New Book Details How the CIA Undermines U.S. Security

Human Events, Jul 23, 2007 by Babbin, Jed

Exclusive Interview With Sabotage Author Rowan Scarborough New Book Details How the CIA Undermines U.S. Security Sabotage: America's Enemies Within the CIA By Rowan Scarborough Regnerv, 2007 $27.95, 229 pp.

Available at HEBookService.com

In his just-released book. Safanage: America's Enemies Within the ClA (Regnery, a HUMAN EVENTS sister company), veteran reporter and national security correspondent for the Washington Examiner Rowan Scarborough details how Bush-hating bureaucrats in the intelligence community are undermining the War on Terror.

HUMAN EVENTS Editor Jed Babbin recently interviewed Scarborough about his book and his views on the current state of U.S. intelligence. Here are excerpts from that interview:

Rowan, just last week we heard [Homeland security secretary] Michael Chert off say that he's got a "gut feeling" that we're going to be hit by the terrorists again this summer. Why doesn't our intelligence community have something better than a gut feeling about that?

ROWAN SCARBOROUGH: We are really still paying for what happened to the CIA and the whole intelligence community in the 90s. For example, the CIA structure in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, was down to a handful of officers by the end of the 90s. The CIA closed scores of bases during the 90s, all over the world, including in Hamburg. Germany-the place where the 9/11 plot really began and where radicalized Muslims were really cropping up in Europe.

Secondly, in the 90s, we did not invest in technology to eavesdrop on these people. In Sabotage, 1 explain that the National security Agency has been playing catch-up to try to come up with new technologies to match e-mail and the Internet. These two things burgeoned in the 90s, and they paralleled the rise of radical Islam. But NSA's budget was going down, and the CIA's budget was going down. We just didn't keep up.

But all of that was fixed, wasn't it? We had the 9/11 Commission and all these wonderful intelligence reforms-come on. Rowan, all this stuff is fixed, everything's wonderful, right?

SCARBOROUGH: You cannot fix a decade of neglect in just four or five years. And as Sabotage proves, the "improvements" made on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission didn't Fix the problems. In some cases, they made the problems worse by adding more unproductive bureaucracy.

In Sabotage, you make the case that the CIA is a rogue agency, not answerable to the President, that they're not following his policies or trying to support him in this war. What in the world is going on? Is the CIA really that bad, really that rogue?

SCARBOROUGH: Well, about three years ago, [Arizona Republican Sen.| John McCain became probably the first politician who declared the CIA a "rogue agency." And it is because, inside the CIA, the bureaucracy at Langley had a priority of leaking and stopping Bush Administration programs rather than following the policy directives of the White House. And we've seen that in countless leaks about terrorist surveillance programs, the prisons where they were trying to interrogate top-ranking al Qaeda prisoners and in station reports from Baghdad. When Porter Goss took over the ClA in 2004. really trying to reform it, what happened? He died by a million leaks. It was a cut every day, until Porter Goss, by 2006, actually was forced out.

The picture you paint of the CIA is that it's pretty much like a liberal college campus. Is that an apt analogy?

SCARBOROUGH: That's how people in the White House look at CIA headquarters in Langley. They look at it much the same way they look at some radical professors. But this is the hand that the White House has been dealt, and they have to deal with the CIA as it is. That's why there was a lot of griping about it behind the scenes. The puzzle is that when President Bush is given the opportunity to criticize the CIA, he never does.

What's the basic problem with the CIA? They never seem to get the word until the media tells them about it. They were surprised when the Berlin Wall was built and just as surprised when it came down. They blew it on 9/11, on Iraq and on pretty much everything else. Is it possible for us, given our national leadership, to have the intelligence agency we need to fight the war we're in?

SCARBOROUGH: In some cases, they were not very good reporters. After all, that is what the clandestine service is in many ways, reporters based in a country trying to get "scoops" on what happens next. But the service has been dominated by careerism, touching all the bases, instead of staying in one place for a while to develop sources and experience.

On the Joe Wilson-Valerie Plame matter, you focus on that as one piece of evidence about the ClA's operating against the Bush Administration instead of as part of it. We have endured a three-year media spectacular surrounding the leak of Flame's identity, culminating in the commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence for perjury. Why do you think that that was essentially a set-up, an attack on the President by the CIA?