Why it's hard for CIA to fight terrorism

For all the talk in Washington of waging "war" on terrorism, the biggest impact in thwarting future attacks against the United States may not come from cruise missiles or ground troops scouring Pleistocene caves for Osama bin Laden. It will come from the "secret war" - human intelligence gathering.

Already, a push is under way to "unshackle" the CIA - allowing it to engage in assassinations, hire "unsavory" agents, and do whatever else it can to infiltrate Islamic extremist groups.

But behind the move to revamp the nation's intelligence-gathering operations lie a host of practical problems that will make any secret war difficult to win, or even to begin.

Beyond the moral questions raised by any change in tactics, the CIA will have to undergo a fundamental shift in culture and mission. Indeed, the nation's intelligence apparatus, much of it created in the cold-war era, is facing a distinctly different task from what it was built for - a world with one clear enemy.

For one thing, questions exist over whether US intelligence has the right tools in its box for the job and how quickly it can get them in place. The hunt for bin Laden will undoubtedly require help from friends in the region, experts say. But the bigger mission, a war on terrorism, is going to require a new idea of how intelligence works.

"People are looking for easy answers," says Loch Johnson, a University of Georgia professor and author of "Secret Agencies: US Intelligence in a Hostile World." "They want to think, 'If only we unleash the CIA or allow assassinations,' but as always the truth is more complicated."

The CIA's foreign officers are not the James Bonds or even the Rambos that some people may believe they are. They are largely white-collar bureaucrats, many of whom who have embassy cover jobs and are usually not terribly immersed in the culture they are living in, says Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer in the Middle East who quit the agency out of frustration.

Such officers recruit foreign nationals to do the actual spying, and not even they are called upon to undertake dangerous action missions. They are information gatherers, in part because taking action would threaten their anonymity and safety, thereby risking the very intelligence-gathering capability they were recruited to provide.

To expect CIA officers to shift suddenly into a search-and-capture, or even kill, mode is unrealistic. More likely, host nations' security forces would be enlisted to capture terrorists fingered by the US. "That's why it is so important for us to build a consensus on this around the world," says Norb Garrett, a former senior operations officer with the CIA and president of business intelligence at Kroll Associates. "We need friends. We can't do it alone."

But those friends may be difficult to come by, says Mr. Gerecht. By opening relations with Pakistan, it is possible the US will find that officers from that country's Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) will "walk-in" with good information on bin Laden, but such liaison operations are always complicated.

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