Drat. I was just working on a post in which I reveal that Addington has moved to Ottawa. Foiled again.

Let me speculate a bit on this one…

I am fairly certain from reading pretty deeply into the public source material available, that during Bill Clinton’s administration, CIA did not have an Assassination Capacity. Much of the CIA materials regarding tracking al-Qaeda between about 1995 and 2001 has seen the light of day either in memoirs (of people who profoundly disagree) or in 9/11 commission documents reflects this. In many ways I depend on an understanding of the hoops AG Janet Reno set up for trying to knock off some of bin Laden’s organization after the bombing of the African US Embassies, and the Millennium plots in December, 1999, and Jan, 2000 when Clinton’s National Security team tried to write a Presidential Finding that would allow for assassinating bin Laden, it is pretty clear there were no existing assets to do the job, and they also lacked a clear legal doctrine and structure for authorizing an assassination. I actually read a good deal of the post 9/11 macho stuff on the part of Republicans, and stuff like Ashcroft’s attack on Jamie Gorlik during the 9/11 Commission’s work as indigative of cover to create such a capacity in CIA, or perhaps in DOD. (Never forget all the conflict, post 9/11 between CIA and DOD between Tenet and Cheney’s new CIA under the auspices of Feith and company in the late 2001-2003 period — I don’t think it was all about how to read raw intelligence data.) Republicans during Clinton’s years would have creamed him royally if it looked like he wanted to resolve this structural and doctrinal problem, and officially and legally have a way to knock off a bin Laden, but having done this vis a vis Clinton, they had to reverse poles once Bush was in office, and 9/11 had occurred — and they needed a cover for a 180 degree turn on whether the President had the Authority to order an Assassination. And this turn is precisely what happened.

OK — we get ourselves to the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001, and the legal authorities get cleaned up, more or less, but that does not resolve the matter of capacity — CIA simply did not have assets that could do targeted and trackless assassinations. All those old stories about “Executive Action” — apparently long gone or just a legend. For this I more or less depend on Gary Berntsen’s book, Jawbreaker, which covers the first weeks and months after 9/11 when CIA tried to pull together from more or less scratch the relevant capacities and assets to attack al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. In fact what Berntsen ended up with was a crew of Army Rangers and other special forces, a few CIA types, all of whom did not know each other, or their mutual skills, had never trained together, and had vastly different ideas about tactics — and above all, most had no previous experience working with Afghans from the Northern Alliance. Given that the tactics involved fairly heavy bombing missions, called in from the ground — the fact that the on site intelligence guys had never previously worked with the Air Force, is somewhat indigative of the rough nature of it all. (Also interesting how many of the intelligence types had been called back from Retirement. Keep in Mind.)

Now you have to throw into the mix the DC politics of all this. In fact the rough group CIA pulled together in September, 2001, did a very credible job. So Credible in fact that in December, when they have al-Qaeda cornered in Tora Bora, Rumsfeld steps in and gets Bush to pull the CIA off the mission (Sent Brentsen home), and turn it all over to DOD, even though DOD had not responded to requests to block the Afghan/Pak border as the bombs were flying on Tora Bora. Problem really was chain of command — the successful effort was CIA strategy, and Rumsfeld, and his actual field commander, Tommy Franks, were bypassed in that setup. Bendtsen works for Cofer Black, and through him for George Tenet, and Tenet discusses all with Bush (and yes Cheney), Tenet also had to brief the Intelligence Committees, and at the time, the Senate Committee was chaired by a Democrat, Senator Bob Graham of Florida. Graham has a great deal to say about all this in his book, “Intelligence Matters” — He was one of the first persons one can assume was very well briefed, who called the Bush Administration on its failure to persue a winning strategy in Afghanistan, for the interconnected dual reasons of saving assets to be used later in Iraq. Because of the politics in DC that were all about command and control — through CIA which was doing pretty well, and about DOD’s lead position– DOD didn’t know shit about Afghanistan, didn’t care to learn. but sure as hell didn’t like the public example of small units under CIA auspices, being fairly successful with their anti-Taliban/al-Qaeda mission. The Politics of Turf Wars. Not new, but in this instance Rumsfeld and Cheney were on the side of DOD, and clearly didn’t appreciate the successes of the ramshackle built CIA operation which they did NOT command.

But no matter — neither DOD nor CIA had a targeted assassination capability in late 2001-02. I think we can project from this very easily some sort of effort to build one. And I assume we should also believe that CIA and DOD would have, given the lay of the land at that point, both tried to build the capacity. A Competition if you will. Tenet would have wanted a Presidential Finding to allow him to proceed — and from what we know, he apparently got it, with warnings not to brief Congress — and DOD doesn’t have to brief congress on such details, so they probably went ahead with their plans. Bush was probably not kept sufficently in the loop so as to actually practice Executive Administrative Leadership, and Cheney probably spent hours figuring how to frustrate CIA’s efforts, because he would have wanted Rummy to win the race. What a way to run a Railroad.

Now I simply put chin in hand and think — What would Tenet try to do? My guess — and this is total guesswork, is that he would have looked to the Mossad, and their very well trained hit teams, the Kidon. This is a capacity to do nothing but very carefully plan — sometimes for months — specific assassinations of those judged by Israel’s political leadership to be very much in need of being rubbed out. They don’t do anything else — they plan targeted assassinations, and then they execute them, anywhere in the world. I think Tenet would have gone with the Kidon model — and since the interests of Israel and the US would be identical in taking down the leadership of al-Qaeda, there could easily have been some hand-off’s or subcontracting involved until CIA could figure out how to do it in the US context, and get around to selecting and training the right kind of assets. One interesting matter — CIA is very limited in what it can brief to Congress when a non-US Intelligence Service is involved, which given the order not to brief Congress, was a very convenient limitation.

But while in general the interests of Mossad and CIA were very close, and nearly totally parallel — there is a long history of semi-bad blood between the two services. You can guage this just by remembering how hyper CIA gets whenever anyone suggests Jonathan Pollard ought to be traded to them and all — so it would not be a permenant collaborative relationship. Not a good thing to be dependent, particularly when the possibilites of national interests coming to verge. Mossad apparently rather frequently takes down and blackmails Saudi’s — US almost never.

So now on to another book of rather recent vintage — Tim Shorrock’s “Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing” on which I have commented frequently. Writing in 2008, Shorrock says that about 80% of CIA program money is spent on outsourced programs and missions. In effect, the 80 thousand plus folk at Langley are one giant procurement outfit, a procurement outfit that no longer maintains in-house expertise, and frequently doesn’t own the technology, hardware and software, or the product it generates — that ownership stays with the outsourcing vendors, who in some instances can hand it off to another entity that will pay. And he goes to great lengths to describe how so many of the for profit vendors are not US partnerships or corporations. He calls it the Security Industrial Complex, Channeling a bit of Dwight Eisenhower who warned against it all. One “Virtue” of this “Security Industrial Complex” is that because it is all privatized, it doesn’t have to report shit to Congress. In fact one major matter Obama, and probably Leon Panetta had to confront on taking office might just be that the Republican Security Industrial Complex partners or owners just might have decided not to brief the new administration on this and that. Maybe they did build a top of the line Targeted Assassination Outfit, but they privatized it.

Now I think Leon Panetta is one very smart and very tough cookie, and I suspect a lot of stuff was shoved under the rug when he arrived at Langley, and he is going to spend months getting his mind around stuff, and trying to refashion the place so that it actually serves Obama’s intelligence needs and requirements. But one thing he clearly needs to do fairly quickly, is bring all the missions and tasks that have been outsourced back in house, or at least under the full control of himself and his President.