Centro Nacional de Inteligencia (Mexico)

MEXGOV has been working on the concept of an intelligence agency embedded within another intelligence agency. If world history tells us anything, it tells us that this breeds dysfunction. Thus it is with the chains of history heralding a warning, that Centro Nacional de Inteligencia, CNI, has been launched.

There is also a Centro Nacional de Inteligencia in Madrid that supports Spanish national interests. Please don't confuse the two.

President Peña Nieto's government has attempted to craft the new CNI after the USGOV's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), except there is almost no comparison in terms of how it's set up, it's mission or the personnel gathered to administer it.

The US Central Intelligence Agency was formed to collect information on nations outside of the United States and it's predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services was an action oriented service. Thus CIA inherited a directorate which has had several names: Clandestine Service, Directorate of Operations, Directorate of Plans, etc. The Mexican version, CNI, won't have that sort of capability because it's linked to Justice-related intelligence collection on people and organizations of interest within Mexico. Based on an American model, it would be sort of an FBI/DEA fusion center (think of a centrally located HIDTA group and you're close).

Interior Minister (Secretaría de Gobernación) Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong would disagree with me but I don't care. That's what it is and a rose by any other name is still a rose. 

The principle mission of the new National Intelligence Center (Centro Nacional de Inteligencia) will be to fight organized crime. The CIA doesn't do that to any significant degree. And what little of it they do, they do poorly because the bureaucracy is big, slow and CNC is poorly funded with many in its dedicated staff "double or triple hatted". That means that there aren't enough people to do it right.

CNI will act as a central collection point for information generated by all other intelligence and justice entities in the country, including the police, military, Attorney General's Office (Procuraduría General de la República, PGR), and other federal and state agencies -- which is specifically what the CIA doesn't do. As Osorio Chong explained, it will "work towards the necessary bringing together of all information." CNI will be structured within the Interior Ministry (Secretaría de Gobernación, Segob), and will report to the existing Mexican Center for Investigation and National Security (Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional, CISEN). Thus, an intelligence agency within an intelligence agency.

CNI's targets will be principally the very smallest of the narcotics trafficking groups: Los Cabelleros Templarios, Los Zetas, what's left of the Beltran Leyva Organization and the Gulf Cartel. They are not presently tasked with targeting the Sinaloa Federation, which incorporates Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion and the Arellano Felix Organization -- and traffics about 80% of the narcotics across the US/Mexico and US/Canada borders. I won't be so indelicate as to ask why it's rolling that way. If you're a cynic, you may have already come to the same conclusion that I have.

CIA Case Officers Attacked - 14 Charged in Mexico

For those of you who don't read La Jornada, I refer you to their article on November 10.

En Tres Marías, los federales intentaron asesinar a los funcionarios de EU: PGR

After more than two months of investigation, on November 9, Mexico's federal Attorney General's Office (Procuraduría General de la República) confirmed that it was formally charging 14 federal police agents for an August 24 attack on a US embassy armored Toyota Land Cruiser on a road near the Tres Marías community, south of Mexico City in the state of Morelos.

The PGR Agents claimed that they mistook the Toyota Land Cruiser with diplomatic license plates containing two Central Intelligence Agency annuitants, working actively for the CIA and a Mexican Naval Captain assigned to Fuerza de Infantería de Marina ( Naval Infantry) for members of a gang that perpetrated a local kidnapping. It is a stretch to believe that the PGR Agents could think that, but that was their story before they were "interrogated". Interrogation in Mexico is not the tender experience that most Americans can relate to (as portrayed both on television and in real life).

The two CIA Case Officers were wounded in the incident by spawl and bullet proof glass flaking as bullets repeatedly struck it.According to La Jornada, The PGR charged that the 14 Mexican police agents "tried to take the lives" of the three men in the embassy vehicle. Investigators determined that the agents were driving private cars and were in civilian clothes when they attacked the embassy's van, which was surrounded by the agents' vehicles. Investigators said that the Armored Toyota Land Cruiser was hit with 152 bullets.

The PGR's formal charges didn't mention possible links to organized crime, but PGR sources indicated they believed three of the agents had ties to the Beltrán Leyva drug cartel. The 14 agents are being held in maximum-security prisons in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, and in Puente Grande, Jalisco.

Much of this investigation could have been shortcut if the CIA had listened to knowledgable sources close to the Beltran Leyva Organization with whom they were in constant contact. Sadly, they didn't use the assets available to them and their "investigation" was prolonged and their findings in the end are skewed without a first-hand account from the person who ordered the attack and paid the PGR officers through cut-outs. The real question is whether or not the CIA cares whether its findings are correct or not. One can only presume that they don't. While I'm not going into further detail on this, read the tea leaves and decide for yourselves.

CIA had a personnel turnover in Mexico right before the attack. One can speculate that the people with the skill to follow through with these inquiries had left the country.

And taking it one step further, having not pursued this, how can they know when it's going to happen again?