4 Problems of U.S. Intelligence

In the process of describing the directors responsible for leading the Central Intelligence Agency since its inception after World War II, The Spymasters by Chris Whipple lays bare at least four systemic problems that affect the intelligence that supports policy decisions affecting U.S.national security. 1) Conflicting attitudes toward analysts, covert operators, technology, a mole/spy (Rick Ames and earlier, James Jesus Angleton's search for spies within CIA) and women affect the agency's morale, hiring, firing and intelligence reports. President Nixon's CIA director, James Schlesinger, purged covert operators left over from the Vietnam era; President Reagan's CIA director, William Casey, himself a covert operator during World War II, hired 2000. Casey ended up in the scandalous plot, where contra guerrillas, funded from arms sales to Iran that were used to free U.S. hostages, fought to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Presudent Carter's CIA director, Stansfield Turner, favored using technology rather than human intelligence collection methods. James Woolsey, President Clinton's first CIA director, however, recognized the value of integrating technology and human intelligence. Until relatively recently, CIA was "white, male and Yale." Appointed by President Trump, Gina Haspel, the first female CIA director, came up through the covert Directorate of Operations. Jennifer Matthews, who joined the CIA in 1989, was one of the analysts in the secret unit, Alec Station, that had warned President George W. Bush's administration of an impending Al Qaeda attack on the United States. At age 45, Ms. Matthews told family and friends she needed an overseas covert assignment in order to progress professionaly. As chief of base in Khost, Afghanistan, she was killed in a suicide bombing in December, 2009. 2) Turf wars, at a time when available information abounds, prevent innovations capable of capturing, evaluating and distributing relevant information, the lack of which can have dire consequences. On paper, responsibilities of the CIA, FBI, other U.S. agencies and departments, embassies and foreign intelligence services seem clear. But in the U.S. alone, the CIA and FBI have conflicting responsibilities, and there are conflicts between the FBI's need to collect evidence to prosecute offenders in court cases and the CIA's need to take timely action on intelligence information. For example, the CIA's Jose Rodriguez justified use of waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" as the fastest way to get Al Qaeda terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, to disclose plans for additional attacks that required immediate prevention. He had no respect for the interrogation method of the FBI's Ali Soufan, who, as an Arabic-speaking Muslim, gained information by establishing personal rapport with terrorists. (See Lawrence Wright's very different positive profile of Ali Soufan in The Looming Tower). Both the CIA and FBI knew Al Qaeda was behind the October, 2000 attack on the USS Cole destroyer in Aden, Yemen, but the Clinton administration's failure to react emboldened Osama bin Laden's September 11, 2001 attacks. What surfaced as one of the consensus reasons for 9/11 in the postmortem was a lack of intelligence sharing. As a remedy, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was designed to integrate not only the CIA and FBI, but also the National Security Agency, Department of Energy and another 10 contributors to U.S. intelligence. Of course, even this cumbersome Office does not collect, evaluate and coordinate intelligence information supplied by other sources, such as NATO, the UK and Israel. A year before the August, 1998 Al Qaeda attacks on U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, for example, the FBI learned CIA discounted the warning of a bombing plot an Egyptian member of Al Qaeda provided at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi. In contrast, acting on a tip from Jordan's General Intelligence Directorate, CIA relied on a would-be double agent, Human Khalil al-Balawi, who presented a video showing he could get close to Al Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al Zawahiri. On December 30, 2009, Balawi, who turned out to be a suicide bomber and triple agent working for Al Qaeda, set off the explosion that killed Jennifer Matthews and her team in Khost, Afghanistan. 3) CIA and Presidents navigate a difficult relationship. Separating those who provide and those who use information is a mistake, when collaboration is likely to produce a much better conclusion. Within the administrations of U.S. Presidents, policy decisions are based on political calculations, incomplete intelligence information, the clash of personalities and opinions and often an attempt to provide deniability and avoid blame, if a decision launches an action that goes wrong. Political suspicions linger, for example, regarding President Clinton's reluctance to retaliate for Al Qaeda's attack on the USS Cole. Acknowledging Al Qaeda crippled a U.S. destroyer could have made Democrats look weak a month before the 2000 election. Plus, with President Clinton's Monica Lewinsky affair fresh in the minds of voters, a retalitory strike on Al Qaeda could look like an effort to distract from the affair, an imitation of the film plot in Wag the Dog. The experience of CIA directors and their staffs is too valuable to exclude from the policy-making loop. Consider the positions held by these CIA directors. James Schlesinger: Secretary of Defense George H. W. Bush: U.S. President William Webster: FBI director Robert Gates: Secretary of Defense John Deutch: Deputy Secretary of Defense George Tenet: Deputy CIA director Michael Hayden: National Security Agency director Leon Panetta: Member of Congress, President Clinton's White House Chief of Staff and OMB director, Secretary of Defense Mike Pompeo: Member of Congress, Secretary of State Yet, the principals in positions to take control during a new crisis may fail to give sufficient attention to a looming problem, if their attention is focused on erroneous information about a different threat and/or if they fail to understand the country or group involved. After George W. Bush won the 2000 presidential election, the CIA continued to voice grave concern about the growing Al Qaeda threat, but the president's advisors: Vice President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz at the Defense Department and National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, were preoccupied with Iraq. Pretending Iraq's Saddam Husein was connected with Al Qaeda and had weapons of mass destruction led to a disasterous war. From their positions of power, Presidents often try to use the information and tools CIA can provide to implement their will. During the Vietnam war, Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon asked CIA director, Richard Helms, to violate the CIA's lack of authority to engage in domestic police activities by beginning a domestic surveillance program, MHCHAOS, designed to identify the communist connections of anti-war protest leaders in the United States. After I left CIA in 1967, I lived in Honolulu for a time. While I was on a date with a Hawaiian assistant attorney general, he asked if I were willing to compile a list of anti-war leaders at Hawaii's East-West University, if the government paid for my Ph.D. studies. I was unwilling. Just as CIA directors need to avoid being intimidated by Presidents, they need to be careful not to use their own power to intimidate their staffs. When a crisis erupts, the CIA hierarchy has a tendency to leave analysts who monitor a country or subject out in the cold, while over and over again the same top tier officials assemble to consider options. After Russia invaded the former Soviet Union's Republic of Georgia in August, 2008, CIA director, Michael Hayden, asked (I hope, in jest.), if CIA had an expert on Georgia. Clearly, the Georgia analyst who followed the country every day was not the first person asked for an assessment. John Brennan was an Irish Catholic and White House counterrorism advisor before he became the CIA director. To confine him to an information-only lane would not make sense. National security depends on a CIA that provides information it knows to be true(and legal), not to robotically go along with every request from Presidents and their administrations. 4) Just as political considerations play a role in the relationship between presidents and CIA directors, they also affect Congressional relations. The title, Playing to the Edge, of the book by George W. Bush's CIA director, Michael Hayden, captures the intelligence community's mindset. Compared to covert operators determined to stretch the legal limits to complete a mission, most legislators are attorneys schooled in a strict rule of law. Blame for poor CIA-Congressional relations, cannot be assigned to CIA alone, however. By August, 2016, Russian interference with the U.S. election process was clear. But when President Obama's CIA officials asked Congressional leaders to warn their State election commissions about foreign tampering, they were told to stop being played by Moscow. Wavering views on assassinations can serve as a proxy for understanding complex Congressional and CIA positions. In 1973, Congress looked at CIA's involvement in plots to assassinate four foreign leaders: Fidel Castro, Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem, the Congo's Patrice Lumumba and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. As a result of these investigations, Congress established oversight by House and Senate Permanent Committees on Intelligence. In the 1980s, the Middle East's unsettled Israeli-Palestinian conflict and U.S. support for Iran's Shah inspired vengeance by Islamic fundamentalists. A CIA manhunt eventually killed an elusive terrorist leader of Iranian-backed Hezbollah, Imad Mughniyah, who promoted effective suicide bombings and the kidnapping and torture of U.S. citizens. When pressure against what was perceived as torture by CIA operatives gained public support after 9/11, Congress condemned the "enhanced interrogation techniques" used on Al Qaeda terrorists and passed the "Detainee Treatment Act" in 2005. But, even as early as 2001, assassinations began to go unchallenged, when they could be accomplished from afar by drones. And crowds gathered outside the White House to cheer the assassination of Osama bin Landen in May, 2011. The U.S. public and Congress agreed to take action for Saudi Arabia's role in the dismemberment of Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, in Iran's Saudi Arabian Embassy, but President Trump was reluctant to lose a $450 billion sale to the Saudis. Yet, President Trump authorized the murder of Iranian general, Qassim Suleimani, head of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Quds Force. How Congress and the public will view future assassinations remains unclear. Although eliminating a dangerous leader appears to accomplish a mission, such a short-term remedy often poses worse long-term consequences. President Clinton's first CIA director, James Woolsey, recognized the dilemma. He described how a giant, after slaying a dragon, suddenly can discover he is surrounded by poisonous snakes. The death of one kingpin does not prevent more than one from taking his place. Finally, no one book provides a complete review of the tools, procedures, limitations and capabilities the U.S. intelligence community uses to protect national security. As Chris Whipple surely knows, the CIA directors and others he interviewed for The Spymasters are motivated to protect their legacies and the integrity of the Central Intelligence Agency. Their perceptions also reflect their personalities and loyalty to and chemistry with associates. Predictably, CIA's current director, Gina Haspel, and Michael Pompeo, the current Secretary of State and Ms. Haspel's predecessor, declined to be interviewed, since anything they would say could have repercussions related to their ongoing responsibilities. It was unfortunate to see the good ol' white, male and Yale CIA boys use Ms. Haspel's lack of response to an interview request as an opportunity to take their long knives to her experience, decisions and behavior. In the final analysis, however, The Spymasters reminds citizens of democracies how free they are to discover the way their governments work and how free they are to correct what they dislike.

Mixed Messages from Saudi Arabia

I like watching CNBC, because a station that follows the stock market has to keep up, not only with economics, but also with political and social trends. Following the U.S. presidential election, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, chairman and controlling shareholder of Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Holding Company and one of the largest foreign investors in the US, told CNBC host, Jim Cramer, "We look at you (your country) as being the vanguard and being the leaders of the world."

     Prince Alwaleed reminded me of the time I began teaching a section on Medieval Italy by asking students to list what they knew about Italy. Roman Empire, pizza, pasta, and home of the Pope helped initiate a discussion of how fragmented the country was before unification in 1870. Now, I asked myself, "What do I know about Saudi Arabia?" Lots of oil, little water, home of 9/11 terrorists, Muslim, women not allowed to drive, considers Iran an enemy. I need to know more.

     The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was not formed until 1932. In the 1950s, the US participated in the country's oil boom through Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company.  US heavy machinery companies also participated in the oil-financed construction boom that transformed a desert into a wealthy country with ports, roads, schools, hospitals, and power plants.

     Despite these close US-Saudi connections, some Sunni Muslims in Saudi Arabia, as well as those from the enemy Shi'ite branch of Muslims in Persian Iran, harbored hatred of the US for its support of Israel against the Palestinians and resented the US presence in Saudi Arabia. At present, Iranian-backed rebels in Yemen fire long-range missiles into Saudi Arabia.

     Although Osama bin Laden's family came from poor South Yemen, his father won favor with Saudi's king and gained lucrative construction contracts. Bin Laden was born in Saudi Arabia and spent most of his early life there in Jeddah. Due to the Muslim terrorist activities he inspired from his later headquarters in Sudan, including a suspected attempt on the life of Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak, Saudi King Fahd was pressured to revoke bin Laden's citizenship and passport in March, 1994. He left Sudan for Afghanistan in May, 1996.

     Fifteen of the 19 hijackers involved in the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US were Saudi nationals. Senior Saudi officials denied any role in the attacks and the 9/11 commission found no evidence linking the Saudi government with funding for the operation. Nonetheless, in September 2016, the US Congress passed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) that gives the families of terrorist victims the right to sue governments suspected of playing a role in a terrorist attack on US soil. Congress overrode President Obama's veto of the bill and JASTA became a law which potentially undermines the close US-Saudi relationship and counter terrorism cooperation between the two countries.

     In Saudi Arabia, cuts in salaries and subsidies due to falling oil prices are understandably unpopular with the Saudi public. Saudi's Vision 2030 economic program is designed to reduce the country's dependence on oil revenues. On CNBC, Prince Alwaleed told Cramer that he is a member of a group looking into energy alternatives to oil.

     Besides the importance of oil in Saudi Arabia's future economy, succession to the Saudi throne also bears watching. Currently, King Salman of the House of Saud supports both Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, his 57-year-old nephew and minister of interior who is next in the line of succession, and his son, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the 31-year-old contender who could leapfrog past his cousin. Speculation heightened when Crown Prince Muqrin bin Aldulaziz resigned his position in April, 2015, to make room for the Deputy Crown Prince.

Make Spatial Relationships

When estimating the number of casualties planes flying into the World Trade Center's towers would cause, Osama bin Laden believed burning jet fuel only would weaken the steel above the plane crashes. According to Lawrence Wright's book, The Looming Tower, bin Laden thought higher floors would collapse, but lower ones would remain standing.

    Spatial relationships are important for architects and engineers who design buildings and cars and for dentists who need to know how upper and lower teeth should fit together, but being able to make accurate calculations about spatial relationships is a skill needed by people everywhere in the world. Check how the skill is used in the following examples:

• Knowing where to sit at a sporting event or play so the view isn't obstructed by a pole,
• Figuring how many cars can be parked in a lot,
• Assembling furniture by looking at instructions,
• Visualizing how atoms are arranged in a molecule,
• Deciding how many pans are needed to bake five dozen cookies for a bake sale.

Recent studies suggest ways to help children develop spatial visualization skills. Engineering professor Sheryl A. Sorby recommends playing with blocks, using two-dimension instructions to build with LEGOs, holding objects and sketching them when turned in different positions. She also suggests introducing girls to the toys sold by Goldie Blox (goldieblox.com). Other teachers have had students draw maps, design 3-D treehouses, build robots, knit, play chess, and use 3-D modeling software SketchUp. Theater classes are a natural place to learn blocking, i.e. positioning and spacing actors so that everyone in the audience can see what is happening on stage. Art classes model with clay and learn techniques to create the illusion of space on a two-dimension surface. 

     The connection that seems to exist among spatial reasoning, math skills, creativity, and the arts is reason enough to get kids up and doing things all around the world.

   

Back to the Land

The world needs food. Too many are starving, and too many are unemployed. As summer approaches in the Northern Hemisphere, it is the perfect time for kids to discover the art of farming, not only to feed their families, but also to earn money. Whether at a roadside stand, farmers' market, or open bazaar, there is income to be made by selling vegetables, herbs, fruit, plants, flowers, and seeds. A youth group, for example, grows tomatoes and peppers in a community garden, cooks them, and packages salsa for sale. A bride who wanted her reception to be filled with sunflowers paid neighborhood youngsters to grow them.

     Farming can be simple or sophisticated. There are ready-made kits that include the proper seeds and soils children need for indoor gardens of basil, parsley, thyme, and other herbs that can be used in cooking. These kits come with directions for the amount of light and moisture plants need. Usually plants need 12 to 16 hours of light a day near a window, but strong, prolonged sunlight is harmful. It is a good idea to turn plants around once a week, since they will grow lopsided toward the light otherwise. The best water for plants is tap water that has been left out overnight to reach room temperature and to let some of its chemical content evaporate. Adding eggshells to the water left out overnight enriches the solution.

     It also is fun for children to try to grow a plant from plump apple, lemon, orange, or grapefruit seeds that have been washed and dried. Begin by covering the drainage hole in a 4-inch flowerpot with a thin layer of clean small stones and adding about 2 cups of potting soil up to an inch from the top of the pot. (It is possible to remove insects and disease from any outdoor soil by spreading it in a pan, heating it in an oven at 180 degrees for a half hour, and letting it cool.) Lay several seeds of the same fruit on the soil, cover with 1/4-inch of soil, carefully water with room temperature tap water and repeat when needed to keep soil moist, place in a sunny spot, and see if sprouts develop in 3 weeks or longer.

      At the end of the earlier post, "A Healthy Environment," there is a detailed description for growing an outdoor garden. According to the National Gardening Association, about 40 million households in the U.S. are growing herbs, vegetables, or fruits, because they want to save money and to raise healthy, organic produce. In an item in the AARP magazine (August/September, 2014), frugal living expert Erin Huffstetler claimed many fruits and nuts are very easy to grow and that there are varieties that suit almost any climate. In particular, she mentiond raspberry, blueberry, and strawberry plants, red seedless grapes, cherry bushes, and almond trees.

     In a backyard or community garden, planting a mixture of crops and flowers discourages the pests that like to feast on one particular plant, and using compost cuts down on the need for and cost of using synthetic fertilizer. Using compost, other natural fertilizers and pesticides, mulch, hand-weeding, crop rotation, and earthworms, it is possible to feed the soil, reduce pest infestations, and manage weeds without pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, or other chemicals. (At the end of the earlier blog post, "A Healthy Environment," How Does Your Garden Grow? describes the composting process.) African subsistence farmers even have increased yields by composting and reducing the need for pesticides by growing diverse crops.

      Iroquois Valley Farms in Illinois has come up with a way to help farmers, at any age, become organic farmers. Before leasing a conventional farm of at least 80 acres to a tenant, it takes three years for a diverse rotation of crops and earthworms to rebuild soil fertility naturally. After seven years, Iroquois Valley Farms offers the new organic farmer a purchase option.

     School projects often lend themselves to farming experiments. Water one part of a garden at night and one during the day to see which plants thrive best. Take a photo of each plot. Supposedly, since less water evaporates at night, that section should look better. Or weed one section and not another. Plants that share water and soil nutrients with weeds should be smaller. Over several years a student could document the effect of rotating crops by planting the same crop over and over every year in one section of a garden and, in other years, alternating that crop with different ones, even flowers, in a nearby section of the same garden. If there are trees on the southern and western sides of a building, see how much cooler the temperature is there compared to the temperature on the other sides of the building.

     Experiments with cross-breeding are not new to farmers who have wanted to deter pests, increase yields, and produce crops that tolerate drought, floods, and soil contamination by salt water.The fast growing, high yield rice strain credited with preventing famine in India was the result of cross-breeding a dwarf strain of rice from Taiwan and a taller variety from Indonesia. What is new is the ability to identify the DNA marker or markers in seedlings with desirable genes and to use marker-assisted breeding to produce high yield and other specialized crops. It should be noted, however, that U.S. Department of Agriculture standards do not permit organic farms to use genetically modified hybrid seeds.

     Companies, such as Monsanto and DuPont, have profitable seed patents on genetically modified seeds that grow corn, soybeans, and cotton. Before the U.S. pressured Sudan to expel Osama bin Laden in order to purge the country of involvement in al-Qaeda's terrorist attacks, he used to invite visitors to the laboratory where he was developing high quality seeds appropriate for Africa. According to Lawrence Wright's book, The Looming Tower, bin Laden claimed the Dutch had a monopoly on the best banana pods, and he thought Muslims should devote similar diligence to the process of genetically engineering plants.

     Whether children live in the city or the suburbs, they can develop an appreciation for how farmers around the world produce the food they eat. An earlier post, "The Bees and the Birds," tells how the pollination process for producing fruits and nuts relies on bees. Why do radio stations like WGN have farm reports telling how much soybeans are selling for? Farmers who know corn is going for $6 a bushel figure the cost of growing a bushel of corn to see if they can make a profit. (An earlier post, "Dairy Cows on the Moove," discusses the costs and income of cows.) Children cannot see the sensors embedded in some fields that monitor when water is needed or the drip irrigation methods other fields use to prevent water loss to wind, runoff, and evaporation. But on a drive in rural areas, they may see the long arms of machines irrigating a dry field. At petting zoos, kids can get up close to goats, and at state and county fairs, they can see prize winning animals and produce. In fall, they might visit a farm for a hay ride or walk through a corn maze.

     Away from video games and trash littered highways, in the country, children and adults come face to face with their interrelationship with the natural environment.