The CIA Has Become a Paper Tiger

Wounded souls from the Clinton administration, defending themselves from the accusation that they had not done enough to track down and stop Osama bin Laden, have now revealed that, to the contrary, they had tried everything, but everything, from using cyber-war to take all the money out from his bank accounts to “unleashing” the CIA with orders to kill.

Of course, proper procedures were followed, starting with interdepartmental consultations. When the U.S. Treasury argued that the U.S. could not “undermine the integrity of the global financial system,” nobody in the White House was rude enough to insist. That stopped any computer wizardry against Bin Laden’s finances.

As for the CIA, it stopped itself. Its intelligence directorate is staffed by administrators and researchers--most of whom spend most of their time extracting information from open sources such as newspapers and magazines. Even when the raw data come from the most secret sources--satellite photography and communications intercepts--the work of CIA analysts is indistinguishable from that of academic researchers. They certainly have no combat skills.

It is no different with the CIA’s large operations directorate, which is staffed by administrators and “case officers” whose task is to recruit and manage foreigners willing to provide secret information for money, for support in their career advancement or because they honestly believe that the U.S. is a force for good that deserves help. Most case officers work in convivial surroundings, prospecting and recruiting at diplomatic cocktail parties and such. For them, black-tie outfits are the essential weapons, not pistols.

Some, of course, operate in dangerous surroundings, but they too are only armed and trained for self-defense. More senior operations officers are not armed at all; they are more para-diplomatic than paramilitary and act accordingly.

So where are the armed operators in the CIA?

After all, while it never had a James Bond or anything like him, the CIA did arm and train the Contras, who fought the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, and before that it ran many paramilitary operations in Indochina during the Vietnam War.

Basically, the armed operators disappeared after Vietnam. As soon as the U.S. withdrew, most of them were fired, and very soon their former ranks were reduced to a handful of aging officers. In fact, by the time the Contras were activated in the early 1980s, the CIA had to rely on outside contractors to actually train and direct their armed groups.

When Bin Laden emerged as the most dangerous of America’s terrorist enemies, officials turned to the CIA not only for intelligence but for a concrete response. For either, the CIA would have had to go to Afghanistan, first to recruit agents who might actually know something--unlike the refugees interviewed in Pakistan--and then to act decisively on the information collected.

But instead of action on the ground, the CIA produced memorandums to explain why it was impossible to go to Afghanistan to find and kill Bin Laden and his men.

The CIA did send some of its officers to talk with the Taliban’s enemies, the Northern Alliance, and it did ask the alliance to go after Bin Laden, but when the alliance failed to do the job, that was the end of it. The CIA just gave up.

Afghanistan has no air-defense perimeter and no border guards. Anyone can enter the country at will, and once there, no great skill is needed to avoid detection. There are no ID cards for anyone to check.

What was called for was a disguise operation of the sort that the Israelis carry out with great success--not with James Bonds but with the young conscripts of its “cherry” commando unit who wear Arab clothes instead of uniforms.

The CIA did not even consider doing the same in Afghanistan. It had no paramilitary teams to cross the border from Pakistan or Tajikistan in Afghan clothing, to chat from teahouse to teahouse in search of information about Bin Laden under the guise of being eager volunteers--a very plausible cover given the thousands of foreign Muslims who have done exactly that in recent years.

Actually, that was the only way of finding Bin Laden because he rarely uses telecommunications, precluding any possibility of using interception to locate him.

Israeli disguise teams rely on their own combat skills to exploit the intelligence they collect--skilled shooters and fighters can deal with any number of picturesque dilettantes.

The CIA could have relied on the U.S. Army’s highly professional Delta commandos to do the same, but it did not even contemplate asking for their assistance because it sent nobody into Afghanistan at all.

Many things must change after the great lesson of September. One of them is the CIA.