HOME
DV NEWS
SERVICE ARCHIVE SUBMISSIONS/CONTACT ABOUT DV
"American
Intelligence Analysts Have a Patriotic Duty to
Speak
Out and Transcend the Cult of Secrecy"
An
Interview with Ray McGovern
by
Barbara Jentzsch
Dissident Voice
September
22, 2003
Editor’s Note: Ray McGovern is a retired senior
analyst, 27 years with the CIA. Once a briefer for Vice Pres. George Bush from
1981-85, McGovern founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals For Sanity (VIPS)
in January 2003. The following interview was broadcast on German Public Radio.
Thanks to Paul Nellen in Hamburg for providing this transcript, translated from
German.
Barbara
Jentzsch: What are the goals of VIPS ["Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity"]?
Ray
McGovern: We established VIPS at the end of January of this year when it became
clear that there would be probably a war against Iraq. That for the first time
in its history the US would attack another nation. And they would do so, using
as justification, intelligence that we thought to be very thin if not bogus.
Jentzsch:
When you say we, who is we, who belongs to VIPS?
RMG:
We are a group of mostly retired but also resigned members of the intelligence
community. Most of us come from the analytic ranks of the CIA, but we have
alumni from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Dept. Intelligence unit,
the FBI and I say also intelligence from other organisations, we are a very
wide intelligence community body.
Jentzsch:
The function of VIPS, is it something like a watchdog?
RMG:
You could call it that. We have all the experience built up over the years at a
very senior level of intelligence and policy. As we saw what was happening we
could see that there was none speaking out for truth and intelligence, so to
speak. That this case for war was made on very flimsy grounds and those inside
of course have a lot of trouble speaking out.
Jentzsch:
Truth? The CIA has a certain history -and truth is as far as I know or remember
not a trademark of the CIA...
RMG:
That is really something that needs to be clarified: there are basically 2
parts of the CIA. One has to do with clandestine action and covert operations
and one has to do with analysis. They are very separate and distinct. The one
that has to do with analysis goes by the scripture that is engraved in the wall
of the entrance to the CIA headquarters which says, "you shall know the
truth and the truth shall set you free". And so it was our job to lay out
all the evidence, to analyze it and to speak out without fear or favor,
conveying the conclusions that we drew from this evidence and telling the
president what we thought the real situation was. In that way we provided a
real service for the President of the United States and his senior advisers
because they had one place where they could come where people had career
protection for telling it just the way it is. For the most part we were able to
do that in the old days. As we see that this is no longer possible it gets us
very very angry and outraged really when bogus intelligence is used to start a
war.
Jentzsch:
When did the old days stop being the old days?
RMG:
The old days stopped being the old days gradually during the reign of William
Casey who came in with Ronald Reagan and was the director of the CIA then. He
had policy axes to grind and he violated the central tenet of being the
director of CIA by becoming a cabinet member. Cabinet member make policy and
the director of the CIA has no business, no business at all making policy. You
can't make policy and convey intelligence. You just can't do it. It is two very
separate and distinct functions and if you start getting involved in making
policy, your credibility in offering intelligence slips to zero.
Jentzsch:
That is happening right now - CIA director Tenet is making policy or is bowing
to pressure from the policy makers.
RMG:
He seems to be. Tenet is a strange director of Central Intelligence. He has
allowed himself to be put into untenable positions, for play on words. For
example, in the Middle East there is a so-called Tenet Plan. Well, he has no
business making a policy plan for the Middle East or anything else. There are
certain requirements for a director of Central Intelligence and this one
fulfills very few of them.
Jentzsch:
So he should have resigned?
RMG:
Well, yes it's difficult. In American government very seldom does anyone resign
on principle. And that's a real drawback in our experience. But some do, but
few. We have 3 foreign service officers to their great credit who resigned
before the war because they just could not stomach what was happening and the
deceit that was being applied to explaining this war. Big fish seldom resign.
They get seduced into the feeling that they are a very important part of the
"team" and their loyalty is to this little team and not to the people
in the United States or the government as a whole. They are willing to deceive
Congress as part of this team and George Tenet and Colin Powell are both
susceptible to those pressures and have bowed to them.
Jentzsch:
In your appeal to your former colleagues at the CIA you are quoting Gingrich
having said that Tenet's job is safe, he can't be fired, because he knows too
much and could blackmail this White House.
RMG:
Yes, there are two things about that. You mentioned Gingrich, well, he said in
a moment of loud thinking, "George Tenet is so thankful and so grateful
and so loyal to the President that he'll do anything for him."
Unfortunately, that seems to be the case and that's no position for a director
of CIA to be in. The other reason that they won't get rid of Tenet is that he
knows chapter and verse about what he told the President of the United States
in July/August and early September of 2001 before 9-11. And I am sure he has a
little computer disk with all that information on it, and were that to be
released to the public, we would see that the President was just not up to the
task of acting on the intelligence, the abundant intelligence - despite all the
SNAFU, there was still plenty of intelligence according to which at the very
least the airlines and airports should have been on heightened alert.
Jentzsch:
How is the mood in the CIA today?
RMG:
The folks who are working in the agency, in the analytic directorate, the
directorate in which most of us from VIPS worked, are terribly demoralized.
Think for example about the heroic efforts they made after 9-11
to
track down each and every report having to do with ties between Iraq and
al-Qaeda. Despite there assiduous efforts, they came up with zero. No
conclusive evidence at all that bears the term evidence, that there were any
ties at all - meaningful ties - between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Then think of them
after a year and a half of this painstaking work, holding their integrity against
the Pentagon which very much wanted to prove the existence of these ties,
watching their director sitting right behind Colin Powell as the spun this yarn
into the end of the speech, about all these associations, this sinister nexus
between al-Qaeda and Iraq.
Now
the other folks unfortunately are the folks that bubbled to the top of the
managerial ranks during William Casey and his protégé who learned so well at
his knee: a fellow named Bobby Gates. They were rewarded for being able to
sniff which way the wind was blowing and to trim their sails accordingly, and
so early on in the eighties you had some prostitution of intelligence. On Iran
for example, on the Soviet Union for example. And the folks that bubbled to the
top, many of them are still in place, and those are the folks that you can go
to when they are doing a "National Intelligence Estimate" (NIE) on
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
And
say: "As you know, the Vice President has said that 'Iraq is
reconstituting its nuclear weapons program', I certainly hope that the NIE will
bear that out", and they say, "Yes, Sir", they'll salute crisply
and they mold the evidence to fit the policy. This is the cardinal sin, cooking
evidence to the recipe of high policy and it was done in this estimate and it
is an unforgivable sin in terms of intelligence.
Jentzsch:
To whom in the CIA is your appeal directed?
RMG:
It is directed toward everyone. We are hoping that everyone has a conscience. Even
those who are more career enhancing minded than the analysts. But yes, it is
primarily to those who have seen what has happened, who have seen that for the
first time in our country’s history an unprovoked war was waged by tricking
Congress into authorizing the President to wage this war. And we can begin to
appreciate the gravity of that situation and not only that but can realize that
this can happen again, if these people are allowed to get away with it. And we
need only to look at Iran or Syria or North Korea to be very very worried and
not at all sure that our government will act in a responsible, honest way.
Jentzsch:
Are you asking your colleagues, ex-colleagues to do something illegal or is
this within their obligation to do?
RMG:
Very good question! What we are asking is not necessary illegal. It is highly
ethical, it is moral. What we are asking them to do is if they see clear signs
of dishonesty, to speak out and to say, these judgments are not supported by
the evidence. They are dishonest judgments, they are judgments that have been
forced upon us by the White House, the Defense Department, the Vice President's
office which is often the case, whoever it happens to be. Now, that is not to
divulge classified information. It is to risk your career, but we hope that
some analysts will put the country's best interest over considerations of
career and just speak out.
There
is a constitutional crisis here
Jentzsch:
Which mistakes or failures are too grave to ignore...
RMG:
Well, there is a constitutional crisis here. Under our system, the Congress,
the legislative branch has exclusive right to declare war. That's the way our
founding fathers wanted it and that's the way it should be. So for the
President of the US to start a war, he has to get congressional authorization
for that and in this case bogus evidence, evidence known to be erroneous and
even forged was used to deceive the Congress last fall, into ...giving the
President the power to make war - that is the most serious sin if you will done
by the administration.
Jentzsch:
How were they able to do that?
RMG:
Well, 9-11 is the answer. 9-11 was an incredible trauma to the body politic of
our nation. 9-11 allowed the President of the US to play on those fears that
were stoked and encouraged by the White Houses PR machine into thinking for
example that Iraq had something to do with 9-11.
The
American populace and their elected representatives was deceived
Jentzsch:
Most Americans thought that. Why?
RMG:
Because the President said it in consecutive sentences. The American populace
was deceived and their elected representatives were told that Saddam Hussein
was about to get a nuclear weapon. And the first indication would be a mushroom
cloud. And so the executive branch mounted a concerted campaign to deceive the
legislative branch into ceding their authority to make war to the President,
and that is the cardinal offense. The 16 words, that's small potatoes, in a
sense however regrettable. It is a red herring because it takes the focus off
the real problem. The real problem was last fall, before Congress voted to
authorize this war.
Jentzsch:
How about the visits?
RMG:
Oh, the visits, that's where we Veteran Intelligence Professionals can make a
real contribution. Here is Colin Powell bragging about his 4 days and nights at
the CIA, right before his February 5 speech to the UN. One would think that he
would be ashamed of that. That's not the way the government works. We don't
want the Secretary of State to come out to the CIA and do the analysis himself.
That analysis should have been done months before. The decision for war had
clearly been taken.
Jentzsch:
Did they do the analysis after that?
RMG:
Well, apparently so, because he did spend four days and four nights out there.
And not only he but Condoleeza Rice came out to join them too. The Vice
President had been out there and Newt Gingrich of all people has come as well.
And so the picture of the Secretary of State sitting down with the analysts,
saying ok now, what are we going to tell the UN, what do we have here? 4 days
before the speech is so incongruous, is so beyond the pale that it doesn't make
any sense at all,- other than the fact that there was really no good evidence
and they were scurrying around, cramming as if for an exam together, whatever
might be put together to make as good a case as they possibly could. And that
of course is what they did and if you look at Colin Powell’s speech and look at
it now in retrospect you'll see that he was wrong on so many counts,
demonstrable wrong, that it is really incredible.
Jentzsch:
All the issues you talk about, are they being talked about in the congressional
investigations that are being conducted now?
RMG:
I am sorry to tell you that I expect nothing from the congressional
investigations. Congress is controlled by the Presidents party and that means
that on both houses, the House and the Senate, controlled that way,
Congress
will not initiate or conduct a unbiased investigation. That's just the nature
of the beast.
Jentzsch:
You have been the personal briefer of Bush senior, 81-85, what do you think
goes through his mind when he sees what his son is doing in matters of
intelligence?
RMG:
I often wonder. You see the folks who are running the policy towards Iraq and
the war in the Middle East, these are a strange breed of folks. It is not as
though they arrived just last week. They have been around for a couple of
decades and ironically enough in the eighties they were widely referred to as
"the crazies", the real crazies. When you referred to the crazies you
knew who was meant: it was the Wolfowitzes, it was the Perles,it was folks that
had gone way out on the limb, espousing policies that ducktailed very much with
the Israeli leaders for whom they also worked. And so for the first President
Bush to be looking at this son, hiring on wholesale the crazies, not only
hiring them on but being susceptible to their suggestions and their policies,
that must be a very hard pill to swallow.
Jentzsch:
Your appeal to CIA employers does come late in the game - the war has run its
course. What can be prevented now?
RMG:
For one thing more war. Further wars, more adventures. If it becomes clear to
the American people and to our elected representatives, that the people who
started and conducted the war in Iraq did so on false pretenses without any
real plan for postwar Iraq, then I think it will be much more difficult for
them to get approval, to get the support they need to do a similar thing
vis-à-vis Syria or Iran or God forbid North Korea. So that's one very important
aspect right there. It is just very very important that the truth gets out and
the focus now of course is the administration would like to say, well, we are
in it now. We really have to support the troops and give them everything they
need.
What
really is necessary is a sober assessment of how we got in there, what we are
trying to accomplish and how our policies should be from now on. And that
should be done in a wider circle than this little clique in the Pentagon that
we used to call "the crazies". It is not at all too late for
intelligence analysts to come forward and say, yes, we saw this happening, this
is how it happened. We are not going to divulge in classified information, but
our conclusions were altered, were prostituted and that's why this war started
and we need not to let that happen again, thank you very much.
Jentzsch:
Do you have any hope that anybody will come forward?
RMG:
Well, it's already happening. Folks are coming forward in London.
Jentzsch:
How about Langley [CIA headquarters]?
RMG:
I think that the American intelligence analysts, the good ones will recognize
that they have a patriotic duty to speak out, that transcends the cult of
secrecy and sensible loyalty and going throughout the channels that usually
only delays things for years.
Barbara Jentzsch is a
Washington, DC-based freelance journalist working with German Public Radio. This
article first appeared in Life-info.de in Germany (www.life-info.de/).
Other Articles by Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity
* Now It’s Your
Turn: Intelligence Veterans Challenge Colleagues to Speak Out
* We Are
Perplexed at the US Refusal to Permit the Return of UN Inspectors to Iraq
* Weapons of Mass
Distraction: Where? Find? Plant?