Intelligence Follies

To the editors:

Your editorial on NATO's bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade (Editorial, May 10) flippantly insists "that this whole episode must be taken into stride" while conceding that "such events would be more palatable if we had more confidence in NATO's operation overall." I beg to differ--the failure on the part of the CIA to distinguish between the address of a suspected Yugoslavian arms agency and the Chinese embassy down the street would be more palatable if we had more confidence in the CIA's intelligence.

Far from being anomalies, U.S. intelligence failures of this sort seem to be de rigeur. During the Gulf war scores of Iraqi civilian buildings hit by American bombs were later admitted by the US government to have been mistakenly identified as military installations. In May of 1998 India's nuclear tests caught US intelligence completely unawares--the CIA was later faulted for having overlooked information clearly indicating the approach of the tests. In August of 1998 the U.S. launched missiles on a Sudanese pharmaceuticals plant based on CIA reports whose linking of the plant to terrorist activities has since been revealed to be highly questionable. The list goes on and on.

What is required as a direct result of such blunders is not simply a review of NATO's strategy in the Balkans but a full and public disclosure of the "extensive process" by which the CIA's information is checked. Until the public of this supposed democracy has access to statistics and hard facts detailing the CIA's intelligence gathering mechanisms and the process by which they are put to use by government officials it is hard to have confidence in the claim that mistakes of this magnitude won't happen again. SAADI SOUDAVAR '00   May 10, 1999