Michael A. Walsh
The United States has the world’s largest and (at $80 billion a year) best-funded intelligence services in the world — some 17 of them, in fact, including such lesser-known outfits as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which helped lead Seal Team Six to Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan, and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
How much bang we’re getting for our buck from the big dogs of the intelligence community, though, is another matter — as the recent Libyan fiasco so vividly demonstrates.
The deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were a moral and military disgrace, bespeaking a failure of nerve and judgment at the highest levels. With significant military assets just a couple of hours away, the men were left to die.
Their deaths were a tragedy, but now the ensuing blame game threatens to devolve into farce.
Ever since UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s ludicrous assertion that the assault on the US consulate in Benghazi (which now appears to have been a CIA station operating under flimsy diplomatic cover) was provoked by an amateur video that lampooned Islam, various elements of the IC have been scrambling to assign blame — and protect the White House.
At various points, the CIA, the FBI and the useless Office of the Director of National Intelligence have either shouldered the responsibility or had fingers pointed at them for editing out references to al Qaeda’s role in the deadly assault from the unclassified talking points provided to Rice and others in the aftermath of the disaster.
Most recently, the hot potato has landed back where it began — at CIA, which remains in organizational turmoil after the sudden resignation of its director, David Petraeus.
According to a detailed report in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, all references to terrorism were edited out by dozens of busy beavers in Langley:
“A detailed examination of how US assessments were turned into the talking points reveals a highly cautious, bureaucratic process that had the effect of watering down the US’s own intelligence. The same process was slow to change conclusions when evidence shifted, in particular about links to al Qaeda and whether the attack grew out of a protest.”
According to the Journal, the report was deliberately watered down to protect the agency’s sources and investigative methods — as if it were top secret that CIA or the National Security Agency is constantly monitoring al Qaeda’s internal communications, or has agents embedded within terror cells.
Yet the talking points also included this fateful line: “The demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the US Embassy in Cairo.” Which we now know was a flat-out lie.
We expect our intel agencies to lie to our enemies — that’s part of their brief. But we don’t expect them to lie to Congress and the White House — which in any case had its own domestic political reasons for not wanting to ascribe the attack to al Qaeda.
But even “watering down” our own intelligence for bureaucratic CYA reasons is simply unacceptable. Unfortunately, it’s all too typical of the CIA — which has consistently bungled just about every major geopolitical development since it helped overthrow Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 and engineered a coup against Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz the next year.
Among other things, the agency failed to adequately assess the global threat posed by the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran and was caught by surprise when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed two years later. And how about those Iraqi weapons of mass destruction?
The Benghazi blunder illustrates why: While the Agency remains very good at collecting intelligence and providing payback against our foreign enemies, its in-house analysts are often too busy playing footsie with the Washington political and journalistic establishment to soberly and apolitically deliver the news.
So it’s no accident that another member of the IC, the Defense Intelligence Agency — which reports to the Pentagon — is beefing up its core of overseas “collection” agents as part of its new Defense Clandestine Service (announced back in April, but informally in existence for more than a decade). Essentially, the Pentagon now has a way to go around CIA if and when it feels the need for threat assessment unfiltered by a dysfunctional Langley bureaucracy.
It’s a sad commentary on a once-proud agency that it’s no longer trusted by the folks who have to put the military’s muscle behind the analysts’ mouths.
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