THE EXPERT WITNESS
Is the CIA Street Smart?
Abarrage of news articles was unleashed recently telling us how--just prior to the African Embassy bombing last year--the CIA had warned our State Department and embassies that some evil terrorist plot was underway and that their dire warnings had gone unheeded, hence, 212 people were killed in the terrorist bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Typical of this type of reporting was the massive 1/9/99 NY Times article "Before Bombings Omens and Fears." Unless you read this closely with the eyes of an intelligence expert, your impression is that the all-seeing, all-knowing spooks had done their job, but the suits had failed to take heed, or, at best, everyone involved shared equally in the screw-up.
Not so fast! Even this article, a masterpiece of spin in its finger-pointing at everyone but CIA, points out that a State Department report, signed by Admiral William J. Crowe, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, indicated that "intelligence provided no immediate tactical warning of the attacks." How important is an immediate, tactical and specific warning? Speaking as a court-qualified expert, I know it means the difference between the embassies taking real action instead of wringing their hands at yet another vague terrorist warning. Such specific and "tactical" information may have saved 212 lives.
The key question is: Was there such specific information available? Apparently there was. A Time magazine article "Inside the Hunt for Osama" (12/21/98) three weeks before the Times article), pointed out that in November, 1997, an "informant walked into the Nairobi embassy" and "warned that unnamed terrorists planned to car bomb the compound." According to the article, the informant "had details about the planned attack--details that would end up being eerily similar to what happened in the bombing nine months later." So why didn't the CIA issue a specific "tactical warning of the attacks," as Admiral Crowe so correctly pointed out? Well, as the Time article says, "CIA officers grilled [the informant] for days but finally concluded he was making up a tale."
I've served 25 years as a federal agent for four federal agencies and handled and supervised thousands of informants of every type, during every kind of investigation imaginable, on every corner of this globe. Knowing when an informant is telling the truth is one of the most difficult arts in intelligence-gathering, but when it comes to anti-terrorist intelligence, the most critical.
During my 17 years with DEA, a small percentage of street agents were truly superior at this crucial art. And in a game where the universally accepted truth is "You are only as good as your informants," the best "stool handlers" are prized players who possess "street smarts"-as streetwise as gutter rats and as moral, ethical and highly motivated as clergymen. One of the few CIA officers I consider street smart is 25-year veteran Ralph McGhee, who furnished me with excerpts from a CIA document, obtained via an FOIA request, wherein the Agency's Public Affairs Office bragged that its relationships with "reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly and TV network . . . had helped turn some 'intelligence failure' stories into 'intelligence success' stories. . . ." As testament to the PAO's success at media manipulation, the CIA's decades-long record of horrific failure and screw-ups has been well documented but not well publicized.
In May 1998, for example, CIA failed to discern that India was preparing to explode nuclear devices. As a result, DCI George Tenet appointed a team to investigate, headed by retired Vice Admiral David E. Jeremiah. The report damned CIA's performance and recommended across-the-board changes and improvements, saying that the CIA "needs to be scrubbed from the top down, from its spies to its analysts to its bureaucratic barons. The [India] debacle revealed chronic failures of imagination and personnel, flaws in information-gathering and analysis, and faulty leadership and training." This finding, so critical to the security of the American people, was virtually absent from mainstream media. As is usual in the sad history of CIA, the problem was answered by the U.S. taxpayer throwing even more money at it-CIA's budget was raised to close to $30 billion a year.
Not a thing was changed in the Agency's systems, training, and management. But in the coming millennium, kill-crazy terrorists will have nuclear and biological weapons within their reach. The time has come for Congress to have enough street smarts to not allow CIA to turn its latest failure into yet another "success." If they don't follow Admiral Jeremiah's recommendations, our nation as we know it may not survive their next screw-up."
--Michael Levine is author of New York Times bestseller Deep Cover, The Big White Lie and Triangle of Death," and hosts "The Expert Witness" radio show, WBAI, 99.5 FM and KPFK 90.7 FM. <www.radio4all.org/expert> <www.shineon.org/levine/index.html>