Another Intelligence 'Oops' Is Unacceptable

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 1, 2004

Byline: Jamie Dettmer, INSIGHT

So let's get this right. The United States and Britain launched a war to topple Saddam Hussein on the basis of intelligence reports and analysis that argued Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and could launch chemical warheads within about 45 minutes of receiving the command from the Butcher of Baghdad. Then it turns out that, oops, the intelligence wasn't, well, kosher.

Never mind. CIA boss George Tenet is safe in his job, according to President George W. Bush, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair hasn't made any moves to replace John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, or the MI6 boss Sir Richard Dearlove.

No, instead Bush and Blair have ordered commissions to inquire what went wrong although both leaders aren't ready as yet to admit that anything went wrong and to come up with recommendations to improve the quality of intelligence. The argument appears to run thus: There really was no harm done, so there's no foul, and therefore no one should get too exercised about the whole business. And Saddam was a bad man; maybe not an imminent threat, but if left to his own devices could have become one, and besides, the Iraqis now are free.

Harold Macmillan, a British prime minister in the 1950s, once said anyone who spent any length of time working for the intelligence services must be either weird or mad. As a result of that impression Supermac once shocked his Conservative colleagues by opining wryly that the intelligence services were a colossal waste of public money, and that may be truer now than it was when Macmillan was prime minister. These days the official intelligence budget of the United States is about $30 billion a year, which doesn't include billions more hidden in various opaque appropriations and black-op skulduggeries.

Critics of the Iraq war are concentrating their fire on what they like to call the "politicization of intelligence," arguing that the spymasters and the analysts gave the politicians the "product" they wanted and were under pressure to do so from their political masters. Some junior and midranking U.S. and British intelligence analysts have complained about subtle pressure and say the politicians cherry-picked among the raw data that came their way.

The White House and Downing Street have denied such charges, but that doesn't let them off the hook. If the intelligence wasn't distorted because of political pressure, then it was just plain wrong because of incompetence and, on behalf of the taxpayers, the politicians should be furious at the lack of value for the money.

Coming on the awkward revelations about pre-9/11 intelligence failures that, if avoided, might have prevented or hindered the al-Qaeda terror attacks on New York City and Washington, surely there should be more of an outcry than we are hearing from Capitol Hill. Republicans, who like to see themselves as the more fiscally responsible party, should be clamoring about the absence of WMDs in Iraq as much as Democrats that they aren't can be put down to the party tribalism of Washington.

And it isn't only as if 9/11 and the Iraq war are the only intelligence mishaps of recent times. In fact, Tenet's CIA and the National Security Agency have recorded some pretty big blunders in recent years, ranging from sending off U.S. warplanes to bomb by mistake the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade and the failure to predict India's nuclear tests.

Is it just in recent times that value for the money has not been forthcoming? During the Cold War, the CIA for years overestimated Soviet military capabilities, although some Washington insiders say that was less due to incompetence and more down to Langley's wish to ensure that money was free-flowing from Congress for the so-called national-security apparatus. The Aldrich Ames case remains a major stain on the CIA, as does the failure of U.S. counterintelligence agencies to pick up the level of penetration of the U.S. military by the East German foreign espionage wing, the HVA Stasi.

Sadly, there is within the intelligence services too little follow-up of major mistakes lessons only rarely are learned, say former and current intelligence officers. Langley sources, for example, say there was only a scant effort to comb through the HVA files the CIA managed to spirit out of East Germany in the wake of the collapse of the communist regime there. "No one really wanted to get into that can of worms," says a source. "The attitude was, 'The Cold War is over, we don't need to know.'"

Of course, there also have been successes by the intelligence services and, as with any successful "sting" by a professional con artist, accomplishments when they come can't be advertised. Methods would be compromised. But the mistakes that have been made have not been small matters either propelling the United States into a war in the Middle East by providing inaccurate intelligence is on the scale of things a pretty serious blunder and not one that should provoke only a slightly embarrassed "Oops."