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Why the Counterterrorism Center Didn’t Counter Terrorism

(From an interview with Robert Baer, former CIA officer and author of Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude)

I was in the CTC from 1985 to 1986 when it was first formed. There had been a whole series of terrorist attacks against us like the Achille Lauro, and Reagan wanted us to do something. So they formed the CTC and brought in Dewey Clarridge to head it up because he was aggressive. He was a real case officer who’d done some ops in Europe and Central America. He’d dress like a gangster to work, with linen suits and a silk carnation in his lapel. He looked like he could be played by DeNiro. And as far as the Reaganites were concerned, he was our guy.

I was in the Africa division. I hated it, and I was just pissing people off right and left. I had no particular career path, and I wanted to do something interesting. So I volunteered for CTC just to be doing anything besides shuffling paper.

The whole purpose of the CTC was to bring information together from the FBI, the CIA, Customs, Immigration, even the Secret Service. All the agencies sent one person apiece. On paper it looked brilliant.

As it turned out, most of the people the agencies sent us were the duds. They were on their way to retirement or had something wrong with their careers. They were the walking wounded. The CTC became a place to park people. Plus, there was no effort to bring the databases together. You’d have some guy at the FBI saying, “I’m not going to give my goddamn files to the CIA or let them see our reports coming in from the field.” Nothing ever got done. Visa applications of suspect people were never sent over to CIA. No one cooperated. It was all a paper hand job.

Also, there was a huge gaping shortage of case officers with experience, and we still had the Soviet Union taking up people and resources. So they pulled people in from everywhere, usually from the Directorate of Intelligence. You’d have some analyst whose specialty was studying satellite photography for the last 20 years, and they’d pull him in and say, "Okay, you’re in charge of Shiia terrorism." The guy’s never set foot in the Middle East, never learned tradecraft, probably lives outside the Beltway, and doesn’t even drive into DC because it’s too dangerous. And he’s giving directions. The entire CIA in the mid-1980s had become just another bureaucracy. It was the Department of Agriculture.

I had nothing to do with TRODPINT, but I knew what was going on. These kinds of plans went on all the time. But it was just a paper exercise. No one ever did anything. These people were like apes behind bars, pounding their chests. The people in Afghanistan were getting paid money to tell them what they wanted to hear. Look at it this way: If you’re an Afghan or from some frontier province, your annual income is $25, and some guy offers you $10,000 a month to plan to capture Bin Laden. What are you going to say? No, I won’t take your money? I’m not going to fleece the American taxpayer whom we love so much?

If you want to pay me a hundred thousand to plan to kill Bin Laden, I’ll do it. I’ll call some Pakistani friends on the phone, give you updates, write papers, etc. I’ll even come to your meetings in Washington.

Operations like this were just a lot of people pushing paper. I saw them. I actually participated in them. You’d just go through the motions. But your heart’s not really in it because you don’t have the money or you don’t have the assets or people in the White House don’t really care. I’m not passing blame because I’ve done it myself.

Could it have been done differently? Could we have motivated these people to actually get Bin Laden? I don’t know.