Andrew Hagen

Apparently the US government and US defense establishment are rife with a culture of dislike of, distrust in, and non-cooperation with counterintelligence. The following is an excerpt of “The 10 Commandments of Counterintelligence,” by James M. Olson, dated 2002. (* PDF)

The Eighth Commandment: Do Not Be Shoved Aside

There are people in the intelligence business and other groups in the US Government who do not particularly like CI officers. CI officers have a mixed reputation. We see problems everywhere. We can be overzealous. We get in the way of operations. We cause headaches. We are the original “black hatters.”

Case officers want their operations to be bona fide. Senior operations managers do not want to believe that their operations are controlled or penetrated by the opposition. There is a natural human tendency on the part of both case officers and senior operations managers to resist outside CI scrutiny. They believe that they are practicing good CI themselves and do not welcome being second-guessed or told how to run their operations by so-called CI specialists who are not directly involved in the operations. I have seen far more examples or this in my CI career than I care to remember.

By the same token, defense and intelligence contractors and bureaucrats running sensitive US Government programs have too often tended to minimize CI threats and to resist professional CI intervention. CI officers, in their view, stir up problems and overreact to them. Their “successes” in preventing CI problems are invisible and impossible to measure, but their whistle blowing when problems are uncovered generate tremendous heat. It is not surprising that they are often viewed as a net nuisance.

When necessary, a CI service has to impose itself on the organizations and groups it is assigned to protect. A CI professional who is locked out or invited in only when it is convenient to the host cannot do his job.

My advice to my CI colleagues has always been this: “If you are blocked by some senior, obtuse, anti-CI officer, go around him or through him by going to higher management. And document all instances of denied access, lack of cooperation, or other obstruction to carrying out your CI mission. If not, when something goes wrong, as it likely will in that kind of situation, you in CI will take the blame.”

This is pretty much outrageous. Noncooperation with CI should be hazardous to careers.

In the wake of the Kristina Leung affair, we now know that China has been stealing Aegis and other secrets from the US Navy for about fifteen years. We have apparently just stopped that ring. (*)

It looks like China might now be able to track US submarines.

Unknown is how many other of these rings are out there.

Perhaps this is a hopeful sign that the post-9/11 counterintelligence efforts are taking root. Maybe the current path is working, and we don’t need an MI5-type agency. Is the NCIX up to the job? (†) Does it have enough authority to get the job done?

Secondly, we need to reevaluate our free trade with China policy. Why are we shipping our capital and knowhow overseas into China when China sees itself as our military rival?

Updated.

Since his appointment as Director of Central Intelligence, Porter Goss has fired numerous high-level officials, including George Tenet’s former underlings and many from the clandestine unit. As the New York Times reports, the latest is the deputy director for intelligence at the CIA, head of the analysis unit. (*) Of course we won’t know all the circumstances of these personnel moves. Are all of them advisable? We can’t know.

What is heartening is that at last the government seems to be addressing the long-time need for an overhaul of the intelligence community.

The London Telegraph covers the tip of the iceberg in the ongoing dispute over the US intelligence community and its alleged incompetence. The old guard in intelligence does not like neoconservative global strategy. (*)

Terrorism expert Yossef Bodansky has a grim outlook on the Global War on Terrorism. The free world is losing, he says, and we can expect an attack leading to massive casualties soon. (*) In an interview, Bodansky places the blame on incompetent intelligence work.

Despite the formulation of a correct policy by the Bush Administration, the war is in a dire state primarily because the U.S. intelligence community has repeatedly failed the White House by providing scant concrete data and wrong threat analysis.

It has been the wanting of intelligence that has made implementation of the President’s policy virtually impossible, and at times has even aggravated the problems facing the U.S.

The primary flaw of the U.S. intelligence community is the intellectual isolationism and arrogance of the purveyors of knowledge to the White House — that is, the intelligence system of research and analysis.

A revamp of that department is needed.

The United States has been terribly served by the inadequate and misleading work of the 9/11 Commission. Its report was just released. (*)

The Commission does some good in the report. The Commission avoids casting blame on individuals, and it gives an excellent summary of the 9/11 attacks, in the process debunking many or most of the conspiracy theories that have developed. I take no small joy in seeing the pet theories of the establishment Left punctured. Conspiracy theorists can now be dealt with quickly. Simply ask them whether they have read the report.

Those successes should not cause us to overlook the stark deficiencies of this unfortunate blunder in report form.

The mandate of the Commission was to

make a full and complete accounting of the circumstances surrounding the attacks, and the extent of the United States’ preparedness for, and immediate response to, the attacks.…

(† PL 107-36, Section 602(4)) This mandate was not fulfilled by the Commission. The Commission has given only a partial and incomplete accounting, and a highly misleading, slanted, and politically correct one at that. This report is, for the most part, unacceptable.

I have seen enough of the report to know that it does not recommend that the open doors immigration policy be curbed. (”Oh, no. Whatever we do in this war, we must keep the barn doors open.”) Open doors combined with border screening is no guarantee of safety, and it curtails liberty. Repulsively, the report effectively encourages the shredding of the Bill of Rights so that the open doors immigration policy can be maintained while we are in wartime.

The Commission’s report is almost exclusively focused on the bureaucratic activity of various governmental agencies and on the particulars of the attacks. These matters are important to know. The problem is that the report is almost exclusively about them.

A few pages are devoted to diagnosing the actual threat. These pages repeat the standard sayings we have about Islamist terrorism. By now we can all recite them like rote knowledge. These sections could have been written by anyone with a pulse and a modem. In no way are they insightful. In no way do they add to what we know. In no way do they challenge the complacency of people with regard to false and unexamined assumptions.

The problem we are having is one of vision, one of imagination. We are not imagining ourselves, as we should, in the shoes of Muslims, or of terrorists. We are not trying to see the world as they see it. (At least not often enough.) We are not able to grasp what this war is about, or how to decisively win it. The Commission does little to nothing to remedy these ills we suffer from.

Fred Kaplan of Slate manages to draw exactly the wrong conclusion from the report. He notes that the modus operandi of the attacks—planes flying into buildings—was conceptualized before 9/11.

So, the problem is not imagination, thankfully. If that were the main shortcoming, reform would be nearly impossible. How do you go about ordering bureaucrats to be “more imaginative” or to “think outside the box”? [sic]

(‡) That is execrable. No, Mr Kaplan, it is a failure of imagination. It is exactly that. No, bureaucrats can’t by themselves react to such a fundamental failure in a useful way, and that is what is so chilling about the whole thing.

How do we get the message to people when they shut their ears to it, and especially now, when the 9/11 Commission is further reinforcing their false ideas?

Here is what the 9/11 report should have said: The attacks signal much more than a need for bureaucratic reform or a cabinet-level chief of intelligence. The attacks signal the end of the existence of the nation-state, the state form that is the basis for the constitutional republic we know as the United States of America. To persevere into the future, the United States must adapt itself to a radically changing world. This will require a complete rethinking of how government is run in this country. It will require radical changes in our governmental structure. These changes might not require any changes to the Constitution itself, but these changes will certainly affect every layer of government and every citizen’s daily life. As we saw on 9/11, even our country’s bustling transportation infrastructure can now be turned into a deadly weapon against us. Protecting ourselves fully is impossible unless and until the Enemy is defeated and a new state form replaces the nation-state and preserves the peace. Speaking of the enemy, this report will now devote 400 out of its 500 pages to the Enemy’s point of view and outlook so that Americans can better understand what we’re up against….

Sadly, that is not what the Commission did. They devote a few non-probing paragraphs to the perspective and outlook of the Enemy and call it a day.

It’s like they treat Al Qaeda as a weather pattern, not a human organization composed of human actors with human goals.

The Commission treats the Enemy as it would Christian Americans with a handful of curious beliefs. The reality is that Islam is a different way of life, not just a handful of curious beliefs. Islam and Christianity do not even agree as to what religion is. Understanding the Enemy must begin with an understanding of Islam.

The inward-directed nature of the report undermines the recommendations for government reform. Since we don’t know whom we’re fighting, we don’t really know how to stop them. Some of the recommendations may have value, but none of them are developed with stopping Islamic terrorism specifically in mind, and none of them are designed specifically to win the war.

Then there is counterintelligence. This is a sensitive subject. It surely factors into 9/11, however, and the report all but ignores it.

Allow me a swift digression. Prior to the Ottoman Turks taking Constaninople in 1453—after which they renamed the great city Istanbul (”The City” in Turkish)—the Christians inside the walls had been too busy discussing an important and puzzling question to bother putting up an effective defense against the ongoing siege. They were concerned with whether there are both male and female angels, or if there is just one kind of angel. It was quite the theological debate. It engrossed the city, even in their moment of supreme peril. The city was violently sacked in a horrific way we cannot even relate to in modern American life, and the Eastern Roman Empire was no more, thanks largely to the obsessively inwards-directed thinking of the Constanipolitans. I know we can learn from their mistake, but will we?

We Americans are obsessed with ourselves and our lives and our problems and our government and our politics. We don’t pay enough attention to the rest of the world. I’m as guilty of this as anyone.

People of other countries are just as self-obsessed as we are. They have their own lives, and they dwell primarily on them. That, though, is the problem. We Americans must become less self-obsessed than are the people of other countries, or we Americans will have no advantage over the great numbers of this world who wish our country the worst, and our cherished prosperity and freedoms will be at the mercy of terrorists, dictators, and thugs, not all of them emanating from abroad. We need to rise above our imporverished current level of inquiry. Awareness is imperative of us.

We need to deeply focus on Islam, and be willing to consider both its good and not-so-good aspects. We need to take a long, hard look at Islam’s dark underbelly. The 9/11 Commission report states: “Islam is not the enemy. It is not synonymous with terror. Nor does Islam teach terror.” (p. 363) Absolutely no evidence for that is given. It’s just a bromide that we hear too often. I happen to agree with the Commission’s statement on this matter, but it is important to know that the Enemy (Al Qaeda, for example) considers itself to be the embodiment of Islam, and its actions to be required by Islam. That is a basic fact that we need to deal with. As long as we retain our self-obsession, though, we deftly avoid such uncomfortable facts.

We need to focus on terrorists and how they look at life. We need to reach a consensus in our country as to whom the Enemy is and what is the nature of this war. We need to have a consensus on our victory conditions in the Global War on Terrorism, and we need to ponder the terrorist victory conditions. The 9/11 Commission is no real help in these critical regards.

It gets worse.

The 9/11 Commission reports that the Global War on Terrorism cannot be won.

A president should tell the American people: No president can promise that a catastrophic attack like that of 9/11 will not happen again.

(p. 365) That is premised on a lie. A president could promise that an Islamic terrorist attack like that of 9/11 will not happen again. That promise would be fulfilled once we win the war against radical Islam (if we do).

The Commission treats the war like an endless march through an unpleasant swamp. Better to stay home and drink a donut shake.

Yet, while this war looks different than other wars, it is still a war, and it will end some day with one side the victor, the other side the loser. The winner will dictate terms to the loser. The 9/11 Commission’s refusal to face this basic reality is childish.

The Commission says: “We [America] should offer an example of moral leadership in the world.” (p. 376) That is totally ignorant of how Muslims, especially of the devout variety, consider any non-Muslim to automatically not have the quality of moral leadership. Hence, this recommendation if followed could only backfire on us.

I could go through the report line by line and trash a lot of it, but what purpose would that serve?

In summary, the 9/11 Commission report is dreadfully wrong and misleading because it is America-centric, not Enemy-centric as it should have been.

If I were grading the work of the Commission, I would be forced to give their disgraceful work an F.

I hold the members of the Commission personally responsible for the failure. Although most all of America, including Congress, is America-centric, that is no excuse. The Commission was supposed to be an opinion leader, not an opinion sheep.

If I were Congress, I would take the report’s recommendations and consider them highly suspect. Implement policies to fill emergency needs, but don’t start rearranging things too much. Then I would charter a new, second commission that will have as its explicit direction the creation of a politically incorrect, non-deferential report on the nature and the point of view of the Enemy. Once that report is complete we will have better insight on how to reform and rearrange the agencies.

Then, having chartered the second commission, I would tell the American people that we can win this war, but only if we again look beyond America and observe with deep interest the rest of the world, especially the Islamic world and the Islamic terrorists.

Know thine Enemy. Let us arm ourselves with the truth and a greater understanding of the rest of the world while we retain our optimistic vigor and determination.

ABC News reports that Saddam’s intelligence service has penetrated US operations in Iraq. The revelation was made after documents were found with Saddam that identified individuals working for him who were also working for the military and the Coalition Provisional Authority. (*)

Therefore, we know that Saddam Hussein had some level of oversight in running the insurgency.

Therefore, we know that Saddam Hussein was not a prisoner of some other group when he was found in the hole, as speculation had contemplated.

We must allow for the possibility that some US troops may have been killed thanks to the enemy’s successful penetration.

In the wake of the Robert Hanssen, Kristina Leung, and other counterintelligence disasters, this is another negative mark, albeit in military counterintelligence this time. This failure must be put in context. The successes of American counterintelligence all cannot be made public quickly. Therefore, we ordinary civilians cannot have the full picture. There must be some good to go with the bad. As an open society, furthermore, the United States will probably never have a flawless intelligence service.

Considering the number of failures, especially those in recent years, and their level of magnitude, however, it appears that reform is needed in how America conducts its intelligence operations. In most need of reform may be counterintelligence, both civilian and military. An MI5–type agency might be a good solution.

USA Today breaks down how the dictator of Iraq was located and nabbed. Intelligence gathering techniques were improved. Low-level functionaries and relatives who might have had any information, even trial information, about Saddam were pinpointed. Eventually a lead specified the farmhouse where Saddam was found. (*) Today is a day of triumph for the intelligence community.

Spengler on Asia Times considers that the US military has been infiltrated with spies, and why America is being defeated in a critical phase of the War on Terrorism.

Today’s intelligence war with radical Islam comes down to a contest for the loyalties of the population of individuals who can move between both worlds. The vast majority of these are university students from Islamic countries in the US or Western Europe, and the remainder are students of Oriental languages in the West. For several reasons, the US is at a vast disadvantage.… American intelligence cannot recruit reliable spies from the available pool of foreign nationals, nor can it train its own.

(*) In light of the US’s recent counterintelligence disasters, these things need investigation.

Katrina Leung is a Chinese-American who is accused of spying for China. Her case is pending. The damage she may have done is great, reports US News. It’s possible that much of the US intelligence operation in China was compromised as a result of what may have been her triple-cross.

“If we are ever able to get access to Chinese records,” says [Larry] Wortzel, now vice president of the Heritage Foundation, “this will compare to East Germany, where we found we never had a viable operation.”

The implications of such a conclusion are still sinking in. Current and former government officials say the entire roster of U.S. intelligence efforts for all of Asia outside the Soviet Union over the past 20 years may have been compromised, as well as operations of allies like Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan.

(*) It has been a tough few years for the FBI’s counterespionage division. Of course, many successes will not be reported publicly, but on balance the picture appears to be negative. It is time to take the China and east Asia espionage projects seriously and devote sufficient resources to them.

US News also has a story on Larry Wu-Tai Chin, who from 1945 to 1985 spied for China from his post at the CIA. (†)

Convicted spy Jonathan Pollard has lost his appeal. (*) I am pleased. (†)

Jonathan Pollard, an American convicted in 1987 of handing over the crown jewels of the United States’s intelligence services to Israel, will appear in court for various motions. The court will hear arguments that his life sentence should be reconsidered. (*) Pollard’s rabid supporters want him to be freed, and thus sickly resemble the Mumia Abu-Jamal movement. (†)

Having got them from Pollard’s treachery, Israel almost certainly provided these most precious US secrets to the Soviet Union, according to a Seymour Hersh article in the New Yorker published on 18 January 1999, pp. 26-33. (‡)

There is no telling how severely Pollard’s betrayal has cost our country in lives and otherwise in various military conflicts since.

Pollard is a turncoat to the United States. He should never be freed under any circumstances. The people who are supporting him ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Update: 4 April 2004. Title changed. Some wording changed.