Neo-Conned! Again

by D Liam O'Huallachain

  What Casey Begat

  Casey begat Gates. And Gates begat not only John McLaughlin but also many others now at senior levels of the agency – notably the malleable John Helgerson, CIA's inspector general. No one who worked with these three functionaries for very long was surprised when Helgerson acquiesced last summer in the suppression of his congressionally mandated report on intelligence and 9/11. In December 2002 Helgerson was directed by Congress to determine “whether and to what extent personnel at all levels should be held accountable” for mistakes that contributed to the failure to prevent the attacks on 9/11. After 18 months, his report was finally ready in the spring of 2004, and it identified individual officers by name. But many of those officers had records of the umpteen warnings they had provided the White House before 9/11, not to mention painful memories of the frustration they felt when they and Richard Clarke were ignored. It would have been far too dangerous to risk letting that dirty linen hang out on the line with the approach of the November election.

  To his credit, knowing the report was ready, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) asked Helgerson to release it to the committee. In an August 31, 2004, letter, Helgerson told Hoekstra that then-Acting Director John McLaughlin had broken with usual practice and told him not to distribute his report. The tenacious chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts, called the postponement “uncommon but not abnormal.” His meaning is clearer than it might seem. Indeed, it is not abnormal. The whole episode was just further confirmation that Roberts takes his orders from the White House, that checks and balances are out the window, and that people like Helgerson can still be counted upon to play along to get along. Helgerson's report has still not been released. And it may be some time before it is, for the CIA Inspector General's job jar is full to overflowing. Managing inquiries into alleged CIA involvement in torture and “extraordinary renderings,” and now into L' Affaire Curveball as well, Helgerson is a busy man. But don't hold your breath; these things take time.

  Defining Politicization

  An unusually illustrative first-hand example of politicization of intelligence became available in relation to the recent nomination of former Under Secretary of State John Bolton to be U.S. ambassador to the UN, with the declassification and release to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee of email exchanges involving his office. In one of those emails, obtained in April by The New York Times, Frederick Fleitz, then principal aide to Bolton, proudly told his boss that he had instructed State Department intelligence analyst Christian Westermann on whose prerogative it properly is to interpret intelligence. Said Fleitz (who we now know was a CIA analyst on loan to Bolton), “I explained to Christian that it was a political judgment as to how to interpret this data [on Cuba's biological warfare capability], and the intelligence community should do as we asked” (emphasis mine).

  Were it not for the numbing experience of the past four years, we intelligence professionals, practicing and retired, would be astonished at the claim that how to interpret intelligence data is a political judgment. But this is also the era of the Rumsfeld maxim: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” and the Cheney corollary: “If you build it, they will come” – meaning that intelligence analysts will come around to any case that top administration officials may build. All it takes is a few personal visits to CIA headquarters and a little arm-twisting, and the analysts will be happy to conjure up whatever “evidence” may be needed to support Cheneyesque warnings that “they” – the Iraqis, the Iranians, it doesn't matter – have “reconstituted” their nuclear weapons development program.

  George Tenet, however docile, could not have managed the cave-in on Iraq all by himself. Sadly, he found willing collaborators in the generation of CIA managers who bubbled to the top under Casey and Gates. In other words, Tenet was the “beneficiary” of a generation of malleable managers who prospered under CIA's promotion policies starting in the early eighties.

  Why dwell on Gates? Because, a careerist in both senses of the word, he bears the lion's share of responsibility for institutionalizing the corruption of intelligence analysis. It began big-time when he was chief of the analysis directorate under Casey. Since this was well known in intelligence circles in late 1991 when President George H. W. Bush nominated Gates to be CIA director, all hell broke loose among the rank and file. Former Soviet division chief Mel Goodman had the courage to step forward to give the Senate Intelligence Committee chapter and verse on how Gates had shaped intelligence analysis to suit his masters and his career. What followed was an even more intense controversy than that precipitated in April by the equally courageous Carl Ford, former director of intelligence at the State Department, who spoke out strongly and knowledgeably against John Bolton's attempts to skew intelligence to his own purposes.

  At the hearings on Gates, Goodman was joined at once by a long line of colleague analysts who felt strongly enough about their chosen profession to put their own careers at risk by testifying against Gates's nomination. They were so many and so persuasive that, for a time, it appeared they had won the day. But the fix was in. With a powerful assist from George Tenet, then staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee, members approved the nomination. Even so, 31 senators found the evidence against Gates so persuasive that, in an unprecedented move, they voted against him when the nomination came to the floor.

  “Centrifuge/Subterfuge Joe”

  A corrupted organization also breeds people like “centrifuge/subterfuge Joe.” Although it was clear to us even before we created VIPS in January 2003 that the intelligence on Iraq was being cooked to the recipe of policy, not until the Senate report of July 2004 did we learn that the recipe included outright lies. We had heard of “Joe,” the nuclear weapons analyst in CIA's Center for Weapons Intelligence and Arms Control, and had learned that his agenda was to “prove” that the infamous aluminum tubes sought by Iraq were to be used for developing nuclear weapons. We did not know that he and his CIA associates deliberately cooked the data – including that from rotor testing ironically called “spin tests.”

  “Who could have believed that about our intelligence community, that the system could be so dishonest,” wondered the normally soft-spoken David Albright, a widely respected authority on Iraq's moribund nuclear program. We in VIPS share his wonderment. I am appalled – and angry. You give 27 years of your professional life to an institution whose main mission – to get at the truth – you are convinced is essential for orderly policy making, and then you find it has been corrupted. You realize that your former colleagues lacked the moral courage to rebuff efforts to enlist them as accomplices in gross deception – deception that involved hoodwinking our elected representatives in Congress into giving their blessing to an unnecessary war. Even Republican stalwart Senator Pat Roberts has said that, had Congress known before the vote for war what his committee has since discovered, “I doubt if the votes would have been there.”

  Catering to “The Powers That Be”

  It turns out that only one U.S. analyst had met with the Iraqi defector appropriately codenamed “Curveball” – the sole source of the scary fairy tale about alleged mobile biological weapons factories. This analyst, in an email to the deputy director of CIA's Task Force on Weapons of Mass Destruction, raised strong doubts regarding Curveball's reliability before Colin Powell highlighted his claims at the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003.

  I became almost physically ill reading the cynical response from the deputy director of the Task Force: “As I said last night, let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn't say, and the powers that be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he's talking about.”

  This brought to consciousness a painful flashback to early August 1964. My colleague analysts working on Vietnam knew that reports of a second attack on U.S. destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf were spurious, but were prevented from reporting that in the next mor
ning's publication. The director of current intelligence “explained” that President Johnson had decided to use the non-incident as a pretext to escalate the war in Vietnam and added, “We do not want to wear out our welcome at the White House.” So this kind of politicization is not without precedent – and not without similarly woeful consequences. Still, in those days it was the exception, rather than the rule.

  George Tenet's rhetoric about “truth” and “honesty” in his valedictory last July 2004 has a distinctly Orwellian ring. Worse still, apparently “Centrifuge/Subterfuge Joe,” the above-mentioned deputy director, and their co-conspirators get off scot-free. Senator Roberts has stressed, “It is very important that we quit looking in the rearview mirror and affixing blame and, you know, pointing fingers.” And, besides, they were only doing what they knew Roberts's patrons in the White House wanted. And, if they were cashiered, would they sing? John McLaughlin, who became acting director when Tenet left, willingly played his part. He told the press that he saw no need to dismiss anyone as a result of what he said were honest, limited mistakes. But what about the dishonest ones? It is enough to make one wonder what it would take to get fired. Tell the truth?

  Forecast: Mushroom Cloudy

  As we have seen, the standard line on why things went so wrong is that administration officials were taken in by intelligence on Iraq that turned out to be wrong. Senator Roberts put it concisely when he spoke with reporters in March: “If you ask any member of the administration, 'why did you make that declarative statement?' … basically, the bottom line is they believed the intelligence and the intelligence was wrong.”

  Again, you would not know it from our domesticated mainstream press, but this does not stand up to close scrutiny. Take the ubiquitous mushroom clouds that, we were warned, could come to us as the “first evidence” that Iraq had a nuclear weapon. On October 7, 2002, the President pulled out all stops in a major speech in Cincinnati. Associating Saddam Hussein with 9/11 and claiming that he would be “eager” to use a nuclear weapon against us, Bush warned, “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof – the smoking gun – that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” Condoleezza Rice parroted that line the next day, and the Pentagon spokeswoman did likewise on October 9. It was no coincidence that Congress voted on October 10 and 11 to authorize war.

  Those of us who worked with former CIA deputy director John McLaughlin know that he is an amateur magician. In the fall of 2002 he had a chance to learn from a real pro. For it was Vice President Dick Cheney who conjured up the mushroom clouds. Indeed, it was Cheney, not Saddam Hussein, who “reconstituted” Iraq's nuclear weapons development; and he did it out of thin air.

  There was nothing but forgery, fallacy, and fairy tales to support key assertions in Cheney's speech of August 26, 2002. The most successful midwife of fairy tales, Ahmad Chalabi, later bragged about facilitating the spurious claims of WMD in Iraq. He said, “Saddam is gone …. What was said before is not important …. We are heroes in error.”

  Cheney and the Son-in-Law

  Cheney's August 26 address provided the recipe for how the intelligence was to be cooked in September. The speech, in effect, provided the terms of reference and conclusions for a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) commissioned at the behest of Congress a few weeks later and completed on October 1, 2002. That NIE, nick-named “The Whore of Babylon,” has been (aptly) criticized as one of the worst ever prepared by U.S. intelligence. But it did the job for which it was produced; i.e., to deceive Congress out of its constitutional prerogative to declare or otherwise authorize war. During September 2002, the intelligence community dutifully conjured up evidence to support Cheney's alarmist stance. The vice president claimed:

  … We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other sources, we've gotten this from the firsthand testimony of defectors – including Saddam's own son-in-law, who was subsequently murdered at Saddam's direction. Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.

  That statement was highly misleading. Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, had been in charge of Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological, and missile programs before he defected in 1995. But what Kamel told us then was that all that weaponry had been destroyed at his command in the summer of 1991. And everything else he told us checked out, including particularly valuable information on Iraq's earlier biological weapons programs. Now we know he was telling us the truth on the 1991 destruction of weapons, as well.

  Many in the intelligence community knew of Cheney's playing fast and loose with the evidence and the administration's campaign to deceive Congress. Most just held their noses; sadly, no one spoke out.

  Cheney's misleading reference to Kamel calls to mind the unbridled chutzpah in vogue during the march to war. This was no innocent mistake. Even if the vice president's staff had neglected to show him the debriefing report on Kamel, the full story became public well before the invasion of Iraq. A veteran reporter for Newsweek obtained the transcript of the debriefing in which Kamel said bluntly, “All weapons – biological, chemical, missile, nuclear – were destroyed.” Newsweek broke the story on February 24, 2003, more than three weeks before the war began. But this news struck a discordant note amid the cheerleading for war, and the mainstream media suppressed it. Even now that Kamel's assertion has been proven correct, the press has not corrected the record.

  The NIE: First None; Then Cooked

  That there was no National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's “weapons of mass destruction” before Cheney's preemptive speech of August 26, 2002, speaks volumes. The last thing wanted by the policymakers running the show from the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President was an intelligence estimate that might complicate their plans for “regime change” in Iraq. Since it was abundantly clear that no estimate was wanted, none was scheduled. This was clearly the course George Tenet preferred, and his lieutenants were happy to acquiesce. It got them all off the horns of a distasteful dilemma – namely, having to choose between commissioning an honest estimate that would inevitably call into serious question the White House/Pentagon ostensible rationale for war on Iraq, or ensuring that an estimate was cooked to the recipe of policy – that is, massaged to justify an earlier decision for war.

  As noted above, forcing “regime change” in Iraq – intelligence or no, legal or no – was a top priority from day one of the George W. Bush administration. The attacks of 9/11 were a fillip to military planning to invade Iraq after the brief sideshow in Afghanistan. On August 29, 2002, after three months of war exercises conducted by the Pentagon, President Bush approved “Iraq goals, objectives and strategy,” and the juggernaut started rolling in earnest. We know this from a Pentagon document titled “Operation IRAQI FREEDOM Strategic Lessons Learned,” a report prepared in August 2003 for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and stamped SECRET. The report was obtained by the Washington Times in late summer 2003, and Rowan Scarborough – no liberal he – wrote the story. Remarkably, it got virtually no play in other media.

  Until September 2002, George Tenet was able to keep his head way down, in the process abnegating his responsibility as principal intelligence adviser to the President. Tenet probably calculated (by all indications correctly) that the President would be just as pleased not to have complications introduced after he had already decided for war and set military deployments in motion. And so the director of central intelligence, precisely at a time when he should have been leaning hard on intelligence analysts throughout the community to prepare an objective estimate, danced away from doing one until it was forced on him. He then made sure that the estimate's findings were the kind that would be welcome in the White House and Pentagon.

  In mid-September 2002, as senior officials began making their case for war, it occurred to them that they needed to do what George H. W. Bush did before the first Gulf War; i.e., seek the endorsement of Congress. Senator Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) alerted Senator Bob Graham (D-Fl
a.), then-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, to the fact that no National Intelligence Estimate had been written. Awakened from his sleep, watchdog Graham wrote to Tenet requesting an NIE. Tenet asked the White House, and got the go-ahead – on one condition: that the estimate's judgments had to parallel those in Cheney's August speech. To his discredit, Tenet saluted and immediately chose a trusted aide, Robert Walpole, to chair the estimate and do the necessary. Walpole had just the pedigree. In 1998 he had won Donald Rumsfeld's favor by revising an earlier estimate to exaggerate the strategic threat from countries such as North Korea. The key conclusions (since proven far too alarmist) of that National Intelligence Estimate met Rumsfeld's immediate needs quite nicely, greasing the skids for early deployment of a multi-billion-dollar, unproven antiballistic missile system.

  Aiming to Please

  Walpole came through again in September 2002 – this time on Iraq, and in barely three weeks (such estimates normally take several months). An honest National Intelligence Estimate on “Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction” would not have borne that title, but rather would have concluded that there was no persuasive evidence of “continuing programs.” But that, of course, was not the answer desired by those who had already decided on war. Thus, a much more ominous prospect was portrayed, including the “high-confidence” (but erroneous) judgments that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was reconstituting its program to develop nuclear weapons.

  Although those widely publicized judgments differed sharply with the statements of senior intelligence and policy officials the year before (a highly curious fact that U.S. media ignored), they dovetailed nicely with Cheney's claims. In an apologia released a year later by the Central Intelligence Agency, Stuart Cohen, another Gates protégé and Walpole's immediate boss as acting head of the National Intelligence Council, contended that the writers were “on solid ground” in how they reached their judgments; and, defying credulity, some of those involved still make that argument.