CQ HOMELAND SECURITY
Nov. 21, 2008 – 10:00 p.m.
What Obama Needs Is a Real Spy to Take Charge at the CIA
By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor
In its 61 years as the nation’s premier intelligence outfit, the CIA has had 18 directors, only one of them a real spy.
And that was a half century ago, when Allen W. Dulles, who had managed a top Nazi spy in Switzerland in World War II, ran the CIA under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.
Barack Obama should give serious consideration to finding another spy to take over now, someone who really knows the business. There are some good candidates inside and out.
Someone needs to shake the place to its foundation, critics say, to dislodge the cloak-dragging bureaucrats who have resisted more daring — and dangerous — operations to take down al Qaeda.
But according to many bitter agency veterans, too many CIA espiocrats have resisted the imprecations of field operatives and members of congressional oversight committees to really take off the gloves — not for torture, but dangerous spying missions.
“These are people who lie, steal and cheat for a living,” said Charles Faddis, who spent more than 20 years in clandestine operations, of the dirty tricks branch. “They know how to manipulate an outsider.”
Manipulation is the heart of the matter. It’s what CIA case officers are supposed to do: seduce foreigners into treachery — lying, stealing, cheating on behalf of the United States.
And they use it against each other, including directors who get in the way.
“George Tenet was completely buffaloed,” Faddis said. “When they saw he wanted to be one of them — he’d come down with his jacket off, tie loose, smoking a cigar — they knew they had him.”
“He was a wannabe,” echoed John Sullivan, who spent three decades in clandestine operations before retiring in 1999. “They saw he wanted to be in the spook business and said ‘we got a guy we can fool.’”
To what end? To resist change, to resist daring, risky proposals for penetrating al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda blew up two U.S. embassies in Africa on Tenet’s watch, blasted a hole in the U.S.S. Cole in Aden, and might have destroyed the Capitol, on top of the World Trade Center and Pentagon, if not for some brave passengers on the hijacked plane that went down in Pennsylvania.
Counterterrorism is a serious business. The fate of the nation might well hang on getting better spies, more aggressively, into some messy places in the world. That means accepting the chance that a CIA officer might be uncovered and suffer “an excruciating death,” as Faddis put it, maybe on TV.
What Obama Needs Is a Real Spy to Take Charge at the CIA
The current occupant of the CIA director’s seventh floor headquarters office “knows how to run a large organization,” Faddis said, “but not spies.”
Michael V. Hayden ran the huge, eavesdropping National Security Agency before taking over from Tenet in 2006.
“He is good at budgets and long-term planning, but when it comes to putting someone in al Qaeda’s inner circle, he has no understanding of that,” says Faddis, who led a CIA team into northern Iraq in 2002, only to watch a local al Qaeda cell slip away while Pentagon bureaucrats dithered. (A top former aide to then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld disputes the charge.)
Hayden and his predecessors went along with fanciful, risky notions about torturing al Qaeda captives into meaningful confessions, Faddis and many other agency veterans say, but not longshot operations to get close to Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Some might have flopped and embarrassed the agency. Then again, others might have succeeded, decapitating the organization’s leadership.
Retooling the agency’s spy service “really takes someone who can get into the guts of the work being done,” Faddis said. “If you’re not somebody who can do that, you’re at a fatal disadvantage, you’re at the mercy of the D.O. (Directorate of Operations, subsumed by a new National Clandestine Service in 2005).”
“When they say what’s possible and not possible, you’re not really able to understand it,” he added. “It would be like me talking to a nuclear engineer.“
Porter J. Goss looked promising when President Bush sent him out to Langley to take over from Tenet. The Florida Republican had been a CIA case officer (the people who recruit and manage foreign spies) from 1960 to 1971, and had chaired the House Intelligence Committee for eight years.
“He made a lot of noise about risk aversion and other problems in the D.O., but nothing happened,” Faddis said.
Then again, Goss’s tenure was brief. After two years of butting heads with top career operations officials, he was gone.
The way things work at CIA today, Sullivan says, means “there ain’t no way we’re going to penetrate al Qaeda, period. Ain’t gonna happen.”
That’s too hard. CIA deputy director Stephen Kappes and Michael Sulick, chief of the National Clandestine Service, have reputations as dedicated spymasters.
But they alone can’t change the culture.
What Obama Needs Is a Real Spy to Take Charge at the CIA
What Sullivan means is that, outside of the unlikely possibility of bin Laden’s body guard or equivalent defecting to the CIA, there are no quick fixes for getting close to the al Qaeda leader.
Going after terrorists requires entirely different, and far more risky techniques than those of the Cold War, when the biggest vulnerability for a CIA case officer stationed in an American embassy was being unmasked by the KGB and PNG’d — declared persona non grata and sent home.
A logical alternative is recruiting young jihadis on the way up, which would put the CIA in the risky position of having a rising terrorist on its payroll, not to mention taking the heat if something goes wrong.
And it would take years to nurture someone into al Qaeda’s inner circles.
“In America we don’t think that way,” Sullivan said. “No one wants to get on the ground in the CIA and do the job. It’s too hard.”
It’s a complaint heard in many quarters, for a long time.
Who’s going to step up and turn things around?
It begins with the president-elect. Barack Obama is a student of history, as his deep reading of Lincoln shows. And he’s often talked about people taking responsibility for their actions.
It’s way past time for CIA to do the same.
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.
Comments
Jeff, The factor that argues against hands-on spycraft is something that permeates the entirefederal bureaucracy: remote monitoring technologies. I think you've got a better chance at seeing NASA returning to manned space flights in lieu of cheap observational platforms than you do of seeing the three letter agencies give up their technological ' gee whiz' toys.
Allen, Hard to argue with you. The same factor was in play when the CIA severely cut resources in the 1990s: The spies were sent home in favor of a build-up of high tech, highly expensive gadgetry. Worked well on 9/11, didn't it?
The current scenario is beginning to sound similar to something out of Douglas Adams' "A Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy." In it, there is a creature which is so dumb, that if one throws a towel over its head so it does not see you, it also believes that you do not see it!
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