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Cheney vs. The CIA
by Mel Goodman
DICK CHENEY vs. THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

Dick Cheney’s principal aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, has been indicted and forced to resign, but the vice president hasn’t said anything. Then again, he rarely does. For the past thirty years, Cheney has been wreaking havoc on America’s national security policy and working to politicize the intelligence assessments of the CIA, but his work has been conducted from the shadows. During this period, Cheney has surrounded himself with hard-liners who share his view of national security policy and his hostility toward the Central Intelligence Agency.

Thirty years ago, Cheney became President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, and his close colleague, Donald Rumsfeld, became the secretary of defense. The two men had a clear security agenda to reverse the moderate policies of President Richard Nixon. This required weakening the negotiating powers of Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, ending arms control and disarmament negotiations with the Soviet Union, slowing the pace of détente with the Kremlin, and ending the dialogue with China. Cheney and Rumsfeld also targeted the CIA, believing that the agency was not being responsive to their foreign policy concerns and that the CIA’s intelligence assessments on the Soviet Union were far too moderate. They were successful in implementing their agenda.

Cheney and Rumsfeld were instrumental in imposing a team of right-wing ideologues onto the CIA in an effort to push the agency’s analysis on Soviet military developments far to the right, charging that the agency “significantly understated the threat of the Soviet military buildup.” The exercise, which began in 1976, was known as the Team A/Team B Exercise. Team A consisted of the analytical cadre at the CIA who worked on Soviet strategic assessments. Team B included such ideologues as Harvard Professor Richard Pipes, William Van Cleve, Paul Wolfowitz, and retired general Daniel Graham. CIA director William Colby refused to accept Team B because of its ideological makeup; his successor, George H.W. Bush, however, was willing to allow the exercise to take place.

Near the end of President George H.W. Bush’s first term, Secretary of Defense Cheney and his two top aides, Wolfowitz and Libby, prepared a draft of the “Defense Planning Guidance,” which emphasized unilateralism and preemptive attack. Written after the Gulf War of 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the document defended the preemptive use of force against states suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction and downplayed the role of arms control. Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Libby were administration critics of the decision to stop the Gulf War before an invasion of Iraq, which was supported by President Bush, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Colin Powell.

Rumsfeld and Libby were also involved in the preparation of a report that overstated the ballistic missile threat in 1998. It was used by the Bush administration in 2002 to justify the construction of a flawed national missile defense and the abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Rumsfeld and Libby also persuaded the CIA to prepare a national intelligence estimate that matched the worst-case assumptions of the Rumsfeld Commission. Just as Team B was largely successful in pushing CIA’s analysis on the Soviet strategic threat to the right, Rumsfeld and Libby did the same with CIA’s work on the challenge of ballistic missiles. On both occasions, CIA senior analysts were intimidated by the influence of right-wing ideologues, with CIA directors Bush and George Tenet permitting the politicization of intelligence to take place.

The next major move against the CIA took place before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when a group of Cheney’s former aides established a special unit in the Pentagon, the Office of Special Plans (OSP). This office prepared intelligence assessments that the CIA would not endorse, charging the Iraq was trying to reconstitute its nuclear weapons capabilities and had developed strong ties with al Qaeda. These specious assessments allowed President Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice to warn that the “smoking gun must not be a nuclear cloud.” The OSP and the White House Iraq Group also used forged intelligence to make this assertion, despite CIA’s efforts to get the phony claim out of the president’s speech in Ohio in October 2002 (successfully) and the State of the Union speech in January 2003 (unsuccessfully). The OSP “cooked the books” on intelligence for the Iraq War, reminiscent of the role of the National Security Council and the CIA during the Iran-contra crisis in the Reagan administration.

In the wake of the indictments against Libby, Cheney continues to surround himself with protégés who believe that the CIA has tried to undermine the national security policy of the vice president, particularly his case for war against Iraq. Libby’s portfolios have been given to David Addington and John Hannah who have worked with Cheney for the past fifteen years and share his worldview. Both men were questioned for the Libby indictment and presumably would have to testify in any Libby trial. Thus we may eventually learn more about the role of Cheney and his minions in taking the country to war against Iraq and whether a forged intelligence document was at the center of the campaign.

The charges of perjury and obstruction against Libby are serious and substantial, but barely touch on the bad blood that exists between the Bush administration and the CIA. Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald made no attempt, morever, to examine the role of forged intelligence in the case for war, and the CIA has never conducted a counter-intelligence investigation of the damage done by the phony document alleging that Saddam Hussein was trying to obtain uranium from Niger. Similarly, the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Pat Roberts (R-KS) has blocked the committee from examining the White House’s use of CIA intelligence to make the case for going to war. If the executive and legislative branches cannot conduct a genuine inquiry into the misuse of intelligence, then it will be necessary to use public tribunals to review the way the United States went to war.

We need such a study because of the danger of going to war under false pretenses. We need a counter-intelligence investigation in the United States to reveal how a forged document was used to make the case for war, who produced this document, how did it move through the intelligence community to reach the president of the United States, when did the community and the executive branch become aware that the document was a fabrication, and did the president, the vice president, the secretary of defense, and the national security adviser wittingly use a forgery to make a case for war and gain a congressional resolution that would permit the use of force against Iraq.

Fitzgerald has given us an excellent chronology on the maneuverings of Scooter Libby against former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame. Now we need a similar chronology on the tortuous path of tailored intelligence. We waited 40 years to learn that the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was based on politicized intelligence that took us into a tragic war against Vietnam. We don’t want to wait 40 years to learn how a forged document took us into an equally tragic war against Iraq.

Melvin A. Goodman, a former senior analyst at the CIA, is senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. He is the author of the forthcoming “The Decline and Fall of the CIA.”