In The Land Of The Free

COINTELPRO and the Omaha Two

By Angola 3 News

July 21, 2010

Courtesy Of "Information Clearing House"

In 2007, veteran journalist Michael Richardson began writing a series of articles for OpEdNews.com about Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa, who are two Black Panther political prisoners known as the Omaha Two. Richardson argues that they were framed for the 1970 murder of a policeman as part of the FBI’s notorious counterintelligence program, dubbed “COINTELPRO.” This top-secret and illegal operation was a dirty war on the entire US Left, including the civil rights & Black liberation movements.

Illustrating this program’s intent, a March 3, 1968 COINTELPRO memo discussed the need to stop "the beginning of a true black revolution," and to "prevent the rise of a 'messiah' who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement… Through counterintelligence it should be possible to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them." Another stated goal was "to prevent the long-range growth of militant black nationalist organizations, especially among youth. Specific tactics to prevent these groups from converting young people must be developed." One specific tactical approach was expressed in an April 3, 1968 communiqué arguing that "The Negro youth and moderates must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teaching, they will be dead revolutionaries."

In terms of scale, the FBI's war of repression against the Black liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s was greatest against the Black Panthers. Many Panthers, like Chicago leader Fred Hampton, were assassinated outright, while others were framed for murders they did not commit. A few of these Panthers, like Geronimo Ji Jaga and Dhoruba Bin Wahad, had their convictions overturned and were released, but many of the COINTELPRO survivors remain in prison today.

In addressing why the Panthers were targeted so intensely by COINTELPRO, Noam Chomsky wrote in 1973: "A top secret Special Report for the president in June 1970 gives some insight into the motivations for the actions undertaken by the government to destroy the Black Panther Party. The report describes the party as 'the most active and dangerous black extremist group in the United States.' Its 'hard core members' were estimated at 800, but 'a recent poll indicates that approximately 25 percent of the black population has a great respect for the BPP, including 43 percent of blacks under 21 years of age.' On the basis of such estimates of the potential of the party, the repressive apparatus of the state proceeded against it to ensure that it did not succeed in organizing as a substantial social or political force."

Michael Richardson is now working on a book about the Omaha Two and an archive of his definitive OpEdNews.com series about the case is available here. This year, he began a new series of articles at Examiner.com, exploring the broader history of COINTELPRO, along with a continued focus on the Omaha Two, viewable here.

Angola 3 News: Please tell us about who the Omaha Two are.

Michael Richardson: Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa (formerly David Rice) were two leaders of the Black Panther affiliate chapter in Omaha, Nebraska and targets of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under Operation COINTELPRO. Both men are serving life sentences at the Nebraska State Penitentiary for the 1970 bombing murder of an Omaha policeman and have been imprisoned forty years. The former Panther leaders have come to be known as the Omaha Two.

A3N: As a journalist at the time, how did you first react to news of their arrests?

MR: I didn’t know Poindexter, but Mondo, then called David, was a friend of mine I met at Omaha City Council meetings. I knew Mondo was the sharpest critic of Omaha police around and that he was constantly being harassed, so I wasn’t surprised he became a prime suspect. I didn’t think he did it though and I followed the case in the news and attended part of his trial the next year. I never got to speak to Mondo after his arrest and I moved from Nebraska within a year of his trial.

My first published article was a report on the trial that appeared in the Omaha Star, but it only reported the surface story as the true facts of the case remained hidden.

Over the years I have wondered if Mondo was guilty, as there seemed to be so much evidence of his involvement. Finally, after over 35 years of doubt I began corresponding with Mondo and started research on the case. I reviewed portions of the voluminous court file, interviewed people familiar with the case including the two current attorneys, read old newspaper accounts, studied formerly secret COINTELPRO files, and visited with both men at the prison where they are held.

I am now convinced Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa did not get a fair trial and were framed by overzealous police and prosecutors who ended up letting the real killers get away to put the Panther leaders in jail.

A3N: Can you briefly explain the charges against the Omaha Two, and what evidence was used to convict them?

MR: On August 17, 1970, an anonymous 911 caller reported a woman screaming at a vacant house. Police arrived to an ambush instead, in which 29 year-old Officer Larry Minard was killed. A recording of the killer’s voice was sent to the FBI crime laboratory for analysis but before Minard was even buried, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had ordered the crime lab to withhold a report on the tape.

A 15 year-old, Duane Peak, was soon charged with the murder and after six different versions of the crime, he implicated Ed and Mondo in exchange for his own freedom.

Dynamite was allegedly found in Mondo’s basement only to have two different detectives both claim they were each the one that found the explosives.

The 911 tape was withheld from the jury. The conflicting police dynamite testimony was also unknown to the jury, as was the deal that allowed Peak his freedom. The jury was never informed that the defendants were COINTELPRO targets.

After five days of deliberation, the jury convicted Ed and Mondo of murder but spared their lives from the electric chair. The two men have been in prison ever since.

A3N: Can you please explain what COINTELPRO was? How do the Omaha 2 fit into the story of COINTELPRO?

MR: Operation COINTELRO was a vast, illegal campaign by the FBI in the 60’s and 70’s to “disrupt” domestic political activity that J. Edgar Hoover deemed dangerous. The clandestine program was national in scope, targeted thousands of individuals and groups and broke a number of laws dwarfing Watergate in magnitude.

The Black Panthers were the primary target of Hoover’s law enforcement conspiracy. Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa had been COINTELPRO targets for at least a year prior to their arrests. Hoover had sent several memos to the Omaha FBI office complaining about a lack of results and urged the Omaha agents to be “imaginative” with counterintelligence actions.

Poindexter had been the subject of a secret FBI smear campaign with forged letters and anonymous phone calls while Mondo was targeted for an ambush while distributing Black Panther newspapers. It was the death of Minard, however, that gave the FBI an opportunity to put the Omaha Two behind bars.

At the time of the trial, the jury had no idea that COINTELPRO manipulation of evidence had occurred. The secret program was officially disbanded a week after the trial ended making Ed and Mondo the last COINTELPRO victims.

The COINTELPRO withholding of evidence did not surface until years later following Freedom of Information requests for COINTELPRO documents.

A3N: Have all the COINTELPRO documents been released?

MR: No. Key documents identifying informants and providing evidentiary details have been destroyed, withheld, or remain heavily redacted.

In the mid 70’s when the Church Committee of the U.S. Senate investigated COINTELPRO, much of the Omaha case remained hidden and so the full story of the FBI duplicity in Omaha remains unknown and will likely never be fully disclosed.

Five different members of the Omaha Police Department ended up making perjured or false statements about the case in court proceedings, to the media, and in congressional testimony.

No official or agent of the FBI ever was publicly disciplined for the COINTELPRO misconduct in the Omaha case.

A3N: What are the Omaha Two doing today to challenge the convictions and imprisonment?

MR: Both Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa have habeas corpus petitions pending in the 8th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals and petitions for hearings pending in the U.S. District Court of Nebraska.

Both appeals address the conflicting police testimony on dynamite and new scientific testing of the 911 tape that establishes Duane Peak did not make the deadly phone call as he had claimed.

Poindexter asked the Nebraska courts for review and in 2008 was told by the Douglas County District Court that it didn’t matter where the dynamite was found or who found it. Last year the Nebraska Supreme Court told Ed that it didn’t matter who made the 911 call.

A3N: How has the mainstream media done with reporting on the Omaha Two?

MR: Poorly. The national media has largely ignored the case and the regional media has failed to explore the COINTELPRO aspect of the prosecution. Almost all Nebraska media accounts of the Omaha Two contain factual errors of some sort and glaring omissions of relevant facts. Anyone relying on the mainstream media about this COINTELPRO case is sadly both misinformed and under-informed.

Racism and the stigma against the Black Panthers is partially to blame, while COINTELPRO media manipulation was another factor in early reporting on the case. Why the media continues to ignore this important case today is a mystery to me.

A3N: What upcoming articles are you working on?

MR: Now that internet newspaper Examiner.com has named me the COINTELPRO Examiner, the opportunity to report on the Omaha Two is part of my beat. I intend on revisiting, in serial form, the long convoluted history of the case as well as report on current developments.

My research on the FBI and COINTELPRO has led me to understand that Ed and Mondo are not alone and that each COINTELPRO conviction needs a fresh new look. COINTELPRO was the largest, most systematic attack on our legal system in U.S. history. It is our responsibility today to carefully review the cases of remaining COINTELPRO targets because of the strong possibility of tampering with evidence.

A3N: Having written about the Angola 3, why do you think their case is important?

MR: Any case coming out of the 1970’s involving the Black Panthers is important because of the COINTELPRO abuses. The Angola 3 case is somewhat different than others since its genesis is inside a Louisiana prison. It may have not been technically a J.-Edgar-Hoover-authorized COINTELPRO prosecution but some of the trial tactics, including deals with informers, are the same.

The severity of the punishment, decades in solitary confinement, calls out for review and is itself an injustice.
 

A3N: Any closing thoughts?
 

MR: Larry Minard, the father of five young children, was buried on what would have been his 30th birthday. He was a police officer responding to the call of a woman screaming. Larry Minard’s killers walk free today.

The named supplier of the dynamite, a suspected police informant, was never charged with the crime and only spent one night in jail.

The anonymous 911 caller was not properly identified and has never been charged in the case.

Duane Peak, the confessed bomber, was released after less then 3 years in juvenile detention.

J. Edgar Hoover let the killer of Larry Minard, the 911 caller, go free to make a case against the Omaha Two.

Justice has not been done in Nebraska.
 

--Angola 3 News is a new project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more.

Ed Poindexter & Mondo We Langa Documentary

Part-1



Part-2



Part-3

The COIN Myth

The Search For Human Intelligence

Part 2

By Jeff Huber,
January 13, 2010
Courtesy Of Anti-War News

Part I noted that two key requirements of our counterinsurgency doctrine – a legitimate host-nation government and a competent, trustworthy host-nation security force – will never be accomplished in Iraq or Afghanistan. Part II will illustrate the lack of reliable intelligence in our woebegone wars.

The counterintelligence field manual that Gen. David Petraeus supposedly wrote but really didn’t says, "Counterinsurgency (COIN) is an intelligence-driven endeavor." That’s bad news for us, because our intelligence systems in both Iraq and Afghanistan can best be described as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. meets Inspector Clouseau.

The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) recently published a report titled Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan. The authors, who include Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, deputy chief of staff for intelligence in Afghanistan, tell us that the intelligence apparatus in Afghanistan "is unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which U.S. and allied forces operate in."

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, says, “Our senior leaders – the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretary of defense, Congress, the president of the United States – are not getting the right information to make decisions with."

As tragic as the incident was, one can’t help but view the suicide bombing in Afghanistan that killed seven CIA agents and wounded six others on Dec. 30 as a prime example of what Flynn and McChrystal are talking about. It’s been amusing listening to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough echo the latest spin from his "inside sources" at the CIA’s excuse division, inside sources who have been telling the open media the same fables they’ve been telling Joe.

It’s what they always feared, Joe says, a double agent gaining their trust and turning on them, but the narrative of the bombing changes as fast as the reasons we invaded Iraq changed during the Bush administration.

It’s not entirely clear who the bomber, a Jordanian named Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, was actually working for, or if he was a double agent or a triple agent or a quadruple agent or just somebody who got mad at the Americans.

When the story broke, al-Balawi was an Afghan National Army soldier who walked into a gym facility and triggered his bomb, and the Taliban were the culprits behind the plot (the Taliban took credit for the bombing).

By Jan. 4, unnamed "Western intelligence officials" had told NBC that al-Balawi was a Jordanian doctor who had been a double agent for al-Qaeda. On Jan. 5, the Associated Press reported that unnamed "terrorism officials" said al-Balawi was a "suspected Jordanian double agent."

Al-Balawi was a known al-Qaeda sympathizer who had posted numerous posts on the Web that supported the terror group, the terrorism officials said. So the Jordanians slapped the cuffs on the good doctor and locked him up, then coerced him into helping them and their CIA buddies to capture or kill Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man. Jordan had gotten thick with the CIA by torturing prisoners the agency had rendered into their country illegally. Now Jordanian intelligence is trying to wash its hands of the whole affair, mainly, one imagines, because al-Balawi also managed to kill his Jordanian handler Ali bin Zaid, a member of Jordan’s royal family who Jordanian intelligence claimed was involved in "humanitarian work."

One of the CIA agents killed was said to be one of the agency’s most knowledgeable experts on al-Qaeda. You’d think an al-Qaeda expert would have known al-Balawi was an open al-Qaeda sympathizer and would have insisted that he be searched upon entering the compound regardless of what a super guy the Jordanians said he was. But no.

The Keystone Kops factor in the narrative continued to snowball. On Jan. 7, Rupert Murdoch’s Times of London reported that unnamed "U.S. intelligence officials" believed the bombing was planned by Osama bin Laden’s "inner circle."

Then, lo and behold, a posthumous video showed up on Jan. 9 in which al-Balawi said the bombing was revenge for the Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud, who was killed in August in a CIA drone attack. In the video, al-Balawi is sitting with Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, Mehsud’s successor.

CIA director Leon Panetta has rejected charges that the bombing deaths were the result of poor tradecraft, but CIA veterans disagree. One former field officer said of the incident, "Is it bad tradecraft? Of course.”

“The tradecraft that was developed over many years is passé,” says another veteran CIA field officer. “Now it’s a military tempo where you don’t have time for validating and vetting sources. … The espionage part has become almost quaint.”

We hear from various voices in the warmongery that the bombing proves how much the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda are in cahoots, but all it proves is that we don’t have a clue what’s going on in that region and that we probably never will find truly reliable human intelligence (HUMINT) sources in that part of the world. You can count the number of people who both speak the local languages and can pass a background security check on the fingers and toes of a rattlesnake.

Lack of good HUMINT isn’t the only thing that has our intelligence agencies stymied. Spy drones flying over Afghanistan are providing more raw video information than we can keep up with. According to the New York Times, a group of "young analysts" stationed at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia and elsewhere watch every second of the live footage, but only a small fraction of the archived video has been retrieved for further analysis. The Air Force plans to add 2,500 new analysts to help handle the volume of data. One has to wonder where the Air Force plans to find 2,500 trained imagery analysts and how young they will be.

I’m willing to concede that the CIA and the rest of our intelligence apparatus in Af-Pak seem like bumblers only because their task is an impossible one. But that only serves to point out that the overall mission – counterinsurgency – is being doctrinally driven by something that’s impossible to achieve, thereby making the counterinsurgency itself a mission impossible.

In Part III: Mission creeps and economy of farce.

Read more by Jeff Huber

• The COIN Myth – January 10th, 2010
• Old Blackwater Keeps on Rollin’ – January 6th, 2010
• The Next Quagmire – January 3rd, 2010
• I See London, I See France, I See Bombs in Underpants – December 30th, 2009
• Another Surgin’ Safari – December 28th, 2009

DNI's Strategic Plan Outlines New Missions

Counterintelligence, Cybersecurity Stressed

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Courtesy Of The Washington Post

The top U.S. intelligence official said counterintelligence and cybersecurity would be given new emphasis under a four-year strategic plan he unveiled Tuesday.

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair told reporters that although combating extremism, issuing warnings, countering weapons proliferation and supporting military operations overseas remain major priorities, the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community must also work to keep abreast of technical innovations and developments in information technology.

The objectives outlined in the new National Intelligence Strategy, he said, "can only be carried out by an intelligence community that is agile, adaptive and united."

Blair described the strategy, the first to be drawn up under the Obama administration, as "a muscular intelligence response to meet the nation's responsibilities so that we can provide good advice to the policymakers and in the field."

Asked about a U.S. military attack on terrorism suspects in Somalia this week, Blair said, "We are as aggressive in the intelligence world as we were before, and, in fact, in the particular area of working against groups of violent extremists . . . we can be more aggressive because we are gaining more and more knowledge."

In the past, counterintelligence was directed primarily at exposing foreign spies. Raising it to a main mission, the document says that now, the targets are not only foreign governments but also "non-state actors, violent extremist groups, cyber intruders and criminal organizations" that are increasingly undermining U.S. interests in myriad ways.

It cites as examples attempts to "manipulate U.S. policy and diplomatic efforts, disrupt or mitigate the effectiveness of our military plans and weapons systems, and erode our economic and technological advantage."

The new strategy envisions more collaborative counterintelligence efforts across government agencies to "identify, deceive, exploit, disrupt and protect against these threats." The task is described as not only penetrating enemy intelligence agencies but also employing "counterintelligence across the cyber domain to protect critical infrastructure."

In calling for enhanced cybersecurity as another major mission, the strategy paper declares that the nation's computerized infrastructure "is neither secure nor resilient." It says foreign governments and others are "stealing, changing or destroying information," potentially undermining "national confidence in the information systems" on which the country depends.

"China is very aggressive in the cyber world," Blair said in answer to a question. "So, too, is Russia and others."

He said the intelligence community should strive to detect and identify those breaking into U.S. systems and to spot "the vulnerabilities of our adversaries."

Another Blair initiative is the establishment and enforcement of "performance expectations" for the agencies under his authority. Each agency, such as the CIA or the Defense Intelligence Agency, produces a strategic plan in concert with the national intelligence strategy. Now, Blair's office will assess their progress.

This is not just an educational exercise, Blair said Tuesday, but a plan that "allows for a scorecard on performance."

Counter Intelligence

Today’s CIA Serves Contractors and Bureaucrats—Not The Nation.

By Philip Giraldi
February 23, 2009 Issue
Courtesy Of The American Conservative Magazine

Suppose you were given the dark mission of spending $50 billion a year to create a global intelligence organization that would be minimally effective. You would want to keep 90 percent of the employees in their home country and incentivize senior staff to stay “close to the flagpole” to enhance their promotion prospects. Training costs should be high—$500,000 per recruit—and bureaucracy so stifling that a third of incoming officers will swiftly wash out. To keep morale low, surround those who remain with contractors—about half of the workforce—and pay the hired guns twice as much as the staff. Add a high level of corruption, routine cover-ups of malfeasance and incompetence, and you would have today’s CIA. It is, as one critic noted, “a sorry blend of Monty Python and Big Brother.”

The Sept. 11 attacks caught the Agency off guard. After the devastating budget cuts of the Clinton years, the CIA was desperately trying to rebuild its capabilities, yet it was still gripped by a Cold War mindset. The over-the-horizon threat from China figured far more prominently than terrorism or nuclear proliferation. But overnight that orientation shifted, and this sclerotic bureaucracy was tasked with becoming the leading edge in the Bush administration’s war on terror. Its budget exploded.

Many of the highly motivated but poorly prepared new hires came in without foreign-language fluency. Few had lived or worked outside the United States. Rather than being sent to overseas posts, most were shunted into CIA offices popping up like mushrooms across the United States. Even non-official cover operatives, very expensive and specially trained officers under business cover, were frequently given domestic assignments because there was no place to put them. When the National Clandestine Service needed to increase “operators” overseas—usually because some congressman was nosing around—it prescribed sightseeing and “area familiarization” trips, which the dispatched officers referred to as “Axis of Evil Tourism.” The new CIA thus became its own false front—long on numbers, short on depth.

In a stopgap move designed to buy time to train the newcomers, numerous Agency retirees were called back to the colors as contractors, their clearances renewed. But contracting quickly became a way for senior managers to featherbed their own staffs. By 2002, contractors made up one third of the burgeoning workforce. By 2006, they were more than half, and, according to some estimates, up to 70 percent in certain areas, including the Clandestine Service. Some even found positions as chiefs of station, unimaginable when the contractor program was initiated. Experienced officers, spying an opportunity, retired early to set up their own companies and return as contractors. They could collect their pensions and also get back on the payroll at much higher salaries.

Contractors are not cheap and, once introduced into a bureaucracy, they tend to grow like Topsy. The average federal government civil servant costs $128,000 per year, including benefits and legacy issues like pensions. Intelligence contractors make that much in salary alone—and sometimes significantly more because of the market value of their security clearances. The companies that employ them use a formula that multiplies the base salary by two and a half to four to come up with the figure that they charge the government. A contractor working for the CIA can easily cost taxpayers half a million dollars per year.

Ready availability of contractors to staff the myriad layers of bureaucracy in Langley encouraged the proliferation of what would be non-jobs anywhere else, what former CIA Chief of Station Milt Bearden described as headquarters’ “buggy-whip makers.” Moreover, intelligence officers who serve overseas are able to retire early by American standards because the job is high stress and, after a point, the officer burns out. Contracting takes many of these officers considered to be less effective and puts them back into the system.

Eventually the growth of contracting alarmed even Congress, and in June 2007 CIA Director Michael Hayden agreed to cut the contractor numbers by 10 percent. It now appears, however, that commitment will be achieved by a hiring freeze rather than any actual cut in positions.

But concentrating on what the CIA has become since 9/11 ignores the roots of the problem. Anyone who has ever worked for the Agency would probably concede that the CIA’s reality has never equaled its mystique. In Rome Station in the 1980s, officers, bemused by the oppressive bureaucracy and strutting incompetence of chiefs who could not speak Italian, would joke about the “real CIA,” speculating that it must exist somewhere, possibly concealed in the Department of Agriculture offices at the embassy or hidden down in the commissary behind the rack of prosciutto.

The Agency has undeniably had successes, but weighed against the cost and measured against the national interest they have been few and far between. From its founding, the CIA has been burdened by unrealistic expectations, often poorly led, politically manipulated, and sometimes corrupt. It failed to realize that even its supposed victories would bear bitter fruit—Afghanistan is a case in point. And the Agency’s ability to predict and counter threats against the United States, the purpose for which it was created by the National Security Act of 1947, has been almost nonexistent. Double agents from Russia, Cuba, China, and MI-6 all penetrated the Agency, and its old-boy culture led to the failure to identify Aldrich Ames, a traitor within its own ranks who betrayed our few agents in Moscow. Despite years of effort and billions of dollars, the CIA has never obtained policy-level information on key international adversaries. The development of nuclear weapons by the USSR and China, the Korean War, and India’s test of an atomic bomb all took the Agency by surprise. From 1969 onward, it bowed to political pressure to overestimate the size of the Russian economy.

More recently, the Agency failed to predict and stop the 9/11 attacks, and its preparation of the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002 was wrong in every particular, leading to the disastrous war with Iraq. Currently, the Agency is unable to penetrate terrorist groups. Nearly every top-level agent employed over the course of 60 years has been a volunteer, a “walk-in,” not the product of intensive efforts to find and recruit spies.

Since the CIA works for the president, political pressure regularly trumps honest analysis. Hundreds of incomprehensible covert actions have been launched because the White House said “do something.” The overthrow of Mohammed Mossadeq in Iran in 1953 and the manipulation of elections in countries like Italy through the 1980s to keep the Communists out only encouraged corruption and inhibited positive political development. Many other operations, particularly in Latin America, did little more than install military dictators, empower leftist revolutionaries, and blacken the name of the United States.

In the wake of 9/11, the Agency failed to redeem itself. Director George Tenet grandiloquently declared war on Osama bin Laden then inexplicably failed to allocate resources to deal with the emerging terrorist threat or create career incentives to attract top officers to work in counterterrorism. He was unable to recruit Arab or Asian Americans who speak the languages and understand the cultures where terrorists germinate because the Agency’s draconian standards prevented them from getting security clearances. A consummate team player and bureaucrat who always sought to please, Tenet capped his career by slanting intelligence to support the White House’s plan for war against Iraq, famously declaring the case for WMD a “slam dunk.”

Yet the CIA always circles the wagons to protect its own. An Agency Inspector General’s report released in August 2007 recommended disciplinary action against Tenet and three of his top aides over failure to perform adequately in the lead-up to 9/11. But the recommendation was ignored by Porter Goss and Michael Hayden, the two directors who succeeded Tenet.

Examples of other mistakes abound: An officer operating in the Middle East once betrayed an entire network of agents when he tried to pass through an airport metal detector with their passports carelessly stuffed into a pocket with a steel pen. Officers in Europe in the early 1990s sent identical letters from the same mailbox on the same day to every agent in Iran, leading to the roll-up of every Agency source in that country. The agents paid with their lives; the officers involved were not punished. One became the chief of the Near East Division.

The Agency’s culture is increasingly defined by a kind of insularity, along with an unwillingness to accept criticism and a belief in its own exceptionalism. CIA analysts have been rightly rebuked for their inability to find and use open-source information. They give greater weight to reports from spies even when the information being provided is wrong. And the Agency’s obsessive secretiveness also goes beyond any rational need to protect sensitive material. It refuses even to acknowledge information already in the public record, including the location of its principal training center near Williamsburg, Virginia.

The most cult-like of the CIA’s divisions is its spy network—designated the National Clandestine Service since 2006 but generally referred to by Agency officers as the DO, an acronym of its former name, the deputy directorate for operations. The DO has its own rites of passage, its own language and expressions. Many clandestine officers believe they belong to an elite that is undertaking extraordinarily difficult and dangerous tasks—“God’s work.” But the James Bond conceit is largely a fiction as few CIA officers are ever in real danger. High internal cohesion derives less from shared peril than the moral ambiguities related to spying.

This strong group identity has led to an acceptance of extraordinary levels of mediocrity or even incompetence within the ranks. As the alcoholic and utterly inept Aldrich Ames learned, it is very hard to get hired but even harder to get fired. One officer who was recorded by a Cuban film crew nonchalantly unloading a dead drop in a Havana park not only went unpunished for his failure to operate securely, he was made chief of a large station in Europe. The dead dropped message from the agent, who was a double working for Cuban intelligence, was concealed, appropriately, in a plastic dog turd fabricated by the Office of Technical Services.

Senior officers, in denial over their own lack of language and cultural skills, frequently maintain that “an op is an op,” implying that recruiting and running spies is the same everywhere—an obvious absurdity. The Agency’s shambolic overseas assignment process means that officers often receive only minimal language training and are expected to learn the local idiom after arriving at a post, presumably through osmosis. Most fail to do so. Frequently chiefs of station cannot converse with the heads of the local intelligence services unless their counterparts happen to speak English. Officers targeting indigenous political parties or government officials often cannot read a newspaper or speak the local language. Attempts in the 1980s to require language qualification as a sine qua non for overseas assignment foundered due the sheer immensity of the problem. In 1995, only three Agency officers could speak Arabic well enough to understand an Arab speaking colloquially. Seven years after 9/11, there are only five such officers.

As the Agency evolved into what one critic called “a global military policy,” an officer corps that largely eschewed any thought of torture or secret prisons in the ’80s and ’90s now embraces these practices—and their tradecraft is so poor that they can’t even keep their war crimes secret. The 26 CIA employees who abducted radical preacher Abu Omar from a Milan street in 2003 used passports and cell phones in false names but called their families in Virginia and claimed frequent flyer miles at their hotels in their true names, enabling Italian investigators to identify nearly all of them. The major counterterrorist operation, costing millions of dollars and with a huge supporting cast of Italians and Americans, successfully “rendered” the hapless Egyptian cleric to Cairo. He was subsequently tortured into telling everything he knew, which was more or less nothing, leading to his release by the Egyptians.

A fish rots from its head. One recent director for operations was referred to derisively by a number of European intelligence services as the “Ex-Chief of Station Luxembourg” because he lacked operational experience and Luxembourg was the most senior overseas position that he had held. He was, however, a skilled operator in the headquarters bureaucracy—which in some ways made him a welcome exception. Most Agency senior officers in the clandestine service are promoted because they are believed to be effective case officers, good at recruiting and running agents, not because they are able managers. The aggressive arrogance common in agent handlers makes them ill-suited superiors. As a result, most CIA chiefs of station are regarded by their subordinates as terrible bosses whose first priority is polishing their own reputations. By 2001, even though the terrorist threat had been growing for years, many overseas stations had become paranoid and operationally paralyzed. A well-known chief of station in Rome was so insecure about his staff that he tasked a loyal officer to crawl through the halls to eavesdrop outside offices and monitor what was being said.

Another reason the wrong officers advance is that personnel policies tend to measure performance in statistical terms. It is, perhaps, a failure of the American imagination, or an adoption of a production-line mentality, that leads to the confusion of more with better. Nowhere is this truer than at the CIA. Field officers are evaluated by the number of recruitments, called “scalps,” and raw intelligence reports produced during a standard two- or three-year tour. Quality is relatively unimportant since most officers move on before the hollowness of their achievements can be fully realized by their successors. As it is extremely difficult, even impossible, to locate and recruit a terrorist, few are willing to make the effort when easier pickings can inflate the numbers. Some officers deliberately seek assignments—referred to as “recruiting tours”—in poor Third World countries where it is easy to run up the score.

Struggling to achieve within the sluggish and multilayered Agency bureaucracy, described by one critic as similar to that of the former Soviet Union, officers become more adept at working the system than collecting intelligence. In a candid moment, most retirees would admit that they never recruited an agent who actually had information vital to the United States and never produced an intelligence report that contained anything policymakers actually needed. It has been estimated that only 4 percent of finished intelligence reports originate from recruited spies, referred to as “humint.”

In the wake of 9/11, analysts realized that they must write more rather than better reports—and align themselves with the prevailing view of the White House—if they wanted to get promoted. Strategic analysis, which takes more time, requires more expertise, and does not tell the White House what is going to happen tomorrow, became a lost art. As Carl Ford, a retired senior analyst, put it, “As long as we rate intelligence more for its volume than its quality, we will continue to turn out the $40 billion pile of crap that we have become famous for.” The policymakers often agree. President Richard Nixon frequently asked what the hell “those clowns” were doing over at Langley. President George H.W. Bush, a friend of the Agency and onetime director, referred to the CIA as “both ineffective and scared.”

Unsurprisingly, rampant operational corruption has led to personal corruption. The September 2008 conviction of the Agency’s third-ranking officer, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo—who pled guilty to wire fraud after being charged with 30 separate crimes—was only the tip of the iceberg. Retired officers become contractors to take advantage of the system, while former senior personnel do even better, exploiting their international contacts to make money on a much larger scale. Several recent Clandestine Service retirees who were involved in Iraq have become partners in ventures marketing oil diverted from wells in Kirkuk and Mosul with the collusion of the Kurdish authorities. The oil is sold primarily on the black market in Eastern Europe.

Into this dysfunctional environment, President Obama has dispatched Leon Panetta—soft-spoken, judicious, wise to the ways of Washington. His lack of intelligence experience initially riled Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein, who was pushing her fellow Californian, Rep. Jane Harmon. But he fielded the committee’s questions with aplomb, and the consensus among former officers is that Panetta is a good pick.

He was, in fact, the second choice. Obama had been leaning toward John Brennan, a company man and close adviser to George Tenet who was forced to withdraw from consideration amid accusations that he approved Bush-era interrogation and rendition practices.

Panetta comes with fresh eyes and a pragmatic streak. As Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, he imposed order on a slovenly West Wing. As a member of the Iraq Study Group, he saw firsthand the disastrous consequences of politicizing intelligence. A consummate insider, he carries enough weight to clear space for renovation.

High on Panetta’s to-do list should be the introduction of a requirement that entry-level hires have foreign language skills. If officers do not achieve proficiency in the language of their target country, their assignments should be canceled. More officers should be sent overseas—under business rather than embassy cover—and they should be required to complete cultural and historical studies before going. These postings should be three years minimum to enable officers to understand the working environment and local players.

Those who undertake arduous assignments shouldn’t be penalized. Indeed, promotion should be recalibrated to gauge success relative to the difficulty of the job. An officer who works hard on terrorists but never recruits—or even meets—one should not be judged on the same scale as someone who goes to Africa and recruits a local chief of police. (In fact, there should be no reward for recruiting an African chief of police.) Moreover, senior-level assignments should no longer be plums for officers who have done their time and are just waiting to retire. And at the highest levels, officers with proven management ability should fill top posts—not necessarily people who have street skills.

These are not changes that Panetta can accomplish by himself. Bureaucracy is a sluggish beast. But he is positioned to alter CIA culture in two critical ways. He can serve as a buffer between the White House and the Agency, not a conduit for policymakers’ demands, and he can encourage risk-taking against terrorist and proliferation targets by protecting and rewarding his officers who are willing to accept the challenge. In his Feb. 5 confirmation hearing, Panetta promised to “turn the page to a new chapter in the Agency’s history.” We’ll soon see whether he has the vision, independence, and will to make good on that pledge and fix a CIA that is undeniably broken.
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Philip Giraldi, a former CIA Officer, is a fellow with the American Conservative Defense Alliance.

Copyright © 2009 The American Conservative