IF THERE IS A SINGLE MAJOR INTELLIGENCE FAILURE to have emerged from the rubble of the twin towers, it is America's inability over the better part of a decade to track down and eliminate Osama bin Laden, who has been the U.S. Public Enemy Number One since the early 1990s. Arrayed against this malevolent David has been a veritable American Goliath of military, intelligence, and antiterrorism assets, an apparatus that has failed utterly to bring him to justice -- or bring justice to him. And though the reasons for that failure will be dissected over and over in the next few months -- by congressional committees, government task forces, and the private sector -- it is fair to say that one thing that the U.S. Goliath has not lacked is money.
In the five years since 1996, when Congress passed two major antiterrorism laws, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Defense Against Weapons of Mass Destruction Act, the United States has spent more than $ 50 billion to fight terrorism, including $ 11 billion last year alone. The Federal Bureau of Investigation's antiterrorism budget, part of that total, rose sixfold during the Clinton administration, to $ 609 million in 2000. At the same time, annual intelligence spending by the United States since the end of the Cold War has hovered at just under $ 30 billion, only a small portion of which is included in the antiterrorism budget. The best-known spy agencies, the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI's National Security Division, together absorb only about one-seventh of that $ 30 billion, with the vast bulk being spent on the high-tech satellites, military surveillance, and eaves-dropping systems run by the Pentagon, the National Security Agency (NSA), and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).
As the ruins still smolder in New York and Washington, it's time to ask: What are we getting for all that money? Some will rush to add still more funds to boost our counterterrorist agencies and spies. Democratic Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is already calling for more money to beef up the intelligence agencies. But America's security establishment doesn't need to get richer; it needs to get smarter. There is substantial reason to believe that our spies and terrorism fighters could do better -- with less money, not more. "I presume there will be an increase in spending on the intelligence agencies, disproportionately concentrated in counterintelligence and human intelligence," says John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, a veteran analyst of the spy agencies. "And I doubt it's going to do much good."
Consider, first, antiterrorism. Not a few critics, including the General Accounting Office (GAO), have made the point that America's antiterrorism effort was assembled helter-skelter in the wake of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and then the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. From modest beginnings, spending doubled and redoubled, far too fast to ensure sensible deployment of the money. Instead, intelligence spending was marked by waste on one hand and by an expensive concentration on the threat of nuclear, biological, and chemical terrorism on the other. Throughout the 1990s, GAO reports on the terrorism battle documented cases of misspent dollars, overlapping jurisdictions, duplication of effort, and mismanagement. Some of that antiterrorism spending was certainly spent correctly, such as millions of dollars expended on the tightening of security at American embassies after the 1998 bin Laden -- linked bombings of U.S. missions in Kenya and Tanzania. But much of the expenditure was devoted toward building up resources against what many experts say is the remote and exceedingly unlikely threat of so-called weapons of mass destruction. "Federal efforts to combat terrorism have been based on worst-case scenarios which are out of balance with the threat," concluded the GAO, adding that federal spending on antiterrorism was "taking place in the absence of sound threat and risk assessment."
"I think there has been a huge amount of waste and inefficiency," says Jonathan Tucker, a chemical-and-biological-warfare expert at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Washington, D.C. "And there's been a lot of threat inflation by agencies who saw terrorism as a way to increase their budgets," he says.
Last year, for instance, the United States spent more than $ 1.3 billion seeking to prevent and prepare for terrorist use of nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. The funding was spread out over a score of agencies, from the FBI and the Federal Emergency Management Administration to the Pentagon, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Environmental Protection Agency. And while many urged federal officials to prepare for such doomsday events, many others warned that the real terrorism threat would come from old-fashioned, low-tech terrorism -- things like bombs aboard planes or deadly car and truck bombs. No one, it seems, inside or outside of government, anticipated that hijacked, fully fueled commercial jetliners would be used as flying bombs in a coordinated assault on multiple targets. But for all of the concern about high-tech terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction, not to mention "infowar" targeting computer and communications systems, the ultimate tragedy was unleashed by a handful of men carrying pocketknives and box cutters.
Next, consider the intelligence agencies. Since the end of the Cold War, the CIA, the NRO, the NSA, and other agencies have struggled to adapt to the new world order. Unlike the Pentagon -- which up to now has suffered real and substantial reductions in spending, including base closings and troop reductions -- the U.S. intelligence agencies have survived nearly intact. Yet most of their nearly $ 30 billion a year, heavily concentrated on the billion-dollar surveillance satellites and half-billion-dollar listening stations on the ground and the high-tech specialists who support them, is a relic of the Cold War, when our spy agencies were charged with monitoring the Soviet Union and its allies, watching Moscow's fleet of intercontinental ballistic missiles and the Warsaw Pact's troop deployments, and verifying disarmament agreements. In recent years, that vastly expensive apparatus has increasingly been enhanced to allow it to provide real-time intelligence to military commanders in the field, thus absorbing even more of the federal budget. But the system's usefulness in tracking low-tech cells of terrorists is questionable.
That difficulty is underscored by the diabolically brilliant low-tech deployment of men armed only with easily concealed -- and, at the time, permitted -- blades aboard four separate aircraft. And bin Laden himself, according to intelligence specialists, has learned how to avoid the electronic ears and satellite eyes that might track his movements and conversations.
Critics of the CIA, including Pike, argue that much of the agency's expenditures on its multibillion-dollar electronic technology could be cut significantly, because its main target, the Soviet Union, is no more. But Pike doesn't expect to see cutbacks any time soon. "Given that we're already hearing why this attack demonstrates why we need missile defense, I assume we're going to spend even more money on a list of things that have nothing to do with what happened," he says.
The agency's defenders portray an intelligence system operating under nearly threadbare conditions. "This is not something where you can shift resources around," says Anthony H. Cordesman, a security expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. Cordesman says that for decades, and especially during the Clinton years, the CIA was underfunded, watched its operations capability crippled, had its best personnel forced into early retirement, and found itself hamstrung by rules and regulations -- including bans on political assassinations and on making use of criminals and human-rights violators in its employ abroad. "The intelligence community put its money into upgrading its technology, particularly because it was so bound in other areas," he says. "Basically, it's not a question of where you can make trade-offs in intelligence, but how many more World Trade Centers do you want to have?"
Cordesman's rhetoric is echoed by Gene Poteat, a 25-year CIA veteran and president of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. "We've tied the hands of the CIA by preventing them from even thinking about assassinations, from dealing with unsavory characters, and by letting the agency be led for years by political hacks," he told me.
In fact, however, while the CIA is precluded from assassinating foreign heads of state and top government officials (not by law, but by executive order), there is nothing to prevent a CIA special-operations squad from taking out Osama bin Laden. That, in fact, was confirmed on September 17 by former President Clinton, who said that during his administration the CIA had the green light to get rid of the terrorist -- but just missed him. And there is no effective restriction on the CIA's ability to recruit and use former drug gangsters, terrorists, and even torturers as its agents overseas, as long as such hirelings are approved at a higher level than the field station. In this sense, at least, the calls to further unleash the CIA are unneeded. More broadly, however, many CIA veterans want to lift the entire system of checks and balances put in place since the 1970s, including congressional oversight.
Even so, many analysts, both on the left and on the right, agree that the CIA is sorely lacking in what it calls "HUMINT": human intelligence gathered by CIA officers and their agents and informants on the ground. Compared with high-tech spying, HUMINT is cheap; the CIA can hire thousands of officers for the equivalent of a single billion-dollar satellite. And it may be that the only way to track Osama bin Laden is by using informants. While many of his acolytes are fanatical true believers who couldn't be persuaded to inform on him, at least some of bin Laden's network and those who have interacted with it are mercenary and therefore susceptible to being bought.
Indeed, the CIA is not exactly unfamiliar with bin Laden and his crew, since he and most of his apparatchiks were closely allied to the CIA during the 1980s, in the war against the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. "We worked with bin Laden in the past," says former CIA agent Poteat. "He was one of the freedom fighters. And there are a lot of people [around him] who worked with the CIA and would again."
But the danger inherent in more HUMINT is that once the CIA starts putting more and more officers into the field, intelligence collection quickly becomes a venue for stepped-up covert operations. That is where President Ronald Reagan's CIA director, William Casey, went overboard in such episodes as the Iran-contra operation, harkening back to the golden age of CIA-sponsored coups d'etat and election-rigging from the 1950s through the early 1970s. If Osama bin Laden is to be made to pay for his crimes, a CIA special-operations unit might have to do the job. Yet as President George W. Bush unrolls his war against terrorism worldwide, it is more and more likely that it will involve not only far-flung operations by conventional military forces but also an ominous resurgence of CIA covert operations. Destabilizing governments turns out to be a lot easier than stopping terrorists.
