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Reflections of Ken Towery
Our Intelligence Mess By R.K Towery Our President has named a panel to investigate America's intelligence operations, to determine, if possible, whether he and previous Presidents were fed erroneous information about Iraq when he, or they, were trying to make up their minds concerning questions of national security. The President has wisely, or conveniently, ordered the investigating panel to report back to the American people well after the current election cycle is completed. In England a similar probe has been ordered by the Prime Minister. We are not advised when it will report back. In this country the probe ordered by President Bush will report after Congressional investigations by Committees of Congress will have completed, and reported on, their own findings. The American people should finally learn a little more about their intelligence operation. If we are going into an age when the nation can be thrown into war simply on the basis of intelligence privy to only a few, it is only fitting and proper that at least our leaders know the intelligence they are operating on is accurate and timely, and that that intelligence was gathered with one thought in mind---the security and safety of America and no other state or nation. Quite frankly, we have never understood our President's reluctance to air all aspects of how America gains its intelligence. How each Administration uses intelligence is obviously up to each Administration, (witness the manner in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt manipulated intelligence before World War 11, or Lyndon Johnson's Administration manipulated intelligence during the Tonkin Gulf incident, or Richard Nixon tried to manipulate intelligence during the Watergate matter), but while it is imperative that individuals who gain intelligence be protected, there is no great secret about the manner in which that intelligence is gained. It is gathered from agents on the ground, in key places, and by intercepting and breaking codes sent by others, by satellites high in the sky, by painstaking examination of photographs from those satellites, by hundreds of different means that change with the circumstances. An agent who lived across the street from us in McLean, Virginia, (next door to the CIA operation in Langley) spent his time during the Vietnam war poring over satellite photos of Southeast Asia, trying to determine how North Vietnam was supplying its troops in South Vietnam. Finally, Fred discovered a series of trails that came to be known under the rubric of the Ho Chi Mien trail through much of Laos. It was a long, laborious, task, without public recognition but of vast importance to troops on the ground and American policy makers. The agent merely turned his findings over to his superiors, who turned them over to the National Security Council, who turned them over to President Richard Nixon. That same procedure had to be repeated many, many times around the world during those Cold War years. At the heart of the current problem is the question: "whatever happened to Saddam's weapons of mass destruction?" The weapons were supposed to have been readily available to Saddam, and, we were told, posed a threat to the civilized world. The weapons (of mass destruction) still haven't been found. Recent testimony by David Kay, former head of the CIA group looking into the matter, indicates he believes "We were all wrong." No one really disputes Mr. Kay's conclusions. Clearly, this President, and previous Presidents, was misled. If we are extremely lucky, the Congressmen, and the Bush-appointed group, may even find out why the presidents were misled, though we seriously doubt any such information will find its way into the public domain. Our view of why the information won't find its way into the public domain is very simple. The information would likely prove detrimental to both political parties, and to the President…and to the Vice President. On the entire subject of U.S. intelligence, we have a few observations: First off, in the interests of "public disclosure", we must say we had a fairly intimate relationship with our intelligence community during the years we were in Washington. Next, it is probably useful to say that we owe the current President Bush absolutely nothing. We believe, and we have said and written we believe, certain aspects of his Presidency to be absolutely at odds with what we have always advocated in terms of public policy. By the same token, he owes us absolutely nothing, other than to be the best President he can be, and to look after the interests of the American people. True, we supported his election, and we have supported him on many issues. We knew him before he became President. We knew him before he became Governor. We even knew him before he became the manager of the Texas Rangers. We knew his father well and personally before he, the elder Bush, became President. But we usually support this President primarily because we find ourselves closer to his position most of the time than to the positions advocated by his political adversaries. But our usual support of Bush, and/or our sometime opposition to Bush, has absolutely no bearing on this issue. Our evolving national policy relative to pre-emptive wars is at stake. Before we went to the United States Information Agency, where we served for a number of years as head of its Policy and Planning shop when Richard Nixon was president, I was top aide to Senator John Tower, of Texas, who served on the Senate Armed Services Committee (and ultimately as the committee's chairman. Tower later served on the so-called "Iran-Contra" Committee, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, along with Dick Cheney, who later became Vice President.) During the years I was with Tower and later with USIA, the "cold war" was an active, on-going operation. USIA and the CIA were completely involved, and closely associated during that period, utilizing the theory, I suppose, that the right hand ought to know what the left hand was doing. As head of USIA's policy shop, I had daily, early-morning briefings from CIA people, often on subjects so secretive the information was relayed verbally, rather than being placed in reading files (which we had to read as the CIA agent sat nearby). Our job was to take that intelligence from the CIA, add it to our own from a world wide network of operatives, and try to fashion policies to guide the actions of our own officers that would hopefully benefit our country. I believe we did a fairly decent job, at least decent enough to cause George Bush, when he was assigned by Nixon to head CIA, to ask me to come with him as his aide, primarily, in my view, because I knew more about the inner workings of CIA than he did at that time. For various reasons I stayed at USIA until returning to Texas. But back to the present, and the potential investigations by various committees. We hope the committees get to the bottom of the matter. Clearly, in our opinion the President was misled. Not that he did not want to believe what he was being told, but nevertheless he was misled. To believe otherwise is to believe that Bush deliberately lied concerning his own beliefs that Saddam posed a threat to the USA he had taken an oath to defend. He would never have been forgiven, nor should he have been forgiven, if he had ignored that oath. Americans are entitled to know whether Bush and previous Presidents were misled because our intelligence apparatus simply did not have all the data it should have had, or whether they were misled deliberately to cause America to go to war, ultimately, for the benefit of another country. There was, during the early build up to the war in Iraq, the usual bureaucratic squabbles between the Defense Department and the State Department. That, in our opinion, is entirely normal. One department is charged with the responsibility of keeping the nation out of trouble, the other charged with the responsibility of getting the nation out of any trouble it might get in. One depends on diplomacy, the other on force. If we could be assured that our diplomacy would always be successful, there would obviously be no need for an Army, Air Force, Navy, or Marine Corps, and we could perhaps be spared from the occasional buffoonery of a camera-crazed Secretary of Defense. But equally obvious is the fact that we cannot always be assured of success in our diplomatic efforts. The Department of Defense has been heavily influenced, over the years, by those allied with people now called "neo-conservatives", or "neo-cons", among whom were Paul Wolfowitz, a "neo-con" Deputy Secretary of Defense to Donald Rumsfeld, and Richard Pearle, a hawkish, private sector "adviser" to Rumsfeld. It was Wolfowitz to whom we are primarily indebted for the inadvertent comment that the term "weapons of mass destruction" was coined in the Pentagon as a bureaucratic solution to the bureaucratic problem of finding a rationale for committing America's military to the process of bringing down Saddam. They, the "neo-cons", are, generally speaking, committed to the preservation of Israel, and, as such, have agitated for war against Iraq for many years. In fact, they have agitated for war against any and all potential enemies of Israel. It is not that the "neo-cons" are committed to Israel more than they are committed to the United States, they merely see no difference in the long-range interests of the two countries. Sometimes, in our opinion, they are right, sometimes wrong. But right or wrong, Israel must be protected, in their view. (And, on a purely personal note, and with particular relevance to the "neo"- conservatives, I will say that I find nothing "conservative", nothing at all, in their stance. Conservatism, to me, does not mean slaughtering innocent women and children, no matter where they are, or bull dozing homes and orchards.) The CIA, or the Central Intelligence Agency, is theoretically an independent agency, beholden to neither Defense nor State. In practice however, the Department of State usually gives higher marks to intelligence from CIA than does Defense. In Embassies around the world CIA agents usually find a home of some sort in the local "American Mission." The host government usually knows CIA agents are present in their country, they just don't know exactly who it is or where they are. On the other hand, the military may accept CIA intelligence, but they also have their own intelligence gathering apparatus, which, together with intelligence from all sources, is filtered through certain cells within Defense before being forwarded to the Secretary of Defense. And there is the rub. If what we read is accurate, the Defense cell through which Middle East intelligence was filtered in this instance, was also the cell most actively seeking war with Iraq. And they, that is, Wolfowitz, Pearle, and others in the neo-con movement, had ready audiences through the New York Times's Bill Safire, the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol, and nearly every T.V. camera, cable or otherwise. Our own principal worry about American intelligence operations is based on two fundamental issues. First, of course, it is entirely possible for our intelligence operatives to be completely wrong. I remember well a day when the CIA briefing officer relayed the startling information that the Chinese (this was in the 1970's) had tested a rocket in the western reaches of China that carried a live, nuclear warhead. That was considered highly dangerous…the rocket had never been tested before…and indicated a degree of irresponsibility not usually associated with great powers. The report created a stir during those cold war days, causing all sorts of speculation on just why the Chinese would be so risky. Without going further into details, we can only say that within days another report, by the same agency, indicated the first report was in error, that electronic devises in place hither and yon had given false readings. On another occasion we got a report through the CIA telling us of the movement of radio-active material, by ship, from a place in the far east to a suspected place in the Middle East. The shipment was monitored from one port to another, and reports were relayed almost on a daily basis. Then, inexplicably, all trace was lost. When the ship got where it could be boarded by trusted agents, no trace was found. The subject, as far as "users" or "customers" were concerned, was simply dropped. On still another occasion, this concerning then-upcoming elections in the Philippine Island, the CIA showed its ability to be completely wrong simply by allowing the wish to become father of the thought. I had just returned from the Philippines and was aware of the situation there very well. (During World War II, we had also served in the Philippines and still had friends there.) The CIA report indicated that the then President of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, was poised to win such a heavy majority, through manipulative fraud, that it was likely to set off massive reactions to the government, probably leading to substantial civil unrest, even civil war. Personally, I thought the report was hogwash. I thought Marcos was likely to suffer significant defeats from the electorate (which he did), especially in the Senate elections, and that the long range implications were much different from what CIA analysts were suggesting. That particular situation, the use of data to reach erroneous conclusions, was repeated so often that one of the State Department criticisms of CIA was that they often tended to place the wrong spin on their own meticulous intelligence gathering. Our second major worry is that so much of our intelligence, particularly concerning the Middle East, is tied to the Israeli intelligence network. That does not mean that our own intelligence sources were faulty, or more faulty than the world wide intelligence gathering network of Israelites. But for many years our very best intelligence coming out of the former Soviet Union was from interviewing Jews leaving Russia and heading for Israel. Our own operatives assigned to that region, good as they were, nevertheless had to proceed with extreme caution, and had extremely limited resources. And the Jewish community had ties to people in high places. They not only had ties to people in high places, they (other than the committed communists) were completely unaffected by any patriotic obligation to "Mother Russia". They were what the Soviets called "cosmopolitans," without any settled ties to any homeland, other than the new Israel. For those and other reasons it was necessary, or at least important, to work with Israeli intelligence in debriefing Jews coming out of the Soviet Union. There was still another factor in the intelligence operation, as well. America and the old Soviet Union were in a death struggle to see which country, or which system, would prevail. Now, in retrospect, it all looks so simple. Seemingly there is no way the Soviet Union could have prevailed. But then it was not so certain. The Soviet Union had a military establishment every bit the equal of our own, with many leaders anxious to see just how good they were. Indeed, during certain periods of the "cold war" they had pieces of military equipment superior to our own. I remember very well one situation that arose during one of those seemingly never-ending Middle East wars between Jews and Arabs. We came by intelligence, relayed to us by the Israelis, whom we were underwriting with military equipment and money, that a new Soviet fighter jet was far superior to our own then top of the line jet, which of course the Israelis were armed with. What had happened was simple. Some new Soviet jets appeared in the skies over the Sinai. Israeli pilots, flying the latest American jets, went up to meet them. The Soviet jets simply outran the American jets, along the entire length of the Sinai. That was upsetting enough, but what made it even worse was that the plane-to-plane chatter was in Russian, indicating the Soviet Union was committed to aiding those who opposed Israeli efforts in the mid east, even to the extent of assigning their top jets to the task, and providing the pilots. It was simply another indication of how far, how deep, how pronounced, the lines of division between America and the old Soviet Union actually were. The Soviet Union, as the world's leading anti-religious Communist power, had no real interest in furthering the interests of countries that championed the Muslim religion, or any religion. In fact, they had some domestic problems growing out of their own indigenous Muslim population. But their principal enemy was the United States, and any place they could recruit allies, including among Muslims, was fair game. Indeed, it worked both ways. We at USIA were also not above using religious feelings on the part of any suppressed people, to foster support for our own cause. (An interesting sidebar to the above story was that the whole thing was labeled super secret by those who do such things. I could never understand why it had to be so secret, other than the fact that the information was relayed to us by a foreign intelligence agency. The Israelis obviously knew of the episode, the Americans knew of it, the Russians knew it, the Egyptians knew it immediately. Understandably, the entire Arab world knew of it within hours. Still, we had to treat it as super secret. In due time, of course, our Defense Department took the information to Congressional armed services committees, in support of requests for a new fighter jet, which they got. America then had a policy, enunciated by none other than Henry Kissinger, that American arms should never be bested by Soviet arms.) So, we know that many things impact both the gathering of intelligence and the interpretation of that intelligence. It is an area where one has to guard against the wish becoming the father of the thought. Sometimes the desire to achieve certain results can color those results, even in the supposedly pristine world of intelligence. For that reason we hope Congress, and the new group appointed by President Bush, will get to the bottom of the question concerning who guided the intelligence that flowed to this President and other Presidents, and why that intelligence was crafted the way it was. This is terribly important, and quite frankly, we can't understand any political leader's reluctance to tackle the issue. Anyone charged with the responsibility of interpreting intelligence is duty bound to consider the source of that intelligence, particularly when we have evidently adopted a policy of pre-emptive wars based on what may, or may not, prove to be faulty intelligence. That intelligence, good or bad, will determine, in this new age, whether young Americans are sent hither and yon to fight and die on distant battlefields. No effort should be spared to be sure the intelligence acted on is the very best that money can buy. And if it's not, heads should role.
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