Why the Spooks Shouldn't Run Wars

By David Wise

Here is what people should keep in mind as they hear about the CIA's ever expanding paramilitary role in the war on terrorism: it was a short trip, and a direct line, from the CIA's ill-conceived operation at the Bay of Pigs to the Cuban missile crisis.

In June 1961, less than two months after the CIA disaster in Cuba, President Kennedy journeyed to Vienna to meet with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev, who was built along the lines of a Soviet tank, sized up the slender young American President and mistakenly assumed he could be pushed around. Knowing that J.F.K. was still reeling from the CIA's failed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro, he threatened to move against Berlin. "It will be a cold winter," Kennedy said. As matters turned out, it was a cold October the next year. Emboldened by the U.S. defeat at the Bay of Pigs, Khrushchev put offensive missiles in Cuba, and the world came as close to the nuclear brink as it ever has.

More than 40 years later, the CIA is back, bigger than ever. President Bush turned to it as a major player after the 9/11 terrorist attack on America. The agency's paramilitary operatives moved into Afghanistan ahead of the special forces and handed out millions in cash to the Afghan warlords. The agency's Predator drones have launched missiles at enemy targets, sometimes killing the wrong people. CIA paramilitary officers are on the ground in Iraq preparing for war against Saddam Hussein.

In the beginning, it was not supposed to be this way. The Indiana Jones role for the CIA was not intended when Congress established the agency in 1947 "to correlate and evaluate intelligence." But the law included language allowing the agency to undertake "other functions and duties," a loophole through which thousands of covert operations have been launched around the globe. Some of these have grown into military operations--as in Afghanistan and Nicaragua in the 1980s--that amount to small wars.

Yet historically the CIA has got into the most trouble when it strayed from intelligence gathering and analysis and into paramilitary operations. The CIA restored the Shah of Iran to his throne in 1953, and the resentment that followed helped spawn the Islamic revolution in that country. Then came the seizure of the American embassy in Iran and the hostage crisis that helped defeat Jimmy Carter. After that, in the 1980s, the CIA ran a not-very-secret war backing the contras in Nicaragua, which led to the Iran-contra scandal that tarnished the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

In Afghanistan, during the same period, the CIA mounted a successful operation in support of the mujahedin rebels, who chased the Soviets out of that country. The CIA's war was run from Pakistan by veteran clandestine officer Milton Bearden, who had the satisfaction of seeing the last Russian troops walk across the Friendship Bridge into Uzbekistan on Feb. 15, 1989. Bearden believes the CIA operation in Afghanistan helped speed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But some of the Islamic fighters supported by the CIA in Afghanistan brought their jihad to America. Ramzi Yousef, who planned the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, was trained in Afghanistan. The war left Afghanistan desolated; an estimated 1 million people died in the conflict. And what happened afterward? The warring factions fought one another, the Taliban took over, and guess whom they allowed in to train terrorists on their soil?

That is not at all to suggest that the CIA is responsible for Osama bin Laden. But the agency's covert and paramilitary enterprises have--time after time, from Cuba to Afghanistan--carried within them the seeds of profound problems later, from the missile crisis to 9/11.

For one thing, these activities have led to weapons ending up in the wrong hands. In the aftermath of the operation in Afghanistan in the 1980s, hundreds of Stinger missiles that the CIA used to arm the Afghan rebels remain unaccounted for. The agency has been trying to buy them back but has recovered perhaps only a hundred or so. Among the seven Afghan rebel groups, all the major ones received the agency's shoulder-fired Stingers, which can effectively bring down an aircraft at an altitude of 6,000 to 8,000 ft. or more. Twenty-four of the CIA's Stingers destined for Afghanistan were somehow diverted to Iran. The CIA comforts itself by hoping the missiles have degraded after a decade and a half. Perhaps, but the hundreds of Stingers still missing are an unsettling legacy of the operation in Afghanistan. In Kenya just two months ago, terrorists using a Russian-made SA-7 version of the Stinger narrowly missed shooting down an Israeli airliner. The chilling conclusion: these weapons can put any airline passenger in jeopardy. Federal officials say they are developing plans to try to protect airliners in the U.S. from the missile threat, but they haven't yet figured out how to do that.

In its paramilitary role, the CIA today has high-tech weapons at its disposal, most notably the Predator. But gee-whiz weaponry is not always as smart as the p.r. flacks would have us believe. Last February, for example, three Afghans, described as dangerous al-Qaeda terrorists, were killed by a missile launched from a CIA Predator drone in the eastern part of the country. They were apparently villagers collecting scrap metal. One was tall and could have been Osama bin Laden. Never mind that the man killed was only 5 ft. 11 and bin Laden is 6 ft. 5; the Predator can't see every detail, and there's a war on.

Then on Nov. 3 in a remote area of Yemen, a CIA Predator loosed a Hellfire missile that vaporized a car in which a top al- Qaeda leader, Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, was thought to be riding along with five other people, including an American citizen. The American, believed to be Kamal Derwish, was later described by Administration officials as the leader of an alleged al- Qaeda sleeper cell in New York State. The officials said he persuaded young men from Lackawanna, N.Y., a Buffalo suburb, to travel to Afghanistan for religious studies at locations that turned out to be terrorist training camps. Six members of the group were arrested last September and charged with providing material support to a foreign terrorist group.

Perhaps Derwish deserved the fate of the company he kept, or perhaps he was a certified bad guy. Nevertheless, an American citizen not charged or convicted of any crime was killed by a CIA Predator, targeted in cooperation with the Pentagon, and there was hardly a peep of protest in this country. Where is the outrage? Intelligence officials say killing an American with a Hellfire missile was perfectly fine because he was an "enemy combatant," a term that the government seems to apply freely these days. Besides, the CIA claims, it didn't know that an American was in the car when the missile was fired. Oops, sorry. It seems unlikely that being zapped by the CIA is exactly the sort of due process that the Framers had in mind when they wrote the Constitution.

How could this happen? In 1976 President Ford signed an Executive Order banning political assassination by any employee of the U.S. government. President Reagan, to his credit, even tightened the ban, dropping the word political and adding that nobody "acting on behalf of" the U.S.--such as contract killers--could assassinate someone. The ban was issued, it will be recalled, because the CIA had been trying to bump off a lot of world leaders, from Patrice Lumumba in the Congo to Castro in Cuba, where the agency hired the Mafia to try to put botulinum toxin in Castro's soup.

Now we are told the CIA has a hit list of terrorist leaders whom the agency is authorized to kill. It's a strategy that even Jeffrey Smith, the former general counsel of the CIA, has frowned upon. "This ought to be a last resort for the United States," he said after the Predator attack in Yemen. And, Smith noted, "sometimes you get the wrong man. It also seems to legitimize assassination...putting at risk our own leaders and to some extent our own citizens."

I couldn't agree more. The CIA is a vital agency, on the front line of protecting the nation against attack. That it failed to do so in advance of 9/11 is no reason to break up the agency, as some have proposed, or to dilute the power of the director of Central Intelligence by placing him under a White House intelligence "czar," which would merely create another layer of bureaucracy.

The CIA would be much better served by getting out of the paramilitary business altogether and strengthening its clandestine intelligence gathering. It was, after all, created to avoid another Pearl Harbor. It should concern itself now with preventing another 9/11.

David Wise is a Washington-based intelligence historian and the author of Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (Random House)