How U.S. Intelligence Failed - Compromise Of The CIA Analytical Division

[Oilwellian]

I felt it was important to post this article dated last Fall because I think we'll be seeing in the near future, a concerted effort to blame the CIA's analytical division for the Iraq WMD intelligence failure. This gives a great look at what's really happening behind the scenes and is chocked full of information as to who's who (like Tenet). In essence, the CIA's analytical division has been completely compromised by politically motivated neo-cons dating back a quarter of a century. It's important to know how fragile we are to the politically manipulated intelligence that now guides our foreign policies. Although it's fairly long, I highly recommend you read this most imformative piece.

<snip>
Dating Back to Watergate

Though one cost of corrupting U.S. intelligence can now be counted in the growing U.S. death toll in Iraq, the origins of the current problem can be traced back to the mid-1970s, when conservatives were engaged in fierce rear-guard defenses after the twin debacles of the Vietnam War and Watergate. In 1974, after Republican President Richard Nixon was driven from office over the Watergate political-spying scandal, the Republicans suffered heavy losses in congressional races. The next year, the U.S. –backed government in South Vietnam fell.

At this crucial juncture, a group of influential conservatives coalesced around a strategy of accusing the CIA’s analytical division of growing soft on communism. These conservatives – led by the likes of Richard Pipes, Paul Nitze, William Van Cleave, Max Kampelman, Eugene Rostow, Elmo Zumwalt and Richard Allen – claimed that the CIA’s Soviet analysts were ignoring Moscow’s aggressive strategy for world domination. This political assault put in play one of the CIA’s founding principles – objective analysis.

Since its creation in 1947, the CIA had taken pride in maintaining an analytical division that stayed above the political fray. The CIA analysts – confident if not arrogant about their intellectual skills – prided themselves in bringing unwanted news to the president’s door. Those reports included an analysis of Soviet missile strength that contradicted John F. Kennedy’s “missile gap” rhetoric or the debunking of Lyndon Johnson’s assumptions about the effectiveness of bombing in Vietnam. While the CIA’s operational division got itself into trouble with risky schemes, the analytical division maintained a fairly good record of scholarship and objectivity.

But that tradition came under attack in 1976 when conservative outsiders demanded and got access to the CIA’s strategic intelligence on the Soviet Union. Their goal was to contest the analytical division’s assessments of Soviet capabilities and intentions. The conservatives saw the CIA’s tempered analysis of Soviet behavior as the underpinning of then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s strategy of détente, the gradual normalizing of relations with the Soviet Union. Détente was, in effect, a plan to negotiate an end to the Cold War or at least its most dangerous elements.

This CIA view of a tamer Soviet Union had enemies inside Gerald Ford’s administration. Hard-liners, such as William J. Casey, John Connally, Clare Booth Luce and Edward Teller, sat on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Another young hard-liner, Dick Cheney, was Ford’s chief of staff. Donald Rumsfeld was then – as he is today – the secretary of defense.

Team B

The concept of a conservative counter-analysis, which became known as “Team B,” had been opposed by the previous CIA director, William Colby, as in inappropriate intrusion into the integrity of the CIA’s analytical product. But the new CIA director, a politically ambitious George H.W. Bush, was ready to acquiesce to the right-wing pressure.

<much more>
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2003/102203.html

[ajacobson]

1. I went to a talk by Ray McGovern today

Basically said the same thing as Parry did, above.

For those who don't know, McGovern was a senior career CIA intelligence analyst, now retired of course. Last year him and a number of former (some current, on background?) analysts formed a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity to call bullshit on the cooked intelligence 43*'s administration was passing around.

McGovern talked about seeing intelligence in 1967 that showed that VC strength was more than twice the figures that Westmoreland used. This was put in front of Westmoreland and it became clear that the artificially low number was used on purpose and it was part of selling the war. McGovern said he regrets not going straight to the NY Times and blowing the lid off of the whole thing. He felt that if he and others who knew had done that, it may have ended the war right there. Of course, within a few months the Tet offensive showed that the situation was very different than what the officials were putting forward. It was pretty heavy shit hearing him talk about that.