Political Correctness Killed 7 at Khost
By: Kent Clizbe
Last December 30th, a horrific bombing snuffed out the lives
of seven American patriots. We can only
wish that the same blast had snuffed out the Politically Correct policies that
led to those young peoples’ deaths. With
heavy hearts, and a salute to our fallen heroes, it is fitting and proper that
we should soberly consider the bureaucracy that placed those brave but
inexperienced officers at a forward firebase in a war zone.
Political correctness killed the CIA operations officer, the
analyst, and the others supporting the meeting, just as surely as the blast and
fragments from the package strapped under the bomber’s robe did. Every clandestine meeting with a terrorist is
dangerous and potentially deadly. The meeting
itself is a tiny part of the operation.
Training and preparation, planning and cultural knowledge, understanding
your asset’s personality, motivations, needs, and problems, are just a few of
the issues that an operations officer must juggle and attempt to control. But the first step is the selection process itself
that chooses candidates who will become operations officers in a war zone.
When the meeting is held in conjunction with a foreign
intelligence service, as the presence of the Jordanian intelligence officer
seems to suggest this one was, another layer of complications are introduced
into an already complicated situation. Language,
control, compatible goals, strategy, tactics, all must be coordinated,
discussed, hashed out, and agreed upon with the partner. Vastly separated by culture and objectives, a
CIA ops officer and her foreign counterpart must dance down a delicately
balanced tightrope.
By their very nature, penetrations of terrorist
organizations are dangerous, crafty, deceptive, and hard to handle. Whether the source is playing the role of a
terrorist at the behest of a hostile intelligence handler, or is a real
terrorist cooperating with friendly intelligence officers, the key element of
the source’s personality is deception.
A terrorist is not usually the most savory character. In fact, he probably has a long history of
walking on the wrong side of the law.
Arrests, jail, detention, prison, living double lives, lying about his true
intentions, beliefs and plans are second nature to a terrorist. Crimes, deceit, double-dealing, conspiracy,
murder, rape and robbery are every day facts of life for a terrorist. He has been involved in black market schemes,
counterfeiting, visa fraud, online fraud, identity theft, and multiple other
schemes, cons, and rackets.
As if the background of the target does not pose enough
challenges, remember that the target comes from a culture so different from
that of middle America that, for the average
American, the terrorist source may as well be from Pluto.
The target is likely a Middle Eastern male, probably native
Arabic-speaking. He is also a member of
a vastly complex, inter-woven network of social, tribal, national, religious,
clan, ethnic, and other groups. The flavor
of Arabic he speaks, and the name he bears immediately identify him of a
certain clan/tribe/ethnicity. He
practices, or used to practice, a form of Islam that is strongly affected by
his tribal and ethnic background.
He likely has
participated in some sort of Islamic revival movement. He has probably traveled abroad, perhaps to
the West. He has been bombarded with
Western culture from the day he was born. He has a grasp of English, at least
in reading. He probably has been
educated in a technical discipline. He
is of above average intelligence. He is
able to use charm, and knows how to manipulate Americans. He has a strong, though misguided,
understanding of American culture and lifestyles. His view of Americans is not complex. He knows that American men are big, play
football and drink a lot of beer. He
knows American women are blonde, have large breasts and are eager to engage in
casual sex with strangers they have just met.
He admires, covets, and loathes the American lifestyle, economy and
culture. He is interested in converting
any American he meets to Islam.
He is smooth like a snake, and would rather slip a knife
into your American ribs than deal with you.
He is meeting with an American intelligence officer for his own reasons,
which very likely have nothing to do with the reasons the American is meeting
with him.
While every case is different, that is a rough profile of a
potential terrorist asset. It might also
be helpful to review who a terrorist asset is not. This man is not a
diplomat. He does not attend embassy cocktail
parties. He is not a European
sophisticate looking for an American contact to discuss the Copenhagen round of Global Warming
talks. The terrorist is not impressed
with American ideas of equality or Political Correctness. He does not fear a sexual harassment
lawsuit. He shares not one of PC
America’s concerns about “offensive speech,” or “the glass ceiling.” He is not interested in hearing the American
view of the Middle East.
A CIA ops officer has the task of meeting, assessing,
developing a close friendship with, and then recruiting the terrorist described
above. The most highly coveted recruitment
would be a member of an enemy terrorist organization. If that terrorist had, or could nurture a
connection to, or information about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, the
recruitment would be a ticket to superstardom for the ops officer.
Who are the CIA ops officers that are pitted against this
hardest of hard targets? What is the
profile that the CIA uses to find and hire the operators to work against
international slimeballs? Based on the
CIA’s profile for hiring, you would think this job requires the same skills as
an investment banker, an NGO advisor, an accountant, a lawyer, or another
high-class professional.
CIA’s recruitment center, flooded with applicants after
9/11, set an arbitrary minimum undergraduate GPA of 3.75 for a candidate to be
considered. Falling back on traditional
profiles of clandestine service candidates, created during the Cold War, the
CIA filled huge classes with eager young faces.
The typical recruit came from a prestige school, with a BA or MA in
International Relations, Political Science, Area Studies, or other soft liberal
arts. The recruit had studied a foreign
language, to less than fluent proficiency.
Since a class-action lawsuit in 1993, it is now more likely that the
recruit is female.
She had foreign experience, probably a semester, or a year,
in an American university’s study abroad program, most likely in Europe. She was in
her mid-20s. She had never been
arrested, never been involved in anything shady or illegal, never used drugs, and
drank alcohol moderately. She sweated
through her polygraph test, probably the first time she has ever been
questioned by a hostile authority.
After passing the academic screening and an interview,
candidates passed a security clearance, including a thorough background check,
drug testing, psychological screening (“I’m fascinated by fire: T or F”), and a polygraph exam. Those with arrest and criminal records are
deemed unsuitable. A rowdy, street-smart
male is likely to be screened out at some point in the process.
These recruits are the type of kids you would want your child
bringing home as a life partner. They come
from all the best schools, eager, arrogant, confident, swaggering, innocent,
and full of potential. But are they the
right candidates for dealing with cunning terrorists?
The answer should be clear.
Absolutely not. The recruits make
very good choir boys and girls, squeaky clean, innocent, naïve, and wholly
unsuited to deal with terrorists. However,
the problems with the CIA’s process just begin at recruitment. You think that these fresh kids will be
trained. Training could be used to
create some of the street-smarts required to deal with terrorists and other
scumbag sources. But the training to
prepare the choir boys to deal with slimeballs would take years and years. They only have a few months. .
Mandatory sexual harassment training in the CIA is rigorous
and repeated. More like communist
“self-criticism” sessions, this training infuriates most males, and empowers
most females. The video vignettes used
in the training paint with a broad brush.
Males are pig-headed imbecilic, racist predators. Females are hard-working, put-upon, victims
of the white male hierarchy. Past lack
of female representation in management has given way to a flood of newly minted
Senior Intelligence Service females, and mid-level female managers up and down
the chain of command, including in the field.
The “street smarts” training that CIA operations officers go
through is quite helpful, if the recruit brings a high level of street sense to
the first day of class. If not, the
training is all but wasted on the naïve innocents. If you’ve never been worried about being
detected by the police, if you’ve never been arrested, if you’ve never lied
about your activities, if you’ve never cased a location to prepare for an
illegal activity, if you’ve never sweet-talked someone into (or out of)
something, the training is a confusing whirlwind of alien concepts.
The recruits, selected for their high GPAs, and pristine
backgrounds, gamely go through the motions. They learn the basics, and the concepts, intellectually,
but for the vast majority, they are in a frightening upside-down universe of
moral ambiguity and repulsive manipulation.
Where right is wrong, and wrong is right; where you must become best
friends with your worst enemy; this is the universe of deadly con-games.
While it is true that females are much better, generally
speaking, at manipulating, and reading subtle signs in, others the unspoken
issue of sex and sexual expectations greatly complicates a female ops officer’s
attempts to ply her craft. Political
correctness dictates that the CIA and its experienced ops officers should not
mention this fact of nature, and in fact, they pretend it does not exist. Unlike other, highly effective intel services,
which use sex as part of their arsenal, the PC CIA treats every ops officer as
if they are interchangeable.
After training, the newly minted female ops officer is
assigned to a post in “the Sand Box,” Afghanistan
or Iraq,
or to more genteel post. In neither one
does she learn anything about the realties of the street culture of her
targets. What she does learn, and become
acculturated to, are the realities of American government culture. She learns how to survive and prosper in the
bureaucracy. At either the fire base, or
genteel circles, she becomes adept at negotiating the social maze of American
PC culture. And while this is important
for her career, it does not advance America’s fight against terrorists.
In human intel ops, initial attempts at making contact with
a potential source might involve an arranged meeting in a public place, or the
source may walk-in to volunteer. When a
female ops officer approaches a stranger in public, especially an Arab male,
the sexual electricity is super-charged.
Even with a walk-in, the ops officer is thrust into a highly emotionally
charged relationship, with an immediate need to begin to sort out truth from
lies and distortions.
Even if operating in the same culture and language, such
situations are extremely difficult to handle.
But when attempts at befriending and manipulating take place in an alien
culture and language, maybe through an interpreter, the relationship is so
complicated as to be unmanageable. A
male ops officer has a difficult enough time in navigating through the twists
and turns of a development, without sexual baggage hanging over each
meeting.
PC denial of reality may not have much immediate effect in other
US
government offices, like the Department of Agriculture, but in CIA operations,
the effects are immediate and obvious, to an objective observer. Painful as it may be for the PC crowd to
admit, we must adapt to the target culture.
We cannot force our targets to adapt to our culture. We should not send a woman in to do a job,
and pretend she is not handicapped by her sex.
The father of one of the dead officers knew instinctively
that a war zone was not the right place for a girl who had graduated from Keith Country
Day School and Colby
College, which offers a semester abroad
program in Spain, and one in
France. The bereaved father recalled: “I begged her not to go, I said, ‘Do you know
how dangerous that is? That’s for soldiers.’ ”
Acknowledging this reality does not demean the work of old,
new, or current female ops officers.
They are doing their best, and are patriots, one and all. Any exception that one may cite (as there are
highly effective female ops officers), simply proves the rule. They clearly have a role to play in the CT
intel war. However, just as in our armed
forces, where women are not allowed in combat roles, we should use the debacle
at Khost as impetus to sift PC dreams of equality from the realities of
operating against terrorists.
Next: The Solution
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