Memo to Central Intelligence Agency
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
From: William Rivers Pitt
To: Central Intelligence Agency
Date: Friday 24 October 2003, 10:30 a.m.
Re: The scapegoating process
Status: IMPORTANT
This morning’s front page of the Washington Post carried a story entitled, “Inquiry Faults Intelligence
on Iraq.” The story described statements by the Republican-dominated Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence. The first two paragraphs read as follows:
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is preparing a blistering report on prewar
intelligence on Iraq that is critical of CIA Director George J. Tenet and other intelligence
officials for overstating the weapons and terrorism case against Saddam Hussein,
according to congressional officials.
The committee staff was surprised by the amount of circumstantial evidence and
single-source or disputed information used to write key intelligence documents -- in
particular the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate -- summarizing Iraq's
capabilities and intentions.
The committee is chaired by Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas. Some background on
Senator Roberts is noteworthy. On June 26, I did an interview with 27-year CIA senior analyst Ray
McGovern on a wide array of issues. That interview can be found here. The discussion turned, at one
point, to Senator Roberts. From the interview:
Take Pat Roberts, the Republican Senator from Kansas, who is chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee. When the Niger forgery was unearthed and when Colin Powell
admitted, well shucks, it was a forgery, Senator Jay Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat
on that committee, went to Pat Roberts and said they really needed the FBI to take a
look at this. After all, this was known to be a forgery and was still used on Congressmen
and Senators. We’d better get the Bureau in on this. Pat Roberts said no, that would be
inappropriate. So Rockefeller drafted his own letter, and went back to Roberts and said
he was going to send the letter to FBI Director Mueller, and asked if Roberts would sign
on to it. Roberts said no, that would be inappropriate.
What the FBI Director eventually got was a letter from one Minority member saying
pretty please, would you maybe take a look at what happened here, because we think
there may have been some skullduggery. The answer he got from the Bureau was a
brush-off. Why do I mention all that? This is the same Pat Roberts who is going to lead
the investigation into what happened with this issue.
There is a lot that could be said about Pat Roberts. I remember way back last fall when
people were being briefed, CIA and others were briefing Congressmen and Senators
about the weapons of mass destruction. These press folks were hanging around outside
the briefing room, and when the Senators came out, one of the press asked Senator
Roberts how the evidence on weapons of mass destruction was. Roberts said, oh, it was
very persuasive, very persuasive.
The press guy asked Roberts to tell him more about that. Roberts said, “Truck A was
observed to be going under Shed B, where Process C is believed to be taking place.”
The press guy asked him if he found that persuasive, and Pat Roberts said, “Oh, these
intelligence folks, they have these techniques down so well, so yeah, this is very
persuasive.” And the correspondent said thank you very much, Senator.
So, if you’ve got a Senator who is that inclined to believe that kind of intelligence,
you’ve got someone who will do the administration’s bidding. On the House side, of
course, you’ve got Porter Goss, who is a CIA alumnus. Porter Goss’ main contribution
last year to the joint committee investigating 9/11 was to sic the FBI on members of that
committee, at the direction of who? Dick Cheney. Goss admits this. He got a call from
Dick Cheney, and he was “chagrined” in Goss’ word that he was upbraided by Dick
Cheney for leaks coming out of the committee. He then persuaded the innocent Bob
Graham to go with him to the FBI and ask the Bureau to investigate the members of that
committee. Polygraphs and everything were involved. That’s the first time something like
that has ever happened.
Be aware, of course, that Congress has its own investigative agencies, its own ways of
investigating things like that. So without any regard for the separation of powers, here
Goss says Cheney is bearing down on me, so let’s get the FBI in here. In this case,
ironically enough, the FBI jumped right in with Ashcroft whipping it along. They didn’t
come up with much, but the precedent was just terrible.
All I’m saying is that you’ve got Porter Goss on the House side, you’ve got Pat Roberts
on the Senate side, you’ve got John Warner who’s a piece with Pat Roberts. I’m very
reluctant to be so unequivocal, but in this case I can say nothing is going to come out of
those hearings but a lot of smoke.
Ray McGovern is one of your people, and has been since the Kennedy administration. He knows
that Senator Roberts is nothing more or less than a shill for the White House. The Washington Post
article referenced above comes to essentially the same conclusion in the first sentence of the third
paragraph: “Like a similar but less exhaustive inquiry being completed by the House intelligence
committee, the Senate report shifts attention toward the intelligence community and away from White
House officials, who have been criticized for exaggerating the Iraqi threat.”
This memo is being written not to tell you about Senator Roberts, for it is sure you know all about
him. This memo is being written because of your poor response to these accusations. At 9:43 a.m.
on Friday, a story hit the Associated Press wires entitled, “CIA Rebuffs Senate Criticism of its Prewar
Intelligence.” According to the AP story, your “rebuff” consisted of the following:
The CIA on Friday rejected Senate criticism of its prewar reports on the threat posed by
Saddam Hussein, saying it's too soon to conclude the intelligence was unfounded while
the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq continues. "It is hard to understand
how the committee could come to any conclusions at this point, particularly while the
efforts of (weapons search leader) Dr. David Kay in Iraq are at an early stage," said CIA
spokesman Bill Harlow.
The rest of the AP story goes on to describe the argument from the Senate committee’s perspective.
This, simply, is unacceptable, for three reasons.
1. The National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE: This was referenced in the above-captioned
Washington Post article as follows: “The committee staff was surprised by the amount of
circumstantial evidence and single-source or disputed information used to write key intelligence
documents -- in particular the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate -- summarizing Iraq's
capabilities and intentions.”
This description of the NIE does not wed to reality. A conservative columnist and avowed Bush-voter
named Paul Sperry wrote an article entitled, “Yes, Bush Lied” on October 6 2003. He writes:
Page 4 of the report, called the National Intelligence Estimate, deals with terrorism, and
draws conclusions that would come as a shock to most Americans, judging from recent
polls on Iraq. The CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and the other U.S. spy agencies
unanimously agreed that Baghdad: 1) Had not sponsored past terrorist attacks against
America, 2) Was not operating in concert with al-Qaida, and 3) Was not a terrorist threat
to America. "We have no specific intelligence information that Saddam's regime has
directed attacks against U.S. territory," the report stated.
Sperry goes on to state:
Now turn to the next page of the same NIE report, which is considered the gold
standard of intelligence reports. Page 5 ranks the key judgments by confidence level –
high, moderate or low. According to the consensus of Bush's intelligence services, there
was "low confidence" before the war in the views that "Saddam would engage in
clandestine attacks against the U.S. Homeland" or "share chemical or biological
weapons with al-Qaida." Their message to the president was clear: Saddam wouldn't
help al-Qaida unless we put his back against the wall, and even then it was a big maybe.
If anything, the report was a flashing yellow light against attacking Iraq.
Bush saw the warning, yet completely ignored it and barreled ahead with the war plans
he'd approved a month earlier (Aug. 29), telling a completely different version of the
intelligence consensus to the American people. Less than a week after the NIE was
published, he warned that "on any given day" – provoked by attack or not, sufficiently
desperate or not – Saddam could team up with Osama and conduct a joint terrorist
operation against America using weapons of mass destruction.
Again, you at CIA know this about the NIE. Your response to the characterization of this report by
White House defenders, a characterization that has been ongoing for months now, allows the ones
truly responsible for the shoddy Iraq data to continue to avoid responsibility. In short, given the facts,
your response was unacceptable.
2. The Office of Special Plans: Paragraphs seven and eight of the Washington Post article
described above reads as follows: “Sen. John ‘Jay’ Rockefeller IV (D-W. Va.) said yesterday he had
secured a promise from Roberts to ask one executive agency, the Defense Department and, in
particular, its Office of Special Plans, for information about the intelligence it collected or analyzed on
Iraq. The office has been accused by some congressional Democrats and administration critics of
gathering unreliable intelligence on Iraq that bolstered the administration's case for war. Those
allegations have not been substantiated, and the director of the office, William Luti, has denied them.”
Luti’s denials do not wed with reality. Reporter Julian Borger of the UK Guardian did an extensive
report on the Office of Special Plans in an article dated July 17 entitled “The Spies Who Pushed For
War.” Portions of this article are below:
According to former Bush officials, all defence and intelligence sources, senior
administration figures created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by
ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defence
Intelligence Agency. The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up
by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and
operated under the patronage of hardline conservatives in the top rungs of the
administration, the Pentagon and at the White House, including Vice-President Dick
Cheney.
The ideologically driven network functioned like a shadow government, much of it off the
official payroll and beyond congressional oversight. But it proved powerful enough to
prevail in a struggle with the State Department and the CIA by establishing a justification
for war. Mr Tenet has officially taken responsibility for the president's unsubstantiated
claim in January that Saddam Hussein's regime had been trying to buy uranium in
Africa, but he also said his agency was under pressure to justify a war that the
administration had already decided on.
The president's most trusted adviser, Mr Cheney, was at the shadow network's sharp
end. He made several trips to the CIA in Langley, Virginia, to demand a more
"forward-leaning" interpretation of the threat posed by Saddam. When he was not there
to make his influence felt, his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was. Such hands-on
involvement in the processing of intelligence data was unprecedented for a vice-president
in recent times, and it put pressure on CIA officials to come up with the appropriate
results. Another frequent visitor was Newt Gingrich, the former Republican party leader
who resurfaced after September 11 as a Pentagon "consultant" and a member of its
unpaid defence advisory board, with influence far beyond his official title.
Democratic congressman David Obey, who is investigating the OSP, said: "That office
was charged with collecting, vetting and disseminating intelligence completely outside of
the normal intelligence apparatus. In fact, it appears that information collected by this
office was in some instances not even shared with established intelligence agencies and
in numerous instances was passed on to the national security council and the president
without having been vetted with anyone other than political appointees."
Far more damning than Borger’s article are the words of Air Force Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, a
career Pentagon officer who worked with Luti’s office until her retirement last April. In an article from
August 5 entitled, “War Critics Zero In on Pentagon Office,” Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski makes her
feelings clearly known:
On most days, the Pentagon's 'Early Bird', a daily compilation of news articles on
defence-related issues mostly from the U.S. and British press, does not shy from
reprinting hard-hitting stories and columns critical of the Defence Department's top
leadership. But few could help notice last week that the 'Bird' omitted an opinion piece
distributed by the Knight-Ridder news agency by a senior Pentagon Middle East
specialist, Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in the office of Under
Secretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith until her retirement in April. "What I saw
was aberrant, pervasive and contrary to good order and discipline," Kwiatkowski wrote. "If
one is seeking the answers to why peculiar bits of 'intelligence' found sanctity in a
presidential speech, or why the post-Saddam (Hussein) occupation (in Iraq) has been
distinguished by confusion and false steps, one need look no further than the process
inside the Office of the Secretary of Defence" (OSD).
Kwiatkowski went on to charge that the operations she witnessed during her tenure in
Feith's office, and particularly those of an ad hoc group known as the Office of Special
Plans (OSP), constituted "a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a
co-optation through deceit of a large segment of the Congress". Headed by a gung-ho
former Navy officer, William Luti, and a scholarly national-security analyst, Abram
Shulsky, OSP was given complete access to reams of raw intelligence produced by the
U.S. intelligence community and became the preferred stop, when in town, for defectors
handled by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), led by Ahmed Chalabi. It also maintained
close relations with the Defence Policy Board (DPB), which was then chaired by
neo-conservative Richard Perle of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Feith's mentor
in the Reagan administration.
"I personally witnessed several cases of staff officers being told not to contact their
counterparts at State or the National Security Council because that particular decision
would be processed through a different channel," Kwiatkowski wrote.
Again, you at CIA are well aware of the OSP. It was their data that was used to justify this war, and
not yours. CIA and the intelligence community as a whole was completely usurped by the OSP, and
by its sponsors Rumsfeld and Cheney, whose ideological motivations caused the creation of this
outsider agency to manufacture evidence for a decision to go to war that had already been made. Yet
your defense of Friday 24 October did not mention the Office of Special Plans. Senator Rockefeller
said the words. Now, you must.
3. The White House: The Valerie Plame incident should tell you all you need to know about the
people you are dealing with. The White House destroyed one of your NOC agents to silence a critic of
the war, a NOC agent who was running a network that worked to make sure weapons of mass
destruction did not fall into the hands of terrorists. Senator Roberts and the rest of that Senate
committee are doing the bidding of this White House with the accusations leveled today.
Do not let this stand. Say the words “Office of Special Plans.” A Washington Post staff writer
named Walter Pincus has been providing an excellent perspective on these matters since the summer
scandal over the Niger uranium claims about Iraq, another incident in which the White House tried to
pin the blame on you. Provide Mr. Pincus with the data he needs. Waiting for vindication from Dr.
David Kay is a dangerous and foolhardy exercise in futility.
WRP/wrp |
