Dec. 15, 2006 – 8:27 p.m.
Poor
The proud Texas Democrat spent most of last week under a media heat lamp that turned him into a poster boy for Washington’s ineptness in the Middle East.
That was unfair, in one sense: He’s not special.
Reyes’ evident ignorance about Islamic terrorists is common among members of the intelligence oversight committees and rampant in the ranks of new recruits to the spy agencies themselves, according to sources well-acquainted with both.
Reyes, however, had the misfortune to be the ascendant Speaker
As the fresh new face of the Democrats’ shaky grasp of national security issues, he’s fresh meat for a Washington press corps whose hands hurt from beating up on Republicans for their handling of the Iraq war and the elusive Osama bin Laden.
And give Reyes credit for this: After his inability to answer elementary questions about Islam turned him into a global laughingstock, he declined to resort to the cornered politician’s usual dirty tricks.
Reyes might have claimed, for example, that I misquoted him, or took his words out of context, or—a common dodge—mouse-trapped him with a “gotcha” question.
Instead, the five-term congressman, Vietnam vet and former Border Patrol officer turned out to be a stand-up guy, in contrast with the usual Washington standards.
“The CQ interview covered a wide range of topics,” said Reyes in an official statement hounded out of him by the television networks, “other than the selected points published in the story.”
That’s true. And indeed, I had planned to devote another column to my interview with Reyes, who says he’s going to run a far more muscular oversight committee than the Republicans.
But his widely televised remarks prompted intelligence insiders to come forward with additional — and depressing — tales that only served to remind that Reyes is hardly the only intelligence official here who can’t tell the difference between Sunnis and Shiites more than five years after the Sept. 11 attacks on U.S. soil.
Former Army intelligence Col. Rich Reynolds, who spent over two decades in the Middle East, told me he was startled recently to hear about several young CIA intelligence analysts at the CIA headquarters who were completely unfamiliar with Israel’s disastrous 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
The analysts’ current area of responsibility? Lebanon.
Likewise, a young intelligence analyst specializing in terrorist finances at the Department of Homeland Security was baffled a few weeks back by a question about hawalas, the ubiquitous Arab shops that work like an informal Western Union network to transfer money around the Middle East.
Experts think hawalas are one of al Qaeda’s prime channels for moving cash.
“What’s a hawala?” she asked.
Another young CIA analyst at the National Counterterrorism Center, according to a former White House National Security Council official who continues to work on intelligence matters, seemed totally surprised to learn that the terrorist group most responsible for killing Americans before 9/11 was not al Qaeda or a Palestinian faction but Hezbollah. The Iran-backed Shiite“Party of God” killed more than 300 Americans in suicide bombings in Beirut and Saudi Arabia in the 1980s and 1990s.
For months, intelligence insiders, current and retired, have been telling me that the spy bureaucracies suffer from two major problems among many.
One is that the last of the Cold Warriors who spent careers conducting clandestine operations against tough Soviet and other opposition services have retired or are on the verge of retirement.
As with a baseball team in a rebuilding phase, the clubhouse is full of fresh faces.
U.S. intelligence is also losing top talent to higher paying Washington-area contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton, CACI, Titan and Science Applications International Corp.
“[A]nd we end up leasing them back,” Ron Sanders, chief human capital officer at the National Intelligence Directorate, told National Public Radio last month — at a cost far above what the government was paying them for the same job.
Some experts think one way to stanch the bleeding would be for the intelligence agencies to put a cap on salaries that they will pay contractors.
In the meantime, according to multiple sources, the CIA, FBI and other agencies have found themselves promoting relative newcomers — people with three to five years experience — into supervisory roles in the battle against sophisticated terrorists, not to mention the espionage services of China, Russia, France, Israel and other “friendly enemies.”
All of which magnifies the importance of strong congressional oversight and expertise on the intelligence panels — and on the part of the members themselves, not just staff.
Retired CIA official Richard J. Kerr, who worked in four of the agency’s divisions during a 32-year career and headed two of them, frequently briefed the Intelligence committees, which he found a dispiriting affair.
“One of my complaints about the oversight committees is that they really know relatively little about the intelligence product, and never enough to know what they could do to improve it,” Kerr related in an e-mail last week.
“They are critics, but not critics of the substance.
“I have known only two members willing to come out to CIA to get detailed briefings,” Kerr continued. “They all repeat the same chestnuts — what we need is better coordination and sharing” among the 17 agencies of the so-called intelligence community.
“That ignores the problem that most intelligence failures are because there is insufficient information, or the analysts (and most importantly, their leaders) don’t ask the right questions.”
Jack Cloonan, a legendary former FBI counterterrorism agent, was incensed last week to read that
“There is absolutely no excuse, five years out from 9/11, to not know the difference [between Sunnis and Shiites], to not know that Osama bin Laden is a Sunni.,” Cloonan told ABC’s Jake Tapper Dec. 13.
“It’s just, frankly, unacceptable. There’s no other word to describe it.”
A number of readers who contacted me suggested that Reyes was failed by his staff, who failed to properly brief him in advance of my interview.
But Cloonan brushes that aside.
“You have to eat, sleep and drink this stuff,” he said. “People’s lives are at stake. I wish people would understand that.”
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.
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