Rowan Scarborough, The Examiner
2007-07-18 17:25:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

WASHINGTON -

In a speech in Dallas in the spring of 2007, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a former CIA director, provided a glimpse into the Clinton years. "By the mid-1990s, recruitment of new case officers at CIA had hit a historic low, and the agency's funding was a prime target for budget-cutters," he said. "Indeed, within three years of my retirement in 1993, CIA's clandestine service had been cut by 30 percent - just when Osama bin Laden was gearing up his war on the United States."

But a more devastating criticism came that spring from Clinton's own CIA director. In his memoir, George Tenet wrote, "The fact is that by the mid-to-late 1990s American intelligence was in Chapter 11, and neither Congress nor the executive branch did much about it."

All this history came crashing down on the CIA's Baghdad station during the Iraq war.

Few Baghdad officers spoke Arabic. Despite al Qaeda's rise in the 1990s as a terror group with global reach, the CIA had not emphasized Arabic language skills.

And contrary to its image, the CIA was not much attracted to danger. As violence in Iraq mounted, CIA officers rarely left their protected station in the heavily secured Green Zone of Baghdad. When they did leave, they were accompanied by former special operations personnel as bodyguards. It was no surprise that the CIA failed to penetrate the insurgent organizations in Iraq.

Officers were heard complaining about their assignment to Iraq and about "Bush's war." They wanted out, despite the 25 percent increase in pay they received when serving in Baghdad. Few stayed more than six months. The station's institutional memory remained low. Army general George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, complained that CIA analytical reports were superficial, and that topics raised in the reports were not pursued.

There were some successes, however. The CIA was able to open six bases scattered around Iraq. Some pushed the military to kill Muqtada al-Sadr before the radical sheikh became too powerful. The military command refused, and al-Sadr went on to lead a deadly anti-U.S.revolt in 2006.

By 2005, the lousy intelligence collection in Iraq was the talk of the military. At a conference that fall in Tampa, home to U.S. Special Operations Command, officers serving in Iraq said the CIA often could not pinpoint the enemy. It gave special-ops teams a neighborhood when they needed an exact address.

That year, Army colonel Derek Harvey decided to explain the problem in a paper for a service publication. Harvey is considered one of the military's leading experts on Iraq and its complex insurgency. He was an Iraq specialist at the Defense Intelligence Agency, then became an advisor to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

He would ultimately accompany General David Petraeus to Iraq to brief him on the enemy. Anything Harvey wrote in 2005, in the Iraq war's third year, would surely get Washington's attention, especially that of members of Congress who were souring on the war and could not understand why the intelligence community could not locate top targets.

But Petraeus, then commander of the U.S. Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, read Harvey's article and told him not to publish it. Too damning, the general said.

"Even after more than three years of conflict, we have yet to organize our intelligence assets efficiently and use our intelligence capability to best advantage," Harvey wrote. "The non-military national intelligence - FBI, Treasury, DIA, and CIA all-source efforts - are not doing enough to identify the networks that are moving foreign fighters/suicide bombers to Iraq, nor have they adequately identified the specific components of the insurgent networks within and external to Iraq, including key nodes, leadership, facilitators, bomb-makers, and financial support systems."

Among Harvey's other criticisms:

¯ "Unfortunately, Iraq is not the number-one priority for DIA and CIA, and has not been given priority resources."

¯ "Iraq for our adversaries is the central theater of confrontation with the West and its point of maximum effort, as is evidenced by the wide variety of foreign fighter recruits showing up among the insurgent forces. ... To effectively counter this effort requires an intelligence structure that is at least as robust, flexible, rapid,and aggressive as the enemy. ... Currently, the architecture has not been developed and adequate resources have not been provided."

¯ "A primary indicator of coalition deficiencies in intelligence assets and capabilities is starkly evident in the fact that tons of Iraqi Ba'ath Party documents, including intelligence service and terrorist liaison data from the previous regime, remain untranslated and unexploited. It is highly likely that these documents contain a veritable set of Rosetta Stones for understanding the key relationships of the current largely Sunni-driven insurgency."

¯ "We do not currently have a national-level 'center of excellence' that provides specific operational and strategic analytical focus on the insurgency leadership, organization, financing, and tactics (including IEDs), as well as comprehensive mapping of networked relations to global terrorist organizations."

A year after Harvey wrote his unpublished paper, his complaints were reinforced by the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel appointed to give President Bush options on the deteriorating war in Iraq. In December 2006, the group, led by former secretary of state James Baker and former congressman Lee Hamilton, issued a blistering criticism of CIA and DIA work in Iraq. In essence, it sided not only with Harvey, but also with Porter Goss's House Intelligence Committee assessment of a troubled clandestine service.

"Our government still does not understand very well either the insurgency in Iraq or the role of the militias," the commission found. Intelligence agencies "are not doing enough to map the insurgency, dissect it, and understand it on a national and provincial level. The analytic community's knowledge of the organization, leadership, financing and operations of militias, as well as their relationship to government security forces, also falls far short of what policymakers need to know."

I asked Congressman Pete Hoekstra about intelligence shortfalls in Iraq. He said, "When I come back from Iraq, or even a briefing here, you learn how tough intelligence is. I don't walk out of there believing that I've got a crystal-clear picture of what the insurgency is, what the scope of it is, what the magnitude is, what the capabilities are. How much is international? How much is external? How much is al Qaeda? How much is Iranian? How much is Syrian? I walk out with lots of unanswered questions."

Yet Hoekstra is sympathetic, knowing how difficult it is to do anything in Iraq, much less walk out of the Green Zone and develop sources who can penetrate al Qaeda. He said the intelligence community was being held to an impossible standard of providing information "as clear as two plus two is four."

"Sometimes I sense that policymakers believe if they get perfect information from intelligence, it gives them the answer as to what to do," Hoekstra said. "That is not going to happen."

ABOUT "SABOTAGE": The articles in this series are drawn from “Sabotage,” a book appearing this week from Regnery Publishing. Author Rowan Scarborough, The Examiner’s national security correspondent, tells the story of a CIA bureaucracy that badly damaged the Bush administration with leaks, false allegations and sheer incompetency. He interviewed scores of intelligence and defense sources to paint a picture of an agency that fell into disarray under former President Bill Clinton and that is still rebuilding in the sixth year of the War on Terror. Scarborough is author of a previous book, “Rumsfeld’s War,” also published by Regnery.

Read other "Sabotage" excerpts | Order the book