Unintended Consequences

No, not that book.

I have had occasion to mention previously that I have been somewhat obsessed by terrorism for years. When my classmates in Sociology or Criminology classes were writing papers on the liberalization of narcotics laws, I was looking up obscure European nihilist philosophers who were said to have influenced Bader-Meinhoff. One of the conclusions I came to was that terrorism is a futile tool, as it is most likely to piss off the people you are trying to influence, and, if you don't blow yourself up in your own bomb factory, you'll either be shot down like a mad dog or languish in prison. Mind you, that was back in the 70s, when we thought there was no way the Israelis would ever consider negotiating with the Palestinians...

So I was a little annoyed by some of the press reports that accompanied a recent RAND study, How Terrorist Groups End, due to their interpretation of the figures that "40% of terrorist organizations or movements 'end' through policing, and only 7% through military force."

They missed the point. (Note that by "they" I do not mean the RAND folks, but rather those who don't know squat about counter-terrorism and/or will leap on any opportunity to screech about how George W. Bush is wrong!)

Conventional military force is of little use against a standard-issue terrorist campaign. But military units can use techniques more traditionally used by law enforcement agencies against, say, a drug gang, and wage a very successful counter-terror campaign. In many ways, they can do so more effectively than a law enforcement agency. The RAND study emphasizes use of local law enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies. Military force, per se, is "too blunt" an instrument--but they apparently did not consider Special Operations Command, or conventional military forces used in supporting roles.

Coincidentally, I just finished GHOST: Confessions of a Counter-Terrorism Agent, by Fred Burton. (Random House, New York, 2008. ISBN 978-1-4000-6569-1.) Mr. Burton was one-third of the original Department of State Dipolomatic Security Service Counter-Terrorism Offcie. The book is fascinating, marred only by the fact that there seem to be lacunae, as if there are still things he can't talk about... which is probably the truth. (I also found his habit of speaking in the present tense about things that happened twenty years ago to be distracting. Remember that when you read the following excerpts.)

The short excerpts from his book, below, illustrate what I see as a side-effect of the perception that terrorism is, or should be, a criminal issue: The application of US Legal procedures where they serve as a detriment to National Security.

[Pages 239-240]
Through 1993 and '94,we make great strides in our ability to protect our VIPs. We've developed skills to smell out terror operations, and we continue to work our HUMINT assets in the field. But for every step forward, it seems the Washington Bureaucracy forces us back two more.
A sea change has taken place over at the FBI. Louis Freeh took over as it's 10th Director in 1993. Ever since, counter-terrorism investigations have become freighted with huge political baggage. Turf wars between the FBI, CIA, and the Department of Justice have soured relations across the board. Not only are the agencies not playing well together, but now the priorities have changed. Terrorism is seen less as a national security issue and more like a criminal one. It is a potentially disastrous shift, one that has divided the intelligence community from the information they need. It is the worst catch-22 imaginable.
Let's say you are debriefing a hostage or terrorist. The original notes are taken by the FBI lead case agent and stored as part of the Bureau's ongoing criminal investigations. They end up secreted away in the appropriate investigative file. By law, the agents conducting the debriefing have to be identified for any future federal trial. This effectively ends any spook's career. It outs them, reveals who they are, and ensures they will never be able to work clandestinely in the Dark World again. You can't go overseas and play spook if people know your true identity.
Obviously, spooks are reluctant to be part of debriefings now. This seals off a huge source of HUMINT for us, although we may not have access to it anyway. The debriefing note, and whatever intel is gleaned from them, is now rat-holed by the FBI. It is rarely disseminated to the other Dark World agencies. We're not talking to one another any more. Everyone's protecting their turf, and I fear that we'll miss an attack because the right information didn't get to the right people in time.

...

[Page 242]
Chasing Ramzi Yousef highlights the divisions we have here at home. In the eighties, when it was just Gleason, Mullen, and me, we had almost a free hand to do whatever we thought needed to be done. Those days are over. The nineties have seen an ever-increasing bureaucratization of counter-terrorism operations. We have layers upon layers to deal with, turf wars to maneuver around or through, and our own internal issues within the State Department that frequently tie our hands. Our own diplomats tend to dislike DSS agents, a sentiment we reciprocate. They consider us alarmist right-wingers at best, John Wayne-style rogues at worst. In return we call the careerists in the floors above the big blue door the Bow Ties, or Mandarins and Black Dragons. The Black Dragons are the senior diplomats whose career ambitions frequently clash with our own efforts to protect them overseas. ...

(Emphasis above added.)

What follows is a blow-by-blow account of how the Satte Department, y insisting on properly following channels, blew it's chance to arrest Ramzi Yousef. The Filipinos almost had him in Manila--they did nab a metric buttload of good intel, which they shared with us--and then DSS got him by ignoring The Rules and only bringing in the absolute minimum number of people.

Where they found an FBI man who didn't play politics I'll never know.

It was probably easier finding Pakistanis who wouldn't leak.