Shaping the Battle Space

Ronald Kessler’s Terrorist Watch, pg 138-9:

Immediately after the New York Times‘ disclosure of the SWIFT program, al Qaeda terrorists who had been sending international money transfers stopped the practice, destroying the CIA’s ability to track them and pinpoint their contacts around the world, according to a well-informed source.

“They read the papers to find out what to do next,” says S. Eugene Poteat, a former CIA officer who is president of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers.

The targets we focus on read the newspapers, and they look at the Internet, and they will then change their course or their modus operandi based on our capabilities,” Heimbach says. “That creates new challenges for us in our ability to collect intelligence.”

“The leaks are killing us,” Cummings says. “Whatever we receive that helps us better understand how they’re motivated, how they’re driven, what their current objectives are, how they operate, who they are, is a huge benefit to us. That’s how we defeat them. Take that away from us, we’re going to be losing again.”

Cummings cites a Washington Post story revealing that the FBI does radiological surveys, especially when threat levels are high, to detect possible nuclear devices at locations where the FBI has ongoing terrorist cases, including at some mosques.

“Did it not occur to anybody that now the terrorists are going to take countermeasures based on the technology we just rolled out in the newspapers?” Cummings says. “Do we understand that we have this great capability to try to figure out whether or not this material is here in the U.S., and now we just lost that capability? The terrorists are reading the same newspapers, getting on the Internet, seeing the same thing. The minute it’s published, the minute there’s something that talks substantially about the capabilities of the U.S. government to capture these guys, that is the topic of conversation around the campfires.”

Hugh Hewitt interview with Douglas Feith:

DF:…the administration made a decision somewhere along the way, some months after we went into Baghdad, and we failed to find the WMD stockpiles that the CIA had said we would find. It appears that people at the White House made the decision that the President is going to focus his attention and his comments on the future and on democracy promotion rather than on the past and the actual rationale for the war, the focus on the threats that came from the regime. And that knocked the priority down for examining things like the historical record. And I think the administration did itself and its whole war effort enormous harm by making that decision to kind of turn its back on the past, and try to focus only on the future.

HH: I’ll jump ahead in my question sequence, because the Duelfer Report is a great part of the book, War And Decision. And in fact, as you point out, he discovered that Saddam had the capacity to reinitiate massive weapons of mass destruction programs, but the administration abandoned the effort. They didn’t even try to make a case that that mattered almost as much as stockpiles. Strategic error on their part, Doug Feith?

DF: Yes, I think it was. And what the Duelfer Report, the so-called Iraq Survey Group Report found was that Saddam had purposefully put himself in a position where he could manufacture chemical and biological weapon stockpiles in three to five weeks. And I mean, this was an enormously important finding, but the Iraq Survey Group report was done under the control of the CIA. And when the report was issued, it was three volumes. It was almost like three inches of paper. And the CIA put it out to the press without so much as a one page sheet of bullets saying here are the key findings. So what did the journalists do when they were all of a sudden handed three inches of paper? Many of the key reports, the first reports came from the wire services, who have to write about something within an hour or two, they got a three inch report, and all they wrote was no WMD found. And so the whole world got the impression that the only thing that was of significance that was found by the Iraq Survey Group was no WMD. Now the fact is what the report actually found, and I quote it at length in my book, is they found that Saddam had facilities, they found that he had personnel, they found that he had material for chemical and biological weapons. The found that he had the intention to have it, they found that he had purposefully built dual-use facilities that could produce military and civilian items, so that nobody could pin it down as specifically military, even though it could be used for military purposes. And as I said, they found that he had purposefully structured his programs so that he could have chemical and biological weapons production within three to five weeks. And these were the things that if the CIA had put those in a fact sheet, a one page fact sheet, the whole world’s perception of the Iraq WMD threat would be different.

HH: I’m going to get to the CIA a little bit later. But this is a good jumping off spot for a broader point you make repeatedly. You’re critical throughout of the information efforts of the administration, the Pentagon, the CIA, State Department, all of it. Who’s responsibility, Doug Feith, is it? Is it the President’s fault that this communication strategy has been so badly, terribly managed?

DF: Well, it’s been very sad to see, because I think that a lot of very good and important work that was done for the country in good faith, with careful analysis, was misunderstood by the American public, is not supported by the American public, because these efforts have been so bad. I mean, ultimately, of course, I mean, the President is the, as the saying goes, the captain of the ship, and he has responsibility for the fact that his administration hasn’t done a professional, proper job in explaining what the administrations is doing in the national security field and why. I mean, what I do in the book is, it’s hard for me to know exactly who within the administration is actually responsible for that, which office…I mean, it was not what was done within the National Security Council. I mean, there were various people who were doing strategic communications and political kinds of things in the administration, and I don’t know where some of these key decisions were made that turned out to be so harmful. But I do know in the broadest sense that they were enormously harmful, because the public does not understand what the administration was aiming to do, or why it was doing it, what kind of activities are going on around the world. And as you pointed out in your earlier question, there’s a widespread lack of understanding of the nature of the threats that we face.

HH: You know, the communication effort with the American people has been so random, halting, almost feckless, Douglas Feith. It’s as though the people in the administration are the only ones in America who don’t know how to sell anything. People who have to sell things go on radio and television…you know, if you’ve got a book to sell like War And Decision, and someone says hey, come spend three hours with me, they’re there. But they were trying to sell an idea, a strategic concept, and no one…I mean, Rumsfeld’s been on this show twice in his tenure, Dick Cheney maybe four or five times. But it’s always ten, fifteen minutes. Did anyone ever sit down with the Secretary of Defense and say you’ve got to take this seriously?

DF: Well, yeah, I know that…when I was reviewing my notes, and this is one of the comments that I make in the book, when I was reviewing my notes from the years that I was at the Pentagon, I mean, I found literally hundreds of references by Rumsfeld, by Cheney, by General Myers, and others, saying our strategic communications are terrible. We have got to get on top of this. And this was not for political reasons.

HH: Right.

DF: This was because the administration had difficult, expensive, costly in lives and blood efforts underway, in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere, and there was an appreciation that the American public has to understand these things if it’s going to support the effort. And there’s also this extremely important point that in fighting the jihadist extremist problem, a major part of the fight has to be at the level of ideological warfare.

Thanks for shedding more light, MataHarley.

More from Ronald Kessler’s book, as it relates to damages from press leaks:

Pg 239:

While the media minimize the threats and mischaracterize the progress in the war on terror, they undermine it by revealing secrets of how the FBI and CIA are trying to stop the next attack.

Al Qaeda in Pakistan has a counterintelligence arm that specifically looks for leaks in the American media so the organization can adjust its tactics and ways of communicating, a CIA official says. Because of leaks, local CIA agents recruited by American CIA officers have been compromised and killed, the official says.

“The leaks have led to some of our sources [agents] being arrested in some places and being executed, because information that gets published in the media can be traced back to a specific individual who then is compromised.”

Leaks also lead foreign intelligence services to hold back from sharing information.

There’s more, but my typing fingers have about had it for tonight.