Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

National Security Strategy and Policy:
Planning for and Responding to Threats to the U.S. Homeland

October 28-29, 2004
Ronald Reagan Building
and International Trade Center
Washington, D.C.

R. James Woolsey,
former Director, Central Intelligence Agency

Introduction By: Dr. Richard H. Shultz

R. James Woolsey: Richard, thank you very much. I was honored when Fletcher and Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis asked me to be with you this morning, but to tell you the truth, until I went straight a couple of years ago and went with Booz Allen Hamilton, I spent 22 years as a Washington lawyer, and spent some time out at the CIA in the Clinton Administration, so I'm actually honored to be invited into any polite company for any purposes whatsoever. [Laughter]

I want to start with the enemy. It seems to me to be a good place to start when one is talking about intelligence. I think we are at war with, and have had them at war with us, for a long time, three totalitarian movements in the Middle East. I'm going to set aside North Korea for purposes of this discussion; they are crazy enough to be in the Middle East, but I'm focusing on the Middle East.

The first are the Baathists, who are fascists, and that’s not an expletive; the Baathist parties were founded in the ‘20s and ‘30s, modeled after the fascists and later the communist parties. They behave like fascists; they are fascists. Their dream of a united Arab Middle East is very much like Hitler’s dream of a 1,000-year Reich, and so on. They have been at war with us since ‘90/’91, it never stopped, it’s still going on in the streets of Fallujah and in the spies and operatives and materiel being smuggled in from Baathist Syria to support what people who call themselves the Party of Return, which means to bring back Baathism or fascism to Iraq.

The second and third groups are Islamists, and I use that term advisedly in order to denote totalitarian movements seeking to take over or get the credit of being part of a religion. First of those is Khamenei, successor to Khomeni in Tehran, and those who report directly to him, including the world’s most dangerous terrorist organization, Hezbollah.

Khamenei speaks for a handful of people at the top of the Iranian government that are cordially loathed by most of the fine people of Iran, but have the instruments of people and are well along the way toward building a nuclear weapon. His theocracy stands at odds with the historic tradition of Shiite Islam, which is generally not unified mosque and state; its background is far more like that of Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq, quietist separation of mosque and state. They’ve been at war with us for at least a quarter of a century, since they seized our hostages in Tehran and conducted a number of terrorist attacks against us in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

The third group are the Islamists from the Sunni side of the great divide within Islam, preeminently al-Qaeda, but ancillary organizations as well, underpinned by the particularly hateful and angry Wahabi set of beliefs in Saudi Arabia, and it is those who sympathize with the Wahabis, Saudi families and the others, who fund al-Qaeda and other terrorist operations to an extraordinary degree.

In 1979, the Saudis got both rich and scared; rich because they went from $2 billion a year earnings in oil at the beginning of the decade to about $20 billion at the end, headed way up -- way above that now. Scared because of the seizure of the Great Mosque in Mecca, and because the Shah fell in Tehran just across the Gulf. So they have for the last quarter-century told Islamists of the Sunni stripe, “Look, here’s all the money in the world you can ever want,” and they have given some $75 billion over the course of the last 25 years to spreading their beliefs in the world. “Here’s all the money in the world you could ever want, just leave us alone. Go ahead and make trouble for the Americans or the Egyptians, whoever you want, but just leave us alone.” And that wedding of the Wahabi movement and the Islamist movement, I think, is not complete, but they have a very close relationship in many dimensions.

... (inaudible) at war with us, why? Why did they decide to come after us? The Sunni Islamists have been with war with us since 1994/’95, so say a decade. Why did they decide to come after us? Well, if you look at our behavior in the ‘20s and ’30s that led Japan to believe we would be an easy mark in December of ’41, before they were rather surprised at our response after Pearl Harbor, I think you’d have to say we mimicked that behavior in the quarter of a century from 1979 to 9/11. 1979, our hostages are seized and what do we do? We tie yellow ribbons around trees. In the ‘80s, various Hezbollah and other attacks on us, and what do we do? We dispatch the lawyers, prosecutors; we’re going to try a few people and put them in prison. That’s about it. President Reagan dropped some bombs in Tripoli.

’91, first President Bush organizes a very fine effort, the Gulf War, throws Saddam out of Kuwait, and then stands back and watches the Kurds and Shiites succeeding in 15 of Iraq’s 18 provinces be massacred. It says reasonably clearly to the people of the Middle East that we do not give a damn about you; what we care about is the oil of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Throughout the 1990s, a number of other terrorist attacks, preceding by shooting our Black Hawks down in ’93 in Mogadishu, and what did we do? We did the same thing we did in Beirut a decade before -- we left. And also in ’93, Saddam tries to assassinate former President Bush with a bomb in Kuwait. President Clinton fires a few cruise missiles into empty buildings in the middle of the night, thereby I suppose dealing forcefully with Iraqi cleaning women and night watchmen, but not especially effectively with Saddam Hussein. And throughout most of the ‘90s, we do what we did in the ‘80s, we send the lawyers and we prosecute come people.

I would suggest that if you were bin Laden or Khamenei or Saddam at the end of the 20th century, your impression would be the same one the Japanese had at the end of the 1930s -- this is a rich, spoiled, feckless country that when bloodied will run. Nothing is more provocative when dealing with totalitarian movements than communicating that, nothing.

If that’s whom we’re at war with and why, what do we have to think about and fight against. Let me just say a few words about this. I think it is the central relevance of this conference.

First of all, we should get away from the idea that on a lot of things of importance we’re going to have very much intelligence. In the Cold War, we sat up there with satellites, listening devices, we had a fair number of spies; we could watch the group of Soviet forces in Germany mobilize, and we could tell whether it was an exercise or something real. We’d stolen their templates for development, we could tell when there was a test at Sary Shagan, whether that missile was in Stage A or Stage B of development, so we knew when to start development of our own jammer. We did that kind of thing all the time; both strategic intelligence and tactical intelligence were really quite good.

Now, we didn’t do such a great job of predicting that the Soviet Union was going to collapse, but then almost nobody did except Ronald Reagan and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and I guess what I think about that is sometimes the Irish just hear voices the rest of us don’t hear. [Laughter] But on strategic and tactical military intelligence we did very well.

This world we’re in now will have none of that. The next sound you hear, theoretically, could be that of a nuclear explosion on the Mall. And we would have exactly the same warning that we had on 9/11 of the crashes into the Twin Towers.

So the first thing, I think, to realize is that we’re going to have to make our society resilient in all sorts of ways against not only unintentional interference but malevolent interference. Take the electricity grid -- I feel like Henny Youngman, take the electricity grid, please -- it combines all the worst aspects of regulation and deregulation. There are a number of vulnerabilities to it, which I won’t go into in detail, but you saw what happened when a tree branch fell 14 months ago in northern Ohio; it took out 50 million consumers for up to a week in Canada and the US. Terrorists are smarter than tree branches. They know what transformers to go after, they know, some of them, what SCADA systems to hack into.

So the first thing we’re going to have to do, far more important than intelligence reorganization I might say, is make our whole society far more resilient against both unintentional consequences like the tree branch falling, and against malevolent interference of our systems, going after their weak points.

The second thing we’re going to have to do is substantially improve domestic intelligence. The key relationship that we have to make sure works in order to understand terrorism in the United States is the relationship between Mr. Hassan who runs the corner grocery in Dearborn, Michigan and Officer O’Reilly who is walking the beat. If Mr. Hassan feels comfortable saying, “Officer, there are three young Yemenis who just came to town, they were saying some real scary things last night and I don’t know what they're up to, but you might want to check them out,” we will have a reasonable system of beginning to deal with people like the terrorist cell in Lackawanna and the terrorist financing operation out here in Herndon, Virginia.

The third thing is we need to improve our intelligence collection overseas and what we can get into and understand. I think it is true that we need to do a better job of human intelligence than technical intelligence. Technical intelligence can be very useful on a lot of things, but we need to penetrate al-Qaeda cells. That is very hard, much harder than penetrating the KGB. There are actually days when I kind of wish for the Soviets back. They were, in many ways, a much more malleable and understandable enemy than what we have now.

But nonetheless, we have to do that. We’re not going to do it by getting them to come to embassy cocktail parties and recruiting them by case officers who look like a younger version of me from Oklahoma, speaking Arabic, but with an Oklahoma accent. It won’t work. You need to have non-official cover officers, so-called NOCs, who are willing to brave the threat of being arrested and not having diplomatic cover, but who seem to be from some other part of the world, something entirely separate from the United States.

And fourth, and I think only fourth, some reorganization might help, particularly if it’s focused on pulling domestic intelligence and foreign intelligence together, because that was part of the big gap, and it wasn’t a gap really that the CIA or FBI was particularly responsible for. Much of it was a result of legislation that had been passed, such as the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure that barred the FBI before 9/11 from giving the CIA intelligence information about terrorists if they had come up with it pursuant to grand jury subpoena. Or the directive of the CIA that said, go recruit spies -- as I point out rapidly that this was after I left -- go recruit spies, but don’t recruit anybody who has any violence in their past. Hello? That would be like telling the FBI to please penetrate the Mafia, but don’t actually put any crooks on your payroll.

So there were a number of things that needed to be changed -- and many of them have been -- in order to improve coordination between foreign and domestic intelligence. I think way down the list is reorganization.

The 9/11 Report, the first 300-plus pages is superb, beautifully written, a first-rate analysis of what happened 9/11. The 40-some recommendations, some are useful, most I think are way down the tier of importance to “hammer everything that looks like a nail” to a government commission, “everything looks like a reorganization opportunity.” Because that’s what you can effect, and that’s something you can talk about publicly, and it’s something people can compromise on. It’s much harder to figure out how to get the CIA to use NOCs, or how to get foreign and domestic intelligence coordinated better, or how to improve domestic intelligence, or how to manage your infrastructure in such a way that it’s resilient.

So I don’t have much of a soft spot in my heart for an intelligence czar or, frankly, for czars in general. I don’t really believe that 500 years of rigidity and stupidity followed by the victory of Bolshevism is a particularly good model for the management of American intelligence. Some type of an NID may be reasonable if it focuses on coordinating domestic and foreign intelligence, but to have progress held up on how much power can you take away from the Secretary of Defense over national agencies that help him and help our fighting forces with direct intelligence to them from signals intercepts, to get in the middle of that and muck it up, which is, I think, rather likely, seems to me sort of like having an argument with an in-law and kicking your German Shepherd that guards the house. The Secretary of Defense, the German Shepherd, is not the problem. He wasn’t the problem on 9/11, he’s not the problem now.

So with that, let me close. Mr. Chairman, it’s been a real pleasure to be with you, and I look forward very much to hearing from the other speakers. Thank you. [Applause]

Questions and Answers

GENE PORTER: Gene Porter, Institute for Defense Analysis. Most of the discussion of actionable intelligence deals with what I call near real time, what’s going to happen in Phoenix next week, what can we do about it. In the old days, actionable intelligence also involved trying to predict what the Soviets were going to do five or ten years in the future, what’s their next-generation ICBM going to look like, such that we can be developing a counter to that. Could somebody talk about the current state of predicting future terrorist threats, or future threats to homeland security five or ten years in the future, that the resource allocators ought to be thinking about today?

MR. WOOLSEY: Actionable intelligence is in the eye of the beholder to some extent. In 1862, on the outskirts of Washington here at Antietam, McClellan was presented with the greatest intelligence gift most any American general has ever been presented with, a copy of Lee’s battle orders rolled up around some cigars, found by one of his cavalrymen. He managed a tie, because McClellan, famously, was always waiting for things to get a bit better. Can you imagine what would have happened to the Army in Northern Virginia if either Grant or Sherman had been in command? It would have been obliterated. Even that fine Army.

So whether intelligence is actionable or not is not a single-person standard. There were opportunities to go after bin Laden in the late ‘90s that were held back because of various things. Some people from the UAE were nearby and one of them might get hurt. Well, we shouldn’t use the cruise missile then, let’s wait. And on and on and on.

So the first thing I think one has to do in understanding actionable intelligence is to get away from the idea that it’s some objective standard. It depends very much on whether one regards one’s self as being at war and is willing to use it, even if there is collateral damage.

As far as near time versus long-term actionable intelligence, I sort of referred to that in talking about watching Soviet development programs as well as the group of Soviet forces in Germany. But what’s different now is that we are, to some extent, here and there in Iraq, and possibly in Iran, and possibly in North Korea, facing a government, but we are to some extent also facing a movement like al-Qaeda that has to some degree metastasized, and may not be as centrally commanded or controlled as it was before, but to be highly ideological, and to give individual cells a great deal of autonomy, as may have been the case in Spain, with what they do.

Under those circumstances particularly-- it’s hard enough to try to get an asset inside al-Qaeda’s inner circle, but to try to get one inside all sorts of different cells in all sorts of different countries, it’s massively difficult. It’s why what Dale said is right on the money. If all Americans regard themselves as charged with helping the police on these matters, a lot can be done. But there are a number of cities in the US in which there are ordinances -- San Francisco, I know is one -- where if you are a police officer and you obtain information, you arrest someone for a state crime, let’s say burglary, and they don’t have any obvious documentation or visa or anything, it is illegal for you or your boss to communicate, any city employee to communicate with the Immigration Service to see if this person might be an illegal alien. That’s not true in all localities; if you're federal officers, if you're FBI and you arrest for a bank robbery, you can check. But we have tied our own--

END OF SIDE A
SIDE B

--on issues such as that, and so actionable intelligence is not just a matter of some quality of the information itself, it’s how much have we tied our own hands, and in what way, and what is the temperament of the people who are deciding whether or not to take action.