What do you see as the greatest dangers of a politicized intelligence system in terms of broader democracy and national security?
Analysts are human beings. They want to make a good living and be promoted just like the rest of us. But if all you have left in the intelligence community are analysts who have really good noses for which way the political wind is blowing and trim their sails accordingly, the country is in grave danger. You have to depend on somebody to tell it like it is. There's an inscription at CIA headquarters: "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." When you lose all the people who believe that, you've lost a precious asset. The ability of the president to make a well-informed, objective policy decision is greatly diminished.
Why did the U.S. intelligence community fail to prevent the 9/11 attacks? And why, almost two years later, does the American public still have no clear explanation of what went wrong?
It was an egregious failure, and there's no getting around that. Enough information has come out to indicate there were enough bits and pieces for a junior high school kid to figure out something very bad was about to happen. We know there were high-level meetings where assertions were made that bin Laden would attempt something pretty spectacular. There was a president's daily brief prepared on Aug. 6, 2001, entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.," and we know in the body of that report there were allusions to plane hijackings. I haven't read that report; this much was leaked to the press. But I do know that when a daily brief has that kind of title and mentions those kinds of things, then it's very important indeed. It appears the administration just took them as routine warnings.
I don't subscribe to the more sinister theories; I take the more charitable interpretation: gross incompetence on the part of the president and the CIA director. The president was served up with repeated warnings, so much so that the "cry wolf" syndrome set in. He didn't know what to do with all the information, so he went off to Texas to chop wood instead. Nobody collared him and said, "Hey, this is really serious."
Pearl Harbor was the reason the CIA was set up in 1947, expressly to prevent this kind of thing: one central clearing house for all the bits of information. Its raison d'être was objectivity, and to prevent such an attack. But the CIA director only has the power to carry out this mission in deference to the president. Unless the president makes it clear, like Jimmy Carter did with Stan Turner, that the CIA director is his main man for intelligence, and that anyone who interferes will be sent packing ... that hasn't happened with this president. Right now the director of the CIA has a hell of a lot of responsibility, and very little authority. He doesn't control 80 percent of the intelligence budget, which is in the Pentagon.
In the end, it all goes back to who we elect in November.
Does VIPS have any kind of ideological or partisan agenda?
Look, we're not afraid of speaking up on these issues, and we feel our credentials speak for themselves. I have letters from George H. Bush, and awards given to me upon retirement. In other words, I graduated summa cum laude. This is true of my other senior-level colleagues as well.
We don't have a partisan agenda -- that's basic to who we are as intelligence professionals. To be against the war is not to be partisan, it's to be sensible. People in this town are intellectually unable to believe that there can be a group working inside Washington without a partisan agenda. When we say we're dedicated to the pursuit of truth and career protection for people pursuing truth, people's eyes glaze over, and they shrug and say, "Yeah, right." It's a hard thing to believe.
What's the press missing in all this? Is there other evidence of a contrived pre-war campaign to mobilize public opinion? After all, it seemed there was reason to believe that Saddam, with the way he thwarted U.N. inspectors, etc., did actually have WMD programs...
He did have WMD programs. What wasn't talked about was how they were [mostly] destroyed. We have that from his son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, who defected in 1995. He was head of the Iraqi WMD programs. He told U.N. inspectors what Saddam had and where, and after the inspectors found and destroyed most of that, Kamel claimed that he himself ordered the rest destroyed. Of course you don't take that at face value, but this came from someone who'd been a pretty credible source in the past, and he was a defector.
A few weeks ago [Mahdi] Obeidi [head scientist of Iraq's uranium enrichment program in the '80s and early '90s] dug up a rose plant in a garden and revealed a few centrifuge components and some blueprints. Obeidi explained that his orders in 1991 were to squirrel this stuff away for the day when the order was given to reconstitute the program. He said that order never came.
How do you feel about the post-9/11 reorganization of U.S. intelligence agencies into the one behemoth Department of Homeland Security? What does it mean for the agencies in terms of doing a credible, nonpartisan job?
I agree with President Bush on this. He was courageous and right when he said creating a Department of Homeland Security would be a huge mistake -- that's what he said for several months anyway. He said it would detract from our fight against terrorism and bog down the system for years.
What changed his mind? Pressure grew, of course, for the president to show that he was doing something [after 9/11] on a big organizational level. There were revelations about failures within the INS, and lack of communication between the FBI and CIA.
Colleen Rowley, the courageous FBI agent in Minneapolis who wrote the letter to the FBI director about the overlooked hijacking intelligence, testified before Congress in May of last year. The same day, when the publicity would have been all about her, the president went on television and said, in effect, that he'd changed his mind about the Department of Homeland Security. Now, do I think he decided this just to take the press away from Rowley? Of course not. But it does account for the timing, I think. The legislation wasn't ready yet; it took Congress several more weeks. Everything is choreographed in this administration.
This [new department] couldn't be worse. I used to run our intelligence exchange with the Germans, and I can tell you that sharing with foreign intel services is a delicate prospect; you have to give them some sort of guarantee that the exchange will be protected. Now, do you think they'll be eager to hand over sensitive information and risk a source if it's going to a department with 170,000 people in it, where they have little idea of who's going to be responsible for handling it? So what could be more noxious to the system? The bulk of our terrorism information comes from these services.
Of course, there is justification for fixing the INS and other problems in terms of sharing information, but to create a mammoth department -- the biggest ever, aside from the Pentagon -- even from a management point of view, makes no sense at all. It will actually endanger the intelligence process and the fight against terrorism.
Do you think the American public is ultimately willing to overlook the major intelligence failures of the Bush administration, including the Iraq-Niger report?
The important thing will be what happens on the ground in Iraq. Nobody I know expects the administration to be able to extricate itself quickly from what's happening. With each week that produces a handful of U.S. casualties, more questions will be asked. If I were a father of a son who died over there, I'd be banging on the White House door, wanting to know why he was sent over to disarm Iraq of WMD that don't appear to exist.
I think there's a basic decency to the American people, and they really do care when kids go off to get killed. And they care about being lied to. Even the press is finally waking up -- apparently they don't like to be lied to either. There is some prospect, I think, that as things wash out here, the invasion of Iraq will be seen as an unprecedented blunder, and those responsible for selling it to Congress will be held accountable. It may not happen until November of next year, but it seems more likely now than it did just a short month ago.
If this scandal does blow over, what are the consequences for U.S. national security going forward?
Well, we have Iran, Syria and North Korea. Because of the administration's preemptive doctrine, those countries are now rushing to accelerate their nuclear weapons programs, and unless the U.S. public demands truth from the administration, I think the administration will just take the next step. Look at the documents from the Project for a New American Century [a Washington-based neoconservative think tank founded in 1997, which urged invading Iraq before 9/11 and is dominated by militarist unilateralists and supporters of Israel's Likud Party]: They provide the strategic and ideological justification for it. The consequences could be immense.
Editor's note: This story has been corrected since its original publication.
About the writer
Mark Follman is an editorial fellow at Salon.
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