A Pretext for War (44 page)
In the months leading up to America’s rush to war, many were arguing that the inspectors should be given more time, and questions were being raised as to whether the United States was deliberately holding back on information. But both Tenet and Condoleezza Rice claimed that the UN inspectors had been briefed on all of the sites identified as “high value and moderate value” in the weapons hunt. The White House also said constantly that all intelligence on weapons sites was being shared with the inspectors.
Finally, on March 6, 2003, Rice sent a letter to Senator Carl Levin of the Senate Intelligence Committee insisting that “United Nations inspectors have been briefed on every high or medium priority weapons of mass destruction, missile and U.A.V. [unmanned aerial vehicle]-related site the U.S. intelligence community has identified.” Tenet testified before Congress on February 12, 2003, saying virtually the same thing.
But, in fact, the CIA had been deliberately withholding from the inspectors 20 percent of the known locations. Of the 105 sites the intelligence community had identified as most likely housing banned weapons, 21 of them were deliberately kept secret from the UN. Given the new information, Senator Levin now believes that Tenet misled Congress and has called his actions “totally unacceptable.”
The CIA claimed that it believed that the inspectors already knew of the sites not provided, but Levin found that excuse lame at best. He said it was his belief that the Bush administration withheld the critical information because it wanted to convince the American people that the United Nations–led hunt for weapons in Iraq had run its full course before the United States began its invasion. In fact, there were still many sites the inspectors were planning to search.
In addition to a lack of intelligence on Iraq, another problem facing the DO in the run-up to the war in Iraq were numerous distractions caused by a series of serious internal scandals and the struggle to keep a lid on them. They ranged from the disappearance of an agent as a result of careless tradecraft by one of the agency’s prize chiefs of station to high-level suspicions of espionage.
In a very serious breach, the CIA chief in one of the agency’s largest and most-sensitive stations took a walk-in defector to his home and then drove him back into the city in broad daylight and dropped him off in a public area. As the CIA chief should have expected, he was under surveillance most of the time, and soon after he dropped off the defector, the man was arrested and later disappeared. Leaving no doubt as to what happened, liaison officers with the foreign intelligence service called the station chief in and warned him about conducting espionage in their country.
As if the scandal were not bad enough, CIA Headquarters had been warned repeatedly about the station chief, who had previously served as chief of another station. According to officials familiar with the case, case officers in the other station virtually mutinied against him because of his drinking problem. “His drinking was during the day, it was in the morning,” said one knowledgeable official. “He would come in just reeking of beer.”
The problem also affected his relationship with the local intelligence service. “They were taking us for a ride every which way but loose,” said one official, who also said the station chief was “abusive and would scream at people.” Once the station chief left and was headed for a promotion, a number of the CIA officials at the station sent a protest to headquarters. To prevent the matter from being “swept under the rug,” the officers sent their complaint not to the DO but to the Office of Medical Services.
Eventually, the officers were assured that the matter would be taken care of and the station chief would be disciplined. Instead, he was named as chief of one of the agency’s premier stations. But just eight months into his tour, he committed the grievous error in tradecraft that resulted in the disappearance of a potential key defector. Following the incident, the chief of station was recalled and demoted, and he left the agency.
Another major distraction in the DO were suspicions about one of its deep-background “non-traditional platform” (NTP) employees. The person was also an SIS-3, a member of the agency’s Senior Intelligence Service, which is made up of the highest-ranking agency employees, equivalent to military generals or navy admirals. For several years, the person had been allowed to write his own performance evaluations. In them he would list the projects he had worked on and the organizations within the agency he had assisted. But when the agency suddenly audited his evaluation, they found it was mostly fraudulent.
A senior-level evaluator, said one knowledgeable NTP official, “went around to each of the divisions and said, ‘Well, he’s worked on this case for you and this case for you—can you give me some remarks on his performance?’ And without exception all of them came back and said, ‘He hasn’t worked with us in years.’
“They started pulling back more and more layers of this,” said the official, “and they brought him home and said, ‘Who have you been working for? What have you been doing?’ And he’s traveling overseas all the time. ‘Where are you going?’ It’s not only a management problem, it’s also a CI [Counter-Intelligence] problem. ‘You’re going overseas all the time—what are you doing when you go if you’re not working for anybody? Where are you getting the money?’ And this guy is one of the two or three most senior guys. . . . Knowing him as I did, I could not discern who he worked for or what function he had and I was ten paces away when he was in country. And he was a role model for all of us, so to speak.”
During an early-2004 interview the official said the case would likely be swept under the carpet. “This fellow would say, ‘I’m off to Switzerland to support such and such a case,’” said the official. “If you go to Switzerland every quarter and you say it’s for business and your money is from the government and you’re not actually doing anything, there are lots of implications there. And for this to be one of the most senior guys, it’s a terrible thing. It’s unfolding even as we speak. He’s still there. And he’s on the carpet now, and they’re going to give him a chance to reform.”
Flush with millions of dollars in post-9/11 budget increases, the DO launched a mad hiring rush as the administration began gearing up for war with Iraq. But quantity did not translate into quality, and instead of producing usable intelligence, the scramble often produced only chaos and confusion. Lack of adequate linguists to handle the surge of increased raw intelligence was a critical problem.
In response, the agency began paying out millions of dollars to a score of established and start-up private companies. Nicknamed “beltway bandits” because many had offices around the Route 495 beltway circling Washington, these contractors would recruit current and former CIA employees at up to double their salaries.
Once on board, they were frequently assigned back to their same offices at CIA doing the same work, but now the taxpayers were paying them up to twice as much. Others were assigned even less sophisticated work than they were originally performing. Because of the slapdash nature of the rush to expand, the quality of intelligence produced by some of these contractors has become questionable.
“The money is incredible—I doubled my salary to go out and come back in and continue doing what I was doing,” said one former DO official. “They’re all former DO officers, and basically what these companies are doing, they have this net and all these people trickling out of the agency, they’re just catching them. It’s like fruit on the ground, because the agency doesn’t have the people that they need to do these jobs. But the problem is these jobs are mindless—because once again there’s no structure applied to the task at hand. So we’re all just sitting there looking at each other, and we’re making a ridiculous amount of money.”
Many of the people were hired to analyze the hundreds of hard drives seized overseas in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other locations as part of the war on terrorism. But because much of the data is in Arabic or other languages which few analysts or agents read or speak, often the information simply collects dust.
“The first contract I was on I left, because I said this is fraud,” said a DO officer turned contractor. “There was over a million dollars sitting in that [CIA] office—just the salary we collected, not to mention the extra money that goes to these companies. We sat there all day and same-timed each other, which is like instant messaging. We would just same-time each other all day. And after about three months of that, I went to my company and I said you need to get me off this contract or I’m going to another company or I’m leaving altogether.
“Basically what we were doing,” said the person, “is we were looking for any ops leads in these hard drives—through e-mail—things that were found residually on hard drives. Anything you do in the computer is somewhere engraved in a hard drive, and so we could look for tools to mine. . . . Sometimes we got hard drives that were probably a couple of weeks old, because these are hard drives from where we went out and either rendered people or we raided places and we would just scoop up—not we, but the agents who were out there—the military would just scoop up hard drives in a big old Santa Claus bag and send them back.”
The problem came when the information was not in English, which was most of the time. According to the contractor:
A lot of it was in Arabic, and none of us spoke Arabic—just a little problem. It would just sit there. It would just sit there. But none of us really knew what we were doing, and we had management who didn’t know what they were doing either.
The problem is, and I just can’t stress enough what the agency does to tackle their problems—they just throw people and money at the issue. It doesn’t matter what the outcome is, it doesn’t matter what the product of that is. It’s just comforting to them to know that in this office next to me, he’s got twenty people sitting there, doesn’t matter what they’re doing, but we’ve got them sitting there and that makes me feel like I’m getting something done, you know that we’re tackling this problem.
After September 11 happened, I think working from a position of chaos is understandable, because we were all shell-shocked. Everybody was like sleeping at the agency, we’ll read traffic, we’ll put out cables, whatever you want, we’ll man telephones. There was a lot of momentum for out-of-box kind of thinking and freethinking and everything else. But it was a very chaotic time, and what we were able to accomplish was probably very good given what we were working under.
Two years after September 11, it’s not acceptable to continue to be working from that same position of chaos, because we haven’t stepped back—we let the momentum carry us along, but we fell back on the old ways of doing things, which is just shove people on the problem.
According to the former DO official turned contractor, the surge in staffing the agency’s Counterterrorism Center [CTC] has left many of the agency’s area divisions around the world depleted. Because of the “need to surge hundreds and hundreds at CTC,” said the contractor, “there’s nobody in these area divisions anymore, everybody’s working the CT target. Africa Division is smaller now than the number of people we have in Baghdad. The entire division. And the people in Baghdad are just sitting.”
Afghanistan has also proved difficult for the agency, said a number of current and former agency DO officials. According to one:
We were talking to teams in the field who were in Afghanistan every night. I was working the night shift all the time, and I would talk to the guys because that’s when they were awake and doing things. [They were] using a secure phone via Inmarsat, and then we have a STU [Secure Telephone Unit] on the other end—we had several teams.
I would ask, What’s going on? How are you all doing? They weren’t doing anything. They weren’t doing anything. And they were so frustrated. People were leaving. . . . There was one team that just left, they just up and left, because they were going to be extended and they had already stayed over their stay or whatever, and they had sent messages saying we’re not doing anything here, and we’ve got family, and we have jobs, and we hear now that you’re thinking of extending us—and this was probably a day before the helicopter was supposed to come and take them away. They got on that helicopter and they left.
Their job was to collect intelligence. But this is what was happening—you’d go into this village and you’d have ten or fifteen people come up to you and go, “I know where bin Laden is.” So you give them a hundred bucks and you never see them again. [The informants were also given a handheld GPS—global positioning system—to pinpoint exact locations.]
The GPS was to be taken to wherever bin Laden was, and they would write down the latitude and longitude. And so a lot of cable traffic has come and gone based on all of this information, from all of these people who come in and say they know where bin Laden is. And of course, they don’t—they want the money. Or if someone does in all good faith, they only heard it through a cousin who heard it from their cousin who heard it from a cousin who heard it from a cousin. It’s so ineffective. I’m not saying that that’s not the right way to go about it, but what I am saying is it’s not working. It’s not been working now for two years. Let’s think of another way to do that.
Because the war in Iraq, which the Pentagon had promised would be over quickly—followed by happy, cheering crowds—instead quickly dissolved into a quagmire, the CIA was caught short. Instead of the eighty-five Clandestine Service officers it had originally planned to send, it was forced to rush to the battlefield four times that number.