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by
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
May
2, 2003
MEMORANDUM
FOR: The President
FROM:
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
SUBJECT:
Intelligence Fiasco
We
write to express deep concern over the growing mistrust and cynicism with which
many, including veteran intelligence professionals inside and outside our
movement, regard the intelligence cited by you and your chief advisers to
justify the war against Iraq. The controversy over intelligence on Iraq has
deep roots, going back a decade. It came to a head over recent months as
intelligence was said to be playing a key role in support of your
administration’s decision to make war on Iraq. And the controversy has now
become acute, since you have been backed into the untenable position of
assuming the former role of Saddam Hussein in refusing to cooperate with UN
inspectors. (Chief UN nuclear inspector Mohamed ElBaradei noted earlier this
week, “We have years of experience and know every scientist worth
interviewing.”) The implications not only for US credibility abroad but also
for the future of US intelligence are immense. They need to be addressed
without delay.
Prominent
pundits (and, quite probably, some of your own advisers) are now saying it does
not matter whether so-called “weapons of mass destruction” are ever found in
Iraq. Don’t let them fool you. It matters a great deal. The Wall Street Journal
had it right in its page-one lead article on April 8:
Officials
Debate Involving the UN in Verification:
American
forces in Iraq are rapidly confronting two other tasks (besides hunting down
Saddam Hussein) of enormous importance: finding any weapons of mass destruction
and convincing the world the finds are real. The weapons search is a critical
one for the Bush administration, which went to war charging that the Iraqi
leader had hidden huge amounts of chemical and biological weapons and could
pass them on to terrorists. If the US doesn’t make any undisputed discoveries
of forbidden weapons, the failure will feed already-widespread skepticism
abroad about the motives for going to war.”
The
failure to find weapons of mass destruction six weeks after US and UK forces
invaded Iraq suggests either that such weapons are simply not there, or that
those eventually found there will not be in sufficient quantity or capability
to support your repeated claim that Iraq posed a grave threat to our country’s
security. Your opposition to inviting UN inspectors into Iraq feeds the
suspicion that you wish to avoid independent verification; some even suggest
that your administration wishes to preserve the option of “planting” such
weapons to be “discovered” later. Sen. Carl Levin recently warned that, if some
are found “Many people around the world will think we planted those weapons,
unless the UN inspectors are there with us.”
Complicating
matters still further, foreign resistance is building to lifting the economic
sanctions against Iraq until the UN can certify that Iraq is free of weapons of
mass destruction. Russian President Vladimir Putin this week joined others in
insisting that only UN weapons inspectors can reliably certify that. With
considerable bite and sarcasm, he asked Prime Minister Tony Blair on April 29, “Where
are these arsenals of weapons of mass destruction, if they were there?”
What
is at play here is a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions.
It is essential that you be able to separate fact from fiction—for your own
sake, and for the credibility of our country’s intelligence community. We urge
you to do two things immediately:
(1)
Invite UN inspectors to return to Iraq without further delay; and
(2)
Ask Gen. Brent Scowcroft, Chair of your Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, to
launch an immediate inquiry into the performance of the CIA and other
intelligence agencies in providing the intelligence upon which you have based
your fateful decision for war against Iraq.
You
may not realize the extent of the current ferment within the Intelligence
Community and particularly the CIA. In intelligence, there is one unpardonable
sin—cooking intelligence to the recipe of high policy. There is ample
indication that this has been done with respect to Iraq. What remains not
entirely clear is who the cooks are and where they practice their art. Are
their kitchens only in the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the
Vice President’s office? There are troubling signs, as will be seen below, that
some senior officials of the CIA may be graduates of the other CIA—the Culinary
Institute of America.
While
there have been occasions in the past when intelligence has been deliberately
warped for political purposes, never before has such warping been used in such
a systematic way to mislead our elected representatives into voting to
authorize launching a war. It is essential that all this be sorted out; Gen.
Scowcroft is uniquely qualified to lead such an investigation.
Some
things are already quite clear to us from our own sources and analysis. We
present them below in the hope that our findings will help get the
investigation off to a quick start.
One
of the many lawmakers who believe they were deceived last summer and fall, Rep.
Henry Waxman (D-CA) wrote you a letter on March 17, asking that you explain why
“evidence” that your administration knew to be forged was used with him and
others to garner votes for the war. Waxman was referring to bogus correspondence
purporting to show that Iraq was trying to obtain in Africa uranium for nuclear
weapons, and noted that it was the perceived need to prevent Iraq from
developing nuclear weapons that provided “the most persuasive justification”
for war. The continued lack of any White House response to Waxman’s letter can
only feed the suspicion that there is no innocent explanation and that the use
of the forged material was deliberate.
Determined
to find out what had happened, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), vice-chair of the
Senate intelligence oversight committee, suggested that the committee ask the
FBI investigate, but committee chair Pat Roberts (R-OK) resisted—giving a fresh
meaning to the word “oversight.” Roberts said through a spokeswoman that it was
“inappropriate for the FBI to investigate at this point.” Roberts then declined
to join Rockefeller in signing a letter to the FBI requesting an investigation.
Rockefeller sent one anyway but the response he has just received from the
Bureau was a brush-off. Unless you give FBI Director Robert Mueller different
instructions, it appears doubtful that any genuine investigation will take
place.
Rep.
Waxman is right to point out that the specter of Saddam Hussein armed with
nuclear weapons was the crucial element that convinced many representatives and
senators to vote to give you the authority to use military force against Iraq.
It is now clear that bogus intelligence fed lawmakers’ fears before the vote on
October 11, 2002.
NIC
Memorandum: “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs”
On
October 4, 2002, a week before Congress voted on the war resolution, the
National Intelligence Council, an interagency body under the CIA Director as
head of the entire Intelligence Community, published an unclassified version of
a memorandum that had been briefed to Congressmen and Senators over the
previous weeks.
Among
the key judgments: “Most analysts assess Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear
weapons program.”
The
clumsy clause conceals a crass cave-in. The preponderant view, then as now,
among nuclear scientists and engineers of the Intelligence Community and the
Department of Energy’s national laboratories is that Iraq had not been able to
reconstitute in any significant way the nuclear development program dismantled
by UN inspectors prior to 1998. The conclusions of the vast majority of
analysts dovetailed with the findings repeatedly presented to the UN by
International Atomic Energy Agency Director Mohamed ElBaradei and his
inspectors after their inspection work at the turn of the year; i. e., that
Iraq had no nuclear program worthy of the name.
The
NIC memorandum’s discussion of alleged Iraqi attempts to reconstitute a nuclear
weapons program does not pass muster as rigorous analysis. The only data
offered that can remotely be called “evidence” is Iraq’s efforts to obtain
high-strength aluminum tubes. The NIC memorandum claims, again, that “most
intelligence specialists” believe the rods were intended for use in uranium
enrichment, while “some believe that these tubes are probably intended for
conventional weapons programs.”
The
truth is just the opposite. Those who posit a nuclear application are in the
distinct minority in the US and foreign intelligence, scientific, and
engineering community.
The
rest of the “evidence” adduced to support the existence of a “Nuclear Weapons
Program” includes Baghdad’s failure to provide inspectors with all the
information sought, the fact Saddam Hussein held frequent meetings with nuclear
scientists, and the surmise that Baghdad “probably uses some money from illicit
oil sales to support its weapons of mass destruction efforts.” The memorandum
concedes that the IAEA “made significant strides toward dismantling Iraq’s
nuclear weapons program,” but claims that, in the absence of inspections since
late 1998, “most analysts assess that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear
program.” “Most analysts” in the Pentagon, perhaps; and in the Vice President’s
office, surely; in the intelligence/scientific/engineering community, no.
Addressing
how soon Iraq could go nuclear, the NIC memorandum states “Iraq is unlikely to
produce indigenously enough weapons-grade material for a deliverable nuclear
weapon until the last half of this decade.” It goes on to say that Iraq could
produce a nuclear weapon “within a year,” if it could acquire the necessary
fissile material abroad.
In
your speech of October 7, 2002, just four days before the vote in Congress,
your advisers had you blur that distinction and raise the prospect that if Iraq
could “produce, buy, or steal” highly enriched uranium, it could have a nuclear
weapon in less than a year. You went on to warn that “the smoking gun could
come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” (The “mushroom cloud” specter was again
used on October 8 by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice with Wolf
Blitzer on national TV, and on October 9 by Assistant Secretary of Defense for
Public Affairs Victoria Clarke with TV commentator Sam Donaldson.)
Interestingly,
the NIC memorandum does not include the information from the forgery purporting
to show that Iraq was trying to get uranium from Niger, although that material
had been around for at least several weeks. Since the other “evidence,” like
the argument from aluminum rods, was presented in such a way as to play up the
threat from Iraq, the absence of the forgery information is conspicuous. Its
absence may be explained by the reluctance of the purveyors of that information
to make available the actual source material, which representatives of the
various intelligence agencies preparing the NIC paper would have required, and
the consequent likelihood that the hoax would be prematurely uncovered.
Whence
the “Intelligence” on Weapons of Mass Destruction?
Glen
Rangwala, the Cambridge University analyst who exposed the plagiarism by
British intelligence of “evidence” on Iraq from a graduate student in
California, suggests that much of the information on such weapons has come from
Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC), which has received Pentagon
money for intelligence gathering. “The INC saw the demand and provided what was
needed,” says Rangwala. “The implication is that they polluted the whole US
intelligence effort.”
It
is well known in intelligence circles that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz has overseen the polluting of the stream of intelligence reporting on
Iraq with a flood of fabricated material from Chalabi, who has few supporters
and still fewer sources inside Iraq. When both the CIA and the Defense
Intelligence Agency refused to give credence to such reporting, Defense
Secretary Rumsfeld set up his own intelligence analysis unit headed by Rich
Haver—a passed-over but still ambitious aspirant to the post of CIA director. The
contribution of reporting from émigrés has been highly touted for months by
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, who seem unaware of Machiavelli’s warning that of all
intelligence sources, exiles are the least reliable.
In
the face of like admonitions from the Intelligence Community, Wolfowitz has
chosen to take the offensive. He has stated in public, for example, that CIA
analysis “is not worth the paper it is written on.”
/s/
Richard Beske, San
Diego
Kathleen McGrath
Christison, Santa Fe
William Christison, Santa
Fe
Raymond McGovern,
Arlington, VA
Steering Group
Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity
Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) is a coast-to-coast enterprise; mostly
intelligence officers from analysis side of CIA. They can be reached at: rmcgovern@slschool.org