Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

and Senate Intelligence Committees entitled “How Not to Catch a Terrorist,” charged: “In the CIA’s core, U.S.- based Bin Laden operational unit today there are fewer Directorate of Operations officers with substantive expertise on al-Qaeda than there were on 11 September 2001.”²³

But there were others. In July 2003, after over twenty years of service, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski resigned her air force commission and left the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia department to reveal how Feith’s Iraq-war-planning unit had manufactured scare stories about Iraq’s weapons and its ties to terrorists.²⁴ Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, with experience in several African countries and on the National Security Council, was asked by the CIA to go to the Saharan nation of Niger to investigate allegations that it had secretly sold uranium to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, charges that President Bush had endorsed with his famous “sixteen words” in his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address. When the Bush administration continued to retail intelligence on the subject of Niger “yellowcake” that it knew to be forged and false, Wilson went public with an op-ed in the New York Times in which, among other things, he wrote, “Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”²⁵ In retaliation, top administration officials conspired to “out” his wife, an undercover CIA agent working on nuclear proliferation and weapons of mass destruction. This was clearly meant to be a warning to any other officials or former officials who might care to leak or come forward with information damaging to the administration.

Gary C. Schroen, CIA station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan, from 1996 to 1999, has provided secret details about the way the agency paid off Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance warlords in the autumn of 2001 to reopen the civil war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and on the bungling of U.S. Special Forces in the subsequent campaign.²⁶ Melissa Boyle Mahle, a former CIA clandestine services officer fluent in Arabic, denounced former director George Tenet for his “total denial of failure” after September 11, 2001.²⁷ Although not an American whistle-blower, the late British foreign secretary Robin Cook also deserves mention as the only cabinet-rank statesman in any country to resign over the war in Iraq—he stepped down as leader of the House of Commons in 2003 to protest the invasion—and then to denounce official lies that were being told about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. “Instead of using intelligence as evidence on which to base a decision about policy,” he charged, “we used intelligence as the basis on which to justify a policy on which we had already settled.”²⁸

After George Tenet resigned as George Bush’s DCI in July 2004 and went on the lecture circuit at $35,000 an appearance—he had earned well over a half million dollars by November 2004—Bush appointed Porter Goss to stanch the leaks at Langley.²⁹ The Senate confirmed him by a vote of 77 to 17 (six senators did not vote), suggesting the increasing worthlessness of Senate oversight of the executive branch. The new head of the CIA quickly got rid of as many messengers like Scheuer as he could identify. Goss had clearly been ordered to make it appear that the agency misled the president (rather than the other way around, as was actually the case). He was then supposed to shake up what he called a “dysfunctional” organization.

Before representing the Fourteenth District of Florida in the House for some sixteen years, Goss worked in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations (DO). During that time he was stationed primarily in Latin America, and rumors persist that he left the agency under a cloud. In 1995, he was appointed to the House Intelligence Committee and, in 1997, the ex-agent became its chairman. There is no evidence that he ever did anything useful in this position, like investigating the intelligence lapses that preceded 9/11 or the failure of the CIA to place a single spy anywhere in Saddam Hussein’s regime. During the 2004 election campaign he actually gave speeches attacking candidate John Kerry for “slashing intelligence funding” without mentioning that, in 1995, he himself had cosponsored a measure calling for the firing of 20 percent of all CIA personnel over five years.

Goss brought with him to the agency a group of Republican activist staff members from the House Intelligence Committee and set them up in prominent executive positions. They helped unleash a witch hunt against any and all intelligence officers who sought to put accuracy and integrity ahead of service to George W. Bush. Goss began his shake-up of the CIA by forcing out the director and deputy director of operations, even though this is not the primary place where the failures of the CIA in recent years have occurred. (This, in turn, led to speculation that it was a way to keep his own service record in the DO under wraps.) Shortly thereafter, Goss fired Jami A. Miscik, deputy director for intelligence, who had worked in the agency since 1983 and was a close associate of George Tenet. She had led the Directorate of Intelligence since May 2002, a period in which much of the false reporting on Iraq occurred. It might have seemed logical that Miscik would be held responsible for the politicized intelligence produced on her watch; but under the circumstances it seems clear that she was actually a scapegoat for President Bush and Vice President Cheney, who ordered up the false intelligence in the first place.³⁰ As Spencer Ackerman of the New Republic has written, “If Goss thought the CIA was dysfunctional before, he has guaranteed that it is now.”³¹

At the same time, President Bush ordered that the number of clandestine service officers within the agency be doubled, placing a much greater emphasis on covert operations.³² The CIA remains the main executive-branch department in charge of overthrowing foreign governments, promoting regimes of state terrorism, kidnapping people of interest to the administration and sending them to friendly foreign countries to be tortured and/or killed, assassination and the torture of prisoners in violation of international and domestic law, and numerous other “wet” exercises that both the president and the country in which they are executed want to be able to deny.

CIA covert operations are distinguished from military assaults carried out by the Department of Defense (which is also rapidly expanding its covert operations) chiefly by the requirement that the president must be able plausibly to deny that he ordered them or that he even knew about them. Covert operations are therefore protected by the most rigorous secrecy. As Loch Johnson observes, this sort of secrecy also destroys the last shreds of agency accountability. “Under a system of plausible denial it often becomes uncertain who really does know about, and has approved of, any given covert action. The lines of accountability wash away like markings in the sand.”³³

From the creation of the CIA in 1947 down to the Hughes-Ryan Act of 1974 (formally entitled Section 602(a) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974), there were virtually no officials of government who actually supervised or gave approval for covert acts or knew in detail about them or what they were supposed to accomplish. “The foreign policy establishment in Washington trusted the CIA,” Thomas Powers wrote in 1979, “and still trusts it, for that matter, but beyond governing circles the political foundation of the CIA rested on nothing more substantial than a popular fascination with espionage and a conviction that we are the good guys.”³⁴ The Church Committee estimated that the National Security Council itself knew about and approved of no more than about 14 percent of all covert actions from 1961 to 1975.³⁵

For example, when it came to investigating the CIAs several attempts to assassinate President Fidel Castro of Cuba (and a few other heads of state), the Church Committee had to throw in the towel. Numerous cabinet officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, testified under oath that it was unthinkable that either Presidents Eisenhower or Kennedy had authorized such a mission. As Powers writes, “The committee was forced to confess in the end that while it had no evidence that the CIA had been a rogue elephant rampaging out of control, it also had no evidence that Eisenhower or Kennedy or anyone speaking in one of their names had ordered the CIA to kill Castro. The only indisputable fact was that the CIA did, in fact, try to do so.”³⁶ Plausible denial, extreme secrecy, the power of the presidency, and a culture of loyalty to the agency rather than to the Constitution cause this kind of endemic confusion—exceedingly useful to those in power—about who is responsible for what the CIA does, a problem that still haunts the government today.