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'The Art of Intelligence,' by Henry A. Crumpton

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, May 27, 2012


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The Art of Intelligence

Lessons From a Life in the CIA's Clandestine Service

By Henry A. Crumpton

(The Penguin Press; 338 pages; $27.95)

Henry Crumpton is one of the few U.S. counterterrorism officials to emerge from the 9/11 debacle with a decent reputation - which is not saying much, I know, but think of the alternatives.

As befits a spy, he wasn't well known even inside Washington's security-industrial complex until 2005, when he emerged from the shadows as the State Department's public counterterrorism coordinator.

An aw-shucks Georgian, Crumpton had earned that nod by quarterbacking the CIA's takedown of the Afghan Taliban after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, as well as running the CIA's little-known domestic spying service, the National Resources Division.

The immediate post-9/11 period was arguably the CIA's finest hour - ever. Within days, Crumpton, head of special operations in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, had dispatched teams of CIA operatives with trunks of cash and advanced communications gear to arm and organize northern Afghan tribesmen into an effective fighting force.

By November, they had chased the Taliban out of Kabul and sent al Qaeda militants scurrying into the high peaks of the Afghan-Pakistan border, where they were decimated by U.S. air strikes called in by agents on horseback.

But Crumpton's passion is intelligence gathering, particularly the old-fashioned kind, through espionage, by CIA case officers recruiting spies in the world's back alleys.

As a young man in the 1980s and '90s, Crumpton made his bones in nasty places like Liberia and other African outposts, where he worked at seducing local government officials, wayward North Korean diplomats and Islamic radicals into ratting out their corrupt, brutal governments or movements.

By his own account, he wasn't very good at it (nor were a lot of other CIA operatives who nevertheless managed to reach the senior ranks, he says).

"In espionage I performed unevenly," he confesses. "My technical skills were horrible. My scientific knowledge was elementary. My foreign language capabilities were poor, and I could not pose as a non-American with any chance of success."

Crumpton's career found traction only in the Counterterrorism Center, which he joined in 1999 as a deputy chief "responsible for all the CIA's global counterterrorism operations." There he became a fierce advocate of Predator drones as an intelligence and killing tool.

Crumpton's colorful insider account of the two years leading up to 9/11 adds to the persuasive case that the CIA's Afghan informants and drones gave the Clinton White House a decent shot at eliminating Osama bin Laden - which it deemed too risky to take. Likewise, he corroborates previous accounts that George W. Bush's aides were so transfixed by Saddam Hussein in the summer of 2001 that they largely ignored the CIA's frantic alarms that bin Laden was determined to strike in the United States.

They remained that way even after the attacks, Crumpton recounts in a scene that's still eerie years later:

"Iraq. We must focus on Iraq - 9/11 had to be state-sponsored," Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, drones on in the White House Situation Room, as if in a seance. "Iraq is central to our counterterrorism strategy."

"What is he smoking? I wondered," Crumpton writes.

At the same time, he excoriates the FBI's feckless counterterrorism effort before 9/11.

In the summer of 1998, he was packed off to the J. Edgar Hoover Building as part of an FBI-CIA executive exchange program initiated after a series of Russian penetrations. (CIA wags dubbed it "an exchange of hostages.")

"I was a good fit, because, as one confidant said, the CIA considered me 'a lunch-pail guy,' " Crumpton writes.

Al Qaeda had just bombed the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. As deputy head of the bureau's International Terrorist Operations Section, Crumpton was quickly dismayed to discover that the FBI had little interest in gathering pre-emptive intelligence on al Qaeda.

"Forward-looking intelligence collection and analysis were almost nonexistent," he writes. "The FBI sought justice, not prevention. ... Sharing evidence as intelligence was anathema to them."

FBI agents were also allergic to writing intelligence reports, the heart of the CIA's work, and pawned off that chore to clerk-analysts, he writes.

Then again, he adds, neither Israel's Mossad nor Shin Bet focused on Hamas and Hezbollah nor "considered AQ worthy of serious discussion. The British were good, but not as good as they thought or acted."

A lot had changed - and not - by the time Crumpton left the CTC in 2002. Bin Laden would remain at large for years. Al Qaeda, however, decimated by CIA operations and drones, could still mount attacks. And the agency itself would be sullied by revelations of secret prisons and torture.

Crumpton, long gone by then, dodged those bullets. But years later, it's disturbing to hear such a highly regarded former counterterrorism official expound on why al Qaeda hates us - and get it so wrong:

"They fear that globalization and the free-market principles and liberal values that come with it will bury them," he lectures an American CEO who "had been cooperating with the CIA for years."

"Of course," he adds, as a kind of toss-off line, "they disagree with our policies, especially in the Middle East."

Well, yes, they do. For al Qaeda, it was always about our military presence in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, not our "freedom" or "values." And that's why, however demented they were, they came after us.

Jeff Stein writes the SpyTalk blog from Washington, D.C. E-mail: books@sfchronicle.com