Can any modern, professionally staffed, high tech intelligence service plying its trade for a Western democracy ever insulate itself from the biases of its sponsoring government? The answer is probably no.

CIA analysts told Senate investigators that they didn’t cave to administration pressure in assessing that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program. They may not have caved, but they sure bent a lot. The heat on analysts and their managers was enormous, especially from the Vice President’s cheerleaders at State, the National Security Council and the Pentagon. As we have reported, this was not because the administration needed the intelligence to craft policy, but it was critical for selling it.

There is a valuable lesson learned in comparing CIA’s-or most of the Intelligence Community’s, for that matter-conclusions with those of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

U.S. intelligence reported, with varying degrees of confidence, that Iraq had been shopping for uranium in Africa and had purchased aluminum tubes for centrifuge rotors as well as other industrial equipment, such as high-strength magnets, to process that uranium. The IAEA, on the other hand, told the UN Security Council shortly before our invasion that the uranium claim was based on forged documents, that the aluminum tubes were intended for rockets and the magnets were used for guidance systems, electric meters and field telephones.

Why was the IAEA so right and the U.S. so wrong? Because the IAEA was immunized from political pressure.

As Jacques Baute, the agency’s chief Iraq nuclear weapons hunter in the 1990s and again in 2002, when the inspectors were reintroduced after a four-year hiatus, put it: “The fact that the (IAEA) has 137 member states forces it to put great distance from any single political agenda and its associated pressure.” He penned that observation in an article for the June 2004 issue of the IAEA Bulletin and suggested, without identifying whom he had in mind, that U.S. and Western intelligence services are captive to policy bias. “National analysts…at any given time, may feel under the pressure, explicit or implicit, from a single political line,” he wrote.

None of the member states, of course, would be willing to subsume their national intelligence services to a global agency. And U.S. intelligence has a better tradition of independence from executive branch manipulation than the services of many of our allies.

British intelligence, for example, is connected by umbilical cord to Downing Street, headquarters of the executive branch. This was clearly demonstrated in Britain’s notorious Sept. 24, 2002, dossier on Iraq’s imaginary weapons-the source of Bush’s State of the Union claim that Iraq had been shopping for uranium. The document, based on reporting from MI6, the GCHQ and the military, was authored by the Joint Intelligence Committee, a cabinet office that oversees intelligence gathering and produces assessments supposedly based on that collection. But the dossier, which also claimed that Saddam could launch chemical or biological warheads on 45-minutes’ notice, received considerable input from Tony Blair’s political appointees and spinmeisters. Britain and MI6 has never backed away from the uranium claim. MI6 “is much more part of policy than we are,” a former senior CIA officer who has worked closely with the British told us. “That’s why they can’t back off” the uranium claim for fear of embarrassing Blair.

Since no nation-certainly not the United States–will agree to a global intelligence pooling organization to inoculate itself from policy biases (as we have seen in the runup to the Iraq war, an administration may even want to encourage bias), the burden rests on independence and toughness at the top of the intelligence chain.

Those traits were lacking under George Tenet. “Leadership failed and failed badly,” John Gannon, who served as the CIA’s deputy for intelligence under Tenet until 2001, told us. “You certainly didn’t have a director there who was encouraging people to tell it like they saw it, and to bring all information to the top so it could fairly be evaluated.”

He said he could not recall such a strong bias in WMD intelligence reporting-”apart from the Soviet Union itself.” But the Soviets did have those weapons. Iraq did not.

Critical, also, is intelligence oversight by Congress. That, alas, has not existed over the past several years.

By Peter Eisner and Knut Royce

     Today we’ll let our sources do the talking. We brought four of them together at a forum last month at the University of the District of Columbia.   

   The collective knowledge was deep—the participants were former CIA analysts Mel Goodman and Larry Johnson; W. Patrick Lang, who ran the Middle East section  for the Defense Intelligence Agency; and retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff.   

    All four are angry about the Iraq invasion, and name culprits in the creation of one of the greatest messes in U.S. history.  

Dick Cheney as Geppetto:

 Mel Goodman:

 ”…it was just a classic case of agitprop: There was a propaganda campaign, and we were taken in by it, and the press was taken in by it—but the chief operator in all this, let’s call him “Geppetto,” was Dick Cheney. This is Dick Cheney’s war. It has always been Dick Cheney’s war….the one thing that Dick Cheney needed to sell this war, to market his war, was nuclear reconstitution. And remember, I think it was September the 8th, [2002], when all of the high-level members of the Bush Administration went on national television with “smoking gun” and the mushroom cloud. And what Joe Wilson was threatening, was to take down the argument about nuclear reconstitution, when he said, “I’ll tell you what I found in Niger. I found nothing.”  

      So, you had only two pins for nuclear reconstitution. It was Niger, enriched uranium, and the phony 16 words; and you had the aluminum tubes. And frankly, I’ll pass the question to Larry, because people feel that Tenet should have resigned. I’ve always thought that Colin Powell should resign. Colin Powell is a hell of a lot more popular in this country than George Bush. If Colin Powell had stood up, and said what he thought, and told us what he knew, there would have been no war.”  

Tenet and his Medals

 Larry Johnson:     

   ”George Tenet has tried to run away from the letter that several of us drafted decrying his book, and calling upon him to give back the proceeds, at least some of the proceeds, from his advance, to the soldiers, and the families of soldiers, who were killed or wounded in Iraq. Because in my view, and our view, the man has blood on his hands. He had a chance, if he would have spoken up, he could have stopped this rush to war. He chose to remain silent, but not just remain silent, he chose to be an active participant in a deception that was carried out, not only against other U.S. government officials, but against the American people.”   

Who lied?

 Lawrence Wilkerson: 

“Either George Tenet is lying through his teeth, or Tyler Drumheller is lying through his teeth—the chief of the European division for CIA—with regard to one of the most important pillars of Secretary Powell’s presentation at the United Nations: the mobile biological laboratories. One of the things Secretary Powell and I told Mr. Tenet and Mr. McLaughlin at the outset of our frenetic five or six days, trying to get ready for the UN, was “multiple sources.” We will not take anything and put it in this presentation, unless there are multiple, independently corroborated sources for the items we’re putting in the testimony. That was the going-in position.  

    Now, I learn, I think—although George has again put some doubt in my mind—that there was a single source for the mobile biological laboratories; that his codename was Curveball; and that there were several, some very key, dissents as to this individual’s testimony, during or before the preparation of the Secretary of State. None of that, ladies and gentlemen, none of that was revealed to the Secretary of State, or to me, or to any member of my team, by either John McLaughlin or George Tenet. So, that’s my first area of concern: Who’s lying? This isn’t an intelligence matter. This is worse, far worse. This isn’t just cherry-picking, or political spin on intelligence. This is plain-out outright falsehood to the Secretary of State.”   

        Mel Goodman:     

 ”George Tenet is an apparatchik. I’m not impressed with George Tenet. He should never have been CIA Director. But how did Colin Powell, a military officer, a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, get taken in by the aluminum tubes, which was driven by a kid, a young kid engineer by the name of Joe Turner, at the CIA, who stood up somehow to all of the PhD scientists of the weapons labs, and Department of Energy, because Foley [Alan Foley, the head of WINPAC at CIA] wanted this argument out there to make the case for war. I think Powell could have stopped this.”  

  Look to the process

   Wilkerson:    

    “Our political process, not just the Federal bureaucracy, but our political process is broken. And somehow, we as Americans have allowed that to happen. And I don’t know what you think about it, but I’m damned mad about it, and I’m doing everything I can, across the country, to tell people that I believe this; to tell them how I think the Federal bureaucracy needs to be repaired—including the Congress of the United States; its committee relationship with the Executive branch is absurd, it’s an anachronism. The Congress needs to be reformed, the Executive branch needs to be reformed.   

  But the big problem we’re confronted with is going to come to bear again, very shortly: it’s this insane process where you have less than 50% of Americans electing our President. And if you think about that, that means one in four, actually elect him or her. And this insane process of primaries, and factions, as Washington called it—not parties; he called it “factions”—who go out there and appeal to their extremes, and are successful in doing so! We have to do something about that, and the only people who can do something about that, are us.”

The bottom line

Lawrence Wilkerson:

“I think our Founding Fathers would be appalled, that in some 200-plus years, we never used that clause they put in our Constitution, except fecklessly, and in one case, successfully. The Articles of Impeachment that threatened Richard Nixon certainly were the reason he decided to resign. I believe, if you asked Hamilton, Madison, Monroe, even Washington, they would probably say, ‘Yeah, probably about every 30 years, they’ll take somebody out.’ And if you look at Clinton, and the peccadilloes for which they brought impeachment proceedings against him, as compared with the ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’—and that’s a direct quote from Article II of the Constitution—with regard to Cheney and Bush, I think there’s a helluva lot better case, with regard to Cheney and Bush.”

By Peter Eisner and Knut Royce

Researching and writing our book, The Italian Letter, we made a little mistake. We assumed that President Bush’s top national security aides would know how to read intelligence. Especially those who’ve been around a while, like that very bright woman who toiled in the National Security Council under two administrations, and who took a break between in between by serving as provost of Stanford University. She now runs the State Department.

     Yet the case of Condoleezza Rice illustrates how assumptions make for bad journalism.  

She got big play in our book because she was: one of Bush’s top advisers, a member of the President’s war sales team, the White House Iraq Group; and was one of the most forceful voices in insisting Iraq had been seeking uranium from Africa.

        But in his generally uncritical book, At the Center of the Storm, George Tenet indicates that Rice simply didn’t know what she was talking about– she didn’t know how to read intelligence, and perhaps didn’t read it at all.

      The startling revelation (pg. 369-70) comes in a passage describing a meeting at the White House just before Christmas 2002.  Attending were Condi and her NSC staff, John McLaughlin, Tenet’s deputy, and Robert Walpole, the national intelligence officer for strategic programs. 

      Condi seems not to have read the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s alleged WMD, a 90-page classified document published that October that was the Intelligence Community’s authoritative (and very wrong) summary of what the U.S. government knew about Saddam Hussein’s bomb arsenal.  Most estimates are loaded with caveats indicating the level of confidence the collective wisdom of the Community has about the information. 

       Condi asked Walpole to summarize the estimate’s “key judgments” section, or the report’s first few pages, which presents the most solid intelligence.  Here’s Tenet’s account. 

        He (Walpole) began doing so from memory, citing all the “we assess” and “we judge” language that appears in the document. 

      “Wait a minute,” Condi interrupted.  “Bob, if you’re saying these are assertions, we need to know it now.”  That was the word she used.  “We can’t send troops to war based on assertions.” 

       Walpole calmly said that the NIE was an “assessment” and that these were analytical judgments.  He explained that the (intelligence) agencies attached certain levels of confidence to the various judgments—some matters we had high confidence in, others moderate or low—but there was a reason the document’s title contained the word “estimate.”  

     Condi asked what he meant about confidence levels…                                                   

And so on.        

      There are a couple of other interesting and relevant asides.  Tenet discloses that the still-classified NIE contains the phrase “we don’t know” 30 times, while the assertion “we know” appears only three times.  And he produces some evidence that Condi knew there were problems with the Niger uranium intelligence weeks before he personally sent her a memo telling her to delete a passage containing that claim from a speech Bush delivered in Cincinnati in October 2002.

  It seems that Jami Miscik, then the CIA’s deputy director for intelligence, had convinced her to cut out a reference from a planned Sept. 26 Rose Garden appearance by Bush that would have claimed Iraq “has sought large amounts of uranium and uranium oxide…from Africa.” 

        At least twice reminded that the Niger uranium claim wasn’t holding up, her memory was remarkably short.  We don’t know if she reviewed Bush’s Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address, in which he famously asserted that the “British government” had discovered that Saddam had been seeking lots of uranium from Africa. That would be an interesting question to ask her if she finally testifies before Henry Waxman’s House oversight committee.  

     But she did pen a forceful Op Ed in The New York Times five days before Bush’s SOU complaining that Iraq’s 12,000-page declaration to the UN that it possessed no banned weapons had “fail(ed) to account for or explain Iraq’s efforts to get uranium from abroad.  

         Had Tenet’s book been published before ours, we might have been gentler with the president’s national security adviser, in describing her very active role in the administration’s heavy-handed pitching for an Iraq invasion by invoking the mushroom cloud.  It turns out, she knew not what she was doing.

By Peter Eisner and Knut Royce

To this hour, the Bush administration contends that the decision to invade Iraq was based on the “best available intelligence” at the time. The lesson learned is that without checks and balances—and subpoenas— policymakers can get away with almost anything.

The blame-the-intelligence argument is itself a fraud. A careful reading of the intelligence, and sometimes a casual glance, would have told anyone who really wanted to understand what was going on with Iraq’s WMD program that U.S. intelligence didn’t know.

In several instances, CIA appears to not have tried. And though White House officials also claim that allied intelligence services had similar concerns about Iraq’s non-existant WMD, that is not the case. As we point out in our book, the French didn’t believe Saddam had an inventory of banned weapons. Neither did the Italians.

One of the prime chances to deep-six the intelligence of an Iraqi nuclear deal with Niger came in early February 2002 , when SISMI, Italian Military Intelligence, finally delivered a “verbatim text” of one report it was using to describe Iraq’s alleged purchase of 500 tons of uranium per year from Niger. This text had been copied from a document in a large trove that was eventually provided by an Italian operative, Rocco Martino, to an Italian journalist.The verbatim text was obvious junk mail, if CIA officials had bothered to fact-check. The text purported to be the final approval by Niger’s Supreme Court of the uranium deal. It was “signed” by Niger’s current ambassador to Washington.

What were some of the obvious errors? Among other things, the document misnamed the court, calling it the State Court (Cour d’Etat), which had been renamed as the Supreme Court (Cour Supreme) in 1990. The document named five officers of the court who had last served in that capacity in 1989, 11 years before the supposed date of ratifying the Niger deal.

The “verbatim text” was a key bit of intelligence used by the Defense Intelligence Agency in those early days of February 2002 to produce an alarming report that landed on Vice President Dick Cheney’s desk. Cheney, in turn, demanded answers of his CIA briefer. That led to Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s trip to Niger the same month.

Wilson, of course, reported back what many at the CIA already knew. Impossible, he said, Iraq could not purchase uranium from Niger, and hadn’t even tried to do it. A little fact-checking by any of the analysts who reviewed the verbatim text, including those from CIA’s Africa section, would have made Wilson’s trip unnecessary. You might never have heard of Joseph Wilson, and certainly not of his wife, Valerie Plame, while Scooter Libby might be making plans for the summer instead of getting ready for 30 months in the slammer.

“The problem is you don’t always have the right people looking at the right documents at the right time,” an intelligence source told us. “If you had the right people looking at these documents, they would have said, ‘Gee, these terms are hosed up, they’re out of date.”

A casual reading of the documents surrounding so-called intelligence about Iraq’s deal with Niger makes clear that the material was pilfered and dusted off from the files of Italian military intelligence.

The Italian Letter itself was a crude document, supposedly addressed to Saddam Hussein by Niger’s president, Mamadou Tandja, confirming the non-existent sale. A little problem: The phony Tandja said he based his power to approve the sale based on “the Constitution of 12 May 1966″ –which had been superceded by three new constitutions in the 1990s. The real Tandja would have known that.

Forget the Truth

By Peter Eisner and Knut Royce

The Bush White House was never really preoccupied with the question of whether or not Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.  It wasn’t until “late 2002,” virtually on the eve of the U.S. invasion, that the administration ordered the CIA to shift priority on WMD intelligence collection to Iraq from North Korea and Iran, according to an internal CIA report. 

     The administration’s belated concern appears to have been driven by two contemporary events.  The White House at the time was narrowly focused on rallying public support for war by invoking the specter of mushroom clouds, and any supportive “intelligence” would be useful.  That would also serve as backup ammunition to discredit inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, reintroduced into Iraq after a four-year hiatus, if they were to conclude there was nothing there.

     The decision to invade had been made months earlier.  There would be no show-stoppers.  No matter that the belated emphasis on discovering Iraq’s alleged banned weapons produced nothing, or that the IAEA also came up with blanks.   

for more  

 Naming the 3500. How Many This Time Next Year?

A thousand more Americans dead. Every one of them because of the imperial hubris, rapacity, and deceit of the Bush Administration. A regime of feculent ideologues that took us into Iraq shouting “9/11″ as if it were “Remember the Alamo,” and spouting a cover story that, as Peter Eisner and Knut Royce point out in The Italian Letter, “it knew to be fake to convince the Congress and the American public that Saddam Hussein was seeking materials to make a nuclear bomb.”

May 29, 2007

FROM WASHINGTON MONTHLY

THE CIA AND THE WAR….Jonathan Schwarz has been reading The Italian Letter by Peter Eisner and Knut Royce and finds himself amazed. “I really can’t understand why this hasn’t gotten some attention,” he says via email. In particular, he’s amazed at this passage about Alan Foley, the head of the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC), which led the CIA’s analysis of Iraqi WMD:

One day in December 2002, Foley called his senior production managers to his office. He had a clear message for the men and women who controlled the output of the center’s analysts: “If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so.” The directive was not quite an order to cook the books, but it was a strong suggestion that cherry-picking and slanting not only would be tolerated, but might even be rewarded.

Click the link for more. Apparently this passage has been verified by a couple of other sources, and Jonathan has the cites. Foley, unsurprisingly, has declined to be interviewed about this. Maybe someone in Congress should take an interest in asking him a little more forcefully?

—Kevin Drum 1:30 PM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (35)

Cooking the Intelligence Books

by mcjoan

Tue May 29, 2007 at 05:26:24 PM PDT

I’ve had The Italian Letter, Peter Eisner’s and Knut Royce’s book about the forged intelligence document the Bush administration used to take us into Iraq, sitting in my “to-read” stack for a couple of weeks now. I need to move it up to the top of the pile.

Jonathon Schwartz has been reading his copy, and finds some astounding information about Alan Foley, the head of the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC), and the CIA’s efforts. As Schwartz explains, WINPAC was the lead organization in the CIA’s intelligence gathering on Iraq WMD.

First there’s this passage, outlining Foley’s thinking before the war.

There were strong indications that Foley all along was toeing a line he did not believe. Several days after Bush’s State of the Union speech, Foley briefed student officers at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, DC. After the briefing, Melvin Goodman, who had retired from the CIA and was then on the university’s faculty, brought Foley into the secure communications area of the Fort McNair compound. Goodman thanked Foley for addressing the students and asked him what weapons of mass destruction he believed would be found after the invasion. “Not much, if anything,” Goodman recalled that Foley responded. Foley declined to be interviewed for this book.

One would presume this was a private conversation in which Foley was speaking with great candor. But here’s the message he gave to the staff at WINPAC:

One day in December 2002, Foley called his senior production managers to his office. He had a clear message for the men and women who controlled the output of the center’s analysts: “If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so.” The directive was not quite an order to cook the books, but it was a strong suggestion that cherry-picking and slanting not only would be tolerated, but might even be rewarded.

Schwartz finds corraboration for this account in two other recent books about the false intelligence that led us into war. Foley doesn’t appear in these other accounts. I second both Schwartz and Kevin Drum in saying that maybe Congress should think about interviewing Mr. Foley, extensively and under oath.

By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

Read Jeff Stein’s column

Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame may have blown town, but the compost pile of fabricated documents at the bottom of the Niger affair is still smoldering.

Ex-CIA Director George Tenet is readying his version of the Iraq intelligence fiasco for “60 Minutes,” the de rigeur launching pad for spooks who have secrets to spill.

“Inevitably, the names of Plame and Wilson will dissolve into footnotes. But decades from now history will remember “the Italian letter,” shorthand for the fabricated documents at the heart of the Plame affair.

Date: Tuesday, May 15  630 – 830 pm.

Borders 18th St. and L St. NW

Filled with headline-making discoveries and never-before told findings, THE ITALIAN LETTER offers the definitive examination of the facts behind the forged intelligence document used by the Bush administration as a basis for going to war with Iraq. Award-winning investigative journalists Peter Eisner and Knut Royce now provide the first book to uncover the details of the intelligence corruption that altered the course of history.

May 15, 2007 6:30 PM
Location: In Store

Washington, D.C. – L Street
18th & L Streets NW
Washington, DC
Phone:202.466.4999