[Peace-discuss] CIA recruiting free food at !!! one world (fwd)

[Carl Estabrook]

[I posted this before, but it never appeared.  --CGE]

On Sat, 13 Nov 2004, jencart wrote:

> Actually, aren't we in favor of increasing the success of the FBI and
> CIA in foiling terrorist plots?  So recruiting brainy, multi-lingual
> folks for those jobs makes sense, tho' it seems a weird way to do it....

[If they were doing the sort of police work that would be part of a
serious approach to terrorism (at least equally important would be
lessening the offenses that produce terrorist responses), then that would
be fine.  But they aren't. Instead, they're producing those offenses.
--CGE]

	Abolish the CIA!
	by Chalmers Johnson

Steve Coll ends his important book on Afghanistan by quoting Afghan
President Hamid Karzai: "What an unlucky country." Americans might find
this a convenient way to ignore what their government did in Afghanistan
between 1979 and the present, but luck had nothing to do with it. Brutal,
incompetent, secret operations of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency,
frequently manipulated by the military intelligence agencies of Pakistan
and Saudi Arabia, caused the catastrophic devastation of this poor
country. On the evidence contained in Coll's book Ghost Wars, neither the
Americans nor their victims in numerous Muslim and Third World countries
will ever know peace until the Central Intelligence Agency has been
abolished.

It should by now be generally accepted that the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979 was deliberately provoked by the United
States. In his memoir published in 1996, the former CIA director Robert
Gates made it clear that the American intelligence services began to aid
the mujahidin guerrillas not after the Soviet invasion, but six months
before it. In an interview two years later with Le Nouvel Observateur,
President Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski proudly
confirmed Gates' assertion. "According to the official version of
history," Brzezinski said, "CIA aid to the mujahidin began during 1980,
that's to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan. But the reality,
kept secret until now, is completely different: on 3 July 1979 President
Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the
pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And on the same day, I wrote a note to the
president in which I explained that in my opinion this aid would lead to a
Soviet military intervention."

Asked whether he in any way regretted these actions, Brzezinski replied:
"Regret what? The secret operation was an excellent idea. It drew the
Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? On the day
that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President
Carter, saying, in essence: 'We now have the opportunity of giving to the
USSR its Vietnam War.'"

Nouvel Observateur: "And neither do you regret having supported Islamic
fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?"

Brzezinski: "What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the
collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of
Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?"

Even though the demise of the Soviet Union owes more to Mikhail Gorbachev
than to Afghanistan's partisans, Brzezinski certainly helped produce
"agitated Muslims," and the consequences have been obvious ever since.
Carter, Brzezinski and their successors in the Reagan and first Bush
administrations, including Gates, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld,
Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, and Colin Powell, all
bear some responsibility for the 1.8 million Afghan casualties, 2.6
million refugees, and 10 million unexploded land-mines that followed from
their decisions. They must also share the blame for the blowback that
struck New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. After all, al-Qaida
was an organization they helped create and arm.

A Wind Blows in from Afghanistan

The term "blowback" first appeared in a classified CIA post-action report
on the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953, carried out in the
interests of British Petroleum. In 2000, James Risen of the New York Times
explained: "When the Central Intelligence Agency helped overthrow Muhammad
Mossadegh as Iran's prime minister in 1953, ensuring another 25 years of
rule for Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, the CIA was already figuring that its
first effort to topple a foreign government would not be its last. The
CIA, then just six years old and deeply committed to winning the Cold War,
viewed its covert action in Iran as a blueprint for coup plots elsewhere
around the world, and so commissioned a secret history to detail for
future generations of CIA operatives how it had been done ... Amid the
sometimes curious argot of the spy world -- 'safebases' and 'assets' and
the like -- the CIA warns of the possibilities of 'blowback.' The word ...
has since come into use as shorthand for the unintended consequences of
covert operations."

"Blowback" does not refer simply to reactions to historical events but
more specifically to reactions to operations carried out by the U.S.
government that are kept secret from the American public and from most of
their representatives in Congress. This means that when civilians become
victims of a retaliatory strike, they are at first unable to put it in
context or to understand the sequence of events that led up to it. Even
though the American people may not know what has been done in their name,
those on the receiving end certainly do: they include the people of Iran
(1953), Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1959 to the present), Congo (1960), Brazil
(1964), Indonesia (1965), Vietnam (1961-73), Laos (1961-73), Cambodia
(1969-73), Greece (1967-73), Chile (1973), Afghanistan (1979 to the
present), El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua (1980s), and Iraq (1991 to
the present). Not surprisingly, sometimes these victims try to get even.

There is a direct line between the attacks on September 11, 2001 -- the
most significant instance of blowback in the history of the CIA -- and the
events of 1979. In that year, revolutionaries threw both the Shah and the
Americans out of Iran, and the CIA, with full presidential authority,
began its largest ever clandestine operation: the secret arming of Afghan
freedom fighters to wage a proxy war against the Soviet Union, which
involved the recruitment and training of militants from all over the
Islamic world. Steve Coll's book is a classic study of blowback and is a
better, fuller reconstruction of this history than the Final Report of the
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (the "9/11
Commission Report" published by Norton in July).

>From 1989 to 1992, Coll was the Washington Post's South Asia bureau chief,
based in New Delhi. Given the CIA's paranoid and often self-defeating
secrecy, what makes his book especially interesting is how he came to know
what he claims to know. He has read everything on the Afghan insurgency
and the civil wars that followed, and has been given access to the
original manuscript of Robert Gates' memoir (Gates was CIA director from
1991 to 1993), but his main source is some two hundred interviews
conducted between the autumn of 2001 and the summer of 2003 with numerous
CIA officials as well as politicians, military officers, and spies from
all the countries involved except Russia. He identifies CIA officials only
if their names have already been made public. Many of his most important
interviews were on the record and he quotes from them extensively.

Among the notable figures who agreed to be interviewed are Benazir Bhutto,
who is candid about having lied to American officials for two years about
Pakistan's aid to the Taliban, and Anthony Lake, the US national security
adviser from 1993 to 1997, who lets it be known that he thought CIA
director James Woolsey was "arrogant, tin-eared and brittle." Woolsey was
so disliked by Clinton that when an apparent suicide pilot crashed a
single-engine Cessna airplane on the south lawn of the White House in
1994, jokers suggested it might be the CIA director trying to get an
appointment with the President.

Among the CIA people who talked to Coll are Gates; Woolsey; Howard Hart,
Islamabad station chief in 1981; Clair George, former head of clandestine
operations; William Piekney, Islamabad station chief from 1984 to 1986;
Cofer Black, Khartoum station chief in the mid-1990s and director of the
Counterterrorist Center from 1999-2002; Fred Hitz, a former CIA Inspector
General; Thomas Twetten, Deputy Director of Operations, 1991-1993; Milton
Bearden, chief of station at Islamabad, 1986 -1989; Duane R. "Dewey"
Clarridge, head of the Counterterrorist Center from 1986 to 1988; Vincent
Cannistraro, an officer in the Counterterrorist Center shortly after it
was opened in 1986; and an official Coll identifies only as "Mike," the
head of the "bin Laden Unit" within the Counterterrorist Center from 1997
to 1999, who was subsequently revealed to be Michael F. Scheuer, the
anonymous author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on
Terror. (See Eric Lichtblau, CIA Officer Denounces Agency and Sept. 11
Report)

In 1973, General Sardar Mohammed Daoud, the cousin and brother-in-law of
King Zahir Shah, overthrew the king, declared Afghanistan a republic, and
instituted a program of modernization. Zahir Shah went into exile in Rome.
These developments made possible the rise of the People's Democratic Party
of Afghanistan, a pro-Soviet communist party, which, in early 1978, with
extensive help from the USSR, overthrew President Daoud. The communists'
policies of secularization in turn provoked a violent response from devout
Islamists. The anti-Communist revolt that began at Herat in western
Afghanistan in March 1979 originated in a government initiative to teach
girls to read. The fundamentalist Afghans opposed to this were supported
by a triumvirate of nations -- the U.S., Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia --
with quite diverse motives, but the U.S. didn't take these differences
seriously until it was too late. By the time the Americans woke up, at the
end of the 1990s, the radical Islamist Taliban had established its
government in Kabul. Recognized only by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the
United Arab Emirates, it granted Osama bin Laden freedom of action and
offered him protection from American efforts to capture or kill him.

Coll concludes: "The Afghan government that the United States eventually
chose to support beginning in the late autumn of 2001 -- a federation of
Massoud's organization [the Northern warlords], exiled intellectuals and
royalist Pashtuns -- was available for sponsorship a decade before, but
the United States could not see a reason then to challenge the
alternative, radical Islamist vision promoted by Pakistani and Saudi
intelligence . . . Indifference, lassitude, blindness, paralysis and
commercial greed too often shaped American foreign policy in Afghanistan
and South Asia during the 1990s."

Funding the Fundamentalists

The motives of the White House and the CIA were shaped by the Cold War: a
determination to kill as many Soviet soldiers as possible and the desire
to restore some aura of rugged machismo as well as credibility that U.S.
leaders feared they had lost when the Shah of Iran was overthrown. The CIA
had no intricate strategy for the war it was unleashing in Afghanistan.
Howard Hart, the agency's representative in the Pakistani capital, told
Coll that he understood his orders as: "You're a young man; here's your
bag of money, go raise hell. Don't fuck it up, just go out there and kill
Soviets." These orders came from a most peculiar American. William Casey,
the CIA's director from January 1981 to January 1987, was a Catholic
Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his
mansion, called "Maryknoll," on Long Island. He attended mass daily and
urged Christianity on anyone who asked his advice. Once settled as CIA
director under Reagan, he began to funnel covert action funds through the
Catholic Church to anti-Communists in Poland and Central America,
sometimes in violation of American law. He believed fervently that by
increasing the Catholic Church's reach and power he could contain
Communism's advance, or reverse it. From Casey's convictions grew the most
important U.S. foreign policies of the 1980s -- support for an
international anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan and sponsorship of state
terrorism in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

Casey knew next to nothing about Islamic fundamentalism or the grievances
of Middle Eastern nations against Western imperialism. He saw political
Islam and the Catholic Church as natural allies in the counter-strategy of
covert action to thwart Soviet imperialism. He believed that the USSR was
trying to strike at the U.S. in Central America and in the oil-producing
states of the Middle East. He supported Islam as a counter to the Soviet
Union's atheism, and Coll suggests that he sometimes conflated lay
Catholic organizations such as Opus Dei with the Muslim Brotherhood, the
Egyptian extremist organization, of which Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin
Laden's chief lieutenant, was a passionate member. The Muslim
Brotherhood's branch in Pakistan, the Jamaat-e-Islami, was strongly backed
by the Pakistani army, and Coll writes that Casey, more than any other
American, was responsible for welding the alliance of the CIA, Saudi
intelligence, and the army of General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistan's
military dictator from 1977 to 1988. On the suggestion of the Pakistani
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) organization, Casey went so far as to
print thousands of copies of the Koran, which he shipped to the Afghan
frontier for distribution in Afghanistan and Soviet Uzbekistan. He also
fomented, without presidential authority, Muslim attacks inside the USSR
and always held that the CIA's clandestine officers were too timid. He
preferred the type represented by his friend Oliver North.

Over time, Casey's position hardened into CIA dogma, which its agents,
protected by secrecy from ever having their ignorance exposed, enforced in
every way they could. The agency resolutely refused to help choose winners
and losers among the Afghan jihad's guerrilla leaders. The result,
according to Coll, was that "Zia-ul-Haq's political and religious agenda
in Afghanistan gradually became the CIA's own." In the era after Casey,
some scholars, journalists, and members of Congress questioned the
agency's lavish support of the Pakistan-backed Islamist general Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar, especially after he refused to shake hands with Ronald Reagan
because he was an infidel. But Milton Bearden, the Islamabad station chief
from 1986 to 1989, and Frank Anderson, chief of the Afghan task force at
Langley, vehemently defended Hekmatyar on the grounds that "he fielded the
most effective anti-Soviet fighters."

Even after the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988, the CIA
continued to follow Pakistani initiatives, such as aiding Hekmatyar's
successor, Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban. When Edmund McWilliams, the
State Department's special envoy to the Afghan resistance in 1988-89,
wrote that "American authority and billions of dollars in taxpayer funding
had been hijacked at the war's end by a ruthless anti-American cabal of
Islamists and Pakistani intelligence officers determined to impose their
will on Afghanistan," CIA officials denounced him and planted stories in
the embassy that he might be homosexual or an alcoholic. Meanwhile,
Afghanistan descended into one of the most horrific civil wars of the 20th
century. The CIA never fully corrected its naive and ill-informed reading
of Afghan politics until after bin Laden bombed the US embassies in
Nairobi and Dar es Salaam on August 7, 1998.

Fair-weather Friends

A co-operative agreement between the U.S. and Pakistan was anything but
natural or based on mutual interests. Only two weeks after radical
students seized the American Embassy in Tehran on November 5, 1979, a
similar group of Islamic radicals burned to the ground the American
Embassy in Islamabad as Zia's troops stood idly by. But the US was willing
to overlook almost anything the Pakistani dictator did in order to keep
him committed to the anti-Soviet jihad. After the Soviet invasion,
Brzezinski wrote to Carter: "This will require a review of our policy
toward Pakistan, more guarantees to it, more arms aid, and, alas, a
decision that our security policy toward Pakistan cannot be dictated by
our non-proliferation policy." History will record whether Brzezinski made
an intelligent decision in giving a green light to Pakistan's development
of nuclear weapons in return for assisting the anti-Soviet insurgency.

Pakistan's motives in Afghanistan were very different from those of the
U.S. Zia was a devout Muslim and a passionate supporter of Islamist groups
in his own country, in Afghanistan, and throughout the world. But he was
not a fanatic and had some quite practical reasons for supporting Islamic
radicals in Afghanistan. He probably would not have been included in the
U.S. Embassy's annual "beard census" of Pakistani military officers, which
recorded the number of officer graduates and serving generals who kept
their beards in accordance with Islamic traditions as an unobtrusive
measure of increasing or declining religious radicalism -- Zia had only a
moustache.

>From the beginning, Zia demanded that all weapons and aid for the Afghans
from whatever source pass through ISI hands. The CIA was delighted to
agree. Zia feared above all that Pakistan would be squeezed between a
Soviet-dominated Afghanistan and a hostile India. He also had to guard
against a Pashtun independence movement that, if successful, would break
up Pakistan. In other words, he backed the Islamic militants in
Afghanistan and Pakistan on religious grounds but was quite prepared to
use them strategically. In doing so, he laid the foundations for
Pakistan's anti-Indian insurgency in Kashmir in the 1990s.

Zia died in a mysterious plane crash on August 17, 1988, four months after
the signing of the Geneva Accords on April 14, 1988, which ratified the
formal terms of the Soviet withdrawal. As the Soviet troops departed,
Hekmatyar embarked on a clandestine plan to eliminate his rivals and
establish his Islamic party, dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, as the
most powerful national force in Afghanistan. The U.S. scarcely paid
attention, but continued to support Pakistan. With the fall of the Berlin
Wall in 1989 and the implosion of the USSR in 1991, the U.S. lost
virtually all interest in Afghanistan. Hekmatyar was never as good as the
CIA thought he was, and with the creation in 1994 of the Taliban, both
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia transferred their secret support. This new group
of jihadis proved to be the most militarily effective of the warring
groups. On September 26, 1996, the Taliban conquered Kabul. The next day
they killed the formerly Soviet-backed President Najibullah, expelled
8,000 female undergraduate students from Kabul University, and fired a
similar number of women schoolteachers. As the mujahidin closed in on his
palace, Najibullah told reporters: "If fundamentalism comes to
Afghanistan, war will continue for many years. Afghanistan will turn into
a center of world smuggling for narcotic drugs. Afghanistan will be turned
into a center for terrorism." His comments would prove all too accurate.

Pakistan's military intelligence officers hated Benazir Bhutto, Zia's
elected successor, but she, like all post-Zia heads of state, including
General Pervez Musharraf, supported the Taliban in pursuit of Zia's
"dream" -- a loyal, Pashtun-led Islamist government in Kabul. Coll
explains:

    "Every Pakistani general, liberal or religious, believed in the
jihadists by 1999, not from personal Islamic conviction, in most cases,
but because the jihadists had proved themselves over many years as the one
force able to frighten, flummox and bog down the Hindu-dominated Indian
army. About a dozen Indian divisions had been tied up in Kashmir during
the late 1990s to suppress a few thousand well-trained, paradise-seeking
Islamist guerrillas. What more could Pakistan ask? The jihadist guerrillas
were a more practical day-to-day strategic defense against Indian hegemony
than even a nuclear bomb. To the west, in Afghanistan, the Taliban
provided geopolitical 'strategic depth' against India and protection from
rebellion by Pakistan's own restive Pashtun population. For Musharraf, as
for many other liberal Pakistani generals, jihad was not a calling, it was
a professional imperative. It was something he did at the office. At
quitting time he packed up his briefcase, straightened the braid on his
uniform, and went home to his normal life."

If the CIA understood any of this, it never let on to its superiors in
Washington, and Charlie Wilson, a highly paid Pakistani lobbyist and
former congressman for East Texas, was anything but forthcoming with
Congress about what was really going on. During the 1980s, Wilson had used
his power on the House Appropriations Committee to supply all the advanced
weapons the CIA might want in Afghanistan. Coll remarks that Wilson "saw
the mujahidin through the prism of his own whisky-soaked romanticism, as
noble savages fighting for freedom, as almost biblical figures." Hollywood
is now making a movie, based on the book Charlie Wilson's War by George
Crile, glorifying the congressman who "used his trips to the Afghan
frontier in part to impress upon a succession of girlfriends how powerful
he was." Tom Hanks has reportedly signed on to play him.

Enter bin Laden and the Saudis

Saudi Arabian motives were different from those of both the U.S. and
Pakistan. Saudi Arabia is, after all, the only modern nation-state created
by jihad. The Saudi royal family, which came to power at the head of a
movement of Wahhabi religious fundamentalists, espoused Islamic radicalism
in order to keep it under their control, at least domestically.
"Middle-class, pious Saudis flush with oil wealth," Coll writes, "embraced
the Afghan cause as American churchgoers might respond to an African
famine or a Turkish earthquake": "The money flowing from the kingdom
arrived at the Afghan frontier in all shapes and sizes: gold jewelry
dropped on offering plates by merchants' wives in Jedda mosques; bags of
cash delivered by businessmen to Riyadh charities as zakat, an annual
Islamic tithe; fat checks written from semi-official government accounts
by minor Saudi princes; bountiful proceeds raised in annual telethons led
by Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh." Richest of all were the annual
transfers from the Saudi General Intelligence Department, or Istakhbarat,
to the CIA's Swiss bank accounts.

>From the moment agency money and weapons started to flow to the mujahidin
in late 1979, Saudi Arabia matched the U.S. payments dollar for dollar.
They also bypassed the ISI and supplied funds directly to the groups in
Afghanistan they favored, including the one led by their own pious young
millionaire, Osama bin Laden. According to Milton Bearden, private Saudi
and Arab funding of up to $25 million a month flowed to Afghan Islamist
armies. Equally important, Pakistan trained between 16,000 and 18,000
fresh Muslim recruits on the Afghan frontier every year, and another 6,500
or so were instructed by Afghans inside the country beyond ISI control.
Most of these eventually joined bin Laden's private army of 35,000 "Arab
Afghans."

Much to the confusion of the Americans, moderate Saudi leaders, such as
Prince Turki, the intelligence chief, supported the Saudi backing of
fundamentalists so long as they were in Afghanistan and not in Saudi
Arabia. A graduate of a New Jersey prep school and a member of Bill
Clinton's class of 1964 at Georgetown University, Turki belongs to the
pro-Western, modernizing wing of the Saudi royal family. (He is the
current Saudi ambassador to Great Britain and Ireland.) But that did not
make him pro-American. Turki saw Saudi Arabia in continual competition
with its powerful Shia neighbor, Iran. He needed credible Sunni, pro-Saudi
Islamist clients to compete with Iran's clients, especially in countries
like Pakistan and Afghanistan, which have sizeable Shia populations.

Prince Turki was also irritated by the U.S. loss of interest in
Afghanistan after its Cold War skirmish with the Soviet Union. He
understood that the U.S. would ignore Saudi aid to Islamists so long as
his country kept oil prices under control and cooperated with the Pentagon
on the building of military bases. Like many Saudi leaders, Turki probably
underestimated the longer term threat of Islamic militancy to the Saudi
royal house, but, as Coll observes, "Prince Turki and other liberal
princes found it easier to appease their domestic Islamist rivals by
allowing them to proselytize and make mischief abroad than to confront and
resolve these tensions at home." In Riyadh, the CIA made almost no effort
to recruit paid agents or collect intelligence. The result was that Saudi
Arabia worked continuously to enlarge the ISI's proxy jihad forces in both
Afghanistan and Kashmir, and the Saudi Ministry for the Propagation of
Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the kingdom's religious police, tutored
and supported the Taliban's own Islamic police force.

By the late 1990s, after the embassy bombings in East Africa, the CIA and
the White House awoke to the Islamist threat, but they defined it almost
exclusively in terms of Osama bin Laden's leadership of al-Qaida and
failed to see the larger context. They did not target the Taliban,
Pakistani military intelligence, or the funds flowing to the Taliban and
al-Qaida from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Instead, they
devoted themselves to trying to capture or kill bin Laden. Coll's chapters
on the hunt for the al-Qaida leader are entitled, "You Are to Capture Him
Alive," "We Are at War," and "Is There Any Policy?" but he might more
accurately have called them "Keystone Kops" or "The Gang that Couldn't
Shoot Straight."

On February 23 1998, bin Laden summoned newspaper and TV reporters to the
camp at Khost that the CIA had built for him at the height of the
anti-Soviet jihad. He announced the creation of a new organization -- the
International Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders -- and
issued a manifesto saying that "to kill and fight Americans and their
allies, whether civilian or military, is an obligation for every Muslim
who is able to do so in any country." On August 7, he and his associates
put this manifesto into effect with devastating truck bombings of the U.S.
Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

The CIA had already identified bin Laden's family compound in the open
desert near Kandahar Airport, a collection of buildings called Tarnak
Farm. It's possible that more satellite footage has been taken of this
site than of any other place on earth; one famous picture seems to show
bin Laden standing outside one of his wives' homes. The agency conceived
an elaborate plot to kidnap bin Laden from Tarnak Farm with the help of
Afghan operatives and spirit him out of the country but CIA director
George Tenet cancelled the project because of the high risk of civilian
casualties; he was resented within the agency for his timidity. Meanwhile,
the White House stationed submarines in the northern Arabian Sea with the
map co-ordinates of Tarnak Farm preloaded into their missile guidance
systems. They were waiting for hard evidence from the CIA that bin Laden
was in residence.

Within days of the East Africa bombings, Clinton signed a top secret
Memorandum of Notification authorizing the CIA to use lethal force against
bin Laden. On 20 August 1998, he ordered 75 cruise missiles, costing
$750,000 each, to be fired at the Zawhar Kili camp (about seven miles
south of Khost), the site of a major al-Qaida meeting. The attack killed
21 Pakistanis but bin Laden was forewarned, perhaps by Saudi intelligence.
Two of the missiles fell short into Pakistan, causing Islamabad to
denounce the U.S. action. At the same time, the U.S. fired 13 cruise
missiles into a chemical plant in Khartoum: the CIA claimed that the plant
was partly owned by bin Laden and that it was manufacturing nerve gas.
They knew none of this was true.

Clinton had publicly confessed to his sexual liaison with Monica Lewinsky
on August 17, and many critics around the world conjectured that both
attacks were diversionary measures. (The film Wag the Dog had just come
out, in which a president in the middle of an election campaign is charged
with molesting a Girl Scout and makes it seem as if he's gone to war
against Albania to distract people's attention.) As a result Clinton
became more cautious, and he and his aides began seriously to question the
quality of CIA information. The U.S. bombing in May 1999 of the Chinese
Embassy in Belgrade, allegedly because of faulty intelligence, further
discredited the agency. A year later, Tenet fired one intelligence officer
and reprimanded six managers, including a senior official, for their
bungling of that incident.

The Clinton administration made two more attempts to get bin Laden. During
the winter of 1998-99, the CIA confirmed that a large party of Persian
Gulf dignitaries had flown into the Afghan desert for a falcon-hunting
party, and that bin Laden had joined them. The CIA called for an attack on
their encampment until Richard Clarke, Clinton's counter-terrorism aide,
discovered that among the hosts of the gathering was royalty from the
United Arab Emirates. Clarke had been instrumental in a 1998 deal to sell
80 F-16 military jets to the UAE, which was also a crucial supplier of oil
and gas to America and its allies. The strike was called off.

The CIA as a Secret Presidential Army

Throughout the 1990s, the Clinton administration devoted major resources
to the development of a long-distance drone aircraft called Predator,
invented by the former chief designer for the Israeli air force, who had
emigrated to the United States. In its nose was mounted a Sony digital TV
camera, similar to the ones used by news helicopters reporting on freeway
traffic or on O.J. Simpson's fevered ride through Los Angeles. By the turn
of the century, Agency experts had also added a Hellfire anti-tank missile
to the Predator and tested it on a mock-up of Tarnak Farm in the Nevada
desert. This new weapons system made it possible instantly to kill bin
Laden if the camera spotted him. Unfortunately for the CIA, on one of its
flights from Uzbekistan over Tarnak Farm the Predator photographed as a
target a child's wooden swing. To his credit, Clinton held back on using
the Hellfire because of the virtual certainty of killing bystanders, and
Tenet, scared of being blamed for another failure, suggested that
responsibility for the armed Predator's use be transferred to the Air
Force.

When the new Republican administration came into office, it was deeply
uninterested in bin Laden and terrorism even though the outgoing national
security adviser, Sandy Berger, warned Condoleezza Rice that it would be
George W. Bush's most serious foreign policy problem. On August 6, 2001,
the CIA delivered its daily briefing to Bush at his ranch in Crawford,
Texas, with the headline "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.," but the
president seemed not to notice. Slightly more than a month later, Osama
bin Laden successfully brought off perhaps the most significant example of
asymmetric warfare in the history of international relations.

Coll has written a powerful indictment of the CIA's myopia and
incompetence, but he seems to be of two minds. He occasionally indulges in
flights of pro-CIA rhetoric, describing it, for example, as a "vast,
pulsing, self-perpetuating, highly sensitive network on continuous alert"
whose "listening posts were attuned to even the most isolated and dubious
evidence of pending attacks" and whose "analysts were continually
encouraged to share information as widely as possible among those with
appropriate security clearances." This is nonsense: the early-warning
functions of the CIA were upstaged decades ago by covert operations.

Coll acknowledges that every president since Truman, once he discovered
that he had a totally secret, financially unaccountable private army at
his personal disposal, found its deployment irresistible. But covert
operations usually became entangled in hopeless webs of secrecy, and
invariably led to more blowback. Richard Clarke argues that "the CIA used
its classification rules not only to protect its agents but also to
deflect outside scrutiny of its covert operations," and Peter Tomsen, the
former US ambassador to the Afghan resistance during the late 1980s,
concludes that "America's failed policies in Afghanistan flowed in part
from the compartmented, top secret isolation in which the CIA always
sought to work." Excessive, bureaucratic secrecy lies at the heart of the
Agency's failures.

Given the Agency's clear role in causing the disaster of September 11,
2001, what we need today is not a new intelligence czar but an end to the
secrecy behind which the CIA hides and avoids accountability for its
actions. To this day, in the wake of 9/11 and the false warnings about a
threat from Iraq, the CIA continues grossly to distort any and all
attempts at a Constitutional foreign policy. Although Coll doesn't go on
to draw the conclusion, I believe the CIA has outlived any Cold War
justification it once might have had and should simply be abolished.

[Chalmers Johnson's latest books are Blowback (Metropolitan, 2000) and The
Sorrows of Empire (Metropolitan, 2004), the first two volumes in a trilogy
on American imperial policies. The final volume is now being written. From
1967 to 1973, Johnson served as a consultant to the CIA's Office of
National Estimates.]