William Rivers Pitt
Interview: 27-Year CIA Veteran by Will Pitt
Thu Jun 26 21:52:35 2003
208.152.73.31

Interview: 27-Year CIA Veteran by Will Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Interview

Thursday 26 June 2003

Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years, serving seven Presidents. He is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an outreach ministry in the inner city of Washington.

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PITT: Could you give me some background regarding who you are and whatwork you did with the CIA?

McG: I was a graduate student in Russian studies when I got interested in the Central Intelligence Agency. I was very intrigued that there was one central place to prevent what happened at Pearl Harbor from happening again. I had been commissioned in the US Army, so I needed to do my two years service there, but wound up down in Washington DC. I took a job with the CIA in 1963, and it was what it was made out to be.

In other words, I was told that if I were to come on as an analyst of Soviet foreign policy, when I sat down in the morning, in my In-Box would be a bunch of material from open sources, from closed sources, from photography, from intercepts, from agent reports, from embassy reports, you name it. It would be right there, and all I had to do was sift through it and make some sense out of it. If I had an important enough story, I would write it up for the President the next morning. That seemed too good to be true, but you know what? It was true, and it was really heady work.

PITT: Which Presidents did you serve?

McG: I started with President Kennedy and finished with President Bush, the first President Bush. That would make seven Presidents.

PITT: What was your area of expertise with the CIA?

McG: I was a Soviet Foreign Policy analyst. I also worked on Soviet Internal Affairs when I first came on, but then my responsibilities grew and I became responsible for a lot of different parts of the world. During the 1980s I was briefing the Vice President and Secretaries of State and Defense, the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. I did this every other morning. We worked in teams of two, and on any given morning depending on schedules, I would be hitting two or perhaps three of those senior officials.

PITT: With all of your background, and with all the time that you spent in the CIA, can you tell me why you are speaking out now about the foreign policy issues that are facing this country?

McG: It’s actually very simple. There’s an inscription at the entrance to the CIA, chiseled into the marble there, which reads, “You Shall Know The Truth, And The Truth Shall Set You Free.” Not many folks realize that the primary function of the Central Intelligence Agency is to seek the truth regarding what is going on abroad and be able to report that truth without fear or favor. In other words, the CIA at its best is the one place in Washington that a President can turn to for an unvarnished truthful answer to a delicate policy problem. We didn’t have to defend State Department policies, we didn’t have to make the Soviets seem ten feet tall, as the Defense Department was inclined to do. We could tell it like it was, and it was very, very heady. We could tell it like it was and have career protection for doing that. In other words, that’s what our job was.

When you come out of that ethic, when you come out of a situation where you realize the political pressures to do it otherwise – you’ve seen it, you’ve been there, you’ve done that – and your senior colleagues face up to those pressures as have you yourself, and then you watch what is going on today, it is disturbing in the extreme. You ask yourself, “Do I not have some kind of duty, by virtue of my experience and my knowledge of these things, do I not have some kind of duty to speak out here and tell the rest of the American people what’s going on?”

PITT: Do you feel as though the ‘truth-telling’ abilities of the CIA, the ability to come in with data without fear of reprisal or career displacement, has been abrogated by this administration?

McG: It has been corroded, or eroded, very much. A lot of it has to do with who is Director. In the best days, under Colby for example, or John McCone, we had very clear instructions. I myself, junior as I was in those days, would go up against Henry Kissinger and tell it like we thought it was. I was not winning any friends there, by any stretch, but I came back proud for having done my job. That was because Colby told me to do that, and I worked directly for him. I also worked directly for George Bush I, and he, I have to say to his great credit, acted the same way. He was very careful to keep himself out of policy advocacy, and he told it like it was.

So to watch what is going on now, and to see George Tenet - who has all the terrific credentials to be a staffer in Congress, credentials which are antithetical to being a good CIA Director - to see him sit behind Colin Powell at the UN, to see him give up and shade the intelligence and cave in when his analysts have been slogging through the muck for a year and a half trying to tell it like it is, that is very demoralizing, and actually very infuriating.

PITT: On September 26 2001, George Bush II went down to the CIA, put an arm around Tenet, and said that he had a “report” for the American people, that we have the best possible intelligence thanks to the good people at the CIA. We’ve come a fair piece down the road since then, and if you read through the news these days, you get the definite sense that the Bush administration is attempting to lay blame for the fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, to lay blame for that at the feet of the CIA. Furthermore, by all appearances, the months of reports the administration put out about Iraq’s weapons capabilities are not turning out to be accurate. To no small extent, it appears that there is a scapegoating process taking place here. What is your take on this?

McG: It is interesting that you would go back to September 26, because that was a very key performance on the part of our President. Here was an agency that was created expressly to prevent another Pearl Harbor. That was why the CIA was created originally in 1947. Harry Truman was hell-bent on making sure that, if there were little pieces of information spread around the government, that they all came to one central intelligence agency, one place where they could be collated and analyzed, and the analysis be given to policy people.

So here is September 11, the first time since Pearl Harbor that this system failed. It was worse than Pearl Harbor. More people were killed on September 11 than were killed at Pearl Harbor, and where were the pieces? They were scattered all around the government, just like they were before Pearl Harbor. For George Bush to go out to CIA headquarters and put his arm around George Tenet and tell the world that we have the best intelligence services in the world, this really called for some analysis, if you will.

My analysis is that George Bush had no option but to keep George Tenet on as Director, because George Tenet had warned Bush repeatedly, for months and months before September 11, that something very bad was about to happen.

PITT: There was the August 6 2001 briefing…

McG: On August 6, the title of the briefing was, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US,” and that briefing had the word “Hijacking” in it. That’s all I know about it, but that’s quite enough. In September, Bush had to make a decision. Is it feasible to let go of Tenet, whose agency flubbed the dub on this one? And the answer was no, because Tenet knows too much about what Bush knew, and Bush didn’t know what to do about it. That’s the bottom line for me.

Bush was well-briefed. Before he went off to Texas to chop wood for a month like Reagan did in California, he was told all these things. He didn’t even have the presence of mind to convene his National Security Council, and say, “OK guys, we have all these reports, what are we going to do about it?” He just went off to chop wood.

PITT: Now why is that? There are people in America who believe this kind of behavior was deliberate – the administration was repeatedly warned and nothing was done about those warnings. It smacks of deliberate policy for a lot of people. This is the current World Heavyweight Champion of conspiracy theories.

McG: In this, I am an adherent of the charitable interpretation, and that comes down to gross incompetence. They just didn’t know what to do. Look at who was in charge there. You have Condoleezza Rice. She knows a lot about Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, but she has no idea about terrorism. She had this terrorism dossier that Clinton NSC director Sandy Berger left behind, and by her own admission she didn’t get to it. “It was still on my desk when September 11 happened,” she said. They didn’t take this thing seriously.

Now, you can probably fault George Tenet for not being careful about crying wolf. In other words, you cry wolf often enough and in an undifferentiated way, then that is not a real service to the President. You really have to say, “Mr. President, you know I warned you about this two months ago, but now this is really serious.” You have to grab him by the collar and say, “We’ve got to do something about this.” Tenet didn’t do that. So I attribute it not to conspiracy theories, but to lack of experience, a kind of arrogance that says, “Who cares what Sandy Berger thinks,” and just gross incompetence.

Now ‘gross incompetence’ is not a nice thing to say about a President, but he had no experience in this at all, and the people he surrounded himself with also had no experience.

PITT: Given all of this – the August 6 briefing, the other terrorism warnings, the big hug given to Tenet by Bush on September 26, and the fact that Tenet was kept on because he knew too much about what the Bush administration was aware of before September 11 – one gets the sense that Tenet has been relegated to the position of lapdog. This is a frightful position for the Director of CIA to occupy.

McG: It wouldn’t be the first time, and I think regarding Tenet the term ‘lapdog,’ unfortunately, is apt. For example, here were rather courageous CIA analysts under terrific pressure from the likes of Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz to establish a contact or connection between al Qaeda and Iraq. They resisted this ever since 9/11, not out of any unwillingness to believe it, but simply because there was no evidence to establish it. To their credit, they held the line, and were supported by Brent Scowcroft of all people, who very courageously spoke out and said that evidence is “scant.”

Now here’s George Tenet, when push comes to shove on February 5 at the UN, sitting right behind Colin Powell like a potted plant, as if to say the CIA and all his analysts agreed with what Colin Powell was about to say about contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq. That was incredibly demoralizing for all my colleagues. That’s the kind of thing that will be a very noxious influence on their morale and their ability to continue the good fight.

PITT: Is there a great deal of unrest and unease within the CIA at this point?

McG: Not a great deal, but an incredible amount of unease and disarray. There are a lot of people who feel as strongly as I do about integrity. It was not some sort of an extra thing with us. We took it seriously, and we had a big advantage, of course. We could tell it like it was. To the degree that esprit de corps exists, and I know it does among the folks we talk to, there is great, great turmoil there. In the coming weeks, we’re going to be seeing folks coming out and coming forth with what they know, and it is going to be very embarrassing for the Bush administration.

PITT: How much of a dent does this unease, and this inability to stand up to those who have put this atmosphere in place, how much of a dent does this put in our ability to defend this country against the very real threats we face?

McG: A big dent, and that of course is the bottom line. What you need to have is rewards for competence and not for being able to sniff which way the wind is blowing. You need to have people rewarded for good performance and not for political correctness. You have to have people who are serious about collecting and analyzing this material. The way the analysis was played fast and loose with, going back to last spring, is just incredible. It requires a whole re-do of how the whole national security setup is arranged, to have intelligence come up and have it treated with the kind of respect and the kind of consideration it is due.

PITT: Let’s bottom-line it here. In the situation regarding the question of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq, where does the fault lie for the manner in which this has all broken down? Was it an intelligence failure on the part of the CIA, or are we talking about the Bush administration misusing both that institution and the information it provided?

McG: It’s both, really. Let’s take the chemical and biological stuff first. At the root of this, as I reconstruct it, is what I call ‘Analysis by Subtraction.’ Let’s take a theoretical example: Iraq had listed 50,000 liters of sarin nerve gas in 1995. The UN is known to have destroyed 35,000 liters of this. Subsequently, US bombing destroyed another 5,000 liters of this. Therefore, QED, they have 10,000 liters of sarin.

There’s no consideration given here to shelf life of sarin, what would be necessary to keep sarin active, where it would be stored, how it would be stored, the correct temperature and all that. Instead, it is, “We think they had this and here is the inventory. We think we destroyed this” or “We know we destroyed that, and so the difference, we assume, is there”

You don’t start a war on an assumption, and with the sophisticated collection devices the US intelligence apparatus has, it is unconscionable not to have verified that so they could say, “Yes sir, we know that it’s there, we can confirm it this and that way.” Instead, as I said, it was analysis by subtraction. We had the inventory here, and we know we destroyed that, so they must have this. Analysis like that, I wouldn’t rehire the analyst who did it if he were working for me. That’s the biological and chemical part.

To be quite complete on this, it encourages me that the analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency - who share this ethic of trying to tell the truth, even though they are under much greater pressure and have much less career protection because they work for Rumsfeld - to their great credit, in September of last year they put out a memo saying there is no reliable evidence to suggest that the Iraqis have biological or chemical weapons, or that they are producing them.

PITT: Was this before or after Vice President Cheney started making personal visits to the CIA?

McG: It was all at the same time. This stuff doesn’t all get written in one week. It was all throughout the spring and summer that this stuff was being collected. When the decision was made last summer that we will have a war against Iraq, they were casting about. You’ll recall White House Chief of Staff Andy Card saying you don’t market a new product in August. The big blast-off was Cheney’s speech in Nashville, I think it was Nashville anyway, on August 26. He said Iraq was seeking materials for its nuclear program. That set the tone right there.

They looked around after Labor Day and said, “OK, if we’re going to have this war, we really need to persuade Congress to vote for it. How are we going to do that? Well, let’s do the al Qaeda-Iraq connection. That’s the traumatic one. 9/11 is still a traumatic thing for most Americans. Let’s do that.”

But then they said, “Oh damn, those folks at CIA don’t buy that, they say there’s no evidence, and we can’t bring them around. We’ve tried every which way and they won’t relent. That won’t work, because if we try that, Congress is going to have these CIA wimps come down, and the next da

• Interview: 27-Year CIA Veteran by Will Pitt (Cont'd) — William Rivers Pitt, Thu Jun 26 22:08
• PITT: So what is the alternative? (Cont'd) — William Rivers Pitt, Thu Jun 26 22:11