The White House war with the CIA

Do you think the CIA maintains any real authority or power to carry out its mission of protecting national security?

It's such an imperial intelligence service, so focused on Washington, so attentive to the White House. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of the administration. That leads to intense demoralization inside the organization. Everybody working below the top level or two must feel very badly used and abused, misunderstood and pissed off. It's very dangerous to our national security because it means we don't have an intelligence service that can actually operate. That service is supposed to tell you what's really going on in the world. It hasn't done that; it's gotten us involved in a serious war that we're going to have a hell of a time getting out of. At the moment, I think our national security is more endangered by the consequences of the war in Iraq than anything else. And nobody can really tell at this stage what those consequences are going to be.

How did Donald Rumsfeld's creation of the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon affect the current state of the CIA, and U.S. intelligence?

They wanted the war so badly that they were doing everything they could to create pressure for it. With the Office of Special Plans, they were essentially saying to the CIA, "OK, you're not giving us what we want, so we're going to create a new CIA."

I think the agency is in terrible shape because of this. But there's something that's even much more important: It appears now that the CIA is actually incapable of operating in a hostile environment. It's afraid. It stands offshore, trying to listen with technical ears and to watch with technical eyes, but it appears that it is actually afraid to go into dangerous places. The institution is afraid of getting hurt, of getting caught.

Can you elaborate on this? How does this connect to the apparent control of the agency by the White House?

In some ways it's been developing in this direction for a long time. But the clearest indication I've seen lately is [Rep.] Porter Goss [R-Fla., the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee] getting pissed off at the CIA for taking all these funds that were supposed to be used to train officers to speak Arabic, and using them for computer translation programs for documents. I think it's a fearfulness of [committing assets to] operating on the ground. Do you think American CIA officers are wandering around the streets of Baghdad right now? Have you read the recent accounts of what it takes to get into the U.S. headquarters in the [so-called] Green Zone there? We have virtually no actual human contact -- we're trying to do this in some kind of technical, remote-control television-commanded way.

What does the Iraq war and the Bush administration's handling of U.S. intelligence resources mean for the broader fight against al-Qaida in dozens of other places around the globe?

Well, it seems we had a lot of things going right. We had the cooperation of much of the world, and could operate in many of those other places. But we largely abandoned that: We pulled back large numbers of intelligence officers who were working on al-Qaida, and turned them to working on Iraq.

We've had about 1,300 people working in the Iraq Survey Group [the intelligence operation set up by the U.S. in early Sept. to hunt WMD in Iraq], but now they're actually talking about abandoning the rest of David Kay's mission because supposedly we need all of those Arabic speakers just to translate documents. But look, the world doesn't unfold on paper, it unfolds between people talking to each other. You can't figure out what all these militants are doing by just constantly reading telephone transcripts and e-mails and other stuff like that. It's just crazy to think that will give us a full handle on terrorist activity.

So the CIA lacks key assets as well as the autonomy it needs to operate effectively.

We're trying to fight a political war in Iraq. I think we're missing real human assets, and the ability to actually conduct many necessary operations. I think there's a delusional dependence on technological solutions. It's kind of like saying, "Hey, we could really save a whole lot of money if we just don't have any more first-grade teachers, we'll just have computers in the classrooms instead, and the kids will punch buttons." I think there's a tendency toward that throughout our whole society. It's not a good way to actually engage things.

Why would the Bush administration really want to operate this way? Why would they think it's a good approach to recasting a foreign country -- and maybe the greater Mideast region?

I think they're ignorant, and were overcome with arrogance in the belief that American power could handle anything, could do anything. Donald Rumsfeld, who's allegedly a smart guy, apparently could not think beyond our ability to destroy Saddam Hussein's army. It seems that it never occurred to him that we would have a political problem afterward that would be complicated.

But recently we learned that the State Department had in fact developed a major report forecasting the political and logistic complications that would follow an invasion of Iraq.

Well, maybe it's that [Rumsfeld and other administration hawks] had nobody really to deal with it. We have practically nobody who can speak the language and we're running the country with teenagers carrying machine guns.

In July and August the city of Baghdad suffered approximately a thousand murders a month. Who was killing who? Do we even know the answer to that question? The tentative answer is, people were getting revenge, or it was petty crimes, etc. I don't believe it for a minute. Those people, whoever they were, were settling who's going to run the country, in kind of a clandestine way. Look back at the Vietnam War: After it was over we discovered that the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong had been running thousands of agents throughout South Vietnam. Thousands. The United States never had one agent reporting from high levels in North Vietnam, or inside the National Liberation Front, the Viet Cong -- not one.

So you're saying the U.S. post-invasion plan for Iraq -- already seemingly very thin -- has this same dangerous gap.

Yes, but we've almost never seen a mistake of this scale unfold in such vivid slow-motion. It's all there, right in front of us right now. We're walking around in that country with no idea what's going on around us. We can't understand any conversation, and we know so little. You may think I'm exaggerating -- and God willing I am. But I don't think so. We don't know who the enemy is, or who we're dealing with, and we can't talk to them. They could all be sitting in a room talking to each other right now about how to kill the Americans, and we would never know. I think an awful lot of that is going on over there as we speak.

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