One Expert's Verdict: The CIA Caved Under Pressure

By Michael Duffy/Washington

The CIA that George Tenet leaves behind next month is a shadow of its imaginary self, a butt of jokes rather than the envy of the world. It is an agency that has become self-protective and bureaucratic; it is too reliant on gadgets rather than spies to steal secrets. Sometimes the CIA has simply been too blind to see what is hiding in plain sight. Tenet restored the agency's morale, but he leaves behind a string of spectacular intelligence failures.

And that may not be the worst of it. In his new book A Pretext for War, intelligence expert James Bamford alleges that the CIA not only failed to detect and deter the secret army of Muslim extremists gathering over the horizon in the late 1990s but also failed to take action when a group of Administration hard-liners, backed by the Pentagon chief and Vice President Dick Cheney, began to advance the case for war with Iraq in secret using data the CIA widely believed weren't supportable or were just plain false. Instead of fighting back, Bamford argues, the CIA for the most part rolled over and went along. The result was a war sold largely on a fiction, confected from unchecked rumor and biased informants.

A Pretext for War is probably the best one-volume companion to the harrowing events in the war on terrorism since 1996, chiefly because it focuses on the most difficult to pierce subject: the hidden machinery of U.S. intelligence. Bamford is a veteran chronicler of the spy world whose The Puzzle Palace, published in 1982, is still considered the classic account of the mysterious National Security Agency (NSA), which electronically snoops on friends and enemies overseas. His account of 9/11 and its aftermath is studded with new details, including some about the undisclosed location known as Site R, an underground bunker on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border where the Vice President spent much of his time in 2001. Deep under Raven Rock Mountain, Site R "is a secret world of five buildings, each three stories tall, computer filled caverns and a subterranean water reservoir." It is just 7 miles from Camp David.

Bamford maintains that before 9/11, the U.S.'s entire spook network was pretty much out to lunch. It was a community that had done its job well in the cold war and was looking for a reason to exist. By the late 1990s the NSA was becoming obsolete, unable to keep up with the pace of technological change. The NSA netted millions more conversations at its worldwide listening posts than it could translate or interpret. The agency spent billions to eavesdrop on chatter overseas that moved by satellite--only to see the world move to harder-to-steal digitized cellular, e-mail and instant-messaging communications. Meanwhile, at the NSA's sprawling Fort Meade, Md., campus, the agency's director could not send an email to all the NSA's 38,000 employees. Why? The NSA had 68 separate e-mail systems.

Things were not much better at the CIA. In a devastating chronology, Bamford reports that even as late as 2000, the agency was stuck in an old cold war way of doing things--training its agents, recruiting spies overseas and keeping headquarters happy. One agent explains that CIA recruiting overseas was about as rigorous as going to an opening-night mixer at a Las Vegas convention: American agents overseas sometimes competed with one another to see who could collect the most business cards at official receptions in foreign capitals. Then they would return to their embassy to determine the night's winner. Each card, the agents told themselves, represented a potential spy for the U.S. In fact, the agent said, "none of these people had anything useful ... It was just numbers. It's all quantity."

With tradecraft like that, it is little wonder the CIA "never once even tried to infiltrate" al-Qaeda, according to Bamford. He says agents working at the CIA's vaunted Alec station, the shop inside the agency responsible for tracking and killing Osama bin Laden, seemed more interested in flying to Afghanistan and Paris to meet with various Afghan warlords who promised to provide details of bin Laden's whereabouts in exchange for bags full of cash. Bamford asserts that the CIA's Afghan assets never came through with very much on the Saudi terrorist, but the CIA kept them on the dole anyway.

About the only thing going well was the 50-year war between the CIA and the FBI. Alec station's chiefs were so turf conscious about which agency had "the lead" in the hunt for bin Laden that they routinely left their FBI counterparts in the dark about what they were learning from overseas--a habit that turned out to be a fatal error. Sloppy surveillance permitted two of the hijackers to elude the CIA as early as January 2000, but then the agency repeatedly failed to inform the FBI or half a dozen other government officers who could have assisted in the hunt. Indeed, at the CIA, keister covering was in full swing long before the attacks of 9/11. In January 2000 the head of Alec station told his bosses he still had the two men under surveillance when in fact he had lost them in Bangkok. That bureaucratic chore completed, Alec station then dropped its chase altogether. It would be more than a year before a conscientious FBI agent assigned to the CIA re-examined the evidence and realized how badly the agency had blundered. The two names were finally given to the State Department on Aug. 23, 2001.

But the intelligence community's shaky performance also made the agency vulnerable to another kind of attack: the one mounted by a group of hard-line neoconservatives who took over at the Pentagon and in the Vice President's office when Bush became President. Long suspicious of the CIA if not openly hostile to it, the neocons came into power asserting internally that the agency couldn't shoot straight and therefore its judgments couldn't be trusted.

The Bush hard-liners had long believed that stability could come to the Middle Eastand Israel--only if Saddam Hussein was overthrown and Iraq converted into a stable democracy. Led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, they were installed at various national-security choke points in the government, and nothing moved without their O.K. Bamford comes very close to stating that the hard-liners were wittingly or unwittingly acting as agents of Israel's hard-line Likud Party, which believed Israel should operate with impunity in the region and dictate terms to its neighbors. Such a world view, Bamford argues, was simply repotted by the hard-liners into U.S. foreign policy in the early Bush years, with the war in Iraq as its ultimate goal. Bamford asserts that the backgrounds, political philosophies and experiences of many of the hard-liners helped to hardwire the pro-Israel mind-set in the Bush inner circle and suggests that Washington mistook Israel's interests for its own when it pre-emptively invaded Iraq last year.

The result was a war built on sand--and a CIA that lacked the will to take on its masters. Douglas Feith, a senior Pentagon official, set up several secret offices in the Pentagon that received data from Israel's own intelligence teams and coordinated its findings with them, partly as a way to get around CIA caution in the region. Bamford reveals that the original source of the spurious allegation that Saddam harbored "mobile biological-weapons labs" did not come from the brother of a top aide to Ahmad Chalabi whose code name was Curveball, but from an Israeli tip going back to 1994. Bamford quotes anonymous CIA agents who say that they suspected that much of the hard-liners' intelligence on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was bogus but there was pressure from within and without to shut up about it.

Bamford implies that Tenet, the ultimate staff guy, is partly to blame for this failure of nerve. When Secretary of State Colin Powell was putting together his now discredited speech to the U.N. last year about Saddam's WMD program, he stood virtually alone against the hard-liners, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley, all of whom seemed keen to pump up the Secretary's talking points. Cheney's staff handed Powell a 50-page draft of allegations; the Secretary rejected most of them as unsupportable, with the hard-liners, Rice and even Tenet fighting him every step of the way during run-through sessions at CIA headquarters. And as it turned out, Powell didn't fight hard enough.

Could Tenet have stopped the rush to war? Bamford suggests he could have. "Off on the sidelines, George Tenet was one of the few who knew the truth," he writes, adding that Tenet preferred to work behind the scenes on minor disagreements about the data "instead of speaking out" against the grand scheme. That's a harsh indictment of the man who kept America's secrets under two Presidents. But one of Tenet's colleagues was even less generous, saying simply, "We caved."