Center for a New American Security

As some of you may or may not already know, Hizballah, together with the Lebanese government, has rolled up what is believed to be the vast majority of the assets of the Central Intelligence Agency in Lebanon. Ken Delanian of the Los Angeles Times and Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo of the Associated Press have more, but this story has already attracted the attention of the U.S. Congress, which has some questions for the CIA.

I know about as much about clandestine operations and running agents as I do about playing linebacker in the NFL, but I do know a little about Lebanon, and I also know something about what my boss John Nagl likes to refer to as "learning organizations," a concept I believe to be relevant here. I first heard about this story from a journalist over lunch last week, and I'll relate to you what I told him and some of what he told me.

1. As many of you know, Hizballah and Lebanese intelligence have been quite good at rolling up Israeli intelligence assets since 2006. (Contrary to what I would have thought, Israel managed to keep a pretty good human intelligence network alive in Lebanon after its withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000.) Our intelligence assets were vulnerable to the same counter-intelligence methods that did in the Israelis, but we apparently blew off the warnings.

2. Given that negligence, if I am a member of the U.S. Congress, I am going to ask if it is really true that the station chief in Beirut was subsequently promoted within the ranks of the CIA. If told this is in fact true, I am going to ask who, if anyone, is being held accountable.

3. I am also, if I am a member of the U.S. Congress, going to be asking whether or not CIA tradecraft has eroded over the past decade as the agency has chased the bright shiny ball we'll call "drone-strikes-in-Pakistan". (A question that, quite frankly, needed to be asked after the 2009 bombing in Khost.) It's great to have an intelligence agency with a knife in its teeth, but the primary mission of an intelligence organization is to gather and analyze intelligence, not to thwack bad guys. If you fail in that primary mission, questions have to be asked as to why you are failing.

4. The CIA strikes me as an organization that hates having to explain itself and has every bureaucratic reason to avoid doing so. In the same way that the U.S. Army has an institutional interest in convincing policy makers that every general officer is equal to another, the CIA has an interest in convincing outsiders that external evaluation will compromise valuable tactics, techniques and procedures and will endanger operational security. (This is not a good recipe for an organization that learns from its mistakes and solicits external criticism in an effort to be more effective.) All organizations resist criticism, but intelligence organizations resist criticism and then wrap themselves in the cloak of all-important operational security to avoid it. Again, if I am the U.S. Congress, I am going to call bulls***, and I am going to do so in the following way.

• I am going to assemble a high-level panel of retired agency veterans and veterans of other U.S. intelligence and military organizations to assess where, exactly, things went wrong in Lebanon. (I would try to get people like Hank Crumpton and John McLaughlin but might also try to get a real outsider like Mark Allen -- which would drive the agency absolutely crazy and would provoke cries that these kinds of things simply cannot be done. Which might be exactly why they should be done.) I would charge this same panel with asking whether or not tradecraft has eroded across the agency and, if it has, to suggest changes to improve it.
• I would demand the CIA hold people accountable. I would demand, in short, heads. We cannot recruit assets in the Arabic-speaking world when people do not believe we will protect them and that they are vulnerable to a) the methods used by Hizballah and Lebanese intelligence and b) our own poor tradecraft.

Because that's what it really comes down to: poor tradecraft. This is not a matter of some Lebanese Karla lurking out there, out-smarting us. This is our premier intelligence agency getting sloppy, resulting in the death or incarceration of some brave U.S. allies.

UPDATE: Greg Miller has more information in today's Washington Post. Key lines:

CIA veterans familiar with the exposure described the harm as extensive. “It has caused irreparable damage to the agency’s ability to operate in the country,” said a former CIA official with knowledge of the case. The former official attributed the failure to a breakdown in tradecraft. “It is all a result of bad counterintelligence tactics.”

One of my commenters, meanwhile, has some intelligent words in defense of the agency. Check it out.

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On a completely unrelated note, famed University of Georgia radio announcer Larry Munson died yesterday. I grew up around SEC football and remember my father, a friend of Munson's, introducing me to the great man. ESPN has compiled a list of Munson's greatest calls, several of which came in games against my Volunteers. My own personal favorite has to be Munson's reaction on seeing a new freshman running back by the name of ... Herschel Walker. Bill Bates may have gone on to enjoy a stellar career with the Dallas Cowboys, but listen to Munson as Walker, a freshman, absolutely runs him over. My god, a freshman! 

1. Jane Mayer's lengthy article in the New Yorker on the National Security Agency should be required reading within defense policy circles because it raises so many good questions about domestic spying, classification, and how we prosecute leakers. I like Mayer's reporting a lot, as I've made clear in the past, so I'll only pause to take issue with one thing in her article: I have a tough time having any degree of sympathy for those who leak classified information -- even when that information exposes a problem in or abuses of the system. And I think Mayer intends for us to pity her protagonist, who is being prosecuted for feeding information to a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. (The protagonist claims none of the information he leaked was classified, though it was cut-and-pasted from SECRET documents.) I found myself nodding along with the guy who told Mayer, "To his credit, he tried to raise these issues, and, to an extent, they were dealt with. But who died and left him in charge?" Exactly right: the system breaks down when every Tom, Dick, Harry and Jane gets to decide what gets released to the media and what does not. Unsurprisingly, journalists have a more sympathetic view toward those people who feed them scoops than do those whose jobs and lives are made harder by their colleagues leaking information.

2. Egypt: Why Are the Churches Burning? by Yasmine El-Rashidi in the New York Review of Books.

3. Kim Dozier on the Osama bin Laden raid. Kim is much admired within the special operations community, and her excellent sources and contacts inform this great article, which incorporates inside information (and leaks) without compromising OPSEC ...

4. ... but John Kenney gets the real scoop on the raid, interviewing several SEALs and printing their testimonies.

5. Confessions of a Vulcan: Dov Zakheim explains how the Bush Administration screwed up Afghanistan.

6. Finally, the Modern Library has re-issued Shelby Foote's Civil War Trilogy with a series of introductory essays. The first essay, by Jon Meacham, correctly places Foote within a very specific social and literary context in central Mississippi in the early 20th Century and notes the influence of the salon of William Alexander Percy. My scarily erudite paternal grandfather, actually, grew up in the exact same time and place, and it was a crazy one: on the one hand, it was in some ways a Third World country, yet on the other hand, it managed to produce a ridiculously disproportionate number of the Twentieth Century's men of letters. (And women, of course, because you can't forget Eudora!) Having only read the section on the Gettysburg Campaign previously, I started the first volume of the series last night and had trouble putting it down.

I was re-reading the national security adviser's remarks to the media on 10 March 2011 in which he cautioned Jake Tapper and others against putting too much stock in the analysis provided by DNI Clapper and the intelligence community. Since the intelligence community is so rarely congratulated when they get something right, it's worth pointing out that had they been wrong, we would not be conducting combat operations in Libya right now. But their order-of-battle analysis, sadly, proved all too accurate. Readers, if you will, join me in a quiet golf clap for the men and women at Langley, Fort Meade and Bolling AFB.

Recently, I went to the launch of a new social movement in Pakistan that seeks to promote democracy and counter extremism. I was later talking to a friend who had followed the launch in the media. You could say that he had a unique take on the matter - as a former officer in Pakistan's intelligence services, he spent many years working on counter terrorism and I was interested to hear what he had to say about all the new kids on the block setting up shop on his turf.

Most people who read this blog regularly can probably guess what I'm going to think about any given topic (particularly if it involves the media) so I thought it would much more interesting to hear a new take on a familiar topic. My friend graciously submitted the following article. However, be aware, the opinions are his own and do not represent those of his former employers or anyone else.

The extremism of simple phrases

The banner said, "Extremism leads to Terrorism". It's simple idea but a catchy phrase is seldom a good basis from which to understand a very complex problem.

Extremists come in a variety of forms. Some say that Muslim extremists are those that follow their religion rigorously. But Muslims aren't the only people with a set of strongly held convictions. Others, for example, might feel extremely attached to animal rights. However, in parts of the world where a fear of Islam is becoming widespread, the sight of Muslims praying can cause panic, while cabbage picking hardly raises an eyebrow.

Pakistan is becoming a test tube for people who want to understand and challenge extremism. Approaches are varied and often conflicting. A social movement called Khudi led by a former extremist recently launched in Pakistan. Khudi's approach reminds me of a faded hip-hop artist looking to get back in the limelight on the basis of a catchy remix of an old tune.

Maajid Nawaz, the former extremist, seemed like our own Nawaz Sherif (Ed. Leader of Pakistan's opposition Muslim League party) in Western clothes and a $100 haircut. He repeated pretty much the same rhetoric you hear surfing our news channels and came off sounding like a salesman trying to peddle himself as new visionary leader and the answer to our political vacuum. The media was there to lend its weight.

The speakers repeated their old - unremixed - tunes that the military and intelligence agencies were constantly curtailing the media, which is why it must grow and gain more power. They tried to make us understand that even if we weren't lucky enough to be noble journalists, we could help Pakistan - of course, by making everyone think like them. In reality, the media has no plan for the betterment of Pakistan; its only quest is to amass more influence for its chosen sons and daughters.

In guarding Pakistan, all separatists, regardless of their geography or level of education, need to be countered. Therefore, if certain members of the media have decided to mislead the nation on the pretext of liberties or the hidden evil of the security services they should be challenged with the same energy we put into stopping armed attackers and suicide bombers. The motive of both sets of people is the same, self-promotion at all costs, including the stability and security of the nation.

The real question here is, who are the terrorists and where is the war? And yet, the answers make the issue no clearer still. For example, Karachi's Binori Town madrassa is led by a man whose own immediate family resides in the United States. And yet, we still face threats from the institution's students and even faculty members.

We, as Pakistanis, feel ashamed when we are told a Pakistan has been arrested on terror charges in the US or the UK. The arrests continue, but so do the drone strikes. I don't believe that we should form an alliance with the enemy. When confronted, we should look to see whether we are facing a wolf or a wolf in sheep's clothes. In a time of war, people are called upon to take sides. There was Bush's "war or terror" and the "axis of evil". Whereas Islamists talk of the Harb al Kabeer, or the Great War. Those who choose a path of their own make powerful enemies.

New social movements for the growth and future of Pakistan are important. But we cannot let ourselves be guided by the agenda of a lone, self-serving individual. With his comment "I corrupted the minds of Pakistani army officers as well as others around the world." Maajid Nawaz showed that he had merely switched from one extreme to another. And as the banner implies, extremism leads to nowhere Pakistan might want to go.