[spectre] (an opportune review ‹ 1/2)

[Louise Desrenards]

I got it! (Ho, Surf! Support your flight and give us a kiss"‹Lamartine.
:)

L.
PS/ I shall not do it twice times, so please to archive;-)

////////////////
Here is a review of the US defense politics as Government Bush politics
through the critical sight of the journalist of investigation that is
Seymour M.Hersh.

To whom does not know who is Seymour M.Hersh one of the last journalists of
investigations (in a side radical democrat) being still in activity by this
way, here is a bio-bibliography:
http://www.answers.com/topic/seymour-hersh
Several times: Pulitzer Price.
The man who has written the famous article on My Lai Massacre in Viet Nam,
1969 (don't remember if it was in The Washington post or in The New York
times), to have move the US opinion at the moment to stop the war, and more
of 30 years after the 2 articles revealing the inside/outside process of
defense and organization of the torture in Abu Graib [quotations in my next
email (2/2)] that at last become a book:
Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (P.S.)
(to see in Amazon)‹PS of the articles.

Any way I am not ashamed to quote The New Yorker that being the media which
published live Hannah Arendt diary on Eichmann lawsuit in Jerusalem (that
become the famous book and more on the current evil), the first article by
Vladimir Nabokov, or E.B.White and +++... it is to say how the DVD integral
archive of this Newspaper (since Dorothy Parker In full Prohibition)
realized and put on sale by Vanity fair at the moment they have bought the
Newspaper to safe it (as museum?) ‹ is not insignificant as real
anthropology of political and cultural critical journalism tradition from
New York to US.
/////////////////

Yet now the link has disappeared of the current summary on Seymour M.Hersh
in the New Yorker‹as I told:
http://www.newyorker.com/search/results?query=seymour+hersh&page=1

But finally surfing I've got it inside from an outside site (giving more
light on South Asia ‹ can be concerning Mumbai attack?)
http://www.alternet.org/story/21021/
(an interview of Hersh presented by Amy Goodman in "Democracy now!"
(integral quote below)

//////////////////
It is to be associated with "Up in the air" and  "The Iran plan".
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050124fa_fact
So it is to archive if you found any interest of information in it:

THE COMING WARS
What the Pentagon can now do in secret.
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Issue of 2005-01-24 and 31
Posted 2005-01-17

George W. Bush¹s reëlection was not his only victory last fall. The
President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over
the military and intelligence communities¹ strategic analyses and covert
operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War
national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for
using that control‹against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the
ongoing war on terrorism‹during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to
be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government
consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as ³facilitators² of
policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This
process is well under way.

Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the Bush
Administration has not reconsidered its basic long-range policy goal in the
Middle East: the establishment of democracy throughout the region. Bush¹s
reëlection is regarded within the Administration as evidence of America¹s
support for his decision to go to war. It has reaffirmed the position of the
neoconservatives in the Pentagon¹s civilian leadership who advocated the
invasion, including Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and
Douglas Feith, the Under-secretary for Policy. According to a former
high-level intelligence official, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met
with the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the election and told them, in
essence, that the naysayers had been heard and the American people did not
accept their message. Rumsfeld added that America was committed to staying
in Iraq and that there would be no second-guessing.

³This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush
Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,² the former high-level
intelligence official told me. ³Next, we¹re going to have the Iranian
campaign. We¹ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the
enemy. This is the last hurrah‹we¹ve got four years, and want to come out of
this saying we won the war on terrorism.²

Bush and Cheney may have set the policy, but it is Rumsfeld who has directed
its implementation and has absorbed much of the public criticism when things
went wrong‹whether it was prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib or lack of sufficient
armor plating for G.I.s¹ vehicles in Iraq. Both Democratic and Republican
lawmakers have called for Rumsfeld¹s dismissal, and he is not widely admired
inside the military. Nonetheless, his reappointment as Defense Secretary was
never in doubt.

Rumsfeld will become even more important during the second term. In
interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I was
told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential election,
and much of it would be Rumsfeld¹s responsibility. The war on terrorism
would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagon¹s control. The
President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing
secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert
operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in
the Middle East and South Asia.

The President¹s decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the
books‹free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law,
all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential
finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The
laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies
involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign
leaders.) ³The Pentagon doesn¹t feel obligated to report any of this to
Congress,² the former high-level intelligence official said. ³They don¹t
even call it Œcovert ops¹‹it¹s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their
view, it¹s Œblack reconnaissance.¹ They¹re not even going to tell the
cincs²‹the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense
Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on
this story.)

In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was
Iran. ³Everyone is saying, ŒYou can¹t be serious about targeting Iran. Look
at Iraq,¹ ² the former intelligence official told me. ³But they say, ŒWe¹ve
got some lessons learned‹not militarily, but how we did it politically.
We¹re not going to rely on agency pissants.¹ No loose ends, and that¹s why
the C.I.A. is out of there.²

For more than a year, France, Germany, Britain, and other countries in the
European Union have seen preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon as a
race against time‹and against the Bush Administration. They have been
negotiating with the Iranian leadership to give up its nuclear-weapons
ambitions in exchange for economic aid and trade benefits. Iran has agreed
to temporarily halt its enrichment programs, which generate fuel for nuclear
power plants but also could produce weapons-grade fissile material. (Iran
claims that such facilities are legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty, or N.P.T., to which it is a signator, and that it has no intention
of building a bomb.) But the goal of the current round of talks, which began
in December in Brussels, is to persuade Tehran to go further, and dismantle
its machinery. Iran insists, in return, that it needs to see some concrete
benefits from the Europeans‹oil-production technology, heavy-industrial
equipment, and perhaps even permission to purchase a fleet of Airbuses.
(Iran has been denied access to technology and many goods owing to
sanctions.)

The Europeans have been urging the Bush Administration to join in these
negotiations. The Administration has refused to do so. The civilian
leadership in the Pentagon has argued that no diplomatic progress on the
Iranian nuclear threat will take place unless there is a credible threat of
military action. ³The neocons say negotiations are a bad deal,² a senior
official of the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.) told me. ³And
the only thing the Iranians understand is pressure. And that they also need
to be whacked.²

The core problem is that Iran has successfully hidden the extent of its
nuclear program, and its progress. Many Western intelligence agencies,
including those of the United States, believe that Iran is at least three to
five years away from a capability to independently produce nuclear
warheads‹although its work on a missile-delivery system is far more
advanced. Iran is also widely believed by Western intelligence agencies and
the I.A.E.A. to have serious technical problems with its weapons system,
most notably in the production of the hexafluoride gas needed to fabricate
nuclear warheads.

A retired senior C.I.A. official, one of many who left the agency recently,
told me that he was familiar with the assessments, and confirmed that Iran
is known to be having major difficulties in its weapons work. He also
acknowledged that the agency¹s timetable for a nuclear Iran matches the
European estimates‹assuming that Iran gets no outside help. ³The big wild
card for us is that you don¹t know who is capable of filling in the missing
parts for them,² the recently retired official said. ³North Korea? Pakistan?
We don¹t know what parts are missing.²

One Western diplomat told me that the Europeans believed they were in what
he called a ³lose-lose position² as long as the United States refuses to get
involved. ³France, Germany, and the U.K. cannot succeed alone, and everybody
knows it,² the diplomat said. ³If the U.S. stays outside, we don¹t have
enough leverage, and our effort will collapse.² The alternative would be to
go to the Security Council, but any resolution imposing sanctions would
likely be vetoed by China or Russia, and then ³the United Nations will be
blamed and the Americans will say, ŒThe only solution is to bomb.¹ ²

A European Ambassador noted that President Bush is scheduled to visit Europe
in February, and that there has been public talk from the White House about
improving the President¹s relationship with America¹s E.U. allies. In that
context, the Ambassador told me, ³I¹m puzzled by the fact that the United
States is not helping us in our program. How can Washington maintain its
stance without seriously taking into account the weapons issue?²

The Israeli government is, not surprisingly, skeptical of the European
approach. Silvan Shalom, the Foreign Minister, said in an interview last
week in Jerusalem,with another New Yorker journalist, ³I don¹t like what¹s
happening. We were encouraged at first when the Europeans got involved. For
a long time, they thought it was just Israel¹s problem. But then they saw
that the [Iranian] missiles themselves were longer range and could reach all
of Europe, and they became very concerned. Their attitude has been to use
the carrot and the stick‹but all we see so far is the carrot.² He added, ³If
they can¹t comply, Israel cannot live with Iran having a nuclear bomb.²

In a recent essay, Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert who is the deputy
director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (and a supporter
of the Administration), articulated the view that force, or the threat of
it, was a vital bargaining tool with Iran. Clawson wrote that if Europe
wanted coöperation with the Bush Administration it ³would do well to remind
Iran that the military option remains on the table.² He added that the
argument that the European negotiations hinged on Washington looked like ³a
preëmptive excuse for the likely breakdown of the E.U.-Iranian talks.² In a
subsequent conversation with me, Clawson suggested that, if some kind of
military action was inevitable, ³it would be much more in Israel¹s
interest‹and Washington¹s‹to take covert action. The style of this
Administration is to use overwhelming force‹Œshock and awe.¹ But we get only
one bite of the apple.²

There are many military and diplomatic experts who dispute the notion that
military action, on whatever scale, is the right approach. Shahram Chubin,
an Iranian scholar who is the director of research at the Geneva Centre for
Security Policy, told me, ³It¹s a fantasy to think that there¹s a good
American or Israeli military option in Iran.² He went on, ³The Israeli view
is that this is an international problem. ŒYou do it,¹ they say to the West.
ŒOtherwise, our Air Force will take care of it.¹ ² In 1981, the Israeli Air
Force destroyed Iraq¹s Osirak reactor, setting its nuclear program back
several years. But the situation now is both more complex and more
dangerous, Chubin said. The Osirak bombing ³drove the Iranian
nuclear-weapons program underground, to hardened, dispersed sites,² he said.
³You can¹t be sure after an attack that you¹ll get away with it. The U.S.
and Israel would not be certain whether all the sites had been hit, or how
quickly they¹d be rebuilt. Meanwhile, they¹d be waiting for an Iranian
counter-attack that could be military or terrorist or diplomatic. Iran has
long-range missiles and ties to Hezbollah, which has drones‹you can¹t begin
to think of what they¹d do in response.²

Chubin added that Iran could also renounce the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty. ³It¹s better to have them cheating within the system,² he said.
³Otherwise, as victims, Iran will walk away from the treaty and inspections
while the rest of the world watches the N.P.T. unravel before their eyes.²

The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside
Iran at least since last summer. Much of the focus is on the accumulation of
intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and
missile sites, both declared and suspected. The goal is to identify and
isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed
by precision strikes and short-term commando raids. ³The civilians in the
Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military
infrastructure as possible,² the government consultant with close ties to
the Pentagon told me.

Some of the missions involve extraordinary coöperation. For example, the
former high-level intelligence official told me that an American commando
task force has been set up in South Asia and is now working closely with a
group of Pakistani scientists and technicians who had dealt with Iranian
counterparts. (In 2003, the I.A.E.A. disclosed that Iran had been secretly
receiving nuclear technology from Pakistan for more than a decade, and had
withheld that information from inspectors.) The American task force, aided
by the information from Pakistan, has been penetrating eastern Iran from
Afghanistan in a hunt for underground installations. The task-force members,
or their locally recruited agents, secreted remote detection devices‹known
as sniffers‹capable of sampling the atmosphere for radioactive emissions and
other evidence of nuclear-enrichment programs.

Getting such evidence is a pressing concern for the Bush Administration. The
former high-level intelligence official told me, ³They don¹t want to make
any W.M.D. intelligence mistakes, as in Iraq. The Republicans can¹t have two
of those. There¹s no education in the second kick of a mule.² The official
added that the government of Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani President, has
won a high price for its coöperation‹American assurance that Pakistan will
not have to hand over A. Q. Khan, known as the father of Pakistan¹s nuclear
bomb, to the I.A.E.A. or to any other international authorities for
questioning. For two decades, Khan has been linked to a vast consortium of
nuclear-black-market activities. Last year, Musharraf professed to be
shocked when Khan, in the face of overwhelming evidence, ³confessed² to his
activities. A few days later, Musharraf pardoned him, and so far he has
refused to allow the I.A.E.A. or American intelligence to interview him.
Khan is now said to be living under house arrest in a villa in Islamabad.
³It¹s a deal‹a trade-off,² the former high-level intelligence official
explained. ³ ŒTell us what you know about Iran and we will let your A. Q.
Khan guys go.¹ It¹s the neoconservatives¹ version of short-term gain at
long-term cost. They want to prove that Bush is the anti-terrorism guy who
can handle Iran and the nuclear threat, against the long-term goal of
eliminating the black market for nuclear proliferation.²

The agreement comes at a time when Musharraf, according to a former
high-level Pakistani diplomat, has authorized the expansion of Pakistan¹s
nuclear-weapons arsenal. ³Pakistan still needs parts and supplies, and needs
to buy them in the clandestine market,² the former diplomat said. ³The U.S.
has done nothing to stop it.²

There has also been close, and largely unacknowledged, coöperation with
Israel. The government consultant with ties to the Pentagon said that the
Defense Department civilians, under the leadership of Douglas Feith, have
been working with Israeli planners and consultants to develop and refine
potential nuclear, chemical-weapons, and missile targets inside Iran. (After
Osirak, Iran situated many of its nuclear sites in remote areas of the east,
in an attempt to keep them out of striking range of other countries,
especially Israel. Distance no longer lends such protection, however: Israel
has acquired three submarines capable of launching cruise missiles and has
equipped some of its aircraft with additional fuel tanks, putting Israeli
F-16I fighters within the range of most Iranian targets.)

³They believe that about three-quarters of the potential targets can be
destroyed from the air, and a quarter are too close to population centers,
or buried too deep, to be targeted,² the consultant said. Inevitably, he
added, some suspicious sites need to be checked out by American or Israeli
commando teams‹in on-the-ground surveillance‹before being targeted.

The Pentagon¹s contingency plans for a broader invasion of Iran are also
being updated. Strategists at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command,
in Tampa, Florida, have been asked to revise the military¹s war plan,
providing for a maximum ground and air invasion of Iran. Updating the plan
makes sense, whether or not the Administration intends to act, because the
geopolitics of the region have changed dramatically in the last three years.
Previously, an American invasion force would have had to enter Iran by sea,
by way of the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Oman; now troops could move in on
the ground, from Afghanistan or Iraq. Commando units and other assets could
be introduced through new bases in the Central Asian republics.

It is possible that some of the American officials who talk about the need
to eliminate Iran¹s nuclear infrastructure are doing so as part of a
propaganda campaign aimed at pressuring Iran to give up its weapons
planning. If so, the signals are not always clear. President Bush, who after
9/11 famously depicted Iran as a member of the ³axis of evil,² is now
publicly emphasizing the need for diplomacy to run its course. ³We don¹t
have much leverage with the Iranians right now,² the President said at a
news conference late last year. ³Diplomacy must be the first choice, and
always the first choice of an administration trying to solve an issue of . .
. nuclear armament. And we¹ll continue to press on diplomacy.²

In my interviews over the past two months, I was given a much harsher view.
The hawks in the Administration believe that it will soon become clear that
the Europeans¹ negotiated approach cannot succeed, and that at that time the
Administration will act. ³We¹re not dealing with a set of National Security
Council option papers here,² the former high-level intelligence official
told me. ³They¹ve already passed that wicket. It¹s not if we¹re going to do
anything against Iran. They¹re doing it.²

The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least
temporarily derail, Iran¹s ability to go nuclear. But there are other,
equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that
the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a
limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of
the religious leadership. ³Within the soul of Iran there is a struggle
between secular nationalists and reformers, on the one hand, and, on the
other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic movement,² the consultant told me.
³The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered,
and with it the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will
collapse² ‹like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and
the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said.

³The idea that an American attack on Iran¹s nuclear facilities would produce
a popular uprising is extremely illinformed,² said Flynt Leverett, a Middle
East scholar who worked on the National Security Council in the Bush
Administration. ³You have to understand that the nuclear ambition in Iran is
supported across the political spectrum, and Iranians will perceive attacks
on these sites as attacks on their ambitions to be a major regional player
and a modern nation that¹s technologically sophisticated.² Leverett, who is
now a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, at the
Brookings Institution, warned that an American attack, if it takes place,
³will produce an Iranian backlash against the United States and a rallying
around the regime.²

Rumsfeld planned and lobbied for more than two years before getting
Presidential authority, in a series of findings and executive orders, to use
military commandos for covert operations. One of his first steps was
bureaucratic: to shift control of an undercover unit, known then as the Gray
Fox (it has recently been given a new code name), from the Army to the
Special Operations Command (socom), in Tampa. Gray Fox was formally assigned
to socom in July, 2002, at the instigation of Rumsfeld¹s office, which meant
that the undercover unit would have a single commander for administration
and operational deployment. Then, last fall, Rumsfeld¹s ability to deploy
the commandos expanded. According to a Pentagon consultant, an Execute Order
on the Global War on Terrorism (referred to throughout the government as
gwot) was issued at Rumsfeld¹s direction. The order specifically authorized
the military ³to find and finish² terrorist targets, the consultant said. It
included a target list that cited Al Qaeda network members, Al Qaeda senior
leadership, and other high-value targets. The consultant said that the order
had been cleared throughout the national-security bureaucracy in Washington.

In late November, 2004, the Times reported that Bush had set up an
interagency group to study whether it ³would best serve the nation² to give
the Pentagon complete control over the C.I.A.¹s own élite paramilitary unit,
which has operated covertly in trouble spots around the world for decades.
The panel¹s conclusions, due in February, are foregone, in the view of many
former C.I.A. officers. ³It seems like it¹s going to happen,² Howard Hart,
who was chief of the C.I.A.¹s Paramilitary Operations Division before
retiring in 1991, told me.

There was other evidence of Pentagon encroachment. Two former C.I.A.
clandestine officers, Vince Cannistraro and Philip Giraldi, who publish
Intelligence Brief, a newsletter for their business clients, reported last
month on the existence of a broad counter-terrorism Presidential finding
that permitted the Pentagon ³to operate unilaterally in a number of
countries where there is a perception of a clear and evident terrorist
threat. . . . A number of the countries are friendly to the U.S. and are
major trading partners. Most have been cooperating in the war on terrorism.²
The two former officers listed some of the countries‹Algeria, Sudan, Yemen,
Syria, and Malaysia. (I was subsequently told by the former high-level
intelligence official that Tunisia is also on the list.)

Giraldi, who served three years in military intelligence before joining the
C.I.A., said that he was troubled by the military¹s expanded covert
assignment. ³I don¹t think they can handle the cover,² he told me. ³They¹ve
got to have a different mind-set. They¹ve got to handle new roles and get
into foreign cultures and learn how other people think. If you¹re going into
a village and shooting people, it doesn¹t matter,² Giraldi added. ³But if
you¹re running operations that involve finesse and sensitivity, the military
can¹t do it. Which is why these kind of operations were always run out of
the agency.² I was told that many Special Operations officers also have
serious misgivings.

Rumsfeld and two of his key deputies, Stephen Cambone, the Under-secretary
of Defense for Intelligence, and Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry)
Boykin, will be part of the chain of command for the new commando
operations. Relevant members of the House and Senate intelligence committees
have been briefed on the Defense Department¹s expanded role in covert
affairs, a Pentagon adviser assured me, but he did not know how extensive
the briefings had been.

³I¹m conflicted about the idea of operating without congressional
oversight,² the Pentagon adviser said. ³But I¹ve been told that there will
be oversight down to the specific operation.² A second Pentagon adviser
agreed, with a significant caveat. ³There are reporting requirements,² he
said. ³But to execute the finding we don¹t have to go back and say, ŒWe¹re
going here and there.¹ No nitty-gritty detail and no micromanagement.²

The legal questions about the Pentagon¹s right to conduct covert operations
without informing Congress have not been resolved. ³It¹s a very, very gray
area,² said Jeffrey H. Smith, a West Point graduate who served as the
C.I.A.¹s general counsel in the mid-nineteen-nineties. ³Congress believes it
voted to include all such covert activities carried out by the armed forces.
The military says, ŒNo, the things we¹re doing are not intelligence actions
under the statute but necessary military steps authorized by the President,
as Commander-in-Chief, to ³prepare the battlefield.² ¹ ² Referring to his
days at the C.I.A., Smith added, ³We were always careful not to use the
armed forces in a covert action without a Presidential finding. The Bush
Administration has taken a much more aggressive stance.²

In his conversation with me, Smith emphasized that he was unaware of the
military¹s current plans for expanding covert action. But he said, ³Congress
has always worried that the Pentagon is going to get us involved in some
military misadventure that nobody knows about.²

Under Rumsfeld¹s new approach, I was told, U.S. military operatives would be
permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy
contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some
cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited
and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists. This could potentially
involve organizing and carrying out combat operations, or even terrorist
activities. Some operations will likely take place in nations in which there
is an American diplomatic mission, with an Ambassador and a C.I.A. station
chief, the Pentagon consultant said. The Ambassador and the station chief
would not necessarily have a need to know, under the Pentagon¹s current
interpretation of its reporting requirement.

The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it
calls ³action teams² in the target countries overseas which can be used to
find and eliminate terrorist organizations. ³Do you remember the right-wing
execution squads in El Salvador?² the former high-level intelligence
official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed
atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. ³We founded them and we financed
them,² he said. ³The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want.
And we aren¹t going to tell Congress about it.² A former military officer,
who has knowledge of the Pentagon¹s commando capabilities, said, ³We¹re
going to be riding with the bad boys.²

One of the rationales for such tactics was spelled out in a series of
articles by John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval
Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, and a consultant on terrorism
for the rand corporation. ³It takes a network to fight a network,² Arquilla
wrote in a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle:

When conventional military operations and bombing failed to defeat the Mau
Mau insurgency in Kenya in the 1950s, the British formed teams of friendly
Kikuyu tribesmen who went about pretending to be terrorists. These ³pseudo
gangs,² as they were called, swiftly threw the Mau Mau on the defensive,
either by befriending and then ambushing bands of fighters or by guiding
bombers to the terrorists¹ camps. What worked in Kenya a half-century ago
has a wonderful chance of undermining trust and recruitment among today¹s
terror networks. Forming new pseudo gangs should not be difficult.

³If a confused young man from Marin County can join up with Al Qaeda,²
Arquilla wrote, referring to John Walker Lindh, the twenty-year-old
Californian who was seized in Afghanistan, ³think what professional
operatives might do.²

A few pilot covert operations were conducted last year, one Pentagon adviser
told me, and a terrorist cell in Algeria was ³rolled up² with American help.
The adviser was referring, apparently, to the capture of Ammari Saifi, known
as Abderrezak le Para, the head of a North African terrorist network
affiliated with Al Qaeda. But at the end of the year there was no agreement
within the Defense Department about the rules of engagement. ³The issue is
approval for the final authority,² the former high-level intelligence
official said. ³Who gets to say ŒGet this¹ or ŒDo this¹?²

A retired four-star general said, ³The basic concept has always been solid,
but how do you insure that the people doing it operate within the concept of
the law? This is pushing the edge of the envelope.² The general added, ³It¹s
the oversight. And you¹re not going to get Warner²‹John Warner, of Virginia,
the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee‹³and those guys to
exercise oversight. This whole thing goes to the Fourth Deck.² He was
referring to the floor in the Pentagon where Rumsfeld and Cambone have their
offices.

³It¹s a finesse to give power to Rumsfeld‹giving him the right to act
swiftly, decisively, and lethally,² the first Pentagon adviser told me.
³It¹s a global free-fire zone.²

The Pentagon has tried to work around the limits on covert activities
before. In the early nineteen-eighties, a covert Army unit was set up and
authorized to operate overseas with minimal oversight. The results were
disastrous. The Special Operations program was initially known as
Intelligence Support Activity, or I.S.A., and was administered from a base
near Washington (as was, later, Gray Fox). It was established soon after the
failed rescue, in April, 1980, of the American hostages in Iran, who were
being held by revolutionary students after the Islamic overthrow of the
Shah¹s regime. At first, the unit was kept secret from many of the senior
generals and civilian leaders in the Pentagon, as well as from many members
of Congress. It was eventually deployed in the Reagan Administration¹s war
against the Sandinista government, in Nicaragua. It was heavily committed to
supporting the Contras. By the mid-eighties, however, the I.S.A.¹s
operations had been curtailed, and several of its senior officers were
courtmartialled following a series of financial scandals, some involving
arms deals. The affair was known as ³the Yellow Fruit scandal,² after the
code name given to one of the I.S.A.¹s cover organizations‹and in many ways
the group¹s procedures laid the groundwork for the Iran-Contra scandal.

Despite the controversy surrounding Yellow Fruit, the I.S.A. was kept intact
as an undercover unit by the Army. ³But we put so many restrictions on it,²
the second Pentagon adviser said. ³In I.S.A., if you wanted to travel fifty
miles you had to get a special order. And there were certain areas, such as
Lebanon, where they could not go.² The adviser acknowledged that the current
operations are similar to those two decades earlier, with similar risks‹and, 
as he saw it, similar reasons for taking the risks. ³What drove them then, 
in terms of Yellow Fruit, was that they had no intelligence on Iran,² the 
adviser told me. ³They had no knowledge of Tehran and no people on the 
ground who could prepare the battle space.²

Rumsfeld¹s decision to revive this approach stemmed, once again, from a 
failure of intelligence in the Middle East, the adviser said. The 
Administration believed that the C.I.A. was unable, or unwilling, to provide 
the military with the information it needed to effectively challenge 
stateless terrorism. ³One of the big challenges was that we didn¹t have 
Humint²‹human intelligence‹³collection capabilities in areas where 
terrorists existed,² the adviser told me. ³Because the C.I.A. claimed to 
have such a hold on Humint, the way to get around them, rather than take 
them on, was to claim that the agency didn¹t do Humint to support Special 
Forces operations overseas. The C.I.A. fought it.² Referring to Rumsfeld¹s 
new authority for covert operations, the first Pentagon adviser told me, 
³It¹s not empowering military intelligence. It¹s emasculating the C.I.A.²

A former senior C.I.A. officer depicted the agency¹s eclipse as predictable. 
³For years, the agency bent over backward to integrate and coördinate with 
the Pentagon,² the former officer said. ³We just caved and caved and got 
what we deserved. It is a fact of life today that the Pentagon is a 
five-hundred-pound gorilla and the C.I.A. director is a chimpanzee.²

There was pressure from the White House, too. A former C.I.A. 
clandestine-services officer told me that, in the months after the 
resignation of the agency¹s director George Tenet, in June, 2004, the White 
House began ³coming down critically² on analysts in the C.I.A.¹s Directorate 
of Intelligence (D.I.) and demanded ³to see more support for the 
Administration¹s political position.² Porter Goss, Tenet¹s successor, 
engaged in what the recently retired C.I.A. official described as a 
³political purge² in the D.I. Among the targets were a few senior analysts 
who were known to write dissenting papers that had been forwarded to the 
White House. The recently retired C.I.A. official said, ³The White House 
carefully reviewed the political analyses of the D.I. so they could sort out 
the apostates from the true believers.² Some senior analysts in the D.I. 
have turned in their resignations‹quietly, and without revealing the extent 
of the disarray.

The White House solidified its control over intelligence last month, when it 
forced last-minute changes in the intelligence-reform bill. The legislation, 
based substantially on recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, originally 
gave broad powers, including authority over intelligence spending, to a new 
national-intelligence director. (The Pentagon controls roughly eighty per 
cent of the intelligence budget.) A reform bill passed in the Senate by a 
vote of 96-2. Before the House voted, however, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld 
balked. The White House publicly supported the legislation, but House 
Speaker Dennis Hastert refused to bring a House version of the bill to the 
floor for a vote‹ostensibly in defiance of the President, though it was 
widely understood in Congress that Hastert had been delegated to stall the 
bill. After intense White House and Pentagon lobbying, the legislation was 
rewritten. The bill that Congress approved sharply reduced the new 
director¹s power, in the name of permitting the Secretary of Defense to 
maintain his ³statutory responsibilities.² Fred Kaplan, in the online 
magazine Slate, described the real issues behind Hastert¹s action, quoting a 
congressional aide who expressed amazement as White House lobbyists bashed 
the Senate bill and came up ³with all sorts of ludicrous reasons why it was 
unacceptable.²

³Rummy¹s plan was to get a compromise in the bill in which the Pentagon 
keeps its marbles and the C.I.A. loses theirs,² the former high-level 
intelligence official told me. ³Then all the pieces of the puzzle fall in 
place. He gets authority for covert action that is not attributable, the 
ability to directly task national-intelligence assets²‹including the many 
intelligence satellites that constantly orbit the world.

³Rumsfeld will no longer have to refer anything through the government¹s 
intelligence wringer,² the former official went on. ³The intelligence system 
was designed to put competing agencies in competition. What¹s missing will 
be the dynamic tension that insures everyone¹s priorities‹in the C.I.A., the 
D.O.D., the F.B.I., and even the Department of Homeland Security‹are 
discussed. The most insidious implication of the new system is that Rumsfeld 
no longer has to tell people what he¹s doing so they can ask, ŒWhy are you 
doing this?¹ or ŒWhat are your priorities?¹ Now he can keep all of the 
mattress mice out of it.²


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