"Unleashing the CIA is No Remedy"

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 9/27; The Gazette (Montreal), 9/25
Melvin Goodman (link to online Media Guide)

Lifting the 25-year ban on political assassination and recruiting unsavory foreign agents into the CIA will not serve America's war against terrorism.

The demands for these changes, issued by members of Congress and former government officials, expose the lack of a coherent policy to deal with terrorism and ignore the fact that previous U.S. assassination plots have often produced unintended and unwelcome consequences.

The CIA's efforts to remove former Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1960 led to the rise of the most corrupt African leader in recent history, Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko. The agency's covert campaign against Iraqi leader Abdel-Karim Qassim in 1963 paved the way for the emergence of Saddam Hussein.

Indeed, it was the revelation of these and other ill-considered CIA assassination plots in Cuba and Chile that led to the 1976 executive order banning such practices.

Even what the CIA considered one its greatest successes--its support for the anti-Soviet mujahedeen in Afghanistan--has blown back in America's face. It was under this covert program that the agency helped fund and train Osama bin Laden and others now suspected of terror attacks that culminated on Sept. 11 with the devastation in New York and Washington.

In the angry aftermath of the attacks, other lessons also are being ignored. Former CIA chief James Woolsey says the agency should be permitted once again to recruit capital criminals as agents if that's what is needed to infiltrate bin Laden's terrorist cells. Woolsey says his successor, John Deutch, who eliminated known human rights violators from the ranks of U.S. foreign agents, is responsible for weakening the CIA's ability to collect intelligence against terrorist organizations.

But Deutch was trying to place limits on just how unsavory agents can be. He was concerned about preventing the kind of contamination of U.S. foreign policy that resulted from the CIA's funding of thugs such as Mobutu and Panama's Manuel Noriega.

Covert action is not a magic bullet that can be used when everything else has failed. There are occasions--and surely President Bush's looming war against terrorism will provide them--when covert action can work if it is coordinated with military and diplomatic measures.

But the CIA doesn't need carte blanche to kill; it does need better cooperation with friendly intelligence services, especially those in moderate Arab and Muslim states, and more agents abroad operating under non-official cover. And there must be scrupulous review of the CIA's covert actions as well as established procedures for accountability. For the past decade, the House and Senate intelligence committees have failed to provide the kind of oversight they were created to provide.

With a long struggle against terrorism about to begin, don't look to an unrestrained CIA to provide a quick fix. Unleashing the agency without a coherent, coordinated strategy will only make a bad situation worse.

Melvin A. Goodman, a former senior analyst at the CIA, is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and an analyst with the Foreign Policy in Focus Project in Washington, D.C.

COPYRIGHT 2001, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; The Gazette (Montreal)

This page was last modified on Thursday, June 20, 2002 2:53 PM
Contact the IRC's webmaster with inquiries regarding the functionality of this website.
Copyright © 2001 IRC and IPS. All rights reserved.