SIN OF OMISSION
By RALPH PETERS
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February 6, 2004 -- YESTERDAY, CIA Director George Tenet defended his agency's pre-war anal ysis on Iraq. He told the truth on every count he addressed, from weapons of mass destruction to the infernal difficulty of intelligence work.
The problem lies in what he failed to say.
Yes, the intelligence system got a great deal right. And it's true that much of what we got wrong appeared logical at the time. As someone who worked in intelligence for decades, I can back his claim that intel rarely gets it entirely right or completely wrong.
He also was right to defend those who work behind the veil of secrecy. Our intelligence community includes tens of thousands of skilled, motivated professionals — some of whom take risks that would make a soldier shudder.
But when Tenet insisted that our Human Intelligence capabilities had returned to adequate health, he did his own subordinates, as well as the American people, a disservice.
The director of Central Intelligence has one of the toughest jobs in our government. If George Tenet has failings, he also has displayed strong virtues. But in praising the genuinely admirable achievements of our spies and case officers over the past few years, he revealed that he just doesn't get it. He is, in the end, a creature of the system — a bureaucrat, not a reformer.
His most telling remark was that our HUMINT capabilities have been rebuilt nearly to earlier levels — to Cold War strength, though he didn't say so. But in this bedeviled, complex, unstable world, returning to Washington-vs.-Moscow numbers of agents will still be inadequate.
The problem remains people. Both in raw numbers and in quality. And those people must be supported by a tough-minded Congress that doesn't use every single "intelligence failure" as an opportunity for grandstanding.
Congress needs to back our shadow warriors when they do our nation's dirty work. Instead, congressional committees have spent a generation plaguing those who risk their lives in the dark corners of the world, pretending agents could play by rules suited to bingo night at the retirement home.
Our enemies didn't wreck our HUMINT capabilities. Congress did.
Give us more spies. Absolutely. But when you increase the intel world's human resources, include more linguists, more regional experts, more skilled interrogators and more analysts — and higher standards.
We need pervasive personnel reform, not Christmas help and a round of musical chairs. The fundamental problem remains that we've tried to take the easy path of relying on technology, while neglecting the less congenial human factor.
Machines can do much to support intelligence work. But we've turned the system upside down, assigning many thousands of intelligence personnel to support machines, leaving too few to do the indispensable work of piercing the minds of our enemies.
Every success that Director Tenet listed deserves our gratitude. For all the criticism directed against it — usually by those who've never worked in intelligence — our intel system is far better than its current reputation. But it still remains less than the sum of its costly parts.
At the end of the day, after all the imagery has been analyzed and the intercepts recorded, intelligence still comes down to having smarter men and women on your side than the enemy has on his. And you have to have them in sufficient numbers.
Our intelligence system will not be as powerful as our nation requires until our focus returns to the human being.
Ralph Peters is a retired Army intelligence officer and the author of "Beyond Baghdad."
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