Ground Down CIA Still in the Pit

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 1, 2001 | by J. Michael Waller

President Bush has let the CIA continue to be run by Bill Clinton holdovers, even though the agency's effectiveness severely was damaged under the Clinton administration.

Why are Bill Clinton's political appointees, still running the CIA? The question is nagging preparedness-minded supporters of President George W. Bush who are worried that the holdover intelligence community, like the rank upon rank of social-policy holdovers at the Pentagon, at best may be naive and at worst poorly prepared to serve the country's needs in the 21st century. These are those, say critics, who were advanced to ever higher levels during the eight years in which Clinton politicized national security.

While Donald Rumsfeld and his team are shaking up the Department of Defense (DOD) to ensure that U.S. war-fighting abilities are adapted to post-Cold War realities, almost nothing of the kind is being done in the intelligence community that keeps decisionmakers informed about international developments and threats. For some reason, Clinton holdovers continue to run the show.

CIA Director George Tenet, who in 1996 replaced John Deutch, received Bush's nod to continue in 2001. Tenet, many intelligence experts argue, is a good intelligence professional and a decent fellow but a do-nothing leader when it comes to reform. Others are more sharply critical, calling him indifferent to security breaches that involve high-ranking political figures. Some accuse him of cronyism, stuffing CIA management with his own Clinton-era people while the Bush White House and Congress looked askance. Still others call him an operator who flattered his way into retention as CIA chief by currying favor with the Bush family.

"The problem is that we don't have an intelligence capability across the board equal to the task of supporting a real U.S. strategy for remaining a great power," says a former senior intelligence official who requested anonymity. "We need to know about facts and have them interpreted in a way that would allow us to fashion a strategy for dealing with problems down the road. Here it is a good 10 or more years after the end of the Cold War and CIA under the leadership of Deutch and Tenet did nothing to adapt to change. They just let it go."

A former National Security Council official agrees. "Deutch and Tenet have done very little to address the new problems of the post-Cold War period. It's been a decade since the Soviet collapse. That's a long time to spend $30 billion a year -- $300 billion -- on intelligence."

Current and former intelligence officers have described to Insight a litany of unremedied problems within the CIA during the Deutch-Tenet years, including:

* bloated management staffs at the expense of solid analysts, linguists and officers in the field who can accurately and quickly collect and assess raw intelligence from world trouble spots;

* a deteriorated human-intelligence capability that makes it almost impossible to penetrate key targets such as terrorist organizations and cripples U.S. efforts to detect and prevent terrorist attacks such as the bombings that destroyed two U.S. Embassies in Africa and a Navy warship in Yemen;

* a bureaucratic culture that penalizes intelligence personnel for thinking creatively;

* politicization of the CIA by controversial Clinton appointees who had served under Tenet in the previous administration;

* ideological blinders concerning important target areas such as China, with the prevailing view that Beijing is not a threat;

* major flaws in quality control of intelligence coming in from the field, with an inordinate reliance on information from security services of other countries;

* an expensive satellite-based signals-intelligence system constructed without a plan to hire the large numbers of people and secure the technology needed to process and analyze the data to make it useful;

* no serious penalties for high-level security lapses, including Tenet's predecessor and former boss, Deutch, who for years e-mailed highly classified documents from his office through America Online to his house;

* a reported high-level CIA cover-up on Tenet's watch of Deutch's alleged wrongdoing.

Rather than shake up the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community the way Rumsfeld is trying to reshape the Pentagon, the Bush administration has chosen to leave the Clinton holdovers in place. In turn, Tenet has allowed Clinton appointees to burrow into the CIA's permanent bureaucracy.

During the Clinton years the ambitious Tenet actively had cultivated former president George H.W. Bush, who had headed the agency for a year. Tenet was well-wired politically, having been staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence under a Democratic chairman and serving on the Clinton transition team in 1992 and 1993, then the White House National Security Council and later as deputy CIA director before replacing Deutch in 1996. Though low-key, he has shown himself to be politically savvy, building bipartisan support that he used to protect not only his agency but his friends.