By the spring of 2004, more than three hundred full-time case officers were packing the Baghdad station and more than half a dozen outlying bases. Overall, CIA personnel in country by then had soared to more than five hundred—including contractors—eclipsing even Saigon station at the height of the Vietnam War more than three decades earlier.
Despite the surge, quantity did not translate into quality. Many of the new arrivals had little or no training in either the right languages, interrogation skills, or tradecraft. By 2004, the total number of CIA employees fluent in Arabic was still only eighty-three, and many of them spoke a dialect not used in Iraq. This has required the agency to become heavily dependent on translators, a problematic situation in terms of both security and effectiveness. Thus, there was little improvement in penetrating Iraqi resistance forces or learning who was behind the insurgency.
To make up for the green arrivals, the agency has been forced to turn to hundreds of volunteers from its reserve force of homebound retirees, many of whom have long been away from the field and are of limited usefulness. Also, because they are rotated in and out so quickly—often for just ninety days at a time—there is little time to accomplish much. The confusion has also had a detrimental effect on the agency’s relationship with a number of regional Iraqi leaders who have become frustrated over their inability to establish liaison relations with CIA officers. According to one former case officer who still maintains close ties to the agency, the CIA was stretched to the limit. “With Afghanistan, the war on terrorism, with Iraq, I think they’re just sucking wind,’’ he said.
Among the other handicaps faced by the station is the endless violence that has forced the agency to require that all employees leaving secure facilities be accompanied by an armed bodyguard. Under such conditions, developing sources and conducting clandestine meetings are all but impossible. “How do you do your job that way?” asked one former CIA official who had spent time in Iraq. “They don’t know what’s going on out there.”
There has also been a tug-of-war between local military commanders who want more and better tactical intelligence to help prevent the daily attacks, and senior officials in Washington who are trying to discover long-term plans and establish a chain of command. This and other management problems led the agency to close a number of its Iraqi bases and pull the station chief out of Baghdad before the person’s tour was up. The person, who had previously run a far less complex station in the Middle East, was replaced in December 2003 by a Clandestine Service officer who had previously run CIA operations in Bosnia and Kosovo. The new chief was the third since May of 2003.
At the same time that insurgents in Iraq are sniping away at the CIA on the battlefield, senior defense and military officials are taking aim at the agency in the windowless back rooms of the Pentagon. Few realize that while George Tenet may be the nominal head of America’s vast intelligence empire, he really controls a mere 15 percent of it.
The rest is under the direct operational control of the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. This includes the National Security Agency, the largest of all the spy agencies; the National Reconnaissance Office, which builds, controls, and manages the spy satellite program; the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes the imagery from the spy satellites; the Defense Intelligence Agency; and a number of others.
For years Rumsfeld, and other defense chiefs before him, had wanted to consolidate their control over America’s spy world by creating their own intelligence czar—a sort of Pentagon equivalent to George Tenet. But also for years, the move had been fought by the various CIA directors, backed up by members of Congress, especially by many on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. Nevertheless, in 2003, Rumsfeld was able to pull off a major coup when Congress finally gave him permission to establish such a post, known as the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence.
To the surprise—and disappointment—of many, Tenet barely lifted a finger in protest. A number of sources believe that Tenet’s near obsession with running the day-to-day operations of the CIA left him with little time or interest for directing the activities of the rest of the intelligence community. Thus, within minutes of the attacks of September 11, with Rumsfeld suddenly becoming the administration’s top warrior, his intelligence coup was almost inevitable.
The merging of the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq has also led to the blurring of the lines between CIA paramilitary operations and the Pentagon’s special forces operations. This, together with the new concept of preemptive wars, has many worried. While there are strict laws governing the CIA’s covert operations abroad, there are far fewer restrictions on the Pentagon’s growing cadre of commandos, SEALs, special forces, Delta Team, and assorted other down-and-dirty fighters. Congressional oversight of the military’s unconventional forces is considerably less than that of civilian intelligence operations.
Since the September 11 attacks, Rumsfeld has greatly boosted the budget of the U.S. Special Operations Command—SoCom—which is based at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. It has also granted expanded authority to the command, allowing its 50,000 fighters to play a far more significant role in the war on terrorism—previously the CIA’s exclusive domain.
Technical intelligence wasn’t much better than human intelligence on Iraq. The satellites could see only the exteriors of buildings, not what was going on inside. And because of the extensive use of difficult-to-tap buried and fiber-optic cables, as well as sophisticated encryption and communications security, NSA was not able to listen to Saddam Hussein or his inner circle. As a result, the agency mostly focused its attention on intercepting wireless Iraqi military communications and eavesdropping on commercial traffic.
“Sigint [signals intelligence] was monitoring the movement of cargo whenever they had a tip-off about certain cargo, especially cargo from China to Iraq, or Russia to Iraq,” said one intelligence official involved with Iraq. “That’s what they monitored. Sometimes they would get the bill of lading, and then on there it would list equipment. But it was usually a lot of dual-use items. Things that could be used in a vaccine program—very legitimate use—equipment as well.” Sigint, said the official, “is given a higher degree of credibility than humint [human intelligence]. There’s more respect. I think hands down their [NSA’s] linguistic capabilities are probably more respected [than that of the CIA].”
In a sense, it is a sort of vicious circle. NSA needs human intelligence sources to help tell it where, and to whom, to listen. So poor humint ultimately results in poor Sigint. “The more humint you get, the better Sigint you get,” said a senior intelligence official. “Because the more humint you get, the more your Sigint is able to cope with the volume that is inherent in just throwing a blanket over a communications network, then trying to sort out what it is you have underneath the blanket. The more humint you have the more precise you can be, and therefore the more effective you can be with Sigint.”
Following the attacks of September 11, NSA had a major decision to make. It had to decide whether to continue to go forward with its massive, long-term reorganization plan, designed to revitalize the agency workforce and modernize its worldwide eavesdropping network, or quickly change gears to focus on the immediate terrorist threat. On September 13, the agency’s director, Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, called a meeting in his office to make the decision.
“We had all the senior leadership of the agency in this room,” said Hayden. “About thirty-five people . . . all the key leaders. We had them all in the room. I said, ‘Okay, we had a plan and we had a transformational road map and we made some decisions, now this [9/11] has happened. Do we need to revisit any of the trajectories that we put the agency on?’ And this was one of those frank and wide-ranging discussions. Every man and woman in the room said, ‘Go faster. No change in direction. If anything, accelerate all the changes under way.’”
Ironically, at a time when most of the intelligence agencies were recalling previously retired workers, NSA went ahead with their plan to offer incentives for employees to take early outs. “This was within thirty days of the attack,” said Hayden, “with the whole system stretched by the challenges of the new war. We had a lot of people leave and actually paid some people to leave.” The problem was that many of the people at NSA had the right skills for the wrong targets. The agency had to move out many of the longtime Soviet linguists and high-frequency specialists to make room for Urdu and Dari speakers, and experts at dissecting and reverse-engineering the Internet.
“We cannot squeeze any more juice out of retraining,” said Hayden. “We had spent a decade trying to retrain people for the new kinds of missions, and now it was time to get new people in here. And the only way you can get new people in here is to let other people go. And we were criticized for that. Someone who’s as good at her job as [Congresswoman] Jane Harmon, the senior member on the [House Intelligence Committee], and pays a lot of attention to us and is very conscientious and comes out to visit us and is very supportive, even she kind of said, ‘What is this all about?’ And said so in a public way, and I quietly pointed out to her, ‘It was a tough decision, but it was a right decision.’”
NSA’s personnel problems began in the early 1990s with the end of the Cold War. “We were a third smaller at the end of the 1990s than we were at the beginning,” said Hayden. “We downsized in the worst possible way—we shut the front door. For most of the decade of the 1990s, we hired fewer than 200 people a year—civilians—in an agency that had over 20,000 civilians in 1990; 15,000 by 2000.” By 2004, according to Hayden, the new recruits had jumped to 1,500 a year.
But of those numbers, the largest group hired were not code breakers but security guards. “Number one, security—we’ve got to defend ourself,” said Hayden. “Garrison no longer equates to sanctuary. So we’re hiring guards. We’re renting some, too. Number two, we’ve increased our polygraphers. Number three, linguists. Number four, analysts. And there almost ain’t a number five. . . . We focused on what I call wartime languages—Arabic, all the languages of Afghanistan, and then selected languages in other parts of the world, Horn of Africa.”
According to Hayden, as the rush to war began gathering steam, most of the intelligence NSA was able to pick up was ambiguous and far from solid with regard to weapons of mass destruction. “When I asked our best analysts to characterize our Sigint now, in comparison to the humint, as an overall assessment, they characterized the Sigint as either ambiguous or confirmatory of the humint,” said Hayden. At the time, however, there was very little humint.
Adding to the ambiguity problem was the fact that much of what Hussein was receiving was dual-use—items that could be used for either innocent or nefarious purposes. Hayden’s Sigint analysts, he said, “brought up an additional fact that made this hard. Saddam was living under a sanction regime. Most commercial transactions which in other parts of the world would have been legitimate transactions were in many cases in Iraq violations of the sanctions. So an awful lot of commercial transactions were of an ambiguous nature that involved dual-use materials or dual-use equipment.”
These transactions, said Hayden, “were conducted in an almost clandestine sort of way. Now, how do you distinguish that clandestinity as evidence of pursuing WMD, as opposed to simply a reflection of living under a regime in which commercial transactions that otherwise would be viewed as normal, here have to be conducted in a secretive sort of way? . . . When you’re looking at the evidence here, say you’re a Siginter [a signals intelligence analyst] and you’re looking at an intercept. It’s admittedly ambiguous—you may give country x the benefit of the doubt, but if country x is Iraq, this is a guy who you know has lied about his weapons of mass destruction program, so there’s a tendency here to be suspicious about even ambiguous activity.”
In addition to looking for WMD, NSA also played a large role in the Bush administration’s efforts to spy on the United Nations weapons inspectors and pressure undecided members of the UN Security Council to vote in favor of its go-to-war resolution.
The agency’s highly secret eavesdropping operations targeting the United Nations dates back to its very first organizing conference in 1945. In April of that year, representatives of more than fifty countries crowded into a San Francisco opera house to negotiate a framework for a new world order. But the American delegates also had a secret weapon.
As coded messages between the foreign delegations and their distant capitals passed through U.S. telegraph lines in San Francisco, copies were covertly turned over to Army code breakers. Other messages were intercepted at a secret listening post known as Two Rock Ranch north of San Francisco. The intercepts were then forwarded to Arlington Hall, the Army’s code-breaking headquarters, over forty-six special secure teletype lines.
The decrypts revealed how desperate France had become to maintain their image as a major world power after the war. Messages from Colombia provided details on quiet disagreements between Russia and its satellite nations as well as “Russia’s prejudice toward the Latin American countries.” Spanish decrypts indicated that their diplomats in San Francisco were warned to oppose a number of Russian moves. “Red maneuver . . . must be stopped at once,” said one intercepted message. Another, from Czechoslovakia, indicated their opposition to the admission of Argentina.
The United States pushed hard to locate the organization on American soil, largely to accommodate the eavesdroppers and code breakers of NSA and its predecessors. The Russians, on the other hand, were also happy to have it on American soil—it gave them a reason to ship dozens of new spies across U.S. borders.