[Mb-civic] Abolish the CIA!

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This is long so save it for when you've got 10-15 minutes--read and 
understand!

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1105-30.htm

Published on Friday, November 5, 2004 by TomDispatch.com  
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. From1967 
to 1973, Johnson served as a consultant to the CIA's Office of National 
Estimates. 

© 2004 Chalmers Johnson

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Action is the antidote to despair.  ----Joan Baez
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