America's Dangerous White Hat Complex
Soldier of Fortune Magazine
In the wake of the unmistakable acts of war waged by terrorists against civilian targets in New York and the Department of Defense in Washington, the Bush Administration must end a dangerous form of political thinking about how to deal with terrorism that has handcuffed American policy for the past three decades. I call this self-defeating policy America's White Hat Hero Complex, or WHZC. WH2C is like those 1930s and 1940s Bob Steele, "Hoot" Gibson, Ken Maynard, or Roy Rogers westerns. When the bad guy came at the white-hatted hero with a knife, Bob, or "Hoot," or Ken, or Roy would toss his six-gun away and take on Mr. Nasty Black Hat with his knife. And when the hero finally smashed the bad guy's arm across the bar and knocked the knife out of his hand, good-guy Roy or fearless Bob dropped his own knife and subdued the villain with bare fists.
You can see WH2C in the constrictive rules of engagement with which America's senior policymakers - often but not exclusively from the State Department or Capitol Hill hav shackled our armed forces and intelligence operatives. My friend, Colonel Charlie A. Beckwith, the soldier who created Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta (better known as Delta Force), once told me about going to the White House Situation Room to brief President Jimmy Carter and his closest aides on the final mission plan shortly before Charlie left on the ill-fated odyssey to rescue our American hostages in Tehran back in 1980. During the briefing, Charlie mentioned that his Delta shooters would "take out" the hostage guards.
Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher looked over at Charlie, eyebrows raised. "'Take them out,' Colonel?"
Charlie said something to the effect of, "Yes, Mister Deputy Secretary. We're going to double-tap 'em. Shoot 'em each in the head - twice."
That's when WH2C kicked in. "Couldn't you just shoot them in the shoulder or something?" Christopher demanded.
Charlie told me later, "I bit my tongue, then I said, 'No, Mister Deputy Secretary. My men have been trained to shoot them each twice, in the head, and that's what they'll do'."
From the 1983 suicide bombings of the American Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, to the recent attack on the U.S.S. Cole, our government has stifled the ability to prevent the killing of Americans because its policies are rooted in WH2C. Instead of going proactive, which means anticipating problems, getting to the bad guys, and neutralizing them before they can do damage to us, we order our sentries to carry unloaded or inadequate weapons, or our ships to sail into harm's way without taking adequate protective measures because we might appear undiplomatically bellicose, pushy, or confrontational.
And even after Americans are murdered, our Powers That Be too often respond not by going after the killers, but by forming commissions, which issue reports advising the State Department and Pentagon to protect their diplomats and armed forces by sealing them hermetically in secure, remotely located, fortress-like installations. I have yet to hear about a commission report that advocates taking steps to identify and neutralize terrorists before they commit their crimes, even though we have that capability in Army units like Delta, and the Navy's Special Warfare Development Group (it used to be called SEAL Team Six before I broke its cover in 1992's Rogue Warrior, which I wrote with SEAL Six's former commander, Richard Marcinko).
Now, to be fair, it's not all reports and memos. Occasionally, we do actually launch Cruise missiles to hit pharmaceutical plants or terrorist camps. But only, it seems, after following the WH2C rule of making sure they're desert-ed, so no one will actually get hurt.
Congress is no better than State. Ever since the Church Committee's CIA-as-Rogue Agency hearings back in 1976, the House and Senate intelligence oversight committees have consistently applied WHZC principles to the Central Intelligence Agency. Indeed, many of the veteran case officers to whom I speak tell me they are reluctant to target any foreign national who is not demonstrably and polygraphably squeaky clean, because the recruitment of malefactors who have engaged in unsavory behavior can cause a career in the Directorate of Operations to go south overnight.
During the time Americans were being held hostage in Beirut, one of our more enterprising case officers in Lebanon came across a chap - let's call him Mahmoud - who had all the makings of a terrific agent. Mahmoud had access to the inner sanctums of Hizballah. He was familiar with Iranians from the seppah pasdaran - the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps - who controlled the Islamic Jihad. If the case officer could recruit him, Mahmoud had the potential to provide valuable insight into these organizations' capabilities and intentions.
But there was a downside. Mahmoud was a car bomber. As a matter of fact, he reportedly held the Beirut record for consecutive car bombs detonated in any one 24-hour period: eleven. The case officer never even submitted Mahmoud's name to Langley, because he knew he'd never receive POA - Provisional Operation-al Approval - to begin the recruitment process. Mahmoud was far too politically incorrect to be allowed to supply the CIA with valuable information that might save American lives.
It wasn't always that way. In the old, pre-Church Committee days, CIA's Middle East-based case officers routinely received POA to deal with such nasty developmental agents as Ali Hassan Salameh, Black September's architect of the Munich Olympics massacre, or trade information with Abu Iyad, Fatah's chief of intelligence, and his deputy, Atif Bsisou, both of whom had blood on their hands.
Now, I'm not advocating that we send our spooks out to recruit some-body to spray poison onto Saddam Hussein's mustache or blow up Imad Mugniyah's car. Nor do I advocate misusing Delta or DEYGRP in some micro-managed, doomed-to-fail fiasco, What America needs is a basic attitude adjustment. From the Commander-in-Chief and Secretary of State, down to the lowest ranking enlisted personnel, we cannot afford to accept WH2C as the standard operating procedure when dealing with terrorism anymore. As former Secretary of State George Shultz suggested just hours after the dastardly attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we must use intelligence and audacity, to protect ourselves. But we must also be willing to preempt terrorists by using deadly force when necessary.
There are still too many officials within our government who believe that terrorism is a political problem that can be solved by political means - in other words, by talking it away. They are wrong. Terrorism is war. Full stop. And war isn't won by high-mind-ed policymakers emulating celluloid cowboy heroes who toss their weapons - and options - away, but by real-life warriors who have the grit to intercept, confront, and if necessary, kill our enemies, before our enemies kill them - or any more of us.
Weisman is the author of The New York Times' best-selling Rogue Warrior series of counterterrorism novels. He is currently researching a nonfiction book about U.S. intelligence activities in the Middle East.
©2002 John Weisman