CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

2002

Generally

July - December

Materials presented in chronological order.

Moore, J. Daniel. "CIA Support to Operation Enduring Freedom" Military Intelligence (Jul.-Sep. 2002).

Pincus, Walter. "Congress to Postpone Revamping of FBI, CIA; Homeland Security Agency Becomes Legislative Focus." Washington Post, 2 Jul. 2002, A1. [http://www. washingtonpost.com]

"Congress will put off a reorganization of the FBI and CIA ... until it establishes a Department of Homeland Security, according to Bush administration and congressional sources.... The delay underscored the increasing awareness on Capitol Hill that reorganizing the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency and other intelligence bodies is an extraordinarily complex undertaking about which there is little agreement on what needs to be fixed or, indeed, whether any changes are even required."

Lanfranco, Edward. "Wreakage of CIA Plane Found in China." UPI, 29 Jul. 2002. [http:// www.upi.com]

"Members of a U.S. Army search team believe they have located the debris of a C-47 plane shot down 50 years ago on a nighttime mission to pick up an agent from behind enemy lines in the Korean War, but the graves of the two pilots [Robert C. Snoddy and Norman A. Schwartz] killed in the crash have not been found."

Loeb, Vernon. "Behind the Peruvian Shootdown." Washington Post, 26 Aug. 2002. [http:// www.washingtonpost.com]

A report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the shootdown by the Peruvian Air Force of a float plane carrying American missionaries from the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism in April 2001 concludes "that, while CIA, State Department and National Security officials 'failed to adequately monitor the operation of this risky program,' the CIA pilots [in a spotter aircraft] had repeatedly tried to stop the shoot down and 'expressed strong reservations to their own chain of command' once the Peruvians initiated military action."

Whitelaw, Kevin, and David E. Kaplan. “Gumshoes and Spooks.” U.S. News & World Report, Commemorative Issue of 9/11, Sep. 2002, 62.

“After the catastrophic terrorist attacks, government agencies banded together to fight al Qaeda. The results were swift -- a global roundup of some suspected al Qaeda operatives. Still, it's been a struggle at times to get the FBI and CIA to overcome their history and divergent cultures.”

Bubnov, Vasily. Tr., Dmitry Sudakov. "Central Intelligence Agency: Yesterday, Today, but Tomorrow?" Pravda.RU, 18 Sep. 2002. [http://english.pravda.ru/]

"CIA is being reorganized.... What is the CIA’s future? It is not very likely that it will occur to someone in Washington to abolish intelligence. Yet, there are no doubts that the American government will require more efficient work from this service."

Risen, James. "C.I.A.'s Inquiry on Qaeda Aide Seen as Flawed." New York Times, 23 Sep. 2002. [http://www.nytimes.com]

Congressional investigators have concluded that the CIA "failed to adequately scutinize information it received before Sept. 11 about the growing terrorist threat posed by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a leader of Al Qaeda now believed to have been a central planner of the attacks on New York and Washington."

Thomas, Evan, with Mark Hosenball, Tamara Lipper, and Michael Isikoff. "Shadow Struggle." Newsweek, 14 Oct. 2002, 29-31.

As Washington prepares for a war against Iraq, "there are real and serious divisions between Bush's war cabinet and the spy agencies that serve it, as well as troubling splits within the intelligence community itself…. [T]he CIA and FBI have done better in cooperating with each other, [b]ut close observers worry about the resistance of the intelligence community to real reform."

At the same time, the "CIA old boys … fear that high-risk covert operations will go bad…. They worry that if CIA analysts bend to political pressure from Bush's right-wing ideologues and play up the Iraqi threat, they will later be accused of cooking the books. The analysts fear that they will miss the one clue to the coming terror attack that is buried in the mountain of tips, leads and clues that inundate the CIA and FBI every day…. The spooks are very wary that they will be double-crossed by Congress….

"The hawks today are no more trusting of the CIA than they were in the 1970s. Though careful to praise the agency for working well with U.S. Special Forces to chase the Taliban out of Afghanistan…, these Bush hard-liners say the agency is both timid and wrong on Iraq…. The Pentagon is working around the CIA's caution by relying on its own spy shop -- the Defense Intelligence Agency -- and it may use U.S. Special Forces to handle covert operations that would ordinarily be carried out by CIA operatives."

Priest, Dana. "CIA Is Expanding Domestic Operations." Washington Post, 23 Oct. 2002, A2. [http://www.washingtonpost.com] 

The CIA "is expanding its domestic presence, placing agents with nearly all of the FBI's 56 terrorism task forces in U.S. cities... Separately, the CIA is undertaking what one intelligence official called a 'concerted effort' to increase the number of case officers working in the agency's domestic field offices. Those offices, directed by the National Resources Division, are staffed by officers from the clandestine service."

Pincus, Walter. "CIA Touts Successes in Fighting Terrorism." Washington Post, 1 Nov. 2002, A29. [http://www.washingtonpost.com]

DCI "George J. Tenet and other intelligence officials have been attempting to counter criticism of their failure to disrupt the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon ... by speaking more openly about successes in thwarting what the government believes were planned terrorist actions. Last year, for example, U.S. authorities stymied plots to kidnap Americans in three countries by using information from a captured senior associate of Osama bin Laden.... Attacks on U.S. facilities and personnel in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the Incirlik air base in Turkey, as well as against U.S. embassies in Rome and Paris, also were disrupted."

For material on the CIA's use of a missile fired from a Predator UAV to kill an al Qaeda leader in Yemen in November 2002, click HERE.

Priest, Dana. “CIA Feels Strain of Iraq and Al Qaeda: Some Gaps Filled by Shifting Staff." Washington Post, 17 Nov. 2002, A26. [http://www.washingtonpost.com]

After 11 September 2001,"the CIA pulled about 160 analysts from [other] jobs ... and turned them into counterterrorism specialists. The transfer ... made certain things easier.... The [15] units already had offices and computers, and they knew how to work as a team. But there were costs." For example, "most were novices to the terrorism world."

Priest, Dana. “Tenet Taps Hutchings for CIA Council." Washington Post, 10 Dec. 2002, A17. [http://www.washingtonpost.com]

DCI George J. Tenet has appointed "Robert L. Hutchings, a European specialist and author of a noted diplomatic history of the Cold War, to lead the National Intelligence Council, a body that analyzes long-term trends and chronic problems in the world for U.S. policymakers."

Risen, James, and David Johnston. "Bush Has Widened Authority of C.I.A. to Kill Terrorists." New York Times, 15 Dec. 2002. [http://www.nytimes.com]

"The Bush administration has prepared a list of terrorist leaders the Central Intelligence Agency is authorized to kill, if capture is impractical and civilian casualties can be minimized, senior military and intelligence officials said. The previously undisclosed C.I.A. list includes key Qaeda leaders like Osama bin Laden and his chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, as well as other principal figures from Al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups, the officials said..... Despite the authority given to the agency, Mr. Bush has not waived the executive order banning assassinations, officials said. The presidential authority to kill terrorists defines operatives of Al Qaeda as enemy combatants and thus legitimate targets for lethal force."

Dreyfuss, Robert. "The Pentagon Muzzles the CIA: Devising Bad Intelligence to Promote Bad Policy." American Prospect 13, no. 22 (16 Dec. 2002): 26-29. [http://www.prospect.org]

Barr, Stephen. "CIA Undertakes a Very Public Experiment in Pay and Performance." Washington Post, 19 Dec. 2002, B2. [http://www.washingtonpost.com] 

"The CIA will conduct an experiment," beginning on 26 January 2002 and running for a year, "aimed at linking pay to job performance." DCI George J. Tenet "announced this week that the agency's Office of Chief Financial Officer had been selected for the pilot project."

Ryan, Maria. "The Myth and Reality of US Intelligence and Policy-Making After 9/11." Intelligence and National Security 17, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 55-76.

The author argues that "the most recent CIA intelligence simply does not support the hardline stance taken by [President] Bush" with regard to the "axis of evil" countries, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Instead, the CIA "has been sidelined as far as policy is concerned and the Departments of State and Defense vie for influence on implementing their long-standing policy preferences by fashioning the post-9/11 war on terrorism to fit them."

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