Thursday, January 23, 2003
The nuts and bolts of American intelligence services
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
For those of us who wonder about the need of a Presidential Commission to assess the control weaknesses that led to the the 9/11/2001 attack by 19 men who had virtually flaunted their intentions, you may want to read "See No Evil: the True Story of a Ground Soldier in CIA's War on Terrorism," by Robert Baer Crown Publishers, N.Y., Jan. 2002, $25.95). It shows political neglect, interagency rivalry, excessive "cover your butt" attitude of inactivity in the government intelligence agencies, the White House and the Congress as the sources of US loss of intelligence and judgment that led to the success of the suicide attacks.
The author, a competition skier, gifted in languages, son of a liberal divorcee, who spent years in Europe. took on the CIA job in 1976 after earning a Foreign Service degree from Georgetown, for its potential of free vacations with skiing in Switzerland. Following such basic training as parachute jumping he was sent to Madras, India, a hotbed of diplomatic activity, to try to develop sources for details of India's nuclear programs, and to search for Soviet military manuals (India was a major client for USSR's warfare tools). After two years of training, he was moved to such posts as Khartoum, Cyprus, and a Washington language school. The key that shaped his overarching interests in terrorism was the April 1983 car bomb that destroyed the American Embassy in Beirut, killing 63, including 17 Americans, and destroyed the core of the CIA's MidEast operation. Pursuing the culprits, Baer saw the hand of Arafat's Fatah, manipulated by Iran's Pasdaran Revolutionary Guard operatives, ensconced in Beirut. Six months later more car bombs blew up 241 Marines and 58 French troops. This was the culmination of eight years of civil war in Lebanon. Despite the deporting of Fatah activists, from Syria to Tripoli, Lebanon in June, and further, in December, to Tunisia, Palestinian fighters continued to participate in the ongoing Lebanese civil war. The author identifies the blowing up of PanAm flight 103 in 1988 as a PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palatina) effort, Iran-sponsored, in revenge for the inadvertent destruction of an Iranian airliner by USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf. The CIA, hampered by cover-your-butt attitudes, was useless. It was further crippled by the 1994 discovery of its betrayal by insider Aldrich Ames (whose flamboyant Jaguar went unnoticed in the CIA parking lot) , forcing Director Woolsey to turn the internal investigation over to arch-enemy FBI. The resulting witch-hunt and firings slowed down all real field work. Meanwhile, FBA's own Robert Hanssen was passing secrets in garbage bags.
The following year, 1995, saw Baer in North Iraq, monitoring the fighting between rival Kurd factions, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, led by Jalal Talabani, and Kurdish Democratic Party, Masoud Barzani's organization. The latter controlled Iraq's oil smuggling to Turkey, and was allied with Iran's Pasdaran. Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, ensconced at battle-scarred Salah al-Din, held a middle peace-making position, although the members - Shiite clerics, Bedouin chiefs, ex-Communists, ex-Army and ex-Baath party chiefs - equaled its Kurds in querulousness. When an ex-Saddam general told Baer of a forthcoming revolt to depose the Hussein government by three army brigades and a tank unit located near Tikrit that would hold the dictator immobile in his native village, the author received a wire from Anthony Lake, Clinton's national security advisor, requesting that the coup d'état be aborted. Barzani subsequently arrested the military coup leaders, although for a brief period, nevertheless dooming the effort. Talabani, whose several hundred pedi merga fighters carried the revolt on single-handedly, capturing thousands of discouraged Iraqi regulars and masses of equipment, eventually had to abandon the action. Saddam, alarmed by his army's collapse, instantly turned to improving the morale of his troops by boosting their pay and rations, and started courting Iraq's 120 tribes with funds and offers of self-government. But the revolt was lost, and Baer was brought home to face an accusation of attempted assassination of a foreign leader, forbidden by Executive Order 12333. The accusation, a fiction propagated by Chalabi and uncritically accepted by Lake's NSC office, was unfounded. The apologetic CIA gave Baer's team an award.
But more NSC trouble ensued, due to the activities of an American banker and oil operator Roger Tamriz, who sought support for an oil pipe from Baku in Azerbaijan, through Nagano-Karabakh, Armenia, and Turkey, to the Mediterranean. Tamriz had risen to financial prominence by adept manipulating, backed at various times by Kamal Adham, Saudi intelligence chief (InterBank collapse, a pipeline in Egypt, Tamoil gas station chain) Muammar Qaddafi (takeover of Amoco's oil refineries in Italy, with assist from Sicilian contacts), Ozer Ciller, husband of Turkey's president (acquisition of Turkmenistan's Block I, a major oilfield). An NSC staffer, Sheila Heslin, variously identified as purportedly acting in the interests of an oil consortium, headed by Amoco, with their own Baku-Ceyhan pipeline project, was investigating Tamriz, and accusing Baer of non-cooperation, Tamriz in the meantime was gaining influence by employing Clinton's attorney Lloyd Cutler, Senator Kennedy's wife Victoria, and buying access to the President at "teas" though campaign contributions (he had Al Gore's support for his pipeline). Lake and his deputy Sandy Berger were stockholders in the consortium's oil companies, Baer wryly notes, in remarking how an administration with less oil and more foreign affairs involvement could have supported CIA as a viable policy tool.
The topic of intelligence failures is also explored in "Breakdown: How America's Intelligence Failures Led to September 11" by Bill Gertz of the Washington Times (Regnery, Sept. 2002). Gertz shows how the intelligence community missed the signs and abused Baer, and where the actions of a Congressional Oversight Committee and a politically correct administration led to the CIA and FBI failures. Steven Emerson's "American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among US" (paperback, Feb. 2002) lays a heavy hand on the Muslim community and its lack of Americanism. The academic Bernard Lewis in the brief but well balanced "What Went Wrong: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East" (paperback, 2002) continues the theses of his "Middle East" (1995) text.
Robert Baer, who resigned from CIA in 1997, blames also the Carter, Reagan and Bush41 administrations in the gradual loss of CIA's ability to perform its mission, which includes lack of response to warnings of 9/11. The revelations show such cross-party line political sabotage of intelligence functions that one seriously doubts the ability and interest of a Presidential Commission to flush out the truth. Maybe US needs no new public slaps in the face, however well deserved. Earnest reform will do.
For those of us who wonder about the need of a Presidential Commission to assess the control weaknesses that led to the the 9/11/2001 attack by 19 men who had virtually flaunted their intentions, you may want to read "See No Evil: the True Story of a Ground Soldier in CIA's War on Terrorism," by Robert Baer Crown Publishers, N.Y., Jan. 2002, $25.95). It shows political neglect, interagency rivalry, excessive "cover your butt" attitude of inactivity in the government intelligence agencies, the White House and the Congress as the sources of US loss of intelligence and judgment that led to the success of the suicide attacks.
The author, a competition skier, gifted in languages, son of a liberal divorcee, who spent years in Europe. took on the CIA job in 1976 after earning a Foreign Service degree from Georgetown, for its potential of free vacations with skiing in Switzerland. Following such basic training as parachute jumping he was sent to Madras, India, a hotbed of diplomatic activity, to try to develop sources for details of India's nuclear programs, and to search for Soviet military manuals (India was a major client for USSR's warfare tools). After two years of training, he was moved to such posts as Khartoum, Cyprus, and a Washington language school. The key that shaped his overarching interests in terrorism was the April 1983 car bomb that destroyed the American Embassy in Beirut, killing 63, including 17 Americans, and destroyed the core of the CIA's MidEast operation. Pursuing the culprits, Baer saw the hand of Arafat's Fatah, manipulated by Iran's Pasdaran Revolutionary Guard operatives, ensconced in Beirut. Six months later more car bombs blew up 241 Marines and 58 French troops. This was the culmination of eight years of civil war in Lebanon. Despite the deporting of Fatah activists, from Syria to Tripoli, Lebanon in June, and further, in December, to Tunisia, Palestinian fighters continued to participate in the ongoing Lebanese civil war. The author identifies the blowing up of PanAm flight 103 in 1988 as a PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palatina) effort, Iran-sponsored, in revenge for the inadvertent destruction of an Iranian airliner by USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf. The CIA, hampered by cover-your-butt attitudes, was useless. It was further crippled by the 1994 discovery of its betrayal by insider Aldrich Ames (whose flamboyant Jaguar went unnoticed in the CIA parking lot) , forcing Director Woolsey to turn the internal investigation over to arch-enemy FBI. The resulting witch-hunt and firings slowed down all real field work. Meanwhile, FBA's own Robert Hanssen was passing secrets in garbage bags.
The following year, 1995, saw Baer in North Iraq, monitoring the fighting between rival Kurd factions, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, led by Jalal Talabani, and Kurdish Democratic Party, Masoud Barzani's organization. The latter controlled Iraq's oil smuggling to Turkey, and was allied with Iran's Pasdaran. Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, ensconced at battle-scarred Salah al-Din, held a middle peace-making position, although the members - Shiite clerics, Bedouin chiefs, ex-Communists, ex-Army and ex-Baath party chiefs - equaled its Kurds in querulousness. When an ex-Saddam general told Baer of a forthcoming revolt to depose the Hussein government by three army brigades and a tank unit located near Tikrit that would hold the dictator immobile in his native village, the author received a wire from Anthony Lake, Clinton's national security advisor, requesting that the coup d'état be aborted. Barzani subsequently arrested the military coup leaders, although for a brief period, nevertheless dooming the effort. Talabani, whose several hundred pedi merga fighters carried the revolt on single-handedly, capturing thousands of discouraged Iraqi regulars and masses of equipment, eventually had to abandon the action. Saddam, alarmed by his army's collapse, instantly turned to improving the morale of his troops by boosting their pay and rations, and started courting Iraq's 120 tribes with funds and offers of self-government. But the revolt was lost, and Baer was brought home to face an accusation of attempted assassination of a foreign leader, forbidden by Executive Order 12333. The accusation, a fiction propagated by Chalabi and uncritically accepted by Lake's NSC office, was unfounded. The apologetic CIA gave Baer's team an award.
But more NSC trouble ensued, due to the activities of an American banker and oil operator Roger Tamriz, who sought support for an oil pipe from Baku in Azerbaijan, through Nagano-Karabakh, Armenia, and Turkey, to the Mediterranean. Tamriz had risen to financial prominence by adept manipulating, backed at various times by Kamal Adham, Saudi intelligence chief (InterBank collapse, a pipeline in Egypt, Tamoil gas station chain) Muammar Qaddafi (takeover of Amoco's oil refineries in Italy, with assist from Sicilian contacts), Ozer Ciller, husband of Turkey's president (acquisition of Turkmenistan's Block I, a major oilfield). An NSC staffer, Sheila Heslin, variously identified as purportedly acting in the interests of an oil consortium, headed by Amoco, with their own Baku-Ceyhan pipeline project, was investigating Tamriz, and accusing Baer of non-cooperation, Tamriz in the meantime was gaining influence by employing Clinton's attorney Lloyd Cutler, Senator Kennedy's wife Victoria, and buying access to the President at "teas" though campaign contributions (he had Al Gore's support for his pipeline). Lake and his deputy Sandy Berger were stockholders in the consortium's oil companies, Baer wryly notes, in remarking how an administration with less oil and more foreign affairs involvement could have supported CIA as a viable policy tool.
The topic of intelligence failures is also explored in "Breakdown: How America's Intelligence Failures Led to September 11" by Bill Gertz of the Washington Times (Regnery, Sept. 2002). Gertz shows how the intelligence community missed the signs and abused Baer, and where the actions of a Congressional Oversight Committee and a politically correct administration led to the CIA and FBI failures. Steven Emerson's "American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among US" (paperback, Feb. 2002) lays a heavy hand on the Muslim community and its lack of Americanism. The academic Bernard Lewis in the brief but well balanced "What Went Wrong: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East" (paperback, 2002) continues the theses of his "Middle East" (1995) text.
Robert Baer, who resigned from CIA in 1997, blames also the Carter, Reagan and Bush41 administrations in the gradual loss of CIA's ability to perform its mission, which includes lack of response to warnings of 9/11. The revelations show such cross-party line political sabotage of intelligence functions that one seriously doubts the ability and interest of a Presidential Commission to flush out the truth. Maybe US needs no new public slaps in the face, however well deserved. Earnest reform will do.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 3:12 PM 
