Anonymous No More

In November, 22-year CIA employee Michael Scheuer, who led the hunt for Osama bin Laden, resigned after the agency, he says, barred him from talking to the media. Scheuer wrote two books on bin Laden and terrorism, but he never revealed his true identity, speaking to journalists as "Mike" or "Anonymous," his pen name.

Those days are over. Scheuer believes that U.S. intelligence agencies still don't comprehend Islamic terrorism-that it's a global insurgency obsessed with killing Americans. He wants the public to know that.

"There's a feeling in the intelligence community . . . that the 9/11 thing was a one-off attack," Scheuer says. Intelligence leaders say they're singularly focused on independent terrorist networks such as bin Laden's al Qaeda. But Scheuer insists a Cold War notion that state-sponsored groups are the biggest threats dominates the agencies' thinking.

The CIA, Scheuer says, isn't training enough new terrorism experts and hasn't expanded the stable of officers in the U.S.-based Counterterrorist Center, which supports overseas spying. CIA officials say its counterterrorism staff has "doubled" since 9/11, but Scheuer says that this doubling consists of new employees who come to the CTC for their primer on terrorism. They stay no more than 90 days, then move on to other assignments. A new crop replaces them. So, while the number of people working in the CTC has increased, Scheuer calls it a "shell game" to say that this applies to the full-time staff.

A July 2002 report by the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security found that, from September 2001 to spring 2002, these CTC employees "were not all experienced in the counterterrorism mission." The report urged the CIA to ensure "that home basing for CTC case officers is a viable option and is career-enhancing."

Scheuer says some of his best officers were passed over for promotion. Some managers "feel that counter-terrorism really isn't espionage," he says. "They wouldn't be a bit sad if the mission was given to someone else, so they could go back to penetrating the Bundesbank or the Chinese Central Committee."

Scheuer doesn't discount such work. But he thinks any underestimation of al Qaeda should have been corrected by top officials, namely former CIA Director George Tenet. Scheuer has known Tenet since the 1980s, and calls him a likable, affectionate man, but "more of a cheerleader than a leader." As a manager, Tenet embraced CIA employees, accustomed to having ridicule heaped on them for intelligence missteps. Of the maligned spies and analysts, he famously said, "I want to hug them."

But "you need somebody to try to run the community," Scheuer says. "Tenet didn't run the community." The ex-director's colleagues have said he lacked the managerial stomach to make unpopular decisions, such as breaking the CIA of its Cold War ways. Tenet declined Government Executive's request for an interview.

Now, Scheuer says, "Everything needs to be reformed, including me," essentially calling for a generational purge of the agency. "The failure to find anybody responsible for anything, [after the 9/11 attacks] . . . has led to a situation where the public perception is that the whole system failed and it needs to be rebuilt."

Scheuer says people, not organizations, deserve blame. "We had opportunities" to capture or attack bin Laden, he says, an assertion that's corroborated even by Scheuer's critics, who say he's a brilliant analyst who knows little about bureaucratic politics. "We either missed the opportunities or refused to take them." Indeed, a number of proposed strikes, for which Scheuer's group provided the coordinates, were called off by CIA and national security leaders.

"The question that needs to be asked is, 'What will happen if we don't do this?' " Scheuer says. "The only way to begin real reform is to find out when people were aware of problems . . . and [why] they never took action."