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U.S. Intelligence Officials Charge Bush Administration With Altering Intelligence-Handling Methods During Prelude to War
Current and former U.S. intelligence officials have charged the Bush administration with bypassing customary procedures for examining intelligence — a move that could explain the disparities between prewar intelligence on Iraqi WMD programs and what has been found so far on the ground, the New Yorker reported this week (see GSN, Oct. 15). The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is currently conducting an inquiry into prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq. The committee has found, according to an intelligence official, that reports provided by U.N. weapons inspectors and the International Atomic Energy Agency were more accurate than CIA reports. “Some of the old-timers in the community are appalled by how bad the analysis was,” the intelligence official said. “If you look at them side by side, CIA versus United Nations, the U.N. agencies come out ahead across the board,” the official added. According to current and former intelligence officials, soon after the Bush administration came into office, senior administration officials began to change how intelligence was examined, the New Yorker reported. A retired CIA officer said that, typically, no requests for action should be made to higher officials, a process known as “stovepiping,” without the information the request is based on having been scrutinized. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, said the Bush administration had dismantled the existing filtering mechanism that prevented the use of bad intelligence. “They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them,” Pollock said of Bush administration officials. “They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,” Pollack said. “They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn’t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information,” he added. For example, soon after the Bush administration came into office, Greg Thielmann, then a disarmament expert with the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), was assigned to serve as daily intelligence liaison with Undersecretary of State John Bolton, according to the New Yorker. Bolton, however, became “troubled because INR was not telling him what he wanted to hear,” Thielmann said, adding that he was soon asked not to attend Bolton’s staff meetings. “I was intercepted at the door of his office and told, ‘The undersecretary doesn’t need you to attend this meeting anymore,” he said. Even though Thielmann said he told Bolton’s staff that he was there to provide intelligence input, the aide had replied, “The undersecretary wants to keep this in the family.” Ultimately, Bolton demanded that he and his staff obtain direct access to sensitive intelligence, according to the New Yorker. Previously, however, such intelligence had only been made available to undersecretaries after it had been analyzed — a process designed to prevent raw intelligence from going to “people who would be misled,” according to Thielmann. Bolton has acknowledged that he altered intelligence-handling procedures to obtain more types of sensitive information, the New Yorker reported. “I found that there was lots of stuff that I wasn’t getting and that the INR analysts weren’t including,” Bolton said in an interview with the New Yorker. “I didn’t want it filtered. I wanted to see everything — to be fully informed. If that puts someone’s nose out of joint, sorry about that,” he added. Bolton also said that Thielmann had “invited himself” to his daily meetings. “This was within my family of bureaus. There was no place for INR or anyone else — the Human Resources Bureau or the Office of Foreign Buildings,” Bolton said. According to the New Yorker, similar changes in intelligence-handling procedures were also made at the U.S. Defense Department. In 2001, an official assigned to a Pentagon planning office examined an assumption held by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Defense Undersecretary Douglas Feith that the Iraqi National Congress opposition group could help overthrow then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. An official said the assumption that the INC could play a major role in any coup against Hussein and that its leader Ahmad Chalabi would be welcomed by Iraqis was subjected to a type of “what could go wrong” study. “What if it turns out that Ahmad Chalabi is not so popular? What’s Plan B if you discover that Chalabi and his boys don’t have it in them to accomplish the overthrow?” the official said. When the official asked about the analysis, however, he was told that senior Pentagon officials wanted to focus more on what could go right, rather than what possibly could go wrong, the New Yorker reported. “Their methodology was analogous to tossing a coin five times and assuming that it would always come up heads,” the official said. “You need to think about what would happen if it comes up tails,” the official added (Seymour Hersh, New Yorker, Oct. 27).
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