Overhaul Sought for Spy Agencies

Appalled at the failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to detect or prevent the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Congress is beginning to consider how to revamp and reinvigorate the nation’s spy services.

Both sides of the aisle appear determined to upgrade the capability and reach of the nation’s 13 known intelligence agencies, whose estimated $30-billion annual budget--the true figure is classified--is likely to rise sharply.

The House Intelligence Committee has taken the lead in the debate. In a report issued this week, the panel argues that the CIA and other intelligence agencies--which were created during the Cold War to spy on the Soviet military and other major threats--are ill-equipped to penetrate the shadowy world of transnational terrorism and religious fanaticism as personified by Osama bin Laden.

“There is a fundamental need for both a cultural revolution within the intelligence community as well as significant structural changes,” the report says, citing an urgency “like no other time in our nation’s history.”

The CIA and its sister agencies have struggled since the end of the Cold War a decade ago to redefine their mission. Rather than trying to spy on other superpowers, the agencies increasingly were asked to keep tabs on the far more amorphous world of international terrorists, drug traffickers, money launderers and other shadowy groups that were outside their traditional purview.

Bin Laden, for example, is surrounded by a small corps of fellow zealots and is believed to communicate by courier and other low-tech systems that American sensors and satellites cannot detect.

Critics have attacked what they claim is a disintegrating network of field agents and spies, those who provide the most crucial intelligence of all--”humint,” or human intelligence, which provides information on an enemy’s intentions.

The 45-page report, which does not evaluate the agencies’ performance related to the attacks, calls for more of almost everything, from spies to satellites. In what may be its most controversial proposal, it suggests creating an agency that would be solely responsible for human intelligence efforts, such as the recruitment and managing of spies. The information then would be passed to other agencies, including the CIA.

The CIA’s clandestine service currently serves that role, and any effort to supplant its spy shop operation is likely to meet fierce resistance from the agency’s many backers.

The report also calls for hiring more linguists and translators who can quickly decipher the daily Internet-fed flood of documents, intercepted communications and other information in such languages as Dari and Pushtu, the most common tongues in Afghanistan. A shortage of linguists has hampered especially the FBI and the National Security Agency, which taps communications around the world.

The report also calls for an independent review of the American intelligence efforts surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks. It calls for a commission--with members appointed by the White House and congressional leaders--to conduct the review.

Despite an intensive, three-year effort to watch and catch Bin Laden, the CIA and other U.S. agencies failed to detect the impending attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The CIA had asked the FBI in August to hunt for two men later named as hijackers, but they could not be found.

President Bush has publicly embraced George J. Tenet, director of central intelligence, and thanked the CIA staff members for their long hours since the attacks. But the House report is critical, focusing on the CIA’s failure to detect a complex conspiracy that involved at least two dozen financiers, planners and skyjackers, working from numerous countries, over a period of at least a year.

“There is a new note of desperation in the report,” said Steven Aftergood, intelligence policy analyst at the nonpartisan Federation of American Scientists. “It is characteristic of these reports to say the agencies are not functioning as well as they could. But now there is a sense that if we don’t fix things, we’re going to have Sept. 11 over again.”

The report does not blame the intelligence agencies for failing to prevent last month’s attacks, in which nearly 6,000 people were killed or are missing and presumed dead. Coordinated teams of skyjackers seized four passenger jets and crashed them into the World Trade Center towers in New York, the Pentagon building in Virginia and a field in Pennsylvania.

“The men and women who work in the intelligence community are taking the events of Sept. 11 very hard and personally,” the report says. “These extremely hard-working, dedicated and courageous individuals are doing good work with what they have.”

Nevertheless, the report makes it clear that far-reaching changes are in order.

It is sharply critical of what it calls an ongoing Cold War mind-set that distorts priorities by emphasizing military intelligence and discourages efforts to identify and track “non-nation state actors,” especially terrorists.

The committee also lists a series of recent intelligence failures, including the surprise test of nuclear weapons by India in 1998 and the CIA’s mistaken targeting of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the 1999 air war in Yugoslavia.

The committee attributes many of the intelligence community’s troubles to a failure to place sufficient emphasis on “human intelligence,” a term that refers to the old-fashioned recruitment of spies and informants.

The report accompanies an intelligence bill to be considered by the House this week. The contents of the bill are classified, but Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), a former CIA case agent and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has said the measure would significantly increase the money allocated for intelligence gathering this year.

The bill would rescind 1995 CIA guidelines that require field agents to obtain approval from headquarters before hiring so-called unsavory informants, such as those believed guilty of human rights abuses. The guidelines were put in place after revelations that informants on the CIA payroll had been involved in the killing of a U.S. citizen.

Current and former CIA officials argue that the 1995 guidelines do not impede their intelligence efforts, noting that the agency has granted a waiver every time an agent has requested one. But the House committee concluded that it has created “a culture of risk aversion” at the agency.

The bill would require Tenet, the CIA director, to draft a new policy that “recognizes concerns about egregious human rights behavior, but provides the much-needed flexibility to seize upon opportunities.”

Each of the proposals would require the consent of the Senate, which has yet to act on its own intelligence authorization bill. The Senate Intelligence Committee drafted its bill before last month’s attacks, but an aide to the committee said no changes are planned because it anticipated many of the needs made clear by the Sept. 11 attacks, including the need for more human intelligence.

Both bills call for increasing expenditures on technology for intercepting and decoding computer communications, and stepped-up recruitment of translators fluent in Middle Eastern languages and dialects.

“The committee has heard repeatedly from both military and civilian intelligence producers and consumers that this is the single greatest limitation in intelligence agency personnel expertise,” the House report says.

The CIA, formed in 1947, was rocked in the mid-1970s, when the Senate Intelligence Committee, then headed by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho), uncovered widespread excesses, including the use of assassination against foreign leaders and illegal wiretapping and spying on Americans. After subsequent disclosure of abuses, Congress increased oversight of the agency’s operations.