[Mb-civic] Confirmation of Bolton Would Shatter Intelligence Analysts' Morale By Ray McGovern

[Mike Blaxill]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/052505A.shtml   

 Confirmation of Bolton Would Shatter
Intelligence Analysts' Morale 
    By Ray McGovern 
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Wednesday 25 May 2005

    Few have more at stake in the expected Senate
approval of John Bolton to be US representative
at the U.N. than the remnant group of demoralized
intelligence analysts trained and still willing
to speak truth to power. What would be the point
in continuing, they ask, when - like so many
other policymakers - Bolton reserves the right to
"state his own reading of the intelligence" (as
he wrote to the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee)?

    Given his well-earned reputation for
stretching intelligence beyond the breaking point
to "justify" his own policy preferences, Bolton’s
confirmation would loose a hemorrhage of honest
analysts, while the kind of malleable careerists
who cooked intelligence to "justify" the
administration’s prior decision for war on Iraq
will prosper. I refer to those who saluted
obediently when former CIA director George Tenet
told them, as he told his British counterpart in
July 2002, that the facts needed to be "fixed
around the policy" of regime change in Iraq.

    It Has All Happened Before

    Bolton’s confirmation hearings provide an
eerie flashback to the challenge that Robert
Gates encountered in 1991 during his Senate
hearings in late 1991, after President George H.
W. Bush nominated him to be CIA director. The
parallels are striking. The nomination of Gates,
who as head of CIA analysis had earned a
reputation among the analysts for cooking
intelligence to the recipe of high policy and
promoting those who cooperated, brought a revolt
among the most experienced intelligence
professionals.

    Playing the role discharged so well last
month by former state department intelligence
director Carl Ford in exposing Bolton’s
heavy-handed attempts to politicize intelligence,
former senior Soviet analyst and CIA division
chief Mel Goodman stepped forward and gave the
Senate intelligence committee chapter and verse
on how Gates had shaped intelligence analysis to
satisfy his masters and advance his career.
Goodman was joined at once by other CIA analysts
who put their own careers at risk by testifying
against Gates’ nomination. They were so many and
so persuasive that, for a time, it appeared they
had won the day. But the fix was in.

    With a powerful assist from former CIA chief
George Tenet, then staff director of the senate
intelligence committee, members approved the
nomination. Even so, 31 Senators found the
evidence against Gates so persuasive that, in an
unprecedented move, they voted No when the
nomination came to the floor.

    The First Exodus and Those Who Stayed

    After Gates was confirmed, many bright
analysts who scored high on integrity quit rather
than take part in cooking "intelligence-to-go."
In contrast, those inspired by Gates’ example and
his meteoric career followed suit and saw their
careers flourish. This explains why, in Sept.
2002 when the White House asked Tenet and his
senior managers to prepare a National
Intelligence Estimate (NIE) parroting what Vice
President Dick Cheney had been saying about the
weapons-of-mass-destruction threat from Iraq,
these malleable careerists caved in and did the
administration’s bidding. Most of the key players
in 2002 had been protégés of Gates.

    These include Tenet’s deputy, John
McLaughlin, who became acting director when Tenet
left in July 2004 to spend more time with his
family. Like his former boss, McLaughlin cannot
now recall being told that one of the key sources
of information highlighted in Colin Powell’s
unfortunate speech at the U.N. on Feb. 5, 2003
was an alcoholic, who had been championed by
advocates of war on Iraq for his peddling of
"intelligence" on phantom "mobile biological
warfare laboratories." Also included among the
players in 2002 are the obedient National
Intelligence Officer who blessed the insertion of
the biological warfare drivel and other nonsense
into the NIE, and the manager who supervised
misbegotten analytical efforts regarding the
non-nuclear-related aluminum tubes headed for
Iraq, as well as the reports on Iraqi efforts to
acquire uranium from Niger - reports based on
crude forgeries.

    Also included: folks like the CIA Inspector
General, who bowed to pressure from the White
House and from McLaughlin last summer to suppress
the exhaustive IG report on 9/11. (Release of
that report before the election would have been
an extreme embarrassment, since it is a goldmine
of names - of both intelligence officials and
policymakers - who bungled the many warnings that
such attacks were coming.) And folks like the
intelligence manager of more recent vintage who
recently tried to explain it all to me: "We were
not politicized; we just thought it appropriate
to ‘lean forward,’ given White House concern over
Iraq."

    Politicization Prospers

    The cancer of politicization spreads quickly,
runs deep, and - as we have seen on Iraq - can
help bring catastrophe.

    Thanks to an official British government
document leaked to the Sunday Times of London, we
now know that - well before the infamous NIE of
Oct. 1, 2002 on Iraqi "weapons of mass
destruction" - the White House told senior
British officials that the US had decided to
remove Saddam Hussein by military force. On July
23, 2002 the head of the UK's foreign
intelligence service, fresh back from talks in
Washington with CIA counterpart George Tenet,
told Prime Minister Tony Blair, "Intelligence and
facts were being fixed around the policy." It is
quite rare to have documentary proof of this kind
of intelligence-fixing-and-disinformation
campaign.

    Barring the unexpected, and despite
continuing efforts by Senator George Voinovich
(R-Ohio) to prevent Bolton from being confirmed,
the Republican-dominated Senate seems sure to
confirm him, even though the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee after looking so carefully
into his qualifications could not endorse him.

    This, too, has happened before. In 1983, the
committee voted 14 to 3 to reject the nomination
of Kenneth Adelman to be director of the Arms
Control and Disarmament Agency. He was
nonetheless confirmed in the full
Republican-controlled Senate by a vote of 57 to
42. Still an influential adviser to Cheney and
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Adelman was among
those arguing most strongly three years ago for
attacking Iraq. Like Bolton, he never hesitated
to "state his own reading of the intelligence."
It was Adelman who achieved dubious fame by
assuring all who would listen that the invasion
would be a "cakewalk."

-------------------------------------------
    Ray McGovern spent 27 years as a CIA analyst,
during which he chaired National Intelligence
Estimates and prepared and briefed to senior
White House officials the President's Daily
Brief. He is a founding member of Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and now
works at Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the
ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC