CIA LACKING THE MEANS TO SPY ON TERROR

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000807580027-8
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 15, 2012
• Sequence Number: 27
• Publication Date: August 18, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/11/15: CIA-RDP90-00965R000807580027-8
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WASEDIGTON - U.S. Intelligence
on Middle Eastern terrorists is so
poor that the Reagan administration
cannot effectively retaliate against
them, according to a wide array of
Spying on smallt tightly knit calls
of Arab-speaking terrorists is hard
enough to begin with, they say, but it
has been made even harder by the
CIA's practice in recent years to de-
emphasize human spying in favor of
satellites and electronic eavesdrop-
ping.
The result, as one intelligence ana.
lyst put it, is a U.S. spying system that
"can read the numbers on a license
plate from 100 miles up, but we don't
know what the guy inside that car is
thinking, and we don't have some-
body in the car pool working for us."
Other handicaps that have affected
American ability to respond to ter-
rorism are:
? The deaths of seven top U.S. Mid-
dle East intelligence specialists, who
were killed in the April 1983 bomb-
ing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut as
they met with some of their top Leba-
nese spies, according to CIA sources.
Their loss ripped a hole in U.S. abil-
ity to find out what is going on in
Beirut, where terrorists have killed
more than 300 Americans since 1980.
? Tight restrictions imposed by
President Reagan on the involve-
ment of U.S. agents and sources with
people who commit criminal acts.
Experts say these restrictions make
it impossible to penetrate terrorist
cells, which typically test recruits by
requiring them to commit robberies
or torture.
? The shying away of some for-
eign intelligence agencies from un-
limited cooperation with the United
States because of leaks and media
-disclosures suggesting that Washing-
.ton cannot keep secrets.
- Foreign intelligence agencies also
have proven unreliable. The agen-
cies sometimes serve only their own
interests or are deceptive, and they
sometimes have used U.S. funds and
training for actions contrary to U.S.
policy, the CIA sources say.
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
18 August 1985
The overall result is that "in the
-Middle East in particular, we do not
have the intelligence information
.upon which to base a pre-emptive
action or a retaliatory action," said
Sen. Jeremiah Denton (R., Ala.),
chairman of the Senate Judiciary
Committee's subcommittee on secu-
rity and terrorism.
Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D., Vt.) con-
curred, characterizing as "nearly
nonexistent" US. intelligence on
Lebanese and other Middle Eastern
terrorists. Leahy is vice chairman of
the. Select Committee on Intelli-
gence.
Several former CIA officials agreed
with Denton and Leahy. They added
that Middle Eastern terrorists had
created networks that have been al-
most impossible to penetrate.
"The Shiite Igroupsl are very, very
'difficult to get into," said Howard T.
Bane, chief counter-terrorist special-
ist at the CIA until his retirement in
1980. "They have known each other
for. a long time, as friends or at the
university. They're not going to ac-
cept third-country nationals like the
Palestine Liberation Organization
did when they ran operations with
the Germans of the Red Army Fac-
tion.
"Anyone you send in is going to
have to be tested," said Bane, now a
-private consultant in suburban Vir-
ginia. "He's going td-have to commit
a crifne to prove himself, and when
they send him out to kneecap some-
body or rob a bank, he can only have
his aunt sick so many times."
Intelligence guidelines
Committing such assaults might be
considered forbidden, according to
Bane and other former CIA officials,
.under Executive Order 12333, a set of
,intelligence guidelines issued by
President Jimmy Carter and re-
newed by Reagan in 1981. It broadly
Sorbids participation by intelligence
personnel in illegal activities and
states firmly that "no person em-
ployed by or acting on behalf of the
United States government shall en-
gage in, or conspire to engage in,
assassination."
' ,To say that we can't do the dread-
ful things that terrorists do ignores
the fact that terrorists are not Boy
Scouts," said George A. Carver Jr., a
former deputy director of the CIA
and now a senior fellow at the
Georgetown University Center for
Strategic and International Studies
in Washington. "The effect is to
leave us feeling terribly virtuous but
Without any intelligence on
terrorists."
Adding to the difficulty, according
to another former CIA official, Rob-
ert Chapman, "all Middle Eastern
groups are now using a compartmen-
talized cell system. They may have 7S
separate cells of two or more people,
unconnected to other cells. They are
all provided a general strategy and
told where the organization wants to
go, but they don't necessarily have
contact or direction from above.
"Instead, each group chooses its
own targets and finds its own mate-
riel in its own ways," said Chapman,
a former CIA station chief and Third
World specialist. "That way, we can
spend 5500,000 trying to penetrate
the movement, and all we find is one
g}ty named Mohammed and another
guy named Abdul."
big challenge
Because reprisals must, in Carver's
view, be carried out within a day or
two of an offense against U.S. inter-
ests, the intelligence challenge is
"horrendous." He and others ques-
tion whether the terrorists responsi?
ble for the offense can ever be
identified, isolated and attacked in
that time span.
That may explain why, Carver said,
"if you go back as far as the 1979
hostage-taking lof Americans in Teh-
ranl, we've never really retaliated
against anything."
A key reason, the experts say, is
that since the 1960s the United States
has put most of its intelligence
money into satellite spying and elec-
tronic eavesdropping. The purpose,
several sources explained, was to de-
velop systems that could verify arms
control agreements and monitor mis-
sile tests and troop movements in the
SAviet bloc.
Today, technical intelligence "all
but eclipses traditional, human
methods of collecting intelligence,"
said former CIA director Stansfield
Turner, a retired Navy admiral.
Turner helped make that happen,
stressing satellite spying while elimi-
nating 805 CIA positions between
1977 and 1979.
His predecessor, William Colby,
also cut back on personnel in favor
of technical systems. The result, one
source said, was a 40 percent real-
dollar cut in the CIA budget in the
'70s and a 50 percent reduction in
personnel. Espionage officers and re-
gional specialists were among the
most heavily hit.
In their place, the CIA under
Turner sought to develop generalists
as managers: station chiefs and case
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/11/15: CIA-RDP90-00965R000807580027-8
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officers able to move at regular in-
tervals from one region to another,
recruiting local nationals to pene-
trate local groups of interest. Diffi?
cult languages, such as Arabic,
tended to be left to local interpreters.
Satellite and electronic technical
spying systems "are not very applica-
ble" to counter-terrorist missions,
Turner conceded, "although any-
body who communicates by tele-
phone is subject to interception."
"Mostly you're counting on pene-
tration," Turner said, "particularly if
you want to go beyond identifying a
terrorist group to identifying who
within that group deserves retribu-
tion. That's a more difficult task,
indeed."
Nonetheless, the United States
lacks any reliable capability to fore-
cast attacks or carry out pre-emptive
strikes, according to Turner.
For all but the simplest air bom-
bardments of isolated training
camps, he said, "you must hire a gun
if you're not going to be indiscrimi-
nate. That means somebody other
than an American, because an Amer-
ican assassin in Baalbek or the slums
of Beirut is more likely to get shot
than to seriously threaten a
terrorist."
Trading information
To perform it, US. can officers
assigned to the Middle East tend to
trade information gathered from sat-
ellites and signal interceptors for the
HUMINT (human intelligence) de-
veloped by the "liaison services" of
such allies as Israel, France, Britain,
West Germany, Italy and Lebanon,
intelligence sources said. All are con-
sidered to run spy networks in the
region that are superior to the Amer-
ican network. "Maybe, maybe we're
in the top 10," one expert said.
The ranking would have been
higher before the April 1983 terrorist
bombing of the US. Embassy in Bei-
rut. Asked if the blast had had the
spy meeting as its target, one knowl-
edgeable source nodded ruefully and
said, "We got careless."
The 1983 intelligence disaster -
the deadliest single day in the his-
tory of the CIA - has made it more
difficult for the United States to con-
firm the reliability of information
supplied by liaison services.
Checking is necessary because
"there's no such thing as a com-
pletely friendly intelligence serv-
ice," said Roy Godsen, a political
science professor at Georgetown
University and a consultant to the
National Security Council. "Every in-
telligence service's job is to serve its
own national interests, and even,
say, U.S. and Israeli intelligence in-
terests are not 100 percent identical."
Indeed not, another expert said,
recalling persistent but inaccurate
Israeli intelligence reports, between
1979 and 1980, that Iranian students
holding U.S. Embassy hostages had
been trained in PLO camps in
Lebanon.
The expert reported similar prob.
lems with French intelligence,
"which would not lie but would
withhold information" to protect
sources or commercial interests, and
with British intelligence, "which,
like the French, has been pretty bad-
ly penetrated by the Soviets in the
past."
For a time, the United States
shared counter-terrorist information
and training and the planning of pre-
emptive attacks with the Lebanese
government of President Amin Ge-
mayel, according to CIA director Wil?
liam J. Casey, interviewed in June by
US. News and World Report.
The U.S.-Lebanese counter-terror-
ist effort at one point included three
U.S.-sponsored Lebanese teams that
were formed and trained in late 1984
to perform pre-emptive attacks and
reprisals against terrorists, accord-
ing to a Washington Post report on
May 12.
That operation was canceled, ac-
cording to tile Post and several other
publications, after members of one
Lebanese team, acting without CIA
authorization, hired others in Leba-
non to detonate a massive car bomb
outside the Beirut residence of a
radical Shiite leader in March.
At least 80 bystanders were killed
and more than 100 injured in that
attack, but not its suspected target,
Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah. re-
puted leader of the Hezbollah (Party
of God) suspected to have been in-
volved in several attacks on US. in-
stallations and personnel. Fadlallah
was away at the time and escaped
injury - in one of the worst intelli-
gence blunders, or most damaging
enemy intelligence penetrations, in
the history of counter-terrorism.
In the wake of the incident, Casey
said, "we pulled back from any in-
volvement in the planning or prepa-
ration of [Lebanese counter-
terrorist] operations."
Publication of the story by Post
reporters Bob Woodward and
Charles C. Babcock further damaged
US. relations with allied intelligence
services, according to Carver, the
former deputy CIA director.
"Loose lips cost lives," he said.
"And foreign intelligence services
and the individuals whose assistance
and cooperation the U.S. urgently
needs are increasingly reluctant,
quite understandably, to put their
welfare, reputations and, above all,
their lives hostage to US. discretion
- particularly in the light of the U.S.
government's manifest inability to
protect even its own secrets."
Despite these setbacks. U.S. intelli-
gence on radical Muslim groups has
improved in recent years. A major
new investment in Middle Eastern
HUMINT began after the 1979 U.S.
Embassy hostage-taking in Tehran
and has continued, several sources
said. Among its little-publicized suc-
cesses, they noted, are the averting
in the last year of three intended
Shiite attacks against U.S. Embassies
in Western Europe.
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Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/11/15: CIA-RDP90-00965R000807580027-8