4GW: Infiltrating Al-Qaeda

We want Al-Qaeda broken. We want to see terrorist plots foiled. To get that, we need good intelligence. After all, the primacy of intelligence gathering is one of the things that defines 4th Generation Warfare (4GW). One of our key enemies is a stateless entity, and unless we know where to strike all our military power won't do us much good. A worrying thought in an era that is shifting more and more toward a mindset Ralph Peters calls "apocalyptic terrorism."

Which leads us to the question: can we really infiltrate Al-Qaeda and its allies? I mean, they're all fanatics, willing to die and such. Isn't that a hopeless task? Aren't we better off using technical intelligence? Won't future plots be too compartmentalized, like 9/11 was?

No. No. And no. Yes, we can do it. Though you wouldn't know it by our performance to date.

The process of recruiting agents is a long subject, but here's a whirlwind tour of sorts. Let's start with some tidbits from a useful OpenFlows article:

In a little-noticed speech in April, James L. Pavitt, the C.I.A.'s deputy director for operations, argued that "the terror cells that we're going up against are typically small and... all those personnel were carefully screened." He added "anything short of one of the... hijackers turning himself in to us" could not have prevented the slaughter.

Not everyone agrees. Robert Baer, a C.I.A. officer for more than two decades, is upbeat. "You can penetrate these groups," he said. "I recruited and ran an agent in Beirut who was a member of Hezbollah [JK: now acting as important allies of Al-Qaeda]. They don't all have the same degree of belief..." But Baer's recent book, "See No Evil,"noted that the agency has come to depend too much on liaison arrangements with foreign intelligence services. "Getting unilateral, non-liaison sources, just isn't done any more," he lamented. "It's discouraged because it's risky."

Which is pretty much the picture another former CIA operative named Reuel Marc Gerecht painted in his devastating Atlantic Magazine piece (July/August 2001). Here's the quote I remember:

"A former senior Near East Division operative says, "The CIA probably doesn't have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of his life with shitty food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan. For Christ's sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don't do that kind of thing." A younger case officer boils the problem down even further: "Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen."

There may be good reason to use some cautions when considering Baer and Gerecht's messages, but there's a lot of corroboration for their overall assessment.

Not least of which is the stunning story of Aqil Collins, a devoted Muslim who trained in Afghanistan and then tried to work with the CIA and FBI because he believed in jihad, but not terrorism. What a fiasco that was, as chronicled on CNN and in his book, "My Jihad."

I sympathize with those who note, correctly, that picking "deep cover" agents demands a lot of care. Nevertheless, too much about Collins' saga feels like the FBI screwups documented in the Rowley memos. Too much care doesn't seem to have been the problem here. Rather, the problem appears to be an insular, bureaucratic culture that couldn't seem to understand who it was dealing with, or how to use him well.

That has to change.

Collins may have had some worthwhile shots at infiltrating Al-Qaeda, and the least we can do is learn from his fiasco of an experience. It will also help if we accept that this is war, and that these are spies not Boy Scouts.

As another retired C.I.A. officer notes: "I've seen foreign services recruit fundamentalists with honey traps, film them with a woman. It's amazing what you can do, even with ideological sources... The Arab services, the Egyptians and Jordanians, have recruited people. The Jordanians put pressure on families. We have penetrated these groups. But the only way to do it is to use unsavory methods, blackmail. You have to put people on the ground."

We sure do. And not just paramilitary teams, useful though they may be. Real intelligence operatives.

Unless we're doing much more of that, supporting those agents properly, and breaking enough windows to change the bureaucratic cultural incentives at FBI and CIA, all the blather about "reform" will be for nothing. And we still won't have the intelligence we really need.