The Clinton cuts and the CIA

Jed Babbin interviews Rowan Scarborough about his new book Sabotage.

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Rowan Scarborough (RS): We are really still paying for what happened to the CIA and the whole intelligence community in the 90s. For example, the CIA structure in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, was down to a handful of officers by the end of the 90s. The CIA closed scores of bases during the 90s, all over the world, including in Hamburg, Germany -- the place where the 9/11 plot really began, and where radicalized Muslims were really cropping up in Europe.Secondly, in the 90s we did not invest in technology to eavesdrop on these people, and in Sabotage I explain that the National Security Agency has been playing catch-up to try to come up with new technologies to match e-mail and the Internet. These two things burgeoned in the 90s, and they paralleled the rise of radical Islam. But NASA’s budget was going down, the CIA’s budget was going down. We just didn’t keep up.

JB: But all of that was fixed, wasn’t it? We had the 9/11 Commission, and all these wonderful intelligence reforms -- Come on, Rowan, all this stuff is fixed, everything’ everything’s wonderful, right?

RS: You cannot fix a decade of neglect in just four or five years. And, as Sabotage proves, the “improvements” made on the recommendation of the 9-11 Commission didn’t fix the problems. In some cases, they made the problems worse by adding more unproductive bureaucracy.

JB: In Sabotage you make the case that the CIA is a rogue agency, not answerable to the president. That they’re not following his policies or trying to support him in this war -- What in the world is going on? Is the CIA really that bad, really that rogue?

RS: Well, about three years ago John McCain became probably the first politician who declared the CIA a 'rogue agency.' And it is because inside the CIA, the bureaucracy at Langley had a priority of leaking and stopping Bush administration programs, rather than following the policy directives of the White House. And we’ve seen that in countless leaks about terrorist surveillance programs, the prisons where they were trying to interrogate top-ranking al Qaeda prisoners, in station reports from Baghdad. When Porter Goss took over the CIA in 2004, really trying to reform it, what happened? He died by a million leaks. It was a cut every day, until Porter Goss by 2006 actually was forced out.

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He also tackles the Plame affair and how the CIA responded to administration request for information. It is a good interview and the book looks like it is worthwhile too.

The Examiner has an excerpt from Scarborough's book today.