Father shares lessons with son on limits of CIA intelligence
By Peter Schweizer - USA Today
Peter Schweizer is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He also is co-author with his wife, Rochelle, of the new book, The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty.
The commission trying to determine how America could have been taken by surprise on Sept. 11, 2001, has focused heavily on the CIA's intelligence failures during the Clinton and Bush administrations.
This week, the panel is expected to ask national security adviser Condoleezza Rice about these intelligence lapses and accusations by former White House counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke that President Bush was fixated on Iraq, not on al-Qaeda.
Democrats, this election year, are making not only terrorism, but also Bush's handling of the Iraq war a campaign issue. There has been plenty of discussion of numerous factors that went into Bush's decision to invade Iraq.
Did a cabal of neoconservatives skew the system to propel us into war? Was Bush, as his critics say, simply being a reckless cowboy? Was intelligence information manipulated? Secretary of State Colin Powell said last week that evidence he presented to the United Nations on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program was based, he was originally told, on solid intelligence. But he admits now it may have been flawed. A separate commission and congressional committees are probing pre-war Iraq intelligence.
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But to better understand what went into Bush's decision to attack Iraq, you need to go back even further. Ignored in the discussion has been something more striking: the influence of his father's experiences, which had to play strongly into how the current President Bush viewed and weighed CIA information.
When George H.W. Bush was president, he was a heavy consumer of CIA intelligence. As a former CIA director under President Gerald Ford, he came to rely on and trust it. But during his administration, there were a few massive intelligence failures that influenced both him and, later, his son.
Based on interviews with Bush family members for a new book about the Bush dynasty, I know the two men talked regularly on the phone and discussed a second Iraq war.
The Bushes operate with a sense of collective memory. Seeing and hearing that his father was caught flat-footed by the CIA on numerous occasions, George W. Bush would have been very wary of making the same mistakes or taking the CIA intelligence totally at face value.
The first intelligence failure during the elder Bush's term was the disclosure that during the Cold War, the CIA seriously had underestimated the size and scope of the Soviet WMD arsenal. In 1990, Moscow revealed that while the CIA had estimated that the Soviets possessed 30,000 nuclear weapons and 600 tons of enriched uranium, the reality was 45,000 nuclear weapons and 1,200 tons of uranium. In short, it had been off by 50% or more.
The second shock came in 1992, with the defection of Soviet biological weapons scientist Ken Alibek. According to Alibek, Bush was stunned by disclosures of a previously unknown effort by thousands to produce biological weapons that the CIA had missed almost entirely.
The third massive intelligence failure was revealed after the dust settled in the first Gulf War. The CIA had been tracking Saddam Hussein's efforts to develop nuclear weapons for more than a decade. But once United Nations inspectors got on the ground, they quickly discovered that the CIA and everyone had been wrong about Iraqi progress on nuclear weapons. Rather than being seven years away from testing such a weapon, as the CIA assumed, Iraq was much closer, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) concluded. Thousands of scientists had been working on the weapons program. Iraq was, according to the IAEA, ready "to commence recovery of the highly enriched uranium from the safeguarded research reactor fuel" just before Desert Storm began. We also should remember that Vice President Cheney was secretary of Defense when this revelation came out.
Family members said that for George W. Bush, the events
surrounding 9/11 represented a dual challenge — terrorism
and WMD. There were the tragic airliner attacks. But there
also were the anthrax letters sent mostly to various news
media and members of Congress. One letter might have
killed up to 100,000 people, by one estimate. And they
proved the perfect weapon for a terrorist: We couldn't
find who sent them. This is what led him to focus quickly
on WMD and not simply al-Qaeda.
Intelligence is a murky business. It is usually not
possible to obtain incontrovertible evidence that a threat
exists. The CIA only can estimate based on given
information what the nature of a threat might be. In the
past, the CIA repeatedly underestimated serious threats.
So for George W. Bush to ignore CIA warnings about Iraq
and do nothing would have, to paraphrase the words his
father made famous, "not been prudent."
The irony in all of this is that when father and son talked about a second Gulf War, the father was against it. Family members told us they recall him asking: "What is the exit strategy?"
Historically, American presidents always have relied on the experiences and advice of their predecessors in making judgments. In this instance, father and son shared a common knowledge of recent history yet made diverging conclusions about what steps to take.
Intelligence, good or bad, never will make a decision for presidents; that burden will fall upon them.
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