Islamic fundamentalism, with an increasingly hostile Iraq in the vanguard, is fueling anti-Americanism in the Middle East.  The supporters of terrorism (Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Osama Bin Laden, etc.) now have a bazaar full of cheap weapons and munitions to select from.  And if they don’t already know, information on how to build a nuclear bomb, or cook up a batch of sarin gas, or to turn cowchips into anthrax, is readily available in libraries and on the internet. 

   To make matters worse, the terrorist has all the advantages.  He is free to chose the weapons, chose the battlefields, chose the time of attack and to select attackers from an ever growing pool of US-hating fanatics.  The terrorist is the aggressor; we are on the defense.  The threat of nuclear, biological and chemical terrorism is the greatest challenge facing our intelligence community today.  And it only takes one shadowy martyr to inflict the damage; not an army.  It is indeed a rough neighborhood out there, and things are going to get rougher before they get better.   

   The main line of defense against international terrorism is the CIA.  The Agency places counter-terrorism at the top of its priority requirements and, in fact, has had greater success in the area than any other organization.  Unfortunately, that success has not been consistent or widespread enough to provide adequate early warning of impending terrorist attacks. Why?  Because the best information on terrorist plans and intentions must come from human source (i.e. real people) information, and those sources come from such a closed group that they are not easily accessible or penetrable.  Terrorist organizations are the single hardest intelligence target to penetrate with human sources.  Advances in technical collection methods have not compensated for the lack of human intelligence.

   The recruitment of new agent sources is the main task of the CIA case officer, and one of the most important courses taught to new operations officers at “The Farm” – the CIA’s secret training facility – is “The Recruitment Cycle.”  It’s a basic “how-to” course describing the steps and techniques required to induce the in-place defection of new sources of intelligence.  The recruitment cycle involves four distinct phases:  spotting, assessing, developing, and delivering the final recruitment pitch.  In short, the course teaches the new officers how to spot new agent talent (i.e. find people with access to the information desired), how to assess their susceptibility to recruitment, how to use their perceived susceptibilities, vulnerabilities and desires to massage and develop them to the point of recruitment, and then to design and deliver a recruitment pitch based on the personal information obtained.  Inducements of money, recognition and revenge are examples of major motivators;  most spies accept recruitment to gain one or more of these things.

   When a CIA case officer targets an international terrorist organization for penetration, the first step is to examine its membership.  The profile of today’s international bomb planting terrorist is an Arab male between the ages of 17 and 24, raised in the strict Muslim faith in a small rural middle eastern town (somewhere like the remote Bekaa Valley of Lebanon), who harbors a deep hatred of the US and a fanatical willingness to martyr himself in the name of Allah.  He is highly suspicious of foreigners, has few if any foreign language skills, and shuns anyone who is not of his faith, clan and heritage.

   Furthermore, the terrorist doesn’t frequent any of the traditional agent spotting arenas for the CIA:  He doesn’t hang out in bars or frequent upscale restaurants, is not to be found on the diplomatic circuit, nor on tennis courts or at cultural events, or at any of the other usual spots where CIA case officers would normally troll for prospective agents. The terrorist and the urbane case officer do not move in the same circles. 

   You see the problem.  The CIA’s recruitment doctrine is not entirely germane when dealing with the terrorist target.  The terrorist can’t be recruited if the CIA case officer is not in a position to spot, assess and develop him first.  So the CIA case officer must step back and work through intermediaries, or access agents, as they are called in the trade.  An access agent is one who bridges the gap between the target and the case officer.  He is directed by the case officer to spot, assess and develop potential recruits in the terrorist milieu.  But finding such an intermediary is a momentous task in and of itself.  The gap between the urbane American case officer and the Arab militant is still too great to bridge in one step.  So additional links in the chain, additional access agents, must be added, further distancing the CIA case officer from his target, and exponentially compounding the difficulty of the operation.  Sometimes there are several links in the chain from the case officer to the actual terrorist operative.  The chain might look something like this:  case officer to wealthy Arab businessman, to small Arab shopkeeper in Lebanon, to the shopkeeper’s relative in the Bekaa Valley, to the relative’s friend on the fringes of the terrorist organization, to the terrorist himself. 

   Then, assuming the CIA case officer is able to orchestrate such a daisy-chain, there is the problem of getting accurate and timely information up the chain to the case officer, and requirements down to the terrorist recruit.

   But that’s not all.  Let’s assume for a moment that the case officer is successful in recruiting and running a penetration of a terrorist organization.  He or she must now struggle with the problem of handling such an unsavory character; a person who is prepared to kill innocent civilians and who may have killed before.  The legal and ethical questions that arise from this are mind-boggling.  And to take this even one step further, what if the operation produces intelligence that warns us of an impending act of terrorism?  Clearly we could not permit the act to take place, so the authorities would have to be called in to thwart the act and to arrest the perpetrators.  That would blow the entire operation, including our penetration, and we would be left back at ground zero, having to spot, assess, develop and recruit another source who would in turn last only as long as the first bit of critical intelligence he provides.

   All this is not to say that the CIA should give up trying to penetrate terrorist organizations, or that it has not had some (mostly unheralded) successes in the past against the terrorist target.  It is only to say that the task is indeed a gigantic one, and the CIA will require new thinking and unique approaches to be successful.

   Now add this to the equation:  In addition to the terrorists’ many advantages already mentioned, they have an endless supply of potential targets, ranging from the most difficult to the easiest, to choose from.  The reason Osama Bin Laden chose to attack our embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam over others was their relative vulnerability.  While official US installations abroad (embassies, consulates, military bases, etc.) top the list of terrorist targets, some are virtual fortresses while others have little or no security at all.  Regardless of their security, all are symbolic of America.

   And, in a perverse way, the very efforts of the US State Department to beef up the security of US embassies abroad make the facilities of IBM, American Airlines, EXXON, Coca Cola, even McDonalds, more attractive to the terrorist.  When terrorists find security too tight on their preferred targets, they simply move down the priority list to “softer” targets.  If they have to move from official target to non-official, so be it; as long as an installation has a symbolic American flag flying over it, it is a target. 

   Thus, when one weighs the relative impotence of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies against the seeming omnipotence of terrorist organizations, one has to wonder what the future holds for Americans abroad -- in both official and non-official capacities.  It has become abundantly clear that we are no longer safe from terrorism, even on our own shores.  Now, more than ever, we need to take the offensive to win.