Thursday July 03, 2008
Columbian hostage rescue
Recently, the Columbian government rescued 15 hostages, including former Columbian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt.To me, the rescue seems like the intelligence community's version of the hidden ball trick -- the Columbian agents got in close and sold the FARC guerillas on the notion that the rescue was unlikely as it would lead to the hostages' deaths. FARC took the bait, hook, line and sinker and the Columbians rescued the hostages without firing a shot.
Could the American government have pulled it off?
No way.
As this Washington Independent column points out, American intelligence personnel are increasingly finding themselves unable to establish the basis for an active group of field agents, in great part due to the fact that they are locked up in their compounds to protect themselves:
Operationally, the torture story has already had a chilling effect in
keeping CIA officers off the streets and out of the back alleys of a
dangerous world. There is a deep and realistic concern that they could
be captured and tortured themselves.
Old hands will recall the case of the CIA Beirut station chief, William Buckley, taken hostage in Beirut in 1984 by Hezbollah or Islamic Jihad, and held until his death there in 1985. An operational assignment to Beirut after the Buckley affair was a personal security nightmare -- but the heightened concerns were limited to that rough neighborhood. CIA officers could still do abroad what they did best -- move around and understand, perhaps as well as any, the lay of the land.
Today, for CIA officers, and literally all U.S. officials abroad, much of the world resembles Beirut in the mid-1980s. A look at any U.S. embassy must be through crash barriers and razor wire. These serve not only to keep America?s adversaries out, but to keep American officers in, crippling the intelligence and any foreign-policy missions at the worst possible time.
It may be impossible for the next administration to fix what has happened to the CIA in the last seven years. It may be a broken brand. Perhaps the only way to proceed next January will be to start over afresh, with a new intelligence structure and new institutions.
Old hands will recall the case of the CIA Beirut station chief, William Buckley, taken hostage in Beirut in 1984 by Hezbollah or Islamic Jihad, and held until his death there in 1985. An operational assignment to Beirut after the Buckley affair was a personal security nightmare -- but the heightened concerns were limited to that rough neighborhood. CIA officers could still do abroad what they did best -- move around and understand, perhaps as well as any, the lay of the land.
Today, for CIA officers, and literally all U.S. officials abroad, much of the world resembles Beirut in the mid-1980s. A look at any U.S. embassy must be through crash barriers and razor wire. These serve not only to keep America?s adversaries out, but to keep American officers in, crippling the intelligence and any foreign-policy missions at the worst possible time.
It may be impossible for the next administration to fix what has happened to the CIA in the last seven years. It may be a broken brand. Perhaps the only way to proceed next January will be to start over afresh, with a new intelligence structure and new institutions.
(emphasis mine)
This is killer. We cannot rely on satellites and clever gadgets to get us all the answers we need, particularly with the sophistication and secrecy some non-state actors and guerilla-based movements have. The textbook example is Hezbollah -- as this post over at Firedoglake shows, Hezbollah is extremely sophisticated, can undermine any government we attempt to install and shows why the American military machine is no longer as effective as it was in the days of the Cold War.The American military should heed the advice of Lou Gerstner, the ex-CEO of IBM, in his book Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? It's pretty compelling, considering Gerstner walked into a company on the verge of disaggregation in 1993 and turned it around into a hugely successful player in the IT service field with a revived corporate culture that eschewed the balkanization of the company prior to Gerstner's arrival.
We need a similar approach to gear our military for modern warfare; unfortunately, I don't think George W. Bush is inclined to or capable of such a drastic turnaround.
Posted by pdmccaul [Politics] ( July 03, 2008 06:55 PM ) Permalink | Comments[0]
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