Spooked by the White House
A CIA veteran says a growing faction of the U.S. intelligence community is furious over the way the administration corrupted the system -- and that the nation's security is at grave risk.
By Mark Follman
July 18, 2003 | Late last week the White House sought to close the books on the Iraq-Niger-uranium debacle, with President Bush officially pronouncing CIA director George Tenet responsible for the intelligence blunder. At the same time, the president reaffirmed his "absolute confidence" in Tenet and the rest of the agency.
But according to a former CIA officer, the politicization of U.S. intelligence has devastated many in the field -- and dangerously weakened our country's security.
"We're hearing from dozens of [intelligence] people. A lot of them are very demoralized," says Ray McGovern, a 27-year CIA veteran who worked as an agency analyst under seven presidents, from Kennedy to the first President Bush. "The cardinal sin in this business is to cook intelligence to the recipe of high policy," he says.
McGovern is a member of the "steering group" of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of retired spooks, some highly decorated, which has been speaking out for several months about a dangerous fundamental breakdown in the U.S. intelligence system -- a system, McGovern asserts, that must remain free of White House meddling if it is to play its vital role in protecting the nation's security. VIPS has published a series of articles and open letters to the White House; its latest letter to President Bush on Monday denounced the administration's "campaign of deceit" in driving the nation to war, and demanded Vice President Dick Cheney's immediate resignation in light of his central role -- particularly Cheney's allegedly deliberate use of the fraudulent Niger-uranium report to sell Congress on the war. The letter also called on Bush to appoint an independent committee to investigate the intelligence breakdown, and to allow U.N. weapons inspectors back into Iraq posthaste, for the sake of U.S. credibility.
The White House has scrambled to lay the blame on the CIA's doorstep, but McGovern, though he has no love for Tenet, says Tenet is only one part of a much larger problem -- one that ultimately extends into the upper reaches of the Pentagon and the White House. Although Tenet formally took responsibility for including the faulty Niger-uranium data in a crucial National Intelligence Estimate report in September 2002, McGovern says it's Condoleezza Rice who is ultimately responsible for the intelligence information that makes it into the president's State of the Union address. Nor does the buck stop with Rice: The pressure to cook the books came from the top and pervaded the administration. McGovern believes that only the White House and the vice president's office could exert the kind of intense pressure necessary to cement bogus intelligence information into the ultimately authoritative NIE report -- and keep it there through the string of drafts leading up to a prime-time presidential speech.
By distorting the truth and corrupting America's intel system, says McGovern, spineless agency leaders and a White House with its finger on the scales have not just demoralized the CIA and other agencies, they have thrown the nation into considerable danger. Without an intelligence community that's consistently motivated to serve up objective information, "the president has nowhere to turn to find out real answers," he says.
Tenet himself began fighting back on Wednesday, during a closed hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, where he told a senator that a White House official pressured him to include the specious Niger-uranium report against his better judgment. On Thursday MSNBC quoted an anonymous source saying that Tenet "reluctantly" fingered National Security Council member Robert Joseph during the hearing.
VIPS, which includes roughly 30 members from across the civilian and military intelligence spectrum, from the FBI and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, to the CIA and Department of Defense, has been warning that America's intelligence system was in trouble for months. In a February 2003 article, McGovern wrote of the grave dangers of a politicized intelligence community: "The integrity of the intelligence process is one casualty. But the real losers are the young men and women we send into battle, and whose names we later chisel into a wall."
The group claims no ideology or partisan agenda, only the desire to uphold the raison d'être of the CIA and its peer agencies: providing essential, objective information to policymakers in its mission to prevent enemy attacks on the United States. According to McGovern, the group feels an affinity with the organization Veterans for Common Sense, where VIPS currently publishes its reports. VIPS steering group members, however, have made their voice heard through mainstream media outlets as well: The former director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis, William Christison, spoke out in the Washington Post in April 2002; and Patrick Eddington, a military imagery analyst at the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center for almost nine years, has contributed Op-Ed pieces to numerous publications including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Times, and is a regular television news commentator.
McGovern himself is currently a full-time co-director of the Servant Leadership School, a faith-based community outreach program in Washington, D.C. Salon spoke with him from Washington on Wednesday, as the White House continued to try to brush aside the Niger-uranium report scandal.
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