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On Day 78 of the Search for
Iraqi W.M.D., yesterday, once again nothing turned up.
Spooks are spitting mad at
the way their work was manipulated to exaggerate the Iraqi threat, and they are
thus surprisingly loquacious (delighting those of us in journalism). They
emphasize that even if weapons of mass destruction still turn up, there is a
fundamental problem —not within the intelligence community itself, but with
senior administration officials — particularly in the Pentagon.
"As an employee of the
Defense Intelligence Agency, I know how this administration has lied to the
public to get support for its attack on Iraq," one of my informants rages.
Some others see a pattern not so much of lying as of self-delusion — and of
subjecting the intelligence agencies to those delusions.
One has to take the outrage
among the spooks with a few grains of salt because the intelligence folks have
been on the losing end of a power struggle with the Pentagon. But that's the
problem: the Pentagon has become the 800-pound gorilla of the Bush
administration, playing a central role in foreign policy and intelligence as
well as military matters.
"The basic problem
here is that O.S.D. [Office of the Secretary of Defense] has become too powerful,"
noted Patrick Lang, a former senior official in the Defense Intelligence Agency.
One step came in the
Clinton administration, when the defense secretary gained greater control over
the handling of images from spy satellites. Mr. Rumsfeld then started up his own
intelligence shop in the Pentagon. The central philosophy of intelligence —
that it should be sheltered from policy considerations to keep it honest — was
deeply bruised.
A commission led by Brent
Scowcroft suggested two years ago that intelligence functions be consolidated
under the director of central intelligence. It was an excellent idea — killed
by, among others, Mr. Rumsfeld.
My own limited encounters
with spies reinforce the idea that intelligence needs to be digested by
professionals rather than cherry-picked by ideologues. I remember one spy who
would call me up periodically for lunch when I lived in China. He would pass on
amazing inside tidbits about China's top leaders — and then ask for copies of
classified Chinese documents I had obtained.
I kept putting him off
because I wasn't going to share my documents — but I did want his scoops.
Unfortunately, I could never confirm them, so they were unusable. Finally, it
dawned on me that he was simply fabricating juicy tidbits so he would have
something to trade.
That's the way the
intelligence game sometimes operates: the information is voluminous, confusing
and contradictory, and prone to abuse, and it needs to be protected from policy
makers rather than massaged to make them feel good.
"The president is a
very powerful guy," said Ray Close, who spent 26 years in the C.I.A. "When
you sense what he wants, it's very difficult not to go out and find it."
As best I can reconstruct
events, Mr. Rumsfeld genuinely felt that the C.I.A. and D.I.A. were doing a
horrendous job on Iraq — after all, he was hearing much more alarming
information from those close to Ahmad Chalabi. So the Pentagon set up its own
intelligence unit, and it sifted through everyone else's information and goaded
other agencies to come up with more alarmist conclusions.
"He's an ideologist,"
one man in the spy world said of Mr. Rumsfeld. "He doesn't start with the
facts, even though he's quite brainy. He has a bottom line, and then he gathers
facts to support the bottom line."
That is not, of course, a
capital offense. Pentagon leaders should feel free to disagree strenuously with
foolish judgments by the C.I.A. But for the process to work, top C.I.A.
officials need to fight back. Instead, George Tenet rolled over.
"Tenet sided with the
D.O.D. crowd and cut the legs out from under his own analysts," said Larry
Johnson, a retired C.I.A. analyst.
Does this mean that Mr.
Tenet should be fired? I don't think so. Despite his failure to stand up for his
people, he should not be made a scapegoat for problems that arose primarily from
the Pentagon's zealotry — and ousting him would leave O.S.D. more powerful
than ever.
"There was a
collective failure here," one senior person in the intelligence world said.
"At the end of the day, it should not be George left out to dry."
THE BOTTOM LINE THE BOTTOM LINE
THE BOTTOM LINE THE BOTTOM LINE THE BOTTOM LINE THE BOTTOM LINE