- These are not happy times at the CIA. In the space of
a few short months, two official reports have found the agency principally
to blame for failing to prevent the September 11 al-Qaida attack and for
claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt there
is a lot of blame to go round. The twin fiascos rank as the worst intelligence
failures since the second world war. But the two reports, by the September
11 Commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee respectively, were
also testaments to political expedience. Both panels were made up of Republican
and Democratic loyalists who reached a political compromise by going relatively
easy on both Clinton and Bush administrations, and focused on institutional
culprits. The CIA, without a defender after the resignation in July of
its long-serving director, George Tenet, presented the easiest target.
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- Yet most of the agency's rank and file believe they have
done little wrong. They were the first to raise the alarm over the danger
posed by Osama bin Laden, long before the 1998 embassy bombings in East
Africa. In 1996 they set up a unit called the Bin Laden Issue Station,
codenamed "Alex", dedicated to tracking him down, only to have
one operation after another aborted as too politically dangerous.
-
- There are a lot of angry spies at Langley, and one of
the angriest is Mike Scheuer, a senior intelligence officer who led the
Bin Laden station for four years. While some of his colleagues have vented
their frustrations through leaks, Scheuer has done what no serving American
intelligence official has ever done - published a book-length attack on
the establishment.
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- His book, Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the
War on Terror, is a fire-breathing denunciation of US counter-terrorism
policy. In it, Scheuer addresses the missed opportunities of the Clinton
era, but he reserves his most withering attack for the Bush administration's
war in Iraq.
-
- He describes the invasion as "an avaricious, premeditated,
unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat but whose defeat
did offer economic advantage". He even goes so far as to call on America's
generals to resign rather than execute orders that "they know [...]
will produce more, not less, danger to their nation". Bin Laden, he
believes, is not a lonely maverick, but draws support from much of the
Islamic world, which resents the US not for what it is, but for what it
does - supporting Israel almost uncritically, propping up corrupt regimes
in the Arab world, garrisoning troops on the Saudi peninsula near Islam's
most holy sites to safeguard access to cheap oil.
-
- "America ought to do what's in America's interests,
and those interests are not served by being dependent on oil in the Middle
East and by giving an open hand to the Israelis," Scheuer argues.
"If we're less open-handed to Israel over time we can cut down Bin
Laden's ability to grow. Right now he has unlimited potential for growing."
What makes these comments the more challenging to the Bush administration
is that they come from a self-described conservative and instinctive Republican
voter.
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- It seems extraordinary that Scheuer's bosses allowed
him to publish his book at all. They had already permitted him one book,
Through Our Enemies' Eyes, written anonymously, but that was a more analytical
work on Bin Laden and al-Qaida. Imperial Hubris is altogether different:
a bitter polemic against orthodoxy and the powers that be.
-
- Scheuer was given the green light only on condition that
he stuck to a set of ground rules: he would continue to write as Anonymous,
he would not reveal his job or employer, and he would refer only to information
that is already "open source" - ie in the public domain. Inevitably,
however, given the controversy surrounding the book, his identity has been
leaked (first by a liberal weekly, the Boston Phoenix, then this week by
the New York Times). Even now, he sticks closely to his employers' guidelines,
refusing formally to confirm his identity, while describing his employers
vaguely as "the intelligence community". (It is for this reason
that he is not permitted by the CIA to be photographed except in silhouette.)
Having initially been allowed to give media interviews to promote his book,
Scheuer was told earlier this month that he has to ask permission for every
interview and to submit an outline of what he is going to say. So far,
no interviews have been granted under the new guidelines.
-
- His interview with the Guardian is one of Scheuer's last
before being gagged. Burly, bearded and in jeans and a loose shirt, his
forceful vocabulary is a far cry from the cautious obfuscation that is
the native tongue in Washington. Not that he minds rocking the boat a little.
"If getting in somebody's face [helps] prevent the death of 3,000
Americans in New York or the sinking of the Cole in Yemen, or two embassies
in East Africa, then I'm in your face," he says.
-
- His bosses at the CIA have not confronted him over the
book, other than to tell him what he can or cannot do with the press. "I
don't think they get it yet. I still think there's a large group in the
American intelligence community who talk about the next big attack but
really believe 9/11 was a one-off," he says. "I think they believe
their own rhetoric that they've killed two-thirds of the al-Qaida leadership,
when they killed two-thirds of what they knew of."
-
- Scheuer says that nearly three years after the September
11 attacks the US intelligence team dedicated to tracking down Bin Laden
is still less than 30 strong - the size it was when he left in 1999. The
CIA claims that the Bin Laden team is hundreds strong, but Scheuer is insistent
that the apparent expansion is skin-deep. "The numbers are big, but
it's a shell game. It's people they move in for four or five months at
a time and then bring in a new bunch. But the hard core of expertise, of
experience, of savvy really hasn't expanded at all since 9/11."
-
- The morass in Iraq, meanwhile, is a "big factor
in not allowing us to develop much expertise" on Bin Laden. "I
think [director of central intelligence George Tenet] said we had enough
people to do two wars at once, and clearly that was a fantasy."
-
- The conclusion of the September 11 Commission - that
the al-Qaida plot might have been broken up if the intelligence agencies
had cooperated better and shared more information - was accompanied by
recommendations for the creation of a national counter-terrorist centre
and a national director of intelligence to coordinate the CIA, FBI and
other agencies. Scheuer believes this is a classic bureaucratic fix. "I've
never known a dysfunctional bureaucracy made better by being made bigger."
His answer to the al-Qaida threat, unsurprisingly, is to give his old unit
at the CIA, the Bin Laden station, more resources and more firepower.
-
- It is a solution forged by the accumulated bitterness
of missed opportunities. In one year under his watch, from May 1998 to
May 1999, Scheuer reckons the US had up to a dozen serious chances to kill
or capture Bin Laden. Only one was taken - a missile attack on an Afghan
training camp in August 1998 - but either the al-Qaida leader was not there,
or he had left before the missiles landed.
-
- Months earlier, however, Scheuer believes there was a
far better opportunity to grab Bin Laden. The CIA had made a deal with
a group of Afghan tribesmen to raid Bin Laden's headquarters near Kandahar
and then take him to a desert landing strip, where a US plane would take
him either to America or another country for trial. The plan, rehearsed
several times over many months, was in Scheuer's view "almost a perfect
operation in the sense that there was no US hand visible". But on
May 29 1998, according to the narrative in the September 11 Commission's
report, Scheuer was informed that the operation had been cancelled because
of the risk of civilian casualties.
-
- The pattern was repeated on December 20 the same year,
when Scheuer's agents were virtually certain that Bin Laden would be staying
the night at a guest house in the Kandahar governor's compound. President
Clinton's principal national security advisers once more decided that the
danger of collateral damage was too high. Afterwards Scheuer wrote to the
top CIA agent in the region, Gary Schroen, saying that he had been unable
to sleep after this decision. "I'm sure we'll regret not acting last
night," he predicted. Yet another opportunity, in Afghanistan, was
missed in 1999.
-
- Other intelligence veterans are more sympathetic to the
policymakers' dilemma, pointing out that if the US had shot and missed
Bin Laden, while killing others, the country would have been condemned
around the world, potentially winning more recruits for al-Qaida. "Mike's
is the viewpoint of the soldier versus the viewpoint of a general,"
argues Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of operations at the CIA's Counter-Terrorist
Centre. "There are political judgments made at a higher pay grade.
I've been at both sides of that equation and they are difficult judgments
to make."
-
- Scheuer counters that the policymakers are just not asking
the right questions. "The question is always what happens if we do
this and we fail. The question is never what happens to Americans if we
don't try this," he says. "When I took my oath of office, it
was to preserve and protect and defend the constitution of the US. It wasn't
'to preserve and protect and defend as long as you don't kill an Arab prince,
as long as you don't offend the Europeans, as long as you don't hit a mosque
with shrapnel'." Scheuer's constant complaints eventually got him
removed from his position at the head of the Bin Laden unit and shifted
to a more nebulous training role.
-
- To his detractors in the administration, Scheuer is no
more than a rogue spy whose career did not turn out the way he had hoped.
Certainly he is bitter at being "sidetracked for the past five years
without any sort of explanation from my employers", but he insists
that the issues he raises are far more important than his career. He says
his recent adoption of a child deepened his anxiety about the future of
the next American generation if the country sticks to its present course.
-
- But even if the US scores some significant victories
against al-Qaida, Scheuer believes the conflict with Islamic extremism
will continue to spiral without a fundamental rethink of US priorities
in Iraq and a relationship with Israel that "drains resources, earns
Muslim hatred and serves no vital US national interest". It is a depressingly
pessimistic assessment. Ultimately, "we only have the choice between
war and endless war".
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/alqaida/story/0,12469,1287015,00.html
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