That story is just one of many, and I am not the only one who has experienced that frustration and anger at seeing one’s hard work wasted because someone is so risk averse. The Agency that I left was one that was opposed to teaching young case officers that ops like the one I described are their chance to capitalize, to make a difference.
Any particularly hairy ops that you are able to tell us about?
Overall, the single most tense and rewarding operation was the run up to the invasion of Iraq. This was eight or nine months before the air campaign began, and at the time, only a mix of CIA, 10th Special Forces Group, and some other special operations troops were in-country. The team was diverse: a mixture of black, white, Asian, and Hispanic operators. We had to quickly come to the realization that most of us were not going to blend in with the local populace, so we adapted to the situation, running our ops mainly at night and having our assets brought to us. Our mission was the full spectrum of operations: collection, set up/conduct sabotage ops, conduct covert action, etc. We also managed to make contact with and maintain interaction with Kurdish fighters.
When you work counterterrorism, pretty much everything is hairy. You have limited or no backup. You are meeting sources who by definition are dangerous and unpredictable. You wear a gun on your ankle. You plan meticulously, and you learn to react instantaneously. I have recovered highly radioactive sources in the field intended for use in dirty bombs. I have had guys hand me what they claimed was nerve agent and which my field test confirmed was sarin. (Fortunately it turned out to be simulant.) I have had guys turn on me and rat me out to the other side. Every day is something different.
“Willful Neglect” seems to be a bit of a departure from “Beyond Repair” in that it takes on homeland security from a more narrow perspective. Can you talk about what led you to that project?
Much like “Beyond Repair,” this second book was born from a depressing realization that our homeland security situation was in a sad state. I had the opportunity to travel to many places to assess site security, nuclear and maritime, across the board, and the theme was always the same. Everywhere I went, there was virtually no security to assess. It was almost all window dressing, with cookie-cutter defense plans, a willfully lax attitude on the part of some, but not all, security personnel—the people paid to protect critical infrastructure—and canned force-enforce exercises that had the opposing force attempting to breach at a set time and place, and with limited gear (Author’s note: For a little background on nuclear security, see my article here). No real-world bad guy is going to follow any such rules, and the continued practice was lulling us into a false sense of security. Now don’t get me wrong, we are safer. We are safer in the sense that, unlike in the past, we are now shooting back. Before 9/11, we had embassy bombings, the U.S.S. Cole was attacked, and our response ranged from minimal to non-existent.
An example of this is rail travel. Successful attacks have occurred, as evidenced in Madrid, India, and other places, and communications chatter shows that the bad guys are interested in conducting more. I can head over to the local Amtrak station and, with the exception of the one or two, sometimes more local and state policemen—and they do a great job with what they have to work with—there isn’t any real security in place. No baggage checks or other screening; you just purchase your ticket and off you go. Once on the train, the security is even more lax. I could get on a train, leave a bag in a car, get off at the next stop, and it detonates one or two stops away. (Author’s note: Before anyone starts with the “stop giving the bad guys ideas” rant, cool it. They already had plans to do these things, and they are smarter than many give them credit for. They don’t need to rely on us for ideas.) And what is our response to these attacks? Build a new agency, have folks stare at screens in some ops center, and assume that this makes us safer.
Tell us a little about Orion Strategic Services.
I started OSS with my wife (Gina, also a former case officer and owner of her own company, Artemis LLC) in 2009. The company focus is on training—mainly tradecraft related. We are not a one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter service; we build and teach our courses based on the client’s needs and wants. Our clients range from government agencies to private corporations and companies, and our instructors are former CIA, other intelligence community, and special operations. We like to keep the company as “flat” as possible, and in keeping with that philosophy, I act as one of the instructors or role players. Our SDR (surveillance-detection) training is probably the most intensive logistically, as we provide, depending on the client and the mission, role players and surveillance teams.
Where do you think intelligence and the intel community needs to focus for the future? Most so-called experts point to getting better at HUMINT (human intelligence).
“Well one thing that we do extremely well is SIGINT (signals intelligence). Of course there is always room for improvement, but overall we do that well. I do, however, agree that we are just not as good at HUMINT. Unlike what some decision-makers believe, HUMINT does not respond well to just having money thrown at it. It is an art, not a science. We have done it right at times, but inevitably bureaucracy rears its ugly head and we have to start back at square one. This is my reasoning for the Office of Strategic services as the model in “Beyond Repair.” It is a more a matter of mindset rather than technique. “Wild Bill” Donovan was criticized for approving hair-brained schemes, but it wasn’t so much the scheme as it was that Donovan wanted his junior officers to be able to come to him with any ideas, no matter how crazy they might be.
If we are to learn anything and apply it to the future, it is that the CIA cannot afford to be a ‘regular’ organization. As an example, in May 1944, the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) carried out an operation to kidnap Heinrich Kreipe, a German Army general and commander of the 22nd Air Landing Infantry Division, from the German-held island of Crete. Two SOE agents and a handful of Cretan resistance fighters conducted the raid successfully, and right under the noses of not just the 22nd Air Landing Infantry, but also the 164th Infantry Division, successfully evading pursuing troops and making it to the coast before being extracted by the Royal Navy. Now imagine that operation being proposed and carried out today. (Author’s note: Yes, yes, I get it—it has been done, just on a smaller scale.) The teaching point for a future CIA is how quickly the op was approved and with how few people were involved in its approval.
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