An assiduous reader has e-mailed to enquire whether Walt thinks President-elect Trump knows what he's doing. Of particular concern (to him) is The Donald's seeming disinterest in the daily briefings to which he (TD) is entitled so that (in theory) he'll be fully in the picture when he takes over in January.
The Prez (outgoing) has already tut-tutted to the lamestream media that Mr Trump doesn't seem to be paying attention, thus may have some rude surprises in store. To this slur, the President-elect [Walt loves rubbing that in! Ed.] replies that the briefings come from the CIA and other agencies which did such a great job on the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" (WMD) file when the US invaded Iraq in 2003. What, he implies, can he learn from them that he can't hear on Fox News?
Good point! Could it be that Mr Trump has read State of Denial, by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster, 2006)? Although this post will be longer than Ed. usually allows, I want to share the last four pages or so from Chapter 25, in which the author summarizes the testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, on 28 January 2004, of Dr. David Kay, who headed the Iraq Survey Group which took over the search for WMDs in the summer of 2003. The emphasis is mine.
Kay testified..."We were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself." Kay said 85 percent of the work was done and he had no reason to believe they ever would find WMD stockpiles in Iraq. "It is important to acknowledge failure," Kay said....
[The next day Kay had lunch] with Bush, Cheney, Rice and Andy Card in a small dining room off the Oval Office. How did you reach your conclusions? Bush wanted to know. And how did U.S. intelligence miss all this?
"We missed it because the Iraqis actually behaved like they had weapons," Kay said. "And we weren't smart enough to understand that the hardest thing in intelligence is when behavior remains consistent but underlying reasons change." ...
Bush wanted to know why Kay thought Saddam hadn't just come clean on WMD long ago. Why had he risked his whole life, his government, instead of just throwing the doors open? Kay said he thought Saddam never believed the U.S. would actually invade. But more important, more than he feared the U.S.., he feared the Shiites and Kurds who lived in Iraq. He knew that they in turn feared him because they thought he had WMD.
"You know...totalitarian regimes generally end up fearing their own people more than they fear external threats. It's just the history of totalitarian regimes," Kay said. "We missed that." And, he said, they were expecially susceptible to missing it because they had so little human intelligence, and instead relied on technical collection....
"The disease of the intelligence community is this over-focus on current intelligence," meaning what was going on that week, as opposed to longer-term, strategic intelligence. "Look," he said, "
current analysis is better if you turn CNN on or read the paper. Quite frankly, the press does a better job."
"A good example of this is the PDB" -- the President's Daily Brief. "Do you understand that if you respond positively to anything in it, you're going to get nothing but that stuff for the next month of so?" The president's expression of interest put it at the top of the agenda in the intelligence community. "George [Tenet, CIA Director at the time] takes it back and it drives it and it will keep appearing. They respond to it. If you ever respond to a PDB item, it's going to be there for a very long time with more and more information." Presidential interest suggests it is important and the intelligence flow just snowballs out of control....
Bush wondered how the CIA and the U.S. intelligence could have been so wrong.
"You know, one of the problems for a director is if he's inside the political process, he loses his balance," Kay answered. "For example, George comes here every day for the briefing. And inevitably that communicates a sense of the political process to the people at the agency."...
The next day, Rice called Kay back to the White House. "There was something you said to the president that really hit a nerve," she said. She was struck by a point he'd made about how one of the hardest things to do in intelligence is discern real change, to figure out why someone keeps doing the same thing, but for different reasons....
Intelligence services [Kay said] don't do a very good job trying to understand the soft side of societies -- how well the government is working and the fundamental attitudes of the people.
Kay felt there was more than enough blame on the intelligence failures to go around. Some of it definitely fell on Rice's shoulders. Her job had been to guard the president's backside and she had not done so.
Tenet was at fault too. He had been brought in not as an intelligence professional but as a sort of big-picture leader, someone who boosted morale and rebuilt the clandestine service. He had fallen victim to his greatest weakness, Kay felt, which was a lack of affinity for the detailed drudgery of intelligence analysis.
But the real villain at CIA, Kay thought, was [Deputy Director John] McLaughlin. Tenet had made his way on the political side of the intelligence world, but McLaughlin had been with the agency for more than 30 years. He was the professional, and Kay felt he had also been the one who clung most stubbornly to the belief that Iraq had mobile biological weapons labs....
Whatever the excuses for the WMD intelligence, [McLaughlin believed], he, Tenet and the CIA had failed. Tenet would later acknowledge in private that
the CIA didn't have a leg to stand on.
That's what happens when "intelligence" is driven by a political agenda, and vice versa. Think about this week's "revelation" by the CIA that the Russians are responsible for the election of Donald Trump. Who could blame President-elect Trump for dismissing such allegations for the ridiculous rubbish they are?
