Seymour Hersh, not only details the plans for attacking Iran, but also informs us that reconnaissance for such an attack has already begun, including on-the-ground infiltration of commando forces.
THE COMING WARS
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
The New Yorker
January 24, 2005
George W. Bush's reelection was not his only victory last fall. The
President and his national-security advisers have consolidated
control over the military and intelligence communities' strategic
analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise
of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an
aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control against the
mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism
during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded,
and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant
with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as "facilitators" of policy
emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This
process is well under way.
Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the Bush
Administration has not reconsidered its basic long-range policy goal
in the Middle East: the establishment of democracy throughout the
region. Bush's reelection is regarded within the Administration as
evidence of America's support for his decision to go to war. It has
reaffirmed the position of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon's
civilian leadership who advocated the invasion, including Paul
Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the
Under-secretary for Policy. According to a former high-level
intelligence official, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with
the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the election and told them,
in essence, that the naysayers had been heard and the American people
did not accept their message. Rumsfeld added that America was
committed to staying in Iraq and that there would be no second-
guessing.
"This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The
Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone," the
former high-level intelligence official told me. "Next, we're going
to have the Iranian campaign. We've declared war and the bad guys,
wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah we've got
four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on
terrorism."
Bush and Cheney may have set the policy, but it is Rumsfeld who has
directed its implementation and has absorbed much of the public
criticism when things went wrong whether it was prisoner abuse in Abu
Ghraib or lack of sufficient armor plating for G.I.s' vehicles in
Iraq. Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have called for
Rumsfeld's dismissal, and he is not widely admired inside the
military. Nonetheless, his reappointment as Defense Secretary was
never in doubt.
Rumsfeld will become even more important during the second term. In
interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials,
I was told that the agenda had been determined before the
Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld's
responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and
effectively placed under the Pentagon's control. The President has
signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret
commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert
operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten
nations in the Middle East and South Asia.
The President's decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off
the books free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under
current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized
by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House
intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of
scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying
and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) "The Pentagon
doesn't feel obligated to report any of this to Congress," the former
high-level intelligence official said. "They don't even call
it 'covert ops' it's too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view,
it's 'black reconnaissance.' They're not even going to tell the
cincs" the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The
Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests
for comment on this story.)
In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic
target was Iran. "Everyone is saying, 'You can't be serious about
targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,'" the former intelligence official told
me. "But they say, 'We've got some lessons learned not militarily,
but how we did it politically. We're not going to rely on agency
pissants.' No loose ends, and that's why the C.I.A. is out of there."
For more than a year, France, Germany, Britain, and other countries
in the European Union have seen preventing Iran from getting a
nuclear weapon as a race against time and against the Bush
Administration. They have been negotiating with the Iranian
leadership to give up its nuclear-weapons ambitions in exchange for
economic aid and trade benefits. Iran has agreed to temporarily halt
its enrichment programs, which generate fuel for nuclear power plants
but also could produce weapons-grade fissile material. (Iran claims
that such facilities are legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty, or N.P.T., to which it is a signator, and that it has no
intention of building a bomb.) But the goal of the current round of
talks, which began in December in Brussels, is to persuade Tehran to
go further, and dismantle its machinery. Iran insists, in return,
that it needs to see some concrete benefits from the Europeans oil-
production technology, heavy-industrial equipment, and perhaps even
permission to purchase a fleet of Airbuses. (Iran has been denied
access to technology and many goods owing to sanctions.)
The Europeans have been urging the Bush Administration to join in
these negotiations. The Administration has refused to do so. The
civilian leadership in the Pentagon has argued that no diplomatic
progress on the Iranian nuclear threat will take place unless there
is a credible threat of military action. "The neocons say
negotiations are a bad deal," a senior official of the International
Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.) told me. "And the only thing the
Iranians understand is pressure. And that they also need to be
whacked."
The core problem is that Iran has successfully hidden the extent of
its nuclear program, and its progress. Many Western intelligence
agencies, including those of the United States, believe that Iran is
at least three to five years away from a capability to independently
produce nuclear warheads although its work on a missile-delivery
system is far more advanced. Iran is also widely believed by Western
intelligence agencies and the I.A.E.A. to have serious technical
problems with its weapons system, most notably in the production of
the hexafluoride gas needed to fabricate nuclear warheads.
A retired senior C.I.A. official, one of many who left the agency
recently, told me that he was familiar with the assessments, and
confirmed that Iran is known to be having major difficulties in its
weapons work. He also acknowledged that the agency's timetable for a
nuclear Iran matches the European estimates assuming that Iran gets
no outside help. "The big wild card for us is that you don't know who
is capable of filling in the missing parts for them," the recently
retired official said. "North Korea? Pakistan? We don't know what
parts are missing."
One Western diplomat told me that the Europeans believed they were in
what he called a "lose-lose position" as long as the United States
refuses to get involved. "France, Germany, and the U.K. cannot
succeed alone, and everybody knows it," the diplomat said. "If the
U.S. stays outside, we don't have enough leverage, and our effort
will collapse." The alternative would be to go to the Security
Council, but any resolution imposing sanctions would likely be vetoed
by China or Russia, and then "the United Nations will be blamed and
the Americans will say, 'The only solution is to bomb.'"
A European Ambassador noted that President Bush is scheduled to visit
Europe in February, and that there has been public talk from the
White House about improving the President's relationship with
America's E.U. allies. In that context, the Ambassador told me, "I'm
puzzled by the fact that the United States is not helping us in our
program. How can Washington maintain its stance without seriously
taking into account the weapons issue?"
The Israeli government is, not surprisingly, skeptical of the
European approach. Silvan Shalom, the Foreign Minister, said in an
interview last week in Jerusalem, with another New Yorker
journalist, "I don't like what's happening. We were encouraged at
first when the Europeans got involved. For a long time, they thought
it was just Israel's problem. But then they saw that the [Iranian]
missiles themselves were longer range and could reach all of Europe,
and they became very concerned. Their attitude has been to use the
carrot and the stick but all we see so far is the carrot." He
added, "If they can't comply, Israel cannot live with Iran having a
nuclear bomb."
In a recent essay, Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert who is the deputy
director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (and a
supporter of the Administration), articulated the view that force, or
the threat of it, was a vital bargaining tool with Iran. Clawson
wrote that if Europe wanted cooperation with the Bush Administration
it "would do well to remind Iran that the military option remains on
the table." He added that the argument that the European negotiations
hinged on Washington looked like "a preemptive excuse for the likely
breakdown of the E.U.-Iranian talks." In a subsequent conversation
with me, Clawson suggested that, if some kind of military action was
inevitable, "it would be much more in Israel's interest and
Washington's to take covert action. The style of this Administration
is to use overwhelming force 'shock and awe.' But we get only one
bite of the apple."
There are many military and diplomatic experts who dispute the notion
that military action, on whatever scale, is the right approach.
Shahram Chubin, an Iranian scholar who is the director of research at
the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, told me, "It's a fantasy to
think that there's a good American or Israeli military option in
Iran." He went on, "The Israeli view is that this is an international
problem. 'You do it,' they say to the West. 'Otherwise, our Air Force
will take care of it.'" In 1981, the Israeli Air Force destroyed
Iraq's Osirak reactor, setting its nuclear program back several
years. But the situation now is both more complex and more dangerous,
Chubin said. The Osirak bombing "drove the Iranian nuclear-weapons
program underground, to hardened, dispersed sites," he said. "You
can't be sure after an attack that you'll get away with it. The U.S.
and Israel would not be certain whether all the sites had been hit,
or how quickly they'd be rebuilt. Meanwhile, they'd be waiting for an
Iranian counter-attack that could be military or terrorist or
diplomatic. Iran has long-range missiles and ties to Hezbollah, which
has drones you can't begin to think of what they'd do in response."
Chubin added that Iran could also renounce the Nuclear Non-
Proliferation Treaty. "It's better to have them cheating within the
system," he said. "Otherwise, as victims, Iran will walk away from
the treaty and inspections while the rest of the world watches the
N.P.T. unravel before their eyes."
The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions
inside Iran at least since last summer. Much of the focus is on the
accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian
nuclear, chemical, and missile sites, both declared and suspected.
The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more,
such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-
term commando raids. "The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into
Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible,"
the government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told me.
Some of the missions involve extraordinary cooperation. For example,
the former high-level intelligence official told me that an American
commando task force has been set up in South Asia and is now working
closely with a group of Pakistani scientists and technicians who had
dealt with Iranian counterparts. (In 2003, the I.A.E.A. disclosed
that Iran had been secretly receiving nuclear technology from
Pakistan for more than a decade, and had withheld that information
from inspectors.) The American task force, aided by the information
from Pakistan, has been penetrating eastern Iran from Afghanistan in
a hunt for underground installations. The task-force members, or
their locally recruited agents, secreted remote detection devices
known as sniffers capable of sampling the atmosphere for radioactive
emissions and other evidence of nuclear-enrichment programs.
Getting such evidence is a pressing concern for the Bush
Administration. The former high-level intelligence official told
me, "They don't want to make any W.M.D. intelligence mistakes, as in
Iraq. The Republicans can't have two of those. There's no education
in the second kick of a mule." The official added that the government
of Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani President, has won a high price
for its cooperation American assurance that Pakistan will not have to
hand over A. Q. Khan, known as the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb,
to the I.A.E.A. or to any other international authorities for
questioning. For two decades, Khan has been linked to a vast
consortium of nuclear-black-market activities. Last year, Musharraf
professed to be shocked when Khan, in the face of overwhelming
evidence, "confessed" to his activities. A few days later, Musharraf
pardoned him, and so far he has refused to allow the I.A.E.A. or
American intelligence to interview him. Khan is now said to be living
under house arrest in a villa in Islamabad. "It's a deal a trade-
off," the former high-level intelligence official explained. "'Tell
us what you know about Iran and we will let your A. Q. Khan guys go.'
It's the neoconservatives' version of short-term gain at long-term
cost. They want to prove that Bush is the anti-terrorism guy who can
handle Iran and the nuclear threat, against the long-term goal of
eliminating the black market for nuclear proliferation."
The agreement comes at a time when Musharraf, according to a former
high-level Pakistani diplomat, has authorized the expansion of
Pakistan's nuclear-weapons arsenal. "Pakistan still needs parts and
supplies, and needs to buy them in the clandestine market," the
former diplomat said. "The U.S. has done nothing to stop it."
There has also been close, and largely unacknowledged, cooperation
with Israel. The government consultant with ties to the Pentagon said
that the Defense Department civilians, under the leadership of
Douglas Feith, have been working with Israeli planners and
consultants to develop and refine potential nuclear, chemical-
weapons, and missile targets inside Iran. (After Osirak, Iran
situated many of its nuclear sites in remote areas of the east, in an
attempt to keep them out of striking range of other countries,
especially Israel. Distance no longer lends such protection, however:
Israel has acquired three submarines capable of launching cruise
missiles and has equipped some of its aircraft with additional fuel
tanks, putting Israeli F-16I fighters within the range of most
Iranian targets.)
"They believe that about three-quarters of the potential targets can
be destroyed from the air, and a quarter are too close to population
centers, or buried too deep, to be targeted," the consultant said.
Inevitably, he added, some suspicious sites need to be checked out by
American or Israeli commando teams in on-the-ground surveillance
before being targeted.
The Pentagon's contingency plans for a broader invasion of Iran are
also being updated. Strategists at the headquarters of the U.S.
Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, have been asked to revise the
military's war plan, providing for a maximum ground and air invasion
of Iran. Updating the plan makes sense, whether or not the
Administration intends to act, because the geopolitics of the region
have changed dramatically in the last three years. Previously, an
American invasion force would have had to enter Iran by sea, by way
of the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Oman; now troops could move in on
the ground, from Afghanistan or Iraq. Commando units and other assets
could be introduced through new bases in the Central Asian republics.
It is possible that some of the American officials who talk about the
need to eliminate Iran's nuclear infrastructure are doing so as part
of a propaganda campaign aimed at pressuring Iran to give up its
weapons planning. If so, the signals are not always clear. President
Bush, who after 9/11 famously depicted Iran as a member of the "axis
of evil," is now publicly emphasizing the need for diplomacy to run
its course. "We don't have much leverage with the Iranians right
now," the President said at a news conference late last
year. "Diplomacy must be the first choice, and always the first
choice of an administration trying to solve an issue of . . . nuclear
armament. And we'll continue to press on diplomacy."
In my interviews over the past two months, I was given a much harsher
view. The hawks in the Administration believe that it will soon
become clear that the Europeans' negotiated approach cannot succeed,
and that at that time the Administration will act. "We're not dealing
with a set of National Security Council option papers here," the
former high-level intelligence official told me. "They've already
passed that wicket. It's not if we're going to do anything against
Iran. They're doing it."
The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least
temporarily derail, Iran's ability to go nuclear. But there are
other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant
told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have
been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could
lead to a toppling of the religious leadership. "Within the soul of
Iran there is a struggle between secular nationalists and reformers,
on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic
movement," the consultant told me. "The minute the aura of
invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it the
ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will collapse" like
the former Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet
Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said.
"The idea that an American attack on Iran's nuclear facilities would
produce a popular uprising is extremely ill-informed," said Flynt
Leverett, a Middle East scholar who worked on the National Security
Council in the Bush Administration. "You have to understand that the
nuclear ambition in Iran is supported across the political spectrum,
and Iranians will perceive attacks on these sites as attacks on their
ambitions to be a major regional player and a modern nation that's
technologically sophisticated." Leverett, who is now a senior fellow
at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, at the Brookings
Institution, warned that an American attack, if it takes place, "will
produce an Iranian backlash against the United States and a rallying
around the regime."
Rumsfeld planned and lobbied for more than two years before getting
Presidential authority, in a series of findings and executive orders,
to use military commandos for covert operations. One of his first
steps was bureaucratic: to shift control of an undercover unit, known
then as the Gray Fox (it has recently been given a new code name),
from the Army to the Special Operations Command (socom), in Tampa.
Gray Fox was formally assigned to socom in July, 2002, at the
instigation of Rumsfeld's office, which meant that the undercover
unit would have a single commander for administration and operational
deployment. Then, last fall, Rumsfeld's ability to deploy the
commandos expanded. According to a Pentagon consultant, an Execute
Order on the Global War on Terrorism (referred to throughout the
government as gwot) was issued at Rumsfeld's direction. The order
specifically authorized the military "to find and finish" terrorist
targets, the consultant said. It included a target list that cited Al
Qaeda network members, Al Qaeda senior leadership, and other high-
value targets. The consultant said that the order had been cleared
throughout the national-security bureaucracy in Washington.
In late November, 2004, the Times reported that Bush had set up an
interagency group to study whether it "would best serve the nation"
to give the Pentagon complete control over the C.I.A.'s own elite
paramilitary unit, which has operated covertly in trouble spots
around the world for decades. The panel's conclusions, due in
February, are foregone, in the view of many former C.I.A.
officers. "It seems like it's going to happen," Howard Hart, who was
chief of the C.I.A.'s Paramilitary Operations Division before
retiring in 1991, told me.
There was other evidence of Pentagon encroachment. Two former C.I.A.
clandestine officers, Vince Cannistraro and Philip Giraldi, who
publish Intelligence Brief, a newsletter for their business clients,
reported last month on the existence of a broad counter-terrorism
Presidential finding that permitted the Pentagon "to operate
unilaterally in a number of countries where there is a perception of
a clear and evident terrorist threat. . . . A number of the countries
are friendly to the U.S. and are major trading partners. Most have
been cooperating in the war on terrorism." The two former officers
listed some of the countries Algeria, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, and
Malaysia. (I was subsequently told by the former high-level
intelligence official that Tunisia is also on the list.)
Giraldi, who served three years in military intelligence before
joining the C.I.A., said that he was troubled by the military's
expanded covert assignment. "I don't think they can handle the
cover," he told me. "They've got to have a different mind-set.
They've got to handle new roles and get into foreign cultures and
learn how other people think. If you're going into a village and
shooting people, it doesn't matter," Giraldi added. "But if you're
running operations that involve finesse and sensitivity, the military
can't do it. Which is why these kind of operations were always run
out of the agency." I was told that many Special Operations officers
also have serious misgivings.
Rumsfeld and two of his key deputies, Stephen Cambone, the Under-
secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and Army Lieutenant General
William G. (Jerry) Boykin, will be part of the chain of command for
the new commando operations. Relevant members of the House and Senate
intelligence committees have been briefed on the Defense Department's
expanded role in covert affairs, a Pentagon adviser assured me, but
he did not know how extensive the briefings had been.
"I'm conflicted about the idea of operating without congressional
oversight," the Pentagon adviser said. "But I've been told that there
will be oversight down to the specific operation." A second Pentagon
adviser agreed, with a significant caveat. "There are reporting
requirements," he said. "But to execute the finding we don't have to
go back and say, 'We're going here and there.' No nitty-gritty detail
and no micromanagement."
The legal questions about the Pentagon's right to conduct covert
operations without informing Congress have not been resolved. "It's a
very, very gray area," said Jeffrey H. Smith, a West Point graduate
who served as the C.I.A.'s general counsel in the mid-nineteen-
nineties. "Congress believes it voted to include all such covert
activities carried out by the armed forces. The military says, 'No,
the things we're doing are not intelligence actions under the statute
but necessary military steps authorized by the President, as
Commander-in-Chief, to "prepare the battlefield."'" Referring to his
days at the C.I.A., Smith added, "We were always careful not to use
the armed forces in a covert action without a Presidential finding.
The Bush Administration has taken a much more aggressive stance."
In his conversation with me, Smith emphasized that he was unaware of
the military's current plans for expanding covert action. But he
said, "Congress has always worried that the Pentagon is going to get
us involved in some military misadventure that nobody knows about."
Under Rumsfeld's new approach, I was told, U.S. military operatives
would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen
seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons
systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local
citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or
terrorists. This could potentially involve organizing and carrying
out combat operations, or even terrorist activities. Some operations
will likely take place in nations in which there is an American
diplomatic mission, with an Ambassador and a C.I.A. station chief,
the Pentagon consultant said. The Ambassador and the station chief
would not necessarily have a need to know, under the Pentagon's
current interpretation of its reporting requirement.
The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what
it calls "action teams" in the target countries overseas which can be
used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. "Do you remember
the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?" the former high-
level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led
gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. "We
founded them and we financed them," he said. "The objective now is to
recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren't going to tell
Congress about it." A former military officer, who has knowledge of
the Pentagon's commando capabilities, said, "We're going to be riding
with the bad boys."
One of the rationales for such tactics was spelled out in a series of
articles by John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the
Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, and a consultant
on terrorism for the rand corporation. "It takes a network to fight a
network," Arquilla wrote in a recent article in the San Francisco
Chronicle:
When conventional military operations and bombing failed to defeat
the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya in the 1950s, the British formed
teams of friendly Kikuyu tribesmen who went about pretending to be
terrorists. These "pseudo gangs," as they were called, swiftly threw
the Mau Mau on the defensive, either by befriending and then
ambushing bands of fighters or by guiding bombers to the terrorists'
camps. What worked in Kenya a half-century ago has a wonderful chance
of undermining trust and recruitment among today's terror networks.
Forming new pseudo gangs should not be difficult.
"If a confused young man from Marin County can join up with Al
Qaeda," Arquilla wrote, referring to John Walker Lindh, the twenty-
year-old Californian who was seized in Afghanistan, "think what
professional operatives might do."
A few pilot covert operations were conducted last year, one Pentagon
adviser told me, and a terrorist cell in Algeria was "rolled up" with
American help. The adviser was referring, apparently, to the capture
of Ammari Saifi, known as Abderrezak le Para, the head of a North
African terrorist network affiliated with Al Qaeda. But at the end of
the year there was no agreement within the Defense Department about
the rules of engagement. "The issue is approval for the final
authority," the former high-level intelligence official said. "Who
gets to say 'Get this' or 'Do this'?"
A retired four-star general said, "The basic concept has always been
solid, but how do you insure that the people doing it operate within
the concept of the law? This is pushing the edge of the envelope."
The general added, "It's the oversight. And you're not going to get
Warner" John Warner, of Virginia, the chairman of the Senate Armed
Services Committee "and those guys to exercise oversight. This whole
thing goes to the Fourth Deck." He was referring to the floor in the
Pentagon where Rumsfeld and Cambone have their offices.
"It's a finesse to give power to Rumsfeld giving him the right to act
swiftly, decisively, and lethally," the first Pentagon adviser told
me. "It's a global free-fire zone."
The Pentagon has tried to work around the limits on covert activities
before. In the early nineteen-eighties, a covert Army unit was set up
and authorized to operate overseas with minimal oversight. The
results were disastrous. The Special Operations program was initially
known as Intelligence Support Activity, or I.S.A., and was
administered from a base near Washington (as was, later, Gray Fox).
It was established soon after the failed rescue, in April, 1980, of
the American hostages in Iran, who were being held by revolutionary
students after the Islamic overthrow of the Shah's regime. At first,
the unit was kept secret from many of the senior generals and
civilian leaders in the Pentagon, as well as from many members of
Congress. It was eventually deployed in the Reagan Administration's
war against the Sandinista government, in Nicaragua. It was heavily
committed to supporting the Contras. By the mid-eighties, however,
the I.S.A.'s operations had been curtailed, and several of its senior
officers were court-martialed following a series of financial
scandals, some involving arms deals. The affair was known as "the
Yellow Fruit scandal," after the code name given to one of the
I.S.A.'s cover organizations and in many ways the group's procedures
laid the groundwork for the Iran-Contra scandal.
Despite the controversy surrounding Yellow Fruit, the I.S.A. was kept
intact as an undercover unit by the Army. "But we put so many
restrictions on it," the second Pentagon adviser said. "In I.S.A., if
you wanted to travel fifty miles you had to get a special order. And
there were certain areas, such as Lebanon, where they could not go."
The adviser acknowledged that the current operations are similar to
those two decades earlier, with similar risks and, as he saw it,
similar reasons for taking the risks. "What drove them then, in terms
of Yellow Fruit, was that they had no intelligence on Iran," the
adviser told me. "They had no knowledge of Tehran and no people on
the ground who could prepare the battle space."
Rumsfeld's decision to revive this approach stemmed, once again, from
a failure of intelligence in the Middle East, the adviser said. The
Administration believed that the C.I.A. was unable, or unwilling, to
provide the military with the information it needed to effectively
challenge stateless terrorism. "One of the big challenges was that we
didn't have Humint" human intelligence "collection capabilities in
areas where terrorists existed," the adviser told me. "Because the
C.I.A. claimed to have such a hold on Humint, the way to get around
them, rather than take them on, was to claim that the agency didn't
do Humint to support Special Forces operations overseas. The C.I.A.
fought it." Referring to Rumsfeld's new authority for covert
operations, the first Pentagon adviser told me, "It's not empowering
military intelligence. It's emasculating the C.I.A."
A former senior C.I.A. officer depicted the agency's eclipse as
predictable. "For years, the agency bent over backward to integrate
and coordinate with the Pentagon," the former officer said. "We just
caved and caved and got what we deserved. It is a fact of life today
that the Pentagon is a five-hundred-pound gorilla and the C.I.A.
director is a chimpanzee."
There was pressure from the White House, too. A former C.I.A.
clandestine-services officer told me that, in the months after the
resignation of the agency's director George Tenet, in June, 2004, the
White House began "coming down critically" on analysts in the
C.I.A.'s Directorate of Intelligence (D.I.) and demanded "to see more
support for the Administration's political position." Porter Goss,
Tenet's successor, engaged in what the recently retired C.I.A.
official described as a "political purge" in the D.I. Among the
targets were a few senior analysts who were known to write dissenting
papers that had been forwarded to the White House. The recently
retired C.I.A. official said, "The White House carefully reviewed the
political analyses of the D.I. so they could sort out the apostates
from the true believers." Some senior analysts in the D.I. have
turned in their resignations quietly, and without revealing the
extent of the disarray.
The White House solidified its control over intelligence last month,
when it forced last-minute changes in the intelligence-reform bill.
The legislation, based substantially on recommendations of the 9/11
Commission, originally gave broad powers, including authority over
intelligence spending, to a new national-intelligence director. (The
Pentagon controls roughly eighty per cent of the intelligence
budget.) A reform bill passed in the Senate by a vote of 96-2. Before
the House voted, however, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld balked. The
White House publicly supported the legislation, but House Speaker
Dennis Hastert refused to bring a House version of the bill to the
floor for a vote ostensibly in defiance of the President, though it
was widely understood in Congress that Hastert had been delegated to
stall the bill. After intense White House and Pentagon lobbying, the
legislation was rewritten. The bill that Congress approved sharply
reduced the new director's power, in the name of permitting the
Secretary of Defense to maintain his "statutory responsibilities."
Fred Kaplan, in the online magazine Slate, described the real issues
behind Hastert's action, quoting a congressional aide who expressed
amazement as White House lobbyists bashed the Senate bill and came
up "with all sorts of ludicrous reasons why it was unacceptable."
"Rummy's plan was to get a compromise in the bill in which the
Pentagon keeps its marbles and the C.I.A. loses theirs," the former
high-level intelligence official told me. "Then all the pieces of the
puzzle fall in place. He gets authority for covert action that is not
attributable, the ability to directly task national-intelligence
assets" including the many intelligence satellites that constantly
orbit the world.
"Rumsfeld will no longer have to refer anything through the
government's intelligence wringer," the former official went on. "The
intelligence system was designed to put competing agencies in
competition. What's missing will be the dynamic tension that insures
everyone's priorities in the C.I.A., the D.O.D., the F.B.I., and even
the Department of Homeland Security are discussed. The most insidious
implication of the new system is that Rumsfeld no longer has to tell
people what he's doing so they can ask, 'Why are you doing this?'
or 'What are your priorities?' Now he can keep all of the mattress
mice out of it."
