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To the Editor:

With Gabriel Schoenfeld’s point that the CIA’s problems “originate in realms deeper than can be addressed by a reconfiguration of the organizational chart,” we agree [“What Became of the CIA,” March]. With his argument that a dramatic reform of our intelligence agencies and of the way in which they communicate with one another and with the President is unnecessary, we emphatically do not agree.

The 9/11 Commission, on which the two of us served as commissioners, thoroughly and exhaustively interviewed Michael Scheuer, whose book Imperial Hubris is criticized at length by Mr. Schoenfeld. On a number of factual issues, he was of real value. But much of what he had to say was not borne out by our investigation.

Melissa Boyle Mahle’s inside view of the CIA, put forward in her book Denial and Deception and likewise discussed by Mr. Schoenfeld, has great merit. Personnel policies that ignore the kind of recruiting that would make the CIA more closely resemble the people and countries on which it spies, combined with the agency’s fear of humiliation or worse for failure, make it risk-averse and sclerotic.

The 9/11 Commission recommended that the agency concentrate on rebuilding its analytic capabilities, building robust human-intelligence assets, vastly strengthening its language programs, and emphasizing the kind of diversity that will allow agents to blend better into the culture of the nations to which they are assigned.

These are not easy tasks. Nor could the commission do more than point out the priorities the CIA should set for itself and recommend a structure in which the director of the agency can focus on this critical task.

But nothing that the CIA may discover is of the slightest use to a President unless he gets the information, together with intelligence developed by the fourteen other agencies in the intelligence community—all combined to paint an intelligible picture.

This is exactly what was so dramatically missing before 9/11. As poor as much of our intelligence was, much of what was developed never got to either President Clinton or President Bush because it was generated in disparate and ineffectually coordinated agencies.

A National Counterterrorism Center and a National Intelligence Director will greatly increase the likelihood that vital intelligence will get to where it is needed and not be lost or hidden.

We on the 9/11 Commission found that the greatest failure before 9/11 was of imagination. We cannot mandate imagination; we could, and did, recommend a structure that will facilitate the effective use of imagination when it appears. And the Congress heeded our recommendation.

Jamie Gorelick

Washington, D.C.

Slade Gorton

Seattle, Washington

 

To the Editor:

Gabriel Schoenfeld believes that the CIA’s “downhill” slide will require steps beyond the recent intelligence reorganization. I agree, but would add footnotes to each of his five points.

Mr. Schoenfeld cannot comprehend how Michael Scheuer (the no longer anonymous “Anonymous”) could have come to head the agency’s al-Qaeda team in the late 1990’s. Scheuer has indeed said and written things (as Mr. Schoenfeld points out) that are decidedly anti-Semitic, that show a lust for carpet-bombing, and that draw bizarre parallels between Osama bin Laden and America’s founding fathers. Yet in being willing to swim against the tide of the time and to see bin Laden not as just another terrorist but as the charismatic leader of a very major and dangerous movement, Scheuer showed himself to be, as Melissa Boyle Mahle puts it in her book cited by Mr. Schoenfeld, “one of the those great analysts who think outside the box.”

A stubborn rebel against groupthink may have strange views, just as a creative artist may decide to cut off his own ear. It does not mean either is useless. But why did Scheuer head the CIA’s al-Qaeda office, and why did he not have a boss who would scrap his nutty musings while listening to his insights—and who would tell him to publish his books after he retired? I have no explanation.

Mr. Schoenfeld’s second example of CIA failure, Aldrich Ames, was identified in 1993 and caught in 1994 largely through the efforts of the CIA’s Paul Redmond and his CIA/FBI team, after Redmond took over the moribund mole hunt in 1991. Ames had been able to spy for the KGB beginning in 1985 largely because CIA security and counter-intelligence was so uncoordinated (due to a mid-70’s decentralization that had over-corrected for earlier excessive centralization).

The anger inside and outside the agency at Ames’s betrayal was so intense that there were numerous demands on me, as CIA director from 1993 to 1995, to go beyond organizational changes; as one Senator put it to me, “Jim, just fire the first three people who come through the door.” But the four officers who had made serious mistakes about Ames were already retired. In her generally fine book, Mahle joins the ya-shoulda-fired-somebody chorus. But I still maintain that the ancient Hebrews had it right: don’t pick a human substitute to sacrifice for an unavailable guilty party; harass, at most, a goat.

Third, as Mr. Schoenfeld correctly observes, the CIA’s reliance on the polygraph in the last few years has been highly, and randomly, destructive of many careers. The recent authoritative National Research Council report on the polygraph, cited by Mahle in her book, should now be enough to convince any objective observer that the use of this highly flawed instrument should be radically curtailed.

Fourth, ethnic and sexual quotas should have no place at the CIA, but ethnic and sexual diversity can be a major advantage in intelligence. Discriminating against women is both wrong and stupid—it halves (well, probably more than halves) the pool of able candidates. In addition, the fact that we are a nation of immigrants gives us an ability both to obtain analytical insights about other cultures and to use field officers of many ethnic backgrounds—advantages not available to most other intelligence services. Coming to the CIA in 1993, I found a superbly talented, and fairly diverse, pool of career people already in place: five of the eleven people directly reporting to me were women and one was an African-American man.

Mr. Schoenfeld’s last point, about risk-taking, is central. But the propensity during political flaps for some in Congress and the executive branch to erect barriers to CIA risk-taking and to deny clearly needed resources has been around since the mid-70’s Church-Pike hearings in the Senate. During my two years as director of Central Intelligence (DCI), however, this reached heights I hope are never again achieved.

In 1993, Congress was in session 195 days and I had 205 appointments on Capitol Hill. Then the pace picked up. Most of this had to do with my efforts to reverse budget cuts or to stop proposed pieces of legislation, generally coming from Dennis DeConcini of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence but sometimes inspired by the executive branch, that would seriously damage intelligence: limits on the CIA’s ability to spy on foreign intelligence services, cuts in funds for Arabic- and Farsi-language instruction, cuts in satellites and in supercomputers for National Security Agency code-breaking. I could virtually never get White House assistance (except from Vice President Al Gore) in these fights.

After two years of this, as Mahle writes, my resignation surprised the White House. It should not have. Intelligence heads cannot defeat these perennial assaults on their own; Presidents need to decide, or be urged by resignations to decide, to be the playing coach of the intelligence team. Nothing else will work.

R. James Woolsey

McLean, Virgina

 

To the Editor:

I would like to commend Commentary and Gabriel Schoenfeld for devoting so much attention to the topic of the CIA’s weaknesses and the need for reform. The primary goal of my book, Denial and Deception, was to shine a bit of light on the issues affecting CIA performance during the 1990’s, to give context to the intelligence failure of September 11, and to further the national debate on intelligence reform. In the spirit of this debate, I have several comments on Mr. Schoenfeld’s article.

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