{"id":25030,"date":"2015-03-09T13:16:01","date_gmt":"2015-03-09T21:16:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=25030"},"modified":"2015-03-09T13:16:01","modified_gmt":"2015-03-09T21:16:01","slug":"us-intel-vets-oppose-brennans-cia-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2015\/03\/09\/us-intel-vets-oppose-brennans-cia-plan\/","title":{"rendered":"US Intel Vets Oppose Brennan\u2019s CIA Plan"},"content":{"rendered":"

The original idea of the CIA was to have independent-minded experts assessing both short- and longer-term threats to U.S. national security. Mixing with operations and politics was always a danger, which is now highlighted by CIA Director Brennan\u2019s reorganization, opposed by a group of U.S. intelligence veterans.<\/p>\n

MEMORANDUM FOR:<\/strong> The President
FROM:<\/strong> Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
SUBJECT<\/strong>: John Brennan\u2019s Restructuring Plan for CIA<\/p>\n

Mr. President, the CIA reorganization plan announced by Director John Brennan on Friday is a potentially deadly blow to the objective, fact-based intelligence needed to support fully informed decisions on foreign policy. We suggest turning this danger into an opportunity to create an independent entity for CIA intelligence analysis immune from the operational demands of the \u201cwar on terror.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Feb. 5, 2003, immediately after Colin Powell\u2019s address to the UN, members of VIPS sent our first VIPS memorandum, urging President George W. Bush to widen the policy debate \u201cbeyond 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cformer senior officers\u201d whom Brennan asked for input on the restructuring plan are a similar closed, blinkered circle, as is the \u201coutstanding group of officers from across the Agency\u201d picked by Brennan to look at the Agency\u2019s mission and future. He did not include any of the intelligence community dissidents and alumni who fought against the disastrous politicization of intelligence before the attack on Iraq. Nor does Brennan\u2019s plan reflect the lessons learned from that debacle.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

You have continued to express confidence in Brennan despite the CIA\u2019s mediocre record under his leadership. We urge you to weigh Brennan\u2019s plan against the backdrop of Harry Truman\u2019s prophetic vision for the CIA. We need to stop wasting time and energy trying to prevent the baby Truman never wanted from being thrown out with the bathwater. Let the bathwater run off, with the baby high and dry.<\/p>\n

An independent group for intelligence analysis would be free to produce for you and your National Security Council the medium- and long-term strategic intelligence analysis that can help our country steer clear of future strategic disasters. And we offer ourselves as advisers as to how this might be accomplished.<\/p>\n

Our concern over what we see as the likely consequences stemming from what Brennan intends, together with our many years of experience in intelligence work, have prompted this memo, which we believe can profit from some historical perspective.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

President Harry Truman wanted an agency structure able to meet a president\u2019s need for \u201cthe most accurate … information on what\u2019s going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots.\u201d In an op-ed appearing in the Washington Post <\/em>exactly one month after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Truman added, \u201cI have been disturbed by … the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment … and has become an operational and at times policy-making arm of the Government.\u201d<\/p>\n

Truman added that the \u201cmost important thing\u201d was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or lead the President into unwise decisions. His warning is equally relevant now \u2013 52 years later.<\/p>\n

Bay of Pigs<\/strong><\/p>\n

Truman was referring to how CIA Director Allen Dulles tried to mousetrap President Kennedy into committing U.S. armed forces to finish what a rag-tag band of CIA-trained invaders of Cuba began by landing at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, a few months before you were born. Kennedy had repeatedly warned the CIA brass and covert action planners that under no circumstances would he commit U.S. forces. But they were old hands; they knew better; they thought the young President could be had.<\/p>\n

Allen Dulles\u2019s handwritten notes discovered after his death show how he drew Kennedy into a plan that was virtually certain to require the support of U.S. forces. Dulles wrote that Kennedy would be compelled by \u201cthe realities of the situation\u201d to give whatever military support was necessary \u201crather than permit the enterprise to fail.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kennedy fired Dulles, a quintessential Washington Establishment figure \u2013 something one does only at one\u2019s own peril. As young CIA officers at the time, some of us experienced first-hand the deep reservoir of hate in which many a CIA covert action operator swam. Many could not resist venting their spleen, calling Kennedy a \u201ccoward\u201d and even \u201ctraitor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Analysis Also Corrupted<\/strong><\/p>\n

You are fully aware, we trust, that our analysts\u2019 vaunted ethos of speaking unvarnished truth to power was corrupted by Director George Tenet and Deputy Director John McLaughlin, who outdid themselves in carrying out the instructions of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. The new ethos boiled down to this: If the President wants to paint Iraq as a strategic threat, it is our job to come up with the \u201cevidence\u201d \u2013 even if it needs to be manufactured out of whole cloth (or forged, as in \u201cyellowcake uranium from Africa\u201d caper).<\/p>\n

Honest analysts were admonished not to rock the boat. A concrete example might help to show this in all its ugliness. When the only U.S. intelligence officer to interview \u201cCurve Ball\u201d before the war saw a draft of Powell\u2019s Feb. 5, 2003 speech citing \u201cfirst-hand descriptions\u201d by an Iraqi defector of a fleet of mobile bioweapons laboratories, he strongly questioned the \u201cvalidity of the information.\u201d The interviewer had, from the outset, expressed deep reservations about Curveball\u2019s reliability.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what the interviewer\u2019s supervisor, the Deputy Chief of the CIA\u2019s Iraqi Task Force, wrote in an email responding to his misgivings:<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s keep in mind the fact that this war\u2019s going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn\u2019t say, and that the Powers That Be probably aren\u2019t terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he\u2019s talking about. However, in the interest of Truth, we owe somebody a sentence or two of warning, if you honestly have reservations.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was not an isolated occurrence. Commenting on the results of a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee five-year study of pre-Iraq-war intelligence, Chairman Jay Rockefeller described it as \u201cunsubstantiated, contradicted, or even nonexistent.\u201d He was alluding to information (in)famously described as a \u201cslam dunk\u201d by then-CIA Director George Tenet who was singularly responsible for advancing the career of John Brennan.<\/p>\n

In a departure from customary diplomatic parlance, then-Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence Carl Ford, speaking to the authors of Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War,<\/em> had harsh words for Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin. Ford said that the evidence and analysis they gave policy makers was \u201cnot just wrong, they lied … they should have been shot.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is unfortunately true that \u2013 short of quitting and blowing the whistle \u2013 there is little one can do to prevent the skewing of \u201cintelligence\u201d when it is directed from the top \u2013 whether by the Bush-Tenet-McLaughlin consequential deceit on the threat from Iraq, or the ideological\/careerist conceit of William Casey-Robert Gates in insisting up until the very end of the Soviet regime that the Soviet Communist Party would never relinquish power and that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was merely cleverer than his predecessors.<\/p>\n

Thankfully, Not All Gave Up<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is hope to be drawn from those occasions where senior intelligence officials with integrity can step in, show courageous example, and \u2013 despite multiple indignities and pitfalls in the system \u2013 can force the truth to the surface. We hope that you have been made aware that, after the no-WMD-anywhere debacle on Iraq, Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence Thomas Fingar did precisely that during 2007, supervising a watershed National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that concluded unanimously, \u201cwith high confidence,\u201d that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon in 2003.<\/p>\n

President Bush concedes in his memoir that this put the kibosh on his and Dick Cheney\u2019s earlier plan to attack Iran during their last year in office. So, character (as in Fingar) counts, and people of integrity can make a difference \u2013 and even help thwart plans for war \u2013 even in the most politicized of circumstances.<\/p>\n

Restructuring<\/strong><\/p>\n

Accordingly, the primary objective in any restructuring should be to make it easier for people of integrity, like Thomas Fingar, to create an atmosphere in which analysts feel free to tell it like it is without worry about possible harm to their careers, should they come up with a politically \u201cincorrect\u201d conclusion \u2013 as the one on Iran clearly was.<\/p>\n

The problem is that the Brennan restructuring effort does just the opposite. It puts the politicization on steroids. Placing intelligence analysts and operations officers together fosters a quite different kind of atmosphere \u2013 the kind that increases the likelihood of what Truman called the \u201cmost important thing\u201d to guard against \u2013 leading \u201cthe President into unwise decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Truman saw the general problem and went even further, saying he \u201cwould 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.\u201d We think Truman was right then; and he is right now.<\/p>\n

Decades of experience show that Truman\u2019s fears were well founded. Indeed, from the outset, putting analysis and covert action operations together in the same agency was the first structural fault, so to speak, when it was created in 1947.<\/p>\n

It was occasioned primarily by insistence that WWII OSS operatives who could match the KGB in what is now called \u201cregime change\u201d remain in government, and then a myopic choice to place them with the analysts in the newly created CIA. As Melvin Goodman points out in his The Failure of Intelligence: the Decline and Fall of the CIA<\/em>, the early \u201cCIA leadership itself was opposed to having responsibility for covert action, believing that the clandestine function would ultimately taint the intelligence product, a prescient observation.\u201d<\/p>\n

During the 1980s, President Reagan\u2019s Secretary of State, George Shultz, correctly accused CIA Director William Casey and his deputy, Robert Gates, of slanting intelligence, charging that their operational involvement \u201ccolored\u201d the Agency\u2019s analysis. Shultz openly charged William Casey with giving President Reagan \u201cfaulty intelligence\u201d to bolster Casey\u2019s own policy preferences, including the ill-conceived arms-for-hostages-swap with Iran.<\/p>\n

Shultz added that, because he had a sense of this analysis-operations toxic mix, he harbored \u201cgrave doubts about the objectivity and reliability of some of the intelligence I was getting.\u201d Shultz was a strong advocate of separating the analysis from operations, likening the need to that of separating investment from commercial banking.<\/p>\n

\u201cWar on Terrorism\u201d as Business Model<\/strong><\/p>\n

The business model chosen by Brennan is fashioned to the \u201cWar on Terrorism,\u201d and he holds up the Counterterrorism Center (CTC) as a model to emulate. There the analysts and operations officers sit side by side charged primarily with hunting, targeting, and killing in that war.<\/p>\n

But truth, it has been pointed out, is the first casualty of war. This can be seen right off the bat in the exaggerated way the supposed \u201csuccesses\u201d of the Center are advertised. Some of us have worked in or closely with these CIA Centers, after which ten new \u201cMission Centers\u201d are patterned. And we are taken aback by the hyperbolic plaudits being given them \u2013 and especially to the CTC.<\/p>\n

That a quintessential politicizer, and big Curve Ball promoter, like former CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin is reported to have advised Brennan on the restructuring, and lauds the benefits of \u201cputting analysts and operators together\u201d adds to our concern.<\/p>\n

Very much in step, former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, for instance, claims that existing Centers have \u201cproven to be a very powerful combination\u201d and that the Counterterrorism Center is \u201cthe most successful agency component over the last decade.\u201d<\/p>\n

Morell remains focused on the business model of war. Just days ago he conceded that he did not think he would live to see the end of al-Qaeda: \u201cMy children\u2019s generation and my grandchildren\u2019s generation will still be fighting this fight,\u201d said Morell.<\/p>\n

Does it occur to Morell or others who have played senior intelligence roles that there ought to be a different kind of center, like what used to exist in parts of the Directorate of Intelligence, where analyst talent might be used not simply for targeting terrorists, but for figuring out what their grievances are, and whether there may be more promising ways to address them?<\/p>\n

Do we really believe that terrorists slip out of the womb screaming \u201cI hate America\u201d? And is there a cost to drone-killing them as the preferred method of eliminating terrorists (together with others who may be in the wrong place at the wrong time)?<\/p>\n

Brennan has announced that the new Centers will \u201cbring the full range of operational, analytic, support, technical, and digital personnel and capabilities to bear on the nation\u2019s most pressing security issues and interests.\u201d<\/p>\n

We need to learn more of the specifics, but the integrated Mission Centers sound very much like fertile field for politicization and centralized control under which subordinates will feel pressure to fall in line with prosecuting the war de jour and to sign on to politically correct solutions dictated from the 7th<\/sup> floor under guidance from your staff in the White House.<\/p>\n

Is this the kind of CIA we need — everyone marching in step, as major parts of the Agency are transformed into a private army at your disposal, with virtually no Congressional oversight? We don\u2019t think so.<\/p>\n

A Watershed<\/strong><\/p>\n

With the present restructuring plan we see little promise for the kind of agenda-free, substantive intelligence that you and other senior policy makers need. But the train seems to have left the station headed toward Brennan\u2019s restructuring plan. The sweeping reorganization scheme is of such importance that it should be the subject of hearings in the intelligence committees of House and Senate, but there is no indication that either committee intends to do so.<\/p>\n

Let the analysts inclined toward targeting terrorists and providing other direct operational support to war sign up for these war-on-terror and like Centers. You and your successors will still need an agency devoted to unfettered intelligence analysis able to critique honestly the likely medium- and long-term consequences of the methods used to wage the \u201cwar on terror\u201d and other wars.<\/p>\n

We can assure you it is far better for those analysts doing this demanding substantive work NOT to be simultaneously \u201cpart of the team\u201d implementing that policy.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is time to revert to what Truman envisaged for the CIA. We are ready to make ourselves available to assist you and your staff in thinking through how this might be done. That it needs to be done is clear to us, and this would seem an opportune time.<\/p>\n

In our view, we need to stop wasting time and energy trying to prevent the baby from being thrown out with the bathwater. Let the bathwater run off. Save the baby, even if that means a separate institution in which analysts of the kind that completed that NIE on Iran in 2007 can flourish. This just might help stop a new unnecessary war, as the combat support officers try to bring an end to old ones.<\/p>\n

In sum, we are convinced that a separate entity for intelligence analysis \u2013 the kind of agency Truman envisaged for his CIA \u2013 would be an invaluable asset to you and your successors as president.<\/p>\n

For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)<\/strong><\/p>\n