Taking on the CIA

I believe it was Seymour Hersch who said that other presidents had taken on the CIA...and lost.

The politicking and infighting in this country doesn't stop with the two major political parties. State Department vs. Pentagon. White House vs. CIA. And it gets nastier and nastier all the time. Eventually, it will destroy us. We won't need an enemy.

In this January 23 Salon.com interview, former CIA officer Larry Johnson speaks out against the White House. Salon begins:

...[F]or almost a year, the White House has been quietly fighting a contentious battle at home on the national security front -- against the U.S. intelligence community itself. Vocal retired intelligence officials, and anonymous active ones, have protested repeatedly that the White House has coerced intelligence agencies to rig findings and analysis to suit administration aims. An egregious example: The long-held goal of removing Saddam Hussein from power, by unilateral war if necessary. The consequences of such White House intimidation could be disastrous, the intelligence veterans say, with the integrity of their work -- and national security -- put at grave risk.

Please excuse an immediate tangent...From my reading of See No Evil (published in 2002) by ex-CIA officer Robert Baer, who was the officer in charge in Iraq in the mid-90s, and from other reports that float around the internet, I will have to take exception to that statement of a "long-held goal of removing Saddam Hussein", unless by "long" they mean since September of 2000 when Hussein switched oil trade currency from dollars to euros.

Because, in 1995, there were no less than three separate plans offered to the CIA in Iraq by Iraqis to oust Saddam, if they could get the assurance from Washington that the U.S. would "permit" it. One offer was from a defecting Iraqi major general who had the forces and a planned coup, but wanted assurance before carrying it out that the United States did not want Saddam in power. Washington wouldn't provide the assurance.

Another plan was from our current buddy Ahmad Chalabi to start an uprising of combined PUK and KDP Kurdish forces. And Washington let them dangle in the wind. Despite Baer's repeated attempts to contact Washington for some direction for over a month, the only message he ever got was just 36 hours before the planned uprising - a cable to be delivered to the Iraqis:

THE ACTION YOU HAVE PLANNED FOR THIS WEEKEND HAS BEEN TOTALLY COMPROMISED. WE BELIEVE THERE IS A HIGH RISK OF FAILURE. ANY DECISION TO PROCEED WILL BE ON YOUR OWN.  p.73

What I never find out from the book is why Washington believed the plan to be compromised. I'm feeling a little bit suspicious, since Baer was the intelligence officer in charge in the area at the time, and he wasn't reporting any compromise to Washington.

At any rate, the third offer was a perhaps valiantly doomed one from Jalal Talabani (yes, that same one who is now part of the governing council) to use his nearly depleted PUK Kurdish forces (nearly depleted because they had long been fighting another KDP Kurdish force led by Masud Barzani - yes, another member of the current governing council) to attack Saddam's V Corps.

From Baer:

The only beacon I had to go by was what I understood American policy to be: that we would support any serious movement to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Those were my orders as I understood them, the reason I had brought my team into northern Iraq. And I took my orders seriously.

..."You know I can't do this alone. What is Washington going to do when I attack?" [Talabani asked.]

"Washington wants Saddam out." That wasn't the answer he was looking for, but there was no point in telling him that Washington was simply ignoring him, me, and Iraq.

...I started to compose in my head the message I would write to headquarters. Dear Langley: I write with the sad news that last night I carelessly misplaced the Iraqi opposition.
pp. 198, 199, 202

The U.S. sat back, Barzani sided with Saddam, and the rest is history. (So tell me - why is Barzani on the Governing Council?)

Again, from Baer, the aftermath of the failed coup:

The following morning, March 6, I awoke to see the general's car pulling up in front. He'd exchanged his major general's uniform for a cheap plaid sport coat. Even his mustache seemed to droop.

"Sir," he said quietly as soon as he sat down on the sofa. "I must leave now. I must go to Damascus to put my children in school."

And why not, I thought? His couriers, the secret committee, the colonel had all been arrested. There was no way Saddam was going to spare them. The general saw no point in keeping a morbid vigil in the north, waiting for an assassin's bullet.

I could tell he wanted to say a lot more. He had put everything on the line - his country, his family, his life. He had trusted us, trusted the CIA, and we had let the coup go forward, right up until the very end when the White House pulled the plug without warning or a decent explanation...In truth, I still don't know what I might have said. That Washington in the end just hadn't wanted to commit? That even though I had kept my masters fully informed, they had dithered and dithered and, in the end, finally decided that too much was at stake to upset the status quo in Iraq? That, faced with a choice between sins of commission or omission, Washington had chosen the latter and left good and brave men twisting in the wind thousands of miles across the ocean? p.203

Baer's book is very interesting, and I can't decide whether he is a true blue nationalist, which I think he is. There are times when I think he's also trying to get a message through without incriminating himself. Over and over, even as he recounts events like those above, he talks about the Iraqis as being great conspiracy theorists who unreasonably think the U.S. has been working with Saddam or at least supporting him. And yet, how else are we supposed to interpret passages like the following discussing the oil that was being smuggled out of Iraq to Turkey while under U.S. embargo?

Washington knew all about the smuggling but pretended it wasn't happening. As far as I know, neither the State Department nor our embassy in Ankara ever challenged Turkey, which could have shut down the whole operation with a single telephone call. Part of the problem was that the Turks were already unhappy about the Gulf War's aftermath. We'd promised Turkey a quick, decisive war but never mentioned the possibility of an open-ended embargo and the long-term damage it would have on Turkey's economy. But there was also a bureaucratic roadblock to enforcing the embargo: Our embassy in Ankara fell under the State Department's European Bureau. Smuggled oil, Saddam, Iraqi dissidents, the fractious Kurds - they were the Near East Bureau's problem. All our Ankara embassy cared about was keeping the Turks happy, and if the Turks said they needed cheap oil for their refineries, well, that was good enough for Ankara.

What I couldn't understand was why the White House didn't intervene. All it had to do was ask Saudi Arabia to sell Turkey a hundred thousand barrels of discounted oil. Turkey certainly would have stopped the smuggling for the right price. It was almost as if the White House wanted Saddam to have a little walking around money.

For [the conspiracy-minded] Iraqis, of course, the arrangement made perfect sense. By turning a blind eye to the smuggled oil, the U.S. managed to turn the Kurdish opposition against itself even as it helped Saddam pay for his praetorian guard, just what you'd expect of a clever superpower that was secretly supporting the local despot.   p.193(emphasis mine)

Well, yeah, that's what I'd think, too. And Baer never gives a better reason for why Washington didn't intervene. He just leaves it at "what I couldn't understand." Baer's not stupid.

Okay, after that long sidetrack, back to the current Salon.com article...

The latest salvo was launched this week when a group of respected former CIA officials, led by decorated analyst Larry C. Johnson, sent a letter to Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert demanding that Congress hold the White House accountable for deliberately revealing the identity of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame.

...Johnson, who also served as deputy director for the State Department's Office of Counter Terrorism, says the administration's political tactics are clear. "With this White House, I see an outright pattern of bullying," he told Salon in an interview Thursday. "We've seen it across different agencies, a pattern of going after anybody who's a critic. When people raise legitimate issues that may not be consistent with existing administration policy, those people are attacked and their character is impugned."

...[Speaking about the Valerie Plame exposure] Johnson has particularly harsh words for a normally tough-talking president who stands by while "the most sensitive security assets of the United States" are compromised. Such behavior, he says, ultimately amounts to treason. "When you expose clandestine human intelligence sources," he fumes, "you aid and abet terrorists."

Johnson doesn't believe there will be a criminal indictment because it would be impossible to prove malicious intent. The letter to Congress asks that there be a bi-partisan investigation and a "call for appropriate action". According to Johnson, appropriate action is:

"...for President Bush to call his senior staff in and ask for the resignation of the person who did this, and have that person apologize."

That's a little shy of the mark in my opinion, but it's only an opinion.

"President Bush has often emphasized security his most important issue. But when you have people in your administration who compromise the most sensitive security assets of the United States, that makes the administration's agenda look pretty ridiculous in my view. And I say that as a registered Republican, and as someone who's given Bush money in the past.

Secondly, the Bush administration puts a lot of emphasis on fighting terrorism as a war, not as a criminal act, therefore the idea is you fight the war on terrorism without having to worry about criminal statutes. Well, that seems to apply as long as it doesn't affect someone in their own administration.

In my view, this administration is actually involved with aiding and abetting terrorists -- because when you expose clandestine human intelligence sources, you aid and abet terrorists."

I don't know about you, but I think those are pretty strong words. I think a charge has been leveled. That is not necessarily the view of anyone else whose name is on the letter to Congress, but it should be getting some publicity. Let me rephrase that. It should be, but since it was said by a Republican, it is all too likely that it won't. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, comes of this letter. I have a feeling that the CIA is not through.

Johnson:

"I think that for its part the Department of Justice is probably on target, particularly with Ashcroft stepping aside. But what I fear here is that they'll come back and say, "We couldn't find evidence of a crime, and therefore no crime was committed." But it's not the legal statute that should be the standard here -- it's the moral statute that should be the standard, because it's U.S. national security and the lives of intelligence personnel that are at risk."

That was my point when I posted at the time of the transfer of the affair to Patrick Fitzgerald. (Which post includes comments from another retired CIA officer - Ray McGovern - who has been very outspoken about this misadministration.) Fitzgerald was built up so much that it seemed an obvious prelude to telling us that there was nothing to find.

When asked why the CIA seems to be openly revolting against this administration, given that political pressure has always been exerted on the organization by previous administrations of both parties, Johnson responded:

"Put it this way, with this White House, I see an outright pattern of bullying: Gen. Eric Shinseki, the former Army chief of staff, warned that the U.S. was going to need several hundred thousand troops in Iraq, and he's attacked for that, and basically told that he doesn't know what he's talking about -- and he's fired essentially a year before he's out of that job. When it's time for him to retire, not a single senior representative of the Department of Defense or White House leadership is there for his retirement. Then there was Thomas White, the secretary of the Army who was forced out. There was a senior CIA analyst by the name of Fulton Armstrong who was attacked, using leaks to the press, which alleged that he was disloyal and somehow under the influence of the Cuban government. There was a prosecutor [ousted from] the Department of Justice who had warned that John Walker Lindh's father had hired a lawyer and that [the DOJ] needed to consider the Miranda rights.

So what we've seen is a repeated pattern across different agencies, all with the apparent sanction of the White House, of going after anybody who's a critic, or who's seen as not being in tune with the administration's message. When people raise legitimate issues that may not be consistent with existing policy, instead of conducting a fair intellectual assessment of those issues, those people are attacked and their character is impugned."

Precisely what Paul O'Neill (another good Republican) is saying in Suskind's The Price of Loyalty.

Johnson continues:

"I've been told that even a number of Republican members want to sign on to the efforts launched by Rep. Russ Holt [D-N.J. - regarding the Plame investigation], who's a former intelligence analyst at the State Department -- but they're saying 'If we do, Dennis Hastert is going to have our ass.' So, clearly the intimidation and the fear factor continues.

I believe there are some Republicans out there who recognize that this is wrong, who recognize they need to take a stand against it. To allow the partisanship to go on ... you know, sometimes it's like dealing with a bunch of 3-year-old kids: Everyone's arguing over who hit who last."

Very much the apparent mentality in the upper reaches of governance. And the kids have the power to lay waste to entire cultures, in fact entire continents.

But both parties should get over it and do the right thing. They should stop worrying about whether they're Republican or Democrat, and start worrying about what's best for America.

That is all they ever should have been worrying about, but it wasn't, it isn't, and it never will be.


courtesy POAC

IMPEACH the treasonous lot of them.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.