US Intel Vets Oppose
Brennan’s CIA Plan
By Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity
March 10, 2015 "ICH"
- The original idea of the CIA was to have
independent-minded experts assessing both
short- and longer-term threats to U.S.
national security. Mixing with operations
and politics was always a danger, which
is now highlighted by CIA Director
Brennan’s reorganization, opposed by a group
of U.S. intelligence veterans.
MEMORANDUM FOR:
The President
FROM:
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity
SUBJECT:
John Brennan’s Restructuring Plan for CIA
Mr. President, the CIA
reorganization plan announced by Director
John Brennan on Friday is a potentially
deadly blow to the objective, fact-based
intelligence needed to support fully
informed decisions on foreign policy. We
suggest turning this danger into an
opportunity to create an independent entity
for CIA intelligence analysis immune from
the operational demands of the “war on
terror.”
On Feb. 5, 2003,
immediately after Colin Powell’s address to
the UN, members of VIPS sent our first VIPS
memorandum, urging President George W. Bush
to widen the policy debate “beyond the
circle 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.”
The “former senior
officers” whom Brennan asked for input on
the restructuring plan are a similar closed,
blinkered circle, as is the “outstanding
group of officers from across the Agency”
picked by Brennan to look at the Agency’s
mission and future. He did not include any
of the intelligence community dissidents and
alumni who fought against the disastrous
politicization of intelligence before the
attack on Iraq. Nor does Brennan’s plan
reflect the lessons learned from that
debacle.
You have continued to
express confidence in Brennan despite the
CIA’s mediocre record under his leadership.
We urge you to weigh Brennan’s plan against
the backdrop of Harry Truman’s prophetic
vision for the CIA. We need to stop wasting
time and energy trying to prevent the baby
Truman never wanted from being thrown out
with the bathwater. Let the bathwater run
off, with the baby high and dry.
An independent group for
intelligence analysis would be free to
produce for you and your National Security
Council the medium- and long-term strategic
intelligence analysis that can help our
country steer clear of future strategic
disasters. And we offer ourselves as
advisers as to how this might be
accomplished.
Our concern over what we
see as the likely consequences stemming from
what Brennan intends, together with our many
years of experience in intelligence work,
have prompted this memo, which we believe
can profit from some historical perspective.
President Harry Truman
wanted an agency structure able to meet a
president’s need for “the most accurate …
information on what’s going on everywhere in
the world, and particularly of the trends
and developments in all the danger spots.”
In an op-ed appearing in the Washington
Post exactly one month after the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy,
Truman added, “I have been disturbed by …
the way CIA has been diverted from its
original assignment … and has become an
operational and at times policy-making arm
of the Government.”
Truman added that the
“most important thing” was to guard against
the chance of intelligence being used to
influence or lead the President into unwise
decisions. His warning is equally relevant
now – 52 years later.
Bay of Pigs
Truman was referring to
how CIA Director Allen Dulles tried to
mousetrap President Kennedy into committing
U.S. armed forces to finish what a rag-tag
band of CIA-trained invaders of Cuba began
by landing at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961,
a few months before you were born. Kennedy
had repeatedly warned the CIA brass and
covert action planners that under no
circumstances would he commit U.S. forces.
But they were old hands; they knew better;
they thought the young President could be
had.
Allen Dulles’s handwritten
notes discovered after his death show how he
drew Kennedy into a plan that was virtually
certain to require the support of U.S.
forces. Dulles wrote that Kennedy would be
compelled by “the realities of the
situation” to give whatever military support
was necessary “rather than permit the
enterprise to fail.”
Kennedy fired Dulles, a
quintessential Washington Establishment
figure – something one does only at one’s
own peril. As young CIA officers at the
time, some of us experienced first-hand the
deep reservoir of hate in which many a CIA
covert action operator swam. Many could not
resist venting their spleen, calling Kennedy
a “coward” and even “traitor.”
Analysis Also
Corrupted
You are fully aware, we
trust, that our analysts’ vaunted ethos of
speaking unvarnished truth to power was
corrupted by Director George Tenet and
Deputy Director John McLaughlin, who outdid
themselves in carrying out the instructions
of President Bush and Vice President Dick
Cheney. The new ethos boiled down to this:
If the President wants to paint Iraq as a
strategic threat, it is our job to come up
with the “evidence” – even if it needs to be
manufactured out of whole cloth (or forged,
as in “yellowcake uranium from Africa”
caper).
Honest analysts were
admonished not to rock the boat. A concrete
example might help to show this in all its
ugliness. When the only U.S. intelligence
officer to interview “Curve Ball” before the
war saw a draft of Powell’s Feb. 5, 2003
speech citing “first-hand descriptions” by
an Iraqi defector of a fleet of mobile
bioweapons laboratories, he strongly
questioned the “validity of the
information.” The interviewer had, from the
outset, expressed deep reservations about
Curveball’s reliability.
Here’s what the
interviewer’s supervisor, the Deputy Chief
of the CIA’s Iraqi Task Force, wrote in an
email responding to his misgivings:
“Let’s keep in mind the
fact that this war’s going to happen
regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn’t
say, and that the Powers That Be probably
aren’t terribly interested in whether Curve
Ball knows what he’s talking about. However,
in the interest of Truth, we owe somebody a
sentence or two of warning, if you honestly
have reservations.”
This was not an isolated
occurrence. Commenting on the results of a
bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee
five-year study of pre-Iraq-war
intelligence, Chairman Jay Rockefeller
described it as “unsubstantiated,
contradicted, or even nonexistent.” He was
alluding to information (in)famously
described as a “slam dunk” by then-CIA
Director George Tenet who was singularly
responsible for advancing the career of John
Brennan.
In a departure from
customary diplomatic parlance,
then-Assistant Secretary of State for
Intelligence Carl Ford, speaking to the
authors of Hubris: The Inside Story of
Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq
War, had harsh words for Tenet and his
deputy John McLaughlin. Ford said that the
evidence and analysis they gave policy
makers was “not just wrong, they lied … they
should have been shot.”
It is unfortunately true
that – short of quitting and blowing the
whistle – there is little one can do to
prevent the skewing of “intelligence” when
it is directed from the top – whether by the
Bush-Tenet-McLaughlin consequential deceit
on the threat from Iraq, or the
ideological/careerist conceit of William
Casey-Robert Gates in insisting up until the
very end of the Soviet regime that the
Soviet Communist Party would never
relinquish power and that Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev was merely cleverer than
his predecessors.
Thankfully, Not
All Gave Up
There is hope to be drawn
from those occasions where senior
intelligence officials with integrity can
step in, show courageous example, and –
despite multiple indignities and pitfalls in
the system – can force the truth to the
surface. We hope that you have been made
aware that, after the no-WMD-anywhere
debacle on Iraq, Assistant Secretary of
State for Intelligence Thomas Fingar did
precisely that during 2007, supervising a
watershed National Intelligence Estimate on
Iran that concluded unanimously, “with high
confidence,” that Iran had stopped working
on a nuclear weapon in 2003.
President Bush concedes in
his memoir that this put the kibosh on his
and Dick Cheney’s earlier plan to attack
Iran during their last year in office. So,
character (as in Fingar) counts, and people
of integrity can make a difference – and
even help thwart plans for war – even in the
most politicized of circumstances.
Restructuring
Accordingly, the primary
objective in any restructuring should be to
make it easier for people of integrity, like
Thomas Fingar, to create an atmosphere in
which analysts feel free to tell it like it
is without worry about possible harm to
their careers, should they come up with a
politically “incorrect” conclusion – as the
one on Iran clearly was.
The problem is that the
Brennan restructuring effort does just the
opposite. It puts the politicization on
steroids. Placing intelligence analysts and
operations officers together fosters a quite
different kind of atmosphere – the kind that
increases the likelihood of what Truman
called the “most important thing” to guard
against – leading “the President into unwise
decisions.”
Truman saw the general
problem and went even further, saying he
“would like to see the CIA restored to its
original assignment as the intelligence arm
of the President … and its operational
duties terminated or properly used
elsewhere.” We think Truman was right then;
and he is right now.
Decades of experience show
that Truman’s fears were well founded.
Indeed, from the outset, putting analysis
and covert action operations together in the
same agency was the first structural fault,
so to speak, when it was created in 1947.
It was occasioned
primarily by insistence that WWII OSS
operatives who could match the KGB in what
is now called “regime change” remain in
government, and then a myopic choice to
place them with the analysts in the newly
created CIA. As Melvin Goodman points out in
his The Failure of Intelligence: the
Decline and Fall of the CIA, the early
“CIA leadership itself was opposed to having
responsibility for covert action, believing
that the clandestine function would
ultimately taint the intelligence product, a
prescient observation.”
During the 1980s,
President Reagan’s Secretary of State,
George Shultz, correctly accused CIA
Director William Casey and his deputy,
Robert Gates, of slanting intelligence,
charging that their operational involvement
“colored” the Agency’s analysis. Shultz
openly charged William Casey with giving
President Reagan “faulty intelligence” to
bolster Casey’s own policy preferences,
including the ill-conceived
arms-for-hostages-swap with Iran.
Shultz added that, because
he had a sense of this analysis-operations
toxic mix, he harbored “grave doubts about
the objectivity and reliability of some of
the intelligence I was getting.” Shultz was
a strong advocate of separating the analysis
from operations, likening the need to that
of separating investment from commercial
banking.
“War on Terrorism”
as Business Model
The business model chosen
by Brennan is fashioned to the “War on
Terrorism,” and he holds up the
Counterterrorism Center (CTC) as a model to
emulate. There the analysts and operations
officers sit side by side charged primarily
with hunting, targeting, and killing in that
war.
But truth, it has been
pointed out, is the first casualty of war.
This can be seen right off the bat in the
exaggerated way the supposed “successes” of
the Center are advertised. Some of us have
worked in or closely with these CIA Centers,
after which ten new “Mission Centers” are
patterned. And we are taken aback by the
hyperbolic plaudits being given them – and
especially to the CTC.
That a quintessential
politicizer, and big Curve Ball promoter,
like former CIA Deputy Director John
McLaughlin is reported to have advised
Brennan on the restructuring, and lauds the
benefits of “putting analysts and operators
together” adds to our concern.
Very much in step, former
CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, for
instance, claims that existing Centers have
“proven to be a very powerful combination”
and that the Counterterrorism Center is “the
most successful agency component over the
last decade.”
Morell remains focused on
the business model of war. Just days ago he
conceded that he did not think he would live
to see the end of al-Qaeda: “My children’s
generation and my grandchildren’s generation
will still be fighting this fight,” said
Morell.
Does it occur to Morell or
others who have played senior intelligence
roles that there ought to be a different
kind of center, like what used to exist in
parts of the Directorate of Intelligence,
where analyst talent might be used not
simply for targeting terrorists, but for
figuring out what their grievances are, and
whether there may be more promising ways to
address them?
Do we really believe that
terrorists slip out of the womb screaming “I
hate America”? And is there a cost to
drone-killing them as the preferred method
of eliminating terrorists (together with
others who may be in the wrong place at the
wrong time)?
Brennan has announced that
the new Centers will “bring the full range
of operational, analytic, support,
technical, and digital personnel and
capabilities to bear on the nation’s most
pressing security issues and interests.”
We need to learn more of
the specifics, but the integrated Mission
Centers sound very much like fertile field
for politicization and centralized control
under which subordinates will feel pressure
to fall in line with prosecuting the war de
jour and to sign on to politically correct
solutions dictated from the 7th
floor under guidance from your staff in the
White House.
Is this the kind of CIA we
need — everyone marching in step, as major
parts of the Agency are transformed into a
private army at your disposal, with
virtually no Congressional oversight? We
don’t think so.
A Watershed
With the present
restructuring plan we see little promise for
the kind of agenda-free, substantive
intelligence that you and other senior
policy makers need. But the train seems to
have left the station headed toward
Brennan’s restructuring plan. The sweeping
reorganization scheme is of such importance
that it should be the subject of hearings in
the intelligence committees of House and
Senate, but there is no indication that
either committee intends to do so.
Let the analysts inclined
toward targeting terrorists and providing
other direct operational support to war sign
up for these war-on-terror and like Centers.
You and your successors will still need an
agency devoted to unfettered intelligence
analysis able to critique honestly the
likely medium- and long-term consequences of
the methods used to wage the “war on terror”
and other wars.
We can assure you
it is far better for those analysts doing
this demanding substantive work NOT to be
simultaneously “part of the team”
implementing that policy.
It is time to revert to
what Truman envisaged for the CIA. We are
ready to make ourselves available to assist
you and your staff in thinking through how
this might be done. That it needs to be done
is clear to us, and this would seem an
opportune time.
In our view, we need to
stop wasting time and energy trying to
prevent the baby from being thrown out with
the bathwater. Let the bathwater run off.
Save the baby, even if that means a separate
institution in which analysts of the kind
that completed that NIE on Iran in 2007 can
flourish. This just might help stop a new
unnecessary war, as the combat support
officers try to bring an end to old ones.
In sum, we are convinced
that a separate entity for intelligence
analysis – the kind of agency Truman
envisaged for his CIA – would be an
invaluable asset to you and your successors
as president.
For the Steering
Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity (VIPS)
Fulton Armstrong, National
Intelligence Officer for Latin America
(ret.)
Larry Johnson, CIA analyst
& State Department/counterterrorism, (ret.)
John Kiriakou, Former CIA
Counterterrorism Officer
David MacMichael, USMC &
National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Ray McGovern, Army
Infantry/Intelligence officer & CIA
presidential briefer (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, Deputy
National Intelligence Officer for the Near
East, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Torin Nelson, former
HUMINT Officer, Department of the Army
Coleen Rowley, retired FBI
Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal
Counsel
Peter Van Buren, former
diplomat, Department of State (associate
VIPS)
Kirk Wiebe, Senior
Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center,
NSA (ret.)
Lawrence Wilkerson,
Colonel (USA, ret.), Distinguished Visiting
Professor, College of William and Mary
Ann Wright, retired U.S.
Army reserve colonel and former US diplomat
(resigned in March 2003 in opposition to the
Iraq War)
Copyright © 2013
Consortiumnews. All Rights Reserved.