What Became of the CIA

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My first personal encounter with the CIA came in 1989. I was living in Washington, D.C., editing a new publication about Communist affairs under the auspices of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. There had been a spate of violence directed against the Communist authorities in Russia; I was among the first to discuss and analyze these events, publishing my findings not only in my own research bulletin but also, to wider attention, in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.

Shortly after my articles appeared I got a phone call from a second secretary of the Soviet embassy. He was fascinated, he told me, by what I had written, and he wanted to talk. I understood at once that a Soviet diplomat with an interest in American views of political violence in his own country would in all likelihood be a KGB officer. When we met at my office a few days later he turned out to be younger than I had expected, perhaps in his mid-thirties, with a broad smile and heavily pockmarked skin. His English was heavily accented but fluent. We had a pleasant talk for an hour. I described my findings in somewhat greater detail, and together we speculated about the future. And that seemed to be that.

Several days later I received another call, this time from someone who, explaining that he was with the CIA, said he had heard through the grapevine that I had met with a Soviet diplomat. The agency was interested in obtaining further information about him. Would I agree to get together? Despite not having much to say, I readily assented.

At the suggestion of my new acquaintance, we met at Tiberio, a posh Italian restaurant on K Street. The agency man, who was perhaps the same age as my KGB contact, had a studied nondescript appearance. Before his present assignment, to a unit debriefing Americans who had had contact with foreigners of interest to the government, he had been stationed in Rome for two years; he could not, he told me, say anything more about what he had been doing there. After a few minutes of such talk, we opened our menus. As he perused the choices, a question sprang from his lips that, when its implications sank in, shocked me to the core: “What’s prosciutto?”

It is, of course, easy to sneer at the CIA, at its blunders in recent years, and at the revealing cluelessness of a junior employee fresh from two years’ immersion in Italy. In fairness, though, the task the agency has been assigned is next to impossible: to observe what is happening inside nearly 200 national governments, to follow internal developments in thousands upon thousands of potentially hostile sub-national groups around the world, and to make sense not only of such discrete information but of broader trends in global politics and society that bear on our national security.

For those in charge of this vast enterprise, the ultimate issue is necessarily one of resource allocation: on what targets should reconnaissance satellites focus their lenses; which communications lines should be intercepted; on which strategic problems should the best analytical minds be brought to bear? And even if resources are always allocated with optimal savvy and thoughtfulness, the unlimited scope of the task, the extensive bureaucracy needed to perform it, and the necessary secrecy in which the work is wrapped virtually guarantee periodic lapses.

Unfortunately, in the age of global terrorism, lapses are unacceptable. The price of intelligence failure was borne in on all of us on September 11; and, given the very real prospect that terrorists will manage to acquire weapons of mass destruction, that price could rise much higher. The question is thus whether our intelligence services can be made to perform better than they have been doing; and, if so, how.

In thinking about this problem, the 9/11 Commission and other observers have pointed to a series of bureaucratic deformations within the agency. These fall under such headings as “stovepiping” or excessive compartmentalization, turf battling, information hoarding, group think, mirror-imaging, and many other terms familiar to readers of textbooks on organizations in disarray. Another line of inquiry, pursued in a still classified and only partially leaked report prepared by the CIA’s inspector general (IG), focuses on a different kind of breakdown: the failure of the agency’s leadership to direct adequate resources to the prevention of terrorism.

To address all of these shortcomings, President Bush has installed a new CIA director, Porter Goss, who against fierce resistance has been reshuffling the senior ranks. Congress, for its part, has moved with celerity and with White House support to follow the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, enacting the most far-reaching restructuring of the intelligence community since the founding of the CIA itself. Among the concrete measures now being set in place, one calls for a new inter-agency center for counterterrorism, another for a national intelligence director with cabinet rank who will both preside over the CIA and coordinate its work with the other fourteen government bodies that make up the U.S. “intelligence community.”

Will these reforms make a difference for the better? A perusal of those portions of the 9/11 Commission report devoted to the actual performance of the CIA does not inspire confidence. To the contrary: from that report, from congressional documents, and from a number of new books, it seems evident that the agency’s problems originate in realms deeper than can be addressed by a reconfiguration of the organizational chart.

Exhibit A in any discussion of these matters should be Imperial Hubris,* a best-selling book by “Anonymous,” who is described on the dust jacket as “a senior U.S. intelligence official with nearly two decades of experience in national-security issues.” As became known not long after the book’s publication, “Anonymous” is Michael Scheuer, until his resignation in the fall of 2004 a member of the CIA’s senior intelligence service. Between 1996 and 1999 Scheuer was in charge of “running operations against al Qaeda.” After leaving that post, he became a high-level manager in the agency’s counterterrorism center, the perch from which he wrote his book.

Imperial Hubris is subtitled Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror. This poses a loaded question from the start, since it is hardly self-evident that the West is losing the war on terror. But Scheuer is strongly convinced—and stridently insistent—that we are. Surveying U.S. counterterrorism policy in the period leading up to and following September 11, he adduces several major reasons why.

In the first place, he contends, American policymakers have failed to grasp the character of our adversaries’ enmity. Here our intellectual weakness begins with a faulty appraisal of Osama bin Laden himself. We have tended to caricature the mastermind of September 11 as a “deranged gangster,” someone “prone to and delighting in the murder of innocents,” and an “apocalyptic terrorist in search of Armageddon.” But, in reality, bin Laden is a strategically astute “practical warrior”—as well as “the most respected, loved, romantic, charismatic, and perhaps able figure in the last 150 years of Islamic history.” Far from seeking the fiery destruction of the West, he is pursuing a series of narrow and tangible objectives.

A related misconception, according to Scheuer, is that bin Laden and his fellow Islamists hate the West for what it is rather than for what it does. Not so, he maintains. Al Qaeda does not want to destroy our liberal democratic institutions, our open society, or our freewheeling way of life. Rather, it is engaged in a “defensive jihad.” Many Muslims have a “plausible perception” that the things they hold most dear—“God, Islam, their brethren, and Muslim lands”—are being “attacked by America.” We are thus not enmeshed in a clash of civilizations but in something much less grand. The “key causal factor in our confrontation with Islam” is “a few, specific U.S. policies.”