Veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh takes on the deeply flawed relationship between the Bush administration and the CIA in the upcoming issue of The New Yorker, with a special focus on the intelligence controversy over reports that Iraq tried to acquire uranium from Niger.
Now, Hersh is no friend of conservatives and Republicans, but he can do interesting work (he is most famous for breaking the My Lai story during the Vietnam War). This new report generally follows a familiar arc: intelligence analysts chafing under pressure from administration hawks, etc. But several paragraphs in the middle of his story JUMPED out at me.
Hersh examines the episode of forged intelligence documents that were given to Italian journalists and that at first appeared to confirm the initial Niger reports. The debunking of those forgeries helped lead to the infamous "sixteen words" controversy and l'affaire Wilson-Plame.
Astonishingly, Hersh cites sources within the CIA who say the forgeries were prepared by CIA insiders for the purpose of striking back at the Bush administration, whom the insiders saw as meddling with the integrity of the intelligence process.
Who produced the fake Niger papers? There is nothing approaching a consensus on this question within the intelligence community. There has been published speculation about the intelligence services of several different countries. One theory, favored by some journalists in Rome, is that SISMI produced the false documents and passed them to Panorama for publication.Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, “Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.” He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.
“The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney,” the former officer said. “They said, ‘O.K, we’re going to put the bite on these guys.’” My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. “Everyone was bragging about it—‘Here’s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.’” These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the SISMI intelligence.
“They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to go—to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence,” my source said. “They thought it’d be bought at lower levels—a big bluff.” The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. “It got out of control.”
Like all large institutions, C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, is full of water-cooler gossip, and a retired clandestine officer told me this summer that the story about a former operations officer faking the documents is making the rounds. “What’s telling,” he added, “is that the story, whether it’s true or not, is believed”—an extraordinary commentary on the level of mistrust, bitterness, and demoralization within the C.I.A. under the Bush Administration.
via The New Yorker
Listen to Seymour Hersh discuss his story via National Public Radio
The accuracy and actionability of intelligence is of critical importance and there are currently serious questions about the CIA's level of competence across many dimensions. But the idea that CIA personnel would try to set up their civilian leadership through forged evidence would mean that a vital component of our national security apparatus has gone rogue, and would call into question every piece of intelligence the CIA produces. Is the CIA unravelling? Or is Hersh all wet? Stay tuned on this one.
Posted by Alan at October 21, 2003 05:18 AM