Neo-Conned! Again

by D Liam O'Huallachain

Iraq: Prime Target from the Start

  Was the intelligence bad? It was worse than bad; it was corrupt. But what most Americans do not realize is that the intelligence adduced had nothing to do with President Bush's decision to make war on Iraq.

  On January 30, 2001, just ten days after his inauguration, when George W. Bush presided over the first meeting of his National Security Council (NSC), he made it clear that toppling Saddam Hussein sat atop his to-do list, according to then Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neil sworn in earlier that day. (The Treasury Secretary is by statute a full member of the NSC.) O'Neil was thoroughly confused: why Saddam, why now, and why was this central to U.S. interests, he asked himself. The NSC discussion did not address these questions. Rather, at the invitation of then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet showed a grainy overhead photo of a factory in Iraq that he said might produce either chemical or biological material for weapons. Might. There was nothing – in the photo, or in other intelligence sources – to support that conjecture, but it was just what Doctor Rice ordered. The discussion then turned from unconfirmed intelligence, to which targets might be best to begin bombing in Iraq. Tenet had shown his mettle. The group was off and running; the planning began in earnest. And not only for war. O'Neil says that two days later the NSC reconvened to discuss Iraq, and that the deliberations included not only planning for war, but also for how and with whom to divide up Iraq's oil wealth.

  Saddam and al-Qaeda

  Seven months later, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 raised the question of possible Iraqi complicity, and on 9/12 White House terrorism adviser Richard Clarke experienced rather crass pressure directly from the President to implicate Saddam Hussein. To his credit, Clarke resisted. This did not prevent the White House from playing on the trauma suffered by the American people and falsely associating Saddam Hussein with it. Following Clarke's example, CIA analysts also held their ground for many months, insisting that there was no good evidence of such an association. Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor to the first President Bush and chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board until just a few months ago, supported them by stating publicly that evidence of any such connection was “scant,” while Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was saying it was “bulletproof.” And President Bush said flat out a year after 9/11, “You cannot distinguish between al-Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.” The 9/11 Commission has now put the lie to those claims, but the PR campaign has been enduringly effective. According to a recent poll, most Americans have not been able to shake off the notion, so artfully fostered by the administration and the compliant media, that Saddam Hussein played some role in the events of 9/11. (This, even though the President himself, in a little noticed remark on September 17, 2003, admitted for the first and only time that there was “no evidence Hussein was involved” in the 9/11 attacks.)

  Weapons of Mass Destruction

  Unable to get enough intelligence analysts to go along with the carefully nurtured “noble lie” that Iraq played a role in 9/11, or even that operational ties existed between Iraq and al-Qaeda, the administration ordered up a separate genre of faux intelligence – this time it was “weapons of mass destruction.” This was something of a challenge, for in the months before 9/11, Condoleezza Rice and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell had said publicly that Saddam Hussein posed no security threat. On February 24, 2001, for example, Powell said, “Saddam Hussein has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.” And just six weeks before 9/11, Condoleezza Rice told CNN: “… let's remember that his [Saddam's] country is divided, in effect. He does not control the northern part of his country. We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.” Conveniently, the U.S. media pressed the delete button on these statements.

  And, as is well known, after 9/11 “everything changed” – including apparently Saddam's inventory of “weapons of mass destruction.” We were asked almost immediately to believe that WMD wafted down like manna from the heavens for a soft landing on the sands of Iraq. Just days after 9/11, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld began promoting the notion that Iraq might have weapons of mass destruction and that “within a week, or a month, Saddam could give his WMD to al-Qaeda.” (This is an early articulation of the bogus “conjunction of terrorism and WMD,” now immortalized in the minutes recording Richard Dearlove's report to Tony Blair ten months later, as the way the attack on Iraq would be “justified.”) And it was not long before the agile Rice did a demi-pirouette of 180 degrees, saying, “Saddam was a danger in the region where the 9/11 threat emerged.” By the summer of 2002, the basic decision for war having long since been taken, something persuasive had to be conjured up to get Congress to authorize it. Weapons of mass deception, as one wag called them, were what the doctor ordered. The malleable Tenet followed orders to package them into a National Intelligence Estimate, which Colin Powell has admitted was prepared specifically for Congress.

  What about the CIA? Sadly, well before the war, truth took a back seat to a felt need on the part of then-CIA Director George Tenet to snuggle up to power – to stay in good standing with a President, vice president, and secretary of defense, all of whom dwarfed Tenet in pedigree, insider experience, and power; and all hell-bent and determined to implement “regime change” in Iraq.

  So What Really Happened?

  In our various oral and written presentations on Iraq, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) colleagues and I took no delight in exposing what we saw as the corruption of intelligence analysis at CIA. Nothing would have pleased us more than to have been proven wrong. As it turned out, we did not know the half of it. Last year's Senate Intelligence Committee report on prewar intelligence assessments on Iraq showed that the corruption went far deeper than we had thought. Both Senator Pat Roberts and the latest presidential panel have insisted, disingenuously, that no intelligence analysts complained about attempts to politicize their conclusions. What outsiders do not realize is that each of those analysts was accompanied by a “minder” from Tenet's office, minders reminiscent of the ubiquitous Iraqi intelligence officials that Saddam Hussein insisted be present when scientists of his regime were interviewed by UN inspectors. The hapless Democrats on Roberts's committee chose to acquiesce in his claim that political pressure played no role – this despite the colorful testimony by the CIA's ombudsman that never in his 32-year career with the agency had he encountered such “hammering” on CIA analysts to reconsider their judgments on operational ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda. It is no surprise that the President's own commission parroted the Roberts's committee's see-no-evil findings regarding politicization, even though the commission's report is itself replete with examples of intelligence analysts feeling the political heat.

  Last July, George Tenet resigned for family reasons the day before the Senate committee issued its scathing report. He left behind an agency on life support – an institution staffed by careerist managers and thoroughly demoralized analysts embarrassed at their own naiveté in having believed that the unvarnished truth was what they were expected to serve up to their masters in the agency and the White House.

  The Senate report and now the presidential commission's findings have performed masterfully in letting the White House off the hook. With copious instances of unconscionable intelligence missteps to draw from, it was, so to speak, a slam dunk – hardly a challenge to pin all the blame on intelligence. George had supplied the petard on which they hoisted him – and the intelligence community. The demonstrated malfeasance and misfeasance are a sharp blow to those of us who took pride in working in an agency where our mandate – and our orders – were to speak truth to power; an agency in which we enjoyed career protection from retribution from powerful policymakers who wished to play fast and loose with intelligence; an agency whose leaders in those days usually had the independence, int
egrity, and courage to face down those who would have us sell out in order to “justify” policies long since set in train.

  Off-Line “Intelligence”: The Pentagon's Office of Special Plans

  The various committees and commissions assessing intelligence performance on Iraq avoided investigating the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans (OSP), whose de facto chain of command, from division chief to commander-in-chief, was a neocon dream come true: from Abram Shulsky to William Luti to Douglas Feith to Paul Wolfowitz to Donald Rumsfeld to Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. Journalist Seymour Hersh rightly calls this a stovepipe. It is also a self-licking ice cream cone. The lower end of this chain paid for and then stitched together bogus “intelligence” from the now thoroughly discredited Ahmad Chalabi and his Pentagon-financed Iraqi National Congress. Then Shulsky, Luti, and Feith cherry-picked “confirmation” from unevaluated reports on Iraq from other agencies, and served up neatly packaged, alarming sound-bites to “Scooter” Libby, Cheney's chief of staff. Whereupon Libby would scoot them right in to Cheney for him to use with the President, the Congress, and the media. But what about the CIA and the rest of our $40 billion intelligence establishment? Tenet and his crew were seen as far too timid, not “forward leaning” enough. The attitude in the world of the OSP was a mixture of chutzpah and naiveté: after our cakewalk into Baghdad, let the intelligence analysts eat cake.

  Since this was all done off-line, and not, strictly speaking, as part of the activities of the “intelligence community,” it could conveniently be ignored in the various inquiries into intelligence performance on Iraq1 – effectively letting the Defense Department off the hook, while putting the spotlight on CIA and other intelligence professionals. Also ignored was the OSP-like operation1 of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office and its role in providing “intelligence,” possibly including the famous forgeries – in which neocon operative Michael Ledeen reportedly played a key role – regarding Iraq's alleged attempts to acquire “yellowcake” uranium.

  Even though quintessential Republican loyalist Pat Roberts characterized the activities of the Office of Special Plans as possibly “illegal,” official responses to queries about the rogue OSP have ducked the issue. Some, like Senator John Kyl2 and Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy secretary of defense, maintain that the OSP provided a valuable service by exercising initiative and challenging the assumptions of the intelligence community. Cherry-picking intelligence, according to them, is simply taking a hard look at the intelligence community's analysis and “going against the grain” in an effort to think creatively and critically about conclusions made by analysts. The problem is that the OSP was pushing the same wrong conclusion vis-à-vis the danger posed by Iraq that those most politicized within the intelligence community were pushing. The OSP – like Tenet and Co. – ignored the analysts' conclusions in favor of feeding the administration what it wanted to hear. Call it “thinking outside the box” if you like; it was also acting out of bounds.

  The other response from the Pentagon is equally disingenuous. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith have argued that OSP activity was merely an effort by two individuals to assist the Department of Defense in reviewing intelligence on Iraq in order to “assist [Feith] in developing policy recommendations.” There is, of course, a multi-billion dollar Defense Intelligence Agency with the charter to do just that, but, to their credit, DIA analysts could not always be counted on to cook the intelligence to the Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Feith recipe. And, while Rumsfeld keeps repeating that the OSP assisted Feith in “developing policy recommendations,” it is no secret that the policy – “regime change” by force in Iraq – came well before the “intelligence.” The OSP simply worked hard to provide the nation's leadership with “evidence” that such a policy should be pursued. Seymour Hersh and others1 have reported credibly on this effort by the OSP to discredit the analysis of the intelligence community and to push its own, much more sinister picture of Iraq's capabilities and intentions.

  Having to contend with Feith-based “intelligence” from the OSP and its powerful patrons greatly increased political pressure on intelligence analysts throughout the community to come up with conclusions that would “justify” policy decisions. Worst of all, George Tenet lacked the courage to stand up to Feith, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld. Neither would Porter Goss, Tenet's successor, have the backbone to go to the mat with Rumsfeld (or his own patron, Dick Cheney) on the role of the OSP, as was made clear when this whole question arose during Goss's nomination hearings. It was clear, for that matter, that Goss would not go to the mat over anything else either.

  The Cancer of Careerism

  Within the intelligence community, the ethos in which fearless intelligence analysis prospered began to evaporate big-time in 1981, when CIA Director William Casey and his protégé Robert Gates in effect institutionalized the politicization of intelligence analysis. Casey saw a Russian under every rock and behind every “terrorist,” and summarily dismissed the idea that the Soviet Union could ever change. Gates, a former analyst of Soviet affairs, knew better, but he quickly learned that parroting Casey's nonsense was a super-quick way to climb the career ladder. Sadly, many joined the climbers, but not all. Later, as CIA director, Gates adhered closely to the example of his avuncular patron Casey. In an unguarded moment on March 15, 1995, Gates admitted to Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus that he had watched Casey on “issue after issue sit in meetings and present intelligence framed in terms of the policy he wanted pursued.”

  In the early eighties, after Casey became director, many bright analysts quit rather than take part in cooking intelligence-to-go. In contrast, those inspired by Gates's example followed suit and saw their careers prosper. By the mid-nineties senior and mid-level CIA managers had learned well how to play the career-enhancing political game. So it came as no surprise that director John Deutch (1995–96) encountered little opposition when he decided to cede the agency's world-class imagery analysis capability – lock, stock, and barrel – to the Department of Defense. True, all of Deutch's line deputies sent him a memo whimpering their chagrin over his giving away this essential tool of intelligence analysis. Only his statutory Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, thought it a great idea. (Tenet set the tone even in those days, by repeatedly referring to his boss – often in his presence – as “the great John Deutch.”)

  Deutch went ahead and gave imagery analysis away, apparently out of a desire to ingratiate himself with senior Pentagon officials. (No other explanation makes sense. He had made no secret of his ambition to succeed his good friend and former colleague William Perry as soon as the latter stepped down as secretary of defense.) But still more shameless was Deutch's order to agency subordinates to help the Pentagon cover up exposures to chemicals that accounted, at least in part, for the illnesses of tens of thousands of Gulf-War veterans. Sadly, with over a decade's worth of the go-along-to-get-along ethos having set in among CIA managers, Deutch could blithely disregard the whimpers, calculating (correctly) that the whimperers would quietly acquiesce.

  Corruption is contagious and has a way of perpetuating itself. What we are seeing today is largely the result of senior management's penchant for identifying and promoting compliant careerists. Deutch did not stay long enough to push this trend much farther; he did not have to. By then functionaries like John McLaughlin, who was Tenet's deputy director, and whose meteoric rise began with Gates, had reached very senior positions. In September 2002, when Tenet and McLaughlin were asked to cook to Cheney's recipe a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's putative “weapons of mass destructive,” they were able to tap a number of willing senior co-conspirators, and what emerged was by far the worst NIE ever produced by the U.S. intelligence community. Several of the key managers of that estimate were originally handpicked by Gates for managerial positions. These include not only McLaughlin but also National Intelligence Officer Larry Gershwin, who gave a pass to the infamous “Curveball” – the main source of the “intelligence”
on Iraq's biological weapons program – and Alan Foley who led those who mishandled analysis of the celebrated (but non-nuclear-related) aluminum tubes headed for Iraq and the forged documents about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Niger. More recently, a rising star who grew up in this ambience explained to me, “We were not politicized; we were just leaning forward, given White House concern over Iraq.” Far from being apologetic, he actually seemed to have persuaded himself that “leaning forward” is not politicization!

  Leaning Forward … or Backward

  Since then McLaughlin and Tenet have been accused by senior CIA officers of the operations directorate of suppressing critical information that threw strong doubt on the reliability of Curveball and his “biological weapons trailers.” That highly dubious information was peddled by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell – with artists' renderings on the big screen, no less – at the UN on February 5, 2003.

  If the accusers are telling the truth, what could McLaughlin and Tenet have been thinking in failing to warn Powell? Clearly, someone should ask them – under oath. Perhaps it was what intelligence officers call “plausible denial,” one of the tricks of the trade to protect senior officials like Powell. (He could not be accused of lying about what he didn't know.) But could CIA's top two officials have thought the truth would not eventually get out? It seems likely that their thinking went something like this: when Saddam falls and the Iraqis greet our invading forces with open arms and cut flowers, who at that victorious point will be so picayune as to pick on the intelligence community for inaccuracies like the absence of the “biological weapons trailers?” I don't know where they got the part about the open arms and cut flowers – perhaps it came from the Office of Special Plans.