Turning to his new colleagues and his old friends at his swearing in, James Woolsey, President Clinton's first CIA director said, "We are here to commit espionage." From the faceless officers of the clandestine service, to the scientists who design and build the satellites that take photos from space or listen to distant radio signals, and the corps of analysts who fill in the jigsaw puzzle, the task of the American intelligence services is to find out what others would rather the United States did not know.
The men and women of CIA and its sister agencies work for the typical low salaries of the federal government. They do so with few of the job protections afforded to employees in the rest of the government, and they tolerate extraordinary government snooping into their private affairs. Necessarily they work anonymously, aware that they will never see their successes in the newspaper and certain that any errors will be front-page, 24/7, news everywhere.
Intelligence work is not, however, a science. However much intelligence flows to CIA and its sister agencies, however much the analyst knows, there is always the doubt: Was this planted? Is the source trustworthy? Is there, somewhere, a piece of paper or a burst of radio waves that reveals that what's on my desk is as false as Robert Hansen's loyalty oath?
The intelligence analyst makes judgments, not decisions. He or she does so knowing that the best that can be said is "we have high confidence that . . ." The president and his advisers make the decisions.
There is an unspoken bargain between the intelligence agencies on one side and political leaders on the other. Intelligence is apolitical. It tells the truth, warts and all, because its only asset in Washington is the credibility of its professionals. The politicians agree not to tell the intelligence services what to write, while the intelligence services promise not to tell the political decisionmaker what to do. The president is free to disregard intelligence, but he is not free to lie about it - either directly, indirectly or by innuendo.
It is trivially easy to apply subtle but real pressure to get slanted intelligence. A pointed question from a senior official, disappointment on the face of a political appointee coupled with a request for a "second opinion," or "visits" by an official to talk "directly to the analysts" all convey the desired outcome.
When politically desired intelligence estimates are reached by counting noses although the specialists in a given area hold a conflicting opinion, the United States is ill-served. This was apparently the reasoning of officialdom in the rush to accuse Saddam Hussein of having a nuclear program. Much of the "evidence" claimed by the administration was that Iraq had purchased high-strength aluminum tubes for use as centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs. The rest was the assertion that Saddam Hussein had tried to procure additional uranium in Africa.
Inconveniently, the nuclear specialists in the intelligence division of the Department of Energy, the team charged with knowing for sure what goes into a nuclear bomb project, said that the tubes were for missile bodies. The International Atomic Energy Agency said that the tubes were for rockets, not centrifuges, and was unequivocal in its judgment. Equally inconveniently, the CIA's own analysts showed that the Niger documents were clumsy forgeries, and former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson's investigation showed that no attempt to buy uranium from Niger had occurred.
Despite doubts throughout the intelligence community, President Bush or somebody close to the Oval Office insisted that a reference to those tubes be inserted into last January's State of the Union address, along with the more famous line about Saddam Hussein attempting to buy uranium from Africa. Both statements were wrong and known at the highest levels to be wrong. The "16 words" about Africa were based on forgeries; the claim of centrifuges had been debunked by the professional analysts responsible for understanding nuclear proliferation.
The credibility of the United States and its president have been seriously damaged around the world. Did Iraq once have chemical weapons including nerve gas, and did it try to build nuclear weapons? Of course. Did it still have chemical or biological weapons that could be used immediately or a program to make them in 2003? Doubtful.
Experts from the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) who helped destroy hundreds and thousands of tons of Iraqi chemical weapons stated unequivocally to me that the Iraqi nerve gas was unstable, and would break down into almost harmless byproducts in about two months. None of the sarin from 1991 was around in 2003. In October, 2002 the Defense Intelligence Agency indicated that it had "no credible evidence" that Iraq was either manufacturing or stockpiling nerve agents.
But George W. Bush is not the first member of his family to take the United States to war in the Persian Gulf based on exaggerated claims. In September of 1990 Dick Cheney, then George H.W. Bush's secretary of Defense, claimed that Iraq had between 250,000 and 350,000 troops in Kuwait. Two photoanalysts (I was one of them) working for the St. Petersburg Times examined high-quality contemporaneous photos shot of Kuwait by Russian civilian satellites. Although U.S. troop encampments in Saudi Arabia could be readily seen, there was no hint of an Iraqi force in Kuwait that might have threatened Saudi Arabia. The Times' analysts concluded that there were no more than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait.
Would the American people have been quite as willing to go to war in 1991 if they had known how small the threat was?
Would American senators and representatives have voted overwhelmingly last fall to invade Iraq, had they known how flimsy was the argument that Iraq's WMD posed an imminent threat to the United States?
We shall never know the answer to either question. But we do know that both Bush administrations have broken their bargains of trust with both the intelligence services and the American people in their eagerness to confront Saddam Hussein. I believe that, despite the first Bush administration's games with intelligence, the first Gulf War needed to be fought. The arguments for the recent conflict were, however, based on pretext and pretense, not the solid information needed to justify a pre-emptive war.
- Peter D. Zimmerman served as chief scientist at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and as science adviser for arms control in the State Department during the Clinton Administration. He wrote this commentary for the St. Petersburg Times.
