[Vision2020] Cowboys and Eggheads

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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April 14, 2013
Cowboys and Eggheads By BILL
KELLER<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/bill_keller/index.html>

My Times colleague Mark Mazzetti has a new book out that is getting a lot
of attention, including some cinematic excerpts published in The
Times, here<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/world/asia/origins-of-cias-not-so-secret-drone-war-in-pakistan.html?ref=markmazzetti&_r=0>and
here<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/magazine/raymond-davis-pakistan.html?hpw>.
“The Way of the Knife” recounts the recent transformation of the Central
Intelligence Agency from a traditional spying shop into more of a
man-hunting paramilitary — custodian of lethal drones, sponsor of dark ops,
employer of secret armies and shady contractors.

As an assassination bureau, the C.I.A. has had some spectacular successes.
(The Navy Seal raid that killed Osama bin Laden was led by the C.I.A.) It
has also come in for some fierce criticism from those who are uncomfortable
with assassination in general, with the eerily impersonal methods of remote
killing, with the civilian casualties, or with the timid oversight of an
agency licensed to kill. And of course the demand for operational
intelligence to aid these manhunts drove the C.I.A. into the practice of
torture and rendition.

But Mazzetti’s important thought is not that war is a dirty business; it is
that by turning our premier intelligence agency into a killing machine, we
may have paid a price in national vigilance.

Alone among the many U.S. intelligence outfits (the number has grown to 16
or 17 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Intelligence_Community>depending
on how you count) the C.I.A. has the job of supplying the
president with the deep strategic intelligence that anticipates dangers and
shapes American policy. The agency has always housed both covert operations
and the more traditional gathering and analysis of information — “cowboys
and eggheads,” as one agency-watcher put it. The worry is that the eggheads
have become so caught up in serving the cowboys tactical intelligence about
high-profile assassination targets that they have less bandwidth to devote
to longer-term threats.

“The C.I.A.’s raison d’être is preventing big strategic surprises,” said
Amy Zegart, an intelligence specialist at the Hoover Institution. “They do
not exist to kill third-rate terrorists running around failed states.”

Gregory Treverton, a RAND Corporation expert who is a former vice chairman
of the National Intelligence Council, said that as hundreds of analysts
flood into the subject of the moment, they are assigned to narrower and
narrower slices of the problem. There is less standing back and figuring
out how it adds up, what might happen next. “All the creativity is going
to, can we identify, locate and take out the bad guys,” Treverton said. But
unless somebody is asking where the bad guys came from and what drives
them, we are fighting the symptom rather than the disease.

We have learned, to our peril, how much it matters when intelligence lets
us down. The C.I.A., having been hollowed out in the ’90s after the end of
the cold war, failed to see the signs of what would be 9/11. Then the
C.I.A. got the ostensible Iraqi weapons threat terribly wrong, drowning out
more skeptical voices in the intelligence units of the State Department and
Energy Department, and paving the way to a colossal blunder of a war.

At least twice before in recent memory the C.I.A. has been consumed by
secret warfare that had unhappy endings. In the 1980s the agency joined
forces with mujahedeen fighters in Afghanistan against Soviet occupiers;
the Soviets were routed, the Americans moved on, and the mujahedeen turned
their jihad on us. At the same time, the agency was secretly, illegally
backing the Nicaraguan contra rebels; that venture ended in defeat,
indictments and embarrassment.

Jeffrey Smith, who has worked on intelligence issues as a Senate staffer, a
State Department lawyer and the general counsel of the C.I.A., points out
that it’s not just the spy agencies that have their attention monopolized
by these ventures, but their clients in the Pentagon, the State Department
and the White House. “The problem with these big covert action programs,” a
senior official once told Smith, “is that they become the policy of the
United States.”

“When you start these programs, everybody is enthusiastic about them,”
Smith said. “But to run them right takes a huge focus of senior
leadership.” And other things get neglected.

By most accounts, including the assessment of intelligence insiders,
academics and journalists who cover the subject, the conglomerate of
intelligence agencies is in much better shape than it was before 9/11.
That’s a low bar, but credit where credit is due. The agencies are better
staffed and better at sharing information. It’s hard for an outsider to
tell until something goes wrong, but high-priority topics like Iran’s
nuclear program and China’s development of cyberweapons seem to be getting
the emphasis they deserve.

Gary Samore, who worked in the Clinton Administration and then returned to
oversee nuclear weapons-related intelligence for President Obama until
January, said he felt well served by the agency’s collection and analysis.

“Of course the C.I.A. missed all the revolutions in the Arab world,” he
said. “But we always miss the revolutions. We missed the collapse of the
Soviet Union, we missed the revolution in Iran, we missed the overthrow in
the Philippines. ... It’s a normal human condition. We all expect
continuity — until there’s change.”

He’s right, but when change does happen you hope the agency will be quick
to catch up with unfolding events and provide the president with cleareyed
reporting that will help position the U.S. to its best advantage. That
requires the difficult, patient cultivation of sources on the ground,
including the opposition. In the Muslim world, Mazzetti and some experts
suspect, the C.I.A. had not acquired a wealth of sources in the opposition,
and that may be partly because in places like Egypt and Libya the agency
was focused on cozying up to the official spy agencies, hoping to tap into
their information about Qaeda operatives.

The concern that essential intelligence has suffered from the paramilitary
preoccupation is shared by some of the president’s own advisers. According
to a Washington Post report last
month<http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-03-20/world/37873177_1_drone-strikes-secret-report-national-security-agency>,
the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board warned in a secret report last
year that spy agencies were paying insufficient attention to China and the
Middle East and other potential trouble spots and should shift emphasis
back toward traditional intelligence work. The panel included Chuck Hagel,
who has since become secretary of defense.

“Who knows what you’re missing?” said Lee Hamilton, former chairman of the
House Intelligence Committee and another member of the advisory board (he
emphasized he was speaking only for himself). Hamilton supports the
president’s power to authorize targeted killing, but he worries that “the
tail is wagging the dog.” He points out that traditional intelligence
analysis has become more urgent because in our digitized world the
profusion of data is overwhelming.

In Senate hearings before his confirmation as the new C.I.A. director, John
Brennan conceded that the agency’s military focus is “a bit of an
aberration from its traditional role” and promised “to take a look at that
allocation of mission.” There is talk of transferring much of the killer
drone program to the Pentagon, where it would be more accountable and
better integrated with other military activities. But President Obama will
almost certainly choose to keep some drone operations at the C.I.A., for
those occasions when the mission requires secrecy or venturing into a
sovereign country. (The C.I.A. ran the bin Laden mission because the
military, on its own, would not be allowed to violate the air space of
Pakistan without its permission.)

Rebuilding traditional intelligence collecting and analysis is not a simple
matter of reassigning case officers. The expertise is not always
transferable; the skills are not fungible. “You’ve had a whole generation
of intelligence people who have come into the C.I.A. now that have only
worked on military operations,” Hamilton said. Treverton says people in the
clandestine service tell him of case officers who arrive at Langley after a
few tours in Iraq:  “Their idea of meeting a source is with a Humvee and a
military escort. They’ve never done real espionage tradecraft.”

Of course, reorienting the C.I.A. depends on the demands of its clients in
the White House and its overseers in Congress. Much as policy makers insist
they want smart, “over the horizon” intelligence, it’s today’s news that
grabs their attention, and covert operations that excite them. I don’t
suppose many of the boys in Congress grew up playing egghead.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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