Hiding in the Green Zone
It’s not just for the Emm Ess Emm.
According to several well informed intelligence sources, hundreds of CIA operatives have become virtual prisoners in the Green Zone, the sprawling American enclave whose high walls and guards separate the U.S. embassy, military command and related civilian agencies from the raging sectarian violence in Baghdad’s streets.
The CIA operatives cannot safely roam the city to meet their few agents, much less recruit new ones.
It’s just too dangerous. CIA chiefs don’t want to risk one getting kidnapped, tortured on camera and beheaded.
That would certainly dampen the allure of a career in the CIA.
So writes Congressional Quarterly’s national security correspondent Jeff Stein, who was an intelligence officer for the Army in Vietnam. He notes
The war was raging in the jungles and rice paddies less than 10 miles away, and communist agents were everywhere in the city. But security was good enough that they weren’t likely to risk exposing themselves by kidnapping or killing me.
Stein offers an informative history of the Baghdad station, which is large and blind, like a giant worm without the burrowing. Congressional concern on this point drew a demurral from quondam DNI John Negroponte that doesn’t quite read like a denial:
“Actually,†responded Negroponte, U.S. ambassador to Iraq for 10 months in 2004-2005, “our posture is sometimes better than we’re given credit for. Secondly, not everybody’s bottled up in the Green Zone.â€
Stein doesn’t explicitly say it, but I will: what Negroponte means is that some CIA officers are bottled up on US military bases.
The article is another angle on “the knowledge problem,” something I’ve talked about since before the invasion phase of our long war with Iraq began. Applied Hayek. Society works by widely distributed information invisible to any central authority. The necessary dispersal of information severely limits the constructive coordination of society by a central authority. What’s more, attempts to centralize social direction destroy information they would require to work. Hayek explained that this was true for economic central planning, nationalized means of production. But the same phenomenon applies to transformative foreign intervention.
As we say on the internet, we’ve been over this. The only Americans who move among Iraqis are heavily armed, heavily armored, traveling in packs, ignorant of the local language. The conditions in which they contact Iraqis severely limit the kinds of things they can learn from the meetings. Stein:
That failure has virtually crippled U.S. strategic intelligence — inside information on the personalities and plans of the often hostile U.S.-backed government, not just the multiplying insurgent groups and armed militias — in Iraq.
“No one is recruiting the future leaders of Iraq,†says the Pentagon counterterrorism official.
Tactical intelligence — the locations and types of enemy troops and weapons — is also suffering from a lack of access to the population and almost nonexistent language skills on the part of both CIA and military intelligence personnel, say these same sources, all of whom have decades of experience in clandestine operations.
21,000 extra troops is supposed to fix all this.
Comment by MQ —
January 21, 2007 @ 6:02 pm
Honestly, for those of us who oppose the occupation this isn’t necessarily bad news. In the long run it is healthier for both Iraq *and the U.S.* to have a future Iraqi political leadership that is not run through and corrupted by CIA moles. Not that the CIA would be competent to do this anyway, but it seems like they’re completely sidelined.
Comment by Thoreau —
January 21, 2007 @ 6:51 pm
I agree with MQ. The only hope for Iraq is leadership with some semblance of domestic legitimacy, and CIA ties will not be conducive to such legitimacy. I have no great hope for good, liberal leadership in Iraq, or even strong leadership, but on the off chance that the least bad scenario (whatever it may be) should come to pass, it is better if they not have CIA ties. They’ll have a better chance at earning some degree of respect from the Iraqi people if they aren’t friends with the CIA.
Comment by blatherskite —
January 21, 2007 @ 7:26 pm
I suppose it can’t be emphasized enough. We’re 5+ years after 9/11 and still have a paltry few Arabic speakers in intelligence.
I don’t believe we’re in WW III, bu those folks who say we are in or near WW III appear to not really believe it either. Otherwise we’d have started intensive Arabic language accumulation in Sept of 2001.
Even if we can’t use them in Baghdad due to security, we need scores or hundreds of them in the US and all over the world. I’d say it’s about the most important thing we could do in the war on terror.
Pathetic.
Comment by Frank —
January 21, 2007 @ 7:29 pm
Jim- I know that you know that 21,000 troops aren’t supposed to fix the problem. The 21,000 are getting sent to appear to be doing something while kicking the can another couple of friedmans down the road. If Bush can come up with another equivalent next year he can foist this catastrofuck on to the next President.
Comment by sean —
January 21, 2007 @ 9:45 pm
I don’t believe we won the Cold War because we had so many Americans who spoke Russian, or read Marx, or knew Russian history, or whatever. Nor did we recruit a large number of Russian CP members who were secretly on our side. Most reports indicate that the Soviets, due to greater unscrupulousness and brutality, plus the large number of American intellectuals who thought their system was superior, ran rings around our intelligence. Certainly they recruited a larger number of officials in our government than we did in theirs.
Speaking as one with a working knowledge of several languages and a lot of historical learning, not to mention a fairly extensive knowledge of Marxist theory, I’d love to believe those skills are useful and important, but history doesn’t support that contention.
Comment by tc —
January 22, 2007 @ 3:05 am
To Frank: things like this are what makes me doubt that Negroponte, or American influence in general, had much to do with the Shiite death squads – or can organize Iraqis in a significant way.
To sean: an invalid comparison – the US wasn’t fighting an insurgency among the Russian population. Look at how Israel fights the Palestinians – intelligence, informants, assassinations etc.
Comment by jb —
January 22, 2007 @ 5:05 pm
Hey Sean,
I’m sure your historical knowledge elsewhere is impeccable, but if you’re under the impression that a miniscule number of CIA types knew Russian or studied Russian history during the cold war, you’re either under twenty-five or lived your life in a cave.
Comment by sean —
January 22, 2007 @ 10:18 pm
I’m interested, jb, when you suggest to people that have “lived their lives in a cave,” do you generally find that it makes them more or less likely to listen to you sympathetically and to consider changing their minds? When you advocate dialogue with Iran and Syria, or between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, do you advocate that we begin by explaining to the Syrians, say, that they are so dumb that they must have been living in caves? And if you can’t have a civil dialogue with your fellow citizens who share most of your basic assumptions about politics, how can you and your comrades possibly believe that there can be a productive dialogue between people like the Israelis and the Palestinians who genuinely despise each other? It never ceases to amaze me.