ISLAND VOICES
Why George Tenet must go
By Clyde McAvoy
Clyde McAvoy is a twice decorated senior operations officer of the CIA, now retired and living in Kailua.
The CIA fails when it's led by intelligence consumers instead of intelligence producers.
Regarding your announced intention to reform CIA, George Tenet, add your own name to the list of those to be canned. Your appointment was like making a customer the head of Macy's, for you learned the intelligence business as a consumer, not a producer.
To be the latter you either would have to recruit a spy or direct one recruited by someone else.
This accounts for your sweeping under the oval rug an enormous intelligence gap in the Near East. Your solution has been to send 300 operations officers on three-month tours to plug this hole. This is like Henry Kissinger sending a similar number to Saigon during the Vietnam War, thereby mortgaging the cover and careers of a whole generation of human intelligence producers. Skills, not volume, are what produce "humint" (human intelligence).
Shaping CIA's most productive era were directors who came up from the ranks. Its founder, Allen Dulles, based in Switzerland, penetrated the German general staff during two world wars. John Kennedy, new to the intelligence game and thinking just by calling something clandestine made it so, ended Dulles' career by getting him to direct a military operation against Castro.
Before Dulles left as a result of that episode, he created two directors in his own image and put them on a fast track to replace him. Richard Helms, as an ostensible foreign correspondent prior to and during World War II, ran agents into Germany, putting to good use his extensive schooling in Europe. William Colby ran agents into the Vatican, tapping a vast intelligence collection machine in the heart of countries swallowed up by the Cold War.
Experienced espionage direction ended with their untimely retirements. President Gerald Ford stumbled into a tragic pattern which continues today by replacing Colby with the untrained George Bush 1. Since that day CIA directors have not been able to work in any foreign language, have not produced any intelligence themselves, and have not had an eye for the promotion of subordinates who do.
This has produced a permissive practice of new officers opting to learn the easy, Latin-based languages leading to cushy assignments. Fluent Near East and Asian language speakers today are scarce at a time when they are needed most. Thus, solid penetrations of Arab intelligence operations here and abroad are, on the basis of recent events, nonexistent.
While toiling in Laos during the Vietnam War, I was summoned home by the Senate foreign affairs committee to testify about what passed through Laos on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in open defiance of treaties and what the agency was doing about it. Helms, then DCI, told committee chairman Fulbright I would testify before his group in private but not in public. Without a chance for headlines none of the members besides Fulbright showed up for the meeting and my cover was thus preserved. Today that is rare.
How do we return to the principles that guided us before we picked customers to run the agency?
• Promote from within the ranks. The most productive days of the agency are when it was led by directors with personal experience at humint.
• Break out the operations division, establish a cover for it, and move it downtown so as not to be blemished by the rest of the agency which houses richer, technology-driven and overt missions. Cover is precious. It should not be spent on someone who doesn't need it.
• Foreign languages are an absolute necessity. Hire only officers who bring one foreign language in with them. Then, if otherwise deserving, pay for a second language after their first tour. A minimum of two languages should be sine qua non for promotion of operations officers to middle grade rank.
• Three months is far short of the time needed to identify, recruit, train and direct a worthwhile spy.
Soon now, a replacement for the incumbent George Tenet must be found. The urge will be strong to use that vital slot to pay some pressing political debt. Stay your hand, Mr. President, and ask yourself who will fill those embarrassing intelligence gaps: a consumer or a producer.
