Spy nation: does the vast, immensely expensive, and largely unaccountable centralized intelligence system created by the Bush administration really make us safer?

Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, a radical Islamic cleric residing in Milan, was on his way to the mosque for noon prayers when he was seized by several men and stuffed into a van. From there he was taken to the U.S. Air Force Base in Aviano, and flown to Egypt, where he was imprisoned for more than a year and tortured at the hands of interrogators who have distinguished themselves--even in the Middle East--for their pitiless brutality. Eventually released to house arrest after the questioning yielded nothing of value, the imam was able to make a phone call describing his experience to his wife.

Nasr, who is also known as Abu Omar, is a veteran of mujahideen training camps in Bosnia. At the time of his abduction from Milan in February 2003, Nasr was under surveillance by Italian authorities, who were trying to learn of contacts between the radical imam--an Egyptian who had been given refugee status in Italy--and terrorist cells in Europe. Nasr's disappearance wrecked the Italian terrorist investigation.

There was little mystery about the identity of those who had seized Nasr. The abductors--a team of up to 22 CIA operatives--were about as stealthy as a homecoming parade. According to the Washington Post, the snatch squad conducted most of its communications via nonsecure cellphones, permitting the Italians to re-trace all of their movements.

They also left behind a thick paper trail of "hotel registries, car rental receipts, electronic highway toll passes and other documents" that were used to identify the Americans, at least one of whom was positively identified as a CIA officer. The operatives spent extravagant sums at some of Milan's most luxurious hotels, such as the Principe di Savoia, "where a single room costs $588 a night, a club sandwich goes for $28.75 and a Diet Coke adds another $9.35," noted the Chicago Tribune. "The CIA's bill at the Principe for seven operatives came to $39,995, not counting meals, parking and other hotel services. Another group of seven operatives spent $40,098 on room charges at the Westin Palace, a five-star hotel across the Piazza della Repupplica from the Principe."

One of the advertised functions of the CIA is to provide timely, reliable intelligence not only to the president and key congressional policymakers, but also--when necessary and appropriate--to close allies, like the Italians. Yet a few weeks after Nasr's abduction, the CIA told Italy's counterterrorism police "that it had reliable information that the cleric ... had fled to an unknown location in the Balkans," related the December 6, 2005 Washington Post. This clumsy and implausible disinformation gambit was intended to throw the Italian authorities off the trail of the CIA's snatch squad, but it didn't work.

In July of last year, prosecutors and judges in Milan issued arrest warrants--enforceable throughout the entire 25-nation European Union--for 22 CIA operatives, including the head of the CIA's substation in Milan, all of whom were charged with kidnapping and other crimes. The scandal arising from the abduction helped undermine former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, head of one of the few foreign governments that strongly supported the Bush administration. It severely compromised the CIA's ability to operate in and around Italy. And it wrecked outfight an Italian counterterrorism effort into what may be an active Islamic terrorist network in Europe.

The CIA is designed to conduct covert operations and collect intelligence. But the conduct of the CIA's snatch squad was hardly covert, and the agency displayed little intelligence in its incompetent efforts to cover up the mess it had made in Milan.

Seeing in the Dark

Until the creation of the CIA through the 1947 National Intelligence Act, the U.S. didn't have a permanent intelligence agency. The task of collecting intelligence on foreign threats was carried out by portions of the State Department and War Department (which in that year was reorganized as the Department of Defense). With the emergence of the Soviet Union as a long-term geo-strategic threat, the Truman administration insisted that it was necessary to create a centralized department to gather, analyze, and collate intelligence; thus the CIA was born.

At the time of its founding, the CIA was advertised as apolitical, devoted to collecting the facts and providing them to policymakers; it was to be the very essence of patriotic professionalism. As the Milan caper illustrates, performance standards for field operatives have declined dramatically, which has to have a negative impact on the agency's ability to gather reliable intelligence. And that incident also illustrates how the CIA is increasingly involved in illegal undertakings such as "extraordinary rendition"--the seizure of suspects for delivery into the hands of regimes that practice torture. So the problem is much worse than simple ineptitude.

Furthermore, during the brief tenure of former CIA director Porter Goss--who had been an agency analyst and a chairman of the House Intelligence Committee prior to his appointment as Director of Central Intelligence--something akin to a purge took place.

Goss, who was a devoted ally of the White House, and an unabashed defender of the Iraq war, "brought with him to Langley a Praetorian Guard from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence," reported the January 4, 2005 Washington Post. Acting "at the behest of the White House," Goss and his underlings worked to remove officials considered politically unreliable from "the clandestine service, that component of the CIA that recruits and handles spies.... Since Goss's arrival in Langley, much of the senior management of the clandestine service has been fired or has quit, reportedly to be replaced with more compliant officials."

"Appointed to lead the agency in the midst of a heated presidential campaign, Goss's primary mission ... was to yank Langley onto President Bush's political team," reported the November 10, 2005 American Prospect (citing dozens of sources from the CIA, State Department, and other agencies). Within a year he had presided over the resignation of as many as 90 senior officials, driven agency morale to unprecedented lows, and "decimated" the agency's Near East Division, which plays a critical role in collecting and analyzing intelligence from the Muslim world.

"[Goss's] immediate goal in 2004 was to block what had been, until then, a stream of damaging leaks of information about CIA intelligence reports that ran contrary to the White House's rosy optimism about Iraq and U.S. anti-terrorism efforts," reported American Prospect. "More broadly, the Goss team clamped down on dissenting views and radically politicized the CIA's leadership. Even worse, say former agency officials, Goss has acquiesced in the dismantling of the CIA itself, which has bowed too easily to the supremacy of the new director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, who spent his days in Baghdad contradicting the CIA's clear-eyed battle reports."

Specifically, while in Baghdad Negroponte consistently downplayed the potential threat to U.S. forces posed by the Iraqi insurgency, while the CIA consistently warned that the insurrection would grow stronger and more violent. A suitable illustration of the Bush administration's priorities is found in the fact that it demoted the CIA for providing reliable, albeit politically unpalatable, intelligence about Iraq, while elevating the unreliable Negroponte to be our nation's first "Intelligence Czar."

The Czar's Domain

In October 2004, at the same time he appointed Porter Goss to head the CIA, President Bush signed into law the "National Intelligence Reform Act." That measure consolidated the so-called "intelligence community"--which employs more than 100,000 people scattered over 16 federal agencies with an annual budget of at least $40 billion, plus additional unspecified amounts provided off-the-books for classified projects. He later appointed Negroponte as the first Director of National Intelligence (DNI).

Negroponte describes his task as that of "remaking a loose confederation [of intelligence agencies] into a unified enterprise." This is in keeping with one of the major criticisms leveled at the intelligence community by the 9/11 Commission--namely, that critical information about the impending attacks had fallen victim to "turf wars" and arbitrary "walls" within the intelligence community.

As is pointed out elsewhere in this issue (see page 27), that contention, which is the basic premise of the 2004 reform measure, is entirely incorrect. Federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies--including the CIA--provided copious detailed advance information about the attacks.

The critical delinquency prior to 9/11 was not a lack of vital information, or even a failure to provide it to key decision makers. Rather, the problem--at least where the protection of the American people is concerned--was the lethal inaction of top-level leadership in Washington. Thus it could be seen as something akin to lunacy to centralize the process even further, thereby tightening the grip of the political class on the intelligence community. This would be tantamount to punishing the field agents, operatives, and analysts who had tried desperately to prevent the attack, while rewarding the policymaking elite that permitted it to occur.

And this is exactly what has happened. Under Negroponte, our nation now has, for the first time, a monolithic, centralized intelligence system. As outlined in the 2004 National Intelligence Reform Act, Negroponte commands a huge and expanding domain that includes the CIA (which is chiefly involved in "human intelligence," academic research, and covert operations), the NSA (which is primarily tasked with "signals intelligence"--cryptology, electronic surveillance, and the like), and the Defense Intelligence Agency. It also encompasses other, less-known intelligence bodies, such as the National Geospatial-intelligence Agency and National Reconnaissance Office.

The act also authorizes the use of "other offices within the Department of Defense for the collection of specialized national intelligence through reconnaissance programs." This category would include ad hoc programs such as the Office of Special Plans (OSP), a self-described "cabal" established within the Pentagon by civilian officials at the Pentagon who fed unreliable intelligence to President Bush about Saddam Hussein's arsenal and supposed connections to al-Qaeda. The CIA, significantly, disputed the OSP's sensational prewar reports on Iraq--another reason why the Bush administration has eviscerated the agency and integrated it into the monolith now headed by Negroponte.

Institutionalized Back-channels

One particularly troubling provision of the Intelligence Reform Act is that it authorizes not only the president, but also the DNI, to use any federal agency for intelligence-gathering or other covert operations. With a federal budget of nearly $3 trillion to play with, and myriad "elements" of federal agencies to hide in, this provision offers wide latitude for mischief.

That provision also creates a potential constitutional problem by permitting a presidential appointee--the DNI--acting with the consent of another appointee--the head of another executive branch agency--to redirect funds appropriated by Congress for specific purposes.

For example: if the DNI wanted to use "elements" within the Department of Agriculture to run a surveillance program or a covert operation, and he obtained the consent of the secretary of agriculture, he could operate the program without securing funds from Congress, and without congressional oversight. This isn't an entirely hypothetical scenario. During the 1980s the Reagan administration used subsidies offered through the Agricultural Department's Commodity Credit Corporation to help underwrite arms purchases by Saddam Hussein's regime at a time when Iraq was at war with Iran--exactly the kind of covert undertaking this provision of the 2004 Reform Act would permit.

President Bush granted DNI Negroponte another extravagant grant of power through a May 5 executive order assigning to him "the function of the President under section 13 (b)(3)(A) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended." That seemingly innocuous decree, pointed out the May 23 issue of Business Week, permits Negroponte"to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations."

Why is this so important? As the publication observed: "On the same day the President signed the [executive order], Porter Goss resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.... Only six days later, on May 11, USA Today reported that the National Security Agency had obtained millions of calling records of ordinary citizens provided by three major U.S. phone companies. Negroponte oversees both the CIA and NSA in his role as the administration's top intelligence official."

The ability to grant waivers of Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosures gives Negroponte a very useful tool in seeking to induce telecommunications firms and other corporate interests to cooperate with domestic surveillance initiatives. As Ron Suskind points out in his book The One Percent Doctrine, among the companies that eagerly turned over immense quantities of personal data to the feds after 9/11 were the telecom giants WorldCom and Global Crossing, both of which were mired in accounting scandals.

Former SEC enforcement chief William McLucas told Business Week that the ability to conceal financial information in the name of national security will likely lead some companies "to play fast and loose with the numbers.... It could be that you have a bunch of books and records out there that no one knows about" Negroponte is now in a position to court those corrupt corporations, offering SEC waivers in exchange for cooperation--even against the privacy interests of their customers.

The Intelligence Leviathan 

There was a time when the function of intelligence agencies was to tell the president and other decision-makers what was going on in the world, so that they could make wise choices about foreign policy. Under DNI Negroponte, however, we have a monolithic, thoroughly politicized intelligence system intended to validate the decisions made by the "war president," whether or not those decisions are rooted in a sound grasp of reality.

The new intelligence monolith endangers the public, rather than serving its interests. Apart from its increasing reliance on totalitarian methods of surveillance and interrogation that pose grave threats to the public (which are described in detail elsewhere in this issue), the new system all but ensures that critical decisions of war and peace will be made on the basis of unsound intelligence, and justified through the use of disinformation.

The national security system created during the Cold War was flawed in significant ways. Now that we are engaged in what we're told will be a decades-long "war on terror," Washington has created a larger, more powerful, and more centralized intelligence organ authorized to expand its mission and budget authority essentially at will. Coupled with the administration's doctrine of "unitary executive" power--under which the president claims the power to redefine laws and constitutional principles as he sees fit in the name of national security--the Bush-era intelligence leviathan offers substantial reason for concern that it may prove to be a greater menace to our liberties than the terrorist enemy it was supposedly created to destroy.

Intelligence Czar

by William Norman Grigg 

A Yale classmate of former CIA Director Porter Goss and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. John Negroponte has spent the last four decades serving as a "'utility infielder" for the power elite--dutifully performing whatever role is assigned to him. In 1968, as a protege of Henry Kissinger. Negroponte was tapped to serve as liaison officer between the U.S. and the North Vietnamese delegations at the Paris peace talks, although he resigned in 1973 to protest the lack of security guarantees to South Vietnam.

During the 1980s. Negroponte served as ambassador to Honduras, whose territory was used as a training ground and staging area for U.S.-backed rebels fighting Nicaragua's Marxist Sandinista junta. Worthy as the Nicaraguan regime was of extinction, many of the elements involved in the effort, as well as the counterinsurgency program in Honduras, were implicated in various abuses and atrocities, including narcotics smuggling and the murder of innocent noncombatants. A 1997 report by the CIA's inspector general concluded that during that time "the Honduran military committed hundreds of human rights abuses ... many of which were politically motivated and politically sanctioned" and "linked to death squads."

In 1989, Negroponte was appointed by the first President Bush as ambassador to Mexico, where he was instrumental in concluding negotiations for the North American Free Trade Agreement. He was tapped by the second President Bush to serve as UN ambassador. He was heavily involved in efforts to build a coalition for war in Iraq, although he relied less on persuasion than intimidation: he demanded that Chile and Mexico recall their UN representatives when they opposed the invasion of Iraq, and--according to numerous press accounts--arranged to conduct wiretaps and other surveillance of various UN delegations during the run-up to the war.

Following the invasion, Negroponte was chosen to serve as U.S. ambassador to Iraq, where he displayed a less-than-acute grasp of intelligence by dramatically understating the size, potency, and resilience of the anti-U.S. insurgency.

Senator Sgt. Schultz

by William Norman Grigg

Through no fault of his own, new CIA Director Michael Hayden bears an uncanny physical resemblance to Colonel Klink, Commandant of Stalag 13 in the 1960s sitcom Hogan's Heroes. During Hayden's May 18 Senate confirmation hearing, Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, performed a decent impression of Sgt. Schultz; Stalag 13's endearingly inept prison guard, whose reaction when exposed to the antics of the allied resistance cell at the stalag was to exclaim: "I see nothing! Nothing!"

The committee headed by Sen. Roberts is entrusted with the task of scrutinizing intelligence activities in order to ensure that they are not only effective in dealing with foreign threats, but that they are also legal and constitutional. The chairman's job is to act in the interests of the public. However, Sen. Roberts clearly believes that his role is to defend the intelligence community from both public scrutiny and criticism.

Prior to his nomination to head the CIA, Gen. Hayden had served as deputy director of the National Security Agency (NSA). in which capacity he headed the administration's illegal warrantless surveillance program. Roberts saw nothing--nothing!--amiss in the NSNs program, which he characterized as "tightly run and closely scrutinized." He waxed indignant, however, over the program's critics and the whistle-blowers who had disclosed the illegal wiretaps, insisting that "'largely uninformed critics" were implicated in a "grave breach of national security."

"I am a strong supporter of the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, and civil liberties," stated Roberts. "But you have no civil liberties if you are dead." All that stands between Americans and those who want to kill them are officials like Gen. Hayden. Roberts insisted, which is why we must simply grant them whatever powers the president sees fit to confer on them and then trust their judgment. "America can be proud of them." Roberts declared. "They deserve our support and thanks, not our suspicion."

The NSA's domestic surveillance program, depicted initially as a modest and contained effort dealing only with international communications, was actually an all-encompassing federal dragnet indiscriminately gathering phone calls, e-mails, and other communications from millions of Americans into one huge pool of data. Sen. Roberts, who claims that he has "been to the NSA and seen how the terrorist surveillance works," saw nothing--nothing!--improper in that arrangement, despite the fact that it unambiguously violated both the law and the Fourth Amendment.

The Bush administration maintains that the Justice Department, not Congress or the courts, is the only entity permitted to review the NSA's surveillance program. Yet on May 10, eight days before the Hayden hearing, the administration fatally undermined an inquiry into the NSA program by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility by refusing to grant security clearances to the attorneys who would investigate the agency's actions. This is the sort of thing that would attract the attention of a legitimate congressional watchdog. But luckily for the administration, the relevant Senate post was manned by Senator Roberts--or was that Sgt. Schultz?