By Ray McGovern, 5/15/07
If they question why we died,
Tell them because our fathers
lied.
-Rudyard Kipling
Mercifully, the flurry of media coverage of former CIA
director George Tenet hawking his memoir, “At the Center of the Storm,” has
abated. Buffeted by those on both right
and left who see through his lame attempt at self-justification, Tenet probably
now wishes he had opted to just fade away, as old soldiers used to do.
He listened instead to his old PR buddy and “co-author” Bill
Harlow who failed miserably in trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s
ear. By this point, they may be having
second thoughts. But, hey, the $4 million advance is a tidy sum, even when
split two ways. Aside from the money,
what else could they have been thinking?
Tenet’s book is a self-indictment for the crimes with which
Socrates was charged: making the worse
cause appear the better, and corrupting the youth.
But George is not the kind to take the hemlock. Rather, with no apparent shame, he accepted
what one wag has labeled the “Presidential Medal of Silence” in return for
agreeing to postpone his Nixon-style “modified limited hangout” until after the
mid-term elections last November. The $4
million advance that Tenet and Harlow took for
the book marked a shabby, inauspicious beginning to the effort to stitch
together what remains of Tenet’s tattered reputation.
Here in Washington
we are pretty much inured to effrontery, but Tenet’s book and tiresome
interviews have earned him the degree for chutzpah summa cum laude. We are
supposed to feel sorry for this pathetic soul, who could not muster the
integrity simply to tell the truth and stave off unspeakable carnage in Iraq. Rather, when his masters lied to justify war,
Tenet simply lacked the courage to tell his fellow citizens that America was
about to launch what the post WWII Nuremberg Tribunal called the “supreme
international crime”-a war of aggression.
Tenet’s pitiable apologia demonstrates once again not only
that absolute power corrupts absolutely, but also that the corruption befouls
all those nearby.
Cheney’s Chess
For those of prurient bent, the book offers a keyhole-peep
into a White House of ill repute, with Vice President Dick Cheney playing at
his chess board, moving sniveling pawns like Tenet from one square to another.
Someone should have told the former CIA director that
unprovoked war is not some sort of game.
Out of respect for the tens of thousands killed and maimed in Iraq, it is
time to start calling spades spades. It
was a high crime, a premeditated felony to have taken part in this conspiracy.
Not surprisingly, few of Tenet’s talk-show hosts were armed
with enough facts to pierce the smoke and the arrogant now-you-listen-to-me
approach from Bill Harlow’s PR toolbox.
Whether out of ignorance or just habit, celebrity interviewers kept
cutting Tenet more and more slack.
Understandable, I suppose, for they, like Tenet, were enthusiastic
cheerleaders for the attack on Iraq. And so, affable, hot-blooded George was
allowed to filibuster, bob, weave, and blow still more smoke. Tenet should not be behind a microphone; he
should be behind bars.
With nauseating earnestness, Tenet keeps saying:
“I believed there were weapons of
mass destruction in Iraq.”
This is a lie. And no
matter how many times he says it (after the axiom of his master, George W.
Bush, who has stressed publicly that repetition is necessary to “catapult the
propaganda”), Tenet can no longer conceal the deceit. Indeed, the only other possibility-that he is
(as he complains) being made the useful “idiot” on whom Vice President Dick
Cheney and others mean to blame the war-can be ruled out.
Tenet was indeed useful to Cheney and Bush, but he is no
idiot. Those who do not rely exclusively
on the corporate media for their information know Tenet for what he is-a
charlatan. A willing co-conspirator, he
did for Bush and Cheney what propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels did for
Hitler. The key difference is that
Goebbels and his Nazi collaborators, rather than writing books and taking
sinecures to enrich themselves, were held accountable at Nuremberg.
Phantom Weapons of Mass Destruction
Tenet knew there were no WMD. Secret British documents reveal not only that
Tenet told his British counterpart the intelligence was being “fixed” around
the policy. They also show that Washington and London
developed a scheme to “wrongfoot” Saddam Hussein by insisting on the kind of UN
inspections they were sure he would reject, thus providing a convenient casus belli.
Saddam outfoxed them by allowing the most intrusive
inspection regime in recent history. At
the turn of 2002-03 UN inspectors were crawling all over Saddam’s palaces,
interviewing his scientists, and pursuing every tip they could get from
Tenet-and finding nothing.
What did satellite imagery show? Nothing, save for the embarrassingly
inconclusive photos that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell displayed on Feb.
5, 2003 at the UN. Were there any photos
of those biological weapons trailers reported by the shadowy Curveball? None.
And so “artist renderings” were conjured up to show what these sinister
trailers might look like.
At least the renderings produced by the CIA graphics shop
were more professional than the crude forgeries upon which the fable about Iraq seeking uranium in Africa
was based. And the Cheney-Rice-Judith
Miller story about aluminum tubes for uranium enrichment was readily seen as a
canard as soon as genuine scientists (as opposed to Tenet’s stable of malleable
engineers) got hold of them.
Exactly four years ago, amid the euphoria of Mission
Accomplished and the incipient concern over the trouble encountered in finding
WMD, then-deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz told writer Sam Tanenhaus of Vanity Fair that Iraq’s supposed
cache of WMD had never been the most important casus belli. It was simply
one of several reasons:
“For bureaucratic reasons we
settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one
reason everyone could agree on…Almost unnoticed but huge is another
reason: removing Saddam will allow the
U.S. to take its troops out of Saudi Arabia…”
Absence of Evidence
Who needs real evidence as opposed to allegations of WMD,
when the name of the game is removing Saddam?
But how to explain the blather about WMD in the lead-up to the war, when
not one piece of imagery or other intelligence could confirm the presence of
such weapons? Easy. Apply the Rumsfeld maxim: “The absence of evidence is not evidence of
absence.” And then explain further that
the lack of evidence proves nothing but how clever the Iraqis have become at
hiding their weapons. Don’t laugh;
that’s what Rumsfeld and the neocons said.
That foolishness had run its course by March 2003 when,
despite the best “leads” Tenet could provide and the intrusive inspection
regime, the UN inspectors could find nothing.
It was getting downright embarrassing for those bent on a belli without an ostensible casus, but by then enough troops were in
place to conquer Iraq
(or so thought Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz).
At that point Bush told the UN to withdraw its inspectors promptly and
let them watch the fireworks of shock and awe from a safer distance on TV. (The real shocker is President Bush repeated
insistence that Saddam threw out the inspectors. But, again, he has so successfully
“catapulted” this piece of propaganda that most Americans do not realize it is
a lie.)
How did the White House conspirators think they could get
away with all this? Well, don’t you
remember Cheney saying we would be greeted as liberators…and Ken Neocon
Adelman assuring us that it would be a “cakewalk?” We would defeat a fourth-rate army, remove a
“ruthless dictator,” eliminate an adversary of Israel, and end up sitting atop
all that oil with permanent military bases and no further need to station
troops in Saudi Arabia. At that point,
smiled the neocons, what spoilsport will be able to make political hay by
insisting: Yes, but you did this on the basis of forgery, fakery; and where, by
the way, are the weapons of mass destruction?
Granted that over recent weeks George Tenet has shown
himself a bit dense beneath the bluster.
Nevertheless, there is simply no defense on grounds of density-or gross
ineptitude or momentary insanity. He
clearly played a sustained role in the chicanery.
Okay; if you insist:
let’s assume for a moment that Rumsfeld did actually succeed in
convincing Tenet that the reason there was no evidence of WMD was because the
Iraqis were so good at hiding them. What
then?
Tenet does not get off the hook. There was, in fact, no absence of well
sourced evidence that Saddam’s WMD had
all been destroyed shortly after the Gulf War in 1991-yes, all of them.
You Go With the Evidence You”ve Got
In 1995, when Saddam Hussein’s
son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, defected with a treasure trove of documents, he
spilled the beans on Iraq’s
weapons of mass destruction. There were
none. He knew. He was in charge of the chemical, biological,
nuclear, and missile programs and ordered all such weapons destroyed before the
UN inspectors could discover them after the war in 1991. He told us much more, and the information
that could be checked out was confirmed.
The
George-and-Condoleezza-must-have-just-missed-this-report excuse won’t wash,
because Newsweek acquired a transcript
of Kamel’s debriefing and broke the story on Feb. 24, 2003, several weeks
before the war, noting gingerly that Kamel’s information “raises questions
about whether the WMD stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist.”
It was the kind of well-sourced
documentary evidence after which intelligence analysts and lawyers positively
lust. But the mainstream press dropped
it like a hot potato after Bill Harlow (yes, Tenet’s co-author), in his role as
CIA spokesperson, angrily protested (a bit too much) that the Newsweek story was “incorrect, bogus,
wrong, untrue.” It was, rather, entirely
correct; it was documentary-and not forged this time. Curiously, the name of
Hussein Kamel shows up on a listing of Iraqis in the front of Tenet’s book, but
nowhere in the text. Tenet and Harlow apparently decided to avoid calling attention to
the fact that they suppressed information from a super source, preferring
instead to help the White House grease the skids for war.
In late summer 2002 CIA operatives
had a signal success. They had recruited
Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri and had him working in place–for the U.S. Proud of their successful recruitment of a
senior Iraqi official, officers of CIA’s clandestine service immediately sought
and were given an early meeting with President Bush and his senior advisers.
The information Sabri had already
passed to us had checked out well.
Naively, the agency officers were expecting sighs of relief as they
quoted him saying there were no WMD in Iraq. The information went over like a lead
balloon, dispelling all excitement over this high-level penetration of the
Iraqi government.
When the CIA officers got back to
Headquarters and told colleagues what had just happened at the White House,
those who had been tasking Naji Sabri asked whether they should seek additional
intelligence from him on the subject.
According to Tyler Drumheller, the division chief in charge of such
collection, the answer was loud and clear:
“Well, this isn’t about intel any more.
This is about regime change.”
And then there was Curveball. Tenet and his deputy, John McLaughlin, played
a direct role regarding the notorious “Curveball,” a former Iraqi taxi driver
and convicted embezzler whom German intelligence deemed a mentally unstable
alcoholic, who was “out of control.”
Unlike the unwelcome reporting from the Iraqi foreign minister,
Curveball provided very welcome, if bogus, information on alleged mobile
laboratories producing biological weapons in Iraq-grist for the “artist
renderings” for Powell’s UN speech.
It was all a crock. And Tenet and McLaughlin both knew it,
because Drumheller gave them chapter and verse before Powell’s speech, and has
now written a book about this sad story.
Moreover, the normally taciturn,
but recently outspoken former director of State Department intelligence, Carl
Ford, has noted that both Tenet and McLaughlin took a personal hand in writing
a follow-up report aimed at salvaging what Curveball had said. Ford spared no words: The report “wasn’t just wrong, they
lied…they should have been shot.”
Nor can Tenet expunge from the
record his witting cooperation in the cynical campaign to exploit the trauma we
all felt after 9/11, by intimating a connection with that heinous event and
Saddam Hussein. If, as Tenet now
concedes, no significant connection could be established between Saddam and
al-Qaeda, why did he sit quietly behind Powell at the UN as Powell spun a yarn
about a “sinister nexus” between the two? That sorry exhibition destroyed what was left
of the morale of honest CIA analysts who, until then, had courageously resisted
intense pressure to endorse that evidence-less but explosive canard.
A Cropping Worth a Thousand Words
George Tenet’s book includes a
photo that is a metaphor for both the primary purpose of his memoir and its
unintended result. Most will remember
the famous photo of Colin Powell briefing the UN Security Council, with Tenet
and then-US ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte sitting staunchly behind
him. Well, on a centerfold page large
enough to accommodate the familiar shot, the photo has been cropped to exclude
Tenet altogether and include only Negroponte’s shoulder and nose (which,
mercifully, he was not holding at the time.)
This is an incredibly adolescent attempt to distance Tenet from that
scandalous performance, even though he was the one most responsible for
it. The cropping also suggests that
Tenet and Harlow are only too aware that by
including spurious “intelligence” in Powell’s speech and then sitting stoically
behind him as if to validate it, Tenet visibly squandered CIA’s most precious
asset–credibility.
“It was a great presentation, but
unfortunately the substance didn’t hold up,” blithely write Tenet and Harlow, without any trace of acknowledgment of the
enormous consequences of the deception.
In a Feb. 5, 2003 Memorandum for the President regarding Powell’s speech
that day, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) gave him an
“A” for presentation, and a “C-” for content.
(If we knew then what we know now we would of course have flunked him
outright.) In the VIPS memo we warned
the president that intelligence analysts were “increasingly distressed at the
politicization of intelligence…and finding it hard to be heard above the
drumbeat for war.”
That a war of choice was on the
horizon was crystal clear-as were the consequences. We urged the president to “widen the
discussion beyond violations of Resolution 1441,and 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.” We take no comfort in
having got that one right. Former UN
Chief Inspector and U.S. Marine Major, Scott Ritter, was screaming it from the
rooftops (and was blacklisted by the domesticated media). It was a no-brainer.
Tenet Breaks Tenet
Tenet’s tell-some-but-not-all book is unwittingly
self-incriminating in another key respect, an illustration of what happens when
you have a politician, with PR help, running U.S. intelligence. Much of the Tenet/Harlow self-justifying
prose is transparent to any observer who has been paying the slightest
attention to issues of intelligence on Iraq over the past few years. What may not be fully clear is that, in his
zeal to indict others and exculpate himself, Tenet plays fast and loose with a
cardinal tenet of intelligence work. You
don’t reveal confidential discussions with policymakers-and you especially
don’t quote the president. You simply do
not do that. For once you violate
confidentiality, not only your effectiveness but also that of those who succeed
you will be greatly impaired, if not ended.
In normal circumstances presidents have a right to expect
that their conversations with advisers will be kept in strictest confidence,
and not revealed later by some buffoon pushing a book. And it is the height of irresponsibility for
an intelligence director to quote a president still in office. If the president and senior advisers are
unable to count on confidences being kept, it becomes impossible to conduct
sensible discussions on policy making.
Why do I say “in normal circumstances?” Because no president has the right to plan a
war of aggression with high confidence that accomplices, or others that might
become privy to such plans, will stay quiet and not blow the whistle. The oath we take to defend the Constitution
of the United States
supersedes any promise, explicit or implicit, to enable the president to commit
crimes in our name. (And someone ought
to tell that to Sen. Dick Durbin, who recently confessed that he knew the
intelligence justification for war was a crock, but could not tell the American
people because it was secret!)
Am I saying there are circumstances in which conscience may
require divulging the confidential remarks of the president of the United States? Of course there are, and these circumstances
are a case in point. But that, sadly,
was/is far from George Tenet’s intent.
That he sees fit now to violate the principle of confidentiality in a quixotic
attempt at self-justification (and, yes, his share of the $4 million) betokens
not only an adolescent narcissism oblivious to the importance of trust, but
also a lack of genuine respect for policymakers, including the president. Those of us who have been privileged to brief
the president’s father and other senior national security officials-and there
must be a hundred of us by now-never violated that trust the way Tenet has
done.
Most people do not know that personal access to the
president and his top advisers was a rarity during most of the CIA’s first
three decades. Regularized personal
access by CIA officers did not begin until former director and then-vice
president George H. W. Bush persuaded President Ronald Reagan to authorize the
sharing of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) in one-on-one morning briefings
for the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, and the
president’s national security adviser.
(With White House approval, we later added the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs as a daily consumer.)
These early morning briefings were conducted by us senior
analysts who prepared the PDB (and badgered the drafter/analysts with all
manner of questions) the day and night before.
We were experienced intelligence professionals steeped in substance and
just a secure telephone call away from the analysts we knew could provide
additional, trustworthy detail if needed.
It was a position of great trust.
Our ethos, our job, was to speak unvarnished truth to power,
irrespective of the policy agendas of the officials we briefed. We were trusted to do that as honestly and
professionally as possible. The last
thing we needed was a CIA director looking over our shoulder-particularly one,
like Tenet, not well schooled in the need to protect the credibility of
intelligence by avoiding policy advocacy like the plague. During the Reagan presidency, the CIA
director rarely joined us for the PDB briefings and did no pre-publication
review. The director had quite enough on
his plate. His was a dual job involving herding the cats of a scarcely
manageable, multi-agency intelligence community, while trying to manage one
agency (CIA) itself conceived with a serious birth defect.
A Structural Flaw
A most unfortunate flaw in the National Security Act of 1947
gave the CIA director not only responsibility for preparing unvarnished
intelligence, but the additional duty “to perform other such functions and
duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National
Security Council may from time to time direct”-like running secret wars, as in
Nicaragua; overthrowing governments, as in Iran, Guatemala, Chile; and applying
President Bush-favored “alternative” methods of interrogation in secret prisons
in violation of international and U.S. Army law, as in Afghanistan, Iraq, and
God knows where else.
This was hardly President Harry Truman’s original
intent. Long after he left the White
House, Truman addressed this directly in an article for the then independent Washington Post on Dec. 22, 1963:
“I have been disturbed by the way
the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times
policy-making arm of the government…I never had any thought of that when I
set up the CIA…. I 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.
A pity no one listened to Truman. As a result, for the CIA director each of the
two scarcely compatible jobs became full-time challenges. During my 27-year career I had a front-row
seat watching nine directors, most of whom did their best to act with integrity
and honesty, despite that noxious structural fault. And, if that were not enough, this difficult
dual task was accompanied by the additional responsibility to manage the entire
intelligence community (16 agencies now).
This posed a tri-fold management challenge.
Tenet all but admits he was not up to it. I’m “no Jack Welch,” is the way he puts
it. Equally unfortunate, he picked
inexperienced managers distinguished only by their malleability, their
subservience to the perceived wishes of the next level up. Perhaps the best case in point is John
McLaughlin, the quintessential affable go-along-to-get-along functionary. McLaughlin very rarely made use of his
prerogative as statutory deputy in charge of the intelligence community and did
not become much involved in operations.
At the top of his sins of commission was staffing substantive analysis
with weak-reed supervisors, the easier to bend analytic conclusions to the
prevailing winds from the White House and Pentagon.
As for poor misunderstood George, instead of tending to his
knitting at CIA headquarters, he decided to hitch a ride downtown with the PDB
briefer in the morning, and thus secure regular face time with his pal, the
president. From all reports there were
many “slam dunks” voiced in those very private discussions. Worse still, Tenet felt free to ignore
substantive dissent from other intelligence agencies-a practice that, though
occasionally tempting, NEVER makes real sense and was an abnegation of his
major responsibility. He knew what the
president wanted to hear. And the
McLaughlin-protégé analysts knew it too.
Not only did they serve it up to recipe, but they actually took steps to
conceal from colleagues elsewhere in the intelligence community what their boss
was telling the president. On those few
occasions when colleagues from other agencies learned via the grapevine what
Tenet was telling the president, they were aghast and, understandably,
angry. But none of their own bosses,
including Colin Powell, dared get crosswise with the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal.
What Tenet should have told Bush? For starters, that:
–State Department analysts had heaped scorn on the Cheney fiction that
Iraq
had “reconstituted” its nuclear weapons program. They were, of course, right, but why make it
harder for the president to keep a straight face when warning of mushroom
clouds? Remember, it is not about Intel;
it’s about regime change.–State had described the cockamamie report about Iraq seeking uranium from Africa
as “highly suspect” well before it was learned that this choice morsel was
based on a forgery.–Department of Energy analysts were having a riotous laugh at the
thought those famous aluminum tubes could be somehow warped into use for
uranium enrichment. The laugh, though,
was mostly a mechanism to help suppress their rage over Tenet’s recruitment of
pseudo-engineers to spin those aluminum artillery tubes into something more
menacing.–US Air Force intelligence experts thought hilarious the specter of
Iraqi planes scarcely larger than the models seen on the Washington Monument
grounds somehow flying to our shores to spray chemical or biological
agents. But the Air Force, too, caved,
acquiescing in their dissent being relegated to a footnote in the infamous
National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1, 2002 on Iraqi WMD.
But Tenet knew what Bush wanted. And “action officer” Condoleezza could boil
down the intelligence estimate into one page and read it to the president,
should the opportunity afford itself.
Tenet’s Ave atque Vale
in the preface to his book speaks volumes.
One need read no further. He
looks back unapologetically and with satisfaction on his long career as chief
of intelligence, “not always successful, but…striving to do what is right.”
“Son of immigrants John and Evangelia Tenet, who left their
villages in Greece
to give me that chance”…and give us George Tenet.
Timeo Danaos et dona
ferentes.
Beware the Greeks
bearing gifts.
Virgil
An earlier
version of this article appeared on Consortiumnews.com.
=================================
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of
the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington,
DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he
prepared and briefed the President’s Daily Brief and chaired National
Intelligence Estimates. He is a member
of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).