The CIA's New Mission In Light Of Its Past

WASHINGTON - Three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the CIA is still five years away from fielding the network of spies and spymasters it will need to defeat global terrorists.

That's not the charge of one of the CIA's growing legion of critics; that's the agency's own grim estimate. The assessment, given to the 9/11 Commission in testimony last spring by then-CIA director George Tenet, was"one of the most appalling comments we heard" in the entire investigation of the attacks, commission Chairman Thomas Kean said later."We don't have that much time."

Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., President Bush's choice to succeed Tenet, was even more pessimistic in the opening session of his confirmation hearing last week:"In terms of years, I don't think five is enough," Goss said."On a scale of 10, we're about three."

When it comes to what the CIA calls HUMINT -- human intelligence -- an agency designed to penetrate rival superpowers has had to build the skills for the war on terrorism almost from scratch. Even today, with intelligence picking up warnings of new terrorist attacks, the CIA has about as many field officers countering that threat around the world -- about 1,000 -- as the FBI has field agents in New York City alone.

Some at the CIA look back with nostalgia on the Cold War years, when veteran spies such as Allen Dulles and Richard Helms ran the agency. Yet most intelligence experts and historians agree that human intelligence wasn't strong then and really never has been. Even at the height of the Reagan-era military and intelligence buildup, the CIA had perhaps a dozen highly placed human sources inside the Soviet Union and 30 or so lesser sources. And even that network was eliminated by the KGB virtually overnight thanks to the treachery of CIA mole Aldrich Ames in 1985.

Intelligence needs have changed

U.S. intelligence leads the world in technical capability -- the spy satellites, eavesdropping devices, reconnaissance drones and supercomputers that can pinpoint missile bases, track troop movements and break enemy codes. But today's enemies wield box-cutters, not ICBMs, and they travel in ones and twos, not armored divisions.

During the Cold War, CIA field officers went to embassy cocktail parties, trade shows and cultural exchanges looking for susceptible Soviets who might be persuaded to provide information to Washington. The terrorists waging today's hot war don't represent countries. If they show up at an embassy cocktail party, they're most likely to do so in a bomb-laden truck.

Never have the CIA's human intelligence failings been open to more public scrutiny. Top CIA officials have acknowledged publicly that they failed to recruit a single spy in Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's inner circle. And though the CIA set up a spy network in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, it did not yield the most tightly held secrets of al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, before or after 9/11.

"How many times do you want to get briefed on al-Qaeda and be reminded we don't have any human sources?" lamented Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz last month in a House Armed Services Committee hearing on combating terrorism."We get mesmerized by the fact that we can read license plate numbers from space, and it's pretty impressive. But the amount that we don't know is enormous."

As the Bush administration learned painfully in its struggles with Iraq and al-Qaeda, human intelligence is prone to human error, to charlatans who peddle false stories or pretend to know more than they actually do, to spy handlers who too readily believe them, and to bureaucratic slip-ups that let terrorist trails go cold.

[Editor's Note: This is only a short excerpt from a long article dealing with the CIA's past mission and needs.]