At Captain’s Quarters, a member of the intelligence community writes in describing his experience with the wall that was observed before 9/11 against sharing intelligence about terrorists:
From 1984 until 2002, I worked as a contractor doing mainly threat assessment and projection for most of the USG intelligence services but primarily CIA, DIA, Air Force and ONI. I assert that the main point about the Wall is that it was not a memo or a directive — it was a culture. There were many walls, throughout the Intelligence Community, as well as between the Intelligence Community and Law Enforcement. Most of these were of long standing and existed for good reasons — security and protecting civil liberties. But under Clinton, all the walls got taller and new ones were added.
The reason for all this was that the Clinton Adminstration viewed the Intelligence Community much more as a source of potential embarrassment than as a trusted advisor. . . .Not believing there were critical national security issuses for which the support the Intelligence Community was vital; acutely concerned about the potential for scandals and political embarassements . . . , and having a strong personal distaste for the whole business, Clinton set out to reduce the risk that the Intelligence Community could do him harm by making it as difficult as possible for the Intelligence Community to do anything. He did this thru his appointments, seeing to it that political animals and risk-adverse adminstrators got key postions; by changing the rules by which intelligence could be collected — for example, banning using people with crimnal associations or “human rights abusers” as HUMINT sources, which meant that no one in the Intelligence Community could talk to a disaffected terrorist; a huge blow that badly hurt our ability to keep tabs on terrorist organiszation after 1998 — and by building walls.
To give you a concrete example of how far the “Wall” culture went, I offer the following personal anecdote:
In Oct 1999, my group, of which I was lead analyst, was given a task to evaluate threats from about 6-8 different countries. State-sponsored terrorism was one of the threats. In our proposal, we argued that evaluating state-sponsored terrorism without considering the actual terrorists organizations themselves made little sense. . . .
All such projects have a kickoff meeting where we and the customers go over the analysis plan in detail, discussing data issues, security issues, potential problems and limitations, and the scope of the conclusions we expect to be able to produce. Attending our kickoff meeting were us, the DIA team for whom we were doing the analysis, and a CIA rep acting a liaison. Everything went great until the topic of terrorists came up.
At once, the DIA guys explained that maybe they’d been too optimistic about the “wall” issue. Our tasking included suggestions for threat mitigation, and since that was clearly counter-terrorism in this case, that was right out. We can’t give any counter-terrorist advice, they flatly said. OK, we said, what about assessment?
That depends, they replied.
So we starting giving them examples of things we thought we might be able to say. No, we can’t say that, they would say, it still sounds too much like advice.
Well, what about this? we’d ask. Maybe not, they’d say, such-&-such organization vets those kind of conclusions; they’re the experts and we can’t step on their charter.
This went on for more than an hour and finally, somewhat exasperated, we asked them exactly what we could say; what type of conclusions we were allowed to draw. At this point, the DIA guys and CIA rep got together and basically gave us a dump on who in the government was doing what with respect to terrorism and what the rules of cooperation [or lack of it] were. At one point, they started talking about an organization we recognized as being in DIA. Wait a minute! we said, those guys are DIA! If they are working that, then we can say this and this and this!
“Yeah,” the head DIA guy said, a bit sheepishly, “they are DIA, but they’re a different part of DIA and we can’t talk to them.” . . .
We blinked a few times, and then all consideration of terrorism was dropped from the task. . . .
That is what Clinton and Gorelik’s Wall culture did. It just didn’t just prevent more effective cooperation and data sharing; it prevented the whole question of terrorism being addressed in a coherent fashion at all. No one was working the problem effectively, but I bet they all thought — just like we were told – that someone else was. That’s the “I thought you brought the matches” school of intelligence analysis, and that was the end effect of Clinton’s intelligence policy: it turned the whole process of intelligence into one big game of “Who brought the matches?”
And on 9/11 we found out who: Al Qaeda brought the matches.
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