Ex-President Bush Says CIA Is Too Reliant on Technology

Former President Bush criticized current U.S. intelligence operations Thursday, suggesting that the nation’s primary spy service has focused too strongly on high-tech surveillance in recent years and too little on recruiting unsavory informants inside foreign terrorist organizations.

Bush, the father of the current president and a former CIA director, added to the mounting questions of how the nation’s 13 intelligence agencies and a $10-billion anti-terrorism effort all failed to detect the complex conspiracy that led to the synchronized suicidal terrorist attacks this week on New York and Washington.

Speaking at a public forum in Boston, Bush appeared to single out CIA rules that require overseas agents to gain headquarters’ approval before they hire informants suspected of human rights violations. The rules were adopted in 1995 amid a scandal over abuses by CIA informants in Guatemala.

“We have to free up the intelligence system from some of its constraints,” Bush said. Human intelligence, he added, is “kind of a dirty business and you have to deal with a lot of unsavory people.”

White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer chose not to endorse the former president’s comments, saying that the current president is focused on the aftermath of this week’s attack.

The elder Bush’s comments largely echoed criticism made last year in a report by the National Commission on Terrorism, a congressionally mandated panel that called for loosening the 1995 restrictions. It said the rules had a chilling effect on field agents and hampered America’s ability to prevent terrorism.

“It deters people from recruiting the people they need,” R. James Woolsey, a former CIA director and member of the commission, said Thursday. “It’s like telling the FBI they can recruit informants inside the Mafia, but they can’t recruit any crooks.”

Robert Gates, another former CIA director, also called for easing the restrictions in cases of terrorism, narcotics trafficking and global organized crime.

“The problem isn’t that headquarters will say no,” Gates said Thursday. “It’s the negative message this sends. People in the field will shrink from submitting anyone who might create a problem.”

A U.S. intelligence official sharply disputed the criticism, however, saying the rules were not obstacles to effective counter-terrorism. Instead, he said, the rules protected field agents from unfair attack if an informant operation backfired.

“The fact of the matter is we have never turned down a request from the field to put such a person on the payroll if they could help on terrorism because of a shaky human rights past,” the official said. “It sounds good in theory to say there are bureaucratic obstacles, but it’s not that simple.”

The real problem, he added, “is there’s not a large line of people ready to rat out Osama bin Laden [even if we could] get them past the polygraph. These groups are very, very hard to penetrate.”

Daniel Benjamin, a former counter-terrorism official in the Clinton White House, agreed. “I just don’t see how serious, tough operatives are going to be deterred by a little paperwork,” he said. “If they are, there’s something wrong.”

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA field agent who has become a harsh critic of agency operations, said the recruitment restrictions were the least of the CIA’s problems. The agency, he said, is stuck in a Cold War mode where button-down agents expect to recruit spies at embassy cocktail parties. The agency has too few agents who speak the local dialects, have a Middle Eastern background and can fit in with Muslim fundamentalists.

“It’s just preposterous” to blame the 1995 rules, he said. “You’ve got all these people who don’t speak the local language, who stick out like a sore thumb if they walk outside, who are afraid to go out to a local mosque, and suddenly these rules come down and they all say, ‘Gee, this is really going to restrict me.’ It’s absurd.”

Vincent Cannistraro, former CIA counter-terrorism chief, said the agency traditionally has shied away from human intelligence operations.

“We don’t like to do it,” he said. “You get your hands dirty because you’re dealing with bloody murderers. We prefer technological things because they’re clean. The problem is they’re not going to tell you plans and intentions.”

A new report, meanwhile, shed further light on the operations of Saudi extremist Bin Laden, who is the prime suspect in Tuesday’s attacks, as well as the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.

The report by the Congressional Research Service, written before this week’s assault, said Bin Laden’s network has up to 3,000 Islamic militants working in cells in at least 34 countries.