Mark Follman
SPOOKED BY THE WHITE HOUSE
Wed Nov 12 00:09:37 2003
64.140.158.175

SPOOKED BY THE WHITE HOUSE
Mark Follman
http://www.southerncrossreview.org/28/follman.htm

A CIA veteran says a growing faction of the U.S. intelligence community is furious over the way the administration corrupted the system -- and that the nation's security is at grave risk.

July 18, 2003 | Late last week the White House sought to close the books on the Iraq-Niger-uranium debacle, with President Bush officially pronouncing CIA director George Tenet responsible for the intelligence blunder. At the same time, the president reaffirmed his "absolute confidence" in Tenet and the rest of the agency.

But according to a former CIA officer, the politicization of U.S. intelligence has devastated many in the field -- and dangerously weakened our country's security.

"We're hearing from dozens of [intelligence] people. A lot of them are very demoralized," says Ray McGovern, a 27-year CIA veteran who worked as an agency analyst under seven presidents, from Kennedy to the first President Bush. "The cardinal sin in this business is to cook intelligence to the recipe of high policy," he says.

McGovern is a member of the "steering group" of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of retired spooks, some highly decorated, which has been speaking out for several months about a dangerous fundamental breakdown in the U.S. intelligence system -- a system, McGovern asserts, that must remain free of White House meddling if it is to play its vital role in protecting the nation's security. VIPS has published a series of articles and open letters to the White House; its latest letter to President Bush on Monday denounced the administration's "campaign of deceit" in driving the nation to war, and demanded Vice President Dick Cheney's immediate resignation in light of his central role -- particularly Cheney's allegedly deliberate use of the fraudulent Niger-uranium report to sell Congress on the war. The letter also called on Bush to appoint an independent committee to investigate the intelligence breakdown, and to allow U.N. weapons inspectors back into Iraq posthaste, for the sake of U.S. credibility.

The White House has scrambled to lay the blame on the CIA's doorstep, but McGovern, though he has no love for Tenet, says Tenet is only one part of a much larger problem -- one that ultimately extends into the upper reaches of the Pentagon and the White House. Although Tenet formally took responsibility for including the faulty Niger-uranium data in a crucial National Intelligence Estimate report in September 2002, McGovern says it's Condoleezza Rice who is ultimately responsible for the intelligence information that makes it into the president's State of the Union address. Nor does the buck stop with Rice: The pressure to cook the books came from the top and pervaded the administration. McGovern believes that only the White House and the vice president's office could exert the kind of intense pressure necessary to cement bogus intelligence information into the ultimately authoritative NIE report -- and keep it there through the string of drafts leading up to a prime-time presidential speech.

By distorting the truth and corrupting America's intel system, says McGovern, spineless agency leaders and a White House with its finger on the scales have not just demoralized the CIA and other agencies, they have thrown the nation into considerable danger. Without an intelligence community that's consistently motivated to serve up objective information, "the president has nowhere to turn to find out real answers," he says.

Tenet himself began fighting back on Wednesday, during a closed hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, where he told a senator that a White House official pressured him to include the specious Niger-uranium report against his better judgment. On Thursday MSNBC quoted an anonymous source saying that Tenet "reluctantly" fingered National Security Council member Robert Joseph during the hearing.

VIPS, which includes roughly 30 members from across the civilian and military intelligence spectrum, from the FBI and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, to the CIA and Department of Defense, has been warning that America's intelligence system was in trouble for months. In a February 2003 article, McGovern wrote of the grave dangers of a politicized intelligence community: "The integrity of the intelligence process is one casualty. But the real losers are the young men and women we send into battle, and whose names we later chisel into a wall."

The group claims no ideology or partisan agenda, only the desire to uphold the raison d'être of the CIA and its peer agencies: providing essential, objective information to policymakers in its mission to prevent enemy attacks on the United States. According to McGovern, the group feels an affinity with the organization Veterans for Common Sense, where VIPS currently publishes its reports. VIPS steering group members, however, have made their voice heard through mainstream media outlets as well: The former director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis, William Christison, spoke out in the Washington Post in April 2002; and Patrick Eddington, a military imagery analyst at the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center for almost nine years, has contributed Op-Ed pieces to numerous publications including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Times, and is a regular television news commentator.

McGovern himself is currently a full-time co-director of the Servant Leadership School, a faith-based community outreach program in Washington, D.C. Salon spoke with him from Washington on Wednesday, as the White House continued to try to brush aside the Niger-uranium report scandal.

The VIPS letter to President Bush on July 14 charges that Vice President Cheney's office led a "campaign of deceit" that drove the nation to war, and calls for Cheney's immediate resignation. What ultimately makes the case against Cheney?

The most egregious crime committed here was the use of evidence known to be fraudulent, which purported that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger for its nuclear program. This is different from having a body of evidence that's susceptible to varying interpretation. A forgery is a forgery.

The vice president's office had commissioned Ambassador Joseph Wilson [in February 2002] to go to Niger and look into the matter, and he came back and told them the information was no good. So if this trip was taken at the behest of the vice president's office, it strains credulity beyond the breaking point to think that when the ambassador got back to report his findings, the vice president's office said, 'Actually, we're not interested in that any longer, so don't tell us what you found out.'

Then there's the fact that Cheney launched the [pro-war] campaign on Aug. 26, 2002, with a strong speech that went far beyond what the evidence allowed, in saying that the Iraqis had restarted their nuclear program. Cheney was way out in front of everybody else, particularly Colin Powell. On March 16, 2003, as a sort of coda to this, he alleged that Iraq had in fact reconstituted its nuclear program, and that the CIA and others agreed with him on this. False. They hadn't.

Why is it imperative that Cheney resign immediately?

I can't think of anywhere in government where honesty is more important than the intelligence business. Intelligence analysts need to operate on the working assumption that they're seeking truth. When they find it, they analyze it the way they think the truth leads, and then they serve it up to policymakers in that form.

It's up to policymakers what they do with the fruits of these efforts. When analysts see it being distorted, it's incredibly demoralizing. It leads to the conclusion, "Maybe I better not serve up the truth anymore, maybe I should serve up what I know they want to hear." When that becomes the case, the country is in considerable danger. If intelligence analysis is prostituted like that and is no longer objective, the president has nowhere to turn to find out the real answers to his questions.

Have you gotten any response from the White House to the letter?

No, we haven't. We'd like to have one, but we're not surprised: After all, Rep. Waxman of California wrote a letter to the president back on March 17 -- he has a lot more status than VIPS -- and he's still received no response from the White House. His letter was a very bitter one, saying, "Look, Mr. President, in September and early October your people lied to me about this nuclear threat, and on the strength of that lie, I voted for war. I want you to tell me how that could've happened."

Aside from the "steering group," who are the people behind VIPS? How many are there, and is it just CIA?

We're a movement that's growing; the current count is 30. The open letter to Bush on Monday has sparked an amazing amount of interest, which is really encouraging, and affirming. We're not just CIA; we have intelligence veterans from across the spectrum: FBI, DIA [the Defense Intelligence Agency, part of the Pentagon], Army Intelligence and INR [Bureau of Intelligence and Research, from the State Department]. Yesterday I had a National Security Agency person call me and say, "Hey, I noticed you don't have anybody from NSA, count me in."

Having left the CIA a decade ago, how are you able to speak for the current sentiment inside the agency, or inside the greater U.S. intelligence community, about all this? Who are you talking with, and hearing from?

We're hearing from dozens of people. The sad part is that we're hearing from midlevel analysts and even lower-level journeymen who are slogging away in the intelligence trenches trying to find the truth and tell it. Unfortunately, in the decades since William Casey and Bobby Gates were the CIA's directors, there've been more careerists -- malleable folks who sniff the wind to find out which direction it's blowing, and trim their sails accordingly. So now you have some people at relatively senior levels who've bubbled to the top by knowing the "correct" answers to the questions they know are on policymakers' minds. Whereas these people were a complete exception in our time, the proportion has grown.

When we retired from the agency, and by that I mean the VIPS steering group, people knew who we were and what we stood for, and the levels at which we operated -- basically the most senior levels of both the military and civilian intelligence communities. We enjoy a certain reputation for integrity, and that's the premier value in intelligence work. So when people see that value being played with fast and loose, they need somewhere to turn. They need people who know the business, who know how much of a sin this is.

So how widespread is this current rancor inside the intelligence community?

A lot of people are very demoralized. And those who aren't, frankly, are ipso facto suspect. The cardinal sin in this business is to cook intelligence to the recipe of high policy; the raison d'être for a place like the CIA is to have one place in government which can operate without fear or favor, which can speak truth to power. Where the president can go and say, "Look, I want the straight scoop here. Forget about the State Department's policies, forget about what Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Perle are saying, tell me what you really think." If the president doesn't have that, he's missing an incredibly valuable ingredient in policymaking.

The current situation is, by definition, a huge problem for the intelligence community. The people not at all demoralized right now, by and large, occupy senior-level positions. It's a sad commentary, because leadership is the key. George Tenet is very malleable and likes to be a team player. Witness what he did on Feb. 5: He sat himself down behind Colin Powell as Powell served up this embroidery of intelligence information before the U.N. Security Council, and Tenet sat there like a potted plant, as if to indicate that the CIA stands -- or sits -- behind everything the secretary of state is saying.

That was an incredibly demoralizing gesture for folks in the CIA who've resisted tremendous pressure ever since 9/11 to prove a link between Iraq and 9/11. There's no evidence of that, and these people, to their great credit, said, "Sir, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to write something I don't believe." So here's Tenet sitting behind Powell, and Powell's drawing a picture of al-Qaida operatives in Iraq. Sure, there were a couple there, but what Powell didn't say was they were in a place that was not controlled by Saddam's government. [The small Ansar al-Islam militant group, which fought Saddam from its enclave in northern Iraq until its fighters were killed or expelled during the war, has been linked to al-Qaida.] So the evidence used to "prove" this link was fraudulent from the get-go. And these analysts had to watch this on TV, with Tenet sitting right behind Powell as he's telling this cooked-up story.

What's your feeling about the intel group installed by the Pentagon, the Office of Special Plans?

It's a technique used by some very convinced policy officials when they want a certain answer to an intelligence question, and when they can't get it from the duly established organizations, they aren't above setting up their own shop. They needed a little group to come up with the "correct" answers, so they created this outlying group of non-specialists, gave them some information where they knew what the conclusions were supposed to be, and what do you know? They came up with the right conclusions.

The administration knew long before the war that the Iraq-Niger connection was bogus -- it was struck from the speech Bush gave in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002. Given your knowledge of the CIA's inner workings, how could something so flagrant possibly make it into a presidential State of the Union address three months later?

It's very clear to me how: Condoleezza Rice has actually told us how it happened. Her explanation says the evidence was in the National Intelligence Estimate prepared last August and September on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- which is true. The NIE is by far the most authoritative pronouncement, not only by the CIA, but by the entire intelligence community. It's very carefully done. This story about Iraq trying to get uranium from Niger was in there -- this was evidence long since disproved, and yet someone insisted it be included in the document. The State Department was so shocked by this, they put in a footnote saying that in their view, the information was garbage. Rice says the footnote appeared on Page 55 or something like that, so that nobody paid any attention to it.

So the real question is, how did that information get into the NIE last fall? The reality is that the vice president's office knew that it was spurious -- but the vice president had led the charge on Aug. 26, saying Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, and there wasn't a shred of evidence of that. So they dusted off this forgery and peddled it on the Hill to get Congress to vote for war. Since the NIE was in progress at that time, they insisted it be included despite [objections] at the State Department and the Department of Energy.

So around Christmastime, here's this drafter of the State of the Union speech, whom Condoleezza Rice instructs to draft a couple of paragraphs about WMD in Iraq, and the drafter says, "Where do I get that?" and she says, "Well, consult the NIE." So the damage had already been done with the NIE report itself. Condi should've known better with this. The key question is, who allowed it to stand in that report? It's exactly the kind of pressure that folks who are malleable managers do not have the guts to resist. The senior person in charge of the NIE bowed to the pressure that came from the White House, and presumably from the vice president's office, so that the report would support what the vice president had already said. Cheney set the terms on Aug. 26, and who's