Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

by Chalmers Johnson

  Whatever happens, the CIA will remain first and foremost the president’s private army, officially accountable to no other branch of the government. How this could be so, why the CIA was created, what it actually does, and the ways presidents since 1947 have twisted it to their own ends remains a widely misunderstood set of topics, crucial to the waning of American democracy. In fact, the term “intelligence” has always rested uneasily in the name “Central Intelligence Agency.” There is no question that the CIA was created in 1947 on the orders of President Truman for the sole purpose of acquiring, evaluating, and coordinating information collected both through espionage and from the public record, concerning the national security of the United States. Truman was determined to prevent another surprise attack on the United States like Pearl Harbor and to ensure that all information available to the government was compiled and presented to him in a timely and usable form.

  The National Security Act of 1947 placed the CIA under the explicit direction of the National Security Council (NSC), the president’s chief staff unit—composed of appointed members not subject to congressional approval—focused on making decisions about war and peace. The CIA was given five functions, four of them dealing with the collection, coordination, and dissemination of intelligence. It was the fifth—a vaguely worded passage that allowed the CIA to “perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct”—that turned the CIA into the personal, secret, unaccountable army of the president. At least since 1953, when it secretly overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran, the CIA has often been ordered into battle without Congress having declared war, as the Constitution requires.

  Clandestine or covert operations, although nowhere actually mentioned in the CIA’s enabling statutes, quickly became the agency’s main activity. As Loch K. Johnson, one of the CIA’s most impartial congressional analysts and former chief assistant to Senator Frank Church, chairman of the post-Watergate Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, observed, “The covert action shop had become a place for rapid promotion within the agency.”7 The Directorate of Operations (DO) soon absorbed two-thirds of the CIA’s budget and personnel, while the Directorate of Intelligence limped along, regularly producing bland documents known as National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs)—summaries of intelligence gathered by all the various intelligence agencies, including those in the Department of Defense. I personally read a good many of these when I served, from 1967 to 1973, as an outside consultant to what was then known as the CIA’s Office of National Estimates. This consulting function was abolished by Kissinger and Schlesinger during Nixon’s second term precisely because they did not want outsiders interfering with their ability to tell the president what to think.8

  Meanwhile, CIA covert operations were mobilized in support of various criminal, dictatorial, or militarist organizations around the world so long as they were (or pretended to be) anticommunist. CIA operatives also planted false information in foreign newspapers and covertly fed large amounts of money to members of the Christian Democratic Party in Italy and the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, to King Hussein of Jordan, and to clients in Greece, West Germany, Egypt, Sudan, Suriname, Mauritius, the Philippines, Iran, Ecuador, and Chile. Clandestine agents devoted themselves to such tasks as depressing the global prices of agricultural products in order to damage uncooperative Third World countries, attempting to assassinate foreign leaders, and sponsoring guerrilla wars or insurgencies in places as diverse as the Ukraine, Poland, Albania, Hungary, Indonesia, China, Tibet, Oman, Malaysia, Iraq, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, North Korea, Bolivia, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Haiti, Guatemala, Cuba, Greece, Turkey, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua, to name only a few of those on the public record.9

  All this was justified by the Cold War and no one beyond a very small group inside the executive branch was supposed to know anything about most of these activities, although over the years much information about them became public. The Central Intelligence Act of 1949 modified the National Security Act of 1947 with a series of revisions that, in the words of the pioneer scholar of the CIA Harry Howe Ransom, were meant “to permit [the CIA] a secrecy so absolute that accountability might be impossible.”10 No congressional oversight of the agency in any form existed until 1974, when, in the wake of Watergate, the Church Committee exposed the CIA’s illegal domestic surveillance, its assassinations of overseas leaders, and its lying to Congress. The committee’s report led Congress to create intelligence committees in both houses, but even that modest attempt at instituting oversight procedures has been thwarted by excessive secrecy—which the CIA has managed to impose on the work of Congress meant to bring a little sunlight to the agency. Since the mid-1970s, governmental secrecy has expanded exponentially, and Vice President Dick Cheney has made it his personal crusade to try to reverse the Church Committee’s reforms.11

  The irony is that Congress created the “central” intelligence agency in 1947 to concentrate vital information in one place and ensure that it went to the president and all other officials with a need-to-know. Instead the intelligence “community” has become a hotbed of competition, turf wars, and confusion. Failure to get intelligence into the right hands had clearly been one of the reasons for the catastrophic surprise of December 7, 1941, and—despite the multibillions that went into the CIA and other intelligence units and the spread of a culture of secrecy—it would be again on September 11, 2001. Overclassification and the use of secrecy to protect political and bureaucratic careers and departmental jurisdictions have rendered the entire intelligence apparatus unable to focus on much of anything.12 To further enhance secrecy and add to the confusion, the president and the CIA have increasingly turned to completely “off-the-books” operations. The unsuccessful attempt to rig the Iraqi election of January 30, 2005, in favor of the White House’s preferred candidate, former CIA operative Iyad Allawi, by using “retired” agents, funds not appropriated by Congress, and other means is but one contemporary example of this phenomenon.13 The public learns about these operations, if it ever does, only as a result of leaks by insiders. The CIA belongs as much to the president as the Praetorian Guard once belonged to the Roman emperors.

  Regardless of what it spends most of its time doing, the CIA is still tasked with providing accurate information to the president to enable him to avoid a surprise attack and protect the nation’s security. In the foyer of the CIA’s headquarters at Langley, Virginia, is inscribed a biblical quotation: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). Loch Johnson suggests that Allen Dulles, former director of the CIA under Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, probably thought it meant, “And ye shall know the truth—if ye be me, or the president.”14 Richard Helms, former DCI under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, once maintained to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward that the early-warning function of the CIA “is everything, and underline everything.”15 But the CIA’s mandate to provide such often unrequested (and sometimes unwelcome) information to a president constitutes a potential restraint on the president’s freedom of action. It may, as in the case of the Bush administration and warnings about 9/11, threaten to totally derail his policies, particularly since such intelligence is very rarely certain or unambiguous. If anything, over the years, the powers of the director of the CIA to compel a president to read and attend to an unwanted intelligence estimate have been systematically diluted.

  When information supposedly supplied to the president about a possible attack or any other matter under the CIA’s purview is leaked to the public, both the agency and the intelligence in question tend to become politically radioactive. Such revelations have usually taken one of two forms. In the first instance, the president turns out to have been shielded from or refused to read or respond to accurate intelligence. In the second instance, t
he president secretly orders the suppression of the intelligence or has intelligence fabricated about a nonexistent danger to support his preferred policies. President Bush has engaged in both types of behavior, but he is certainly not the first president to do so.

  In 1961, at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, Richard Bissell, then head of the Directorate of Operations, gained the ear of President John F. Kennedy and assured him that elated Cubans would welcome American-supported insurgents, strew rose petals in their path, and help U.S.-based Cuban exiles overthrow the Castro government. Bissell simply did not show Kennedy estimates, also in his possession, that indicated the depth of Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s popularity, suggesting that no popular uprising would occur and that the invasion would surely fail dismally.

  Similarly, in May 1970, in the midst of the Vietnam War, as President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger plotted their “incursion” into Cambodia, the CIA’s Board of National Estimates (BNE) concluded that “an American invasion of Cambodia would fail to deter North Vietnamese continuation of the war.”16 DCI Helms did not even bother to deliver this estimate to the White House, knowing what the BNE did not—that the decision to invade had already been made and was unstoppable. Robert M. Gates, former DCI under Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, puts it this way: “It has been my experience over the years that the usual response of a policymaker to intelligence with which he disagrees or which he finds unpalatable is to ignore it.”17

  Examples of the outright distortion or fabrication of intelligence are rarer, but they have occurred. During the Vietnam War, General William Westmoreland, U.S. military commander from 1964 to 1968, omitted from his estimate of enemy forces all communist guerrillas and informal local defense forces—perhaps as many as 120,000–150,000 fighters— which another military estimate indicated had been responsible for up to 40 percent of American losses. His apparent intent was to make victory in Vietnam look more plausible. On March 14, 1967, DCI Helms included Westmoreland’s figures in an NIE going to the White House even though he “knew that the figures on enemy troop strength in Vietnam provided by military intelligence were wrong—or, at any rate, quite different from CIA figures. Yet he signed the estimate without dissent. The apparent reason, according to his biographer, was that ‘he did not want a fight with the military, supported by [National Security Adviser Walt] Rostow at the White House.’“18

  Another example of the suppression or distortion of intelligence occurred in 1969-70 over the issue of whether or not the Soviet SS-9 ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) could carry three warheads and whether those warheads could be fired at separate and distinct targets— that is, whether or not the SS-9 carried MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles). If true, this would perhaps have given the Soviet Union a first-strike capability against the United States. The SS-9 came in four models, the first of which had its initial flight test on September 23, 1963, and began to be deployed in the summer of 1967. All Western intelligence agencies agreed that models one through three carried a single warhead, some with huge yields (in the range of eighteen megatons). Disagreement arose over model four, which seemed to carry three warheads that might—or might not—have been independently targetable.

  National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird argued that the fourth version of the SS-9 was a MIRVed weapon; the CIA in its NIE on the subject claimed that it was not. At first the CIA rejected the pressure coming from the policy makers and, in fact, strengthened its evidence against MIRVs. Ultimately, however, DCI Helms removed the paragraph arguing against Soviet preparations for a first strike after “an assistant to [Secretary of Defense Laird] informed Helms that the statement contradicted the public position of the Secretary.”19 As it turned out, the CIA was right. The SS-9s were armed with MRVs (multiple reentry vehicles), not MIRVs—that is, they could produce only a cluster of explosions in a single area. The Soviet Union did not deploy MIRVs until 1976, six years after the United States had done so.20 So it was we, not they, who accelerated the nuclear arms race—and we did so on the basis of fabricated intelligence.

  When it comes to ignoring accurate CIA intelligence, the preeminent example in the Bush administration was National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice’s indifference to al-Qaeda—she also rejected warnings on the subject from officials of the departing Clinton administration—and her failure to ensure that the president read and understood the explicit warnings of an imminent surprise attack that the agency delivered to her. On August 6, 2001, in a blunt one-page analysis headlined, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” the CIA presented its President’s Daily Brief to Bush at his Crawford, Texas, ranch. According to Steve Coll of the Washington Post, “The report included the possibility that bin Laden operatives would seek to hijack airplanes. The hijacking threat, mentioned twice, was one of several possibilities outlined. There was no specific information about when or where such an attack might occur.”21

  After the extent of its failure became known, and under extreme pressure from the public and families of the victims of 9/11, the Bush administration reluctantly authorized the creation of a National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (also known as the 9/11 Commission) and permitted National Security Adviser Rice to testify before it in public. But the fix was in: the commission was constrained to concentrate on “intelligence failures” instead of the failure of policy makers to heed the intelligence that came their way, and on the need to “reform” the CIA—but not to such an extent as to damage the president’s ability to blame it for his mistakes and use it in future operations of his choice.

  After the 9/11 attacks and the Bush administration’s decision to go to war with Iraq, the focus shifted from ignoring unwanted intelligence to actively creating false intelligence that would support its regime-change war of choice. The critical item in the administration’s rush to war was the NIE of October 1, 2002, entitled “Iraq’s Continuing Program for Weapons of Mass Destruction,” which became known inside the agency as the “whore of Babylon.”22 It explicitly endorsed Vice President Cheney’s contention of August 26, 2002—”We know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons”—and was signed by DCI George Tenet with “high confidence.” “The intelligence process,” wrote CIA veteran analyst Ray McGovern, “was not the only thing undermined. So was the Constitution. Various drafts of the NIE, reinforced with heavy doses of ‘mushroom-cloud’ rhetoric, were used to deceive congressmen and senators into ceding to the executive their prerogative to declare war—the all-important prerogative that the framers of the Constitution took great care to reserve exclusively to our elected representatives in Congress.”

  In succeeding months, numerous review commissions revealed that the October NIE was only one of numerous failures by the government’s supposed truth tellers to do what the people of the United States pay them to do. The Senate Intelligence Committee, the 9/11 Commission, and the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group, under Charles Duelfer, all reported that the CIA’s intelligence on Iraqi WMD was largely fictitious. Even more dangerous for the White House, these reports suggested that much of this intelligence had been manufactured by neoconservative officials in the Pentagon long eager to invade Iraq.

  In particular, the third-highest-ranking civilian defense official in the Pentagon, Douglas Feith, had set up the Office of Special Plans, devoted to going through all the raw intelligence available to the various spy agencies and ferreting out items that offered possible evidence of (or hints of evidence of) links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

  It was this effort to get around both the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, neither of whose analysts had found any links or ties between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, that eventually led some officials to break ranks and charge publicly that the war against Iraq was in fact undercutting the “war on terrorism.” The most prominent of these whistle-blowers were Richard A. Clarke, the White House’s coordinator for
counterterrorism in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, who published a tell-all book, Against All Enemies, and the CIA’s Michael Scheuer, who, in his book Imperial Hubris and in a letter to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees entitled “How Not to Catch a Terrorist,” charged: “In the CIA’s core, U.S.-based Bin Laden operational unit today there are fewer Directorate of Operations officers with substantive expertise on al-Qaeda than there were on 11 September 2001.”23

  But there were others. In July 2003, after over twenty years of service, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski resigned her air force commission and left the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia department to reveal how Feith’s Iraq-war-planning unit had manufactured scare stories about Iraq’s weapons and its ties to terrorists.24 Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, with experience in several African countries and on the National Security Council, was asked by the CIA to go to the Saharan nation of Niger to investigate allegations that it had secretly sold uranium to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, charges that President Bush had endorsed with his famous “sixteen words” in his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address. When the Bush administration continued to retail intelligence on the subject of Niger “yellowcake” that it knew to be forged and false, Wilson went public with an op-ed in the New York Times in which, among other things, he wrote, “Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”25 In retaliation, top administration officials conspired to “out” his wife, an undercover CIA agent working on nuclear proliferation and weapons of mass destruction. This was clearly meant to be a warning to any other officials or former officials who might care to leak or come forward with information damaging to the administration.