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US looking for intelligent
answers
By B Raman
James
Risen of the New York Times reported on May 21 that a
review has begun to determine whether the US
intelligence community erred in its pre-war assessments
of Saddam Hussein's government and Iraq's weapons
programs. According to his report, George J Tenet,
director, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in his
capacity as the director, Central Intelligence (DCI) has
ordered the review. It would be based on an an
examination by a team of retired intelligence officers
of all the reports sent by the CIA and other agencies to
the various departments of the government before the war
on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the
country's alleged links with al-Qaeda in order to see
how many of those reports proved to be correct and, if
they did not, why.
Tenet wears two hats. As the
director, CIA, he supervises the day-to-day functioning
of the agency and as DCI he acts as the intelligence
adviser to the president and as the coordinator of the
functioning of all the agencies of the US intelligence
community, civilian as well as military.
Such
reviews, called retrospective analysis in the
intelligence jargon, are normal in all intelligence
agencies after any war or conflict or after any serious
breach of national security. They help the agencies not
only to identify gaps in intelligence coverage, but also
to assess the performance of individual sources and
their handling officers and the analysts of the
agencies. Often, sources which are thought of highly
prove to have been giving incorrect information, and
sources which were not taken seriously prove to have
been giving valuable intelligence which was not acted
upon. Similarly, how good an analyst is could be
determined only by re-visiting his past reports in the
light of what actually happened subsequently on the
ground. Reputations of many sources and analysts are
often damaged by such re-visits.
The fact that
Tenet has ordered such a review should not, therefore,
be a matter of great surprise, but what has imparted
unusual significance to the review is the embarrassing
(to the US) fact that much of the so-called intelligence
regarding Iraq's WMD capability and its links with
al-Qaeda, which US Secretary of State Colin Powell
placed before the United Nations Security Council, has
proved to have been wrong.
How did this happen?
Did the sources, many of them anti-Saddam political
exiles from Iraq leading luxurious lives in the West at
US expense plant spurious reports of an alarming nature
on the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)?
Such intelligence peddlers often think - not incorrectly
- that the more alarming their reports, the greater
their importance in the eyes of their controlling
agency.
Did the CIA analysts, under constant
pressure from their political masters to produce more
and more tar with which the latter could blacken the
face of Saddam uncritically accept, against their better
judgement, all the trash coming from their sources?
Before the war, not only the CIA and the DIA,
but also MI-6, the British external intelligence agency,
disseminated not only to the people of Iraq and other
countries, but even to their own people, disinformation
meant to over-demonize Saddam. The purpose was to
overcome opposition to the war. Since the agencies
strictly follow the principle of restrictive security
under which they do not admit to each other their
authorship of such disinformation, did each agency
believe the disinformation disseminated by others as
credible information and allow it to influence its
analysis?
The media have highlighted the failure
of the US-UK invaders to find any WMD or Saddam-Osama
bin Laden links so far, but have not drawn attention to
another intriguing aspect. The US made two so-called
decapitation attacks to kill Saddam and his close
associates - on the opening day of the war and again on
the penultimate day. We were told that the CIA had
received "time-sensitive information" about their
presence at two places, which were attacked.
One
would have expected that immediately after occupying
Baghdad, the Americans would have rushed to those spots
and searched the rubble in order to look for the bodies
of Saddam and others. Did they do so? If they did, whose
bodies did they find there? There is total silence on
this, giving rise to the suspicion that the information
from the so-called mole which led to the decapitation
attacks was wrong. Who was that mole? Did he
deliberately take the CIA for a ride? If so, why?
There is another aspect that is equally murky.
What was the respective role of the CIA and the DIA in
intelligence collection and covert action not only in
Iraq, but also in Afghanistan? The CIA has the exclusive
responsibility for the recruitment and running of human
sources and for covert actions. However, the DIA is also
permitted to do this in areas of conflict or war where
US troops are sent into action. Thus, both the CIA and
the DIA can run source operations in Afghanistan and
Iraq.
There are reasons to believe that while
the CIA was more professional in its intelligence
coverage of Iraq before and during the war and resisted
pressure from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to
produce evidence that would justify the invasion and
occupation of Iraq, the DIA had no qualms about obliging
Rumsfeld. Many anti-Saddam exiles, such as Ahmed
Chalabi, who were tried and discarded by the CIA on
grounds of unreliability, were taken on the DIA's pay
roll, allegedly on the orders of Rumsfeld.
During his press briefings relating to
Afghanistan as well as Iraq since October 7, 2001,
Rumsfeld often could not conceal his disappointment over
what he apparently perceived as the unsatisfactory
performance of the CIA. Once he remarked that he got so
many conflicting reports about the whereabouts of Osama
bin Laden that he had stopped taking them seriously.
Since the middle of last year there have been
reports in the US media that he has been urging that the
DIA should be given the same powers as the CIA for the
recruitment and running of human agents anywhere in the
world outside the US, in peace time as well as during
conflicts and wars.
That Rumsfeld cannot escape
some responsibility for the poor performance of the
agencies in Iraq is also hinted at in the NY Times
report. Risen says: "One intelligence official said Mr
Rumsfeld had become irritated by disagreements within
the intelligence community over the possible links
between Iraq and the [al-]Qaeda network. Before the war,
some Pentagon officials expressed frustration over what
they perceived to be excessive caution on the part of
CIA analysts who found scant [al-]Qaeda-Iraqi
connections, according to several intelligence
officials."
Another complaint that has surfaced
in this connection relates to the politicization of the
intelligence collection and analysis process under the
present Bush administration. Such complaints were heard
frequently during the presidency of Ronald Reagan when
William Casey was the director of the CIA and DCI. In
testimonies before the Congressional intelligence
oversight committees, serving and retired officers of
the CIA accused Robert Gates, then the head of the
analysis division of the CIA, who subsequently became
the director of the CIA, of pressurizing them to produce
the kind of reports that Casey and Reagan wanted, even
if they went contrary to established facts.
Such
allegations disappeared during the tenure of the father
of the present president and the Bill Clinton
administration. They have re-surfaced again since Bush
took over in January, 2001. In a reference to this,
Risen says: "The review comes at a time of increasing
tension between the Pentagon and CIA over the handling
of intelligence. Intelligence officials said that
several CIA analysts had quietly complained that senior
Defense Department officials and other Bush
administration officials sought to press them to produce
reports that supported the administration's positions on
Iraq. In addition, several current and former CIA
officers who have been upset about what they believe has
been the politicization of intelligence concerning Iraq
were the first to disclose the existence of the new CIA
review."
The US media have not escaped this
controversy either. Before the war, many retired CIA
officers, who have constituted themselves into a group
called the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
(VIPS), accused the American print and electronic media
of declining to provide them with space or time to voice
their concerns over the way the Bush administration was
manipulating public opinion by distorting reports of the
CIA on Iraq. They said in a statement: "Some of us have
had the extraordinary experience of being erased at the
last minute from the op-ed page of the Wall Street
Journal and invited-then-disinvited to/from TV programs
like Jim Lehrer and Fox News. Ordinarily, we would not
mind being marginalized; we are used to it. But our
country seems to be just days away from a fateful
decision to go to war. And many of our former colleagues
and successors are facing a dilemma all too familiar to
intelligence veterans - the difficult choices that must
be faced when the demands of good conscience butt up
against deeply ingrained attitudes concerning secrecy,
misguided notions of what is true patriotism, and
understandable reluctance to put careers - and mortgages
- on the line. In the face of impending catastrophe we
feel a responsibility to speak out - if only to remind
the present generation of intelligence officers that
they do have choices and that in the longer run their
consciences will rest easier if they face squarely into
those choices."
Finding themselves informally
barred from the US media, two of them - Ray McGovern and
David MacMichael - appeared on the Panorama program of
Channel One of German TV on March 6 to discuss the
use/abuse of intelligence to support the US
administration's case for attacking Iraq. They narrated
instances of how the Bush administration allegedly
distorted reports sent by the CIA that there was no
evidence of Iraqi involvement in the September 11, 2001,
terrorist strikes and that the evidence regarding its
links with al-Qaeda was weak in order to project to the
public that the evidence against Iraq was strong.
According to them, there was similar distortion of the
CIA's reports relating to WMD.
It is doubtful
whether the truth regarding the use or misuse of the
intelligence agencies by the Bush administration for
building up a case for attacking and occupying Iraq
would ever come out since the US media itself appear to
be disinterested in it in the name of patriotism. Unless
the truth is brought out and corrective action taken,
not many outside the US may, in future, take seriously
even correct US intelligence reports relating to nuclear
and missile proliferation by North Korea and Iran and
the activities of bin Laden's al-Qaeda and International
Islamic Front.
B Raman is Additional
Secretary (ret), Cabinet Secretariat, Government of
India, and presently director, Institute For Topical
Studies, Chennai; former member of the National Security
Advisory Board of the Government of India. E-Mail:
corde@vsnl.com. He was also head of the
counter-terrorism division of the Research &
Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence agency,
from 1988 to August, 1994.
(Copyright 2003
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