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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Unleashing the CIA is no Remedy |
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by Melvin Goodman
(No verified email address) |
26 Sep 2001
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Strategy against terror requires coordination, not cowboys |
WASHINGTON -- The calls to lift the 25-year ban on political assassination and recruit more "unsavory" foreign agents into the CIA will not serve America’s new war against terrorism.
These demands, issued by members of Congress and former government officials, expose the lack of a coherent policy to deal with terrorism and ignore the fact that previous U.S. assassination plots have often produced unintended -- and unwelcome -- consequences.
The CIA’s efforts to remove former Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1960 led to the rise of the most corrupt African leader in recent history, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko. The agency’s covert campaign against Iraqi leader Abdel-Karim Qassim in 1963 paved the way for the emergence of Saddam Hussein. Indeed, it was the revelation of these and other ill-considered CIA assassination plots in Cuba and Chile during the Kennedy and Nixon administrations that led to the 1976 executive order banning such practices.
Even what the CIA considered one its greatest successes – its support for the anti-Soviet mujahideen in Afghanistan – has blown back in America’s face. It was under this covert program that the agency helped fund and train Osama bin Laden and others now suspected of a string of anti-American terror attacks that culminated on Sept. 11 with the devastation in New York and Washington.
In the angry aftermath of the terror attacks, other lessons are being ignored as well. Former CIA chief James Woolsey says the CIA should be permitted once again to recruit capital criminals as agents if that’s what is needed to infiltrate bin Laden’s terrorist cells. Woolsey says his successor, John Deutsch, who scrubbed known human rights violators from the ranks of U.S. foreign agents, is responsible for weakening the CIA’s ability to collect intelligence against terrorist organizations.
But Deutch was trying to place some limits on just how unsavory the people on the agency’s payroll can be. Deutsch was concerned about preventing the kind of contamination of U.S. foreign policy that resulted from the CIA’s funding of thugs like Mobutu and Panama’s President Manuel Noriega.
Covert action is not a magic bullet that can be used when everything else has failed. There are occasions -- and surely President Bush’s looming war against terrorism will provide them -- when covert action can work if it is coordinated with military and diplomatic measures. But to be effective, the CIA doesn’t need a carte blanche to kill; it needs better cooperation with friendly intelligence services, especially those in moderate Arab and Muslim state, and more agents abroad operating under non-official cover. And there must be scrupulous review of the CIA’s covert actions, as well as established procedures for accountability. For the past decade, the House and Senate intelligence committees have not conducted the kind of oversight they were created to provide.
Terrorism is not a new phenomenon. In Joseph Conrad’s novel "The Secret Agent," there is a minor character, an anarchist called "the professor," whom no one dares to touch because he has wired himself to a powerful bomb. The novel ends with the professor walking like a "pest in the street full of men." This grotesque vision is a reminder that, in the long run, it will be law enforcement agencies -- as well as intelligence agents -- who will win this war.
With a long struggle against terrorism about to begin, don’t look to an unrestrained CIA to provide a quick fix. Unleashing the agency without a coherent, coordinated strategy will only make a bad situation worse.
Melvin A. Goodman, a former senior analyst at the CIA, is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, DC.
Copyright 2001
Global Beat Syndicate, 418 Lafayette Street, Suite 554, New York, NY 10003 |
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http://www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/syndicate
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