Neo-Conned! Again

by D Liam O'Huallachain

  Without Fear or Favor … or with Lots of Both?

  Sorry to say, CIA analysis can no longer be assumed to be honest – to be aimed at getting as close to the truth as one can humanly get. Now, I can sense some of you readers smirking. I can only tell you – believe it or not – that truth was the currency of analysis in the CIA in which I was proud to serve. But that was B.C. (before Casey).

  Aberrations like the Tonkin Gulf cave-in notwithstanding, the analysis directorate before Casey was widely known as a place in Washington where one could normally go and expect a straight answer unencumbered by any political agenda. And we were hard into some very controversial - often critical – national security issues. It boggles my mind how any President, and particularly one whose father headed the CIA, could expect to be able to make informed judgments on national-security and foreign-policy issues without the ability to get candid, straightforward intelligence analysis.

  In 2004, the vice president insisted on having “some additional, considerable period of time to look [for weapons of mass destruction] in all the cubbyholes and ammo dumps … where you'd expect to find something like that.” (“Cubbyholes?” The vice president's very vocabulary betrays a tabula rasa on military matters.) Speaking at Georgetown University in 2004, George Tenet put it this way: “Why haven't we found the weapons? I have told you the search must continue and it will be difficult.” Difficult indeed. But now, the expensive, prolonged search has found nothing. Mistake or willful deception, the jig is up. Tenet, mercifully, has gone away - at least until he starts pushing his book. (No wish to steal his thunder, but a good source tells me Tenet's book says, “Condi made me do it.”)

  The alarming thing is that Cheney is now looking in the cubbyholes of Iran.

  Blaming (and “Fixing”) the Intelligence Community

  The current administration approach is, as we've seen, to place all blame on the intelligence community – and then to insist upon bureaucratic “reform.” But the problem is not organizational diagrams; it is lack of integrity and professionalism. Lt. Gen. William Odom, one of the country's most highly respected and senior intelligence officers, now retired, put a useful perspective on last summer's politically driven rush into wholesale intelligence reform. In a Washington Post op-ed on August 1, 2004, he was typically direct in saying, “No organizational design will compensate for incompetent incumbents.” I believe he would be the first to agree that the adjectives “careerist and sycophantic” should be added to “incompetent,” for incompetence often is simply the handmaiden of those noxious traits. For the surest way to produce incompetent incumbents is by promoting folks more interested in career advancement than in performing professionally and speaking truth to power. And a major part of the problem is the failure of the 9/11 Commission and Congress to hold accountable those whose misfeasance or malfeasance led to the disasters of 9/11 and Iraq.

  Now, more than two years and tens of thousands of lives after the invasion of Iraq, I marvel at the ease with which the White House has succeeded in getting Congress to scapegoat the intelligence community. All it takes is “a few good men” – like Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman (and former marine) Pat Roberts, living out the Marine Corps motto, Semper Fi - always faithful.

  But faithful to what? Faithful, first and foremost, to the party, in what - let us be frank – has become to all intents and purposes a one-party state. That pejorative label, you may recall, is what we used to pin on the dictatorship in the U.S.S.R., where there were no meaningful checks and balances. There has been a dangerous slide in that direction in the U.S.

  What is required is character and integrity, not a re-jiggered organizational chart. Those who sit atop the intelligence community need to have the courage to tell it like it is – even if that means telling the President his so-called “neoconservative” tailors have sold him the kind of suit that makes him a naked mockery (wardrobe by the imaginative designer, Ahmad Chalabi).

  Enter John Negroponte

  A major step in intelligence “reform” came on February 17, 2005, with the President's announcement that he had selected John Negroponte for the newly created post of director of national intelligence and his subsequent confirmation in the post by the Senate on April 21.

  Is Negroponte up to being a fearless director of national intelligence? Will he be able to overcome decades of being a super-loyal “team player,” implementing whatever policies the White House thrust upon him? Is there a chance he will summon the independence to speak to the President without fear or favor – the way we were able to do in the sixties and seventies?

  It is, of course, too early to tell. Suffice it to say at this point that there is little in his recent government service to suggest he will buck his superiors, even when he knows they are wrong – or even when he is aware that the course they have set skirts the constitutional prerogatives of the elected representatives of the American people in Congress. Will he tell the President the truth, even when the truth makes it clear that administration policy is failing – as in Iraq? We shall have to wait and see.

  The supreme irony is that President Bush seems blissfully unaware that the corruption that Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and he have fostered in the intelligence community – politiciza-tion that seems certain to continue, intelligence community reform or no – has frittered away an indispensable resource for the orderly making of foreign policy. Institutional politicization at the CIA is now virtually complete. It pains me to see how many senior careerists at CIA and elsewhere have made a career (literally) of telling senior officials in the White House and elsewhere what they think the White House wants to hear.

  If that is the template John Negroponte chooses, and if he contents himself with redrawing organizational diagrams, the security of our country is in even greater danger. If, on the other hand, Negroponte intends to ensure that he and his troops speak truth to power – despite the inevitable pressure on them to trim their analytical sails to existing policy – he has his work cut out for him. At CIA, at least, he will have to cashier many careerists at upper management levels and find folks with integrity and courage to move into senior positions. And he will have to prove to them that he is serious. The institutionalization of politicization over the last two dozen years has so traumatized the troops that the burden of proof will lie with Negroponte.

  His prior career and lack of experience in managing a large organization offer slim hope that he is up to that task. Let us remember, though, that even at the bottom of Pandora's box lies hope. Negroponte is likely to be faced immediately with strong challenges. From what can be discerned of Bush's intentions vis-à-vis Iran, for example, it appears altogether likely that the challenge of speaking truth on this issue will be Negroponte's first acid test. Let us hope that a combination of integrity and self-interest will win the day. Awareness of what happened to the hapless George Tenet may give Negroponte pause before saluting smartly and marching off in his footsteps. One can only hope that Negroponte will forget that Tenet earned a Medal of Freedom for his servility.

  Show Me Your Company …

  Negroponte is best known to most of us as the ambassador to Honduras with the uncanny ability to ignore human rights abuses so as not to endanger congressional support for the attempt to overthrow the duly elected government of Nicaragua in the mid-1980s. His job was to hold up the Central-American end of the Reagan administration's support for the Contra counterrevolutionaries, keeping Congress in the dark when that was deemed necessary.

  Stateside, Negroponte's opposite number was Elliot Abrams, then assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, whose influence has recently grown by leaps and bounds in the George W. Bush administration. Convicted in October 1991 for lying to Congress about illegal support for the Contras, Abrams was pardoned, along with former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger (also charged with lying to Congress), former National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane, and three CIA operatives. Indeed, their par
dons came cum laude, with President George H. W. Bush stressing that “the common denominator of their motivation … was patriotism.” Such “patriotism” has reached a new pinnacle in his son's administration, as a supine Congress no longer seems to care very much about being misled.

  The younger President Bush completed Elliot Abrams's rehabilitation in December 2002 by bringing him back to be his senior adviser for the Middle East, a position for which the self-described neoconservative would not have to seek congressional confirmation. Immediately, his influence with the President was strongly felt in the shaping and implementation of policy in the Middle East, especially on the Israel-Palestine issue and Iraq. In January of this year, the President made him his deputy assistant for national security affairs and deputy national security advisor for global democracy strategy, where he can be counted on to overshadow – and out-maneuver – his boss, the more mild-mannered Stephen Hadley.

  It is a safe bet Abrams had a hand in recruiting his erstwhile partner-incrime, so to speak, for director of national intelligence. There is little doubt, in my opinion, that he passed Negroponte's name around among neoconser-vative colleagues to secure their approval. On the day Negroponte was nominated, FOX News Channel commentator Charles Krauthammer granted him a dubious distinction. Krauthammer noted that Negroponte “was ambassador to Honduras during the Contra War … and he didn't end up in jail, which is a pretty good attribute for him. A lot of others practically did.”

  Organizational “Reform” Won't Cut It

  No amount of reform, however – not even the promotion of pedigreed loyalists from the Reagan era – can remedy what is essentially the root of the problem. Over and over again we hear the plaintive plea for better information sharing among the various intelligence agencies – and for a single individual, now Negroponte, to make it happen. We keep hearing this plea because it furthers the notion that the poor intelligence on Iraq was essentially an “accident,” that it was a function of bad intelligence work, and is to be remedied by intelligence reform. The truth is that the main problem was corrupted intelligence work, caused not by a broken system but by men and women with broken character, most of whom knew exactly what they were doing.

  The NIE on Iraq, for instance, was out-and-out dishonest. It provided the cover story for a war launched for a twin purpose: (1) to gain an enduring strategic foothold in the oil-rich Middle East, and (2) to eliminate any possible threat to Israeli dominance of the region. While these aims are generally consistent with longstanding American policy objectives, no previous U.S. administration thought it acceptable to use war to achieve them.

  And, on Occasion, Candor Slips Through

  These, of course, were not the reasons given to justify placing U.S. troops in harm's way, but even the most circumspect senior officials have had unguarded moments of candor. For example, when asked in May 2003 why North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz responded, “Let's look at it simply …. [Iraq] swims on a sea of oil.” Basking in the glory of “Mission Accomplished” shortly after Baghdad had been taken, he also admitted that the Bush administration had focused on weapons of mass destruction to justify war on Iraq “for bureaucratic reasons.” It was, he added, “the one reason everyone could agree on” – meaning, of course, the one that could successfully sell the war to Congress and the American people. And in another moment of unusual candor – this one before the war – Philip Zelikow, a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 2001 to 2003, more recently executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now a senior State Department official, discounted any threat from Iraq to the U.S. Instead, Zelikow pointed to the danger that Iraq posed to Israel as “the unstated threat – a threat that dare not speak its name … because it is not a popular sell.” In this connection, General Brent Scowcroft recently noted that the President has in fact been “mesmerized” by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and that Sharon has Bush “wound around his little finger.”

  The (real) twin purpose for the war leaps out of neoconservative literature and was widely understood from Canada to Europe to Australia. Australian intelligence, for example, boldly told the government in Canberra that the focus on weapons of mass destruction was a red herring to divert attention from the “more important reasons” behind the neocon-servatives' determination to launch this war of choice. It strains credulity to suppose that what was clear in Canberra could have escaped the attention of senior intelligence officials in America. They knew it all too well. And, sadly, they proved all too eager to serve up to their masters what was clearly wanted – an ostensible casus belli: “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq. Sycophancy has no place in intelligence work, and certainly not in matters of war and peace.

  It bears repeating that the unforgivable sin in intelligence analysis is telling the policymaker what he/she wants to hear – justifying with cooked “intelligence” what they have already decided to do. And that, in a nutshell, is what happened on Iraq. CIA credibility has taken a major hit, and it is far from certain that the agency can recover. It used to be that, in such circumstances, one would look to Congress to conduct an investigation. But the highly partisan intelligence committees of Congress have given new meaning to the word “oversight.”

  Character Counts

  It is important to understand, as we follow the continuing “reform” process, that the real culprit is a failure of leadership in both the executive branch and Congress, not a structural fault.

  I served under nine CIA directors, four of them at close remove. And I watched the system work more often than malfunction. Under their second hat as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), those directors already had the necessary statutory authority to coordinate effectively the various intelligence agencies and ensure that they did not hoard information. All that was needed were: (1) a strong leader with integrity, courage, a willingness to knock noses out of joint when this was unavoidable, and no felt need to be a member of the “President's team”; and (2) a President who would back him up when necessary. Sadly, it has been over 24 years since the intelligence community has had a director – and a President – fitting that bill.

  When President-elect Jimmy Carter asked Adm. Stansfield Turner, then-commander of the Sixth Fleet, to be director of central intelligence, Turner shared his concern at assuming responsibility for the entire intelligence community absent unambiguous authority to discharge those responsibilities. An executive order signed by Carter delineating and strengthening the authorities implicit in the National Security Act of 1947 was all Turner needed. And on those few occasions when that did not suffice (let's say the FBI was caught hoarding intelligence information useful to CIA analysts), Turner would not hesitate to go directly to the President for his help in rectifying the situation. And the problem would be fixed.

  No shrinking violet, Admiral Turner was not overly concerned about putting noses out of joint; he didn't need the job. Unlike his more timid successors, he would have been a match for Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, the consummate insider. If Turner were to learn that the Pentagon – or the vice president's growing empire, for that matter – had set up small “intelligence” offices of their own – like the Office of Special Plans, there would have been hell to pay. Turner would have asked Carter to put a quick end to it. It is no secret that both George Tenet and Porter Goss have been obsequious toward Rumsfeld, and Negroponte's comments at his nomination hearings strongly suggest that he will follow suit. A friend who knows Rumsfeld, Goss, and Negroponte well has quipped, “Goss will lead Negroponte down the garden path, and Rumsfeld will eat Negroponte's lunch.”

  The analysts in the trenches will still be there, of course, and some will keep trying to tell it like it is – whatever the hierarchy above them might look like at any given time. In the before-Casey days, at least, we had career protection for doing so. And so we did. Anything short of that would have brought the equivalent of professional censure and ostracism by
our own colleagues. And if, for example, a senior policymaker were to ask a briefer if there were good evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and we knew that serious analysts we trusted thought not, we would simply say, “No.”

  Danger to Civil Liberties Grows

  One important reality that gets lost in all the hand wringing about problems in sharing intelligence among agencies is the fact that the CIA and the FBI are separate and distinct entities for very good reason – first and foremost, to avoid infringement on the civil liberties of American citizens. So a red flag should go up when, under the intelligence reform legislation, the director of national intelligence will have under his aegis not only the entire CIA but also a major part of the FBI. Under existing law, the CIA has no police powers and its operatives are generally enjoined against collecting intelligence information on American citizens. Since citizens' constitutional protections do not sit atop the list of CIA priorities and its focus is abroad, it pays those protections little heed. In contrast, FBI personnel, for judicial and other reasons, are trained to observe those protections scrupulously and to avoid going beyond what the law permits. That accounts, in part, for why FBI agents at the Guantánamo detention facility judged it necessary to report the abuses they witnessed. Would they have acted so responsibly had they been part of a wider, more disparate environment in which the strict guidelines reflecting the FBI's ethos were not universally observed?