nor how their information factored into the rest of our intelligence. Finally, neither the revelation that, because of one John Walker, the Soviets were privy to all of US naval communications, nor the fact that US intelligence had overlooked countless indications that this was so, make those in charge of US intelligence any more skeptical about what they were seeing and hearing.

The CIA’s uncritical acceptance of “low hanging fruit” regarding terrorism is part of the same phenomenon. Paranoia would not have been necessary to ask why, if the Arab intelligence services that told us that al Qaeda was responsible for terrorism knew so much about it, they were powerless to prevent it from operating in their police states.  After the 1998 US cruise missile attack on an innocent Sudanese pharmaceutical factory that Arab intelligence had designated, and US technical sources had confirmed as an al Qaeda chemical warfare facility, common sense would have counseled skepticism about those sources. No way. In 1993 the CIA decided that Arab regimes were innocent, that “loose networks” of renegades and Islamic extremists were responsible for terrorism, and that to confirm the validity of a source one need only confirm the truth of some of its details.

Since then, CIA has held to its paradigm of terrorism with acts of denial and definition that shock common sense. Foremost is its squaring of the facts with the dogma that no Arab regime, especially that of Iraq, was responsible for the 1993 or (and) the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.

Here is a thumbnail sketch. One of the 1993 bombing’s masterminds is a secular person who entered the US on an Iraqi passport as Ramzi Yousef (the name under which he was convicted and sent to federal prison). He left the US for Baghdad as Abdul Basit Karim, on a Pakistani passport obtained on the basis of Kuwaiti documents that had been doctored during Iraq’s 1990 occupation of Kuwait. The real Kasim, who disappeared 7 during that occupation, was physically different from Yousef. Only Iraqi intelligence could have merged the two identities.

The man who CIA says is Yousef’s superior and uncle, and who it calls the mastermind of the 2001 attack, who also took part in the 1993 one, and joined Yousef in the 1995 Philippines plot to bomb US airliners over the Pacific, is a secularist Baluch who goes by the name Shaik Khalid Mohammed. A third secularist by the name of Ali, otherwise known as Ammar al Baluchi provided funds for all three attacks. Only Mohammed had anything to do with al Qaeda, and that only after 1996, long after his own network had performed operations like that of 9/11. Where did the money and motivation for that network come? Could it be that this network thinly disguised as a family worked for Iraqi intelligence, which had long recruited Baluchs for a variety of tasks?

CIA however absolved Iraq from responsibility for any of the attacks by this fictitious Baluchi family, while pinning all of them on Islamic extremism and just the 2001 attack on Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda. Go figure. Worse, it refuses to question the sources or the line of reasoning that led to this conclusion.