bout de papier, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2008), pp. 18–20
AT THE CENTER OF THE STORM: MY
YEARS AT THE CIA, by George Tenet,
Harper Collins, New York, 2007, 549 pp.,
$30.00 (US).
ON THE BRINK: AN INSIDER’S
ACCOUNT OF HOW THE WHITE
HOUSE COMPROMISED AMERICAN
INTELLIGENCE, by Tyler Drumheller,
Carroll and Graf Publishers, New York,
2006, 296 pp., $26.95 (US).
How did the United States get into the Iraqi quagmire so quickly, with so few allies, and with no apparent game plan? That question and its many variations have dominated a huge and growing collection of materials by journalists and academics, to which we can now add the memoirs of some of the principals. Needless to say, the picture sketched with increasing clarity by the insiders isn’t pretty: a largely feckless presidency, ostensibly leading an ineffectual National Security Council; an unusually docile Congress; confusion, conflict and back-stabbing in the US foreign policy departments and agencies; tension and discord in the defence establishment; and an intelligence community under intense pressure by the neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
The Iraq conflict began with more bravado than coherence. And as the campaign began to head south shortly after the predictably short military offensive, the blame game began. How does one explain it all? The response on the part of the presidency and others was simple and concise: faulty intelligence got the US into an impossible war.
But is that the truth? And is it that simple? If any individual knew how the origins of the Iraqi conflict and the intelligence community were intimately linked, it was George Tenet, head of the CIA and Director of Central Intelligence for seven years since his appointment by President Clinton, and the lone Democrat in a leading governmental position under President Bush (although no longer of Cabinet rank). Aptly enough, he entitles his fulsome, 500-page memoir At the Center of the Storm, because it must have been an agonizing daily grind in the midst of the chaos that passed for policy discussion within the Bush administration in the aftermath of 9/11 and the lead-up to war in Iraq in 2003.
Tenet’s broad brush lines echo some of the more recent journalistic exposés, like Fiasco by Thomas E. Ricks and Hubris by Michael Isikoff and and David Corn. Yet Tenet’s objectives are more specific than simply using his autobiography to tell the saga of a conflict gone wrong. His contention is that the CIA did its job. It told President Bush and the administration what it believed was the truth with respect to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Moreover, it performed its analytical function despite intense pressures on him, his senior officials and the analytical community by a bevy of neo-conservative heavyweights, led by Vice-President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and two of Rumsfeld’s deputies, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. Mistakes were admittedly made, and bureaucratic infighting contributed to public pronouncements based on faulty or incorrect intelligence. But somehow, his argument goes, with the pressures leading to war in the post 9/11 period, the Iraq conflict was simply inevitable, irrespective of the CIA’s performance. Nor does he know when regime change in Iraq became entrenched in the Bush administration’s agenda.
So how does Tenet fare? At the broad level, it’s a good line. But as it gets into the details, it begins to falter. In essence, Tenet’s argument turns on a number of specific, rather complex analytical issues, most of which found their way into the ill-fated Colin Powell speech to the UN Security Council in February, 2003. The CIA got it wrong, according to Tenet, on the aluminum cylinders, mobile biological launchers and other elements of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction program. But they got it wrong “because the truth was so implausible.”
The essence of this story is better told, with the professional candour of the aggrieved insider, by Tyler Drumheller, former head of the CIA’s clandestine European Division. He has his own take on the run-up to war, and it’s downright ugly. His shorter memoir – about 200 pages after about 80 pages were excised by CIA censors — accuses the Bush Administration of “the manipulation of intelligence” and “an unprecedented drive for intelligence to justify the Iraq war and find someone to blame for the September I attacks.”
An experienced operations officer with 30 years of service, Drumheller’s view is evident from the sub-title of his memoir. A number of senior Bush officials, chief among them Paul Wolfowitz, were anxious to use American military muscle to resolve an old, unfinished conflict. To this end they manipulated evidence, relied on false information, supported spurious sources and generally brow-beat a badly-divided American intelligence community to support a public drive towards war. Alerted by the CIA to problems with sources, the administration either ignored the warnings or lost the memos. A succession of administration speeches deliberately exaggerated dangers and hyped the challenges posed by Saddam and his regime, at a time, ironically enough, when Saddam was probably internally weaker and more subject to domestic challenge than at any time since 1991. The Defense Department created its own intelligence units, second-guessed the professional analysts about virtually every important judgment, and accepted as intelligence a raft of lies and exaggerations gathered by the Iraqi exile community in the United States. When the inevitable reckoning came, not only did they hand the blame to the CIA, but the CIA, in a Tenet statement, accepted it.
Drumheller was front and centre for the now-legendary series of foul-ups linked to the German source, “curveball.” Although he is less authoritative on other issues, because of the position he held within the CIA throughout the drive to war, Drumheller’s views are supported by a rising chorus of other authors, including James Risen, whose book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, tracks the same set of issues with considerable authority. In short, placed side to side, Drumheller’s version of the key events leading to the Iraq conflict is sounder on details than Tenet’s. One also suspects that it’s supported by the still-classified evidence buried in CIA computers.
Between Tenet and Drumheller, despite some attempts at keeping the discourse polite, there’s a lot of distance. Tenet comes away in Drumheller’s view as a person seduced by the rush to war, committing the fatal error (in the intelligence community) of being “dragged into the inner workings of a White House that behaved as if it was on a constant war footing.” In doing so, he “sacrificed the objectivity any intelligence chief must have if he or she is to deliver unwelcome information to policy makers.” Harsh judgments, but probably accurate descriptions of a CIA head who liked his access to the presidency and paid the ultimate price for trying to ensure that his many masters were happy.
But if the CIA and the intelligence community were not centrally responsible for the rush to war, where does the onus lie? As Drumheller emphasizes, the principal responsibility for the drive to war resided with a small group of inside ideologues bent on redressing what they considered old failures. They used the panic of the post 9/11 period to abandon a containment policy which had kept Saddam in check for a decade. They rolled over the expertise of Scowcroft, Kissinger and other Republican stalwarts, and ignored (if they bout de papier Vol. ever asked) the views of the Arab states who will now bear the real burdens for the war’s devastation and failure. Iraq wasn’t an intelligence failure, despite the mistakes at the leadership of the CIA. It was fundamentally a policy fiasco, for which the intelligence community was asked to fall on its sword. There’s more than enough blame to go around.
Ultimately, George Tenet confronted the central dilemma of leadership in the intelligence community, a tension explored by Tim Weiner in his fascinating, albeit uneven, review of the CIA’s 60-year evolution, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Getting good intelligence to the right people at the right time in the American system has depended upon access at the top. But acquiring and keeping access to a succession of presidents has inevitably meant bending assessments to suit prevailing political views, whether the issue was the fictitious “missile gap” of the 1950s, the Cuban threat to Central America in the 1980s, or Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction in the post 9/11 period. Tenet kept his place at the top, but not because he delivered honest, dispassionate “ground truths.” His cardinal sin, which destroyed the CIA as the key civilian institution in the American intelligence community, was that he gave American leaders what they wanted to hear, against the advice of intelligence professionals like Tyler Drumheller and others.
The key issues and the personalities behind the Iraq conflict are increasingly on full view. When, one wonders, will Cheney, Rumseld, Wolfowitz and Feith respond as the bookshelves fill with materials increasingly stacked clearly against them?
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2008), pp. 18–20. Read the rest of this issue →
