Salon - The Demoralized and Furious Spies

"We're hearing from dozens of [intelligence] people. A lot of them are very demoralized," says Ray McGovern, a 27-year CIA veteran who worked as an agency analyst under seven presidents, from Kennedy to the first President Bush. "The cardinal sin in this business is to cook intelligence to the recipe of high policy," he says.

The White House has scrambled to lay the blame on the CIA's doorstep, but McGovern, though he has no love for Tenet, says Tenet is only one part of a much larger problem -- one that ultimately extends into the upper reaches of the Pentagon and the White House. Although Tenet formally took responsibility for including the faulty Niger-uranium data in a crucial National Intelligence Estimate report in September 2002, McGovern says it's Condoleezza Rice who is ultimately responsible for the intelligence information that makes it into the president's State of the Union address. Nor does the buck stop with Rice: The pressure to cook the books came from the top and pervaded the administration. McGovern believes that only the White House and the vice president's office could exert the kind of intense pressure necessary to cement bogus intelligence information into the ultimately authoritative NIE report -- and keep it there through the string of drafts leading up to a prime-time presidential speech.

By distorting the truth and corrupting America's intel system, says McGovern, spineless agency leaders and a White House with its finger on the scales have not just demoralized the CIA and other agencies, they have thrown the nation into considerable danger. Without an intelligence community that's consistently motivated to serve up objective information, "the president has nowhere to turn to find out real answers," he says.

The administration knew long before the war that the Iraq-Niger connection was bogus -- it was struck from the speech Bush gave in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002. Given your knowledge of the CIA's inner workings, how could something so flagrant possibly make it into a presidential State of the Union address three months later?

Condoleezza Rice has actually told us how it happened. Her explanation says the evidence was in the National Intelligence Estimate prepared last August and September on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- which is true. The NIE is by far the most authoritative pronouncement, not only by the CIA, but by the entire intelligence community. It's very carefully done. This story about Iraq trying to get uranium from Niger was in there -- this was evidence long since disproved, and yet someone insisted it be included in the document. The State Department was so shocked by this, they put in a footnote saying that in their view, the information was garbage. Rice says the footnote appeared on Page 55 or something like that, so that nobody paid any attention to it.

So the real question is, how did that information get into the NIE last fall? The reality is that the vice president's office knew that it was spurious -- but the vice president had led the charge on Aug. 26, saying Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, and there wasn't a shred of evidence of that. So they dusted off this forgery and peddled it on the Hill to get Congress to vote for war. Since the NIE was in progress at that time, they insisted it be included despite [objections] at the State Department and the Department of Energy.

So around Christmastime, here's this drafter of the State of the Union speech, whom Condoleezza Rice instructs to draft a couple of paragraphs about WMD in Iraq, and the drafter says, "Where do I get that?" and she says, "Well, consult the NIE." So the damage had already been done with the NIE report itself. Condi should've known better with this. The key question is, who allowed it to stand in that report? It's exactly the kind of pressure that folks who are malleable managers do not have the guts to resist. The senior person in charge of the NIE bowed to the pressure that came from the White House, and presumably from the vice president's office, so that the report would support what the vice president had already said. Cheney set the terms on Aug. 26, and who's going to come out with a report that says otherwise?

In the old days, that's exactly what we would've done, and we'd be persona non grata in the vice president's office. Not so anymore.