Asia Times: Politicized intelligence: Washington's North Korea wars


	January 22, 2002	atimes.com

The Koreas

PYONGYANG WATCH
Politicized intelligence: Washington's North Korea wars
By Aidan Foster-Carter

"Military intelligence: a contradiction in terms" - a jibe that is as untrue as it is snobbish. Each year I lecture on Korea to senior officers from around the world at the Royal College of Defense Studies in London. Without fail, the level of discussion - not only on security issues - is higher than in most universities.

Here's a better candidate for the definition of an oxymoron. How about politicized intelligence? Meaning the tainting of strategic information by the biases of those who gather it, or of those for whom they do so. A dumb and dangerous practice, telling people only what they want to hear and what they knew already. Prejudices are cozily confirmed, never challenged; while anomaly and novelty are missed or suppressed. A nation where such habits are endemic takes a big risk: its intelligence will be - well, unintelligent. If that state is also the world's sole superpower, then the rest of us had better start worrying too.

Yet politicized intelligence seems to be the norm in Washington. For some reason, the divisions between liberals and conservatives are especially fierce in the United States. In most countries, we disagree but can still get along. But in the US, left and right - center and right, really (who's left?), which makes the rancor even weirder - really detest one another. The incoming Bush administration's motto was ABC - Anything But Clinton. So if Democrats were talking to North Korea and on the verge of a missile deal, it was the clear duty of good ol' Republicans to stop this appeasement in its tracks, badmouth Kim Jong-il, and generally pour cold water on detente. Colin Powell had more sense, and Bush later came around. But the harm had been done, not least in collateral damage to Kim Dae-jung's "Sunshine" policy. Talk about friendly fire.

This is no way to run the proverbial railroad, much less a foreign policy. Yet for politicians to be political is inevitable. It's their job. But we can ask them to be pragmatic rather than dogmatic. And we must insist that those whose job it is to feed them the information to make decisions are scrupulously non-partisan. Fat chance. Again perhaps inevitably, in general the Pentagon and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), with their focus on military matters, tend to be more conservative than the State Department, whose area specialists are more likely to be liberal. (The Central Intelligence Agency - CIA - can and does go either way.) So these different bodies may hold opposed views on (say) the threat from North Korea, which they feed to their political masters.

That's fine. But they shouldn't play dirty. In the Clinton era, which some Republicans thought was far too soft on China (we hear less of that now, post-September 11), scary articles detailing Beijing's military menace regularly appeared in the conservative Washington Times. It was an open secret that the paper's Bill Gertz was used as a conduit by disaffected intelligence sources to leak information buttressing the hawks' case, because they felt the pinkos in the White House and State weren't taking the China threat seriously.

Ditto North Korea. Remember Kumchang-ri? That was the big dig, spotted by spy satellite, that led to charges that underground (literally) nuclear activity was continuing. This bedeviled relations between the US and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) for nearly a year, until an inspection team pronounced it all clean. And what sparked off this false alarm? A photograph leaked to the New York Times by anonymous opponents of the 1994 Agreed Framework. No doubt those who do this sneaky stuff think they're patriots, alerting their nation to peril. But what of professional ethics? And what about the risk in leaking secrets, whether true or tendentious? I find this deeply worrying - including the fact that, by contrast, people in DC shrug as if it were normal behavior.

Maybe they'll think again after a startling article in last week's International Herald Tribune (IHT) headlined "Who fired up the missile threat? Republicans in Congress know". This accuses partisans of national missile defense (NMD) of in effect bullying the CIA to "find" a threat from rogue states' missiles. In 1998, the agency saw no such threat; yet by 1999, suddenly North Korea had missiles that could hit the US "at any time". What changed? A reckless Pyongyang rocket fired over Japan, sure. But more to the point, a deliberate campaign on Capitol Hill by some in the Republican Party to make the CIA say what they wanted to hear.

The conspirators even boast about it. "It was the largest turnaround ever in the history of the [CIA], and I was part of making it happen." Thus Curt Weldon, Pennsylvania congressman and chairman of a House subcommittee on military research. By his own account, in 1995 Weldon "went ballistic" with a hapless CIA analyst who said there would be no missile threat to the continental US for at least 15 years, yelling: "This is over, this is [expletive], this is a politicized process!" Sure is. But who politicized it? Israel, for one, which lobbied overtime to get the US to focus on leakage of Russian missile skills to Iran. Another IHT article - both ran first in the Washington Post - claims the Iranian threat was much exaggerated, too.

Now Osama bin Laden has forced a less blinkered look at where the real menace lies. On January 10, the latest US National Intelligence Estimate said that in a nuclear, chemical or biological attack, ships, trucks or planes are likelier vectors than missiles. So said NMD's critics all along, way before September 11. Trouble is, one-track minders like Weldon bullied them into silence or - worse - fudging the figures. We expect better than this of America - and need it, in dangerous times. Keep politics out of intelligence.

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