The Art of Intelligence Lessons From Life in the Cia
The Art of Intelligence Lessons from a Life in the CIA'southward Undercover Service by Henry A Crumpton.
In January 2000, the National Security Council directed the CIA to locate and track Osama bin Laden, in a possible prelude to a military strike. In the run a risk-averse world before Sept. xi, 2001, neither the Pentagon nor the CIA's leadership could eyebrow allowing fifty-fifty limited forces in northern Afghanistan or neighboring countries to carry out the directive. At the time, Henry A. Crumpton was responsible for the CIA's global counter-terrorism operations, and he and a small group of other officials pushed "a reluctant and even suspicious interagency bureaucracy" toward the position that unmanned aerial vehicles — drones — could provide a solution.
The CIA found a Predator drone, which had seen some service over Bosnia, gathering dust at an Air Force base and moved it to a base of operations in Uzbekistan. After a homo source revealed that bin Laden was at the Tarnak Farms compound, near Kandahar, in a at present-famous incident the Predator's cameras zoomed in on a tall human dressed in white. "Holy Mother of God," said ane of the operatives watching the video-stream. But the Predator was non armed with Hellfire missiles. It would accept six hours for cruise missiles fired from the Indian Ocean to hit the target, and the Clinton White House balked.
Crumpton's memoir, "The Art of Intelligence," is a lively account of his 24-twelvemonth career in the CIA that charts one of the near pregnant legacies of the by decade of warfare: the rise of drones. The failure to strike in 2000 led to a renewed fight over arming the Predator, and equally Crumpton notes, "Many were resistant to the notion that the CIA should accept such lethal capability and say-so."
That controversy endures, and Crumpton provides a pocket-sized window into the early on history of the programme, describing how "mission-driven bureaucratic subversives, operating within the huge and lumbering U.S. security establishment, had imagined and produced an armed UAV." After the U.s.a. invaded Afghanistan, Crumpton writes, "we cranked Hellfire shots twenty-four hour period and night."
Crumpton likes to mix it upward. He portrays himself as one of those bureaucratic subversives who, in the wake of nine/11, sometimes worked in a "barely-bounded rage." He likewise uses his book to skid the pocketknife into some old in-firm foes, especially those deemed likewise timid for the struggle. And he periodically rails at the press, politicians and other repositories of fecklessness. That'south standard fare for the Washington memoir.
'The Art of Intelligence: Lessons from a Life in the CIA'due south Underground Service' by Henry A. Crumpton (The Penguin Press)
Crumpton'south account of his life equally a young recruit, his years in the Africa division, and his close-upwards view of the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban is far more than interesting and often entertainingly frank.
A native of rural Georgia, Crumpton left home at 16 and headed to Alabama, where he found piece of work on the evening shift in a carpet factory and so he could study for a high schoolhouse diploma by day. He was a kid who was passionate near learning and bursting with curiosity about the world. After graduating from high school, he drifted west and offset attended St. John's in Santa Fe, simply the college'south Not bad Books program gave way to "extracurricular opportunities" at the University of New United mexican states afterwards he transferred there. Later on graduation, he traveled through Asia, the Soviet Union and Western Europe, eluding law enforcement for diverse offenses, including "vehement public disorder."
Since babyhood he had pined for a life in the CIA, and an agency recruiter saw some raw talent in the eager 22-year-sometime, who became the youngest and least experienced trainee in his class. Crumpton was assigned to the Africa sectionalisation, where officers "thrived in fluid, unstructured and churning environments," he writes. Information technology was in many ways an ideal environment for luring Soviet-bloc officials into working for the CIA. Crumpton describes breaking and entering to plant listening devices, bugging the hotel rooms of visiting foreign leaders, working with anti-Marxist guerrillas and the dance of recruitment. One but wishes he could take been a little more specific about where he was operating and who the targets were, but ane presumes the CIA's publications board sanitized some of this copy.
The Transitional islamic state of afghanistan campaign left Crumpton variously exhausted, exhilarated and embittered, and he moved on to calmer assignments in 2002. The CIA and Articulation Special Operations Command's network of commandoes had briefly and brilliantly run the state of war but were, in the stop, denied the resources to consummate what Crumpton saw as the campaign's strategic objectives, goals that still define the conflict: killing the leadership of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, denying them havens from which to operate and improving the lives of ordinary Afghans.
It is possibly Crumpton's misfortune that his memoir arrives in the publicity-sucking slipstream of his colleague Jose Rodriquez Jr.'s "Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Deportment Subsequently 9/xi Saved American Lives," an apologia for "enhanced interrogation techniques," elsewhere described as torture. (Crumpton was not involved in the hole-and-corner prisons gear up upwards overseas past the CIA afterwards the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.)
"The Art of Intelligence" combines the derring-do of sometime-fashioned spycraft with thoughtful meditations on the future of warfare and intelligence work. It deserves to be read.
finnp@washpost.com
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