| 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.
		 
      Return to Table of Contents  |