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« Back to Spy Wars main page    Transcript for: Spy WarsThink Tank with Ben WattenbergTTBW 1208 'Spy Wars' PBS feed 3/25/2004 Funding for Think Tank is provided by: At Pfizer we’re spending over five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have twelve thousand scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer. Life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. (opening animation) Ben WATTENBERG: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. America has a vast intelligence network--from the CIA and FBI to the National Security Agency. In spite of victories against terrorists and the capture of Saddam Hussein, they are under fire for failures at home on 9/11, and failures abroad, both before and after the Iraq War. Experts say over-reliance on advanced spy technology should be substituted by a new emphasis on first-hand human intelligence. What are the obstacles to gathering credible information on the ground? Are America’s spy agencies configured to fight the war on terror? And are we doing an effective job of preventing new attacks on America? To find out, Think Tank is joined this week by: Bill Gertz, defense columnist and reporter for the Washington Times and the author of Breakdown: The Failure of American Intelligence to Defeat Global Terror. And Ronald Kessler, former investigative reporter for the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, and the author of The CIA at War: Inside the Secret Campaign Against Terror. The topic before the House: Spy Wars, this week on Think Tank. (musical break) Ben WATTENBERG: Bill Gertz, Ron Kessler, welcome to Think Tank. Let me begin starting with you Bill then Ron, let’s kind of get the lay of the land. What organizations are we talking about? What are there thirty of them or something? I mean... Bill GERTZ: What is known as the U.S. intelligence community is made up of some fourteen different organizations, most prominently the CIA. Others are the electronic spying agencies... Ben WATTENBERG: And that’s NSA - National Security Agency? Bill GERTZ: ...National Reconnaissance Office. Ben WATTENBERG: Those are separate? Bill GERTZ: Yes. It’s a huge bureaucracy and, in fact, I think this is one of the problems with intelligence today is that it is over-bureaucratized. The budget annually is somewhere in the range of between thirty billion and forty billion dollars. It’s probably gone up. Ben WATTENBERG: And nobody really knows, some of that’s secret isn’t it? Or classified? Bill GERTZ: All of it’s secret. Congress is supposed to have the budget oversight function. Ben WATTENBERG: Ron, how many people are involved in these. We’re talking 55, 60, 70,000 people. Ron KESSLER: Yes. And then the CIA recruits agents and there are a huge number of additional agents who are not employees but are recruited. Ben WATTENBERG: That includes people spying for us. Ron KESSLER: Exactly. Exactly. Ben WATTENBERG: Or we hope they’re spying for us. I mean you can never tell who they’re spying for but... so it’s enormous. I mean it’s big time stuff. Okay, now, what about the magic acronym, or abbreviation, WMD - weapons of mass destruction, allegedly in Iraq. Saddam Hussein certainly behaved as if he had them. What went wrong? What... or did anything go wrong? Ron KESSLER: I think we’re going to find them and we’re going to find out what happened to them. Ben WATTENBERG: We’re going to find them in Iraq or are we going to find them in Syria where... Ron KESSLER: Either way, either way, and/or you know, records showing where they went. David Kay himself has said that he thinks.. Ben WATTENBERG: David Kay was the investigator appointed by the president? Ron KESSLER: Yes. Ben WATTENBERG: Right. Ron KESSLER: Who said, on the one hand, he doesn’t think we will find them and that the CIA should be investigated. But then, on the other hand, he said that he thinks that the weapons could have gone to Syria; that the records on where they were were destroyed. We’ll never find them but they did exist. He actually said that before, in the past two years, Iraq was even more of a threat to the U.S. because it was so chaotic so, you know, really he’s provided ammunition on both sides. What we have found - what David Kay has reported - is dozens of additional weapons programs that Saddam was pursuing, you know, and laboratories and missiles we didn’t know about and a lot of other very dangerous new commodities. Ben WATTENBERG: You buy that Bill Gertz? Bill GERTZ: My view is that I don’t know. David Kay said there was an intelligence failure. You know, in the newspaper business, one of the major sins is to begin your story with a lead that says 'something may happen' because it may not happen. If you look at the intelligence estimates on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, there are a lot of weasel words in there like Saddam probably has large stockpiles. And the question I have... and David Kay has said that he thinks it was an intelligence failure. George Tenet, the CIA director, says we still need more time to find them, but Kay is on record as saying that the intelligence people got it wrong. And the question is why didn’t the intelligence, or why wasn’t the intelligence community able to be able to verify if they actually had this? Couldn’t they send people in? Couldn’t they use some kind of special sensors to try and find these weapons so that they could really know? And that obviously wasn’t done. Ron KESSLER: Well they obviously tried and, of course, it’s very hard to penetrate a police state where cooperating with the CIA means you’re going to be executed. It’s just not that easy and part of the problem is this lack of funding, lack of support which meant that the human spy element of the CIA was tremendously decimated so, you know, it was very, very difficult to do the job that we wish they would have done. I mean there’s no question there were problems. There’s no question that we thought that they had weapons that they were going to use that they didn’t use. Certainly there were mistakes. But at the same time the generals themselves thought that they had weapons of mass destruction, that they next unit over had them. Ben WATTENBERG: Every... Ron KESSLER: So how do you penetrate that when they all thought that they did have them? WATTENBERG: It used to be they said, 'Well how come the Israelis get it right? The Mossad is such a wonderful intelligence agency.' Well they’ve been taking some big hits now. They’ve been - I mean they’re still obviously, you know, I don’t know whether they’re the cream of the crop but they’re good. But they’ve been - everyone makes mistakes. It’s a tough business, isn’t it? I mean in fairness, it’s... Bill GERTZ: Oh, absolutely. Penetrating terrorist organizations - that’s the objective. That’s the brass ring. There’s two reasons you want to do it. One: to get information on them; two: to destroy them. And they have...the culture within the CIA has been: it’s impossible to penetrate a terrorist organization. I had the head of the CIA counterterrorism center tell me that a number of years ago. And that’s like training for the Olympics and saying it’s impossible for you to win a gold medal. If you’re not going to at least make the effort it won’t happen. And the British have shown that you can penetrate organizations. There’s an amazing case that didn’t get a lot of attention. It was code-named 'steak knife' where British military intelligence planted an agent inside the Irish Republican Army and kept him there for at least three prime ministers. And he was recently disclosed by a member of parliament and they had to pull him out. But it can be done. Ron KESSLER: Yes, the CIA actually did penetrate Al Qa’eda at lower levels and certainly under George Tenet that was the main goal to penetrate. But even then, you know, Bin Laden said on one of the videotapes, very few people even within my own organization knew about the plan. So even with those penetrations, unless you’re right at Bin Laden’s level it’s very difficult. Bill GERTZ: I’d disagree because, you know, in the months leading up to 9/11, in fact even the years, the CIA didn’t have a single case officer, agent, inside Afghanistan. Yet we knew he had at least twenty-three terrorist training camps; we knew that’s were Bin Laden was working and we didn’t have any people there. Ben WATTENBERG: In fairness - I hate to be fair on this issue because you guys disagree - but the Clinton years were before 9/11. I mean that tended to focus the mind. And then when they run 747s into your buildings and 3,000 people get hit all of a sudden it moves up on the menu. Is that - I mean fair is fair. Ron KESSLER: Yes. As I said, you know, none of us fully recognized the threat and, you know, it’s easy for us to go back and say, well of course they should have been doing this and that. And to some extent that’s true, but there was nothing like 9/11 to focus our attention. Ben WATTENBERG: What are the problems that are encountered when an intelligence agency - let’s say it’s the CIA - tries to recruit a spy? What’s the technique? Ron KESSLER: You first find out everything you can about the person - what the person’s habits are, what his interests are, who his girlfriends are, whether he likes his boss or not. And then seem to approach him in some casual way, maybe at a bar or whatever. Or... Ben WATTENBERG: And the target would be what? A person from their intelligence agency or it might just be a military guy? Anyone, I mean. Ron KESSLER: Yes. Someone who has on the inside information. It could be the chauffeur of the ambassador; it could be someone who might be in intelligence service. And then try to strike up a relationship, maybe through a friend or just meet him in a, you know, talk to them in a bar, start the conversation going, then start to feel, you know, what his sensitivities are and what he might be interested in, and just develop the relationship like that. And at some point introduce the idea of. you know, gee, maybe, you know, maybe the Americans were right about one thing see what his reaction was. So it’s a very delicate process... Ben WATTENBERG: And it could mean some money for you, mister. Ron KESSLER: And eventually it’s money, yes. But it could take, you know, typically a year or two years to develop an agent like that. Ben WATTENBERG: And it might be ten years until he gives you anything that’s worthwhile. Ron KESSLER: That’s right. That’s right. And you know, people read the newspaper and they say, 'Oh, gee the you know, the CIA missed this and it missed that' as if it’s like turning on a TV, you know. Well, they didn’t turn on the TV so they didn’t find out what happened. It’s not that easy. Billl GERTZ: Under the current structure in the CIA there are all kinds of legal restrictions. These rules that were imposed by CIA director John Deutsch [CIA director, 1995-1996], which became known as the Deutsch Rules that said basically you can’t recruit a bad guy. Ben WATTENBERG: Let me ask a question. You know, we haven’t had any big hit - haven’t had any hit as far as we know in the United States for, what, two and a half years now since the... If they wanted to they could get a couple of teenagers and wrap them with explosives and go into a pizza parlor the way they’ve done in a number of other places - or a nightclub or whatever - and you can’t defend against that. So why haven’t they done that? If America’s target number one. Bill GERTZ: Clearly Al Qa’eda has been hurt from the war on terrorism. The number - you know, Ron mentioned the number of leaders that have been captured or killed. They’ve definitely been weakened, but on the other hand we don’t know. We don’t have a good handle on what they’re doing and if you look at the timing of their spectacular attacks, primarily in Africa in 1998, August, we had two embassies blown up simultaneously. Then we had September 11th. The time we’re getting close to where there could be another big attack. Although we haven’t seen it. Everybody’s nervous about it. A lot of people in the intelligence community believe the next big attack will involve some kind of chemical, biological or even radiological type of an attack that would be an escalation. Ben WATTENBERG: This whole discussion of American intelligence is fascinating, I must say, and it’s interesting to hear the two different points of view. Just this week, early in the week, a man who I had never heard of named Richard Clark came out with a new book. And he claims that President Bush was obsessed with Iraq even though that’s not where the Al Qa’eda people really were. Comments? Ron KESSLER: Richard Clark’s account just doesn’t square with any of the known facts from the record or from Bob Woodward’s very good book about the start of the war. Ben WATTENBERG: The start of which war? Ron KESSLER: The start of the Iraq war. You know, naturally, as you say, Bush was interested whether Iraq was involved but the fact is that about a week after 9/11 he made a decision not to go after Iraq. He could have gone after Iraq simply on the weapons of mass destruction issue at that point. They had been violating the sanctions since the Gulf War. He didn’t. What he did do was wait until something like eight or nine months before the Iraq war to actually start planning a war against Iraq. That was a year-and-a-half after 9/11. So if he was so obsessed you know, why did he wait a year-and-a-half to go after Iraq? Even after he went after Iraq he gave Saddam Hussein the opportunity to either declare his weapons of mass destruction or leave the country. So it wasn’t as if there was some preordained idea from 9/11 that we’re going to go after Iraq. It really has nothing to do with reality. Bill GERTZ: There was clear evidence that Saddam Hussein was supporting terrorists. There’s no question about that. Abu Abbas, the Achille Lauro guy, he was caught there. We know the current guy, Al Zachari, who is still in Iraq, you know, worked there, was helped by the Iraqis. Just recently we got hold of a document from the Iraqi intelligence... Ben WATTENBERG: These are Al Qa’eda people? Bill GERTZ: Yes. There was a document from the Iraqi intelligence service from ’93, which talked about how the Iraqi intelligence service was meeting regularly with Bin Laden in 1993. Said he was - it described him as a collaborator, and at that point he was really regarded as the leader of the Arabs in Afghanistan, which later became the Al Qa’eda terrorist network. Ron KESSLER: There’s one other element to this whole thing and that is the media treatment. You know, the whole idea for example that the CIA analysts were being pressured by the administration came from one Washington Post story, which said that Cheney visited the CIA and some analysts thought that that constituted pressure, although they didn’t say that he actually asked them to change anything, or that anything was changed. But in the third paragraph of that same story it said that analysts who were there thought it was wonderful, they were so pleased that he came out and asked questions, they were good questions and it was wonderful that he was paying attention to them. Now if - I’m a former Washington Post reporter. I know that if I had written that lead honestly and said in the lead of that story 'Cheney came out to the CIA. Some analysts thought that it constituted pressure, but other analysts thought it was wonderful' that story never would have run because it would have been so absurd it would have been laughed out of the paper. Ben WATTENBERG: Okay, now this whole issue has become an enormous political issue in this election year of 2004. Bill, let me start with you. Can you just give me a real quick rundown on how many investigations are running and why they’re being delayed or the president’s commission is. I mean just so we know the players with the scorecards. Bill GERTZ: Well, there are two main commissions looking at the intelligence-related issues. One is the commission headed by former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, who is looking at the 9/11 intelligence failures. Ben WATTENBERG: And that was appointed by the president. Bill GERTZ: Yes. Now they’re following an earlier congressional investigation, which was limited to 18 months, and whenever that happens the bureaucracy figures out that if you wait until after the 18 months you don’t have an investigation anymore. In addition to that we’ve now got a new commission looking at the issue of Iraq, weapons of mass destruction and that’s headed by former Virginia Senator Chuck Robb and I think Laurence Silberman is the ... Ben WATTENBERG: Appointed by the president? Bill GERTZ: Yes. And they’re going to look at what happened to the estimates and intelligence on Iraq’s weapons. Ben WATTENBERG: Does it have a deadline? Bill GERTZ: I think they do. And I think that they’re - to me that was an effort, a political effort, to try and kick the can down the road, because I think the Republicans see that the Democrats are going to make an issue of that in the current presidential campaign. Ben WATTENBERG: Now what about on the congressional side, Ron? Ron KESSLER: The intelligence committees are holding hearings so, you know, it’s an endless process. But you’ve got to look at the big picture here. The big picture is that now we’re in this new age where it’s easy to create weapons of mass destruction, kill hundreds of thousands of people. We also have terrorists who have no assets to protect, who don’t care if they’re killed in the process of going after us. So, things have changed and we simply can’t wait until there’s actual proof of these threats in the form of an actual attack. That’s what we did with 9/11. You know, everyone said 'well there’s nothing imminent. He would never attack us in the United States.' Sure enough, he did and all these efforts by the CIA and the FBI and the military are to try to thwart these threats before they actually materialize. Bil GERTZ: One of the intelligence officials I interviewed a long time ago, he said - he joked - that the model of the CIA is that we may not always be right but we’re never wrong. And I think that a lot of the finger pointing we’re seeing now is an attempt to shift the blame from intelligence to the policy side. Ben WATTENBERG: How does this all break out in terms of partisanship in this election of 2004? Who’s saying what to whom and saying 'you did this, you did this.' A lot of finger pointing going on Ron KESSLER: You know, as I see it, the Democrats are using the fact that the war on terror is secret and so we really don’t necessarily know most of the things that are going on. We don’t know about how many countries are cooperating, have rolled up terrorists, and they’re using that to attack Bush saying that he’s not doing enough or saying that we went into Iraq and that detracted from the war on terror, which in fact I don’t think is true. That’s basically the way it shakes out. It’s a typical election year where the people who are not in power are going to criticize the ones who are in power and ... Ben WATTENBERG: And play 'gotcha.' Ron KESSLER: ...the American people will decide. Yes. Ben WATTENBERG: How do you see it? Bill GERTZ: Well, it’s complex. First of all you have some of the Democrats have already lined up. Senator Bob Graham was going to run for president on a campaign that criticized the intelligence under Bush, even though the current head of the CIA was also the head of the CIA under Clinton. And the question is why does he still have his job, considering we’ve had so many intelligence failures. And I think the Democrats may try to exploit that, even though he was their guy in the previous administration. Ben WATTENBERG: So it’s going to - just to wrap this up as to what happened this week - it’s going to get hot and heavy; Clark’s a player. Both the Democrats and the Republicans are... Bill GERTZ: You’re going to have some public testimony. And they’re going to try to blame the Bush administration. But when you look at what the Clinton administration was doing in its last weeks, they weren’t focused on terrorism; they had Madeleine Albright in Pyong Yang trying to arrange a presidential visit to North Korea. Ron KESSLER: What Clinton actually did, if you look at actual actions, is that he sent a few cruise missiles into Bin Laden’s tent after Bin Laden bombed our embassies and that not only didn’t work but it also confirmed that the United States was a paper tiger; that they would do nothing and it actually goaded Bin Laden into doing more and... Ben WATTENBERG: And in fact he said that, that the United States won’t stay the course in any military action. Can’t take casualties, and so on. Bill GERTZ: And in fairness, as you said, I don’t think the administration was really up to speed. They were still in a transition; they were still reviewing policies. What are they going to do? How are they gonna do it differently than the previous administration? Ben WATTENBERG: Okay. Let me wrap up his discussion and ask you each for brief answers. Is the war on terrorism, or is terrorism, going to get worse, and how long do you think this sort of incident, this whole Al Qa’eda thing is going to last? Bill GERTZ: I think it is going to get worse and I think how long it will take us to win is going to depend on a major change in tactics. One thing that the U.S. government is not doing right now very well is fighting what I call the ideological war on terrorism. Did it during the Cold War; we were very effective at it. It’s the kind of software part of the battle where, how do you deal with the issue of Islamist fundamentalism? It’s very difficult for a secular government to do that. The question that has to be answered is, is Islamist terrorism directly related to Islam? Or is it, as the president has said, a perversion of Islam? We need to answer those questions and we need to figure out a way to go after the underlying philosophy behind this and beat that. Perhaps it means organizing moderate Muslims, or getting all good religious people together and trying to find a way to deal with the issue. But you’re not going to do it simply by.... Ben WATTENBERG: That’s pretty gauzy and amorphous, isn’t it? I mean... Bil GERTZ: Well, you know, one suggestion: we had Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe. We can’t do that for terrorism, but why not set up some outside institution that could deal with it since the government can’t ... Ron KESSLER: Well we do have Radio Sawa, which is an attempt to do that, and actually in my book I talk about CIA creating fake mullahs and paying off existing mullahs to send a more moderate message. Now obviously that isn’t being done enough... Ben WATTENBERG: Right. Ron KESSLER: ... and there isn’t enough impact, but that is one way that it can be done. Ben WATTENBERG: How long is this going to last? And I know it’s guesswork, but... Ron KESSLER: I think you know, I’d say ten years. You know, as you say, there have been many terrorist organizations in the past and many of them - most of them in fact--have died out one way or another. A lot of times because of CIA penetrations, but I think, you know, we’re in for a long haul and we’re just going to have to... Ben WATTENBERG: And it’s going to get worse? Ron KESSLER: No, I don’t think so. I mean we do see the results, you know, the CIA rolled up Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the number three man in Al Qa’eda. Those are very important penetrations and decapitations and that is having an affect. It’s true that they’re more dispersed, but I think there’s no question there’s been tremendous progress. Ben WATTENBERG: Okay. Thank you very much, Ron Kessler and Bill Gertz, for joining us on Think Tank. And thank you. Please remember to send us your comments via email. It helps us make our show better. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. (credits) We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. Please send your questions and comments to New River Media, 1219 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20036. Or e-mail us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Tank, visit PBS on line at www.pbs.org, and, please, let us know where you watch Think Tank. Funding for this program is provided by: At Pfizer we’re spending over five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have twelve thousand scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer. Life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. This is PBS.. 1 Back to top  Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. ©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved. 
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