ZGram - 7/17/2003 - "The Guardian: The Spies Who Pushed for War"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

July 17, 2003

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Is this the beginning of the end?   Is this the break we've all been 
waiting for?  Is this the unraveling of not-so-hidden, unelected 
power of what is euphemistically still called a "foreign government"?

[START]

Julian Borger reports on the shadow rightwing intelligence network 
set up in Washington to second-guess the CIA and deliver a 
justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force.

The Spies Who Pushed for War
By Julian Borger
The Guardian

Thursday 17 July 2003

   As the CIA director, George Tenet, arrived at the Senate yesterday 
to give secret testimony on the Niger uranium affair, it was becoming 
increasingly clear in Washington that the scandal was only a small, 
well-documented symptom of a complete breakdown in US intelligence 
that helped steer America into war.

   It represents the Bush administration's second catastrophic 
intelligence failure. But the CIA and FBI's inability to prevent the 
September 11 attacks was largely due to internal institutional 
weaknesses.

   This time the implications are far more damaging for the White 
House, which stands accused of politicising and contaminating its own 
source of intelligence.

   According to former Bush officials, all defence and intelligence 
sources, senior administration figures created a shadow agency of 
Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs to compete 
with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defence Intelligence 
Agency.

   The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by 
the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA 
information and operated under the patronage of hardline 
conservatives in the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon 
and at the White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney.

   The ideologically driven network functioned like a shadow 
government, much of it off the official payroll and beyond 
congressional oversight. But it proved powerful enough to prevail in 
a struggle with the State Department and the CIA by establishing a 
justification for war.

   Mr Tenet has officially taken responsibility for the president's 
unsubstantiated claim in January that Saddam Hussein's regime had 
been trying to buy uranium in Africa, but he also said his agency was 
under pressure to justify a war that the administration had already 
decided on.

   How much Mr Tenet reveals of where that pressure was coming from 
could have lasting political fallout for Mr Bush and his re-election 
prospects, which only a few weeks ago seemed impregnable. As more 
Americans die in Iraq and the reasons for the war are revealed, his 
victory in 2004 no longer looks like a foregone conclusion.

   The White House counter-attacked yesterday when new chief 
spokesman, Scott McClellan, accused critics of "politicising the war" 
and trying to "rewrite history". But the Democratic leadership kept 
up its questions over the White House role.

   The president's most trusted adviser, Mr Cheney, was at the shadow 
network's sharp end. He made several trips to the CIA in Langley, 
Virginia, to demand a more "forward-leaning" interpretation of the 
threat posed by Saddam. When he was not there to make his influence 
felt, his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was. Such hands-on 
involvement in the processing of intelligence data was unprecedented 
for a vice-president in recent times, and it put pressure on CIA 
officials to come up with the appropriate results.

   Another frequent visitor was Newt Gingrich, the former Republican 
party leader who resurfaced after September 11 as a Pentagon 
"consultant" and a member of its unpaid defence advisory board, with 
influence far beyond his official title.

   An intelligence official confirmed Mr Gingrich made "a couple of 
visits" but said there was nothing unusual about that.

   Rick Tyler, Mr Gingrich's spokesman, said: "If he was at the CIA he 
was there to listen and learn, not to persuade or influence."

   Mr Gingrich visited Langley three times before the war, and 
according to accounts, the political veteran sought to browbeat 
analysts into toughening up their assessments of Saddam's menace.
   Mr Gingrich gained access to the CIA headquarters and was listened 
to because he was seen as a personal emissary of the Pentagon and, in 
particular, of the OSP.

   In the days after September 11, Mr Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul 
Wolfowitz, mounted an attempt to include Iraq in the war against 
terror. When the established agencies came up with nothing concrete 
to link Iraq and al-Qaida, the OSP was given the task of looking more 
carefully.
   William Luti, a former navy officer and ex-aide to Mr Cheney, runs 
the day-to-day operations, answering to Douglas Feith, a defence 
undersecretary and a former Reagan official.

   The OSP had access to a huge amount of raw intelligence. It came in 
part from "report officers" in the CIA's directorate of operations 
whose job is to sift through reports from agents around the world, 
filtering out the unsubstantiated and the incredible. Under pressure 
from the hawks such as Mr Cheney and Mr Gingrich, those officers 
became reluctant to discard anything, no matter how far-fetched. The 
OSP also sucked in countless tips from the Iraqi National Congress 
and other opposition groups, which were viewed with far more 
scepticism by the CIA and the state department.

   There was a mountain of documentation to look through and not much 
time. The administration wanted to use the momentum gained in 
Afghanistan to deal with Iraq once and for all. The OSP itself had 
less than 10 full-time staff, so to help deal with the load, the 
office hired scores of temporary "consultants". They included 
lawyers, congressional staffers, and policy wonks from the numerous 
rightwing thinktanks in Washington. Few had experience in 
intelligence.

   "Most of the people they had in that office were off the books, on 
personal services contracts. At one time, there were over 100 of 
them," said an intelligence source. The contracts allow a department 
to hire individuals, without specifying a job description.

   As John Pike, a defence analyst at the thinktank 
GlobalSecurity.org, put it, the contracts "are basically a way they 
could pack the room with their little friends".

   "They surveyed data and picked out what they liked," said Gregory 
Thielmann, a senior official in the state department's intelligence 
bureau until his retirement in September. "The whole thing was 
bizarre. The secretary of defence had this huge defence intelligence 
agency, and he went around it."

   In fact, the OSP's activities were a com plete mystery to the DIA 
and the Pentagon.

   "The iceberg analogy is a good one," said a senior officer who left 
the Pentagon during the planning of the Iraq war. "No one from the 
military staff heard, saw or discussed anything with them."

   The civilian agencies had the same impression of the OSP sleuths. 
"They were a pretty shadowy presence," Mr Thielmann said. "Normally 
when you compile an intelligence document, all the agencies get 
together to discuss it. The OSP was never present at any of the 
meetings I attended."

   Democratic congressman David Obey, who is investigating the OSP, 
said: "That office was charged with collecting, vetting and 
disseminating intelligence completely outside of the normal 
intelligence apparatus. In fact, it appears that information 
collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with 
established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was 
passed on to the national security council and the president without 
having been vetted with anyone other than political appointees."

   The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White 
House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to 
a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's 
office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush 
administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than 
Mossad was prepared to authorise.

   "None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon 
through normal channels," said one source familiar with the visits. 
Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith's authority without having to 
fill in the usual forms.

   The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship 
Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's 
Likud party.

   In 1996, he and Richard Perle - now an influential Pentagon figure 
- served as advisers to the then Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu. In 
a policy paper they wrote, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for 
Securing the Realm, the two advisers said that Saddam would have to 
be destroyed, and Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would have 
to be overthrown or destabilised, for Israel to be truly safe.

   The Israeli influence was revealed most clearly by a story floated 
by unnamed senior US officials in the American press, suggesting the 
reason that no banned weapons had been found in Iraq was that they 
had been smuggled into Syria. Intelligence sources say that the story 
came from the office of the Israeli prime minister.

   The OSP absorbed this heady brew of raw intelligence, rumour and 
plain disinformation and made it a "product", a prodigious stream of 
reports with a guaranteed readership in the White House. The primary 
customers were Mr Cheney, Mr Libby and their closest ideological ally 
on the national security council, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice's 
deputy.

   In turn, they leaked some of the claims to the press, and used 
others as a stick with which to beat the CIA and the state department 
analysts, demanding they investigate the OSP leads.
   The big question looming over Congress as Mr Tenet walked into his 
closed-door session yesterday was whether this shadow intelligence 
operation would survive national scrutiny and who would pay the price 
for allowing it to help steer the country into war.

   A former senior CIA official insisted yesterday that Mr Feith, at 
least, was "finished" - but that may be wishful thinking by a rival 
organisation.

   As he prepares for re-election, Mr Bush may opt to tough it out, 
rather than acknowledge the severity of the problem by firing 
loyalists. But in that case, it will inevitably be harder to 
re-establish confidence in the intelligence on which the White House 
is basing its decisions, and the world's sole superpower risks 
stumbling onwards half-blind, unable to distinguish real threats from 
phantoms.

[END]