This, to my mind, is a must read for understanding the failure of our intelligence on the issue of WMD. Someone who knows the workings of the intelligence community, in an interview with our oft-posted listmember, the great William Rivers Pitt, gives the best picture I've seen of all that led up to these times, from the Soviet war against Afghanistan to now. It's a riveting read. I've pulled some highlights out, but do link to the piece on Truthout.org (a site to support with your funds) to read it all. Interview: 27-Year CIA Veteran, by William Rivers Pitt, 6/26/03 Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years, working at senior levels, serving seven Presidents. Excerpts: PITT: With all of your background, and with all the time that you spent in the CIA, can you tell me why you are speaking out now about the foreign policy issues that are facing this country? McG: It’s actually very simple. There’s an inscription at the entrance to the CIA, chiseled into the marble there, which reads, “You Shall Know The Truth, And The Truth Shall Set You Free.” Not many folks realize that the primary function of the Central Intelligence Agency is to seek the truth regarding what is going on abroad and be able to report that truth without fear or favor. In other words, the CIA at its best is the one place in Washington that a President can turn to for an unvarnished truthful answer to a delicate policy problem. We didn’t have to defend State Department policies, we didn’t have to make the Soviets seem ten feet tall, as the Defense Department was inclined to do. We could tell it like it was, and it was very, very heady. We could tell it like it was and have career protection for doing that. In other words, that’s what our job was. When you come out of that ethic, when you come out of a situation where you realize the political pressures to do it otherwise – you’ve seen it, you’ve been there, you’ve done that – and your senior colleagues face up to those pressures as have you yourself, and then you watch what is going on today, it is disturbing in the extreme. You ask yourself, “Do I not have some kind of duty, by virtue of my experience and my knowledge of these things, do I not have some kind of duty to speak out here and tell the rest of the American people what’s going on?”…to see George Tenet – who has all the terrific credentials to be a staffer in Congress, credentials which are antithetical to being a good CIA Director – to see him sit behind Colin Powell at the UN, to see him give up and shade the intelligence and cave in when his analysts have been slogging through the muck for a year and a half trying to tell it like it is, that is very demoralizing, and actually very infuriating…That’s the kind of thing that will be a very noxious influence on their morale and their ability to continue the good fight…In the coming weeks, we’re going to be seeing folks coming out and coming forth with what they know, and it is going to be very embarrassing for the Bush administration. PITT: How much of a dent does this unease, and this inability to stand up to those who have put this atmosphere in place, how much of a dent does this put in our ability to defend this country against the very real threats we face? McG: A big dent, and that of course is the bottom line. What you need to have is rewards for competence and not for being able to sniff which way the wind is blowing… PITT: You stated that the decision to make war in Iraq was made in the summer of 2002. General Wesley Clark appeared on a Sunday talk show with Tim Russert on June 15, and Clark surprisingly mentioned that he was called at his home by the White House on September 11 and told to make the connection between those terrorist attacks and Saddam Hussein. He was told to do this on the day of the attacks, told to say that this was state-sponsored terrorism and there must be a connection. What do you make of that? McG: That is really fascinating. If you look at what he said, he said, “Sure, I’ll say that. Where’s the evidence?” In other words, he’s a good soldier. He’s going to do this. But he wanted the evidence, and there was no evidence. Clark was not only a good soldier, but a professional soldier. A professional soldier, at his level at least, asks questions. When he found out there was no evidence, he didn’t say what they wanted him to say. Contrast that with Colin Powell, who first and foremost is a good soldier. But when he sees the evidence, and knows it smells, he will salute the President and brief him anyway, as he did on the 5th of February… PITT: Why was the decision made in 1989 to leave Afghanistan in such a sorry state? The chaos left in the aftermath of that war led to the rise of the Taliban. Why didn’t we help clean up the terrible mess we had helped to cause? McG: I hate to be cynical about these things, but once we got the Soviets out, our reason to be there basically evaporated. You may ask about the poor people and the poor country. Well, we have a history of doing this kind of thing, of using people…We had a brilliant victory, we got the Soviets out of there, we started pounding our chests, and nobody gave much thought to helping the poor Afghanis that were left behind… My primary attention is on the forgery of the Niger documents that supposedly proved Iraq was developing a nuclear program. It seems to me that you can have endless arguments about the correct interpretation of this or that piece of intelligence, or intelligence analysis, but a forgery is a forgery. It’s demonstrable that senior officials of this government, including the Vice President, knew that it was a forgery in March of last year. It was used anyway to deceive our Congressmen and Senators into voting for an unprovoked war…Cheney knew, and Cheney was way out in front of everybody, starting on the 26th of August, talking about Iraq seeking nuclear weapons. As recently as the 16th of March, three days before the war, he was again at it. This time he said Iraq has reconstituted its nuclear weapons program. It hadn’t. It demonstrably hadn’t. There has been nothing like that uncovered in Iraq… There is no conceivable reason why the United States of America should not be imploring Hans Blix and the rest of his folks to come right in. They have the expertise, they’ve been there, they’ve done that. They have millions of dollars available through the UN. They have people who know the weaponry, how they are procured and produced. They know personally the scientists, they’ve interviewed them before. What possible reason could the United States of America have to say no thanks, we’ll use our own GI’s to do this?…The more sinister interpretation is that the US wants to be able to plant weapons of mass destruction in Iraq…It can be the kind of little vile vial that Colin Powell held up on the 5th of February. You put a couple of those in a GI’s pocket, and you swear him to secrecy, and you have him go bury them out in the desert. You discover it ten days later…I think that’s a possibility, a real possibility…Four months ago, I would have said, “McGovern, you’re paranoid to say stuff like that.” But in light of all that has happened, and light of the terrific stakes involved for the President here – each time he says we’re going to find these things, he digs himself in a little deeper – I think it’s quite possible that they will resort to this type of thing. From: Wade Frazier [public.email2@verizon.net] McGovern was obviously a committed professional who believed in what he did. It was interesting how that interview ended, with McGovern slowly becoming more “radicalized” in his perspective. McGovern spent a career believing in his mission, as virtually every careerist must do at one level or another if they cherish their sanity. McGovern probably has yet to have his “radicalizing” experience, if he will ever have it. Very few ever achieve the radical perspective, which means seeing situations without the attendant ideological baggage, and trying to perceive things at their root level. one of my CIA pals had his radicalizing experience while working for the CIA, and his experience is important in assessing issues that are being broached these days in various forums. Ralph McGehee joined the CIA in 1952 and was a prized recruit, him being an All-American football player. Ralph is one of I believe only two CIA employees who have ever legally written memoirs that were critical of the CIA. I have synopsized Ralph's book here: http://home1.gte.net/res0k62m/mcgehee.htm Ralph ate up his indoctrination, eagerly doing his part in waging the noble war against communism. Ralph did not sit behind a desk in Washington, but worked in the field, mostly in East Asia. He did not begin figuring out what the CIA was really all about until he created a huge intelligence breakthrough in Southeast Asia. Ralph found a way to beat the commies in Thailand, and was awarded universal praise for his efforts. However, his intelligence arrived at the wrong answer, at least in the eyes of American propagandists. The peasants of Southeast Asia thought that communism was a great improvement over the colonial and neo-colonial exploitation they endured under the imperial powers. It was ironic to see McGovern call the CIA's days under Colby the good old days, because Colby killed Ralph's intelligence program when it arrived at the wrong answer. http://home1.gte.net/res0k62m/mcgehee.htm#communists Ralph began experiencing cognitive dissonance after his program was killed, but was so gung ho that he volunteered for Vietnam in 1968. He finally realized what the war against communism was all about, and the realization nearly destroyed him. http://home1.gte.net/res0k62m/mcgehee.htm#saigon From that point forward, Ralph committed himself to telling the world what the CIA was really all about. The beginning of his book's conclusion kind of says it all: “The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency. It is the covert action arm of the President's foreign policy advisers. In that capacity it overthrows or supports foreign governments while reporting 'intelligence' justifying those activities. [McGehee says he has never once seen a CIA official tell the truth to Congress. Instead comes a steady stream of lies. – WF] It shapes its intelligence, even in such critical areas as Soviet nuclear weapon capability, to support presidential policy. Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target of its lies. “As noted in the Church Committee's final report, the Agency's task is to develop an international anti-communist ideology. The CIA then links every egalitarian [which means “all men are created equal” – WF] political movement to the scourge of international communism. This then prepares the American people and many in the world community for the second stage, the destruction of those movements. For egalitarianism is the enemy and it must not be allowed to exist.” So, I think a solid case can be made that the CIA has never really been about “intelligence,” but playing the dirty neocolonial game. The CIA was founded and run by Wall Street executives and lawyers, and its biggest single “hire” was bringing the Nazi's Eastern European intelligence network directly into the CIA. http://home1.gte.net/res0k62m/war.htm#gehlen What Ralph regularly saw during his career was intelligence analysts producing good raw analysis, but then the bureaucrats at the CIA would begin chipping away at it until it conformed to policy. Not long before the CIA, FBI and friends succeeded in finally silencing Ralph, in 2000, he wrote: “As I discovered in my 'Vietnam days,' William Colby and others saw that policy-dictated intelligence ensured that no information challenging our policy saw the light of day. However, the rejection of reality started from the very first days from just after WWII and prior to the creation of the CIA. “Later, even Sam Adams, the number one analyst/protestor on Vietnam, had little knowledge about the Communists 'People's War,' written about ad naseum by Vo Nguyen Giap, Ho Chi Minh and even Mao Tse-Tung. “Agency analysts do not use open source data/datum – and herewith lies one major cause of its egregiously terrible intelligence. Another is the multi-leveled bureaucratic structure of the CIA that authorizes politicized bureaucrats at all levels to hack away at raw intelligence until it supports policy. “In my last few years in the CIA, as a skeptic, I saw that distorting intelligence to support policy was a universal truism. This can be deduced particularly from Mel Goodwin's experience regarding CIA intelligence on the Soviet Union. William Casey was a total practitioner of this phenomenon. “…For a successful career in the CIA, one must accept that the Emperor wears gorgeous robes – stating the obvious kills the messenger.” This “radical” perspective of the CIA and related institutions is critical for Americans to begin to realize. In the end, the CIA's mission is probably an evil one. A CIA man is the person who gave Dennis Lee the billion-dollar-plus offer to stop pursuing free energy: http://home1.gte.net/res0k62m/advent.htm#offer Another free energy pioneer I know of was derailed by the Big Boys at around the same time that Dennis Lee went to jail with a million dollar bail. The CIA was instrumental in stopping him, using grim cloak and dagger techniques. The CIA had a hand in the operation that ended up getting John Kennedy killed, http://home1.gte.net/res0k62m/cover-up.htm#wean and was probably the ringleader in covering up the government's involvement. This is “radical” information to be sure, but none of it has ever been challenged, as far as I know. It is simply ignored. More people, especially Americans, need to begin realizing the real game that is being played in our names. Humanity's survival may depend on it. Suzanne to Wade: Hasn't McGovern seen the light? That's the whole idea of the piece. Wade to Suzanne: He is seeing more light all the time (I have been reading his stuff for awhile now), but he still operates within his parameters — i.e., the CIA is an essentially good institution that is being abused by the White House. He takes the incompetence angle versus the consciously manipulative angle. He is kind of lib left in that regard. He is not really questioning the root stuff, like who the hell needs the CIA besides the Fortune 500? As radical as McGehee is, he still would like to believe that an organization like the CIA could be good guys, although he feels the CIA is unsalvageable. I think it is good that McGovern is seeing the light more clearly, and the day he realizes the whole CIA paradigm is hopelessly corrupt, I will say, “He finally became radicalized.” For instance, there is a great deal of persuasive evidence that Pearl Harbor was no “intelligence failure,” but something the U.S. government allowed to happen to spur the isolationist U.S. public into World War II. Oh sure, there are arguments against it, but the evidence keeps mounting that Pearl Harbor was no accident on the U.S.'s side. And McGovern takes the “prevent Pearl Harbor” tack as his motivation for joining the CIA. Again, the guy was a careerist whose professional ideal of what the CIA should be is what drives that group he is a part of. When they finally admit that the CIA has always been an institution that primarily serves wealth and power at the expense of the rest of the world, then he will be “radical.” I am not saying that most will not agree with McGovern from the intelligence field, but there is another level of awakening that they have yet to go through, I believe.
Follow
