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The Western intelligence community is facing its biggest shake-up since the end of the Cold War. After its miserable failure to to predict the terrorist attack the United States, the director of the CIA, George Tenet, will either resign or be forced to do so, and questions will surely be asked in Britain about the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6 and the Security Service, MI5.
The inability of all these agencies to offer even a hint of what the terrorists were planning is the latest of a long list of failures. Even though intelligence agencies justify their very expensive existence by promising to warn their governments of threats to national security, their record turns out to be very poor.
The CIA failed to predict the first Soviet atom bomb, the Chinese invasion of Korea, the Hungarian revolt, the siting of Soviet missiles in Cuba, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. It failed even to imagine the collapse of the Soviet communism and the end of the Cold War.
Its judgment has been equally flawed. It helped to restore the Shah of Iran to power in 1953 but then underestimated support for the Ayatollah Khomeini and was caught by surprise when the Shah was overthrown. It sponsored the disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, got mixed up in Iran-Contra with its secret support for he Nicaraguan rebels, spied illegally on thousands of Americans opposed to the Vietnam war and never imagined that Saddam Hussein would invade Kuwait.
According to a study by the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the CIA's success rate in predicting Soviet moves was no better than that of America's many think tanks. A former CIA officer, Aldrich H. Ames, now serving a life sentence for passing secrets to Moscow, says American intelligence is "a self-serving sham carried out by careerist bureaucrats who manage to deceive policy-makers and the public about the necessity and value of their work."
The National Security Agency in Maryland with its computers measured in acres rather than figures, boasted of being able to "monitor the entire electro-magnetic spectrum"--to eavesdrop on the world.
It had the ability, so it said, to program its computers to listen for "key words" in telephone and email conversations (bomb", "terrorist", "bin Ladin", "Sadam Hussein" etc) and on hearing them, lock on to the conversation and record it. But where was the NSA and its key word program when the terrorists were plotting this attack? Indeed where was Britain's own GCHQ, our equivalent of the NSA?
The truth is that American intelligence has never been very good---the late William Colby, one time-CIA director, admitted that the agency had never succeeded in penetrating the Kremlin--and since the end of the Cold War it has grown fat and lazy.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, American intelligence had to look around for a new enemy or risk losing its multi-million dollar budgets. The international drug trade looked promising but the Drug Enforcement Administration claimed that as its territory and won the bureaucratic battle.
The CIA then came up with terrorism, which looked very promising indeed. Like communism it was everywhere, an ever-present threat. It set up a Counter Terrorism Center which grew from a three-man operation working out of one room with one TV set broadcasting CNN into an operation which rivalled the CIA's giant Near East division.
But its mind-set never changed. Its officers were reluctant to get down to the dirty business of trying to penetrate Middle Eastern terrorist groups because it would take them away from Washington's diplomatic conference circuit or the heavily-guarded American embassies from which they sometimes worked.
And also because they had no idea of how to do it. In the 19th century Britain produced spies like Richard Burton who could not only speak half a dozen languages and dialects but who could dress and pass as a Muslim tribesman. I doubt if the CIA has one fluent Arabic-speaking officer, or any officer who has ever been inside a mosque, much less mixed with tribesmen in the mountains of Afghanistan.
The sort of person who might be able to do this would, in all likelihood, not have led a life of absolute probity. One thinks of those polyglot opportunists played by Peter Ustinov in many a movie. Yet it turns out that George Tenet, the director of the CIA--whose days in that job must be numbered--ruled that the CIA must never recruit foreign agents with criminal backgrounds.
Over the coming weeks we will no doubt hear the usual excuses wheeled out by the intelligence community to explain their failure to warn about the attacks on America. The favourite one is that they were underfunded. Some CIA officers have already told Jane's Defence Weekly that the United States had devoted too much money to signals intelligence and not enough to the CIA.
But Jane's, whose resources and funding is minute compared with the CIA, was the only organisation which came anywhere near predicting this week's attack. Back in September 1999, Jane's Terrorism and Security Monitor reported that Osama bin Laden's group was preparing for a series of attacks on U.S. targets, especially financial targets in New York. Now that's real intelligence.
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