William Rivers Pitt
Interview: 27-Year CIA Veteran by Will Pitt (Cont'd)
Thu Jun 26 22:08:44 2003
208.152.73.31

Interview: 27-Year CIA Veteran by Will Pitt (Cont'd

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 day they’ll undercut us. How about these chemical and biological weapons? We know they don’t have any nuclear weapons, so how about the chemical and biological stuff? Well, damn. We have these other wimps at the Defense Intelligence Agency, and dammit, they won’t come around either. They say there’s no reliable evidence of that, so if we go up to Congress with that, the next day they’ll call the DIA folks in, and the DIA folks will undercut us.”

So they said, “What have we got? We’ve got those aluminum tubes!” The aluminum tubes, you will remember, were something that came out in late September, the 24th of September. The British and we front-paged it. These were aluminum tubes that were said by Condoleezza Rice as soon as the report came out to be only suitable for use in a nuclear application. This is hardware that they had the dimensions of. So they got that report, and the British played it up, and we played it up. It was front page in the New York Times. Condoleezza Rice said, “Ah ha! These aluminum tubes are suitable only for uranium-enrichment centrifuges.”

Then they gave the tubes to the Department of Energy labs, and to a person, each one of those nuclear scientists and engineers said, “Well, if Iraq thinks it can use these dimensions and these specifications of aluminum tubes to build a nuclear program, let ‘em do it! Let ‘em do it. It’ll never work, and we can’t believe they are so stupid. These must be for conventional rockets.”

And, of course, that’s what they were for, and that’s what the UN determined they were for. So, after Condoleezza Rice’s initial foray into this scientific area, they knew that they couldn’t make that stick, either. So what else did they have?

Well, somebody said, “How about those reports earlier this year that Iraq was trying to get Uranuim from Niger? Yeah…that was pretty good.” But of course if George Tenet were there, he would have said, “But we looked at the evidence, and they’re forgeries, they stink to high heaven.” So the question became, “How long would it take for someone to find out they were forgeries?” The answer was about a day or two. The next question was, “When do we have to show people this stuff?” The answer was that the IAEA had been after us for a couple of months now to give it to them, but we can probably put them off for three or four months.

So there it was. “What’s the problem? We’ll take these reports, we’ll use them to brief Congress and to raise the specter of a mushroom cloud. You’ll recall that the President on the 7th of October said, “Our smoking gun could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” Condoleezza Rice said exactly the same thing the next day. Victoria Clarke said exactly the same thing on the 9th of October, and of course the vote came on the 11th of October.

Don’t take my word for it. Take Henry Waxman’s word for it. Waxman has written the President a very, very bitter letter dated the 17th of March in which he says, “Mr. President, I was lied to. I was lied to. I was briefed on a forgery, and on the strength of that I voted for war. Tell me how this kind of thing could happen?” That was March 17. He hasn’t received a response from the White House yet.

That’s the way it worked, and you have to give them credit. These guys are really clever. It worked.

PITT: We were talking a little while ago about Andy Card and marketing wars in August, and you stated that the decision to make war in Iraq was made in the summer of 2002. General Wesley Clark appeared on a Sunday talk show with Tim Russert on June 15, and Clark surprisingly mentioned that he was called at his home by the White House on September 11 and told to make the connection between those terrorist attacks and Saddam Hussein. He was told to do this on the day of the attacks, told to say that this was state-sponsored terrorism and there must be a connection. What do you make of that?

McG: That is really fascinating. If you look at what he said, he said, “Sure, I’ll say that. Where’s the evidence?” In other words, he’s a good soldier. He’s going to do this. But he wanted the evidence, and there was no evidence. Clark was not only a good soldier, but a professional soldier. A professional soldier, at his level at least, asks questions. When he found out there was no evidence, he didn’t say what they wanted him to say.

Contrast that with Colin Powell, who first and foremost is a good soldier. But when he sees the evidence, and knows it smells, he will salute the President and brief him anyway, as he did on the 5th of February.

PITT: There was a recent Reuters report which described Powell being given a draft of his February 5 UN statements by Scooter Libby and the Rumsfeld boys. Powell threw it across the room, according to Reuters, and said, “I’m not reading this. This is bullshit.”

McG: I can see it happening. Powell was Weinberger’s military assistant for a couple of years, and I was seeing Weinberger every other morning in those years. I would see Powell whenever I went in to see Weinberger, and so I used to spend 15 minutes with him every other morning, just kind of reassuring him that I wasn’t going to tell his boss anything he didn’t need to know. Not only that, but we come out of the same part of the Bronx. He was a year ahead of me. He was ROTC and so was I. He was in ROTC at City College and became Colonel of Cadets and head of the Pershing Rifles, a kind of elite corps there.

I understand Colin Powell. I know where he is coming from, I know where he got his identity and his persona, and it was in this great institution we call the United States Army, which, by the way, I am very proud to have served in. But that be exaggerated, and it has been in his case. People were expecting him to take a stand on principle and resign. That was never a possibility I attributed to Colin Powell, because unlike General Clark, Powell is really a creature of how he was given his identity in this whole system. He is just not constitutionally able to buck it.

PITT: Do you think Powell was aware that the British intelligence dossier he used on February 5 before the UN, the one he held up and praised lavishly, was plagiarized from a graduate student who was writing about Iraq circa 1991?

McG: No, I think he was unaware of that. I’ll tell you a little story. Back in January, Colin Powell invited all the NATO countries for a confab so he could brief them on Iraq and tell them what they should be telling their host governments. After one of the sessions he was in the hall, and one of the ambassadors asked him what the evidence was like on Iraq. Powell said he didn’t know, he hadn’t seen it yet. That was January.

Small wonder that Powell now brags of having had to spend four days in early February – right before his UN speech on the 5th – up at CIA headquarters pouring over the evidence, analyzing and selecting what he should say on the 5th. I can only believe he had a lot on his plate – the Middle East and other stuff – and that the daily briefings were so sparse that he really didn’t have a good handle on what the evidence was that support this case for weapons of mass destruction and all that stuff. It becomes more believable to me that he really was starting almost with tabula rasa on the 1st of February, and then went up to CIA headquarters and said, “OK, what have we got?” And the first thing he was given was Scooter Libby’s first draft, and you already recounted his reaction.

PITT: So what we have, essentially, is in the run-up to the war the Secretary of State of the United States of America was cramming for a major exam like a freshman in high school.

McG: Yes. And most of the evidence was being supplied by the Vice President’s office, in the person of Scooter Libby, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld along with Wolfowitz. That’s curious enough, but an equally important point I would make is this: I worked at senior levels up there for 27 years. Never, never once, not one time did the Vice President of the United States, the Secretary of State or the National Security Advisor come up to the CIA for a working visit. Vice President Bush came up a couple of times to give awards out – after all, he was once the Director – but never for a working visit.

We went down there. I was part of that briefing team. I would be down there every other morning, and if they wanted more depth I would bring folks down there with me, folks who I knew were the experts. We came to them. We had our homework done alone, thank you very much. We got real good insights into what the concerns were during these morning briefings, and sometimes we got concrete requirements or papers to be done by the next day. We had a really good window into what was uppermost in policy-maker’s minds, but we would take that back to CIA headquarters and say, “OK, now we know what they’re interested in. What to we have?” And we’d do it alone. We’d analyze the heck out of it. We’d polish it off, pass it by our supervisors and bring it down the next morning.

The prospect of the Secretary of State and Condoleezza Rice and Cheney convening in CIA headquarters to sit around a table and help with the analysis…give me a break! You don’t have policy-makers at the table when you’re doing analysis. That’s antithetical to the whole ethic of analysis. You’re divorced from policy as soon as you do your analysis, and when you’re finished, you serve it up to them, and they can do what they want with it. To be sure, that’s the other part of the game. But when they get it, they get it in unexpurgated virgin form, and that was heady and important work. It was the only place in town, in the Foreign Affairs realm, that could and did do that work.

PITT: Where do you see this whole issue of the manner in which the war was sold to the American people going?

McG: The most important and clear-cut scandal, of course, has to do with the forgery of those Niger nuclear documents that were used as proof. The very cold calculation was that Congress could be deceived, we could have our war, we could win it, and then no one would care that part of the evidence for war was forged. That may still prove to be the case, but the most encouraging thing I’ve seen over the last four weeks now is that the US press has sort of woken from its slumber and is interested. I’ve asked people in the press how they account for their lack of interest before the war, and now they seem to be interested. I guess the simple answer is that they don’t like to be lied to.

I think the real difference is that no one knew, or very few people knew, before the war that there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Now they know. It’s an unavoidable fact. No one likes to be conned, no one likes to be lied to, and no one particularly likes that 190 US servicemen and women have been killed in this effort, not to mentioned the five or six thousand Iraqi civilians.

There’s a difference in tone. If the press does not succumb to the argument put out by folks like Tom Friedman, who says it doesn’t really matter that there are no weapons in Iraq, if it does become a quagmire which I believe it will be, and we have a few servicemen killed every week, then there is a prospect that the American people will wake up and say, “Tell me again why my son was killed? Why did we have to make this war on Iraq?”

So I do think that there is some hope now that the truth will come out. It won’t come out through the Congressional committees. That’s really a joke, a sick joke.

PITT: During the Clinton administration, if there was going to be an investigation into something, it was going to come out of the House of Representatives. What would your assessment of the situation be at this point?

McG: It doesn’t take a crackerjack analyst. Take Pat Roberts, the Republican Senator from Kansas, who is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. When the Niger forgery was unearthed and when Colin Powell admitted, well shucks, it was a forgery, Senator Jay Rockefellar, the ranking Democrat on that committee, went to Pat Roberts and said they really needed the FBI to take a look at this. After all, this was known to be a forgery and was still used on Congressmen and Senators. We’d better get the Bureau in on this. Pat Roberts said no, that would be inappropriate. So Rockefellar drafted his own letter, and went back to Roberts and said he was going to send the letter to FBI Director Mueller, and asked if Roberts would sign on to it. Roberts said no, that would be inappropriate.

What the FBI Director eventually got was a letter from one Minority member saying pretty please, would you maybe take a look at what happened here, because we think there may have been some skullduggery. The answer he got from the Bureau was a brush-off. Why do I mention all that? This is the same Pat Roberts who is going to lead the investigation into what happened with this issue.

There is a lot that could be said about Pat Roberts. I remember way back last fall when people were being briefed, CIA and others were briefing Congressmen and Senators about the weapons of mass destruction. These press folks were hanging around outside the briefing room, and when the Senators came out, one of the press asked Senator Roberts how the evidence on weapons of mass destruction was. Roberts said, oh, it was very persuasive, very persuasive.

The press guy asked Roberts to tell him more about that. Roberts said, “Truck A was observed to be going under Shed B, where Process C is believed to be taking place.” The press guy asked him if he found that persuasive, and Pat Roberts said, “Oh, these intelligence folks, they have these techniques down so well, so yeah, this is very persuasive.” And the correspondent said thank you very much, Senator.

So, if you’ve got a Senator who is that inclined to believe that kind of intelligence, you’ve got someone who will do the administration’s bidding. On the House side, of course, you’ve got Porter Goss, who is a CIA alumnus. Porter Goss’ main contribution last year to the joint committee investigating 9/11 was to sic the FBI on members of that committee, at the direction of who? Dick Cheney. Goss admits this. He got a call from Dick Cheney, and he was “chagrined” in Goss’ word that he was upbraided by Dick Cheney for leaks coming out of the committee. He then persuaded the innocent Bob Graham to go with him to the FBI and ask the Bureau to investigate the members of that committee. Polygraphs and everything were involved. That’s the first time something like that has ever happened.

Be aware, of course, that Congress has its own investigative agencies, its own ways of investigating things like that. So without any regard for the separation of powers, here Goss says Cheney is bearing down on me, so let’s get the FBI in here. In this case, ironically enough, the FBI jumped right in with Ashcroft whipping it along. They didn’t come up with much, but the precedent was just terrible.

All I’m saying is that you’ve got Porter Goss on the House side, you’ve got Pat Roberts on the Senate side, you’ve got John Warner who’s a piece with Pat Roberts. I’m very reluctant to be so unequivocal, but in this case I can say nothing is going to come out of those hearings but a lot of smoke.

PITT: So what is the alternative?

McG: The alternative would be an independent judicial commission, such as the one that a lot of the British are appealing for in London. You get a person who is not beholden to George Bush or to

• PITT: So what is the alternative? (Cont'd) — William Rivers Pitt, Thu Jun 26 22:11

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