How To Create A WIA

Two weeks after George Bush's reelection, Porter J. Goss, the newly appointedDirector of Central Intelligence, wrote aninternal memorandum to all employees of his agency telling them, "[Ourjob is to] support the administration and its policies in our work. As agencyemployees, we do not identify with, support, or champion opposition to theadministration or its policies."[1] Translated from bureaucrat-speak, thisdirective says, "You now work for the Republican Party. The intelligenceyou produce must first and foremost protect the President from being heldaccountable for the delusions he has concerning Iraq, Osama bin Laden,preventive war, torturing captives, democracy growing from the barrel of a gun,and the 'war on terror.'"

This approach is not new, even though former CIAanalyst Melvin A. Goodman declares that "the current situation is theworst intelligence scandal in the nation's history."[2] Back in 1973, whenJames Schlesinger briefly succeeded Richard Helms as CIA director, he proclaimedon arrival at the agency's Virginia "campus": "I am here tosee that you guys don't screw Richard Nixon."[3] Schlesinger underscoredhis point by saying that he would be reporting directly to White House politicaladviser Bob Haldeman and not to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. Inthe contemporary White House, Goss need not bother going directly to Karl Rovesince Bush's outgoing and incoming National Security Advisers, Condoleezza Riceand Stephen J. Hadley, have both been working for months under Rove's directionprimarily to reelect the President.

In 1973, Schlesinger wanted to protect Nixon from revelations that the CIAhad broken into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee andillegally infiltrated the antiwar movement within the United States. His actualachievement was to perpetuate Washington's idée fixe that the UnitedStates could still win the Vietnam War despite overwhelming intelligence to thecontrary. The same is likely to be true today and the outcome is likely to besimilar. Just as thirty years ago, an administration refused to pay attention toits own internal intelligence assessments and lost the Vietnam War, so anotheradministration has again wrapped itself in a fantasy bubble of wishful thinkingand so is losing the war it started in Iraq.

Intelligence and the Truth-teller

Part of the background to the Goss memo is a widespread misunderstanding ofwhy the CIA was created and what it actually does. For example, Bushapostle David Brooks writes in the New York Times that the CIA isengaged "in slow-motion brazen insubordination, which violate[s] allstandards of honorable public service. . . . It is time to reassert some harshauthority so CIA employees know they must defer to the people who win elections.. . . If they [people in the CIA] ever want their information to be trusted,they can't break the law with self-serving leaks of classified data."[4]Brooks seems to think that the CIA is the President's personal advertisingagency and that its employees owe their livelihoods to him. About MichaelScheuer, the head of the "bin Laden Unit" in the agency'sCounterterrorism Center from 1996 to 1999 and the anonymous author of ImperialHubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, Brooks fumes, "Herewas an official on the president's payroll publicly campaigning against hisboss. "

Leave aside the fact that the President doesn't pay any government official'ssalary, at least not legally, and that Scheuer was more interested in educatingthe public about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, on which he is an authority, thanin covering up the President's mistakes; the point is that the issue of theCIA's intelligence on the Iraq war is bringing back into our political life onceagain the figure most feared by presidents: the truth-teller. During a previousperiod of falsified intelligence, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger saidin the Oval Office in front of President Nixon and his Special Counsel CharlesColson, "Daniel Ellsberg is the most dangerous man in America. He must bestopped at all costs."[5] Kissinger and Nixon subsequently ordered upfelonies, such as a break-in at Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, in order totry to smear and discredit the man who had revealed to the public the systematiclying of three presidents -- Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson -- about the warin Vietnam.

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had ordered a special staff to write atop secret History of U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68, known as"The Pentagon Papers," of which Ellsberg was responsible for the 1961volume on John F. Kennedy's presidency. Ellsberg's release of the highlyclassified Pentagon Papers to the New York Times resulted in thepublic exposure of virtually every National Intelligence Estimate on Vietnamwritten by the CIA since the end of French colonial rule. Bush's attempt tosquelch information from the CIA then is hardly unprecedented in the annals ofour government, but it is egregious and ultimately self-defeating.

The term "intelligence" has always rested uneasily in the name ofthe Central Intelligence Agency. There is no question that the agency wascreated in 1947 on the orders of President Truman for the sole purpose ofcollecting, evaluating, and coordinating -- through espionage and from thepublic record -- information related to the national security of the UnitedStates. Truman was concerned to prevent another surprise attack on the U.S. likePearl Harbor and to ensure that all information available to the government wascompiled and presented to him in a timely and usable form. The National SecurityAct of 1947 placed the CIA under the explicit direction of the National SecurityCouncil (NSC), the president's chief staff unit for making decisions about warand peace, and gave it five functions. Four of them concern the collection,coordination, and dissemination of intelligence. It is the fifth -- which allowsthe CIA to "perform such other functions and duties related to intelligenceaffecting the national security as the National Security Council may from timeto time direct" -- that has turned the CIA into a personal, secret,unaccountable army any president can order into battle without first having toask Congress to declare war, as the Constitution requires.

Clandestine operations, although nowhere mentioned in the CIA's enablingstatutes, quickly became the Agency's main activity and as one of its mostimpartial Congressional analysts, Loch K. Johnson, has put the matter, "Thecovert action shop had become a place for rapid promotion within theagency."[6] The Directorate of Operations (DO) soon absorbed two-thirds ofthe CIA's budget and personnel, while the Directorate of Intelligence limpedalong writing National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) -- summaries ofintelligence produced by all the various intelligence agencies, including thosein the Department of Defense -- for the White House.

Meanwhile, CIA covert operations subverted domestic journalism, planted falseinformation in foreign newspapers, and covertly fed large amounts of money tomembers of the Christian Democratic Party in Italy, to King Hussein of Jordan,and to clients in Greece, West Germany, Egypt, Sudan, Suriname, Mauritius, thePhilippines, Iran, Ecuador, and Chile. Clandestine agents devoted themselves tosuch tasks as depressing the global prices of agricultural products in order todamage uncooperative Third World countries, and sponsoring guerrilla wars ormiscellaneous insurgencies in places as diverse as the Ukraine, Poland, Albania,Hungary, Indonesia, China, Tibet, Oman, Malaysia, Iraq, the Dominican Republic,Venezuela, North Korea, Bolivia, Thailand, Haiti, Guatemala, Cuba, Greece,Turkey, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua, to name only a few of thoseon the public record. All this was justified by the Cold War, and no one beyonda very small group inside the government knew anything about it. The CentralIntelligence Act of 1949 modified the National Security Act of 1947 with aseries of amendments that, in the words of that pioneer scholar of the CIA HarryHowe Ransom, "were introduced to permit [the CIA] a secrecy so absolutethat accountability might be impossible."[7]

How to Misuse Intelligence

Regardless of what it most enjoys doing, the CIA is still tasked withproviding the president with accurate information to enable him to avoid asurprise attack and protect the national security. In the foyer of the CIA'sheadquarters at Langley, Virginia, is inscribed a Biblical quotation: "Andye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32).Loch Johnson conjectures that former Director of the CIA (DCI) Allen Dullesprobably thought it meant, "And ye shall know the truth -- if ye be me, orthe president." Former DCI Richard Helms once maintained to Bob Woodwardthat the early warning function of the CIA "is everything, and underlineeverything."[8] Even if true, the CIA's power to provide such unrequestedinformation to a president constitutes a potential restraint on his freedom ofaction and may on occasion totally derail his policies, particularly since suchintelligence is very rarely certain or unambiguous. Over the years the powers ofthe DCI to compel a president to read an intelligence estimate have beensystematically diluted, and when information supplied to the president about apossible attack or any other matter under the CIA's imprimatur has been leakedto the public, both the Agency and the intelligence have become politicallyradioactive.

Such revelations have usually taken one of two forms. In the first instance,the president, it is argued, has been shielded from or has refused to readaccurate intelligence. In the second instance, the president is accused ofsecretly ordering the suppression of intelligence or of fabricating intelligenceto support his preferred policies. President Bush has engaged in both forms ofdishonesty, but he is certainly not the first president to do so. The examplesare legion.

In 1961, at the time of the invasion of the Bay of Pigs, Richard Bissell,then head of the Directorate of Operations, gained the ear of President Kennedyand assured him that elated Cubans would welcome American-supported insurgents,strew rose petals in their path, and help overthrow the Castro government.Bissell simply did not show Kennedy the estimates that said Castro had extensivepopular support and the invasion would fail.

Similarly, in May 1970, as President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissingerplotted their "incursion" into Cambodia, the Board of NationalEstimates (BNE) concluded that "an American invasion of Cambodia would failto deter North Vietnamese continuation of the war. "[9] DCI Helms failed todeliver this estimate to the White House, knowing what the BNE did not -- thatthe decision to invade had already been made. Former DCI Robert M. Gatesgeneralizes: "It has been my experience over the years that the usualresponse of a policymaker to intelligence with which he disagrees or which hefinds unpalatable is to ignore it."[10]

Examples of the distortion or fabrication of intelligence are rarer, but theydo occur. During the Vietnam War, Gen. William Westmoreland, U.S. militarycommander from 1964 to 1968, omitted from his estimate of enemy forces allCommunist guerrillas and informal local defense forces -- perhaps as many as120,000-150,000 fighters -- that another estimate indicated had been responsiblefor up to 40% of American losses. His apparent intent was to make victory inVietnam look more plausible to the American public. On March 14, 1967, DCI Helmsincluded Westmoreland's figures in an NIE going to the White House even thoughhe "knew that the figures on enemy troop strength in Vietnam provided bymilitary intelligence were wrong -- or, at any rate, quite different from CIAfigures. Yet he signed the estimate without dissent. The apparent reason,according to his biographer, was that 'he did not want a fight with themilitary, supported by [National Security Adviser Walt] Rostow at the WhiteHouse.'"[11]

Another example of the suppression or distortion of intelligence occurred in1969-70 over the issue of whether or not the Soviet SS-9 ICBM could carry threewarheads and whether those warheads could be fired at separate and distincttargets -- that is, whether or not the SS-9 carried MIRVs (multipleindependently-targetable re-entry vehicles). If true, this would perhaps havegiven the Soviet Union a first-strike capability against the United States. TheSS-9 came in four models, the first of which had its flight test on September23, 1963, and began to be deployed in the summer of 1967. All Westernintelligence agencies agreed that models one through three carried a singlewarhead, some with huge yields (in the range of 18 megatons). Disagreement aroseover model four, which seemed to carry three warheads. Whether these wereindependently targetable was in dispute.

National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and Secretary of Defense MelvinLaird contended that the fourth version of the SS-9 was a MIRVed weapon; the CIAin its NIE on the subject said that it was not. At first the CIA rejected thepressure coming from the policymakers and, in fact, added more evidence againstMIRVs to its estimate. Ultimately, however, DCI Helms removed the paragrapharguing against Soviet preparations for a first strike after "an assistantto [Laird] informed Helms that the statement contradicted the public position ofthe Secretary."[12] As it turned out, the CIA was right. The SS-9s werearmed with MRVs, not MIRVs -- that is, they could produce only a cluster ofexplosions in a single area. The Soviet Union did not deploy MIRVs until 1976,six years after the United States had done so. [13] So it was we, not they, whoaccelerated the race toward mutual assured destruction -- and did so on thebasis of fake intelligence.

When it comes to ignoring accurate CIA intelligence, the preeminent examplein the Bush administration was National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice'sindifference to al-Qaeda and her failure to ensure that the president read andunderstood the explicit warnings of an imminent surprise attack that the agencydelivered to her. As the Washington Post's Steve Coll has summarized thematter in his book Ghost Wars, "BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO STRIKE INU.S. was the headline on the President's Daily Brief presented to Bush at hisCrawford, Texas, ranch on August 6 [2001]. The report included the possibilitythat bin Laden operatives would seek to hijack airplanes. The hijacking threat,mentioned twice, was one of several possibilities outlined. There was nospecific information about when or where such an attack might occur."[14]

Slaying the Messenger

After the extent of its failure became known, and under extreme pressure fromthe public and families of the victims of 9/11, the Bush administrationreluctantly authorized the creation of a National Commission on TerroristAttacks upon the United States and permitted National Security Adviser Rice totestify before it in public. But the fix was in: The Commission was toconcentrate on "intelligence failures," not on the failure ofpolicymakers to heed the intelligence, and on the need to "reform" theCIA but not to such an extent as to damage the president's ability to blame itfor his mistakes.

On November 20, 2004, right-wing members of the House of Representativesscuttled the major recommendation of the 9/11 Commission -- namely, to providethe leader of the American intelligence community with greater authority todirect and coordinate the analyses of all 15 intelligence agencies. Reflectingthe Pentagon's interests in maintaining control over 80% of the $40 billionannual intelligence budget, Duncan Hunter (R-CA), Chairman of the House ArmedServices Committee and an ally of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, withdrewhis support. Other Republican congressmen joined him, demanding that the bill goeven further than was already the case in harassing so-called illegalimmigrants, primarily from Mexico.

The President and the Speaker of the House both said they favored enactmentof the proposed legislation, but many experienced observers thought it was allGrand Kabuki by the Republican Party, intended to make it appear that the WhiteHouse favored reform while ensuring that reform did not actually occur. Inkilling the reform bill, the Pentagon unambiguously displayed the raw politicalpower of the military-industrial-congressional complex. During October 2004,Gen. Richard B. Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, without the publicapproval of any civilian leader of the Defense Department, wrote to CongressmanHunter expressing his support for sabotaging change.

After the 9/11 attacks and the Bush administration's decision to go to warwith Iraq, the focus shifted from ignoring unwanted intelligence to activelycreating false intelligence. The critical item was the NIE of October 1, 2002,entitled "Iraq's Continuing Program for Weapons of Mass Destruction,"which became known inside the CIA as the"whore of Babylon."[15] It explicitly endorsed Vice PresidentCheney's contention of August 26, 2002 -- "We know that Saddam has resumedhis efforts to acquire nuclear weapons" -- and was signed by DCI GeorgeTenet with "high confidence." "The intelligence process,"writes CIA veteran Ray McGovern, "was not the only thing undermined. So wasthe Constitution. Various drafts of the NIE, reinforced with heavy doses of'mushroom-cloud' rhetoric, were used to deceive congressmen and senators intoceding to the executive their prerogative to declare war -- the all-importantprerogative that the framers of the Constitution took great care to reserveexclusively to our elected representatives in Congress."

In succeeding months numerous review commissions revealed that the OctoberNIE was only one of numerous failures by the truth-tellers to do what the peopleof the United States pay them to do. The Senate Intelligence Committee, the 9/11Commission, and the CIA's Iraq Survey Group under Charles Duelfer all reportedthat the CIA's so-called intelligence on Iraqi WMD was fictitious.