The Corruption of Intelligence

By Ray McGovern, TomPaine.com. Posted July 12, 2004.

In our various oral and written presentations on Iraq, my veteran intelligence officer colleagues and I took no delight in sharply criticizing what we perceived to be the corruption of intelligence analysis at CIA. Nothing would have pleased us more than to have been proven wrong. It turns out we did not know the half of it.

Several of us have just spent a painful weekend digesting the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee on prewar intelligence assessments on Iraq. The corruption is far deeper than we suspected. The only silver lining is that corrupter-in-chief George Tenet is now gone.

When the former CIA director departed, he left behind an agency on life support – an institution staffed by sycophant managers and thoroughly demoralized analysts, who are embarrassed at their own naivete in believing that the passage carved into the marble at the entrance to CIA Headquarters – "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free' – held real meaning for their work.

The Senate Committee report is meticulous. Its findings are a sharp blow to those of us who took pride in working in an agency where we could speak truth to power – with career protection from retribution from the powerful, and with leaders who would face down those policymakers who tried to exert undue influence over our analysis.

Enter 'Joe Centrifuge'

Although it was clear to us that much of the intelligence on Iraq had been cooked to the recipe of policy, not until the Senate report did we know that the skewing included outright lies. We had heard of "Joe,' the nuclear weapons analyst in CIA's Center for Weapons Intelligence and Arms Control, and it was abundantly clear that his agenda was to "prove' that the infamous aluminum tubes sought by Iraq were to be used for developing a nuclear weapon. We did not know that he and his CIA associates deliberately falsified the data – including rotor testing ironically called "spin tests.'

The Senate committee determined that "Joe' deliberately skewed data to fit preconceptions regarding an Iraqi nuclear threat. "Who could have believed that about our intelligence community, that the system could be so dishonest?' wondered the normally soft-spoken David Albright, a widely respected veteran expert on Iraq's work toward developing a nuclear weapon.

I share his wonderment. I too am appalled – and angry. You give 27 years of your professional life to an institution whose main mission – to get at the truth – is essential for orderly policy making, and then you find it has been prostituted. You realize that your former colleagues lacked the moral courage to rebuff efforts to enlist them as accomplices in deception. Deception that involved hoodwinking our elected representatives into giving their blessing to an ill-conceived, unnecessary war. Even Republican stalwart Sen. Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has conceded that, had Congress known before the vote for war what his committee has now discovered, "I doubt if the votes would have been there.'

Catering to the Powers That Be

It turns out that only one U.S. analyst had met with the Iraqi defector appropriately codenamed "Curveball' – the source of the scary tale about mobile biological weapons factories – and that this analyst, in an e-mail to the deputy director of CIA's task force on weapons of mass destruction, raised strong doubt regarding Curveball's reliability before Colin Powell highlighted his claims at the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003. I almost became physically ill reading the cynical response from the deputy director of the task force:

"As I said last night, let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn't say, and the powers that be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he's talking about.'

(Reading this brought to consciousness a painful flashback to early August 1964. We CIA analysts knew that reports of a second attack on U.S. destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf were spurious but were prevented from reporting that. The director of current intelligence explained to us condescendingly that President Johnson had decided to use the non-incident as a pretext to escalate the war and that "we do not want to wear out our welcome at the White House.' So this kind of politicization, though rare in the past, is not without precedent – and not without similarly woeful consequences.)

With respect to Iraq, George Tenet's rhetoric about "truth' and "honesty' in his valedictory last week has a distinctly Orwellian ring. Worse still, apparently "Joe Centrifuge,' the above-mentioned deputy director, and other co-conspirators will get off scot-free. Sen. Roberts says he thinks, "It is very important that we quit looking in the rearview mirror and affixing blame and, you know, pointing fingers.' And Acting Director John McLaughlin has told the press that he sees no need to dismiss anyone as a result of what he portrayed as honest, limited mistakes.

Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years – from the John F. Kennedy administration – to that of George H. W. Bush.

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