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by Ian Masters,
AlterNet
Posted on April 7,
2005
Editor’s Note: This is
an edited transcript of an interview conducted by Ian Masters with
Vincent Cannistaro, the former CIA head of counterterrorism operations
and intelligence director at the National Security Council under Ronald
Reagan, which aired on the Los Angeles public radio KPFK on April 3,
2005.
Ian Masters: You’ve been following President Bush’s commission’s
report that came out this week, featuring fairly much, in terms of the
press coverage, questions about “Curveball,” apparently a very
appropriately named agent that the German intelligence was working. And,
apparently his intelligence was heavily relied upon as a justification
for going into war, particularly a lot of his claims ending up in the
speech that Colin Powell made before the U.N.. And apparently, though,
from the very beginning, the Germans were letting our side know that the
guy was a fabricator and was, in fact, crazy. First of all, I didn’t
think the CIA relied that heavily upon foreign intelligence. I thought
there was a kind of professional sense that our taxpayers give us $30
billion dollars a year, we should be able to do this on our own and not
rely on others. First of all, address that, sort of, cultural question
if you will.
Well, I think in the case of Iraq, there were special circumstances,
because the CIA does not have a good network of Iraqi sources in place,
even though Iraq had become the forefront of U.S. policy all the way
back to the Gulf War in 1991. So there was a dearth of information
coming from CIA’s own sources. Secondly, there was an awful lot of
so-called information coming from Iraqi exiles, primarily Ahmed
Chalabi’s INC—the Iraqi National Congress. And that seemed to have a
very receptive audience in some areas of the government, particularly at
the Defense Department and at the vice president’s office. These were
reports that tended to support the preconception of the administration
that Saddam Hussein needed to be gotten rid of, and the primary reason
for doing that was that he was in imminent possession of weapons of mass
destruction, which could be turned against the United States of America
or its allies.
So in that kind of environment — where there’s a tremendous policy need
for information and you don’t have a great deal of source information
that’s proprietary — then that’s how information that seems to be
comprehensive, coming in from a foreign source, is overemphasized.
Well, in this case, the Germans had told the CIA’s head of the
European desk on the operations side, Tyler Drumheller, who I spoke to,
but he wasn’t comfortable going on the radio. He was told by Curveball’s
handlers in Germany that the guy was crazy and a fabricator and the real
question, I guess, is he passed this information on to the top people
inside the agency, the Deputy Director McLaughlin and the Director
George Tenet, both of whom are now — well, I don’t know about
McLaughlin. He works for CNN. But, I believe George Tenet says he
doesn’t remember the conversation.
Well, I think there’s no question that there’s a sequence of events that
still remains a bit clouded, mainly because the report itself indicts
the whole incident as an egregious example of a failure of intelligence.
To put it in some perspective, Curveball was an Iraqi chemical engineer,
who allegedly defected and showed up at a refugee camp in Germany. He
was then being exploited by German intelligence for information. Allied
countries to the United States had all been alerted to the U.S. need for
information on Iraq and on weapons of mass destruction programs in Iraq.
And so the Germans exploited this information.
But the first cut of the information was passed to the DIA, not to the
CIA. That’s the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s intelligence
collection unit. And that information then was disseminated by DIA to
the CIA. So the CIA never had any direct access to Curveball, a codename
provided by the Germans to this defector source. The interesting thing
to me is that the only DIA analyst who ever met with Curveball — who
went to Germany and was given access to him — came back with an
assessment which was very, very negative.
The problem was: what happened to his assessment? It didn’t get reported
up through the senior levels of DIA — and therefore it didn’t get
disseminated to CIA — until the Germans were directly queried by CIA on
Curveball. That’s when they said, “Look this guy may be a fabricator,
don’t trust any of his information.” His information had already gotten
into the system, because it had been disseminated by the head of the
Defense Intelligence Agency. And it had been distributed through our
government, where of course in some sectors — particularly the Defense
Department policymakers civilian policy makers and at the vice
president’s office — it found an extremely receptive audience.
It was believed because it fit the preconceptions of those policy
makers. Now, why did the CIA — which ultimately was responsible for
putting the National Intelligence Estimate together in 2002, which was
the most critical assessment of any intelligence report that the U.S.
government has to offer — put the information in there and play a part
in its key judgment of alleged WMD programs by Saddam Hussein? And
that’s the question which is still not answered. We do know that some of
the analysts at CIA were very suspicious of the Curveball information,
as well as information provided by other so-called Iraqi defectors in
exile. But that information, that assessment, was reported up through
the chain of command at CIA, but apparently nothing was done about it.
So nothing was done to dampen down the expectations of some of the
senior policymakers that this was genuine information. And it got into,
as we know, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s address to the United
Nations Security Council — with disastrous results, because the
information was totally false. At the time, some analysts that I
spoke to were very critical of the information, but they were not able
to impress senior leadership, meaning George Tenet and John McLaughlin,
his deputy, with their doubts. Their doubts were never reflected, either
in Colin Powell’s speech, or in the National Intelligence Estimate
itself.
The importance of the NIE, the National Intelligence Estimate, is
that that was the document upon which the senators made that vote — and
of course, the most fateful vote of all was John Kerry’s vote — to
support the war, or to authorize the use of force.
Absolutely. The NIE is considered [the] most important intelligence
analysis that the U.S. government produces. It’s supposed to reflect the
collective wisdom of the intelligence community on a particular issue.
And that’s why, while it is supervised by a member of the National
Intelligence Council, which is at the CIA, all the intelligence
community members play a role in contributing to it. And in this case,
the minority opinions of some agencies, such as the Department of
Energy, Department of State, were relegated to minor footnotes, which
really didn’t capture the attention of the reader of the NIE itself. So,
yes, the NIE — which as we know now was corrupted by false intelligence
and in some cases fabricated, deliberately fabricated, information — it
played a critical role in getting the U.S. Senate to vote in favor of
war with Iraq.
At the time, you were quoted in some articles as saying that you had
heard of dissent within the agency and people that were being, sort of,
steamrollered by the administration. Give us some sense of what was
happening at the time. Having spoken, again, with the key guy in the
agency, Tyler Drumheller, he said, he understood that on the analysis
side, there were people that actually either were fired or who quit. Not
so much on the operations side that he was a part of, but on the
analysis side there was some real frustration apparently.
Well, there was a tremendous amount of pressure on the analysts and even
though the Silberman-Robb report dismisses political pressure on the
process—they were not given that as an assignment by the president—they
weren’t allowed ...
Well, that wouldn’t ... you couldn’t ... we shouldn’t be surprised by
that.
No, we’re not surprised by it. But, the point is that it’s being taken
as conventional wisdom that there really wasn’t any pressure by policy
makers on the analytical process itself. And that’s just simply not
true. It’s simply not true because analysts, generally, are like anyone
else. They are concerned about their careers, their futures. Many of
them are ambitious. If they understand that a dissenting opinion against
the conventional policy wisdom is heard, that it’s going to affect their
careers. There was a chilled environment in which to express any kind
of opposite opinion.
Not only that, there wasn’t very much of a receptiveness at the senior
levels of the CIA — at George Tenet’s level, for example, because he was
a very political director. And he was very concerned about getting along
with the administration. He was formerly a Democrat, appointed by a
Democratic President and he had to stay on in a Republican
administration. And he had to compete with a secretary of defense,
Rumsfeld, who really didn’t want the CIA playing a large role in the
intelligence community, and wanted to supplant that role. So, George had
a more political bent. He wanted to get along, and therefore he had
to play along. And “playing along” really meant to sustain the
conceptions of the policy makers — particularly at the Pentagon and the
vice president’s office — that Saddam Hussein was a real and imminent
danger.
To do that, you had to accept some of these alarming reports that
kept coming in, being fed by Ahmed Chalabi and his INC group. In
many cases, the information was fabricated. Information, for example,
about an alleged attempt by Saddam Hussein to acquire nuclear material,
uranium, from Niger. This, we know now, was all based on fabricated
documents. But it’s not clear yet — either from this report, or from any
other report — who fabricated the documents.
The documents were fabricated by supporters of the policy in the United
States. The policy being that you had to invade Iraq in order to get rid
of Saddam Hussein, and you had to do it soon to avoid the catastrophe
that would be produced by Saddam Hussein’s use of alleged weapons of
mass destruction.
Well, Ambassador Wilson publicly refuted the claims — particularly
the 16 words in the President’s State of the Union address that the
Iraqis were trying to buy significant quantities of uranium from Niger.
That document, I understand, was fabricated ... it originally came out
of Italian intelligence, I think SISME, or SISDE—I’m not sure which one.
It was SISME, yeah. ...
[D]uring the two-thousands when we’re talking about acquiring
information on Iraq. It isn’t that anyone had a good source on
Iraq—there weren’t any good sources. The Italian intelligence service,
the military intelligence service, was acquiring information that was
really being hand-fed to them by very dubious sources. The Niger
documents, for example, which apparently were produced in the United
States, yet were funneled through the Italians.
Do we know who produced those documents? Because there’s some
suspicion ...
I think I do, but I’d rather not speak about it right now, because I
don’t think it’s a proven case ...
If I said “Michael Ledeen” ?
You’d be very close . . .
Well, again, Vincent Cannistraro, the feeling you get is that, from
going back to, let’s agree that 9/11 is the greatest intelligence
catastrophe since Pearl Harbor, and then the WMD catastrophe that
followed it. These are two huge embarrassments and it seems to be that
the way the White House has handled it’s as though you have a car
accident. And instead of blaming the driver, you are blaming the car
here. So, do you believe that, you know, that this process — whether it
was the intention or not — it’s certainly worked out in such a way to
exonerate the White House and to lay the blame with the wrong . . .
I think that’s certainly the objective. To lay it off to the
intelligence community. But, it’s very disingenuous. It’s like saying,
OK, the intelligence community that we whipped into a frenzy in order to
provide information to sustain our policy conclusions that Saddam had a
WMD program and that he was an imminent danger — that intelligence
community provided information that now turns out not to be correct. And
that’s why we were misled into saying what we did say, and doing what we
did do. That’s very disingenuous, because that’s not the case at all.
The case was that this was not a fact-based policy that the U.S.
government adopted. It was a policy-based decision that drove the
intelligence, and not the other way around. And that’s, of course, the
reverse of the process. You had a lot of people who played along to get
along, and they understood that in that kind of administration, you
couldn’t say exactly what it is that you really believed.
Now, having said all that, it’s not to exonerate the intelligence
community, because, clearly, there were major gaps. And I think the
major gap was the failure of, specifically, the CIA and the DIA to
develop their own proprietary Iraqi sources that could be in a position
to give them the kind of information they really needed — rather than
having this dependence on foreign sources that you did not have direct
access to. There’s nothing wrong in dealing with a liaison and sharing
information. But, to be utterly a hundred percent — not 100 percent,
let’s say, but 98 percent — dependent on such sources is a telling
criticism of the American intelligence community for having failed to
recognize that this was a priority that they needed to develop sources
on. They had plenty of time to do it. They didn’t do it. And, again, you
see some of this married in some of the other intelligence failures,
such as 9/11 and the failure to penetrate al Qaeda. The problem really
began when there was no appreciation for what al Qaeda was. That it was
a threat. And I think that’s the same rationale that drove the Iraqi
programs as well.
This particular White House coined the phrase “the axis of evil,”
naming Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and it’s worth noting that we didn’t
have any diplomatic relations with all three of those countries Then,
Iran, where there’s rumors of war, in terms of some pre-emption against
their developing nuclear weapons. North Korea, estimates are that they
had maybe two, now since they’ve been reprocessing fuel rods for
plutonium, they have up to six. Again, we don’t have any representation.
So, isn’t that the heart of the problem, that you’ve got all the
overhead collections from the satellites, but, unless you have people on
the ground, you’re flying blind. And it gets to the real question, which
is why do we have this foreign policy rigidity here, where we don’t
recognize these countries. I mean, couldn’t you just recognize these
countries just for the sake of getting people in there?
Well, I mean, it’s a good point. The question is the areas where we are
very deficient on in terms of understanding the societies and
understanding the policy decisions that are being made in those
societies are areas where we have no official representation. We have no
real official dialog. And that is part of the problem. In that kind of
absence of contact, you’re really susceptible to people who have their
own agenda, primarily exiles.
North Korea is an example where we don’t know in the U.S. government how
many weapons they may have. There are estimates which range from four —
which is the last one I’ve seen at the CIA — to 14, which comes out of
DIA. That’s a huge disparity in estimate. And it just really tells you
that we just don’t have solid information. And when you don’t, how do
you devise a rational policy to deal with those countries. And I think
the one spin-off from the Silberman-Robb report — as well as other
reports that were made by the Senate and the National Commission on
Terrorism — will be to cast doubt on the basis of any aggressive
policies that the Bush administration takes against Iran, in particular,
over the next few years.
Ian Masters is the host of the radio programs
Background Briefing (Sundays from 11am - 12 noon) and Live From the Left
coast (Sundays from 12 noon - 1pm), heard on KPFK 90.7FM Los Angeles.
The full transcript and mp3 audio of the Vincent Cannistraro interview
is available at IanMasters.org.
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