DCI Tenet Claims Responsibility

   DCI Tenet told Congress yesterday that he takes "ultimate 
responsibility" for the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy 
in Belgrade and promised to change the Agency's procedures to ensure 
that such a mistake cannot happen again. Tenet attributed the error
to poor targeting procedures, inadequate review and faulty databases. 
"It was a major error," Tenet told the House Permanent Select Committee 
on Intelligence. "I cannot minimize the significance of this." The 
Yugoslav Directorate of Supply and Procurement was the first target
"unilaterally proposed and wholly assembled" by CIA. Tenet also gave 
new details about a mid-level intelligence analyst who challenged 
the targeting data before the airstrike. Washington Post 7/23/99 A16.

   I read this article feeling a great deal of irony due to the 
inability's of the CIA's analysis that have manifested themselves 
over and over. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence 
in a recent annual report discussed the Agency's gross inability's 
in analyzing political, military and economic information -- 
what else is there?

   A recent Admiral Jeremiah report followed up and concluded the
CIA needed to be scrubbed from the top to bottom. See
http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/jeremiah.html

   A departing (conservative) case officer recorded the devastating
intellectual inability's of the leadership of the CIA's Directorate
of Operations. http://www3.theatlantic.com/issues/98feb/cia.htm.

   A number of high-level analysts left the CIA and wrote of its
terrible intelligence. For example see: "Lost Promise: How CIA 
Analysis Misserves the Nation," by John A. Gentry -- 
http://www.fas.org/irp/gentry/index.html

   A former top Soviet affairs analyst, Melvin Goodwin, documents 
and decries the CIA analytical inability's -- see
http://www.us.net/cip/cia.htm

   Yet from his first days, Tenet ignored the CIA's analytical
needs and pushed ahead with his own non-intellectual tack. He called 
for increased operations and dismayingly overtly! discussed his plans 
for increased covert actions against China. 

   Tenet has overseen and ignored this gamut of intelligence
failures. As he himself notes -- he is ultimately responsible --
he must resign.  He does not have the knowledge, ability, or
motivation to bring about required reform.

   Lastly I must record my own criticisms.  I have documented the
CIA's refusal to report accurately on Vietnam, leading to the deaths 
of millions of Vietnamese and ten of thousands of Americans and the
near collapse of our own society; and, inter alia, the officially 
documented failure of the CIA's intelligence to note the decline 
and collapse of the USSR.

   But contributing to the intelligence failures are the inability's 
of its Directorate of Operations.  We have official testimony re Cuba's
DGI running the Agency's entire stable of Cuban double agents, East
Germany's STASI than ran hundreds if not thousands of CIA double 
agents; and, the KGB's known double agents loyal to the USSR who duped 
the CIA into reporting falsely on the Soviet Union's "super" weapons of 
mass destruction. Echoing these unbelievable (in the full meaning
of that term) failures, is the CIA's dissemination of "intelligence" 
from a known Chinese double agent that documented the Cox report's 
conclusions and the negative impact of those on our national security. 

   At my web site I include a number of recommendations on how
to improve the CIA's performance -- using many examples taken from 
my own experience.

   Making the CIA a good intelligence service is relatively easy,
making the CIA reform, especially with the current leadership,
is impossible.

Ralph McGehee
http://come.to/CIABASE