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<font size=3><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050124fa_fact" eudora="autourl">http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050124fa_fact<br>
</a>THE COMING WARS<br>
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH<br>
What the Pentagon can now do in secret. <br>
Issue of 2005-01-24 and 31<br>
Posted 2005-01-17<br><br>
George W. Bush’s reëlection was not his only victory last fall. The
President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control
over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and
covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second
World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious
agenda for using that controlagainst the mullahs in Iran and against
targets in the ongoing war on terrorismduring his second term. The
C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly
serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put
it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President Bush and
Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way.<br><br>
Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the Bush
Administration has not reconsidered its basic long-range policy goal in
the Middle East: the establishment of democracy throughout the region.
Bush’s reëlection is regarded within the Administration as evidence of
America’s support for his decision to go to war. It has reaffirmed the
position of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon’s civilian leadership
who advocated the invasion, including Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy
Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-secretary for Policy.
According to a former high-level intelligence official, Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after
the election and told them, in essence, that the naysayers had been heard
and the American people did not accept their message. Rumsfeld added that
America was committed to staying in Iraq and that there would be no
second-guessing. <br><br>
“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush
Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former
high-level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the
Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are,
are the enemy. This is the last hurrahwe’ve got four years, and want to
come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”<br><br>
Bush and Cheney may have set the policy, but it is Rumsfeld who has
directed its implementation and has absorbed much of the public criticism
when things went wrongwhether it was prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib or
lack of sufficient armor plating for G.I.s’ vehicles in Iraq. Both
Democratic and Republican lawmakers have called for Rumsfeld’s dismissal,
and he is not widely admired inside the military. Nonetheless, his
reappointment as Defense Secretary was never in doubt. <br><br>
Rumsfeld will become even more important during the second term. In
interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I
was told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential
election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld’s responsibility. The war on
terrorism would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagon’s
control. The President has signed a series of findings and executive
orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units
to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as
many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia. <br><br>
The President’s decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the
booksfree from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current
law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a
Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence
committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the
nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted
assassinations of foreign leaders.) “The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated
to report any of this to Congress,” the former high-level intelligence
official said. “They don’t even call it ‘covert ops’it’s too close to
the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it’s ‘black reconnaissance.’ They’re
not even going to tell the cincs”the regional American military
commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not
respond to requests for comment on this story.)<br><br>
In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target
was Iran. “Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting
Iran. Look at Iraq,’” the former intelligence official told me. “But they
say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learnednot militarily, but how we did it
politically. We’re not going to rely on agency pissants.’ No loose ends,
and that’s why the C.I.A. is out of there.”<br>
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For more than a year, France, Germany, Britain, and other countries in
the European Union have seen preventing Iran from getting a nuclear
weapon as a race against timeand against the Bush Administration. They
have been negotiating with the Iranian leadership to give up its
nuclear-weapons ambitions in exchange for economic aid and trade
benefits. Iran has agreed to temporarily halt its enrichment programs,
which generate fuel for nuclear power plants but also could produce
weapons-grade fissile material. (Iran claims that such facilities are
legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or N.P.T., to which it
is a signator, and that it has no intention of building a bomb.) But the
goal of the current round of talks, which began in December in Brussels,
is to persuade Tehran to go further, and dismantle its machinery. Iran
insists, in return, that it needs to see some concrete benefits from the
Europeansoil-production technology, heavy-industrial equipment, and
perhaps even permission to purchase a fleet of Airbuses. (Iran has been
denied access to technology and many goods owing to sanctions.)
<br><br>
The Europeans have been urging the Bush Administration to join in these
negotiations. The Administration has refused to do so. The civilian
leadership in the Pentagon has argued that no diplomatic progress on the
Iranian nuclear threat will take place unless there is a credible threat
of military action. “The neocons say negotiations are a bad deal,” a
senior official of the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.) told
me. “And the only thing the Iranians understand is pressure. And that
they also need to be whacked.”<br><br>
The core problem is that Iran has successfully hidden the extent of its
nuclear program, and its progress. Many Western intelligence agencies,
including those of the United States, believe that Iran is at least three
to five years away from a capability to independently produce nuclear
warheadsalthough its work on a missile-delivery system is far more
advanced. Iran is also widely believed by Western intelligence agencies
and the I.A.E.A. to have serious technical problems with its weapons
system, most notably in the production of the hexafluoride gas needed to
fabricate nuclear warheads. <br><br>
A retired senior C.I.A. official, one of many who left the agency
recently, told me that he was familiar with the assessments, and
confirmed that Iran is known to be having major difficulties in its
weapons work. He also acknowledged that the agency’s timetable for a
nuclear Iran matches the European estimatesassuming that Iran gets no
outside help. “The big wild card for us is that you don’t know who is
capable of filling in the missing parts for them,” the recently retired
official said. “North Korea? Pakistan? We don’t know what parts are
missing.”<br><br>
One Western diplomat told me that the Europeans believed they were in
what he called a “lose-lose position” as long as the United States
refuses to get involved. “France, Germany, and the U.K. cannot succeed
alone, and everybody knows it,” the diplomat said. “If the U.S. stays
outside, we don’t have enough leverage, and our effort will collapse.”
The alternative would be to go to the Security Council, but any
resolution imposing sanctions would likely be vetoed by China or Russia,
and then “the United Nations will be blamed and the Americans will say,
‘The only solution is to bomb.’”<br><br>
A European Ambassador noted that President Bush is scheduled to visit
Europe in February, and that there has been public talk from the White
House about improving the President’s relationship with America’s E.U.
allies. In that context, the Ambassador told me, “I’m puzzled by the fact
that the United States is not helping us in our program. How can
Washington maintain its stance without seriously taking into account the
weapons issue?”<br><br>
The Israeli government is, not surprisingly, skeptical of the European
approach. Silvan Shalom, the Foreign Minister, said in an interview last
week in Jerusalem,with another New Yorker journalist, “I don’t like
what’s happening. We were encouraged at first when the Europeans got
involved. For a long time, they thought it was just Israel’s problem. But
then they saw that the [Iranian] missiles themselves were longer range
and could reach all of Europe, and they became very concerned. Their
attitude has been to use the carrot and the stickbut all we see so far
is the carrot.” He added, “If they can’t comply, Israel cannot live with
Iran having a nuclear bomb.”<br><br>
In a recent essay, Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert who is the deputy
director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (and a
supporter of the Administration), articulated the view that force, or the
threat of it, was a vital bargaining tool with Iran. Clawson wrote that
if Europe wanted coöperation with the Bush Administration it “would do
well to remind Iran that the military option remains on the table.” He
added that the argument that the European negotiations hinged on
Washington looked like “a preëmptive excuse for the likely breakdown of
the E.U.-Iranian talks.” In a subsequent conversation with me, Clawson
suggested that, if some kind of military action was inevitable, “it would
be much more in Israel’s interestand Washington’sto take covert action.
The style of this Administration is to use overwhelming force‘shock and
awe.’ But we get only one bite of the apple.”<br><br>
There are many military and diplomatic experts who dispute the notion
that military action, on whatever scale, is the right approach. Shahram
Chubin, an Iranian scholar who is the director of research at the Geneva
Centre for Security Policy, told me, “It’s a fantasy to think that
there’s a good American or Israeli military option in Iran.” He went on,
“The Israeli view is that this is an international problem. ‘You do it,’
they say to the West. ‘Otherwise, our Air Force will take care of it.’”
In 1981, the Israeli Air Force destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor, setting
its nuclear program back several years. But the situation now is both
more complex and more dangerous, Chubin said. The Osirak bombing “drove
the Iranian nuclear-weapons program underground, to hardened, dispersed
sites,” he said. “You can’t be sure after an attack that you’ll get away
with it. The U.S. and Israel would not be certain whether all the sites
had been hit, or how quickly they’d be rebuilt. Meanwhile, they’d be
waiting for an Iranian counter-attack that could be military or terrorist
or diplomatic. Iran has long-range missiles and ties to Hezbollah, which
has dronesyou can’t begin to think of what they’d do in
response.”<br><br>
Chubin added that Iran could also renounce the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty. “It’s better to have them cheating within the system,” he said.
“Otherwise, as victims, Iran will walk away from the treaty and
inspections while the rest of the world watches the N.P.T. unravel before
their eyes.”<br>
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The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions
inside Iran at least since last summer. Much of the focus is on the
accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian
nuclear, chemical, and missile sites, both declared and suspected. The
goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such
targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term
commando raids. “The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and
destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible,” the
government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told me.<br><br>
Some of the missions involve extraordinary coöperation. For example, the
former high-level intelligence official told me that an American commando
task force has been set up in South Asia and is now working closely with
a group of Pakistani scientists and technicians who had dealt with
Iranian counterparts. (In 2003, the I.A.E.A. disclosed that Iran had been
secretly receiving nuclear technology from Pakistan for more than a
decade, and had withheld that information from inspectors.) The American
task force, aided by the information from Pakistan, has been penetrating
eastern Iran from Afghanistan in a hunt for underground installations.
The task-force members, or their locally recruited agents, secreted
remote detection devicesknown as snifferscapable of sampling the
atmosphere for radioactive emissions and other evidence of
nuclear-enrichment programs. <br><br>
Getting such evidence is a pressing concern for the Bush Administration.
The former high-level intelligence official told me, “They don’t want to
make any W.M.D. intelligence mistakes, as in Iraq. The Republicans can’t
have two of those. There’s no education in the second kick of a mule.”
The official added that the government of Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani
President, has won a high price for its coöperationAmerican assurance
that Pakistan will not have to hand over A. Q. Khan, known as the father
of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, to the I.A.E.A. or to any other international
authorities for questioning. For two decades, Khan has been linked to a
vast consortium of nuclear-black-market activities. Last year, Musharraf
professed to be shocked when Khan, in the face of overwhelming evidence,
“confessed” to his activities. A few days later, Musharraf pardoned him,
and so far he has refused to allow the I.A.E.A. or American intelligence
to interview him. Khan is now said to be living under house arrest in a
villa in Islamabad. “It’s a deala trade-off,” the former high-level
intelligence official explained. “‘Tell us what you know about Iran and
we will let your A. Q. Khan guys go.’ It’s the neoconservatives’ version
of short-term gain at long-term cost. They want to prove that Bush is the
anti-terrorism guy who can handle Iran and the nuclear threat, against
the long-term goal of eliminating the black market for nuclear
proliferation.”<br><br>
The agreement comes at a time when Musharraf, according to a former
high-level Pakistani diplomat, has authorized the expansion of Pakistan’s
nuclear-weapons arsenal. “Pakistan still needs parts and supplies, and
needs to buy them in the clandestine market,” the former diplomat said.
“The U.S. has done nothing to stop it.”<br><br>
There has also been close, and largely unacknowledged, coöperation with
Israel. The government consultant with ties to the Pentagon said that the
Defense Department civilians, under the leadership of Douglas Feith, have
been working with Israeli planners and consultants to develop and refine
potential nuclear, chemical-weapons, and missile targets inside Iran.
(After Osirak, Iran situated many of its nuclear sites in remote areas of
the east, in an attempt to keep them out of striking range of other
countries, especially Israel. Distance no longer lends such protection,
however: Israel has acquired three submarines capable of launching cruise
missiles and has equipped some of its aircraft with additional fuel
tanks, putting Israeli F-16I fighters within the range of most Iranian
targets.) <br><br>
“They believe that about three-quarters of the potential targets can be
destroyed from the air, and a quarter are too close to population
centers, or buried too deep, to be targeted,” the consultant said.
Inevitably, he added, some suspicious sites need to be checked out by
American or Israeli commando teamsin on-the-ground surveillancebefore
being targeted. <br><br>
The Pentagon’s contingency plans for a broader invasion of Iran are also
being updated. Strategists at the headquarters of the U.S. Central
Command, in Tampa, Florida, have been asked to revise the military’s war
plan, providing for a maximum ground and air invasion of Iran. Updating
the plan makes sense, whether or not the Administration intends to act,
because the geopolitics of the region have changed dramatically in the
last three years. Previously, an American invasion force would have had
to enter Iran by sea, by way of the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Oman; now
troops could move in on the ground, from Afghanistan or Iraq. Commando
units and other assets could be introduced through new bases in the
Central Asian republics.<br><br>
It is possible that some of the American officials who talk about the
need to eliminate Iran’s nuclear infrastructure are doing so as part of a
propaganda campaign aimed at pressuring Iran to give up its weapons
planning. If so, the signals are not always clear. President Bush, who
after 9/11 famously depicted Iran as a member of the “axis of evil,” is
now publicly emphasizing the need for diplomacy to run its course. “We
don’t have much leverage with the Iranians right now,” the President said
at a news conference late last year. “Diplomacy must be the first choice,
and always the first choice of an administration trying to solve an issue
of . . . nuclear armament. And we’ll continue to press on
diplomacy.”<br><br>
In my interviews over the past two months, I was given a much harsher
view. The hawks in the Administration believe that it will soon become
clear that the Europeans’ negotiated approach cannot succeed, and that at
that time the Administration will act. “We’re not dealing with a set of
National Security Council option papers here,” the former high-level
intelligence official told me. “They’ve already passed that wicket. It’s
not if we’re going to do anything against Iran. They’re doing
it.”<br><br>
The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least
temporarily derail, Iran’s ability to go nuclear. But there are other,
equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me
that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging
a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling
of the religious leadership. “Within the soul of Iran there is a struggle
between secular nationalists and reformers, on the one hand, and, on the
other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic movement,” the consultant told me.
“The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is
shattered, and with it the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian
regime will collapse”like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East
Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief,
he said.<br><br>
“The idea that an American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would
produce a popular uprising is extremely illinformed,” said Flynt
Leverett, a Middle East scholar who worked on the National Security
Council in the Bush Administration. “You have to understand that the
nuclear ambition in Iran is supported across the political spectrum, and
Iranians will perceive attacks on these sites as attacks on their
ambitions to be a major regional player and a modern nation that’s
technologically sophisticated.” Leverett, who is now a senior fellow at
the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, at the Brookings Institution,
warned that an American attack, if it takes place, “will produce an
Iranian backlash against the United States and a rallying around the
regime.”<br>
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Rumsfeld planned and lobbied for more than two years before getting
Presidential authority, in a series of findings and executive orders, to
use military commandos for covert operations. One of his first steps was
bureaucratic: to shift control of an undercover unit, known then as the
Gray Fox (it has recently been given a new code name), from the Army to
the Special Operations Command (socom), in Tampa. Gray Fox was formally
assigned to socom in July, 2002, at the instigation of Rumsfeld’s office,
which meant that the undercover unit would have a single commander for
administration and operational deployment. Then, last fall, Rumsfeld’s
ability to deploy the commandos expanded. According to a Pentagon
consultant, an Execute Order on the Global War on Terrorism (referred to
throughout the government as gwot) was issued at Rumsfeld’s direction.
The order specifically authorized the military “to find and finish”
terrorist targets, the consultant said. It included a target list that
cited Al Qaeda network members, Al Qaeda senior leadership, and other
high-value targets. The consultant said that the order had been cleared
throughout the national-security bureaucracy in Washington.<br><br>
In late November, 2004, the Times reported that Bush had set up an
interagency group to study whether it “would best serve the nation” to
give the Pentagon complete control over the C.I.A.’s own élite
paramilitary unit, which has operated covertly in trouble spots around
the world for decades. The panel’s conclusions, due in February, are
foregone, in the view of many former C.I.A. officers. “It seems like it’s
going to happen,” Howard Hart, who was chief of the C.I.A.’s Paramilitary
Operations Division before retiring in 1991, told me. <br><br>
There was other evidence of Pentagon encroachment. Two former C.I.A.
clandestine officers, Vince Cannistraro and Philip Giraldi, who publish
Intelligence Brief, a newsletter for their business clients, reported
last month on the existence of a broad counter-terrorism Presidential
finding that permitted the Pentagon “to operate unilaterally in a number
of countries where there is a perception of a clear and evident terrorist
threat. . . . A number of the countries are friendly to the U.S. and are
major trading partners. Most have been cooperating in the war on
terrorism.” The two former officers listed some of the countriesAlgeria,
Sudan, Yemen, Syria, and Malaysia. (I was subsequently told by the former
high-level intelligence official that Tunisia is also on the
list.)<br><br>
Giraldi, who served three years in military intelligence before joining
the C.I.A., said that he was troubled by the military’s expanded covert
assignment. “I don’t think they can handle the cover,” he told me.
“They’ve got to have a different mind-set. They’ve got to handle new
roles and get into foreign cultures and learn how other people think. If
you’re going into a village and shooting people, it doesn’t matter,”
Giraldi added. “But if you’re running operations that involve finesse and
sensitivity, the military can’t do it. Which is why these kind of
operations were always run out of the agency.” I was told that many
Special Operations officers also have serious misgivings. <br><br>
Rumsfeld and two of his key deputies, Stephen Cambone, the
Under-secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and Army Lieutenant General
William G. (Jerry) Boykin, will be part of the chain of command for the
new commando operations. Relevant members of the House and Senate
intelligence committees have been briefed on the Defense Department’s
expanded role in covert affairs, a Pentagon adviser assured me, but he
did not know how extensive the briefings had been. <br><br>
“I’m conflicted about the idea of operating without congressional
oversight,” the Pentagon adviser said. “But I’ve been told that there
will be oversight down to the specific operation.” A second Pentagon
adviser agreed, with a significant caveat. “There are reporting
requirements,” he said. “But to execute the finding we don’t have to go
back and say, ‘We’re going here and there.’ No nitty-gritty detail and no
micromanagement.”<br><br>
The legal questions about the Pentagon’s right to conduct covert
operations without informing Congress have not been resolved. “It’s a
very, very gray area,” said Jeffrey H. Smith, a West Point graduate who
served as the C.I.A.’s general counsel in the mid-nineteen-nineties.
“Congress believes it voted to include all such covert activities carried
out by the armed forces. The military says, ‘No, the things we’re doing
are not intelligence actions under the statute but necessary military
steps authorized by the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to “prepare the
battlefield.”’” Referring to his days at the C.I.A., Smith added, “We
were always careful not to use the armed forces in a covert action
without a Presidential finding. The Bush Administration has taken a much
more aggressive stance.”<br><br>
In his conversation with me, Smith emphasized that he was unaware of the
military’s current plans for expanding covert action. But he said,
“Congress has always worried that the Pentagon is going to get us
involved in some military misadventure that nobody knows
about.”<br><br>
Under Rumsfeld’s new approach, I was told, U.S. military operatives would
be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy
contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some
cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be
recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists. This could
potentially involve organizing and carrying out combat operations, or
even terrorist activities. Some operations will likely take place in
nations in which there is an American diplomatic mission, with an
Ambassador and a C.I.A. station chief, the Pentagon consultant said. The
Ambassador and the station chief would not necessarily have a need to
know, under the Pentagon’s current interpretation of its reporting
requirement.<br><br>
The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it
calls “action teams” in the target countries overseas which can be used
to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. “Do you remember the
right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?” the former high-level
intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that
committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. “We founded them and
we financed them,” he said. “The objective now is to recruit locals in
any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.” A
former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando
capabilities, said, “We’re going to be riding with the bad
boys.”<br><br>
One of the rationales for such tactics was spelled out in a series of
articles by John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval
Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, and a consultant on
terrorism for the rand corporation. “It takes a network to fight a
network,” Arquilla wrote in a recent article in the San Francisco
Chronicle: <br><br>
When conventional military operations and bombing failed to defeat the
Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya in the 1950s, the British formed teams of
friendly Kikuyu tribesmen who went about pretending to be terrorists.
These “pseudo gangs,” as they were called, swiftly threw the Mau Mau on
the defensive, either by befriending and then ambushing bands of fighters
or by guiding bombers to the terrorists’ camps. What worked in Kenya a
half-century ago has a wonderful chance of undermining trust and
recruitment among today’s terror networks. Forming new pseudo gangs
should not be difficult. <br><br>
“If a confused young man from Marin County can join up with Al Qaeda,”
Arquilla wrote, referring to John Walker Lindh, the twenty-year-old
Californian who was seized in Afghanistan, “think what professional
operatives might do.”<br><br>
A few pilot covert operations were conducted last year, one Pentagon
adviser told me, and a terrorist cell in Algeria was “rolled up” with
American help. The adviser was referring, apparently, to the capture of
Ammari Saifi, known as Abderrezak le Para, the head of a North African
terrorist network affiliated with Al Qaeda. But at the end of the year
there was no agreement within the Defense Department about the rules of
engagement. “The issue is approval for the final authority,” the former
high-level intelligence official said. “Who gets to say ‘Get this’ or ‘Do
this’?”<br><br>
A retired four-star general said, “The basic concept has always been
solid, but how do you insure that the people doing it operate within the
concept of the law? This is pushing the edge of the envelope.” The
general added, “It’s the oversight. And you’re not going to get
Warner”John Warner, of Virginia, the chairman of the Senate Armed
Services Committee“and those guys to exercise oversight. This whole
thing goes to the Fourth Deck.” He was referring to the floor in the
Pentagon where Rumsfeld and Cambone have their offices. <br><br>
“It’s a finesse to give power to Rumsfeldgiving him the right to act
swiftly, decisively, and lethally,” the first Pentagon adviser told me.
“It’s a global free-fire zone.”<br>
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The Pentagon has tried to work around the limits on covert activities
before. In the early nineteen-eighties, a covert Army unit was set up and
authorized to operate overseas with minimal oversight. The results were
disastrous. The Special Operations program was initially known as
Intelligence Support Activity, or I.S.A., and was administered from a
base near Washington (as was, later, Gray Fox). It was established soon
after the failed rescue, in April, 1980, of the American hostages in
Iran, who were being held by revolutionary students after the Islamic
overthrow of the Shah’s regime. At first, the unit was kept secret from
many of the senior generals and civilian leaders in the Pentagon, as well
as from many members of Congress. It was eventually deployed in the
Reagan Administration’s war against the Sandinista government, in
Nicaragua. It was heavily committed to supporting the Contras. By the
mid-eighties, however, the I.S.A.’s operations had been curtailed, and
several of its senior officers were courtmartialled following a series of
financial scandals, some involving arms deals. The affair was known as
“the Yellow Fruit scandal,” after the code name given to one of the
I.S.A.’s cover organizationsand in many ways the group’s procedures laid
the groundwork for the Iran-Contra scandal.<br><br>
Despite the controversy surrounding Yellow Fruit, the I.S.A. was kept
intact as an undercover unit by the Army. “But we put so many
restrictions on it,” the second Pentagon adviser said. “In I.S.A., if you
wanted to travel fifty miles you had to get a special order. And there
were certain areas, such as Lebanon, where they could not go.” The
adviser acknowledged that the current operations are similar to those two
decades earlier, with similar risksand, as he saw it, similar reasons
for taking the risks. “What drove them then, in terms of Yellow Fruit,
was that they had no intelligence on Iran,” the adviser told me. “They
had no knowledge of Tehran and no people on the ground who could prepare
the battle space.”<br><br>
Rumsfeld’s decision to revive this approach stemmed, once again, from a
failure of intelligence in the Middle East, the adviser said. The
Administration believed that the C.I.A. was unable, or unwilling, to
provide the military with the information it needed to effectively
challenge stateless terrorism. “One of the big challenges was that we
didn’t have Humint”human intelligence“collection capabilities in areas
where terrorists existed,” the adviser told me. “Because the C.I.A.
claimed to have such a hold on Humint, the way to get around them, rather
than take them on, was to claim that the agency didn’t do Humint to
support Special Forces operations overseas. The C.I.A. fought it.”
Referring to Rumsfeld’s new authority for covert operations, the first
Pentagon adviser told me, “It’s not empowering military intelligence.
It’s emasculating the C.I.A.”<br><br>
A former senior C.I.A. officer depicted the agency’s eclipse as
predictable. “For years, the agency bent over backward to integrate and
coördinate with the Pentagon,” the former officer said. “We just caved
and caved and got what we deserved. It is a fact of life today that the
Pentagon is a five-hundred-pound gorilla and the C.I.A. director is a
chimpanzee.”<br><br>
There was pressure from the White House, too. A former C.I.A.
clandestine-services officer told me that, in the months after the
resignation of the agency’s director George Tenet, in June, 2004, the
White House began “coming down critically” on analysts in the C.I.A.’s
Directorate of Intelligence (D.I.) and demanded “to see more support for
the Administration’s political position.” Porter Goss, Tenet’s successor,
engaged in what the recently retired C.I.A. official described as a
“political purge” in the D.I. Among the targets were a few senior
analysts who were known to write dissenting papers that had been
forwarded to the White House. The recently retired C.I.A. official said,
“The White House carefully reviewed the political analyses of the D.I. so
they could sort out the apostates from the true believers.” Some senior
analysts in the D.I. have turned in their resignationsquietly, and
without revealing the extent of the disarray. <br>
<img src="http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/images/spacer.gif" width=5 height=5 alt="[]"><br><br>
The White House solidified its control over intelligence last month, when
it forced last-minute changes in the intelligence-reform bill. The
legislation, based substantially on recommendations of the 9/11
Commission, originally gave broad powers, including authority over
intelligence spending, to a new national-intelligence director. (The
Pentagon controls roughly eighty per cent of the intelligence budget.) A
reform bill passed in the Senate by a vote of 96-2. Before the House
voted, however, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld balked. The White House
publicly supported the legislation, but House Speaker Dennis Hastert
refused to bring a House version of the bill to the floor for a
voteostensibly in defiance of the President, though it was widely
understood in Congress that Hastert had been delegated to stall the bill.
After intense White House and Pentagon lobbying, the legislation was
rewritten. The bill that Congress approved sharply reduced the new
director’s power, in the name of permitting the Secretary of Defense to
maintain his “statutory responsibilities.” Fred Kaplan, in the online
magazine Slate, described the real issues behind Hastert’s action,
quoting a congressional aide who expressed amazement as White House
lobbyists bashed the Senate bill and came up “with all sorts of ludicrous
reasons why it was unacceptable.”<br><br>
“Rummy’s plan was to get a compromise in the bill in which the Pentagon
keeps its marbles and the C.I.A. loses theirs,” the former high-level
intelligence official told me. “Then all the pieces of the puzzle fall in
place. He gets authority for covert action that is not attributable, the
ability to directly task national-intelligence assets”including the many
intelligence satellites that constantly orbit the world. <br><br>
“Rumsfeld will no longer have to refer anything through the government’s
intelligence wringer,” the former official went on. “The intelligence
system was designed to put competing agencies in competition. What’s
missing will be the dynamic tension that insures everyone’s prioritiesin
the C.I.A., the D.O.D., the F.B.I., and even the Department of Homeland
Securityare discussed. The most insidious implication of the new system
is that Rumsfeld no longer has to tell people what he’s doing so they can
ask, ‘Why are you doing this?’ or ‘What are your priorities?’ Now he can
keep all of the mattress mice out of
it.”<img src="http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/images/dingbat.gif" alt="[]"><br><br>
<br>
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