The Role of the Central Intelligence Agency - Research Paper Example

Military sciences 28th September Introduction of CIA In 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was established when the National Security Act was signed by President Harry S. Truman. This act resulted in the creation of the post of a Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). This was done to get a responsible and experienced individual to act as leader of the American intelligence community while also remaining as the chief consultant to the President regarding intelligence problems regarding the country’s security. The DCI was also the head of the CIA. In 2004 the “Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act”  changed the National Security Act in order to provide a Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The DNI would accept few of the duties previously accomplished by the DCI, along with another person acting as the DCI. The director of CIA has various duties which CIA helps in accomplishing. The role of CIA before 9/11 attacks The CIA’s functions have been explained so now let’s consider its role in war against terrorism before 9/11 attacks. The first actions taken by the CIA was long ago back in 1986. The CIA was taking actions against terrorism which had begun in foreign countries. The terrorist acts involved hijacking passenger planes, killing civilians and causing damage to public and private property. In 1986 CIA established a Counterterrorist Center to eliminate specifically terrorism. It is important to note that terrorism has no one largely accepted definition. Hence, what one nation declares as terrorism can be actually fighting or struggling against the brutalities imposed by the Government, fellow compatriots or other countries. The CIA itself does not have its own definition of terrorism and international terrorism. In the Frequently Asked Questions section on its website the CIA reports that the definition of terrorism has come from the Title 22 of the US Code. “The term "terrorism" means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.” (CIA). Initially, CIA was challenged with secular terrorism that was not based on misinterpretation of essential religious beliefs but then CIA discovered Islamist terrorism impending progressively great on its compass. The terrorist network which became famous as al-Qaeda (the words means “The Base”) was established during the end of the Cold war era between the US and Russia. The network comprised of skilled and semiskilled fighters of Arabian dissent who struggled against the Soviets and the foreign-controlled government in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Osama bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam established in Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhuwa, Pakistan a service called “Office of Services” in order to direct and provide money to the "Afghan mujahidin" (as these fighters became famous). The CIA is the organization that provided U.S. assistance to Afghani Mujahidin fighters through Pakistan in a secret campaign called “Operation Cyclone”. The US and CIA have refused to accept that they dealt with non-Afghan mujahidin fighters, or had any telephonic conversation or other forms of communication with Osama bin Laden (Coll). However, various sources have claimed that CIA took both Afghans and Arabs to America for formal military training (Foden). Osama Bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam established offices named “Al-Khifah” in the U.S for recruiting people as fighters. The center of these offices was the Farouq Mosque located in Atlantic Avenue of Brooklyn. This place was called "a place of pivotal importance for Operation Cyclone" (Fox News). Between recognizable personalities at the mosques in Brooklyn center were an Egyptian agent named Ali Mohamed, who was working for the al-Qaeda, the Green Berets, the CIA and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad  during different periods throughout the last 20 years of the previous century. In 1988, Osama Bin Laden founded al-Qaeda by utilizing the extremists of the aforementioned “Services Office”. Initially, al-Qaeda was a small organization this can be observed from the fact that Jamal al-Fadl  joined al-Qaeda in 1989 and he became al Qaeda's third recruit (Bergen) In 1996, during the month of January the CIA decided to keep an eye on the secret activities of Osama Bin Laden and hence made an investigational "virtual station," called the “Bin Laden Issue Station”, below the Counterterrorist Center. In spring 1996 the man who became third member of Al-Qaeda, Al-Fadl, left al-Qaeda changed sides and become an agent for the CIA. Al-Fadl provided the CIA with information regarding the al-Qaeda head. According to Al-Fadl the head was both a terrorist funding supplier and a terrorist mission organizer. In 1999, leader of the CIA Mr. George Tenet initiated an outstanding strategy to confront al-Qaeda. This strategy’s makers and performers were the Counterterrorist Center with its newly appointed head Mr. Cofer Black and the Counterterrorist Center’s Bin Laden unit. Once the strategy was ready Tenet gave CIA intelligence head Mr. Charles E. Allen to establish a "Qaeda cell" in order to supervise its strategic implementation (Tenet and Harlow). In 2000, United States Air Force (USAF) and the CIA together flew over Afghanistan using a miniature remote-controlled exploration drone known as the Predator. They got credible pictures of Osama Bin Laden. Mr. Cofer Black along with various other people became supporters of making Predators carrying missiles in order to attempt killing Bin Laden and some important al-Qaeda members. Afterwards, the Cabinet-level Principals Group conference on 4th September 2001 on the topic of extremism, the CIA continued spying flights, the drones this time were fully equipped with missiles. In 2000, the CIA established a “Strategic Evaluation Division” to compensate for the lack of overall evaluation of al-Qaeda, and inability to formulate assassination strategies. The division was established in July 2001 and it had problems in hiring employees. On September 10, 2001The division’s head assumed his role (9/11 Commission Report). The role of CIA after 9/11 attacks On September 11th 2001, nineteen militants from the Al-Qaeda group hijacked four commercial aircraft in United States airspace and crashed them into strategic locations. More than 3000 people were killed during these historic suicidal attacks for which Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility. On October 7th, President George Bush sanctioned Operation Enduring Freedom against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan which had been harboring Al-Qaeda and was the beginning of America's War on Terror. The scale of the September 11th terrorist attacks indicated towards a major lapse on part of the United States Intelligence agencies. The operations required to organize such co-ordinated terrorist attacks usually leave behind traces that intelligence agencies can track, generally in the form of dubious financial transactions, communication intercepts and immigration checks. The CIA however, was more involved with intelligence gathering on Osama bin Laden and the operations of Al-Qaeda. Bin Laden was identified as a threat in 1996, when the CIA assigned a unit of a dozen officers dedicated to gathering information on the suspected radical terrorist. By 1997, the unit realized that Osama was more than just a financier to Al-Qaeda, and in fact had a key role in the terrorist organization which was being increasingly suspected of planning attacks on American installations. As a covert counter strike, CIA operatives managed to gather intelligence in December 1999 indicating that Osama would be residing in Kandahar and could be eliminated by a cruise missile strike. However, due to close proximity of his suggested location to a mosque as well as the civilian casualties that would ensue as a consequence of the attack, the covert attack was not sanctioned. In the run up to the September 11th terrorist attacks, the CIA continuously issued warnings to the concerned authorities. The President's Daily Brief (PBD), a secretive document prepared by the CIA and intelligence agencies which highlights and ranks the potential threats to national security, included bin Laden's name from January 2001 onwards. In subsequent reports in June, alarms were raised by stating that attacks with “dramatic consequences” will occur, including a serious warning on August 6th with a classified review titled “Bin Laden determined to strike in the US” (Eichenwald, “The Deafness Before the Storm”) ; however due to uncertainty about the timing of the suggested attacks, the reports were disregarded. The above statements point towards the role the CIA played in tracking Osama bin Laden, arranging for covert strike options against him and highlighting the threat of imminent terrorist attacks; however, certain shortcomings of the CIA have also been criticized. The Bin Laden Unit estimated that it took about US$ 30 million annually to finance Al-Qaeda's global operations (Kean,Hamilton et al, 170); however the unit was unable to track the financial transactions and money laundering which kept the terrorist organization afloat and dent the network by restricting its financial freedom. It is also alleged that the CIA did not share information with other intelligence agencies which might have led to a more accurate picture of the threat by Al-Qaeda. The CIA failed to place a number of the terrorist involved in the September 11th attacks on their watch list in the months prior to the same and were not able to conclusively link the presence of a number of suspected Al-Qaeda militants in the United States to the increase in terrorist threats. The CIA decided to take a more aggressive and involved approach in the offensive against terrorism post September 11th 2001. Even before the official deployment of the American armed forces was sanctioned, the CIA had already placed a covert operations team in Afghanistan nine days after the attacks. The units on the ground used a combination of military offensive and cash pay outs to cause defections amongst the Afghani warlords to accelerate the overthrowing of the Taliban regime. The CIA deployment in Afghanistan was the agency's largest since their involvement in Vietnam. After the United States decided to expand their war on terror, the CIA was given the responsibility of gathering intelligence on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) program. The agency analysts issued reports indicating the presence of the WMD program under Saddam Hussein's control; however, it is suspected that the CIA was pressurized by the United States government to issue such reports, even if fabricated, since the WMD program was the justification that spearheaded the American offense in Iraq. The moment of vindication for the CIA arrived in May 2011 when the agency operatives were able to track Osama bin Laden's location to a suburb in Pakistan and co-ordinate a covert strike to eliminate the Al-Qaeda leader (York, Baker and Cooper). Bibliography "9/11 Commission Report." n.d. 2012 September 27 . Bergen, Peter L. Holy War, Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden. Weidenfield & Nicholson, 2001. CIA. Terrorism FAQs. 13 July 20ll. 27 September 2012 . Coll, Steve. Ghost Wars. Penguin, 2005. Eichenwald, Kurt. The Deafness Before the Storm (NY Times). 10 September 2012. 27 September 2012 . Foden, Giles. ""Blowback Chronicle"referring to John Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism (Pluto Press)." Guardian 15 September 2001. Fox News. "Cooperative Research transcript of Fox TV interview with J. Michael Springmann (head of the non-immigrant visa section at the US consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 1987–88) ." July 18, 2002. Kean, Thomas, and Lee H. Hamilton. n.d. 28 September 2012 . Tenet, George and Bill. Harlow. At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. York., Peter Baker, Helene Cooper And Mark Mazzetti. "Bin Laden Is Dead, Obama Says." The New York Times. 2 May 2011. 27 September 2012 . Read More