Let us start with a three-paragraph quotation from a co-authored book review in the March, 2024, issue of an unclassified CIA publication:
“The third and final section focuses on the roles women
played in identifying Usama bin Laden and al-Qaida
as serious threats to the United States and in bringing
about their destruction. Counterterrorism pathfinders
such as Cindy Store, Gina Bennett, and Barbara Sued
feature prominently, as do others like Jennifer Matthews
and Alfred Bukowski. Mundy describes in painstaking
and frustrating detail how first Bennett and Store, then
others, tried largely in vain to convince US officials of
the threat Bin Laden posed, the creation of a dedicated
team at CIA focused entirely on him and al-Qaida, and
the events leading up to 9/11 and the days that followed.
The Bin Laden unit, named Alec Station after the son of
its founding director, Michael Scheuer, represented an
uncomfortable merger between operations and analysis,
and targeting—man hunting—was then something that
the CIA had little experience with. It did not help that
Scheuer—an ally and advocate for the women on his
team—was himself an analyst, leading a DO team staffed
largely by women.”
To Mundy, who accurately describes some difference-
as in the cultures of the DO and DI at that time, it was a
situation that appears in retrospect almost to have been
designed to fail. She is not wrong. Although Scheuer’s
team located bin Laden on a few occasions, it struggled
for years to convince policymakers and CIA leaders of
the unique threat al-Qaida posed, likely due—in part,
at least—to the absence of male operations officers who
would have stood better chances of being heard. Mundy’s
interviewees recount, however, that after 9/11, CIA
completely reconfigured itself to focus on counterterror-
ism, how the prominence of women rose with it, and how
divisions over the proper conduct of what became known
as the global war on terrorism—especially the ethics of
enhanced interrogations—divided even that closely knit
group of officers, men and women alike.” Source: (https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/c252f567841769c88770df3cbfba3200/Review-The-Sisterhood-Studies-68-1-March-2024.pdf)
It is not surprising that today’s CIA has devolved into such a hapless organization and that it is now stupid enough to admit its own accelerating rottenness. In the above article, one of the the authors — a former big-and-tough male operations officer — admits that all of the Americans who died on 9/11 did so because all the big-tough boys in the Directorate of Operations do not deign to consider female CIA officers as their equals, even though female officers beat many of them like a drum and nearly to death on issues related to finding and eliminating Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. This included the then-Director of Operations, a old Cold Warrior brought back out of retirement, and who, after firing me, offered me a substantial monetary award if I would agree to lie to my unit by saying I was leaving because I was exhausted. Well, I am never exhausted, and, as gentlemanly as I could, I told him to stick his cash award up his ass. Later, I had to sign a form reaffirming that I had turned down what clearly was no more than the Cold Warrior’s offer of a bribe for silence.
This elderly fellow and his lieutenants on the Agency’s 7th Floor hated the idea that an important CIA unit had a majority — a big one — of female officers working in it. They thought that there were not nearly enough big-and-tough male officers like themselves therein. The review considered here admits the turth on that point. The unit also had a chief –me — who only worked most, not all, of his Agency career in the Directorate of Operations, always in covert operations, and the recipient of only three of the Directorate of Operations’ highest awards. One of the article’s co-authors, the so-called “historian” Brent Geary, is, of course, a former operations officer whose prose suggests he has been ingrained from his first day at the “Farm” with the traditional women-suck-at-operations ideology.
There is a second section of this review that is written by a former CIA officer named Linda Weissgold, who once was Chief of the Agency’s Directorate of Analysis. She turns out to be the typical protect-your-butt and those of the 7th Floor bureaucrats CIA officer. She softly disagrees with her male co-author by saying that she cannot “bring herself to defend the truth of the fact that 3,000 Americans died on 9/11 because the truth to stop that event was brought to CIA’s top leaders by women.” Why is this, Ms. Weissgold? Because, she writes, “Director George Tenet’s well-documented efforts to get policymakers to act belies claims that the analysts’ warnings went unheeded.”
Now, there doubtless are such documents, all written or dictated by DCI George Tenet after he returned from National Security Council meetings or other such senior decision-making forums. If the “well-documented” heroics of Tenet really exist, they primarily exist as self-serving lies. Most often Tenet went into decision-making senior meetings alone or with a lawyer; that is, with no one who knew more than a superficial amount about bin Laden or Afghanistan or the strengths and weaknesses of the intelligence reporting.Tenet always was briefed on the latest reporting before he went to such meetings and it was always stressed to him that the intelligence was solid as possible, and unlikely to get much better what he had at present. On his return, Tenet never failed to say he had expressed this warning to his fellow attendees.
Instead of acting on this data, Tenet appears to have done all he could to avoid being the person responsible for championing a lethal attack on bin Laden. Then, late in the game, he came up with the dire need for a so-called “second thread” of intelligence to confirm the already clearly accurate intelligence that had been gathered across the CIA by both women and men, working at home and overseas. He suggested, and his political and military masters agreed, that, as good former colonials, Britain’s MI6 must be asked to provide a “second thread’ of intelligence to confirm the work of lowly Americans. Ever the good colonials –always believing the Mother Country better at intelligence work than America — they also probably offered to pay MI6’s expenses, a not unusual practice. The British, of course, came up with nothing. And so, Tenet, his lieutenants, and their political and military masters — Osama bin Laden could have had no better protectors — refused to listen to the work of mere female CIA officers. Time then continued its gentle, quiet, and undisturbed travel to the day 3,000 Americans died unnecessary because their government refused to try to terminate the threat it knew was coming for them.
Why? Because, in large measure, female officers had played the key role in understanding and exploiting the CIA-produced intelligence that repeatedly gave Tenet and his political masters a series of near-certain death-shots at bin Laden. The senior big-and-tough Directorate of Operations’ lads couldn’t bear the thought that women and not men had delivered the goods, and so they questioned the quality of their own agency’s intelligence capabilities when speaking with their political and military masters. The latter were all Clinton appointees and probably shared of his well-known views of women what they were good for.
Co-author Ms. Weissgold also throws in a good deal of clutter and fluff about how hard it is to work in bureaucracies and with politicians, but her section fails to accept the fact — as did Geary’s — that Tenet and other senior, mostly male CIA leaders completely failed America on 9/11, and all because that bunch of self-servers consistently undercut, denigrated, and deliberately underrated the abilities of female intelligence officers, not just in Alec Station but, in my view, across the CIA. Indeed, Tenet, his lieutenants, and senior political leaders never once — despite at least 10 chances — tried to kill bin Laden between December 1994 and 11 September 2001. Why did they want Americans dead?
Finally, the point of these comments is not only to mark the on-going decline of the CIA — intentionally started by Clinton, continued by Brennan under Obama’s orders, and now accelerated by Biden’s regime — but also to comment on Agency’s stark inability to look at itself and see its many self-inflicted failures, as in the 9/11 case. It was the senior Agency leaderships’ arrogance, jealousy of female success, and resentment of that consistent success, that knowingly cost thousands of American deaths that could have been prevented. The content of the book review also seems to amount to an honest admission – a former acting DCI is on the editorial board approving its publication — that senior Agency leaders’ still take pride in underestimating female capabilities and, in that way, at least, reaffirms continued abusive institutional treatment of female officers both as lesser folk and, perhaps, as a proper reason to have at them at hand for blame when another 9/11 disaster occurs
