Abstract
From day one, the conservative officials who were swept into power at the CIA by the “Reagan revolution” made clear their view that the Directorate of Intelligence's tradition of rigorously objective independent analysis was impeding a deeper understanding of the true nature of the Soviet threat to Western civilization. Determined to make intelligence more responsive to the political-military agenda of the administration, in 1982 Reagan's CIA Director, William Casey, abolished the directorate's existing organizational structure and promoted a relatively young and inexperienced executive assistant, Robert Gates, to fill out a new organizational chart. Gates soon seeded the analytical division with like-minded allies, who came to be known as “Gates Clones.” One of them, John McLaughlin, rose to become deputy, and in July 2004, acting director.
The practice of threat inflation became so endemic that the analytical division missed the gathering signs of the Soviet Union's economic, technological, and political decline, and failed to predict its impending disintegration. By the time Bill Clinton arrived in Washington in 1993, the new corporate culture of politicized, heavily massaged and bureaucratically coordinated analysis was firmly entrenched. A national security neophyte and self-conscious centrist like Clinton was neither prepared nor inclined to do anything about it.
There are direct links between this earlier era and the current Iraq intelligence debacle. When the first Bush administration nominated Robert Gates for the directorship in 1991, for the first time ever a number of veteran CIA analysts publicly opposed the appointment, tagging Gates as one of those most responsible for destroying the ethic of rigorous, impartial analysis. Others questioned Gates's nomination on the basis of the misleading testimony he had given on the Iran-contra scandal and his alleged involvement in a covert scheme to funnel support to Saddam Hussein's regime.
While Gates had solid Republican backing, the Democrats were in the majority and the first President Bush needed to secure the support of the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Sen. David Boren of Oklahoma, for the nomination. Working behind the scenes to limit the investigation of Gates was Boren's staff director, George Tenet, and with Boren's support, Gates was confirmed. While Gates's tenure as director was brief, Tenet proved his bona fides to the Bush national security team, and his favor would be remembered when Bush the Younger came to town nine years later and elected to keep Tenet on as CIA director. (Tenet reciprocated, and further politicized the agency, renaming the Langley headquarters the “George H. W. Bush Center for Intelligence.”)
The brief and unsuccessful tenures of Clinton's first two CIA directors, Jim Woolsey and John Deutch, assured that the managerial influence of the Gates Clones at CIA remained intact. The CIA Tenet took over in 1997 did not differ substantially from the politicized body the Republicans had bequeathed to Clinton in 1992. There was one crucial difference, however. The forces mobilized by the CIA's anti-Soviet Islamic jihad of 1980-1992 had spiraled out of control, gone global, and morphed into a virulent anti-American, anti-Western crusade.
It was a massive textbook case of “blowback,” and a lesson in the law of unintended consequences. Yet no senior CIA officials or their political bosses have ever taken responsibility for aiding and abetting the forces of Islamic terrorism in general and Al Qaeda in particular. Even after the threat was finally recognized in the mid-1990s, the intelligence community failed to turn off the Saudi and Pakistani export of Islamic militancy that had once been their joint project.
Similarly, the agency now refuses to accept responsibility for the train of destruction that was set in motion by the faulty assessment of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Skipping lightly over the problem posed by the agency's erroneous and spuriously confident conclusions, Acting Director McLaughlin argued in several interviews that if members of Congress had only read the agency's entire October 2002 estimate on Iraq “cover-to-cover,” they would have found in it “ample material for serious debate” about whether or not aluminum tubes ordered by Iraq could have been used as components of centrifuges to secretly enrich uranium for weapons.
McLaughlin was clearly seeking to distract the media's attention from the main political consequence of the agency's estimates. While not providing a compelling rationale for prompt preemptive action, the CIA's erroneous assessments and fraudulent aura of certainty made it far more difficult for opposition legislators to brake the Bush administration's feckless stampede to invade Iraq. The path to war was already on a downhill slope. The phony intelligence estimate made it slippery, leaving few places for the opposition to gain traction.
In response to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's withering critique of the CIA's pre-war intelligence, McLaughlin told the press, “We get it.” Yet he immediately followed with a self-serving caveat: “Although we think the [intelligence] judgments were not unreasonable when they were made nearly two years ago, we understand with all that we have learned since then that we could have done better.”
“Not unreasonable”? A major burden of the committee's analysis is precisely that many of the judgment's arrived at in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq were not reasonable inferences from the intelligence available at the time, and cannot be explained or excused on those grounds.
McLaughlin sought to rationalize his apparent inability to read this way: “The very people who ask us to not be risk-averse are frequently the ones who criticize mistakes that are made in the course of our duties. If you stop and think about it, to take a risk by definition means there's a high probability of a mistake. We risk our lives around the world every day, our analysts here in Washington risk their reputations every day by taking positions on issues on which the evidence is thin and uncertain. So there's always a possibility of a mistake. That's built into our business.”
What a preposterous argument! It suggests the existence of a management culture in which senior CIA officials can no longer distinguish between the agency's operational and analytical roles. There is no compelling need for analysts to take “risks” with their analytical judgments, even less so when many thousands of lives hang in the balance and the underlying evidence is “thin and uncertain.” In this circumstance, caution and circumspection are much to be preferred over pseudo-”gutsy” extrapolations that give rise to baseless fears, preemptive war, and a tragic, avoidable loss of human life. Who's asking for analytical heroism? Who demands that CIA analysts “risk their reputations” by climbing out on analytical limbs?
The Select Committee traced many of the CIA's failings to a “broken corporate culture,” which, it now appears, also includes lying to Congress. Tenet appears to have lied, not once, but twice to a congressional committee, telling Sen. Carl Levin on February 13, 2003 that the agency had briefed U.N. inspectors on all 105 “high value and moderate value” weapons sites in Iraq, a claim he reiterated in writing on March 6, 2003.
In January 2004, after a year of resistance, the CIA finally declassified the number of sites that had been shared with the inspectors. In doing so, they quietly acknowledged that 21 of 105 sites had not been shared with the United Nations before the war.
One can only speculate as to Tenet's motives for purveying misinformation at that particular time. But one can easily imagine that any admission from him that one-fifth of the high- and medium-priority sites had not been shared with U.N. inspectors would have reinforced demands that the inspectors be allowed to complete their work before launching the first undeclared preventive war in American history, with all the potential for death and destruction that such a step implies.
Tenet's veracity has likewise been questioned in the context of his now infamous statement to the president that the intelligence case for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was a “slam dunk.” Asked to comment, McLaughlin told the press on July 4: “That's just a relationship we don't discuss for obvious reasons. It's a privileged relationship and our advice must remain confidential.”
As I write, more than 1,000 coalition personnel, including more than 900 U.S. soldiers, and some 12,000 Iraqi civilians are dead. Iraq's new interim prime minister is a former secret policeman-for-Saddam-turned-CIA-informer with a penchant for personally carrying out summary executions, and the CIA stands accused of torturing and even murdering terrorist suspects during interrogations. In Langley, it's all just part of the “privileged relationship.”
McLaughlin is right about one thing. When legislators and commentators try to lay all the bodies on the CIA's doorstep, he points a finger at Capitol Hill and says, in effect, one measly erroneous document could not by itself have pushed the country into war. And he has a point.
Equally culpable are the legislators who said they opposed giving Bush a blank check for war, but when faced with a choice between risking their seats in Congress in the mid-term election, or risking the lives of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, they chose the latter, voting for a joint resolution giving the president unfettered discretion to begin the country's first preventive war on a date of his own choosing. It was a simple resolution. There was no ambiguity about what it said, or what it meant. Now that this fraudulent imperial adventure has gone sour, many of these worthies are pointing their fingers at the White House and saying, “George did it.”
Not so. They let George do it.