One significant omission strikes me in Section 3.4 of the 9/11 report (PDF file), which provides a historical overview of the failures of the intelligence community to adapt to the “new terrorism.” The commission recounts CIA debacles dating back to the Bay of Pigs and details the woes of the understaffed Clandestine Service through the mid 1990s:

The nadir for the Clandestine Service was in 1995, when only 25 trainees became new officers. In 1998, the DCI was able to persuade the administration and the Congress to endorse a long-range rebuilding program. It takes five to seven years of training, language study, and experience to bring a recruit up to full performance…With budgets for the CIA shrinking after the end of the Cold War, it was not surprising that, with some notable exceptions, new hires in the Clandestine Service tended to have qualifications similar to those of serving officers: that is, they were suited for traditional agent recruitment or for exploiting liaison relationships with foreign services but were not equipped to seek or use assets inside the terrorist network.

The report recommends that:

The CIA Director should emphasize (a) rebuilding the CIA’s analytic capabilities; (b) transforming the clandestine service by building its human intelligence capabilities; (c) developing a stronger language program, with high standards and sufficient financial incentives; (d) renewing emphasis on recruiting diversity among operations officers so they can blend more easily in foreign cities; (e) ensuring a seamless relationship between human source collection and signals collection at the operational level; and (f) stressing a better balance between unilateral and liaison operations…

Much is made of the decimation of the clandestine service and the need to “strengthen congressional oversight” of intelligence, but there is absolutely no mention of how congressional oversight led by at least one self-aggrandizing blabbermouth was a cause of the alarming shortage of good intelligence assets.

I am talking, of course, about Sen. Robert Torricelli, who crusaded in the mid-1990s to bar the CIA from hiring shady characters–including those with criminal backgrounds and those with clean records who had had any involvement with terrorists or human rights violators. (Effective human spies, as Sen. Bob Graham once noted, “are not found in monastaries.”) Torricelli advocated preventing the CIA from hiring exactly the kind of people who would be able to gather and provide useful intelligence. Apparently at the behest of then celebrity girlfriend Bianca Jagger, Torricelli embraced the cause of State Department employee Robert Nuccio, who leaked him classified material dealing with CIA operations in Guatemala. Torricelli squawked to the media about the top-secret info, which reportedly detailed how unsavory individuals tied to murder were on the CIA payroll. The brouhaha led to the adoption of the “Torricelli principle,” which required that a top CIA official rather than a field officer approve the hiring of informants with less than Boy Scout backgrounds.

After the 9/11 attacks, critics noted that the Torricelli rules had a chilling effect on the recruitment of informants inside terror cells. The House Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security found that the policy may hamper the CIA’s ability to infiltrate terrorist groups by prompting “excessive caution” in recruiting informants – “especially those who would provide insights into terrorist organizations.”

I’m not through reading this tax-subsidized door stop of a report, yet, but so far, the major theme of the report seems to be “Blame Bureaucracies, Not People.” Not Clinton. Not Gorelick. Not Tenet. Not Torricelli.

Accountability, schmaccountability.

Meanwhile, the 9/11 commissioners’ book tour extravaganza–I’m calling it Blahsfest 2004–continues. So glad they’re looking out for us.

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