The Human Factor: Caspar W. Weinberger says that electronic intelligence is important, but there's no substitute for old-fashioned spies - Brief Article

Women's Quarterly, Autumn, 2001 by Caspar W. Weinberger

IN ALL OF THE WELTER of discussion, criticisms, predictions and proposals that followed the September 11th horror, there is one point on which all seemed agreed: We must improve our intelligence capabilities. Few define what it is we most need.

I am not one to join in the quick, easy criticism of the CIA. They can and do gather vast amounts of intelligence from many sources. But most of those sources, such as overhead reconnaissance, cannot tell us what evil is being planned, by whom, or where terrorist or other attacks will be launched.

Our big gap and the capability we most need can only come from human intelligence--information gathered from human resources on the ground in enemy territory. In short, we need spies.

Of course, it is most important for us to know what can be gathered from our sources in the skies: Large troop movements, placement of big weapons, location of enemy ships, conversations and communications, and that we can do very well.

But what we most need--and what is most difficult to secure--is the knowledge in advance of what terrorist groups are planning, who and what are their targets, what methods they will use, and information of that kind.

How do we get that? James Webb, former secretary of the Navy and one of our greatest war novelists and writers, has it right:

"We need to have a sophisticated and effective intelligence apparatus reconstituted in this country. We...have become paralyzed by a lot of political correctness debates and by the movements in the mid-1970s to rake apart a lot of our intelligence functioning, domestically and overseas.... We need to have an apparatus that is free to do the job it wasn't able to do in this incident."

As Lee Hamilton, former chairman of the House Committee on Intelligence, put it: "You have to have spies on the ground to get [the terrorist enemies'] location in real time, to know where he will sleep that night. You have to penetrate their language, their culture.

This is a most difficult assignment. It requires years of preparation to recruit and train people who can infiltrate enemy organizations, join with them in their planning, speak their language, look like them, and be a thousand percent loyal to America and our allies. It may take years of training and years of operations by these hard-to-find spies. We should have started years ago because it is only from human intelligence and reliable first-hand information that we will find out what we need to know and, in time, to prevent such attacks.

Why don't we have it now? Largely because in the mid-1970s a Senate committee headed by then Sen. Frank Church of Idaho looked into the CIA's so-called "dirty tricks," and FBI investigations, and raised a storm of criticisms that democracies could not tolerate the practices or tactics used to gather the information we need to enable us to stay democracies. The criticisms of that committee and the failure to respond to all the "political correctness" of the conventional wisdom of that time has left us sadly bereft of the most valuable of all intelligence resources. The various investigators appeared to take particular delight in revealing secret operations, methods, and sources used and to be used. In the course of all this the identities of several CIA personnel became known, adding to the risks they already faced.

IN ANY EVENT, the recruitment and training of people capable of furnishing human intelligence was strongly discouraged by all these disclosures and we now are sorely lacking in this most vital of our intelligence needs.

We also need far greater funding to rebuild this capability. (About $10 million a year is spent for all CIA covert operations in all of East Asia, compared with about $10 billion for satellites and electronic surveillance, according to the New York Times).

And most of all we need an acceptance of the fact that gathering human intelligence for us is an honorable, vitally needed task, and we should give honor (when they can be known) to those who undertake it for us all.

Caspar W. Weinberger, former secretary of defense (1981-87), is chairman of Forbes, Inc.