The White House war with the CIA

Author Thomas Powers, an expert on U.S. spy agencies, wonders who will take the rap for 9/11 and the "horrific, calamitous" mistake in Iraq.

By Mark Follman

Nov 8, 2003 | While the nation's attention is focused on the slow-motion deterioration of Iraq, the White House for months has been at war on the home front -- clashing repeatedly with the CIA in a rare series of public disagreements. They've fought over intelligence that seemed to predict the 9/11 terrorist attacks. They've fought over whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. They've fought over a seemingly vindictive White House leak that identified an undercover CIA agent.

According to Thomas Powers, a widely respected authority on the nation's spy business, that conflict has put the CIA -- and U.S. national security -- in peril.

"I think the agency is in terrible shape because of this," Powers told Salon in an interview. "It appears now that the CIA is actually incapable of operating in a hostile environment. It's afraid."

Powers is the author of "Intelligence Wars: American Secret History From Hitler to Al Qaeda." He says that the CIA, facing a demoralized rank and file and a lack of resources, is being effectively hamstrung by the Bush administration and compromised in its job of protecting national security. A big part of the danger is that U.S. intelligence, in the hands of an administration that views foreign policy through its own self-serving lens, has lost not just its autonomy, but essential assets. With the administration's focus shifting to the invasion earlier this year, crucial intelligence resources needed to battle al-Qaida around the globe -- as well as those now needed to secure and stabilize Iraq -- have been squandered. "We have practically nobody who can speak the language [in Iraq]," Powers says. "We're running the country with teenagers carrying machine guns."

As the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq keeps rising, evidence continues to accumulate that the Bush administration was determined to invade the country and topple Saddam Hussein, and was never interested in compromise. On Thursday several major news services reported that the Pentagon was offered a last-minute deal by high-level Iraqi officials, via an obscure Lebanese-American middleman, to avert the war. According to the New York Times, the U.S. government did not pursue the offer. The back-channel attempt, which allegedly would have made concessions to key U.S. foreign policy goals in Iraq, may not have been credible. But according to Powers, the Bush administration's apparent lack of interest in the offer fits a broader pattern in which it has parsed intelligence to fit its long-held plan for taking over Baghdad.

Even before the war, a faction within the intelligence community had begun to attack the administration for corrupting the intelligence system in its forced march to war. But since July, when former ambassador Joseph Wilson revealed that the administration knowingly used bogus intelligence to promote the war, it has grown increasingly vocal in its criticism. The administration retaliated against Wilson by leaking the identity of his wife, undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame -- yet another example, Powers says, of how the White House has no qualms about compromising national security in pursuit of its agenda. And the breakdown is almost unprecedented, he says. While the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident, which escalated the war in Vietnam in 1964, bears some comparison to the Iraq/Niger uranium scandal, Powers sees a more egregious scenario unfolding now.

"This [war] is more manufactured, more deliberate and more coldblooded. And it was done in plain sight. The whole world was watching and saying, 'No!'" he says. "My own feeling is we've embarked on a horrific, calamitous mistake in Iraq. We're already in a situation we have very little control over and very little ability to get out of, without leaving everything much worse off."

Salon reached Powers by phone at his home in Vermont on Thursday.

Since July when the phony Iraq/Niger uranium story first broke, a number of CIA veterans have been publicly condemning the Bush administration for corrupting the U.S. intelligence system. They're saying it's demoralizing to the agencies, and dangerous to national security. They're saying there is an unprecedented degree of manipulation by the White House. Is this an accurate assessment of what's going on?

Absolutely. I think we've never seen such a flagrant and disastrous misuse of the [intelligence] system.

If you think about the whole history of the run-up to the war, going back as far as 9/11, it seems that the CIA has been right on two occasions. First, it was right about 9/11. The agency was issuing a lot of warnings before it happened. The administration, for whatever reason, has refused to make a lot of documents available to Senate and other investigators, including the 9/11 Kean commission, and we don't know exactly why. But we have to assume there are things in those intelligence reports that these investigators want, which the administration does not want public. It's very unlikely that it's the fact that the CIA fell on its face and didn't offer any adequate warnings. It's the opposite: There's probably very explicit, maybe even uncomfortably close predictions of what would happen ...

Such as we began to see with the leaked presidential daily brief from Aug. 6, 2001, which warned of attacks by bin Laden inside the U.S. and described the potential for plane hijackings?

Right -- that would be the principal one. But of course, that brief is a daily publication; there are a hundred of them that the Kean commission would like to have a look at, and they haven't seen any of them. Yet all the evidence we do know of strongly suggests that the CIA was warning the White House vigorously.

Second, you have to ask, Why wasn't the White House livid with fury at the CIA for the failure to find WMD in Iraq? And the answer is, the CIA told the White House they never would. They must have been forthcoming when they said that they didn't know what there was, or where it was. There's really no solid way to interpret the judgments made in the [declassified] summary of the [October 2002] National Intelligence Estimate. It's vague. We don't know what's in the rest of the document, but it's pretty clear [the intelligence] community didn't know where anything was; they were unable to tell the U.N. inspectors how to find anything. They had four months when they could have led those weapons inspectors around anywhere in Iraq. They couldn't find anything, except what they found by accident in that military scrap heap, those 16 empty artillery shells that had been designed for chemical warheads. That was it; I mean it was really just junk -- certainly not the kind of usable weapon that would justify going to war.

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