CIA Myths
By Larry Johnson on February 21, 2008 at 9:53 PM in Current Affairs
Latest from Mel Goodman, drawn from his recently published book, Failure of Intelligence. We’ll have a link up soon for you to purchase a copy if you are interested.
By Mel Goodman
The time for serious soul-searching regarding the role of the CIA and the intelligence community is long overdue. The recent intelligence failures regarding the unanticipated collapse of the
Myth Number One: The Central Intelligence Agency is the central intelligence organization in the intelligence community, which consists of 15 intelligence agencies and departments. This has always been a myth, although it was President Harry Truman’s intention to create centrality for the CIA. But the agency met with opposition from the Pentagon, which opposed the objective and balanced intelligence estimates and assessments of the CIA, as well as from the FBI, which did not want any competition in the field of counter-intelligence. Under the Bush administration, the CIA has been steadily weakened, with a director, Michael Hayden, who is a four-star general, and the creation of the post of director of national intelligence, currently Admiral Mike McConnell, who has taken charge of national intelligence estimates as well as the daily briefings of the president. By placing the position of the DNI in the hands of the military, the Bush administration has completed the militarization of the CIA and even the intelligence community itself, where active-duty and retired general officers run the Office of National Intelligence, the CIA, the National Counter-Terrorism Center, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office. The Pentagon is responsible for nearly 90% of all personnel in the intelligence community and 85% of the community’s $50 billion budget. The absence of an independent civilian counter to the power of military intelligence threatens civilian control of the decision to use military power and makes it more likely that intelligence will be tailored to suit the purposes of the Pentagon. This is exactly what President Truman wanted to prevent.
Myth Number Two: The Intelligence Community is a genuine community that fosters intelligence cooperation and the sharing of intelligence information. The intelligence community has never functioned as a community. With the exception of the production of the National Intelligence Estimates, which are indeed a corporate product of the community, there is limited sharing of the most important and sensitive documents collected by the various intelligence agencies, and very little esprit de corps within the community. There have always been deep rivalries between the civilian and military agencies with the CIA and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence Research often lined up against the Defense Intelligence Agency and the various intelligence branches of the four military services. This division was particularly profound during the debates over Soviet military power and the verification of Soviet and American arms control agreements, with military intelligence consistently exaggerating the strength of the Soviet military and opposing the disarmament agreements of the 1970s and 1980s.
Myth Number Three: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence offers a genuine possibility for exercising central control over the intelligence community. The creation of the DNI has worsened the malaise and the capabilities of the CIA without assuring any reform for the Agency or the intelligence community. The sudden departure of the first DNI in December 2006, John Negroponte, for a lesser position at the State Department, meant that the reform process would start over under a new, less experienced DNI, Admiral McConnell. The veto power of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence over the ability of the DNI to transfer personnel from individual agencies into joint centers or other agencies will undermine any legitimate reform process. McConnell himself spends far too much time preparing for his daily briefing of the president, which should be in the hands of the CIA, and the issue of cyber-security, which should be in the hands of the NSA. Instead of reform, Negroponte and McConnell have built a huge, lumbering, and bloated bureaucracy that includes a principal deputy director, four deputy directors, three associate directors, and no fewer than nineteen assistant deputy directors. The DNI has a huge budget (over $1 billion) and has taken its management staff from the CIA and INR, thus weakening the overall intelligence apparatus. There has been no real accountability of the DNI, with congressional intelligence oversight committees failing to monitor the DNI’s hiring of independent contractors with extravagant salaries.
Myth Number Four: The CIA is not a policy agency, but is chartered to provide objective and balanced intelligence analysis to decision-makers without any policy axe to grind. This is possibly the greatest and most harmful myth of all, because CIA’s covert action, which has registered a series of strategic disasters over the past sixty years, is part of the policy process, and most clandestine collection of intelligence is designed to collect intelligence in support of administration policy. The CIA was unfairly described thirty years ago as a “rogue elephant out of control.” In fact, the CIA is part of the White House policy process with various presidents authorizing regime change in
Myth Number Five: The 9/11 intelligence failure was due to the lack of sharing intelligence collection. The conventional wisdom is that the 9/11 intelligence failure was caused primarily by the failure to share intelligence, particularly the failure of the CIA to inform the FBI of the presence of two al Qaeda operatives in the
Melvin A. Goodman is senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, and author of the just released “The Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.” He was an intelligence analyst at the CIA from 1966-1990.
http://www.madcowprod.com/02072008.html
Thank you for sharing this with us, Larry.
The book promises to be one helluva read and a real eye opener, just from this post alone.
Whew!
Wouldn’t want to be the one responsible for rehabilitating that mess!
Always method to madness, isn’t there?
Mel, best of luck with the book. I look forward to adding it to my library. I consider anything that you write required reading.
~~~~
O/T Can someone help me out? We used to advertise a book here on NQ. Something about the spice trade and the cities of Amsterdam, Venice and London. This was around the time of the “Be Obama’s European Tour Guide” contest. What’s the title? I want to buy it.
We now return to praising Mel’s book and arguments.
I almost dropped a lot of money on spice trade and silk road books a few weeks back.
I think The Taste of Conquest must be what you are looking for. If not, search on spice trade at amazon. You can get it for $16.50 shipped via abe books.
I concur, I received Taste of Conquest as a gift, and it was a good book.
Too too funny…
Is this in the archives?
I never heard who one the contest either.
duooh!! *won
Some questions.
First, were all of the things attributed to CIA in the quotes above actually carried out by government employees, or were some of them (thinking of the mysterious black-uniformed people at Guantanamo in some of the photos that made it into the press, for example) contractors? Is there a difference in terms of responsibility? In other words, if a contractor assigned to an agency screws up royally, should the agency or some other entity be blamed?
Second, seems like this could go toward more privatization (which I view as a bad thing, given the unauthorized CS gas release in Iraq, the shoot ‘em ups that killed many innocent Iraqis, the brash and bordering-on-dangerous behavior in New Orleans after Katrina, Colonel Westhusing’s frustration with contractor incompetence, etc., etc.) —OR— toward a more central, less military dominated, intelligence community. Is Goodman suggesting one over the other as a solution? Sounds like he thinks perhaps that Truman’s vision should be implemented. Or that we should scrap it. Hard to tell from these quotes.
Larry thanks for the heads up.
Mr.Goodman (Dr?) nails in six paragraphs what these ship o’ fools want to keep “classified”.
It will be an eye opening read.
Out of total curiousity, Hillary gets this, inside out?
Larry..
Mel sums it Up..You and I Know He is Right..
We Have Both Been in the trenchs..Coping with endless Turf battles..and coping with those who are trying to Lift thier Leg the Highest..
I’m glad I’m Out and I think you are too..Bad enough trying to do your job without knee Deep in Piss..
and hardly gaining ground..especially when the Rules Change every day..
why are there turf battles? aren’t they all playing for the same team?
I don’t get it.
I know it will never happen, but I’d love to see the counter-terrorism briefing documents given to (and any other information on al Qaeda shared with) the incoming Bush administration in late 2000, early 2001 by the outgoing Clinton administration intelligence officials.
We already know that the Bush administration demoted the counter-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke, to the point he was limited to dealing with Bush deputies instead of Bush principals. We know that Attorney General Ashcroft downgraded the al Qaeda terrorist threat in the eight months prior to the 9/11 attacks to a point where the pre-9/11 terrorist threat wouldn’t have even registered on their pretty post-9/11 color-coded terrorist level chart. We know that Condi Rice, the NSA chief, only held one cabinet-level counter-terrorism meeting one week before the 9/11 attacks, at which she said they didn’t really discuss al Qaeda, but instead talked about a “regional strategy” (i.e. invading Iraq). We know that once the October 2000 U.S.S. Cole attack was traced back to al Qaeda by January 2001 that the incoming Bush administration blew off retaliating against al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan even though President Bill Clinton had promised bin Laden that it would happen, a threat made to bin Laden following the two earlier embassy bombings in Africa. We know that the 9/11 Commission, with the help of Condi Rice’s close friend, Zelikow, covered up the Bush administration’s culpability for the 9/11 attacks succeeding (playing defense), while at the same time another Republican operative made a specious movie trying to lay the blame for 9/11 on the Clinton administration (playing offense). We know that urgent, multiple requests for search warrants (regular, FISA, whatever) from desperate FBI field operatives in the Midwest involving an al Qaeda operative arrested three weeks before the 9/11 attacks were turned down by top Bush officials.
Strange, but I see a pattern forming, dot leading to dot leading to another dot.
Anyway, since I served in the U.S. Air Force Security Service back during the early 1970s and know how field reports were sent back to NSA headquarters (i.e. up the chain of command), I really have a hard time believing that “50-60 analysts and operatives from the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA…failed to inform leading officials at their own agencies of the two al Qaeda operatives (in the United States)…, who were brought to our attention by Malaysian intelligence officials in January 2000.”
This is why I’d love to see the counter-terrorism intelligence briefing materials passed onto the incoming Bush administration as President Bill Clinton’s time in office ended. Were the names of these two al Qaeda operatives in the United States mentioned? If so, then this would be one more indication that the incoming Bush administration was more obsessed over Iraq, and invading Iraq for its oil, than they were in protecting U.S. citizens from the rabid right-wing religious fundamentalist al Qaeda terrorist threat prior to 9/11.
Oh, and I just wanted to add that this is one of the best posts I’ve read in awhile, with so many dots being connected. Excellent work. I am just a wee bit skeptical, though, about “top officials,” especially top intelligence officials in the Bush administration being out of the loop, unless they chose to be out of the loop, like Bush blowing off the August 6, 2001 PDB briefed to him by a CIA official that “Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the U.S..” Too much evidence has already surfaced showing that Bush and top officials in his administration, prior to 9/11, didn’t give a damn about the safety of U.S. citizens.
Just about anyone with an interest can answer the questions that the CIA supposedly cannot. The reason the CIA cannot answer the questions is because the answers do not suit the corporate, powerful interest, the military/industrial/entertainment/media complex, the military Keynesians. “Team B” ran it sideways to suit their own purpose, but things do not change very much without team b.
Anyone who thinks that John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton do not represent these same interest groups and that things will change if one or the other of them is elected is not any better at figuring it out than the CIA.
Would anyone deliberately stress those divisions, making the various departments bitterly antagonistic toward each other, purposely?
Perhaps out of some mistaken belief competitive abilities would be enhanced, or in an attempt to scuttle the efficacy of the American intelligence services, which isn’t that far fetched, people DO think in this manner, divide and conquer…
Larry,
i’m currently reading Legacy of Ashes by time weiner … could i get your take on this book? although i’m only a 150 pages into the book it sounds like some of the points you are making are in agreement with his historical analysis.
oops … i menat to say some of the points the author is making … too damn early and not enough coffee yet!
Trying again
Thus, two of the leading 9/11 terrorists fell through the cracks of the system.
They were supposed to. No 9-11 attack. No new Pearl Harbor.
The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.
http://www.crisispapers.org/Editorials/PNAC-Primer.htm
Michael Springman, former head of the American visa bureau, Jeddah
“MICHAEL SPRINGMAN: In Saudi Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high level State Dept officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants. These were, essentially, people who had no ties either to Saudi Arabia or to their own country. I complained bitterly at the time there. I returned to the US, I complained to the State Dept here, to the General Accounting Office, to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and to the Inspector General’s office. I was met with silence. ”
According to a CIA officer who testified to the committee, “a kind of tuning fork buzzed” when he and his colleagues heard the news. The CIA arranged for Malaysian intelligence to monitor the pair once they landed in Kuala Lumpur on January 5, 2000. Their behavior, CIA Director George Tenet testified, “was consistent with clandestine activity.”
Photographs of the gathering were taken secretly by Malaysian intelligence and transmitted back to CIA headquarters. By that time, the CIA had obtained a copy of al-Mihdhar’s Saudi passport, giving the agency his full name, passport number, birth date and other details. The passport showed that al-Mihdhar had a visa, issued at the U.S. consulate in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, giving him the right to enter the United States at any time until the visa expired in April 2000.
Yet no action was taken to warn U.S. customs officials. According to Tenet, “We had at that point the level of detail needed to watchlist [al-Mihdhar]—that is, to nominate him to State Department for refusal of entry into the US or to deny him another visa. Our officers remained focused on the surveillance operation and did not do so.”
In the 911 commision report…if I recall they only make passing reference to Saudi Visa waiver.
In Saudi Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high level State Dept officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants.
high level = ? never any names…
Point taken. You are not suggesting Addington got his wish? Tinfoil hat wise?
No Quarter:
The link for article below starts with:
http://www.ctc.usma.edu/
Click on: “Introducing the CTC Sentinel - A New
Journal for Cutting-edge research” and download Issue
#3 for February 2008.
The article (pg 1) by Richard Clarke and Robert Knake
is entitled: “Counter-Terrorism Issues for the Next
President”
“…The next president will inherit from the current
administration a dysfunctional counter-terrorism
apparatus.(1) The U.S. military has been stretched
thin by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the
intelligence community has been discredited by the
lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the
ongoing failed hunt for Usama bin Ladin, and the
Department of Homeland Security has so many missions
and so many disparate agencies that it is ineffective. An even more challenging task will be to restore to the United States credibility in the world and to reduce the number of people who bear us ill will…”
Such a large part of this seems to go back to the people making money, not the terrorists, per se.
I suppose it’s like the drug wars, until the inside people, within any government, stop facilitating the flow of cash, terrorists will always have weapons.
A terrorist group can function as a great asymmetrical army, can’t it?
Simon,
A full spectrum counterterrorism package includes efforts to cripple terrorist group capabilites and countermotivation e.g. radicalization is a reversible process with weak points that have not been addressed with precedent and practice. Militarization and privatization have ensured that agencies like the CIA no longer function as a public service e.g. there are more private contractors in Iraq than troops. Countermotivation will be served best with what I refer to as peacebuilding initiative by a ‘peacebuilding corps’ e.g. the fundamental principle will be to ‘help people help to themselves’. There are not nor have there ever been Congressional funding or plans for post-war peacebuilding e.g. Charlie Wilson’s War. Neither does America have a Department of Peacebuilding to dispatch such a peacebuilding corps into regions which have been relatively secured. It is a shame. I do not believe that America has a sincere desire for pragmatic peace. There is a silence surrounding those who have sacrificed their lives. The only talk I hear from Bush is concern about his legacy.
[...] more than 80% of U.S. intelligence spending, which he estimated at about $60 billion in 2007. As Mel Goodman, former CIA official and now an analyst at the Center for International Policy, observed, [...]
[...] than 80 percent of U.S. intelligence spending, which he estimated at about $60 billion in 2007. As Mel Goodman, former CIA official and now an analyst at the Center for International Policy, observed, [...]
[...] more than 80% of U.S. intelligence spending, which he estimated at about $60 billion in 2007. As Mel Goodman, former CIA official and now an analyst at the Center for International Policy, observed, [...]
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[...] more than 80% of U.S. intelligence spending, which he estimated at about $60 billion in 2007. As Mel Goodman, former CIA official and now an analyst at the Center for International Policy, observed, [...]
[...] more than 80% of U.S. intelligence spending, which he estimated at about $60 billion in 2007. As Mel Goodman, former CIA official and now an analyst at the Center for International Policy, observed, [...]
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