CIA failed in Somalia - Money for warlords backfired

The covert effort by the CIA to finance warlords in Somalia has drawn sharp criticism from U.S.government officials who say the campaign thwarted counterterrorism efforts inside the country and empowered the same Islamic groups it was intended to marginalize.

The criticism, expressed privately, flared even before the apparent victory this week by Islamist militias dealt a sharp setback to U.S. policy in the region, U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the debate said.

The officials said the CIA effort, run from the agency's station in Nairobi, channeled hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past year to secular warlords inside Somalia with the aim, among other things, of capturing or killing a handful of suspected members of Al Qaeda who are believed to be hiding there.

The officials said the decision to use proxies was born in part from fears of committing large numbers of U.S. personnel to counterterrorism efforts in Somalia, a country that the United States hastily left in 1994.

Then, attempts to capture the warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid and his aides ended in disaster and the death of 18 U.S. soldiers.

The U.S. effort of the past year occasionally included trips to Somalia from Nairobi by CIA case officers, who landed on warlord-controlled airstrips in the capital, Mogadishu, with large amounts of money for distribution to militias, said experts outside the U.S. government and American officials involved in policy making.

Among those who have criticized the CIA operation as shortsighted have been senior Foreign Service officers at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi. Earlier this year, Leslie Rowe, the embassy's second-ranking official, signed off on a cable back to the State Department in Washington that detailed grave concerns throughout the region about the U.S. efforts in Somalia, said several people with knowledge of the report.

Around that time, the State Department's political officer for Somalia, Michael Zorick, who had been based in Nairobi, was reassigned to Chad after he sent a cable to Washington criticizing the policy of paying Somali warlords.

One U.S. official who traveled to Nairobi this year said that officials from various government agencies working in Somalia had expressed concern that U.S. activities were not being carried out in the context of a broader policy.

"They were fully aware that they were doing so without any strategic framework," the official said. "And they realized that there might be negative implications to what they are doing."

The details of the U.S. effort in Somalia are classified, so officials from several agencies agreed to discuss them only after being assured of anonymity. The officials included supporters of the CIA-led effort, as well as critics.

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