CIA: A fundamental intelligence test after fatal blunders

Peter Preston, Guardian News Service, London

There are, you may distantly recall, four horsemen to this pending apocalypse: Military action, financial action, diplomatic action -- and intelligence. But without intelligence, there is precious little useful action of any kind. And that, two months in, is precisely where we find ourselves. Without intelligence. Time to shape up and kick a few equestrian backsides.

Four in particular suggest themselves. They belong to George Tenet, director of the CIA, Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, and (downscale) their British opposite numbers, Sir Richard Dearlove and Sir Stephen Lander (otherwise known as the knights of the crossed wires). As a disenchanted press begins to cry for ritual sacrifices, for example of poor Geoff Hoon, Britain's defense secretary, here's a quartet of sacrifices that might actually do some good.

The war may be a misnomered, misbegotten one: The tactics lugubriously resorted to may seem crude or counterproductive. What is not in doubt, though, is that sometime, somehow there will have to be a turning point that can reasonably be hailed as victory: For letting the master perpetrators of Sept. 11 run free to murder thousands more is not an option.

It isn't Bush's face or Blair's poll rating that matters. It isn't even the 43 percent of the British public who told the Observer on Sunday that they don't believe bin Laden would ever be caught. It is, at the very least, stopping these killers as well as stopping the killing. And we need to be clear-eyed about the critical failure so far: Just one damn intelligence debacle after another.

Would high-profile dismissals help? Do you rationally ditch your generals, overt or covert, in the midst of such a campaign? Only in extremis, perhaps. But consider the intelligence record so far -- with extreme prejudice.

Osama bin Laden was not exactly a nonentity on Sept. 10. He was already America's (and thus Britain's) most wanted, vainly searched for over the years. He had warned floridly of a big coup coming. Yet nobody was ready, nobody had a clue. Intelligence sat stunned at the back of the class.

And since the twin towers collapsed things have grown worse, not better. Outside America, in the hills of southern Afghanistan, bin Laden sits unscathed with his video camera. Why don't the "crack" special forces teams go in and root him out? Because they have no idea where he is.

Because information on the ground (about almost anything useful) is chronically deficient. Because the rising of the Pashtun tribes against the Taliban that CIA analysts predicted simply hasn't happened. Because the Taliban are tougher nuts than those fabled experts in their cosy offices supposed.

The carpet bombing that is turning off the Arab world was never, of course, a part of the plan. The weeks of collateral damage and friendly fire were never strategic imperatives. They are there, continuing, because nobody has a brighter idea or better information. Thud and blunder replacing intelligence.

And inside America? You sigh for the FBI. Over a 1,000 of the usual suspects rounded up -- but not one breakthrough worth a damn. Nobody who matters in custody, nobody talking. Anthrax letters potter through the post -- to Kenya, Argentina and Pakistan as well as Washington and New York. Why? Mueller's finest have no idea.

There are general alerts from time to time, awful warnings, but nothing specific enough to be useful rather than merely alarming. Failure before the event has turned to prolonged failure after it.

One grisly conclusion. In spite of the threat, openly signaled, in spite of the billions of dollars spent -- now topped up with a billion more -- America's intelligence forces had no Muslim expertise and no key Muslim operators in the field. They start, literally, from ground zero. They are as hapless and hopeless as their braided colleagues ordering up the B-52s.

Sir Richard and Sir Stephen, by contrast, are far smaller sherries. They, like Britain itself, stand on the peripheries of conflict. But they, too, have served no apparent function thus far. The Arab groupings we allowed to operate here because we could supposedly keep an eye on them have yielded no gold. Any contacts that might go with our colonial, subcontinental past are barren. We, like the Americans, have our general alerts. The rest is silence.

Unfair? Good chaps doing their best? Perhaps: You certainly wouldn't expect ministers to gripe in public. It is not the done thing. But what goes for the CIA and FBI also goes for our homegrown talent. After the cold war ended, they all looked for new threats and new revenue streams. There was (remember?) the war on drugs. How could that be waged without good sources in the Afghan field? There was the threat of militant Islam. There was the struggle against organized crime and its cash-covered channels.

Nothing, at first glance, could have prepared them better for the pivotal task now thrust upon them, the underpinning of this entire "war". Yet nothing, as September turns into mid-November, is what we get. The thoroughly modern spooks -- the bright, educated, ideal dinner party guests -- like scanning electronic data gathered from the skies. Hands don't get dirty that way.

Our lack of intelligence, in short, isn't bad luck, but bad judgment; systemic rather than random. And that is why the issue needs airing and why Bush and Blair ought to start kicking. George Tenet is a hold-over from the Clinton area, retained for an "undetermined" span. Why not make a determination? Why go on pretending that "homeland security" can be guaranteed without homeland revolution?

In democratic life, politicians are paid to take the rap -- and will do, unless this manhunt succeeds. But the people who have let us down most evidently are unaccountable, wrapped in their secrecies and introversions. It doesn't make sense any longer.

We want to catch Osama bin Laden. We wish to dismantle his network. Perhaps the Libyans and the Syrians can help us. Perhaps the Pakistanis could do a deal more. But the central argument for a bombing pause now is purely practical, as practical as the weeks spent assembling aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea.

When in doubt, stop digging and start thinking. A fundamental intelligence test.