The (lack of) intelligence underpinning Bush's Iraq policy
Posted on Thursday, May 18, 2006. By Ken Silverstein.
During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein's Information Minister became the butt of a million jokes for proclaiming that American soldiers were being routed, even as U.S. troops were quickly closing in on Baghdad. “Their infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad,” Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf—aka Baghdad Bob—said as Saddam's end neared. “Be assured, Baghdad is safe.”
Now, on the subject of Iraq the Bush administration has roughly the same credibility as Baghdad Bob, and for similar reasons: the administration covers its ears when it gets bad news and anyone bold enough to deliver it is sent to face the firing squad. “This administration,” Bob Graham, the former Senator and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me, “does not seek the truth as a basis for its judgments, but tries to use intelligence to validate judgments it has already made.”
A number of current and former intelligence officials have told me that the administration's war on internal dissent has crippled the CIA's ability to provide realistic assessments from Iraq. “The system of reporting is shut down,” said one person familiar with the situation. “You can't write anything honest, only fairy tales.”
The New York Times and others have reported that in 2003, the CIA station chief in Baghdad authored several special field reports that offered extremely negative assessments of the situation on the ground in Iraq—assessments that later proved to be accurate. The field reports, known as “Aardwolfs,” were angrily rejected by the White House. Their author—who I'm told was a highly regarded agency veteran named Gerry Meyer—was soon pushed out of the CIA, in part because his reporting angered the See No Evil crowd within the Bush administration. “He was a good guy,” one recently retired CIA official said of Meyer, “well-wired in Baghdad, and he wrote a good report. But any time this administration gets bad news, they say the critics are assholes and defeatists, and off we go down the same path with more pressure on the accelerator.”
In 2004 Meyer was replaced with a new CIA station chief in Baghdad, who that year filed six Aardwolfs, which, sources told me, were collectively as pessimistic about the situation in Iraq as the ones sent by his predecessor. The station chief finished his assignment in December 2004; he was not fired, but according to one source is now “a pariah within the system.” Three other former intelligence officials gave me virtually identical accounts, with one saying the ex–station chief was “treated like shit” and “farmed out.” (I was given the former station chief's name and current position, but I am not publishing the information because he is still employed by the CIA.)
As has been the case with other people deemed to be insufficiently loyal, the White House went fishing for dirt on the two station chiefs, including information on their political affiliations. “I spent 30 years at the CIA,” said one former official, “and no one was ever interested in knowing whether I was a Republican or a Democrat. That changed with this administration. Now you have loyalty tests.”
The fate of those two station chiefs had a predictable effect. In 2005, I'm told, the Baghdad station chief filed but a single Aardwolf. The report, which one person told me was widely derided within the CIA as “a joke,” asserted that the United States was winning the war despite all evidence to the contrary. It was garbage, but garbage that the Bush administration wanted to hear; at the end of his tour, that Station Chief was given a plum assignment. “This is a time of war,” said one former intelligence official. “Every day American kids are getting killed over there. We need steady, focused reporting [from Baghdad] but no one is willing to speak out since they know they'll get shot down.”
“The CIA's ability to speak honestly is gone,” concluded the official, “which is extraordinarily dangerous to our country.”
Charlie Allen is said to be another person who paid a price for telling the truth. In August of 2005 Allen was appointed by Bush to an assistant secretary post at the Department of Homeland Security. Before moving to DHS, Allen had served at the CIA for 47 years and was one of its most legendary and respected figures. According to his biography on the DHS website, Allen was awarded the National Intelligence Medal for Achievement in 1983 and the CIA Commendation Medal in 1991 “for provision of warning intelligence in Desert Shield/Desert Storm.” In October 2005, CIA Director Porter Goss awarded Allen the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the CIA’s “highest and most coveted award.”
In 2004, Allen, then Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Collection, traveled to Iraq and upon his return made the mistake—like the two Baghdad station chiefs—of writing a pessimistic report about the U.S. position. “He knew the business, the region, and the policy,” said one person who read the report. “What he wrote was spot-on.”
Allen concluded that the administration's strategy and tactics “were not going to get us out of the mess we were in,” said a second source who also read the report. This person said that Allen had anticipated being appointed deputy to John Negroponte when Negroponte was named Director of National Intelligence in April 2005, but Allen’s negative assessment killed his chances. “Charlie went over there,” said this person, “and wrote a realistic report that did not go over well with the administration, and that's why he's over at DHS. Charlie told friends that he'd learned it was better not to put certain things on paper.” (I requested comment from Allen through the DHS press office, but got no reply.)
Several of the sources I spoke with said that they were further troubled because it appears that no National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq (NIE) has been produced since the summer of 2004. The last NIE—which the CIA describes as “the most authoritative written judgment concerning a national security issue”—offered a dark but prescient assessment of the U.S. position in Iraq, as disclosed when the highly classified document was later leaked to the New York Times. One former senior agency official told me, “If I were at the CIA now and was asked to work on an NIE [on Iraq], my first response would be, 'How the fuck do I get out of this?' The most courageous, honest person in the place would be reluctant to do it because every time someone says the emperor has no clothes he gets his head lopped off.” Indeed, President Bush practically dismissed the 2004 NIE, responding to questions about the report at a September 2004 press conference by saying: “They were just guessing as to what the conditions might be like. The Iraqi citizens are defying the pessimistic predictions.”
NIEs are important because they are supposed to include non-consensus viewpoints, allowing readers to evaluate whether a particular policy is based on unanimity or if there is a serious rift. “Given the significance of the situation in Iraq, where we have so little historical experience, I would expect an administration that wanted truth to guide its policy to be requesting regular NIEs,” said former Senator Graham.
Clearly, better reporting from Iraq is badly needed. But don't expect more honesty out of Baghdad soon. Under this administration, anything less than cheerleading can be a career-ending move.
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http://harpers.org/sb-cia-badnews-293480283.html