A thoughtful and timely article in Commentary by Gabriel Schoenfeld -- which the Wall Street Journal has thought important enough to reproduce -- asks how the CIA could have degenerated to such a point as to have ever employed Michael Sheuer as head of operations against al Qaeda between 1996-99 and then as a high-level counter-terrorism manager.

Sheuer, the once-anonymous author of a sensational book lambasting the Bush administration's war against terror, is here eviscerated by Schoenfeld. Sheuer ludicrously sanitises al Qaeda, which he says is simply engaged in a '

defensive jihad

'; eulogises Osama bin Laden as a '

gentle, generous, talented, and personally courageous'

leader; vilifies

'Israel’s crafty use of “diplomats, politicians, intelligence services, [and] U.S. citizen spies,” along with “wealthy Jewish-American organizations,” in order to “lac[e] tight the ropes binding the American Gulliver to the Jewish state” '

; and yet, while reserving special fury not only for America’s alliance with Israel but for its

'hallucinatory crusade for democracy'

, also lambasts Washington for being insufficiently hawkish in waging the war on terror. As Shoenfeld comments:

'Sentiments like these mark the author of Imperial Hubris as something of a political hybrid—a cross, not to put too fine a point on it, between an overwrought Buchananite and a raving Chomskyite...How did a person of such demonstrable mediocrity of mind and unhinged views achieve the rank he did in the CIA, and how could so manifestly wayward and damaging a work have been published by someone in the agency’s employ?'

A question, indeed, of key concern to all of us. Schoenfeld attempts to answer it by reference to a book produced by another ex-CIA operative, who he acknowledges left the Agency's employment in unhappy circumstances after a self-confessed mistake. As a result, her observations need to be treated with some circumspection -- maybe rather more than Schoenfeld allows. But one particular revelation rings bells, not least because it so closely corresponds to what has happened to our own civil service here in Britain -- and probably to our own intelligence services, too. It is the scourge of politically correct employment 'inclusiveness'. This resulted in an Agency obsession with hiring quotas of black, Asian and Hispanic people along with 'gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans-gendered employees'. As Schoenfeld comments:

'These, then, have been the fruits of an effort going back well over a decade and consuming a large quotient of the agency’s senior-level attention—the same period in which al Qaeda was gathering force and training thousands of Islamists, and when the CIA’s overriding need, conspicuously unmet all those years, was the hiring of more officers capable of speaking and reading Arabic'.

Astonishing -- and yet all too likely. For a wide variety of cultural and political reasons, only some of which are covered in this interesting article, the intelligence services of the west slept on their watch, with terrible consequences. Have they now put their houses in order? How will we ever know?

Posted by melanie at March 2, 2005