The VIPS letter to President Bush on July 14 charges that Vice President Cheney's office led a "campaign of deceit" that drove the nation to war, and calls for Cheney's immediate resignation. What ultimately makes the case against Cheney?
The most egregious crime committed here was the use of evidence known to be fraudulent, which purported that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger for its nuclear program. This is different from having a body of evidence that's susceptible to varying interpretation. A forgery is a forgery.
The vice president's office had commissioned Ambassador Joseph Wilson [in February 2002] to go to Niger and look into the matter, and he came back and told them the information was no good. So if this trip was taken at the behest of the vice president's office, it strains credulity beyond the breaking point to think that when the ambassador got back to report his findings, the vice president's office said, 'Actually, we're not interested in that any longer, so don't tell us what you found out.'
Then there's the fact that Cheney launched the [pro-war] campaign on Aug. 26, 2002, with a strong speech that went far beyond what the evidence allowed, in saying that the Iraqis had restarted their nuclear program. Cheney was way out in front of everybody else, particularly Colin Powell. On March 16, 2003, as a sort of coda to this, he alleged that Iraq had in fact reconstituted its nuclear program, and that the CIA and others agreed with him on this. False. They hadn't.
Why is it imperative that Cheney resign immediately?
I can't think of anywhere in government where honesty is more important than the intelligence business. Intelligence analysts need to operate on the working assumption that they're seeking truth. When they find it, they analyze it the way they think the truth leads, and then they serve it up to policymakers in that form.
It's up to policymakers what they do with the fruits of these efforts. When analysts see it being distorted, it's incredibly demoralizing. It leads to the conclusion, "Maybe I better not serve up the truth anymore, maybe I should serve up what I know they want to hear." When that becomes the case, the country is in considerable danger. If intelligence analysis is prostituted like that and is no longer objective, the president has nowhere to turn to find out the real answers to his questions.
Have you gotten any response from the White House to the letter?
No, we haven't. We'd like to have one, but we're not surprised: After all, Rep. Waxman of California wrote a letter to the president back on March 17 -- he has a lot more status than VIPS -- and he's still received no response from the White House. His letter was a very bitter one, saying, "Look, Mr. President, in September and early October your people lied to me about this nuclear threat, and on the strength of that lie, I voted for war. I want you to tell me how that could've happened."
Aside from the "steering group," who are the people behind VIPS? How many are there, and is it just CIA?
We're a movement that's growing; the current count is 30. The open letter to Bush on Monday has sparked an amazing amount of interest, which is really encouraging, and affirming. We're not just CIA; we have intelligence veterans from across the spectrum: FBI, DIA [the Defense Intelligence Agency, part of the Pentagon], Army Intelligence and INR [Bureau of Intelligence and Research, from the State Department]. Yesterday I had a National Security Agency person call me and say, "Hey, I noticed you don't have anybody from NSA, count me in."
Having left the CIA a decade ago, how are you able to speak for the current sentiment inside the agency, or inside the greater U.S. intelligence community, about all this? Who are you talking with, and hearing from?
We're hearing from dozens of people. The sad part is that we're hearing from midlevel analysts and even lower-level journeymen who are slogging away in the intelligence trenches trying to find the truth and tell it. Unfortunately, in the decades since William Casey and Bobby Gates were the CIA's directors, there've been more careerists -- malleable folks who sniff the wind to find out which direction it's blowing, and trim their sails accordingly. So now you have some people at relatively senior levels who've bubbled to the top by knowing the "correct" answers to the questions they know are on policymakers' minds. Whereas these people were a complete exception in our time, the proportion has grown.
When we retired from the agency, and by that I mean the VIPS steering group, people knew who we were and what we stood for, and the levels at which we operated -- basically the most senior levels of both the military and civilian intelligence communities. We enjoy a certain reputation for integrity, and that's the premier value in intelligence work. So when people see that value being played with fast and loose, they need somewhere to turn. They need people who know the business, who know how much of a sin this is.
So how widespread is this current rancor inside the intelligence community?
A lot of people are very demoralized. And those who aren't, frankly, are ipso facto suspect. The cardinal sin in this business is to cook intelligence to the recipe of high policy; the raison d'être for a place like the CIA is to have one place in government which can operate without fear or favor, which can speak truth to power. Where the president can go and say, "Look, I want the straight scoop here. Forget about the State Department's policies, forget about what Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Perle are saying, tell me what you really think." If the president doesn't have that, he's missing an incredibly valuable ingredient in policymaking.
The current situation is, by definition, a huge problem for the intelligence community. The people not at all demoralized right now, by and large, occupy senior-level positions. It's a sad commentary, because leadership is the key. George Tenet is very malleable and likes to be a team player. Witness what he did on Feb. 5: He sat himself down behind Colin Powell as Powell served up this embroidery of intelligence information before the U.N. Security Council, and Tenet sat there like a potted plant, as if to indicate that the CIA stands -- or sits -- behind everything the secretary of state is saying.
That was an incredibly demoralizing gesture for folks in the CIA who've resisted tremendous pressure ever since 9/11 to prove a link between Iraq and 9/11. There's no evidence of that, and these people, to their great credit, said, "Sir, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to write something I don't believe." So here's Tenet sitting behind Powell, and Powell's drawing a picture of al-Qaida operatives in Iraq. Sure, there were a couple there, but what Powell didn't say was they were in a place that was not controlled by Saddam's government. [The small Ansar al-Islam militant group, which fought Saddam from its enclave in northern Iraq until its fighters were killed or expelled during the war, has been linked to al-Qaida.] So the evidence used to "prove" this link was fraudulent from the get-go. And these analysts had to watch this on TV, with Tenet sitting right behind Powell as he's telling this cooked-up story.
What's your feeling about the intel group installed by the Pentagon, the Office of Special Plans?
It's a technique used by some very convinced policy officials when they want a certain answer to an intelligence question, and when they can't get it from the duly established organizations, they aren't above setting up their own shop. They needed a little group to come up with the "correct" answers, so they created this outlying group of non-specialists, gave them some information where they knew what the conclusions were supposed to be, and what do you know? They came up with the right conclusions.
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