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Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War!
How We Got Here
First we crippled the CIA. Then we blamed it.
BY TOM CLANCY
Tuesday, September 18, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT
We know now that America has been the victim of a large, well-planned, and
well-executed terrorist act. The parameters are yet to be fully explored, but
that won't stop the usual suspects from pontificating (and, yes, that
includes me) on what happened and what needs to be done as a result. A few
modest observations:
• As I write this we only know the rough outlines of what has taken place. We
do not know exactly who the perpetrators were, though we have heard from Vice
President Dick Cheney that there is "no question" that Osama bin Laden had a
role. But many groups may have been involved, and we do not know their
motivation, or for whom or for what particular objective they worked.
• "Don't know" means "don't know" and nothing more. Absent hard information,
talking about who it must have been and what we need to do about it is a
waste of air and energy. To discern the important facts, we have the Federal
Bureau of Investigation as our principal investigative agency, and the
Central Intelligence Agency (along with National Security Agency and the
Defense Intelligence Agency) as our principal foreign-intelligence services.
Getting the most important information is their job, not the job of the news
media, which will only repeat what they are told. Gathering this information
will take time, because we need to get it right.
• Terrorism is a political act, performed for political objectives. The
general aim of terrorism is to force changes in the targeted society through
the shock value of the crime committed. Therefore, if we make radical changes
in how our country operates, the bad guys win. We do not want that to happen.
Whoever planned this operation is watching us right now, and they are
probably having a pretty good laugh. We can't stop that. What we can do is to
maintain that which they most hate, which is a free society. We've worked too
hard to become what we are, and we can't allow a few savages to change it for
us.
Next, our job is to take a step back, take a deep breath and get to work
finding out who it was, where they are, and what to do about it.
Terrorism is a crime under the civil law when committed by domestic
terrorists; it can be an act of war when committed by foreigners. For
domestic criminals we have the FBI and police. For acts of war we have our
intelligence community and the military. In either case we have well-trained
people to do the work. If we let them do their job, and give them the support
they need, the job will get done as reliably as gravity.
The foreign-source option seems the most likely at this time. The first line
of defense in such a case is the intelligence community. The CIA is an agency
of about 18,000 employees, of whom perhaps 800 are field-intelligence
officers--that is, the people who go out on the street and learn what people
are thinking, not how many tanks they have parked outside (we have satellites
to photograph those).
I've been saying for a lot of years that this number is too small. American
society doesn't love its CIA, for the same reason that it doesn't always love
its cops. We too often regard them as a threat to ourselves rather than our
enemies. Perhaps these incidents will make us rethink that.
The best defense against terrorist incidents is to prevent them from
happening. You do that by finding out what a potential enemy is thinking
before he is able to act. What the field intelligence officers do is no
different from what Special Agent Joe Pistone of the FBI did when he
infiltrated the mafia under the cover name of Donnie Brasco. The purpose of
these operations is to find out what people are thinking and talking about.
However good your satellites are, they cannot see inside a human head. Only
people can go and do that.
But America, and especially the American news media, does not love the CIA in
general and the field spooks in particular. As recently as two weeks ago,
CBS's "60 Minutes" regaled us with the hoary old chestnut about how the CIA
undermined the leftist government of Chile three decades ago. The effect of
this media coverage, always solicitous to leftist governments, is to brand
the CIA an antiprogressive agency that does Bad Things.
In fact, the CIA is a government agency, subject to the political whims of
whoever sits in the White House and Congress. The CIA does what the
government of which it is a part tells it to do. Whatever evil the CIA may
have done was the result of orders from above.
The Chilean event and others (for example, attempts to remove Fidel Castro
from the land of the living, undertaken during the presidency of JFK, rather
more rarely reported because only good came from Camelot) caused the late
Sen. Frank Church to help gut the CIA's Directorate of Operations in the
1970s. What he carelessly left undisturbed then fell afoul of the Carter
administration's hit man, Stansfield Turner. That capability has never been
replaced.
It is a lamentably common practice in Washington and elsewhere to shoot
people in the back and then complain when they fail to win the race. The loss
of so many lives in New York and Washington is now called an "intelligence
failure," mostly by those who crippled the CIA in the first place, and by
those who celebrated the loss of its invaluable capabilities.
What a pity that they cannot stand up like adults now and say: "See, we
gutted our intelligence agencies because we don't much like them, and now we
can bury thousands of American citizens as an indirect result." This, of
course, will not happen, because those who inflict their aesthetic on the
rest of us are never around to clean up the resulting mess, though they seem
to enjoy further assaulting those whom they crippled to begin with.
Call it the law of unintended consequences. The intelligence community was
successfully assaulted for actions taken under constitutionally mandated
orders, and with nothing left to replace what was smashed, warnings we might
have had to prevent this horrid event never came. Of course, neither I nor
anyone else can prove that the warnings would have come, and I will not
invoke the rhetoric of the political left on so sad an occasion as this.
But the next time America is in a fight, it is well to remember that tying
one's own arm is unlikely to assist in preserving, protecting and defending
what is ours.
Mr. Clancy is a novelist.
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