Spying in Baghdad: The CIA’s Real Mission Impossible
By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor
Many years ago, when I was a young Army Intelligence operative in South Vietnam, I had a daily routine to see if my spies had any new information for me.
I’d drive by a soccer stadium in Danang, the large coastal city where I lived, and I’d look for a particular mark on the wall. If it was there, I’d go to a prearranged place at a set time for a clandestine meeting with a go-between.
Many times the pick-up place was a pleasant beach about a mile from my house.
The war was raging in the jungles and rice paddies less than 10 miles away, and communist agents were everywhere in the city. But security was good enough that they weren’t likely to risk exposing themselves by kidnapping or killing me.
My secret courier was a young boy who would come along selling ice cream from a box slung over his shoulder. I’d buy a cone wrapped in rice paper, and drive away. Back at the office, I’d unroll the paper to decipher my spy’s tiny handwriting.
Baghdad is nothing like that.
The chaotic, ubiquitous violence of Baghdad has kept the CIA indoors.
According to several well informed intelligence sources, hundreds of CIA operatives have become virtual prisoners in the Green Zone, the sprawling American enclave whose high walls and guards separate the U.S. embassy, military command and related civilian agencies from the raging sectarian violence in Baghdad’s streets.
The CIA operatives cannot safely roam the city to meet their few agents, much less recruit new ones.
It’s just too dangerous. CIA chiefs don’t want to risk one getting kidnapped, tortured on camera and beheaded.
That would certainly dampen the allure of a career in the CIA.
So “they spend their days playing cards and watching DVDs,†said a former senior CIA operations official who maintains close ties in the agency.
No Casualties
One barometer of the CIA’s caution is the lack of agency casualties in the war, which has killed more than 3,000 U.S. military personnel and wounded 25,000 more.
Not a single CIA “case officer,†spy jargon for espionage operative, has been killed in Iraq, a half dozen former senior CIA officers with close knowledge of the situation there told me.
(A civilian construction manager gunned down near Baghdad by masked insurgents in 2004 might have been an undercover CIA agent, said a retired military intelligence officer, but that could not be immediately confirmed. The CIA, of course, never discusses personnel issues.)
A handful of CIA case officers have been wounded in Iraq, the sources said, including a female who survived being shot by a sniper.
But the absence of casualties speaks volumes, the sources said.
“Without being overly harsh, it really says that they are risk averse, more so than our troops,†says a senior Defense Department counterterrorism manager. “They are in armored vehicles, they convoy out of the bases that they live on.â€
Reports of the CIA’s difficulty in getting out of the Green Zone to recruit and manage spies in Baghdad are so widespread that John D. Negroponte, the outgoing director of National Intelligence, was asked about it during a hearing of the House Intelligence Committee last Thursday, Jan. 18.
“What do you say to the criticism that I’ve heard from some agents that the value of the intelligence in Iraq is somewhat diluted by the fact that many of our agents are bottled up in the Green Zone . . .†Rep. John F. Tierney, D-Mass., asked John D. Negroponte.
Tierney said he’d heard that “their deployments are maybe too short . . . that there are too few Arabists, and that in some instances it’s claimed that we [can’t] even fully identify the number of different insurgent groups or [are not able] to identify which insurgent groups might be responsible for which insurgent acts.â€
“Actually,†responded Negroponte, U.S. ambassador to Iraq for 10 months in 2004-2005, “our posture is sometimes better than we’re given credit for. Secondly, not everybody’s bottled up in the Green Zone.â€
Negroponte, recently tapped to be Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s deputy, declined to elaborate in open session.
Stillborn
But multiple CIA sources, who spoke freely only in exchange for anonymity, said the agency’s mission of recruiting and managing human spies in Baghdad was stillborn in the weeks following the 2003 invasion and has never recovered, despite adding hundreds of personnel in the past few years.
That failure has virtually crippled U.S. strategic intelligence — inside information on the personalities and plans of the often hostile U.S.-backed government, not just the multiplying insurgent groups and armed militias — in Iraq.
“No one is recruiting the future leaders of Iraq,†says the Pentagon counterterrorism official.
Tactical intelligence — the locations and types of enemy troops and weapons — is also suffering from a lack of access to the population and almost nonexistent language skills on the part of both CIA and military intelligence personnel, say these same sources, all of whom have decades of experience in clandestine operations.
That limits “other covert ops, like providing detonators which will either not work or will explode prematurely in the hands of the bomb makers,†said the counterterrorism official.
“When you’re fighting an insurgency,†says an ex-senior CIA operative who helped rout al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, “you need hundreds and hundreds of informants.â€
Turmoil
The CIA has had three chiefs of station in Baghdad since U.S. troops pulled down the statue of Saddam Hussein on Apr. 9, 2003.
The first was a longtime operative and senior official who grew up in the Middle East in the 1950s, the son of a CIA legend in the agency’s early “Good Shepherd†days.
Now retired himself, the official, whose name is being voluntarily withheld here, was CIA station chief in Cairo, among other Middle East assignments over the decades, before being dispatched to Iraq.
“He was chosen to be the first to go into Baghdad and set things up not just because he knew the region so well, but because he’s such a nice guy, he can get along with the military really well, and he knows the Arabs and the area,†said a longtime colleague.
The CIA thought it would be a small office, since U.S. officials envisioned a short war and occupation.
“They really planned a station for only about 40 people,†said the colleague, who was also tasked with working on Iraq.
“They went in there in May and expected to be home by the end of June. They said, ‘Don’t worry about it, this whole thing, the military operation, is going to be over in May.’ â€
“And then the situation deteriorated,†the former official said. “By the fall they saw they needed a much bigger station.â€
The CIA then dispatched a much younger officer, who spoke Arabic but whose administrative experience was limited to running the agency’s small station in Kuwait, said the source, in an account backed up by another top CIA veteran of post-9/11 counterterrorism campaigns.
In 2004 the station began swelling to its current staffing of about 500 operatives, technicians and other support personnel.
Scores of case officers were borrowed from Washington or elsewhere, particularly Europe and Africa, for short stints in Iraq, CIA sources said.
Many were out of shape and lacked basic military skills, said a source with first-hand knowledge of the situation.
They got two weeks’ combat orientation.
“They were overweight case officers from Geneva who we gave bandoleers and shotguns and then send them to Baghdad,†the source said.
In 2003 the Abu Ghraib prison abuse pictures surfaced, involving the CIA in the scandal.
“They felt he was in over his head,†the source said of the station chief. “They took him out and replaced him with a more senior officer.â€
But before the second station chief left Baghdad that November, he filed a report that starkly contradicted the optimistic claims about Iraq by top administration officials.
Inevitably, it leaked.
“It pulled no punches in detailing how the new insurgency was gaining strength from the political and economic vacuum that the United States had allowed to develop in Baghdad,†New York Times reporter James Risen wrote.
“For his honesty, the station chief was subjected to inflammatory accusations about his personal behavior, all of which he flatly denied,†and “quit the CIA in disgust.â€
The Baghdad station’s third — and current — chief previously headed the CIA office in Kabul.
He also speaks Arabic, but presides over hundreds of operatives who cannot speak the local language or go anywhere.
Ray of Sunshine
The situation isn’t entirely bleak.
Many of the CIA’s young post-9/11 recruits are smart and tough and eager to get into the war, said a senior CIA veteran of Afghanistan.
“They’re good, real good,†he said.
But most of them, especially former Special Forces and Delta Force commandos, are employed in the CIA’s paramilitary branch and pretty much doing what they were doing before in Iraq: Conducting raids to disrupt terrorist attacks and snatch “high value targets,†from insurgent leaders to Iranian operatives.
Military spy services have tried to fill the intelligence vacuum, informed sources said, but they face the same dangerous streets and language deficits as the CIA.
“I heard about one personal meeting a case officer had with an agent,†said an amazed former CIA operator. “They rendezvoused in armored Humvees on a neighborhood street. That’s ridiculous.â€
On the rare occasions that Americans walk the streets of Baghdad, they attract unwanted attention.
Meantime, Iraqis risk their lives being identified with U.S. troops or intelligence agents.
If they can’t risk being seen with an American, it’s nearly impossible for the CIA to contact and assess them for recruitment.
Working through third parties — say, another Iraqi — risks losing control of the informant. It also opens up the operation to enemy penetration via double agents.
“Given the events of the past three years . . . the agency’s utility in such an environment is questionable,†says former Delta Force operative John Rollins, who up until last year was the Department of Homeland Security’s chief of staff for intelligence.
Most likely, he thinks, the CIA would reserve the “few Americans that can blend into the environment or speak the language†for “safer activities or missions where the payoff is significant,†such as trying to catch Osama bin Laden.
Talk about hard targets.
“Given the promises that were made and unfulfilled after Desert Storm [in 1991, when the first President Bush encouraged Iraqi Shiites to rebel against Saddam Hussein then stood aside as they were slaughtered] and questionable agency intelligence collection efforts leading up to this war,†Rollins said, “few locals may wish to be associated with the agency.â€
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.
Source: CQ Homeland Security
© 2007 Congressional Quarterly Inc. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.cq.com/public/20070119_homeland.html
