Book of the week: America's failures

WASHINGTON, Sept. 10 (UPI) -- While imperfect in its recitation of the facts, "Breakdown: How America's Intelligence Failures Led to September 11" by Bill Gertz (Regnery, 258 pages, $15.95) should be required reading for every person at all levels of intelligence and law enforcement in the United States.

When you finish reading "Breakdown," you will then know that the failure to thwart the Sept. 11 attacks was not simply a matter of "failing to connect the dots."

Members of the highest levels of American government could not see that the mass of dots formed a picture as clear as a Seurat painting; a picture of airplane attacks by al Qaida on their previous target, the World Trade Center.

In his compelling indictment of the failures of every federal agency involved in the collection and use of intelligence, Gertz paints a fascinating and disturbing story of how middle- and high-level bureaucrats, completely devoid of passion and the ardor for the fight, ignored or minimized every warning signal delivered to them by their foot soldiers about the impending threat on American lives from terrorists associated with al Qaida.

Indeed, it seems that just about every agent who warned of al Qaida's flight school activities, Iran's apparent funding of the terrorist activities of Osama bin Laden, and Iraq's leader's secret meetings with Mohamed Atta (one of the pilots who flew into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11) in Prague, was dismissed as an alarmist.

Gertz reveals that so many people in positions of authority in every agency from the FBI to the CIA were petty and self-protecting to the extent that they blocked major intelligence and law enforcement efforts that might have resulted in the avoidance of the Sept. 11 attacks.

While everyone has now heard about the courage of Colleen Rowley, the FBI whistleblower, few have heard of Kie Fallis, the Farsi-speaking specialist at the Defense Intelligence Agency, who ultimately resigned in disgust when his warning cries about Iran's funding of bin Laden's network were ridiculed by his superiors and colleagues.

"Breakdown" contains numerous other examples as irritating as that Rowley and Fallis.

Gertz does something that few authors do in books of this genre: he suggests some very solid changes that make good sense. Among them, improving the infrastructure of the agencies, (who can forget Rowley's testimony before the Senate when she revealed that the FBI could not even search their existing database for intelligence with basic word variables such as "flight?"), the hiring of more experts including fluent Arab speakers, and scientists, and the de-politicization of agency leadership positions (do we really want the head of the CIA to be a guy who played golf for several years with the president?)

Gertz correctly points out that political cronies, instead of brilliant experts, have come to head various agencies, causing rapid agenda shifts and broken morale. This started when President Jimmy Carter, who did not care for the CIA, brought in Stanfield Turner to head that agency. Gertz fails to mention that this trend continued with Ronald Reagan and every president since.

Gertz also lets his conservative and personal views undermine the credibility of his book in several ways. He criticizes the placement of minorities and women in critical positions in the intelligence community as a nod to the liberal politics of affirmative action over true merit. In the next breath he comments on Rowley (a single mother of four) and Fallis (a male of Persian descent), who were the ones with the courage to speak out on what they perceived as the institutional failures of their respective agencies.

Gertz writes with great praise about the clever intelligence work of master spy James Angleton, who headed the CIA's equivalent of an internal affairs section, as if a return to the days of Angleton would rectify the CIA's present morass.

Gertz totally forgets to mention that Angleton became very close to Kim Philby, his British counterpart at MI-6, but was duped by Philby, who was revealed as a Soviet spy. Philby later defected to the Soviet Union, and Angleton became somewhat paranoid and suspected everyone of being a mole.

Similarly, Gertz insinuates that all the FBI's money for terrorism efforts during the Clinton administration were somehow shifted to preventing abortion clinic bombings, which is patently false.

Finally, Gertz and his publisher have done something silly. They have included several attachments purporting to be from intelligence briefing materials that are entirely blank at the request of the U.S. government. These documents show nothing to support Gertz's factual claims and diminish the book's overall credibility.

Notwithstanding these infirmities, Gertz's book is a terrific commentary on the intelligence failures in America and should serve to warn America's intelligence leaders about the politicization of intelligence agencies.

Gertz's book should caution present leaders that what is needed in American intelligence agencies is courageous people who are not afraid to take a risk, who are willing to compare fragments of information they receive against data they already have about terrorist organizations, and who have the guts to attempt force Congress to provide funding for experts and a better infrastructure for the future of the country.

At base, Gertz suggests, they should not be political party rah-rahs, but people of brilliance and vision whose political views are simply that America must be protected from future terrorist attacks through intelligence and hard work.