November 8, 2004
By JAMES RISEN
ASHINGTON, Nov. 7 - The Bush administration has failed to recognize that Al Qaeda is now a global Islamic insurgency, rather than a traditional terrorist organization, and so poses a much different threat than previously believed, says a senior counterterrorism official at the Central Intelligence Agency.
Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the C.I.A.'s Osama bin Laden unit and the author of a best-selling book critical of the administration's handling of the fight against terrorism, said in an interview with The New York Times this weekend that the government "doesn't respect the threat" because most officials still regard Al Qaeda as a terrorist organization that can be defeated by arresting or killing its operatives one at a time.
He noted that President Bush and other officials had repeatedly said two-thirds of the leadership of Al Qaeda has been killed or captured, but he said the figure was misleading because it is referring to the leaders who were in place as of Sept. 11, 2001.
Al Qaeda has replaced many of those dead or captured operatives and continues to thrive as a guiding force for Islamic extremists around the world.
"I think Al Qaeda has suffered substantially since 9/11, and it may have slowed down its operations, but to take the two-thirds number as a yardstick is a fantasy," Mr. Scheuer said. "To say that they have only one-third of their leadership left is a misunderstanding. That is looking at it from a law enforcement perspective. They pay a lot of attention to leadership succession, and so one of the main tenets of Al Qaeda is to train people to succeed leaders who are captured or killed."
The C.I.A. disputed the idea that it did not understand the evolving nature of Al Qaeda and said the agency had never characterized the two-thirds figure for those killed and captured as anything other than the Qaeda leaders who where in place before Sept. 11.
"The leadership of the intelligence community and those they brief have a very clear understanding of the threat and understand it to be a question of a global movement rather than a single organization," a C.I.A. spokesman said.
Mr. Scheuer said that in addition to running its own core terrorist network, Al Qaeda was also now providing support to regional Islamic rebellions around the world. Mr. bin Laden is providing inspiration to Islamic extremists far beyond Al Qaeda's own membership, vastly complicating the task of combating the threat to the West, he said.
"The amount of punishment the C.I.A. has delivered to Al Qaeda since 9/11 would have wiped out any other terrorist organization," Mr. Scheuer said. "But this is an insurgent organization.''
"The difference between fighting a terrorist group and fighting an insurgency is one of size," he added. "Yet we still don't know how big it is. We still, today, don't know the order of battle of Al Qaeda."
Mr. Scheuer's interview with The Times was his first since the C.I.A. imposed stringent rules on his access to the news media. A C.I.A. spokesman said Sunday that Mr. Scheuer was not authorized to speak for the agency.
Since the publication of his book, "Imperial Hubris," in July, Mr. Scheuer has emerged as the agency's most vocal in-house critic, and the agency has gone to great lengths to try to silence him. His book was published anonymously and, at first, the C.I.A. allowed him to grant interviews to promote it as long as he was not publicly identified by name.
But since he was openly critical of the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq, saying that it inflamed anti-American sentiment in the Arab world and served as a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda, both he and his book sparked political controversy, and Mr. Scheuer's name soon made its way into print. Mr. Scheuer quickly granted about 100 media interviews to promote his book, angering the White House, where officials came to believe that C.I.A. management was sending a message to the president about its opposition to the war in Iraq by allowing him to speak out and publish his book. The C.I.A. then clamped down, effectively ending his ability to speak publicly.
The complete text of a letter that he wrote to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the substance of which has been previously reported, is being published in the December issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Mr. Scheuer agreed to discuss, on the record, the issues he raised in that letter as well as a range of other matters.
Mr. Scheuer served as chief of the C.I.A.'s bin Laden station from 1996 through 1999 and so knows the history of the government's pre-9/11 efforts against Al Qaeda. He testified before the Sept. 11 commission, but is now critical of the commission for refusing to identify by name any top officials who should be held responsible for failing to prevent the attacks.
"The American people need a better understanding of how we got to 9/11," he said. "But I think the 9/11 commission was bound and determined not to find any culpability. By finding no one guilty, they managed not to deal with the real problems."
He remains deeply frustrated by the failures of leadership at the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and other agencies that he witnessed before the Sept. 11 attacks, and believes that top officials have escaped personal accountability.
Mr. Scheuer is particularly critical of the F.B.I. for failing to adequately focus on Al Qaeda before the attacks, and then, he said, trying to avoid blame afterwards. "From the start of the C.I.A.'s bin Laden unit until today, there was no information that we had that wasn't available to the F.B.I.," he said. "They sat in the same building, read the same information I read. But for whatever reason, the 9/11 commission said that we weren't sharing things with them."
He is now derisive of the F.B.I. agents who came to the bin Laden unit before the attacks on New York and Washington. "With the exception of one very good officer, the F.B.I. agents who came to the unit came to have coffee, and to try to get trips to Europe," he said. "The agency carried the bureau on its back."
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