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July 29, 2004
Speaking of the CIA
Jane's Defense Weekly has a disturbing article about our efforts in Iraq.
Iraq's new internal intelligence service, the General Security Directorate (GSD), established by the transitional government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi faces an uphill struggle in its mission to crush the plethora of insurgent groups that have dragged the country to the brink of anarchy.
So far no surprise. What about the CIA?
However, the USA is having its own serious problems in functioning effectively in Iraq even though it currently has hundreds of operatives deployed.
Why the "serious problems?" Lets read one more paragraph before you get my take on the matter:
Yet the CIA's vast deployment in Baghdad, Basra, Mosul and other cities has hardly been able to dent the insurgency. In December 2003, the CIA station chief in Baghdad was removed because his ability to lead the complex intelligence operation was in doubt and a more experienced officer was sent in. Since last year's invasion, the CIA's Baghdad station has become the largest in the agency's history, bigger even than the station in Saigon during the Vietnam War. The overall mission in Iraq - originally planned for 85 personnel - presently numbers 500, including 300 full-time 'case officers' running intelligence-gathering operations. With the war on terrorism now covering five continents, US intelligence capabilities are stretched extremely thin, or "beyond the limits" as one informed intelligence source told JID.
The relevant question is; how did we get into this situation? Several things conspired to get us to where we are today.
First was the ravages of the Church Commission. While the CIA was in need of reform, Frank Church went too far in demolishing the agencies ability to collect intelligence through traditional means, i.e. human intelligence. The CIA had little choice but to rethink how it would gather information. The cloak and dagger stuf was out.
Second was the increasing emphasis on technical means of gathering intelligence over "humint" or human intelligence. This came about partially as a response to the Church Commission, but also because of the requirements of fighting the Cold War. It didn't take long for the CIA to realize that parachuting agents into the Soviet Union(which they actually tried) was a loosing proposition. They tried recruiting agents through traditional means, but although there were some occasional successes, this too, was very difficult to pull off in a totalitarian society. As the United States is the worlds leader in technological development, it was decided to leverage this to our advantage.
Also, with regards to the Cold War, much of the intelligence requirements were simply "counting things". We needed to find out how many missiles and submarines they had, for example. We could find out much of their capabilities through technical means as well. And we got quite creative at intercepting communications, even going so far as to send divers from submarines to tap into underwater communications cables.
The result was that although we are very good at technical means of gathering intelligence our human intelligence suffers. As we all know, the agency does not have anywhere near enough Arabic-language speakers, let alone people who are ethnic Arab an so could "blend in".
The 9/11 Commission does address this issue somewhat. Our lack of Arabic speakers is criticizd several places in the report. However, the report seems mostly concerned with domenstic agencies such as the FBI Here's one;
On October 12, 2000, a suicide boat bombing of the USS Cole in Aden harbor killed 17 American sailors and injured 40, in addition to causing over $100 million of damage. We knew it, it was al Qaeda's work, but the Clinton administration did not bother to engage even in a symbolic use of force, not even that one salvo of missiles this time. Instead, it launched once again a massive invasion of aggressive FBI agents, incidentally, none of whom could speak Arabic.Joe Lieberman's statement to the Commission contains the same message:
We warned of a critical shortage of language skills, including Arabic and Farsi, and directed the FBI to review its language recruiting efforts.To it's credit, the CIA is working hard to recruit Arabic speakers.
Let's hope we can get this process going in time to successfully influence what's happening in Iraq.
Particularly bad for intelligence agencies after 9/11 were reports that only a handful of agents throughout CIA spoke fluent Arabic. Though never confirmed officially, sources familiar with the situation in 2001 say that outside the eavesdropping analysts at the National Security Agency, less than a dozen CIA field agents could speak the language spoken by the groups that were the consensus favorites to mount attacks on America.
Posted by Tom at July 29, 2004 10:32 AM
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