Panel Faults CIA’s Spying

The CIA has ignored its core mission of spying, has refused to take corrective action and is heading “over a proverbial cliff” after years of poor planning and mismanagement, the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee has concluded in the latest congressional broadside aimed at America’s premier intelligence agency.

A report that accompanies the committee’s proposed intelligence authorization bill, which was approved by the full House in a 360-61 vote Wednesday night, paints a devastating picture of the CIA division that sends clandestine agents overseas, recruits foreign spies, steals secrets and provides covert commandos for the war on terrorism.

In a strongly worded response to the committee’s chairman, Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), outgoing CIA Director George J. Tenet staunchly defended the agency’s performance. He denounced some of the committee’s criticism as “ill informed” and “frankly absurd.”

Recent investigations into the CIA’s failures on Sept. 11 and in prewar reports on Iraq chiefly have blamed agency analysts, who assess classified information from satellite photos, stolen documents and other intelligence. However, the House committee warned in its majority report that the CIA’s problems were broader and in some respects had worsened in recent years.

A Senate report expected next month also was expected to strongly criticize the agency as well as address allegations of links between prewar Iraq and Al Qaeda.

“All is not well in the world of clandestine human intelligence collection,” House Intelligence Committee Republicans said in the majority report accompanying the funding measure. “For too long, the CIA has been ignoring its core mission activities. There is a dysfunctional denial of any need for corrective action.”

The CIA “continues down a road leading over a proverbial cliff,” the committee warned. “The damage to the [human intelligence] mission through its misallocation and redirection of resources, poor prioritization of objectives, micromanagement of field operations, and a continued political aversion to operational risk is, in the committee’s judgment, significant and could be long lasting.”

The committee’s harsh language, representing the position of the House, is notable because CIA officials and the Bush administration previously have blamed problems at the spy service on budget and staffing cuts imposed by the Clinton administration after the Cold War. President Bush has given no indication that he is dissatisfied with the CIA’s performance.

But Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence blamed “continued CIA mismanagement,” as well as decade-old cuts, for the problems. Goss, the outgoing chairman, is a former CIA clandestine officer and has generally supported the CIA in the past.

If the CIA “continues to equate criticism” from Congress and others “as commentary unworthy even of consideration ... they do so at their peril,” the committee added. The operations directorate, as the agency’s clandestine division is known, “will become nothing more than a stilted bureaucracy incapable of even the slightest bit of success.”

Fighting terrorism needs to stay a CIA priority, but the agency must become “much more than just the Central Counterterrorism Agency,” the committee said. It also complained that Tenet, who has headed the CIA for seven years, recently said he needed another five years to rebuild America’s clandestine service.

“This is tragic,” the committee wrote.

Democrats, who said they were surprised by the harsh language in the report, said Goss could be asserting his independence from the CIA in a bid to replace Tenet, who is stepping down July 11 as CIA director and nominal head of America’s 14 other intelligence agencies. James L. Pavitt, who has headed the CIA operations directorate for five years, also announced that he was quitting.

In a two-page letter to Goss on Wednesday night, Tenet said he was “deeply disappointed” at the criticism of the clandestine service.

“I find it hard to accept that any serious observer would believe

Tenet said “dysfunctional organizations” did not perform as the CIA did in Afghanistan and Iraq. He cited the CIA’s role in exposing a nuclear proliferation network run from Pakistan, and in capturing more than two-thirds of Al Qaeda’s leadership. “To suggest that the organization that was key to all these victories” is on the verge of being incapable of success “is frankly absurd,” he added.

The House committee critique comes after the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks sharply faulted CIA leaders, including Tenet, for failing to mobilize the broader intelligence community against Al Qaeda and for failing to share information with the FBI and other agencies that might have led to detection of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The House report is one of several assessments of the CIA in progress. There also are internal agency inquiries and other congressional investigations.

The CIA’s internal review of its prewar performance, led by Richard J. Kerr, a former deputy director, has not been released. But several officials who have seen Kerr’s interim report said it was only eight pages long and generally positive, one official said.

Kerr is supposed to issue a final report after he hears from the Iraq Survey Group, the CIA-led weapons-hunting teams in Iraq. The teams are seeking to unravel Iraq’s illicit weapons programs from the early 1990s and to determine if any arms were produced after that time. But the survey group’s work has been severely hampered by the violence in Iraq, and it has not said whether it would conclude its work this year.

Meanwhile, a still-secret report by the Senate Intelligence Committee presents what officials describe as blistering criticism of the CIA’s prewar intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. Unclassified portions of the nearly 400-page report are tentatively scheduled for release July 7.

Senate staffers had hoped to convince the CIA to release the entire document, even omitting potentially sensitive material in order to win agency approval. But the CIA last week asked the committee to redact at least one-third of the report, committee staffers said, on the grounds that it needed to protect secret sources and systems used to collect intelligence.

Congressional sources and intelligence officials said the Senate committee’s classified report was sharply critical of the CIA’s prewar assessments of the ousted regime’s illicit weapons program and alleged efforts to procure uranium from Africa, and the hurried process by which intelligence agencies produced a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq in the months leading up to the war.

The Senate committee supports the CIA on one key front: It concludes that the agency was skeptical of any collaboration between Baghdad and Al Qaeda.

Describing the Senate panel’s report, a former intelligence official familiar with the document said, “I don’t think you’re going to see anything that’s different than what the 9/11 commission has been saying, which is that these two organizations were not in bed.”

The former official said there was broad agreement in the intelligence community that Iraq did not direct or support Al Qaeda. “Nobody was suggesting there was evidence of operational support or coordination or anything like that,” he said.

The Senate report also found no evidence that Bush administration officials pressured intelligence analysts to present a stronger or more urgent case for war.

The report examines the role of Ahmad Chalabi, the former Iraqi exile leader who supplied a series of defectors and informants to Western intelligence before the war. It also reviews the role of independent intelligence “cells” set up at the Pentagon to review raw intelligence and to “stovepipe” the information directly to policy makers. In general, the report concludes that neither Chalabi nor stovepiping were major factors in the flawed intelligence judgments on Iraq, the official said.

Lawmakers often use funding bills to register complaints about agency performance, but current and former intelligence officials said the language in the majority report accompanying the House intelligence funding bill represented a particularly severe scolding of the CIA.

Much of the criticism centers on concerns that the CIA is squandering post-Sept. 11 funding increases on management and support staff at agency headquarters in Langley, Va. The money would be better spent on overseas operations, congressional staffers said.

The House bill calls for an increase in funding for the nation’s 15 intelligence agencies, though congressional officials said the funding boost this year was not as great as it was after the Sept. 11 attacks. The actual numbers are classified, but officials said the total intelligence budget was about $40 billion, up from approximately $30 billion before the attacks.

The authorization legislation does not call for major reform of the intelligence community, but Republicans and Democrats have introduced separate bills in the House that would make sweeping changes. Goss introduced a measure last week that would put the CIA in charge of coordinating the other 14 intelligence agencies, with greater control over funding and staffing.

Democrats, led by Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), the ranking minority member of the House panel, have argued for a more aggressive overhaul, including the creation of a Cabinet-level position to oversee intelligence agencies. “This bill is weaker, far weaker, than the American people deserve,” Harman said Wednesday.