Blame
the CIA. That's a political agenda that has found
bipartisan support in the US Congress. Both the right
and the left saw the departure of Central Intelligence
Agency chief George Tenet as a first step toward
improving US intelligence capabilities.
This
month two bipartisan committees - the independent 9-11
Commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee -
reviewing US counter-terrorism policy and the George W
Bush administration's response to the attacks of
September 11, 2001, have fingered the CIA as having led
the US government astray. This assessment conflicts with
the popular assumption that right-wing politics and
ideology have driven all decisions by the Bush
administration, including the war on Iraq. But rather
than blaming the politicization of intelligence, the
congressional bodies have followed the traditional route
of scapegoating the CIA.
One of the most vocal
critics of the CIA's performance has been John F Lehman
Jr, former navy secretary under the late president
Ronald Reagan and member of the independent 9-11
Commission, which will release its final report this
month. Lehman is also a leading candidate to replace
Tenet as director of central intelligence.
The present danger, then and now Over
the past four decades Lehman has been a consistent
advocate of US military supremacy and ever-increasing
military budgets. During his tenure as navy secretary,
he oversaw the expansion of the US naval fleet in
opposition to many in the navy who believed that the
young hot-shot - who took over the job at the age of 38
- vastly overestimated the Soviet threat. He pushed out
highly regarded officers such as Admiral Hyman Rickover,
while winning the admiration and friendship of the most
ideologically driven members of the Reagan
administrations, such as assistant defense secretary
Richard Perle and national security adviser Robert
McFarlane.
Unlike many of the neo-conservatives
and militarists who have shaped and supported the
aggressive foreign policy of Bush, Lehman is no chicken
hawk. As a naval reserve officer, Lehman flew combat
missions during the Vietnam War. But he has long
traveled in the same ideological circles of the
militarist right wing. He has been a longtime critic of
the CIA, not because of its propensity for covert
operations but because of its passivity and timid threat
assessments. He blames the CIA for misleading
assessments of the tactics of the Vietnamese guerrilla
armies and for downplaying Soviet military strength.
Lehman's ideological and class origins have
catapulted him into national politics and into the
center of the military-industrial complex. A scion of
one of Philadelphia's oldest and wealthiest families,
Lehman owns an investment firm and sits on the board of
directors of numerous corporations, many of which are
major defense contractors. His credentials as a navy
secretary dedicated to expanding the fleet and
technological capabilities of the US Navy, combined with
his family background in investment banking, have made
Lehman a major figure in the new frontier of private
equity investing in aerospace and defense industries. A
member of Philadelphia's high society, Lehman can trace
his family line back to an aide to William Penn, founder
of the Quaker colony. The late Grace Kelly was Lehman's
cousin and, while a student at Cambridge, he frequently
spent weekends at the palace of Prince Rainier and
Princess Grace in Monaco.
As a student, Lehman
also began associating with the emerging right-wing
elite. He joined the Intercollegiate Student Institute,
founded by William Buckley Jr, and as a graduate student
roomed with Edwin Feulner, who would become the
president of the Heritage Foundation. Although a
national-security aide to Henry Kissinger during the
administration of president Richard Nixon, Lehman by the
late 1970s had moved further to the right. He joined the
Committee on the Present Danger that was sharply
critical of the moderate national-security policies of
both political parties and blamed the CIA for
underplaying the Soviet threat. But as time proved, the
CIA national intelligence estimates provided in the
1970s were largely correct, while the independent threat
assessments advanced by the Committee on the Present
Danger and the closely associated Team B proved wildly
overstated.
Lehman's penchant for ideology and
political agendas over fact-based intelligence was one
of the reasons he was forced out of the second Reagan
administration. In 1987, when he left with such other
hardliners as Richard Perle and Frank Gaffney, it was
increasingly apparent even to the most diehard
anti-communists that the Soviet Union was beginning to
implode. After leaving the Reagan administration, Lehman
dedicated himself to investment banking and private
equity ventures in defense industries. He also became a
trustee of the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy
Research Institute, a conservative think-tank. In his
writings in such conservative publications as the Wall
Street Journal, American Spectator, and National Review,
Lehman bemoaned the post-Cold War decreases in the US
military budget.
Although one of the harshest
critics of the CIA for its pre- and post-September 11
intelligence, Lehman has in his own policy advocacy not
let facts stand in the way of his political agenda. Just
11 days after September 11, Lehman signed a statement by
the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) that
presaged the Bush administration's own foreign-policy
initiatives.
Common knowledge about
Iraq PNAC's September 20, 2001 letter to Bush
stated: "It may be that the Iraqi government provided
assistance in some form to the recent attack on the
United States. But even if evidence does not link Iraq
directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the
eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a
determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in
Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will
constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in
the war on international terrorism."
Lehman
signed another PNAC statement at the onset of the Iraq
invasion that urged the president "to accelerate plans
for removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. As you
have said, every day that Saddam Hussein remains in
power brings closer the day when terrorists will have
not just airplanes with which to attack us, but
chemical, biological or nuclear weapons as well. It is
now common knowledge that Saddam, along with Iran, is a
funder and supporter of terrorism against Israel. Iraq
has harbored terrorists such as Abu Nidal in the past,
and it maintains links to the al-Qaeda network."
Although the two congressional committees on the
September 11 attacks and the subsequent US response
concluded that US intelligence agencies got their facts
wrong, Lehman himself persists in supporting the
administration's claim that Saddam and al-Qaeda were in
cahoots.
Lehman told NBC television's Meet
the Press on June 20 that the commission had
documents captured in Iraq that "indicate that there is
at least one officer of Saddam's Fedayeen, a
lieutenant-colonel, who was a very prominent member of
al-Qaeda". Lehman succeeded in giving new life to the
administration's claims, although the CIA quickly
dismissed the assertion, saying that the documents did
not support Lehman's allegation. In fact, the CIA had
investigated this alleged link "a long time ago" and
concluded that one officer in Saddam's militia merely
had a name that was similar to that of an al-Qaeda
operative. However, Lehman claimed on national
television that it was new information, as yet
unexamined by the commission or other government
entities.
Bad intelligence Lehman has
long charged that the CIA has dismissed dissenting
points of views. He has faulted the CIA for not giving
adequate attention to theories that Iraq was behind the
1993 World Trade Center bombing, the September 11
attacks, and even the anthrax attacks of the autumn of
2001. And Lehman continues to parrot the arguments of
the neo-conservatives, regularly appearing in the Weekly
Standard, that al-Qaeda and Saddam were close
collaborators.
That Lehman has even been
considered capable of directing the overhaul of the
badly flawed US intelligence system underscores the
degree to which right-wing ideologues and agendas
continue to shape US national-security strategy. The
main lesson for intelligence reform that should be drawn
from recent US foreign-policy misadventures is that
politicized intelligence is bad intelligence.
Certainly the CIA fell short in providing
fact-based intelligence about the al-Qaeda threat and
the alleged Iraqi threat. But, as it has done in the
past, notably under pressure from Team B and the
Committee on the Present Danger in the late 1970s, the
CIA reworked its own intelligence estimates to reflect
the ideological convictions of the administration. But
John Lehman - along with the neo-conservatives, the
trigger-happy militarists such as Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Richard Cheney, and
the liberal hawks in the Democratic Party - also got it
very wrong. Conveniently, they all join together again
in blaming the CIA for its faulty fact-checking.
Tom Barry is policy director of
theInterhemispheric
Resource Center and author of numerous books on
international relations. He can be contacted at
tom@irc-online.org. Used by permission.
