[A-List] Interview with CIA veteran (very good read!): Distribute widely

["bon moun" <sherrynstan@xxxxxxx>]

  Interview: 27-Year CIA Veteran by Will Pitt
  t r u t h o u t | Interview 
  Thursday 26 June 2003

  Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years, serving seven Presidents.
He is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity. He is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an outreach
ministry in the inner city of Washington.
-------
  PITT: Could you give me some background regarding who you are and what
work you did with the CIA?
  McG: I was a graduate student in Russian studies when I got interested
in the Central Intelligence Agency. I was very intrigued that there was
one central place to prevent what happened at Pearl Harbor from
happening again. I had been commissioned in the US Army, so I needed to
do my two years service there, but wound up down in Washington DC. I
took a job with the CIA in 1963, and it was what it was made out to be.
  In other words, I was told that if I were to come on as an analyst of
Soviet foreign policy, when I sat down in the morning, in my In-Box
would be a bunch of material from open sources, from closed sources,
from photography, from intercepts, from agent reports, from embassy
reports, you name it. It would be right there, and all I had to do was
sift through it and make some sense out of it. If I had an important
enough story, I would write it up for the President the next morning.
That seemed too good to be true, but you know what? It was true, and it
was really heady work.
  PITT: Which Presidents did you serve?
  McG: I started with President Kennedy and finished with President
Bush, the first President Bush. That would make seven Presidents.
  PITT: What was your area of expertise with the CIA?
  McG: I was a Soviet Foreign Policy analyst. I also worked on Soviet
Internal Affairs when I first came on, but then my responsibilities grew
and I became responsible for a lot of different parts of the world.
During the 1980s I was briefing the Vice President and Secretaries of
State and Defense, the Assistant to the President for National Security
Affairs, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. I did this every other
morning. We worked in teams of two, and on any given morning depending
on schedules, I would be hitting two or perhaps three of those senior
officials.
  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??
  PITT: Do you feel as though the ?truth-telling? abilities of the CIA,
the ability to come in with data without fear of reprisal or career
displacement, has been abrogated by this administration?
  McG: It has been corroded, or eroded, very much. A lot of it has to do
with who is Director. In the best days, under Colby for example, or John
McCone, we had very clear instructions. I myself, junior as I was in
those days, would go up against Henry Kissinger and tell it like we
thought it was. I was not winning any friends there, by any stretch, but
I came back proud for having done my job. That was because Colby told me
to do that, and I worked directly for him. I also worked directly for
George Bush I, and he, I have to say to his great credit, acted the same
way. He was very careful to keep himself out of policy advocacy, and he
told it like it was.
  So to watch what is going on now, and 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.
  PITT: On September 26 2001, George Bush II went down to the CIA, put
an arm around Tenet, and said that he had a ?report? for the American
people, that we have the best possible intelligence thanks to the good
people at the CIA. We?ve come a fair piece down the road since then, and
if you read through the news these days, you get the definite sense that
the Bush administration is attempting to lay blame for the fact that no
weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, to lay blame for
that at the feet of the CIA. Furthermore, by all appearances, the months
of reports the administration put out about Iraq?s weapons capabilities
are not turning out to be accurate. To no small extent, it appears that
there is a scapegoating process taking place here. What is your take on
this?
  McG: It is interesting that you would go back to September 26, because
that was a very key performance on the part of our President. Here was
an agency that was created expressly to prevent another Pearl Harbor.
That was why the CIA was created originally in 1947. Harry Truman was
hell-bent on making sure that, if there were little pieces of
information spread around the government, that they all came to one
central intelligence agency, one place where they could be collated and
analyzed, and the analysis be given to policy people.
  So here is September 11, the first time since Pearl Harbor that this
system failed. It was worse than Pearl Harbor. More people were killed
on September 11 than were killed at Pearl Harbor, and where were the
pieces? They were scattered all around the government, just like they
were before Pearl Harbor. For George Bush to go out to CIA headquarters
and put his arm around George Tenet and tell the world that we have the
best intelligence services in the world, this really called for some
analysis, if you will.
  My analysis is that George Bush had no option but to keep George Tenet
on as Director, because George Tenet had warned Bush repeatedly, for
months and months before September 11, that something very bad was about
to happen.
  PITT: There was the August 6 2001 briefing?
  McG: On August 6, the title of the briefing was, ?Bin Laden Determined
to Strike in the US,? and that briefing had the word ?Hijacking? in it.
That?s all I know about it, but that?s quite enough. In September, Bush
had to make a decision. Is it feasible to let go of Tenet, whose agency
flubbed the dub on this one? And the answer was no, because Tenet knows
too much about what Bush knew, and Bush didn?t know what to do about it.
That?s the bottom line for me.
  Bush was well-briefed. Before he went off to Texas to chop wood for a
month like Reagan did in California, he was told all these things. He
didn?t even have the presence of mind to convene his National Security
Council, and say, ?OK guys, we have all these reports, what are we going
to do about it?? He just went off to chop wood.
  PITT: Now why is that? There are people in America who believe this
kind of behavior was deliberate ? the administration was repeatedly
warned and nothing was done about those warnings. It smacks of
deliberate policy for a lot of people. This is the current World
Heavyweight Champion of conspiracy theories.
  McG: In this, I am an adherent of the charitable interpretation, and
that comes down to gross incompetence. They just didn?t know what to do.
Look at who was in charge there. You have Condoleezza Rice. She knows a
lot about Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, but she has no idea about
terrorism. She had this terrorism dossier that Clinton NSC director
Sandy Berger left behind, and by her own admission she didn?t get to it.
?It was still on my desk when September 11 happened,? she said. They
didn?t take this thing seriously.
  Now, you can probably fault George Tenet for not being careful about
crying wolf. In other words, you cry wolf often enough and in an
undifferentiated way, then that is not a real service to the President.
You really have to say, ?Mr. President, you know I warned you about this
two months ago, but now this is really serious.? You have to grab him by
the collar and say, ?We?ve got to do something about this.? Tenet didn?t
do that. So I attribute it not to conspiracy theories, but to lack of
experience, a kind of arrogance that says, ?Who cares what Sandy Berger
thinks,? and just gross incompetence.
  Now ?gross incompetence? is not a nice thing to say about a President,
but he had no experience in this at all, and the people he surrounded
himself with also had no experience.
  PITT: Given all of this ? the August 6 briefing, the other terrorism
warnings, the big hug given to Tenet by Bush on September 26, and the
fact that Tenet was kept on because he knew too much about what the Bush
administration was aware of before September 11 ? one gets the sense
that Tenet has been relegated to the position of lapdog. This is a
frightful position for the Director of CIA to occupy.
  McG: It wouldn?t be the first time, and I think regarding Tenet the
term ?lapdog,? unfortunately, is apt. For example, here were rather
courageous CIA analysts under terrific pressure from the likes of Deputy
Defense Secretary Wolfowitz to establish a contact or connection between
al Qaeda and Iraq. They resisted this ever since 9/11, not out of any
unwillingness to believe it, but simply because there was no evidence to
establish it. To their credit, they held the line, and were supported by
Brent Scowcroft of all people, who very courageously spoke out and said
that evidence is ?scant.?
  Now here?s George Tenet, when push comes to shove on February 5 at the
UN, sitting right behind Colin Powell like a potted plant, as if to say
the CIA and all his analysts agreed with what Colin Powell was about to
say about contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq. That was incredibly
demoralizing for all my colleagues. That?s the kind of thing that will
be a very noxious influence on their morale and their ability to
continue the good fight.
  PITT: Is there a great deal of unrest and unease within the CIA at
this point?
  McG: Not a great deal, but an incredible amount of unease and
disarray. There are a lot of people who feel as strongly as I do about
integrity. It was not some sort of an extra thing with us. We took it
seriously, and we had a big advantage, of course. We could tell it like
it was. To the degree that esprit de corps exists, and I know it does
among the folks we talk to, there is great, great turmoil there. 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. You need to have people rewarded for good
performance and not for political correctness. You have to have people
who are serious about collecting and analyzing this material. The way
the analysis was played fast and loose with, going back to last spring,
is just incredible. It requires a whole re-do of how the whole national
security setup is arranged, to have intelligence come up and have it
treated with the kind of respect and the kind of consideration it is
due.
  PITT: Let?s bottom-line it here. In the situation regarding the
question of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq, where does
the fault lie for the manner in which this has all broken down? Was it
an intelligence failure on the part of the CIA, or are we talking about
the Bush administration misusing both that institution and the
information it provided?
  McG: It?s both, really. Let?s take the chemical and biological stuff
first. At the root of this, as I reconstruct it, is what I call
?Analysis by Subtraction.? Let?s take a theoretical example: Iraq had
listed 50,000 liters of sarin nerve gas in 1995. The UN is known to have
destroyed 35,000 liters of this. Subsequently, US bombing destroyed
another 5,000 liters of this. Therefore, QED, they have 10,000 liters of
sarin.
  There?s no consideration given here to shelf life of sarin, what would
be necessary to keep sarin active, where it would be stored, how it
would be stored, the correct temperature and all that. Instead, it is,
?We think they had this and here is the inventory. We think we destroyed
this? or ?We know we destroyed that, and so the difference, we assume,
is there?
  You don?t start a war on an assumption, and with the sophisticated
collection devices the US intelligence apparatus has, it is
unconscionable not to have verified that so they could say, ?Yes sir, we
know that it?s there, we can confirm it this and that way.? Instead, as
I said, it was analysis by subtraction. We had the inventory here, and
we know we destroyed that, so they must have this. Analysis like that, I
wouldn?t rehire the analyst who did it if he were working for me. That?s
the biological and chemical part.
  To be quite complete on this, it encourages me that the analysts at
the Defense Intelligence Agency - who share this ethic of trying to tell
the truth, even though they are under much greater pressure and have
much less career protection because they work for Rumsfeld - to their
great credit, in September of last year they put out a memo saying there
is no reliable evidence to suggest that the Iraqis have biological or
chemical weapons, or that they are producing them.
  PITT: Was this before or after Vice President Cheney started making
personal visits to the CIA?
  McG: It was all at the same time. This stuff doesn?t all get written
in one week. It was all throughout the spring and summer that this stuff
was being collected. When the decision was made last summer that we will
have a war against Iraq, they were casting about. You?ll recall White
House Chief of Staff Andy Card saying you don?t market a new product in
August. The big blast-off was Cheney?s speech in Nashville, I think it
was Nashville anyway, on August 26. He said Iraq was seeking materials
for its nuclear program. That set the tone right there.
  They looked around after Labor Day and said, ?OK, if we?re going to
have this war, we really need to persuade Congress to vote for it. How
are we going to do that? Well, let?s do the al Qaeda-Iraq connection.
That?s the traumatic one. 9/11 is still a traumatic thing for most
Americans. Let?s do that.?
  But then they said, ?Oh damn, those folks at CIA don?t buy that, they
say there?s no evidence, and we can?t bring them around. We?ve tried
every which way and they won?t relent. That won?t work, because if we
try that, Congress is going to have these CIA wimps come down, and the
next day they?ll undercut us. How about these chemical and biological
weapons? We know they don?t have any nuclear weapons, so how about the
chemical and biological stuff? Well, damn. We have these other wimps at
the Defense Intelligence Agency, and dammit, they won?t come around
either. They say there?s no reliable evidence of that, so if we go up to
Congress with that, the next day they?ll call the DIA folks in, and the
DIA folks will undercut us.?
  So they said, ?What have we got? We?ve got those aluminum tubes!? The
aluminum tubes, you will remember, were something that came out in late
September, the 24th of September. The British and we front-paged it.
These were aluminum tubes that were said by Condoleezza Rice as soon as
the report came out to be only suitable for use in a nuclear
application. This is hardware that they had the dimensions of. So they
got that report, and the British played it up, and we played it up. It
was front page in the New York Times. Condoleezza Rice said, ?Ah ha!
These aluminum tubes are suitable only for uranium-enrichment
centrifuges.?
  Then they gave the tubes to the Department of Energy labs, and to a
person, each one of those nuclear scientists and engineers said, ?Well,
if Iraq thinks it can use these dimensions and these specifications of
aluminum tubes to build a nuclear program, let ?em do it! Let ?em do it.
It?ll never work, and we can?t believe they are so stupid. These must be
for conventional rockets.?
  And, of course, that?s what they were for, and that?s what the UN
determined they were for. So, after Condoleezza Rice?s initial foray
into this scientific area, they knew that they couldn?t make that stick,
either. So what else did they have?
  Well, somebody said, ?How about those reports earlier this year that
Iraq was trying to get Uranuim from Niger? Yeah?that was pretty good.?
But of course if George Tenet were there, he would have said, ?But we
looked at the evidence, and they?re forgeries, they stink to high
heaven.? So the question became, ?How long would it take for someone to
find out they were forgeries?? The answer was about a day or two. The
next question was, ?When do we have to show people this stuff?? The
answer was that the IAEA had been after us for a couple of months now to
give it to them, but we can probably put them off for three or four
months.
  So there it was. ?What?s the problem? We?ll take these reports, we?ll
use them to brief Congress and to raise the specter of a mushroom cloud.
You?ll recall that the President on the 7th of October said, ?Our
smoking gun could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.? Condoleezza
Rice said exactly the same thing the next day. Victoria Clarke said
exactly the same thing on the 9th of October, and of course the vote
came on the 11th of October.
  Don?t take my word for it. Take Henry Waxman?s word for it. Waxman has
written the President a very, very bitter letter dated the 17th of March
in which he says, ?Mr. President, I was lied to. I was lied to. I was
briefed on a forgery, and on the strength of that I voted for war. Tell
me how this kind of thing could happen?? That was March 17. He hasn?t
received a response from the White House yet.
  That?s the way it worked, and you have to give them credit. These guys
are really clever. It worked.
  PITT: We were talking a little while ago about Andy Card and marketing
wars in August, and 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: There was a recent Reuters report which described Powell being
given a draft of his February 5 UN statements by Scooter Libby and the
Rumsfeld boys. Powell threw it across the room, according to Reuters,
and said, ?I?m not reading this. This is bullshit.?
  McG: I can see it happening. Powell was Weinberger?s military
assistant for a couple of years, and I was seeing Weinberger every other
morning in those years. I would see Powell whenever I went in to see
Weinberger, and so I used to spend 15 minutes with him every other
morning, just kind of reassuring him that I wasn?t going to tell his
boss anything he didn?t need to know. Not only that, but we come out of
the same part of the Bronx. He was a year ahead of me. He was ROTC and
so was I. He was in ROTC at City College and became Colonel of Cadets
and head of the Pershing Rifles, a kind of elite corps there.
  I understand Colin Powell. I know where he is coming from, I know
where he got his identity and his persona, and it was in this great
institution we call the United States Army, which, by the way, I am very
proud to have served in. But that be exaggerated, and it has been in his
case. People were expecting him to take a stand on principle and resign.
That was never a possibility I attributed to Colin Powell, because
unlike General Clark, Powell is really a creature of how he was given
his identity in this whole system. He is just not constitutionally able
to buck it.
  PITT: Do you think Powell was aware that the British intelligence
dossier he used on February 5 before the UN, the one he held up and
praised lavishly, was plagiarized from a graduate student who was
writing about Iraq circa 1991?
  McG: No, I think he was unaware of that. I?ll tell you a little story.
Back in January, Colin Powell invited all the NATO countries for a
confab so he could brief them on Iraq and tell them what they should be
telling their host governments. After one of the sessions he was in the
hall, and one of the ambassadors asked him what the evidence was like on
Iraq. Powell said he didn?t know, he hadn?t seen it yet. That was
January.
  Small wonder that Powell now brags of having had to spend four days in
early February ? right before his UN speech on the 5th ? up at CIA
headquarters pouring over the evidence, analyzing and selecting what he
should say on the 5th. I can only believe he had a lot on his plate ?
the Middle East and other stuff ? and that the daily briefings were so
sparse that he really didn?t have a good handle on what the evidence was
that support this case for weapons of mass destruction and all that
stuff. It becomes more believable to me that he really was starting
almost with tabula rasa on the 1st of February, and then went up to CIA
headquarters and said, ?OK, what have we got?? And the first thing he
was given was Scooter Libby?s first draft, and you already recounted his
reaction.
  PITT: So what we have, essentially, is in the run-up to the war the
Secretary of State of the United States of America was cramming for a
major exam like a freshman in high school.
  McG: Yes. And most of the evidence was being supplied by the Vice
President?s office, in the person of Scooter Libby, and Secretary of
Defense Rumsfeld along with Wolfowitz. That?s curious enough, but an
equally important point I would make is this: I worked at senior levels
up there for 27 years. Never, never once, not one time did the Vice
President of the United States, the Secretary of State or the National
Security Advisor come up to the CIA for a working visit. Vice President
Bush came up a couple of times to give awards out ? after all, he was
once the Director ? but never for a working visit.
  We went down there. I was part of that briefing team. I would be down
there every other morning, and if they wanted more depth I would bring
folks down there with me, folks who I knew were the experts. We came to
them. We had our homework done alone, thank you very much. We got real
good insights into what the concerns were during these morning
briefings, and sometimes we got concrete requirements or papers to be
done by the next day. We had a really good window into what was
uppermost in policy-maker?s minds, but we would take that back to CIA
headquarters and say, ?OK, now we know what they?re interested in. What
to we have?? And we?d do it alone. We?d analyze the heck out of it. We?d
polish it off, pass it by our supervisors and bring it down the next
morning.
  The prospect of the Secretary of State and Condoleezza Rice and Cheney
convening in CIA headquarters to sit around a table and help with the
analysis?give me a break! You don?t have policy-makers at the table when
you?re doing analysis. That?s antithetical to the whole ethic of
analysis. You?re divorced from policy as soon as you do your analysis,
and when you?re finished, you serve it up to them, and they can do what
they want with it. To be sure, that?s the other part of the game. But
when they get it, they get it in unexpurgated virgin form, and that was
heady and important work. It was the only place in town, in the Foreign
Affairs realm, that could and did do that work.
  PITT: Where do you see this whole issue of the manner in which the war
was sold to the American people going?
  McG: The most important and clear-cut scandal, of course, has to do
with the forgery of those Niger nuclear documents that were used as
proof. The very cold calculation was that Congress could be deceived, we
could have our war, we could win it, and then no one would care that
part of the evidence for war was forged. That may still prove to be the
case, but the most encouraging thing I?ve seen over the last four weeks
now is that the US press has sort of woken from its slumber and is
interested. I?ve asked people in the press how they account for their
lack of interest before the war, and now they seem to be interested. I
guess the simple answer is that they don?t like to be lied to.
  I think the real difference is that no one knew, or very few people
knew, before the war that there weren?t any weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq. Now they know. It?s an unavoidable fact. No one likes to be
conned, no one likes to be lied to, and no one particularly likes that
190 US servicemen and women have been killed in this effort, not to
mentioned the five or six thousand Iraqi civilians.
  There?s a difference in tone. If the press does not succumb to the
argument put out by folks like Tom Friedman, who says it doesn?t really
matter that there are no weapons in Iraq, if it does become a quagmire
which I believe it will be, and we have a few servicemen killed every
week, then there is a prospect that the American people will wake up and
say, ?Tell me again why my son was killed? Why did we have to make this
war on Iraq??
  So I do think that there is some hope now that the truth will come
out. It won?t come out through the Congressional committees. That?s
really a joke, a sick joke.
  PITT: During the Clinton administration, if there was going to be an
investigation into something, it was going to come out of the House of
Representatives. What would your assessment of the situation be at this
point?
  McG: It doesn?t take a crackerjack analyst. Take Pat Roberts, the
Republican Senator from Kansas, who is chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee. When the Niger forgery was unearthed and when
Colin Powell admitted, well shucks, it was a forgery, Senator Jay
Rockefellar, the ranking Democrat on that committee, went to Pat Roberts
and said they really needed the FBI to take a look at this. After all,
this was known to be a forgery and was still used on Congressmen and
Senators. We?d better get the Bureau in on this. Pat Roberts said no,
that would be inappropriate. So Rockefellar drafted his own letter, and
went back to Roberts and said he was going to send the letter to FBI
Director Mueller, and asked if Roberts would sign on to it. Roberts said
no, that would be inappropriate.
  What the FBI Director eventually got was a letter from one Minority
member saying pretty please, would you maybe take a look at what
happened here, because we think there may have been some skullduggery.
The answer he got from the Bureau was a brush-off. Why do I mention all
that? This is the same Pat Roberts who is going to lead the
investigation into what happened with this issue.
  There is a lot that could be said about Pat Roberts. I remember way
back last fall when people were being briefed, CIA and others were
briefing Congressmen and Senators about the weapons of mass destruction.
These press folks were hanging around outside the briefing room, and
when the Senators came out, one of the press asked Senator Roberts how
the evidence on weapons of mass destruction was. Roberts said, oh, it
was very persuasive, very persuasive.
  The press guy asked Roberts to tell him more about that. Roberts said,
?Truck A was observed to be going under Shed B, where Process C is
believed to be taking place.? The press guy asked him if he found that
persuasive, and Pat Roberts said, ?Oh, these intelligence folks, they
have these techniques down so well, so yeah, this is very persuasive.?
And the correspondent said thank you very much, Senator.
  So, if you?ve got a Senator who is that inclined to believe that kind
of intelligence, you?ve got someone who will do the administration?s
bidding. On the House side, of course, you?ve got Porter Goss, who is a
CIA alumnus. Porter Goss? main contribution last year to the joint
committee investigating 9/11 was to sic the FBI on members of that
committee, at the direction of who? Dick Cheney. Goss admits this. He
got a call from Dick Cheney, and he was ?chagrined? in Goss? word that
he was upbraided by Dick Cheney for leaks coming out of the committee.
He then persuaded the innocent Bob Graham to go with him to the FBI and
ask the Bureau to investigate the members of that committee. Polygraphs
and everything were involved. That?s the first time something like that
has ever happened.
  Be aware, of course, that Congress has its own investigative agencies,
its own ways of investigating things like that. So without any regard
for the separation of powers, here Goss says Cheney is bearing down on
me, so let?s get the FBI in here. In this case, ironically enough, the
FBI jumped right in with Ashcroft whipping it along. They didn?t come up
with much, but the precedent was just terrible.
  All I?m saying is that you?ve got Porter Goss on the House side,
you?ve got Pat Roberts on the Senate side, you?ve got John Warner who?s
a piece with Pat Roberts. I?m very reluctant to be so unequivocal, but
in this case I can say nothing is going to come out of those hearings
but a lot of smoke.
  PITT: So what is the alternative?
  McG: The alternative would be an independent judicial commission, such
as the one that a lot of the British are appealing for in London. You
get a person who is not beholden to George Bush or to the Democrats, a
universally respected figure, and let him pick the members of the
commission, and you give them access to this material. Not restricted
access, like what the 9/11 committee in Congress got. You give them
everything, and you let them tell their story. It would take a while,
but they would come up with a much better prospect of a fair judgment on
what happened.
  PITT: That?s not going to come unless there is some pretty significant
pressure put on the administration from outside Congress.
  McG: I wouldn?t see that coming at all, and surely not before 2004.
  PITT: In your time at CIA as a Soviet Foreign Policy analyst, you were
directly involved with analyzing Soviet policy issues in the run-up to
and duration of the Soviet war in Afghanistan?
  McG: Yes.
  PITT: How deep into the details of that did you get?
  McG: Oh, quite deep. By that time my responsibilities had grown, and I
stayed very interested and abreast of what was going on there.
  PITT: Could you talk about how America?s involvement in the Soviet war
in Afghanistan led to the events of September 11? There are some very
clear, straight-line connections ? starting with Brzyznski?s ?Afghan
Trap? in 1978 - between the two events, yes? From your perspective, how
did that develop?
  McG: The big momentum was put on by a fellow named William Casey, who
was head of CIA under Reagan. He saw this as a little war that he could
wage and win, and he had a lot of support from folks on the Hill. What
they did was arm and recruit folks like Osama bin Laden and others. One
of the big decisions they had to make was whether or not to give them
Stinger missiles. I remember when that was under discussion. The dangers
of giving these uncontrollable folks Stinger missiles was emphasized,
but the decision was to go ahead and give them those missiles anyway. In
many respects, the folks that were used as our proxies in this war
against the Soviets have come back to bite us, and to bite us very hard
as we know from 9/11.
  PITT: The invasion came in 1979 because the Soviets were worried about
their puppet regime in Afghanistan. It became a great Muslim cause to
defend Afghanistan against the godless invaders. Osama bin Laden became
a hero by funding this fight, and by fighting along with the others.
When the war ended in 1989, when the Soviets withdrew with their tail
between their legs, Afghanistan was left in an utterly shattered and
destroyed state. Given the fact that we basically precipitated the start
of that war by arming and training those mujeheddin fighters to go after
the Afghan government in 1978 and 1979, 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. The Kurds are one example. We
use them and betray them, and we don?t care much once our little
geopolitical objective has been achieved. That?s what was in play here.
Nobody gave a damn. 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.
  In addition, these bad guys were our good guys. Osama bin Laden and
all those folks were people we armed and trained, and when you get that
close ? and this is a systemic problem within the Agency ? when you get
that close so that you?re in bed with these guys, you can?t step back
and say, ?Whoa, wait a second. These guys could be a real danger in the
future.? You can?t make a calculated, dispassionate analysis of what
might be in store for these guys. It was a poor situation politically,
strategically, and as it turned out, analytically as well.
  PITT: What we?re talking about is actions and consequences. At the
time, there was not a lot of concern for Afghanistan after we had
achieved our goals there, and the place was left to fester, and 9/11
became the inevitable consequence of that.
  McG: Right.
  PITT: Are you aware of the situation surrounding John O?Neill? He was
a Deputy Director of the FBI, and was the chief bin Laden hunter. He
investigated the first Twin Towers bombing, he investigated the Khobar
Towers bombing, he investigated the bombing of our embassies in Africa,
and he investigated the bombing of the USS Cole. He was the guy in
government who knew everything about bin Laden, and he quit the FBI in
protest three weeks before 9/11. He quit because he said he was not
being allowed to investigate terror connections to Saudi Arabia, because
such investigations threatened the petroleum business we do with that
nation. O?Neill quit, took a job as chief of security at the World Trade
Center, and died doing his job on September 11. The fact that he was
thwarted in his terrorism investigations clearly left a hole in our
intelligence capabilities regarding these threats ? the guy who knew the
most about it was not allowed to pursue those connections to the
greatest possible degree.
  McG: I am aware of that. There are other FBI folks who have spoken out
about this same problem. There is an agent from Chicago named Robert
Wright who has spoken out about his being hamstrung in his attempts to
investigate these matters. Just read the book about the FBI labs that
was written by Warren and Kelley. The corruption and deceit that goes on
there, and the headquarters mentality where you can be completely
incompetent and still get a Presidential award ? which is what happened
with the fellow who squashed the Minneapolis Bureau?s requests for
action against Moussaoui ? there?s something really insidiously wrong
there. The problem is that if you ask Pat Roberts or the Judiciary
Committee and the Congress to do something about it, well, lots of luck.
  PITT: Is there anything else you would like to touch upon before we
are finished?
  McG: 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. That seems
to me to be something that needs to be borne in mind, that needs to be
held up for everyone to see. If an informed public, and by extension an
informed Congress, is the necessary bedrock for democracy, then we?ve
got a split bedrock that is in bad need of repair.
  I have done a good bit of research here, and one of the conclusions I
have come to is that Vice President Cheney was not only interested in
?helping out? with the analysis, let us say, that CIA was producing on
Iraq. He was interested also in fashioning evidence that he could use as
proof that, as he said, ?The Iraqis had reconstituted their nuclear
program,? which demonstrably they had not.
  What I?m saying is that this needs to be investigated. We know that it
was Dick Cheney who sent the former US ambassador to Niger to
investigate. We know he was told in early March of last year that the
documents were forgeries. And yet these same documents were used in that
application. That is something that needs to be uncovered. We need to
pursue why the Vice President allowed that to happen. To have global
reporters like Walter Pincus quoting senior administration officials
that Vice President Cheney was not told by CIA about the findings of
this former US ambassador strains credulity well beyond the breaking
point. Cheney commissioned this trip, and when the fellow came back, he
said, ?Don?t tell me, I don?t want to know what happened.? That?s just
ridiculous.
  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. As the first President Bush said about the
invasion of Kuwait, this cannot stand.
  One other thing I?d like to note is the anomaly that President Bush
has succeeded Saddam Hussein in the role of preventing UN inspectors
from coming into Iraq. He has not even been asked why.
  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. Don?t come in here. That
needs to be brought out. For the UN to be waiting with those inspectors
at the ready, there has got to be some reason why the United States
won?t let them back in.
  The more sinister interpretation is that the US wants to be able to
plant weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Now, most people will say,
?Come on, McGovern. How are you going to get a SCUD in there without
everyone seeing it?? It doesn?t have to be a SCUD. 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, and President Bush, with more credibility than he could with
those trailers will say, ?Ha! We?ve found the weapons of mass
destruction.?
  I think that?s a possibility, a real possibility. I think that, since
it is a real possibility, the Democrats? sheepishness on this, their
reluctance to get out on a limb and say there are no weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq, may be more explainable. But they should come
around anyway.
  PITT: I have heard that it is difficult to manufacture Iraqi-style
weapons of this type, because the Iraqi chemical and biological weapons
have a particular signature created in their inception that is hard to
duplicate.
  McG: It was very difficult to do the forgery, too. A slipshod job was
done. When Colin Powell was asked about it , he said, ?We have this
information. If it is inaccurate, fine.? Like I said before, he and I
come out of the same part of the Bronx. He went to Army charm school and
I did not. That kind of tone, that kind of attitude, was always
accompanied by an obscene gesture and a four-letter word where I came
from. But that?s the attitude.
  If they can take that kind of attitude on a forgery, they can take the
same attitude on this. ?You can believe who you want,? they?ll say. ?You
can believe Hans Blix and Saddam Hussein, or you can believe us. We say
we found it there.?
  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.

William Rivers Pitt william.pitt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx is a New York Times
best-selling author of two books - "War On Iraq" available now from
Context Books, and "The Greatest Sedition is Silence," now available
from Pluto Press at www.SilenceIsSedition.com.