Intel Wars (31 page)

Intelligence officials in Washington admit that some of the fusion centers have proven to be better run and to produce better intelligence than others. The well-funded New York State Intelligence Center in Albany generally gets high marks for the above-average quality of its work. A number of senior intelligence officials in Washington heaped considerable praise on the reporting and analysis produced by the New York Police Department Intelligence Division, headed by David Cohen, the head of the CIA's clandestine service from 1995 to 1997. Studies produced over the past several years by the NYPD on how European countries are combating Muslim radicalization and how the Israeli police and security services handle counterterrorism were rated as being particularly insightful by DNI officials in Washington.

But since the first fusion center was opened in 2006, DHS has failed to regulate them. A number of senior intelligence officials admit that the quality of the intelligence reporting emanating from the fusion centers leaves much to be desired. At times it has been of such poor quality that it has proven to be embarrassing for intelligence officials in Washington. A senior DNI intelligence official recalled an incident in 2009, when one of his aides brought him a secret intelligence report produced by one of the Texas intelligence fusion centers that was lifted almost word for word from an ultraconservative Web site that openly advocated harsh measures to stem the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States. The incident was particularly mortifying for the official because his boss had earlier that day testified before the House intelligence oversight committee about the dramatic improvements that had been made in the quality of the analysis coming out of the U.S. intelligence community.

The crux of the problem is that these state and local intelligence fusion centers are not subject to the same rigorous fact-checking and editorial quality-control standards that are the norm in the U.S. intelligence community. According to a senior DHS official, the biggest problem that he has experienced is that these centers are run by cops who have little if any prior intelligence experience. “They don't know it; they don't understand it; and they don't want to do it,” the official stated in a recent interview. According to the DHS official, many of the state and local law enforcement officials who are in charge of the fusion centers have ruthlessly taken the money they get gratis from DHS and then, without informing Washington, have converted their centers from counterterrorism analysis to criminal investigation in clear violation of the intent behind the creation of the fusion centers.

The result is that much of what passes for intelligence coming out of the fusion centers has nothing to do with counterterrorism whatsoever. For example, the August 6, 2010, daily intelligence report issued by the Central Florida Intelligence Exchange, a state-run fusion center in Orlando, reported on its front page that
Dondi, an Asian elephant, had died suddenly at the Southwick Zoo
outside Boston, Massachusetts, at the ripe old age of thirty-six. The center reported Dondi's passing because during the winter months she performed at an establishment known as Flea World in Sanford, Florida, and the fusion center was using the report to alert state and local police that animal rights activists might stage protests at Flea World to mark her death in captivity.

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Its wartime counterpart, the President's Emergency Operations Center, located in the basement of the East Wing of the White House, is the ultramodern nuclear war bunker that houses many of the same command and communications systems found in the Sit Room.

*
A July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism found that “the arrest and prosecution by U.S. law enforcement of a small number of violent Islamic extremists inside the United States—who are becoming more connected ideologically, virtually, and/or in a physical sense to the global extremist movement—points to the possibility that others may become sufficiently radicalized that they will view the violence here as legitimate. We assess that this internal Muslim terrorist threat is not likely to be as severe as it is in Europe, however.”

CHAPTER 7

Distant Battlefields

Mission Creep and the U.S. Intelligence Community

All the business of war, and indeed the business of life, is to endeavor to find out what you don't know by what you do; that's what I called “guessing what was on the other side of the hill.”

—ARTHUR WELLESLEY, 1ST DUKE OF WELLINGTON

On June 5, 2010, just two weeks after Denny Blair had vacated the DNI's office at Liberty Crossing, President Obama appeared in the White House Rose Garden with his new pick to head the nation's intelligence community, retired U.S. Air Force Lt. General James R. Clapper Jr. Clapper and the president had met for the first time only a month earlier in a May 6 private meeting in the Oval Office, where Obama asked the general if he would take over as DNI. Clapper said yes, subject to the president letting him run his organization in his way.

Genial and easygoing, the sixty-nine-year-old Clapper had spent his entire forty-five-year career in intelligence, beginning as an air force lieutenant flying airborne signals intelligence collection missions over Laos and South Vietnam during the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Renowned for his sense of humor, Clapper hated bureaucracy and was not afraid to mix it up with his superiors. While head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Clapper clashed repeatedly with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for advocating that his agency and the rest of the Pentagon's intelligence organizations be placed under the command of the newly created office of the director of national intelligence. Rumsfeld, a fierce opponent of the creation of the DNI's office, and intelligence reform in general, rejected Clapper's proposal and forced him out of his post as head of NGA in June 2006.

Clapper did not have to wait long to get back into the game. In November 2006, President Bush forced Rumsfeld out of office and replaced him as secretary of defense with Robert M. Gates. Among Secretary Gates's first decisions was to completely overhaul the Pentagon's massive intelligence establishment, which was headed at the time by Stephen A. Cambone, whose reputation within the intelligence community left much to be desired. Cambone resigned in January 2007, and within days Gates nominated Clapper to replace Cambone as undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

With the exception of a few members of Congress who wanted a career civilian official at the helm of the intelligence community, President Obama's decision to nominate Clapper to be the new DNI was met with approval by the Washington establishment because of his long experience in the intelligence world. A now retired senior intelligence official who served under Clapper during the Bush administration said of him, “Jim's a really great guy. Funny, sharp-witted, completely apolitical, and smart as hell … He knows the intelligence business better than just about anybody I know.”

But there were those within the intelligence community, many of whom were angry about Denny Blair's firing, who were not happy with Clapper's nomination, largely because they viewed him as too committed to keeping the Pentagon's intelligence resources divorced from the control of the office of the DNI. One of Denny Blair's former aides warned, “Don't overestimate him [Clapper]. He seems warm and cuddly. But he's not the expert that everyone makes him out to be.”

Clapper inherited the same predicament as his predecessor sixteen months earlier, only he had more resources to play with. The U.S. intelligence community was slightly larger (210,000 people), and its annual budget had risen to $80.1 billion, equal to the combined amount spent by the U.S. Departments of Transportation and Education. Other government departments were having their budgets slashed, but not the intelligence community, which continued to get pretty much what it wanted. A May 2011 report to the president revealed that in addition to the money spent on intelligence, the U.S. government was spending $10.1 billion trying to keep its classified information a secret, which included the hefty sums currently being spent to upgrade the security of a variety of computer systems holding classified information in the aftermath of the massive leak of classified Pentagon and State Department documents to WikiLeaks in 2010.

But the intelligence community was still failing to get its sometimes contrarian views taken seriously within the Obama administration. For instance, the White House and the Pentagon were still locked in a contest of wills with the intelligence community about how the wars in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan were going. The intelligence community's view in the summer of 2010 was that they were not going well. The intelligence analysts at Liberty Crossing took the position that the military situations in both countries were largely locked in a stalemate, which was not what the White House or the Pentagon wanted to hear. Having promised to begin withdrawing U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan in July 2011, the Obama administration urgently needed some proof to demonstrate that progress was being made on these fronts. According to intelligence insiders, the White House and the Pentagon began following the Bush administration's penchant of ignoring or suppressing any information from the intelligence community that reflected negatively on how the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan were progressing, while at the same time spinning a message that dramatic progress was being made on the battlefield.

Today, the disconnect between what the White House and Pentagon are publicly saying and the stark reality on the battlefields in Afghanistan and Pakistan has once again become as apparent as it was during the Bush administration. Take for example the classified report submitted to President Obama on December 16, 2010, which concluded that the White House's strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan was “showing progress.” In Afghanistan, the report asserted, General David H. Petraeus, who arrived in Kabul in June 2010 to replace General Stanley A. McChrystal as commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, had managed to right the ship, and the Taliban's momentum had been “arrested in much of the country and reversed in some key areas.” In neighboring Pakistan, the report boldly announced, “significant progress [had been made] in disrupting and dismantling the Pakistan-based leadership and cadre of al-Qaeda over the past year.” Curiously, it said nothing about whether the Pakistani military and intelligence service had made any effort to go after Mullah Omar's Afghan Taliban forces hiding in the northern part of their country or had made any progress attacking the militant Pakistani Taliban strongholds in the FATA.

At almost the same time President Obama's status report was released, two highly classified National Intelligence Estimates on Afghanistan and Pakistan, which were prepared by the national intelligence officer for South Asia, Dr. Neil H. Joeck, were sent to Washington policymakers, contradicting much of what was contained in the unclassified version of the president's progress report. The intelligence estimate on Afghanistan painted a particularly bleak picture of the situation. According to the estimate, the “positive trends” that the White House was claiming were based solely on relatively minuscule improvements in the security status of five districts in Kandahar and Helmand provinces. The gains that had been made were extremely tenuous, leaving both provinces still very much up for grabs. In other key provinces, like Paktika in eastern Afghanistan, the report showed that the Taliban were still prevailing, with some districts in the province being 80–90 percent controlled by the insurgents. These were hardly impressive indicators of success. According to a Canadian intelligence officer interviewed after he returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan in the spring of 2011, the Taliban used the winter months to reinfiltrate hundreds of fighters into the districts cleared during the fall.

Left unsaid in the estimate was that it is now widely accepted inside the U.S. intelligence community that, barring a complete collapse of the Taliban from within, it is probably not possible to defeat them militarily, no matter how many more American troops are sent to Afghanistan. Not only were the Taliban continuing to gain strength and expand the scope and intensity of their operations, but their underground “shadow governments” were now probably dug in too deep to be uprooted, especially in the rural areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan.

If one accepts this basic premise, as many (but not all) intelligence officials do, then direct negotiations with Mullah Omar's Taliban are an unpalatable but necessary step if the war in Afghanistan is to be resolved. Secret peace negotiations with the Taliban are currently taking place outside of Afghanistan with Mullah Omar's representatives. The United States is directly involved in the talks, as well as a number of NATO governments and Hamid Karzai's Afghan regime. But the outcome of these talks is very much up in the air. With President Obama facing what promises to be a stiff reelection fight in 2012, there is only a very narrow window of opportunity to ink a deal with the Taliban, because no one seeking the Oval Office wants to be seen as negotiating with terrorists.

Pakistan remains an even more complex and perhaps intractable problem. According to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, President Obama's special adviser on Afghanistan and Pakistan, “Pakistan may be a knot that we may never be able to untangle.” The intelligence community's view was that the security situation in Pakistan, while significantly better than it was in 2009, was nowhere near as good as President Obama's progress report made it out to be.

According to the December 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, Pakistan remained a safe haven for virtually every major terrorist or insurgent group on the U.S. intelligence community's “Most Wanted” list. Osama bin Laden may be dead, killed in Abbottabad in northern Pakistan on May 1, 2011, but his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the rest of al Qaeda's leadership are still hiding in northern Pakistan. In the aftermath of the killing of bin Laden, questions are now being asked in the United States and Pakistan about whether the terrorist leader was protected by the ISI or elements of the Pakistani security forces. Mullah Mohammed Omar and the rest of the Afghan Taliban's leadership continue to operate freely inside Pakistan with the apparent blessing of the Pakistani government. Tens of thousands of heavily armed extremist fighters belonging to the Pakistani Taliban still control huge segments of the lawless tribal areas of northern Pakistan. Pakistan is also the home for over a dozen other homegrown terrorist groups, which the Pakistani government refuses to go after, despite intense pressure from the U.S. government, because almost all of them were created decades ago by the Pakistani intelligence service to serve as covert proxy foot soldiers in Pakistan's never-ending war against neighboring India over the disputed province of Kashmir.

Even with incessant pushing and prodding by Washington over the past three years, and the presence of 140,000 heavily armed Pakistani troops and paramilitary forces in the region, the Pakistani military seems unwilling to make a concerted effort to clear the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of the Pakistani Taliban and their Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda allies. The attacks that the Pakistani military made into the FATA in 2010 achieved very limited short-term gains, which the Pakistanis then promptly surrendered to the Taliban after their troops returned to their barracks. The frustration of the Obama White House with the Pakistani military was all too apparent in an earlier report sent to Congress in September 2010, which stated that “unless these challenges are overcome, the Government of Pakistan risks allowing the insurgency the opportunity to reestablish influence over a population that remains skeptical of its staying power.”

So the unmanned drone remains the only reliable weapon available to the U.S. intelligence community to go after al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan. In 2010, the CIA carried out 112 drone attacks on al Qaeda and Taliban targets in northern Pakistan, double the number of attacks in the previous year, according to figures published by the authoritative Web site
The Long War Journal
. These drone attacks proved to be far more lethal than in previous years, thanks to a new generation of technical intelligence sensors, such as automated cell phone intercept and unattended ground sensor systems, which have vastly shortened the interval between the time that an al Qaeda target was located in northern Pakistan and the time that a drone could put a missile on the target in the FATA. These new sources have also allowed the CIA to dramatically lessen its dependence on the Pakistani intelligence service, whose agent sources have become viewed at Langley as increasingly unreliable.

While the number of al Qaeda and Taliban fighters killed inside Pakistan jumped significantly in 2010, a small but vocal group of mid-level intelligence officials at DNI headquarters has argued that classified statistics showed that the vast majority of the militants being killed were low-level fighters, not high-level commanders. This argument is supported by a tally compiled by Reuters, which showed that the CIA drone strikes had killed about five hundred al Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban militants during the two-year period from May 2008 to May 2010. Of the five hundred dead, only fourteen were rated by the intelligence community as senior “high-value” al Qaeda or Taliban officials, and another twenty-five were rated as being mid-level al Qaeda militants.

Events that have taken place in Pakistan since the issuance of President Obama's December 2010 progress report reveal just how dangerous the situation had become. On December 16, 2010, the same day that the report was issued in Washington, the secret war in Pakistan claimed its most important victim. It wasn't a senior al Qaeda commander hit by a missile in the FATA. Nor was it a Taliban commander grabbed by a U.S. Special Forces “capture-kill” team.

The victim was Jonathan D. Bank, the CIA station chief in Islamabad. A veteran of several high-profile assignments in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world, Bank had replaced John Bennett as head of the Islamabad station in the summer of 2009.