Ex-CIA official urges restraint

‘I’d tell him (President Bush) to keep your shirt on.’

By: Jeff Milgram
   America should resist the temptation to respond militarily to Tuesday’s devastating terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon until it has strong evidence of who is responsible, a former CIA official says.
   And tracking down the terrorists may prove to be extremely difficult, said Fred Hitz, the CIA’s inspector general from 1990 to 1998 who is now a lecturer of public and international affairs and director of Princeton University’s Project on International Intelligence.
   The manner in which the government decides to respond will say a great deal about the kind of country this is, said Mr. Hitz.
   "If this terrorist act, in addition to shocking us, also scares us, causes us to pull back into our shell, then the terrorists will have succeeded," he said.
   He said the pressure for retaliation will increase once the number of fatalities becomes known.
   "I’d tell him (President Bush) to keep your shirt on," Mr. Hitz said.
   American counterterrorist officials suspect that associates of the militant Islamic Saudi billionaire Osama bin Laden were behind the terror attacks that Mr. Hitz called "extremely well organized and precise."
   But finding and punishing the mastermind may be extremely hard.
   "They’re difficult to track down," Mr. Hitz said.
   "We have to find out who did this … and we have to punish them," Mr. Hitz said. But he warned that the possibility exists that the United States will never be able to conclusively identify the terrorist group that hijacked four American commercial airliners and flew two of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center 18 minutes apart and one into the Pentagon about a half hour later. The fourth hijacked airliner crashed outside Pittsburgh.
   "Let’s assume the investigation is not decisive, but just offers possibilities," he suggested rhetorically. This distinct possibility would be one of the worst outcomes for the Bush administration, he said.
   "The blame game will start immediately, if it hasn’t started already," Mr. Hitz said.
   One of the problems facing American intelligence agencies is that federal law makes it difficult for them to infiltrate human intelligence agents into terror cells because these agents, themselves, might have to take part in terror acts.
   He predicted that there will be discussions about lifting the bans on assassinations and on American intelligence services using missionaries and journalists as spies.
   Some questions about the terror attack remain unanswered, he said.
   *How did the Federal Aviation Administration fail to determine that airplanes that took off from Logan Airport in Boston en route to Los Angeles were diverted to New York?
   *How did the terrorists get weapons aboard the aircraft?
   *Who piloted the planes during their final moments in the air?
   "It’s hard for me to believe that any American commercial pilot, even one with a gun pointed to his head, would fly into the World Trade (Center) towers," Mr. Hitz said.
   "We need to think about what could have produced the frustrations that caused these crimes," he said. "To have that kind of hatred is a phenomenon we will have to try to understand."
   But, he added, no amount of frustration can justify such a crime.
   "This is a watershed day. … It makes it clear that you’re not safe in your own domain," Mr. Hitz said Tuesday. "We have to take reasonable precautions that it doesn’t happen again, and then move on."