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President Bush has decided to let the CIA off the leash. He has given it an extra $1 billion and told it that it is no longer banned from assassinating America's enemies, including Osama bin Laden and members of his terrorist networks.
This sounds very gung-ho and will no doubt go down well in the United States, but is it a good idea? Most governments have at some time considered assassinating troublesome enemy leaders but have decided that it is not good policy.
To begin with, the replacement leader could well be worse than the original one. The writer Sayed Aburish, biographer of Saddam Hussein, says that if the West imagines that Hussein is a heartless tyrant and hard to deal with, "just wait for the new generation of Iraqi leaders".
Next, it cannot be good policy deliberately to create martyrs. Bin Laden must consider he is already in a "no lose" situation. If Britain and America do not find and capture or kill him, then they have failed. If the CIA or other Allied forces do kill him, then he will be considered a martyr in the Islamic world. In years to come do we want millions of young Muslims wearing shirts with bin Laden's image, the way an earlier generation of youth treated Che Guevara?
The fact that President Bush has authorised the CIA to assassinate bin Laden suggests that he is unware of the historial tensions in the Agency between its two main divisions--intelligence collection and analysis, and the operations or covert action section.
By coincidence, a new CIA recruitment drive for spies, underway at the very same time as President Bush changed CIA policy on assassination, exposes the problem.
"For the extraordinary individual who wants more than just a job, we offer a unique career, a way of life that will challenge the deepest resources of your intelligence, self-reliance, and responsibility," the CIA job description said. "It demands an adventurous spirit, a forceful personality, superior intellectual ability, toughness of mind, and a high degree of personal integrity, courage, and love of country." No mention of murder or assassination.
So is the CIA there to collect and analyse intelligence that will help protect the American national interest? Or is it a covert action service, there to comit sabotage and assassination, to encourage revolt and undermine regimes the United States considers unfriendly?
The two sections have seldom co-operated and have often fought internal wars as vicious as those they waged against the KGB and other enemy intelligence services. The collectors and analysts are typified by such legendary CIA officers as Lyman Kirkpatrick, an urbane academic who flitted between university posts and senior positions in the CIA (he was Inspector General at the time of the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba). Or Harry Rositzke, a senior officer in the Soviet bloc division, a sceptical intellectual who at the end of his career had come to doubt the value of all intelligence operations. "What role does the spy play? It's way down there."
The covert action section of the CIA is typified by Bill Harvey, an American James Bond, a former FBI agent sacked by Hoover for drinking too many martinis on duty, a man who went nowhere without two pearl-handled revolvers in quick-draw holsters, drove fast cars and had no time for foreign places or foreigners--especially Englishmen.
This was no doubt because the British traitor Guy Burgess insulted Harvey's wife at a Washington party and because what was meant to be Harvey's greatest triumph--the Berlin tunnel, where the CIA tapped into Soviet telephone lines--had been betrayed to the KGB by another British traitor, George Blake.
The success rate of both CIA sections has been patchy. The analysts 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.
The covert action brigade 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. In Guatemala it toppled the elected government of the leftist Guzman Arbenz, only to see him replaced by the corrupt Carlos Castillo Armas.
It sponsored the disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, got mixed up in Iran-Contra with its secret support for the Nicaraguan rebels, and failed miserably to assassinate Fidel Castro with exploding cigars and poisoned gel for his beard.
These flaws in the CIA go right back to its inception after the Second World War. On the one hand the gung-ho warriors who had had such a good war in General "Wild Bill" O'Donovan's commanda-type unit, the Office of Strategic Services, wanted a CIA that carried on OSS's traditions.
But President Truman was wary. He knew that Donovan had tried to convince President Roosevelt in the middle of the war that the way to defeat Japan was to bomb them with bats because the Japanese were mortally afraid of them. The Air Force spent a fortune looking for a way to drop the bats so that they would not freeze on the way down.
The "pure intelligence" school modelled themselves on the pipes and tweed jackets of the British Secret Intelligence Service and thought that the "bang-bang stuff" should be left to the armed services. Real spies should concentrate on recruiting agents, gathering information, assessing it and passing it on to the appropriate government department.
They thought at first that this could be done efficiently and economically. Allen Dulles, of the famous Dulles family, a future director of the CIA, told Congress that "a couple of dozen people" in the United States and "scores rather than hundreds" abroad would be more than enough to run the Agency.
But the CIA soon took on a life of its own. Under its slogan "Bigger than State [Department] by forty-eight", the CIA expanded at a mind-boggling rate, soon becoming a huge bureaucracy in its own right with its own revenue, its own banks, its own airline and its own policies.
Now it has a budget of $30 billion, a staff of at least 20,000, and, as a result of President Bush's order, the covert action side of the agency's activities is in the ascendancy. The CIA is no longer merely in the business of collecting information about what is happening in the world; it sees its duty as making things happen. It It has become virtually a government within the government of the United States.
President Bush at least has had the honesty describe exactly what he wants to the CIA to achieve--bin Laden's death. The CIA itself prefers euphemisms. It admits that it killed people in the Vietnam war, usually traitorous agents. But it described this type of assassination with a euphemism. The Agency's new recruitment literature does not refer to spies but uses yet another euphemism.
One doubts if it will be of any comfort to Osama bin Laden to learn that his arch enemy wants him "terminated with extreme prejudice by a CIA clandestine service collection management officer". In other words, bumped off by the CIA.
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