David E. Kaplan
Mission Impossible - America's spy agencies
Mon Jul 26, 2004 00:25
64.140.158.90

Nation & World
Mission Impossible
The inside story of how a band of reformers tried--and failed--to change
America's spy agencies
By David E. Kaplan
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/040802/usnews/2intell.htm

Twice each week, a top-secret report with distinctive red stripes lands on
the desks of select policymakers in Washington. Called the "Red Cell," it is
the work of a CIA unit by the same name, set up after the 9/11 attacks to
think "outside the box." "Some of it is really wacky, even scary," says an
insider. "Like bombing Iran." The "Red Cell," in a very real sense, is
emblematic of the trouble the U.S. intelligence community finds itself in
today. Its reports, in-house critics say, are getting stale. "There's not a
lot of young blood," an analyst says, "and there's not enough turnover."

That even the "Red Cell" analysts are having trouble thinking about the new
challenges to the United States suggests how hard it will be to change
America's much-maligned intelligence community, a $40 billion complex of 14
agencies in six cabinet departments plus the CIA. It is, by far, the
largest, most expensive intelligence network in history. Created in 1947,
the U.S. intelligence community has grown enormously in terms of bodies and
dollars but also in the number and complexity of its responsibilities.

It has also, for many reasons, grown into a mess. "The intelligence
community does not exist except as a figment of congressional imagination,"
confides one of its most senior officials. "We've created the hardest
structure you can ever imagine--to understand, to manage, to be effective.
We've created an impossible situation." Porter Goss, a CIA veteran who
chairs the House Intelligence Committee, agrees: "Nobody in their right mind
would create the architecture we have in our intelligence community today.
It's a dysfunctional community."

One must go back 30 years to find a time when America's intelligence
agencies were under such assault. Back then, America's spy agencies were
lumbered with revelations of assassination plots, mind-control experiments,
and illegal spying on Americans. Today, the charges are different. If the
crisis a generation ago was of accountability, the trouble now centers more
on competence. The release last week of the final report by the bipartisan
9/11 commission was just the latest humiliation for the intelligence
community (Page 34); that report comes hard on the heels of the Senate
Intelligence Committee's July 7 critique of the community's assessments of
Iraq's prewar weapons capabilities.

After 9/11, Americans had good reason to assume the nation's intelligence
capabilities were being improved. But then came the Iraq war and the
subsequent revelations that the CIA's "slam dunk" intelligence on Saddam
Hussein's stockpiles of banned weapons was a complete air ball, a casualty
of badly forged documents, eager exiles with outlandish stories, and
analysis that, in the most charitable sense, could be described as flawed.
The Senate Intelligence Committee's 511-page Iraq report documents how on
the country's weightiest issue--whether to launch a pre-emptive war--the
U.S. intelligence community ended up wrong on virtually every critical
point. "In short," laments Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the intelligence panel's
ranking Democrat, "we went to war in Iraq based on false claims."

The record of failures, combined with new threats and high-tech challenges,
has pushed serious intel-ligence reform to center stage for the first time
in 40 years. In its final report, the 9/11 commission is calling for a major
restructuring; many top intelligence officials agree change is overdue.

But it won't be easy. Since 1991, the intelligence community has been the
subject of no fewer than 16 federal studies and commissions--many calling
for major reform--yet its basic structure has remained essentially unchanged
for a half century. Why? The usual Washington reasons: fights over turf and
money. In the intelligence game, the big players include a half-dozen
powerful congressional commit-tees, a handful of billion-dollar contractors,
and the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI, and a dozen other agencies.

But money and power alone don't explain the failure to improve America's
intelligence capabilities. A six-month examination by U.S. News --based on
extensive interviews with senior intelligence officials and a review of
thousands of pages of internal government memorandums, reports, and other
documents--shows why the nation's hydra-headed intelligence network has been
so stubbornly, and successfully, resistant to change. The magazine's inquiry
identified many of the same prob-lems found by the 9/11 commission and the
Senate intelligence panel: chronic shortages of qualified spies, experienced
analysts, and fluent linguists, and a system hobbled by overclassification,
conflicting security rules, and myopic management.

The magazine's review, however, documented not just technical problems but
cultural, structural, and even psychological impediments to change. They are
illuminated by a story, never previously told, of the last major effort to
reform the nation's intelligence services--and why that effort failed.
Technically, the story begins just three years before the 9/11 attacks, but
those involved say it really dates back to the early 1990s. At the time, the
fall of the Berlin Wall was still fresh in the public mind, but for many
intelligence hands the celebration of the victory over communism was
short-lived. In search of a peace dividend, Congress slashed the
intelligence budget by nearly 20 percent. Some lawmakers, angry at the CIA's
exaggeration of Soviet economic strength, even sought to abolish the agency.

By the mid-1990s, cutbacks and controversies like the Aldrich Ames espionage
scandal had taken their toll. Plummeting morale and a booming tech market
prompted a brain drain of some of the community's best minds. At the same
time, cellphones, 24-hour cable-news networks, and the Internet were
revolutionizing communications. In the cloistered cubicles of the
intelligence agencies, managers were finding their deadlines shorter and
their staffs smaller. The threats also seemed to have multiplied, from
Serbian ethnic cleansing to North Korea's secret nuclear program.

Two-part job. By 1996, calls for reform were echoing across the Potomac. To
better marshal the intelligence community's resources, some in Congress
demanded what studies and commissions have repeatedly called for: increasing
the power of the DCI, the director of central intelligence. The DCI has
always worn two hats: first as CIA chief and second as coordinator, at least
on paper, of the entire intelligence community. The problem is that the DCI
controls only about 10 percent of the intelligence budget; nearly all the
rest is run by the Pentagon, with its military intelligence programs and
control of satellites and electronic listening posts.

Unsurprisingly, Pentagon brass argued that a true DCI would shortchange
military priorities. Others warned that an intelligence czar, not unlike
that proposed last week by the 9/11 panel, would add unneeded bureaucracy or
create an unaccountable superspy agency. Confronted by the Pentagon and its
powerful allies on Capitol Hill, the reformers backed down. The compromise:
Congress created four new positions under the DCI, charged specifically with
managing the intelligence community. The new plan gave the four a clear
mandate, fancy new titles--and virtually no real authority.

The quartet who took the reigns of the ODCI--the Office of the DCI--are
virtually unknown outside Washington's national security circles. But to
many inside they are heroes, operatives who were given a true mission
impossible--reforming the intelligence community before 9/11.

There was Joan Dempsey, an Arkansas native who had worked in U.S.
intelligence since she was an 18-year-old Navy tech listening in on Soviet
bomber and submarine traffic. Known as a tough, shrewd professional, Dempsey
had risen to be the Pentagon's senior civilian career intelligence officer
before joining the CIA as George Tenet's chief of staff. She was, says one
colleague, the best "closer" he'd ever seen--someone who knew how to cut
deals and get the job done. Dempsey was given the top spot, as deputy
director of central intelligence for community management.

Under Dempsey were three veterans of the CIA. Her deputy for administration
was a sharp-witted native of Montgomery, Ala. An amateur Egyptologist and
25-year veteran of Army intelligence and the CIA, James Simon had experience
in almost every facet of the spy business, from imagery to eavesdropping.
Placed in charge of analysis was John Gannon, a widely respected veteran who
had run the agency's Directorate of Intelligence and was now chairman of the
DCI's National Intelligence Council, which oversaw the community's weighty
"estimates" on key issues. Finally, there was Charlie Allen, more of a
legend than a man around the CIA. "If you don't think you're getting your
money's worth out of the federal government," says an admirer, "you should
meet Charlie Allen." A workaholic, Allen had served as an intelligence
officer for 40 years and earned a reputation as a plain-spoken professional
who regularly bucked the bureaucracy. After warning again and again back in
1990 that Saddam Hussein was about to invade Kuwait, Allen was dismissed as
an alarmist and nearly disciplined. Saddam invaded two weeks later; Allen
received a CIA Commendation Medal for his trouble. At the ODCI, Allen was
put in charge of collection, overseeing the gathering of intelligence by
everything from human spies to satellites to remote listening posts.

The nerve center of the new team was the sixth floor of CIA headquarters in
Langley, Va. There the ODCI staff, some 200 men and women from a dozen
different agencies, spread out across a series of colorless government
cubicles. The new managers harbored few illusions. The Office of the DCI was
long seen as a backwater in the intelligence community. "You had a certain
percentage of people there," said Simon, "who, frankly, had retired in place
or were considered to be brain-dead."

Before the team was fully assembled, events interceded. In May 1998, the new
nationalist government in New Delhi detonated three nuclear weapons in
India's first tests since 1974, a move thought likely to spark a new arms
race with Pakistan. Washington learned about the blasts from an Indian press
release. White House officials were livid; critics branded it the worst
intelligence failure since the inflated estimates of Soviet power. The CIA's
new director, Tenet, put on his DCI cap and promised change. "I'm going to
take direct charge of how our community collects information, how collection
and analysis are lashed together," he told reporters, "to ensure that the
kind of event that occurred here will not occur again."

Three months later, al Qaeda's terrorists struck in East Africa, destroying
two embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. On December 4, Tenet sent out his now
famous memo: "We are at war," he declared. "I want no resources or people
spared in this effort, either inside CIA or the community." From her office
on the sixth floor, Dempsey dutifully had the memo faxed to the heads of the
other major intelligence agencies. The response: nothing. The new ODCI staff
was getting its first taste of their limited powers.

Charlie Allen sprung to action. He began sending out "tasking" orders,
demanding increased satellite coverage of Afghanistan and more electronic
intercepts of al Qaeda's communications. "Charlie tasked the hell out of the
collection agencies," says an ODCI staffer, "but Tenet's memo was completely
ignored by the leadership." Why? The National Security Agency director at
the time, Lt. Gen. Kenneth Minihan, told the 9/11 commission he believed the
memo applied only to the CIA. Not so, says the staffer. "They knew they
didn't have to respond to the DCI and they didn't . . . . they had lots of
taskings so they can pick and choose what they do."

Pushing the Predator. Allen kept at it. "Everyone said this is a job that
can't be done," he told U.S. News . "I began to task and to push and to
shove." Eventually, things started to happen. "I had to lean on people," he
says, sounding more like a Mafia boss than a bureaucrat. Allen convened
daily meetings on al Qaeda with key players from across the
community--specialists in satellite imagery, electronic intercepts, and
covert action. He finally got a satellite moved--no easy task--and had U.S.
intelligence charting al Qaeda's camps as never before. Working with the
National Security Council's Richard Clarke, Allen pushed a new drone, the
Predator, into service in Afghanistan--despite the CIA's reluctance. "It
was," he said, "a bloody struggle."

The rest of the new ODCI team was finding it no easier. The problems were so
many and so deep it was hard even to know where to begin. The budgetary and
personnel systems were archaic and labyrinthine. Individual spy agencies
resembled not so much modern corporations as feudal fiefdoms. Communitywide,
there was only the most tenuous central authority, widespread duplication of
effort, and secrecy bordering on paranoia.

The ODCI's first job, the team decided, was crafting a common vision, a
strategic plan that set goals for the entire intelligence community. The
fact that one did not exist, insiders say, was itself an indictment of the
system. Within a year, the ODCI staff had produced a classified road map.
Titled simply "Strategic Intent for the Intelligence Community," the plan
was anything but simple. At the heart of the strategy was integrating a
dozen disparate agencies into a true community by breaking down the walls
that impeded the flow of intelligence.

The walls, however, were everywhere. Not just between agencies but within
them, too. At the CIA, the spies of the Operations Directorate distrusted
the analysts whose job was to make sense of patterns and look for clues. The
FBI's criminal investigators and spy catchers refused to talk to each other.
The National Security Agency, the nation's global eavesdropping shop, had so
many internal E-mail systems that the director had trouble communicating
with his own staff. In the arcane argot of the intelligence world, such
divisions are called stovepipes, vertical tubes that send information upward
for superiors to mull but seldom across divisions, where it could be checked
and added to other data. Reformers spoke of "gorillas in the
stovepipes" --program managers who protected their turf from outsiders at
all costs. "If you collected it," Simon explained, "you own it."

The more the team looked, the more dismayed they became. Basic questions
seemed to have no answers. No one had any idea how many analysts or
linguists worked in the intelligence community, what expertise they had, or
where they could be reached. Gannon launched a survey, found more than
10,000 analysts spread across a dozen agencies, and began building a
database. Nor had anyone done a worldwide survey of U.S. collection efforts.
Allen took that on and found a completely disjointed, uncoordinated effort.
Among the holes in the collection net: central Iraq. While U.S. intelligence
listened in and surveilled Iraq's northern and southern no-fly zones,
incredibly, no one in the entire U.S. intelligence community was looking at
Baghdad and Saddam's strongholds. When the United Nations weapons inspectors
left Iraq, America's intelligence services were virtually blind. On the
sixth floor at Langley, Charlie Allen was shocked at how dependent America's
spy agencies had become on the U.N. inspectors. "We had," he recalls,
"almost nothing."

The lack of basic data on collection meant, among other things, that there
was no reliable way to determine which programs were more effective--and
more cost efficient--among the different agencies. The intelligence
community, Simon believed, wa

• Golden triangle of death New Zealand Passports Snuff Movies — Provocative1, Mon Jul 26 01:24