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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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The One
Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
by Ron Suskind |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Suspicion Ron Suskind’s latest book, The One
Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11,
gives readers exactly what we look for from an investigative journalist: a
perspective that we may not have known about without this work. The title
refers to a policy of Vice President Cheney: we need to act on our suspicions
if there’s even a 1% chance that the suspicion is accurate. That’s a new
doctrine for “Gentlemen, we are at war.” Tenet, naturally theatrical, knew when to pause, to let a
line sink in. While the President, the Vice President, and the Pentagon
were preparing for the next stage—an invasion and occupation of The architecture was already clear. CIA would be offense.
FBI would be defense. Justice would set the rules, some of which were meant
to be broken. He would have to do some things that he’d rather not see on the
front page of a newspaper. When, if, they appeared, he hoped he’d have a defendable
position. “This,” Tenet continued, “is a challenge unlike any other
we’ve faced. It is a challenge which redefines the way we work, the way we
think, the way we act. “It is a challenge which has cut deeply into my country’s
psyche.” Another pause. “This is not a passing phenomenon. It is a challenge that
will outlive everyone in this room.” Everyone in that room was an intelligence chief—an
extraordinary collection of them, twenty or so—representing the world’s
“English-speaking peoples.” This designation of kinship, popularized by Winston
Churchill in speeches designed to deepen an alliance with Intelligence chiefs from these nations had assembled,
irregularly and informally, for a few decades. Sometimes the DCI came. Often
not. Tenet changed that when he assumed the post in 1997, taking over from
John Deutch, who never had much taste for meetings
like this. A firm rotation was developed. Everyone came, led by the vanguard
of the American intelligence community. This year, it was Everything, of course, was different at this meeting. The
longstanding goal to cooperate and coordinate—to match the group’s generally
solid concert on sigint with the increased sharing
of humint—would now be lifted to divine mission.
Cooperation was now survival. So, on Monday morning, the team that would fight the
global “war on terror” settled in for a long day at the end of the earth: an
inconspicuous stone house on the edge of a resort on an island with more
sheep than people. “We must work as one,” Tenet said, once his opening was
complete. “As for CIA, I can tell you this. There is nothing we won’t do,
nothing we won’t try, and no country we won’t deal with to achieve our
goals—to stop the enemy. The shackles, my friends, have been taken off” Then they dove in. Tenet and Pavitt
with Lieutenant General Mike Hayden, head of NSA, guided the proceedings,
offering updates, though much of the best news had already been passed, week
by week, in regular array of cross-border communications—calls, cables, and
secure packages. Now everyone was in one room to talk it through, to hear
of progress and plot the near future. Tenet told them that they felt they
were closing in on a prize, an actual al Qaeda manager, Abu Zubaydah. That was the first order of business. Yes,
they’d picked up some mid-sized lieutenants—like Ibn
al-Sheikh al-Libi, who’d run the al Qaeda training
camp in But just two weeks earlier, in late February, he told
them, there had been a break. A Pajerojeep was
stopped by militiamen at a checkpoint in Chapri, a
town near the Afghan border. The town has an archway passage to the Pakistani
tribal frontier. The jeep carried some very tall women, three of them,
wearing burkas, and four men. The group was
arrested and sent off for interrogation in Kohat.
The disguised men were unforthcoming, but the driver, who was Pakistani, was
bribable. The passengers were bound for Pavitt said that CIA
operatives, matched with Pakistani intelligence teams, were sweeping Everyone in the room knew of Zubaydah,
a thirty-year-old Saudi-born Palestinian. He’d been ever present on sigint for nearly two years. His name was intoned by
operatives at all levels, by new recruits, foot soldiers, and wannabes
throughout South Asia and the Sigint among these closest,
English-speaking allies had, over the past fifty years, been tugged by
goodwill and advancing technology into an ever-tightening weave. The system,
called Echelon, developed during World War II to intercept radio communications,
had grown with each step of the technological revolution. Largely managed out
of Fort Meade by the NSA, with 38,000 employees worldwide, and by the British
out of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) based near
Cheltenham, England, the system catches an estimated 3 billion
communications each day that are carried by radio, satellite, telephone,
faxes, and c-mails. Automated computer analysis sorts the intercepts. It is
essentially one system—with shared satellites, fiberoptic
pipes, listening posts, and devices placed at telephone switching
stations—that has firewalls built within it. Even as technology has raced forward, the statutory
framework of each country, among a family of almost identical democracies,
has stood firm on rights of privacy. Essentially that means there is a prohibition
against any of the governments eavesdropping on its citizens without probable
cause and a subpoena—the type that the At this meeting, Tenet described such constraints among
“the shackles” that would, at the very least, be loosened, if not in practice
discarded. What the new era demanded, he said, was
creative partnerships. A country may not be able to tap the lines of its own
citizens without legal authorization. But there’s nothing to stop it from
listening in on some other country’s citizen, and then filing very thorough
reports to that foreign citizen’s government. Just as long as the report does
not hand over the specific raw matter—the sigint
dispatch of nouns and verbs—the letter of various privacy laws would stay
intact. Spirit of the law be damned. If
necessity is the mother of invention, those in the room were now necessity’s
sons and daughters. “What this meant,” said one foreign intelligence chief a
bit later, “is that the privacy laws of the leading democracies would,
essentially, be skirted. The idea was: This is war. This is what is
demanded.” Around the room they went, realizing, each of them, that
intelligence in this war was as important as a bullet in a gun or a plane
that strafes. In the corner, FBI chief Bob Mueller watched silently, taking
mental notes, trying not to think—as the discussion swirled—the way he had
his whole life, like a prosecutor building a case. He already understood
that the FBI would need to find some bridge between intelligence and law
enforcement. Mueller offered a brief “my focus is law enforcement, not
intelligence” disclaimer to the group, and said little else. “I’m here as an
observer,” he added. He had already given ground to Tenet on the
interrogation issue. Now he would look the other way on issues of the use, or
misuse, of signals intelligence. His job in the “war on terror” was to not do certain things. Lunch was served. People milled about in slacks and polo
shirts, comrades in arms. Intelligence services, in any democracy, tend to be
of modest size and conflicting profile. Secrets, and surveillance, are
counterpoints to so many cherished freedoms, such as privacy, dissent, and
government accountability Over sandwiches, several participants discussed
the oddity of working with countries like After lunch, Tenet picked up the thread. “We’re going to
have to work with others in a way we haven’t before,” he said, and then he
ticked off “ Each country chimed in. The Brits were strong with “Risks are going to have to be taken,” Tenet implored
them. “These countries are our partners now, like it or not. We’re going to
have to shed old habits and old mind-sets.” Pavitt laid out the
particulars—the progress on specific innovations since 9/11. Tens of millions
had been spent, with hundreds of millions more expected, to establish One foreign intelligence chief interjected with a
question: “How do we know what we should or shouldn’t tell some of these
foreign services? Especially ones we’ve traditionally had trouble trusting?” “In most cases, tell them everything—because they already
know more than you,” said Tenet, his voice rising. “Without them, and their
help, we have no fucking global effort. We’d be walking through the Arab
world wide open and half blind. The key for us, at this point, is understanding that we don’t know shit.” Suspicion can become paralyzing, and actions can become
erratic. The One
Percent Doctrine takes readers inside the policy making arenas of our
government and reveals the challenges Steve Hopkins,
September 25, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the October 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
One Percent Doctrine.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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