Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story (43 page)

I continue to believe that the Agency’s founding fathers got it right in the aftermath of World War II: the nation needed a strong, central intelligence agency that would bring together core missions so each could influence and enhance the others. Over the intervening decades, however, this vision slowly gave way again to a more dispersed intelligence community. New agencies were added, many of them inside the Department of Defense. This expanded the community and diluted the centrality of the CIA. Many of these agencies specialized in one particular aspect of intelligence collection, such as signals intelligence or satellites or human intelligence for military customers, and this made it somewhat harder to keep all the core missions of intelligence under the guidance of a single authority. The majority of the intelligence budget and personnel was allocated not to the CIA but to the Department of Defense. It is worth pondering that more than half the seventeen agencies that make up the intelligence community are part of the Pentagon.

Columbia professor Richard Betts describes the evolution of the intelligence community as a natural pendulum swing between centralization and decentralization. “You need both, centralization to ensure coordination and pluralism to ensure second-guessing. The tension is between the need to share and the need to know for information security purposes.”
5
Pluralism is certainly worthwhile, but not when the organization designed to be at the center is moving farther toward the margins. Vice Admiral Tom Wilson, who was the director of DIA from 1999 to 2002, makes a good point on varying perspectives in the intelligence community, which is that different intelligence agencies have different customers, so they may end up looking at different elements of the same “targets” from very different perspectives, and with their customers’ specific requirements in mind. “What naval intelligence may do with regard to the Chinese navy in terms of getting a battle group prepared for a Western Pacific deployment or contingency is very different from what CIA is going to do on what the Chinese economy will allow them to spend in terms of establishing their navy, which is also different from what DIA would do on where their navy organizations are going with long-term development,” he said.
6
I agree, but I would note that over the years the Defense Department has moved further into nonmilitary intelligence collection, based in part on its standing requirement for “a second set of eyes” or for “preparation of the battlefield.” In some cases, the Pentagon’s expanding role is justified by its mounting and increasingly complex set of requirements, including information for weapons designers and tactical doctrine developers, combatant commanders’ geopolitical needs, and the Joint Chiefs’ need to understand foreign military leaders. Nevertheless, even these sometimes appear to drift into what in the past was viewed as the domain of civilian collectors.

*   *   *

The execution of covert action has and should remain firmly in the domain of the CIA, with the military playing a supporting though often key role—and vice versa in a war zone. A variety of factors—including legal authorities, intelligence community mandates, and personal relationships—influence who controls such covert actions.

The interplay between the CIA and the Defense Department’s intelligence agencies is often described in terms of the authorities under which each agency typically operates. Title 50 of the U.S. Code governs the execution of war and national defense and defines and describes how the government conducts covert action. Covert action, according to Title 50, is “an activity or activities of the United States Government to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly in a country while deliberately obscuring the hand of the US government.”
7
To execute covert action, the president must issue a “finding” authorizing the activity. Once this is accomplished, the implementing agency—to date, this has always been the CIA—and the executive branch must follow a strict set of guidelines for keeping the relevant members of Congress informed. There are specific reasons for these stipulations, the most important being that the president is on record as having explicitly authorized the operation. Others include maintaining clear oversight of covert action by the intelligence committees of the House and Senate.

The Pentagon has undertaken more covert-style activities through what is known within Washington as “clandestine military activities.” These activities, generally authorized by Title 10 of the U.S. Code, look like covert action and are often intended to achieve similar results, but are conducted under different budgetary and oversight requirements. Under Title 10, the Defense Department must report all activities to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. With a larger number of CIA operations being conducted by Special Operations Forces and other military elements that have been seconded to the Agency, the acts themselves are rarely dramatically different. But issues of authority and oversight leave room for confusion and a tendency to zealously guard and not share information, neither of which is conducive to good policy.

The key to cutting through potential confusion and bureaucratic competition due to overlapping authorities is concerted and clear-eyed leadership. Former CIA director Mike Hayden said of the debate over Title 50 versus Title 10 authority: “It is
only
about congressional oversight; it’s not about what happens on the ground. I was the director of central intelligence for thirty-one months and I never argued with anyone about this.” Hayden, the only man to head both the CIA (from 2006 to 2009) and the National Security Agency (from 1999 to 2005), added, “It was always, ‘How do you want to work this?’ I never felt like I was being wronged.”
8
Even so, there is little doubt among those responsible for running operations on the ground that the roles and responsibilities of different agencies need to be streamlined and clearly defined.

Outside active war zones, where deniability is paramount and the means and ends are more related to politics and economics than military objectives, the CIA is better positioned to oversee operations. Even outside war zones, the Defense Department has a serious and important role to play, but we need to better integrate these operations to prevent mishaps and ensure that all the instruments of U.S. power are working toward the same ends. The CIA-directed raid by U.S. Special Operations Forces that killed Osama bin Laden on May 1, 2011, is an excellent example of how military capabilities—and Special Operations Forces in particular—can be used to conduct surgical operations with the potential for deniability outside active war zones.

On the ground overseas, the lead on intelligence activities in a foreign country should be the CIA chief of station, who typically represents both the Agency and the director of national intelligence. The chief of station is essential to coordinating the intelligence activities of all agencies, including the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and others within the Defense Department. Over the years, there have been tensions at the embassy level regarding intelligence operations. Ambassador Bill Luers, a smart and sophisticated career diplomat with whom I served in Latin America, had strong opinions about what the role of intelligence should and should not be. He had not hesitated to protest what he saw as Agency overreaching or what he considered to be the role of U.S. diplomats. Most ambassadors measure up to this standard. Ambassador Frank Wisner, a senior retired diplomat and former ambassador to Egypt and India, describes the confusion often present in U.S. embassies and the ways in which we might be able to improve intelligence operations and oversight: “It is absolutely essential that there be a senior intelligence officer in countries of importance and that they have responsibility over and an ability to deconflict all intelligence activities. If the chief of station believes an operation will endanger the U.S., he or she needs to go to the ambassador or to policy channels and appeal. It is important the chief of station is fully empowered.”
9
I have to agree that while the Defense Department brings very important collection and operational capabilities to the table, someone needs to oversee all intelligence operations in a given country, and the CIA chief of station is best positioned to execute those duties.

*   *   *

Covert action is a large umbrella, covering everything from the kind of political action I was involved with in Chile to the proxy war I helped stage and manage in Afghanistan. The ability to make things happen in secret is something that presidents will always need, and when you are talking about achieving objectives outside war zones, covert action is almost always a highly effective tool. As we draw down in Iraq and Afghanistan, we will need to go back to covert action, with surrogates on our payroll—warlords in Afghanistan and tribal leaders in Iraq—and we may be better off. When you are operating under the radar, you are freer to do things such as hire tribesmen—even those who do not get along with each other—as long as their enemies are our enemies. Many past successes in Iraq and Afghanistan have had as much to do with our buying support from these local leaders as with a large military presence. There is no military unit in Iraq, Afghanistan, or frankly the world that can ever defeat U.S. forces going head to head. But we were not going to win our most recent two wars on a conventional military battlefield.

Consistent manpower, secrecy, and a workforce groomed over time to excel at clandestine operations are essential to running effective covert operations. Retired admiral Bill Studeman, who served as deputy director of the CIA in the mid-1990s and as director of the NSA from 1988 to 1992, said that covert action depends upon a covert workforce of highly trained individuals “who are recruited and trained for their ability to recruit a foreigner to become a traitor and spy for our country against theirs. The Agency has always had the ability to attract top talent, and it’s one of the best workforces in the federal government.”
10
The CIA has built an extraordinarily stable system with the necessary infrastructure and organizational experience to efficiently and discreetly execute its duties. U.S. Special Operations Forces and other parts of the military have adopted similar skills, in many cases attending CIA training courses and spending many years in the intelligence branches (as opposed to rotating in and out, as is typical in the military system). Nevertheless, the military system overall maintains a larger tail, which makes it more cumbersome to operate in secret over protracted periods of time. Of course, covert action is not historically what the military was built to do; it was built to fight overt wars against declared enemies.

Certainly the CIA has paramilitary needs, and Special Operations Forces and other military assets should be called in or detailed to the Agency when necessary. The size of our Special Operations Forces, as I mentioned previously, should and will likely shrink considerably in the coming years as we pull back from engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan and move back toward greater clandestine activities. Special Operations Forces actually began as an offshoot of the OSS and CIA’s Special Operations Division in the post–World War II environment. The “seconding” of military personnel and assets has almost always worked well. In fact, I would argue that when it comes to paramilitary activities outside war zones, this is the primary way the military should be operating on the ground. In places such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, we are moving toward a model in which discreet counterterrorism operations will be paired with efforts to co-opt and arm local tribes and other indigenous forces. Thus, to be effective, we will need to continue to integrate the military’s capabilities with the CIA’s tradecraft and deniability under CIA authorities. The military will continue to have a range of duties assigned to it under its own mandate, including traditional military-to-military advisory activities such as training and equipping foreign security forces. But when it comes to activities we do not want the world to know about, we should do it under CIA authorities and CIA command and control. That, along with intelligence collection and analysis, is what the CIA was built for in the first place. We need to keep those lines clear and distinct.

The next few years in Afghanistan will be an important test case, because soon it will no longer be an active war zone but rather a country in simmering conflict with a vastly reduced U.S. and foreign presence. Because we will no longer be fighting an active ground war there, we should place the remaining limited Special Operations Forces military personnel under the CIA umbrella. This would allow the forces remaining in-country to operate under the radar and work with their partners to keep the situation under control, as well as to report through one single chain of command. I suspect something similar is already under way in Iraq, given the decision to withdraw all U.S. troops and the clear requirements both to protect U.S. political and economic interests and to limit the influence of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

If this model is successfully implemented, there is no reason the CIA and the Defense Department should be at odds with one another in the field. Indeed, in this era of increasing interdependence, there is every reason to think that productive cooperation is ongoing and will increase, albeit more efficiently with clearly delineated roles both within and outside the war zones.

*   *   *

I remain a strong supporter of the use of drones, given their lethality, accuracy, and stealth, which has leveled the playing field against terrorism. In fact, in many ways we have trumped what was long described as the terrorists’ “asymmetrical advantage” through drone technology, which from their perspective is a terrifying and unpredictable capability. They now live in constant fear of being hit by surprise in the false safety of their environs.

For this reason, a great deal of news is dedicated to the use of drones as weapons of attack. But drones can do other things as well, such as conduct aerial location and surveillance on a target and provide guidance to ground troops conducting a mission. Some of these are traditional intelligence missions, while others are clearly in the realm of the war fighter. At the same time, field personnel can find themselves in confusing situations, and redundancies can easily become silos if coordination is poor. If a target is identified and located, the process for approving a strike can be unnecessarily time-consuming and complex without clear lines of authority.