CIA chief plays dumb on neo-con
intelligence By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Was Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) director George Tenet really
the last person in Washington to find out that both the
president and vice president were being fed phony or
"sexed up" intelligence about prewar Iraq by a Pentagon
office
staffed by ideologically driven neo-conservatives?
It's highly doubtful. But in a desperate attempt
to walk a tightrope between his increasingly
irreconcilable loyalties to the administration of
President George W Bush and to his own intelligence
professionals, Tenet is suggesting that he was really in
the dark about what was going on just a few kilometers
down the Potomac River from CIA headquarters in
Washington.
Only one month ago, in a rousing
defense of the intelligence community's professionalism,
Tenet boasted to students at Georgetown University that
he and only he was the purveyor of intelligence
information to the president. Then this Tuesday he
claimed to members of the Senate Armed Services
Committee that he was unaware until just last week that
officials based in the Pentagon's policy office had
given intelligence briefings directly to the White
House.
"Is that a normal thing to happen, that
there [is] a formal analysis relative to intelligence
that would be presented to the NSC [National Security
Council] that way, without you even knowing about it?"
an incredulous Democratic senator, Carl Levin, asked
Tenet during contentious hearings.
"I don't
know. I've never been in the situation," Tenet replied,
insisting, "I have to tell you, Senator, I'm the
president's chief intelligence officer; I have the
definitive view about these subjects."
"I know
you feel that way," Levin said, betraying a hint of
sarcasm.
The exchange reflected the latest
development in what is becoming one of the biggest
intelligence crises in modern US history - one the
administration is trying desperately, but with
increasing difficulty, to quash.
The scandal,
which is based on Washington's abject failure one year
after invading Iraq to find any evidence to back up the
administration's prewar claims that former Iraqi
president Saddam Hussein possessed massive stockpiles of
biological and chemical weapons; reconstituted his
nuclear-weapons program (to the extent that, according
to Vice President Dick Cheney, he had obtained weapons);
and had operational ties with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda
network, has been building since last summer.
It
gained momentum in January when the CIA's chief weapons
inspector, David Kay, admitted that US intelligence
personnel, including himself, had been "almost all
wrong" on its prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons of
mass destruction (WMD) capabilities.
Both Kay
and the administration, as well as members of Congress
from Bush's Republican Party, immediately blamed the
official intelligence community, headed by Tenet as CIA
director, for the failure.
Opposition Democrats,
however - backed by former intelligence officials and
some media reports - charged that the administration had
systematically exaggerated and manipulated the
intelligence by both intimidating the professional
analysts who disagreed with it and by producing its own
intelligence, much of which now appears to have been
fabricated, through unofficial channels.
As a
result, the intelligence committees in both houses of
Congress have expanded their investigations in recent
weeks.
While it is now clear that professional
intelligence analysts made some serious errors in
assessing Iraq's WMD programs - largely through a
combination of assuming "worst-case scenarios" in the
absence of hard evidence and lacking reliable agents or
assets in Iraq either as informants or investigators -
the "Feith factor" has recently emerged as the key focus
of the committees' work.
Shortly after the
September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the
Pentagon, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas
Feith set up two groups, the Office of Special Plans
(OSP) and the Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group (CTEG).
These groups were tasked to review raw intelligence to
determine if official intelligence agencies had
overlooked connections between Shi'ite and Sunni
terrorist groups and between al-Qaeda and secular Arab
governments, especially Saddam Hussein's.
The
effort, which reportedly included interviewing
"defectors", several of them supplied by the Iraqi
National Congress (INC), an exile group close to
neo-conservatives who support Israel's Likud Party,
closely tracked the agenda of the Defense Policy Group
(DPG), chaired by Feith's mentor, Richard Perle.
It's known that the DPG convened after September
11 with INC leader Ahmad Chalabi to discuss ways in
which the terrorist attacks could be tied to Saddam. Yet
neither the State Department nor the CIA was informed
about the meeting.
The OSP, which was overseen
by Abram Shulsky, then brought on Michael Malouf, who
had worked for Perle in the Pentagon 20 years before and
specialized in obtaining authorizations, thereby giving
the office access to analyses produced by official
intelligence agencies, according to knowledgeable
sources.
Malouf's operation, called the "bat
cave", permitted hawks in the Pentagon and in Cheney's
office to anticipate the intelligence community's more
skeptical arguments about the alleged threats posed by
Saddam, and then to devise questions or develop their
own evidence that would be used to challenge the more
benign views of the professional analysts, according to
these sources.
At the same time, the OSP, which
consisted of only two permanent staff members but which
employed dozens of like-minded consultants, developed
its own "talking points" and briefing papers, one of
which - on the subject of Saddam's alleged ties to
al-Qaeda - was leaked last November to the
neo-conservative publication the Weekly Standard.
It consisted of 50 excerpts taken from raw,
mostly uncorroborated intelligence reports from sources
of varying reliability from 1990 to 2002, which
purported to show an operational relationship between
captured leader Saddam and the terrorist group. But when
it was published, former intelligence officials
dismissed the work as amateurish, unsubstantiated and
indicative (even if most of the allegations were true)
of the absence of any operative relationship.
"This is meant to dazzle the eyes of the not
terribly educated," former State Department intelligence
officer Greg Thielmann told Inter Press Service at the
time. But as recently as last month, Cheney referred to
the paper as "the best source of information" for
intelligence on Iraq.
It was this paper that
reportedly formed the basis of a briefing by Feith given
to the NSC and Cheney's office in August 2002. Tenet
said on Tuesday that he "vaguely" remembered having
received a similar briefing by Feith, but was never
informed that it was also presented to the White House.
Even then, the presentation to the CIA reportedly
omitted certain remarks made to the White House to the
effect that the CIA was deliberately ignoring evidence
of Saddam-al-Qaeda links.
"Did you ever discuss
with the secretary of defense or other administration
officials whether the Department of Defense policy
office run by Mr Feith might be bypassing normal
intelligence channels?" Levin asked Tenet on Tuesday.
"I did not. I did not," he replied.
Why
he did not remains a major question, particularly in
light of the fact that several publications, including
the New Yorker, Knight-Ridder news agency and IPS, were
reporting already last July that Feith's office was
constantly "stovepiping" intelligence directly to Cheney
and the White House to circumvent official channels.
These accounts have now been accepted by
Democrats and some Republicans on the intelligence
committees. Last Friday, the ranking Democrat on the
House of Representatives committee, Representative Jane
Harmon, raised the issue directly in a speech at Perle's
American Enterprise Institute.
"The president
should direct a review of the activities of various
[Pentagon] offices, particularly an early analytic unit
that reported to Under Secretary of Defense Doug Feith,
as well as the Office of Special Plans," she said.
"Disclaimers notwithstanding, many in Congress and
intelligence operatives in the field now believe these
entities fed unreliable and 'unvetted' intelligence to
[Pentagon] policymakers and the Office of the Vice
President."
staffed by ideologically driven neo-conservatives?
