CIA: THE ENRON OF INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES

By John LeBoutillier

CIA Director George Tenet

CIA Director George Tenet recently testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Mr. Tenet, the only Clinton Cabinet officer remaining in his original post, has been able to artfully avoid having the CIA take the blame for sloppy and poor intelligence work leading up to 9-11. He did it again with the United States Senate.

In fact, because of his good personal relationship with both George Bushes, Tenet has twice since 9-11 been able to secure increases in the CIA budget.

In October, President Bush granted an emergency budget increase of $1 billion to the CIA. And now, in his fiscal 2003 budget, the President has proposed another $1.5 billion increase - that we know of. In fact, the overall intelligence budget is highly classified - and 'hidden' in the budgets of other federal departments. Only a handful of Congressmen and Senators know the 'actual' amount.

It is also believed that even more money is secretly spent on intelligence than even these select members of the House and Senate are aware of.

'Black funds' exist - off-the-books accounts that CIA, NSA, DIA and the service Intel agencies have access to.

All of this is to point out that whatever happened on 9-11 is <bnot the result of too little money being spend on intelligence gathering.

No, the problem is how that money is spent.

Over the past thirty years our Intel agencies have fallen in love with satellites, eaves-dropping equipment and high tech means of 'listening' to our enemies - and our friends, too.

'HUMINT' - the gathering of intelligence through human beings on-the-ground infiltrating and getting up-close-and-personal - has taken a back seat to this fascination with high tech means.

Thus you get the odd occurrence: John 'Taliban' Walker can get into the Taliban and Al Qaeda - even meet Osama bin Laden - and yet our own agents could not get any where near Osama, Mullah Omar or the Taliban/Al Qaeda leadership before 9-11.

What has happened over the years to the CIA? They have become a government inside a government. One problem is that the CIA spies on its own government. Yes, the CIA places 'agents' in other federal agencies, and on the staffs of House and Senate committees, to "keep an eye on things."

Which leads to this serious oversight problem: Every congressional committee that oversees intelligence activities has CIA staff on its staff. That way Langley can keep track of trouble brewing it its own backyard. That's like having the fox guarding the chicken coop.

This is the biggest - and so far unreported - scandal in the US today.

Bigger than Enron, bigger than anything else.

The very fact that the CIA is an uncontrollable agency operating outside the Constitution - and getting away with it - is something that one day is going to blow open, and cause big trouble.

A small - but meaningful - example:

In the mid-1980's, then-Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage personally arranged for a uniformed military officer to be detailed to temporary White House duty. This officer had some innocuous job description.

In reality his assignment was simple: to spy on the inner workings of the President's Reagan's office. Get the daily schedule of the senior staff, listen in on as many conversations as possible, find out what was 'brewing' before others knew - and then report all of this daily back to Armitage.

A career CIA man, Armitage wanted to know what was happening at the White House -- so that the Pentagon and the CIA could be 'ahead of the curve.' Armitage today is Deputy Secretary of State and may very well have a similar 'operative' placed in the White House and National Security Council.

This is plain out-and-out wrong. Federal agencies should not be expending taxpayers' money and human intelligence spying on each other, instead of spying on our foreign adversaries.

But they do. And that is but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the enormous leeway the CIA has --because of the very nature of its' secretive mission - to do anything it wants.

Less well known to the general public is the extent to which the CIA is also protected by certain federal judges. These friends of the agency, strategically placed on the federal bench (some used to work for the CIA) will always be there to get the CIA off the hook in case something bad happens.

And recently, it did.

A case in point involves the collapse of 7 World Trade Center. Crushed in the 9-11 attack, this building housed several federal offices, including CIA's New York office.

Furthermore, the CIA was performing an illegal domestic operation on September 11, when the attack occurred. (By law, the CIA is prohibited from operating inside the US for any purpose other than recruiting.)

When the building was smashed, CIA lost its control of evidence of illegal activity.

So, the agency rushed to a 'friendly' federal judge, who granted a secret motion that placed the CIA in charge of the excavation and search of 7 World Trade Center.

That's right, all the workers, bulldozer operators and diggers on that particular construction site work for the CIA, not New York City, or anyone else.

We are left to wonder what the 'illegal domestic operation' was - and how we have come to allow a secret federal agency to have such unbridled power.

My source: a federal judge in New York.

This is a huge scandal waiting to explode. Not surprisingly, the so-called mainstream news media, including the New York Times, have not reported this story.