Powell & Iraq—The Uses and Abuses
of National Intelligence Estimates
A NYT Magazine piece on Colin Powell and the case to
invade Iraq highlights an NIE that was prepared not
to determine the truth, but rather to “justify”
preemptive war on Iraq where there was nothing to
preempt.
By Ray McGovern
July 18, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - The New York Times Magazine on
Friday posted “Colin Powell Still Wants Answers,” a
long article by Robert Draper to appear in Sunday’s
edition. The article is based on Draper’s upcoming
book, To Start a War: How the Bush Administration
Took America Into Iraq.
Google Books calls it “the definitive, revelatory
reckoning with arguably the most consequential
decision in the history of American foreign policy.”
I can hardly wait.
Meanwhile, Draper’s article focuses on then
Secretary of State Powell and his UN speech of Feb.
5, 2003 and the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)
upon which it is largely based. A lot of the detail
will be new to most readers, not very much new to
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which
had been established a month before. VIPS watched
the speech, dissected it, and sent their verdict to
President George W. Bush before close of business
that same afternoon
We gave Powell a charitable grade of “C”, faulting
him for, inter alia, not providing needed context
and perspective. We should have flunked him
outright.
Draper describes how, despite CIA’s strong effort to
please, the “case” the agency made for war on Iraq,
using such evidence as there was on weapons of mass
destruction, was deemed not alarmist enough for Vice
President Dick Cheney and other administration
hawks.
Specifically, the hawks were dissatisfied with the
evidence-light, but-alarmist (term of art used was
“leaning forward”) Pentagon and White House
briefings by CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin in
late Dec. 2002 on WMD in Iraq. The hawks started to
look elsewhere, since not all senior officials
(including Powell) appeared to be “with the
program.”
Draper reports that Powell ordered Carl Ford,
director of the widely respected State Department
Intelligence Unit (INR), to review the bidding
regarding biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.
Ford’s analysts strongly disputed many of the key
assertions from the usual suspects — particularly
those coming from non-intelligence, war-friendly
bureaucrats enlisted to support the war-lust
proclivities of Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld.
Powell’s chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson,
was also spending an inordinate amount of time
batting away unsourced and dubious-sourced
assertions from Cheney-ites, so Powell finally told
Wilkerson to start drafting from scratch.
Here’s where it gets interesting; here is where a
little history and inside-baseball intelligence
experience comes in handy. Draper quotes Powell: “It
was George Tenet who came to the rescue.”
CIA Director Tenet suggested basing a new draft on
the National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1, 2002,
“Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass
Destruction.” That had immense appeal to Tenet and
others who had been co-opted into “leaning forward”
to facilitate a Bush/Cheney war on Iraq. Indeed, one
can assume it had appeal to most of those involved
in Powell’s speech preparation, given that the
Security Council briefing was but a handful of days
away.
I have been referring to that NIE, advisedly, as The
Whore of Babylon, wrong on every major accusation
about WMD in Iraq. I speak from experience at the
CIA as a former chair of National Intelligence
Estimates. This one was prepared not to determine
the truth, but rather to “justify” a preemptive war
on Iraq where there was nothing to preempt.
To their credit, State/INR analysts had expressed
formal dissent from some of its main conclusions
back in September 2002.
No, it is not possible that Powell could have been
unaware of that. And it is not difficult to explain
why Powell chose to spurn his own intelligence
analysts, despite their relatively solid reputation.
I will resist the temptation to guess at Powell’s
motivation, even though I have had some considerable
experience with him. Back in the day, we used to
spend a few minutes comparing notes before my
one-on-one morning briefings of his boss, Defense
Secretary Casper Weinberger, with The President’s
Daily Brief.
I am not surprised, though, as Draper quotes Powell
explaining his decision to stay in place as
secretary of state and to do what he was told: “I
knew I didn’t have any choice. He’s the President.”
Draper adds that, “although Powell would not admit
it, Bush’s request that he be the one to make the
case against Hussein to the U.N. was enormously
flattering. Cheney took a more direct approach: ‘The
Vice President said to me: “You’re the most popular
man in America. Do something with that popularity.””
The All-Purpose NIE on Iraqi WMD
Draper describes INR’s Director Ford as “heartsick”
watching Powell on TV before the UN Security
Council. Ford’s chagrin was widely shared among
serious intelligence analysts — as well as by us
alumni watching the prostitution of what had been
our tell-it-like-it-is intelligence analysis
profession. But there the National Intelligence
Estimate was for plucking — an intelligence
community-endorsed consensus already “on the books”
— and with drafting time running out.
Admittedly, this would be a far cry from starting
“from scratch.” Rather, it became a case of “garbage
in, garbage out.” Draper names the intelligence
garbagemen: CIA Director Tenet, his deputy
McLaughlin, the chair of the NIE Robert Walpole, for
example. They were out and out guilty of fixing the
NIE in the first place and then its derivative that
Powell briefed in open session to Security Council.
No, these were not innocent mistakes. The
intelligence was fraudulent from the get-go.
I am not making this up. Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity were able to see what was
coming, and warned Bush on the afternoon of Powell’s
speech to be wary of “those advisers clearly bent on
a war for which we see no compelling reason and from
which we believe the unintended consequences are
likely to be catastrophic.” VIPS followed up with
two more Memos before the March 2003 U.S./UK attack
on Iraq.
The leaked Downing Street Minutes, published by The
Times of London on May 1, 2005, provided the
“smoking gun.” The minutes, from a July 23, 2002
briefing of Prime Minister Tony Blair by the chief
of British intelligence, just back from
consultations with Tenet in Langley, showed that the
White House had already decided to attack Iraq for
regime change and that the “intelligence and facts
were being fixed around the policy”. [Emphasis
added.]
This and additional detail is covered in a chapter I
wrote in 2005, for the book Neo-CONNED Again!, which
I titled “Sham Dunk: Cooking Intelligence for the
President.”
Sadly, not one of the many intelligence
functionaries aware of what was going on went to the
media or resigned. In contrast, before the attack on
Iraq, three senior Foreign Service Officers, looking
on from Athens, Ulaanbaatar, and Washington,
summarily quit on principle — so clear had it become
that the U.S. was embarked on a so-called “war of
choice.”
“War of choice” is more formally known as “war of
aggression” — defined at the post WWII Nuremberg
Tribunal as “the supreme international crime
differing from other war crimes only in that it
contains within itself the accumulated evil of the
whole.” (Think torture, for example, as part of that
accumulation.)
Equally sad, none of the perpetrators of the crime
have been held to account for this crime, nor even
for torture and other accumulated evils. No one held
to account. Col. Pat Lang and I addressed this issue
in an op-ed in 2007; we argued that the U.S. could
ill afford letting the Iraq War-liars off lightly,
even if that meant taking a hard look back over
previous years.
What is the inevitable result when no one is held to
account?
Putting a coda on all this several years later, the
head of the Senate Intelligence Committee announced
on June 5, 2008 the bipartisan conclusions of a
five-year study by his committee that the attack on
Iraq was launched “under false pretenses.” He
described the intelligence conjured up to “justify”
war on Iraq as “uncorroborated, contradicted, or
even non-existent.”
“Non-existent” intelligence?
Finally, for those who may continue to believe that
Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice
(of “mushroom cloud” fame”), for example, were
mistaken, rather than lying about weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq, let me suggest watching this
very short video.
Then, please ask yourself if Iraq could
go from zero weapons of mass destruction before 9/11 to
a formidable array of WMD a short year later.
NIEs: a Big Deal
Ever since the CIA was established, the NIE has been the
supreme genre of intelligence analysis and has included
input from other intelligence agencies — in recent
years, 17 of them. The NIE’s record for accuracy is
spotty. One completed in September 1962, for example,
said the Soviets would never try to put missiles in
Cuba, as the missiles were en route.
A thoroughly professional one on Iran in 2007, managed
by a former director of State/INR, concluded unanimously
“with high confidence” that Iran had stopped working on
a nuclear weapon in late 2003. That one demonstrably
played a huge role in thwarting Cheney/Bush planning for
a strike on Iran in 2008, their last year in office.
(Bush actually says as much in the part of his memoir
that he wrote himself.)
It would be a mistake, however, to put the “Whore of
Babylon” NIE of Oct. 1, 2002 about all those Iraqi WMD
in the category of the unfortunate 1962 Estimate on
Cuba. The conclusions in the Iraq Estimate were not
mistaken, they were fraudulent. The conclusions were
fixed to “justify” an unprovoked attack on Iraq.
Here’s what happened and why it is relevant today.
Throughout 2002, Tenet, who as director of Central
Intelligence was in charge of the entire intelligence
community as well as the CIA, had been deftly avoiding
doing an Estimate on WMD in Iraq because he knew the
evidence was paper-thin. As the public campaign to
justify an attack on Iraq heated up in September 2002,
the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob
Graham (D-FL) asked Tenet to please prepare such an
Estimate. The answer came back: Can’t do; too busy.
Under pressure from Committee member Dick Durbin (D-IL)
Graham called Tenet back and told him, in essence: No
NIE, no vote to authorize war.
After informing the White House, Tenet got permission to
go ahead and have an NIE prepared — with two conditions.
It had to conform with the extreme accusations about
Iraqi WMD that Cheney made during a speech at a Veterans
of Foreign Wars convention in Nashville on Aug. 26,
2002; and the NIE had to be formally issued before the
first week of October when the White House wanted a
House and Senate vote to give Bush permission to make
war.
No problem for Tenet, who found himself the ultimate
beneficiary of former CIA Director Robert Gates’ finely
tuned Geiger counter for careerists and corruptibility
in selecting top managers. The malleable managers
promoted originally by Gates were happy to conjure up in
record time a formal estimate written to the
specifications of their frequent visitor: Vice President
Cheney. This is the NIE on Iraq’s weapons capability
that Draper describes as having “been thrown together in
less than three weeks” in September 2020.
Corrupt Holdovers: ‘So
Eager to Help’
James Clapper, whom
President Barack Obama appointed director of National
Intelligence overseeing the entire intelligence
community, was in charge of satellite imagery analysis
at the time, leading up to the attack on Iraq. Did he
tell anyone that no WMD had been discovered in imagery —
the primary source for such intelligence? Well, no.
Rather, he was “leaning
forward.”
At the Carnegie Foundation
in November 2018, Clapper was hawking his memoir
Facts and Fears: Hard Truths From a Life in
Intelligence. In the book Clapper places the blame
for the consequential fraud (he calls it “the failure”)
to find the (non-existent) WMD, in his words, “where it
belongs — squarely on the shoulders of the
administration members who were pushing a narrative of a
rogue WMD program in Iraq and on the intelligence
officers, including me, who were so eager to help that
we found what wasn’t really there.”(Emphasis
added) .
Clapper explained:
“… we heard that Vice
President Cheney was pushing the Pentagon for
intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction,
and then the order came down [to Clapper as director
of NIMA, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency] to
find the WMD sites. We set to work, analyzing
imagery to eventually identify, with varying degrees
of confidence, more than 950 sites where we assessed
there might be WMDs or a WMD connection. We drew on
all of NIMA’s skill sets … and it was all wrong.”
During the Q and A I
commented on
Clapper’s eagerness to please whatever superiors he was
working for at the time, and give them the information
they lusted for to “justify” things like war — to the
point of finding “what wasn’t really there.”?
I noted that exactly two
years earlier, the Obamas and Clintons were desperate to
blame Donald Trump’s victory on Russian interference.
And so, I asked, was this a repeat performance? Had
Clapper snapped to and again “found what really wasn’t
there?” This, I emphasized, was the conclusion of VIPS,
including two former technical directors at NSA who had
done the forensic research on how DNC emails ended up at
WikiLeaks — the work the FBI decided not to do.
Why Not an NIE on
Russian Interference?
Here’s the rub. In December
2016, Clapper
rejected a
request from House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin
Nunes (R-CA) to provide a briefing to members on
Russia’s alleged meddling in the November election.
The denial prompted Nunes
to cast doubt on recent claims coming out of the CIA,
including whether or not there really is an agency
assessment that Moscow was aiming to help Trump win the
presidency. “We want to clarify press reports that the
CIA has a new assessment that it has not shared with
us,” he added.
Nunes was more pointed in a
letter to
Director of National Intelligence Clapper. He claimed he
was “dismayed” that the committee had not been informed
about reports that the CIA had revised information that
it previously reported to members. Nunes noted that
during an open hearing in November, Clapper said the
evidence connecting the government of Russia to
WikiLeaks was “not as strong,” and that the intel
community didn’t have “good insight into” the issue.
At about the same time,
several Democratic senators, including Patrick Leahy
(D-VT) and Ben Cardin (D-MD), wrote a letter to
Clapper requesting an NIE on “Russian efforts to
manipulate the recent US presidential election.”
“Given the serious nature
of these matters, with unprecedented national security
implications, we believe that our intelligence community
must prioritize a conclusive, public NIE to lay out the
facts of this serious matter for the American people,”
the senators urged in their letter.
Oops. Lame duck Clapper and
his bosses suddenly developed a Tenet-like allergy to
preparing a full blown NIE. The White House opted
instead to commission Clapper to do a study for Obama.
The Democrats in Congress may well have been warned
about the thinness of the evidence (now thoroughly
debunked) that Russia hacked the DNC emails published by
WikiLeaks. In any event, they acquiesced in what
Clapper misnamed an “Intelligence Community Assessment”
titled “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in
Recent US Elections.”
An NIE, of course, would
have required the participation of all 17 intelligence
agencies, some of whom, like State/INR, might ask
troublesome questions about the evidence as well as the
conclusions. Clapper’s lame excuse that there was not
enough time to do a full NIE does not pass the smell
test.
After several months of
advertising the “Intelligence Community Assessment” as
the product of all 17 intelligence agencies, Clapper was
forced to admit to Congress that, well, actually only
the CIA, FBI, and NSA were involved; and, well, actually
only “handpicked analysts” from those three. Notably
shut out of the process were that pesky INR (with its
substantial expertise on Russia) and the Defense
Intelligence Agency, which has charter responsibility
for keeping tabs on the GRU, the Russian military
intelligence agency alleged to have done the hacking.
Former U.S. Ambassador to
Russia Jack Matlock asked a former colleague why State/INR
was frozen out of the process. His friend
explained simply
that INR did not agree with the analysis — and not for
the first time.
In other words, the Jan. 6,
2017 “Intelligence Community Assessment” was
deliberately organized as a rump effort to come up with
the answers Clapper’s White House bosses wanted — a
reprise of his performance with imagery analysis on WMD
in Iraq.
And off and running went
Russiagate.
This escapade actually may
have been easier for Clapper who may believe what he
said during an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd
on May 28, 2017; namely that the Russians are “almost
genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor,
whatever, which is a typical Russian technique.”
Certainly, Clapper would not want any State Department
pin-stripers messing with his firm handle on the make-up
of Russian chromosomes.
Clapper and his colleagues
are no longer in office and, by some estimates, may be
lucky to stay out of jail. The coming months should see
some kind of denouement for all this — or maybe not.
“We’ll see what happens.”
In any case, the stakes are
very high. Meanwhile, why not an NIE on Russian hacking
of the DNC. With all the work that has already been
done, it should not take very long to prepare — assuming
that work can bear close scrutiny.
Ray
McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of
the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city
Washington. During his 27-year career as a CIA analyst,
he briefed The President’s Daily Brief, led the Soviet
Foreign Policy Branch, and chaired National Intelligence
Estimates. He is still on the Steering Group of Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. -
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