WASHINGTON, 6 February 2004 — Before he departed on his quest for Saddam Hussein’s fabled weapons of mass destruction last June, David Kay, chief of the Iraq Survey Group, told friends that he expected promptly to locate the cause of the pre-emptive war. On Jan. 28, Kay appeared before the Senate to testify that there were no WMDs. “It turns out that we were all wrong,” he said. President Bush, he added helpfully, was misinformed by the whole intelligence community which, like Kay, made assumptions that turned out to be false.
Within days, Bush declared that he would, after all, appoint a commission to investigate; significantly, it would report its findings only after the presidential election.
Kay’s testimony was the catalyst for this U-turn, but only one of his claims is correct: That he was wrong. The truth is that much of the intelligence community did not fail, but presented correct assessments and warnings, that were overridden and suppressed. On virtually every single important claim made by the Bush administration in its case for war, there was serious dissension. Discordant views - not from individual analysts but from several intelligence agencies as a whole - were kept from the public as momentum was built for a congressional vote on the war resolution.
Precisely because of the qualms the administration encountered, it created a rogue intelligence operation, the Office of Special Plans, located within the Pentagon and under the control of neoconservatives. The OSP roamed outside the ordinary inter-agency process, stamping its approval on stories from Iraqi exiles that the other agencies dismissed as lacking credibility, and feeding them to the president.
At the same time, constant pressure was applied to the intelligence agencies to force their compliance. In one case, a senior intelligence officer who refused to buckle under was removed.
When the CIA debunked the tales about Niger uranium and the Saddam/Al-Qaeda connection, its reports were ignored and direct pressure applied. In October 2002, the White House inserted mention of the uranium into a speech Bush was to deliver, but the CIA objected and it was excised. Three months later, it reappeared in his State of the Union address.
Never before had any senior White House official physically intruded into CIA’s Langley headquarters to argue with mid-level managers and analysts about unfinished work. But twice Vice President Cheney and Lewis Libby, his chief of staff, came to offer their opinions. According to Patrick Lang, the former head of human intelligence at the CIA: “They looked disapproving, questioned the reports and left an impression of what you’re supposed to do. They would say: ‘you haven’t looked at the evidence’. The answer would be, those reports (from Iraqi exiles) aren’t valid. The analysts would be told, you should look at this again’. Finally, people gave up. You learn not to contradict them.”
The CIA had visitors too, according to Ray McGovern, former CIA chief for the Middle East. Newt Gingrich came, and Condi Rice, and as for Cheney, “he likes the soup in the CIA cafeteria,” McGovern jokes. CIA Director George Tenet, for his part, opted to become a political advocate for Bush’s brief rather than a protector of the intelligence community.
On Feb. 5 2003, Colin Powell presented evidence of WMDs before the UN. Cheney and Libby had tried to inject material from Iraqi exiles and the OSP into his presentation, but Powell rejected most of it. Yet, for the most important speech of his career, he refused to allow the presence of any analysts from his own intelligence agency.
This week, when Bush announced he would appoint an investigative commission, Powell offered a limited mea culpa at a meeting at the Washington Post. He said that if only he had known the intelligence, he might not have supported an invasion. Thus he began to show carefully calibrated remorse, to distance himself from other members of the administration and especially Cheney. Powell also defended his UN speech, claiming “it reflected the best judgments of all of the intelligence agencies”.
Powell is sensitive to the slightest political winds, especially if they might affect his reputation. If he is a bellwether, will it soon be that every man must save himself?
