[Originally published in The Valley News.]
In an informal speech in 2004, Paul Pillar, then CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, said that the White House had ignored CIA warnings that military intervention in Iraq would intensify anti-American hostility throughout the Islamic world. The White House was furious. Robert Novak, commenting on the speech, wrote, “This leads to the unavoidable conclusion that the president of the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency are at war with each other”.
The White House believes that there is a cabal of active and retired CIA officers who have done everything in their power to undermine the president, including an attempt to defeat him in the 2004 presidential election. Apparently, the president, vice president and Karl Rove all share this view of the CIA.
The White House is also said to be furious that a senior CIA analyst, Michael Scheuer, was allowed to publish the book Imperial Hubris, which was cleared by the CIA while he was still employed there and was highly critical of White House Middle East policy.
Further, after the Iraq invasion, the White House received a number of special messages directed to the president from CIA’s chief of station in Baghdad, saying that the insurgency was going badly for us and would get worse because there were many, many Iraqis who hated us and who supported the insurgents. The president was said to respond angrily after he read one of the reports: “Who is this guy anyway? Is he some kind of defeatist wuss?”
Add to that a goodly number of op-ed pieces and speeches by CIA retirees unfavorable to the White House and its Middle East policies, and a picture emerges of a White House that regards the “CIA cabal” as a major instigator of negative comment on the administration’s foreign policy.
So, the president sent Porter Goss and his minions from the House Intelligence Committee to run the CIA. Given their insensitive, negative and ham-fisted approach, most of which has been aired extensively in the press, it’s clear that the White House placed no constraints on how Goss ran the CIA. It looked both from the inside and from the outside as if Goss was sent to Langley to punish the CIA rather than to reform, improve or redirect it.
The troubling point here is that the White House appears to have put its personal (and wrongly directed) anger above the good of the nation and well above the recommendations of the 9/ll Commission and the Commission on the Intelligence of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. Before 9/11 ever happened, everyone who looked at America’s intelligence shortcomings said that “human intelligence” (HUMINT) – the collection of intelligence through recruited human sources – really needed fixing and that the CIA’s Operations Directorate therefore had to be strengthened.
Despite that analysis – and apparently out of personal pique – the White House seems to have set out to weaken the institution still further by having Goss, whom even the White House was said not to respect, keep the CIA in a constant state of turmoil. Recently departed senior CIA officials say they left the agency because of the nasty and vindictive top-down management style employed by Goss and his “gosslings”.
It is absolutely true that there are a number of active and retired CIA officers who, like many other Americans, have taken issue with the White House’s Middle East policy. Many of them have served there. Many focused professionally on that region for decades. Their knowledge of the history and realities of the region led them to view the administration’s radical new foreign policy of pre-emptive unilateralism in Iraq as ill advised at best and dangerous at worst. Only time will tell whether they were right or wrong, but they took those positions because they truly believed the White House policies were disastrous and that not saying so would be a disservice to their country.
The old CIA is now dead and will never be reconstituted. The assignment of Goss to Langley is now mercifully over. The president has proposed a very smart general, Michael Hayden of the Air Force, as his replacement. However, he is a technologically experienced general from the National Security Agency who has never had any experience with human intelligence operations.
The real issue here is what this administration wants and expects from what is left of the CIA. It is generally assumed that the remnants of the CIA – to be known as the National Clandestine Service – will provide human intelligence coverage of critical targets abroad. Given the miserable state of the current CIA, it will need infusions of money, people and, most important, savvy and experienced leadership. The president probably should have picked someone who really understands the human intelligence business.
The fact that he did not leads to all kinds of questions about what he really wants to accomplish and whether or not Hayden’s appointment is simply another example of the White House taking it out on the CIA.
Given the way the White House treats the world around it, it is no surprise that its attitude toward the CIA is punitive and retaliatory. It is sad that the disintegration of the CIA is rooted in petty vindictiveness. Actually, it is more than sad. As the 9/11 Commission made clear, having a capable CIA is the country’s only real hope in addressing the critical need to have human intelligence operations as a tool for fighting terrorism.
Haviland Smith, who retired from the CIA as a station chief in 1980, served in Europe and the Middle East as chief of counterterrorism and as an executive assistant in the CIA director’s office.
