Prologue: The Secret History
President George W. Bush angrily hung up the telephone, emphatically ending a tense conversation with his father, the former president of the United States, George Herbert Walker Bush.
It was 2003, and the argument between the forty-first and forty-third presidents of the United States was the culmination of a prolonged, if very secret, period of friction between the father and son. While the exact details of the conversation are known only to the two men, several highly placed sources say that the argument was related to the misgivings Bush's father felt at the time about the way in which George W. Bush was running his administration. George Herbert Walker Bush was disturbed that his son was allowing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and a cadre of neoconservative ideologues to exert broad influence over foreign policy, particularly concerning Iraq, and that he seemed to be tuning out the advice of moderates, including Secretary of State Colin Powell. In other words, George Bush's own father privately shared some of the same concerns that were being voiced at the time by his son's public critics.
Later, the president called his father back and apologized for hanging up on him, and no permanent rift developed, according to sources familiar with the incident.
Yet the father-son argument underscores the degree to which the presidency of George W. Bush has marked a radical departure from the centrist traditions of U.S. foreign policy, embodied by his father. Since World War Two, foreign policy and national security have been areas in which American presidents of both parties have tended toward cautious pragmatism. On issues of war and peace, both liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans have in the past recognized that the stakes were too high to risk sudden and impetuous actions based on politics or ideology. Even presidents with strong visions of America's place in the world -- Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy -- moved slowly and deliberately before taking actions that might place American soldiers in harm's way. The United States was supposed to be slow to anger.
George Herbert Walker Bush grew up within that tradition and embraced it as president. When he went to war against Iraq in 1991, he did so only after Saddam Hussein invaded neighboring Kuwait, and only after gaining the broad support of an international coalition. After liberating Kuwait -- the sole stated objective of that war -- the elder Bush halted American troops rather than march toward Baghdad to topple Saddam.
George W. Bush was elected by voters who expected a repeat of the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush. He reinforced that belief when he said, at a campaign debate in October 2000, that he planned to pursue a "humble" foreign policy: "If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us; if we're a humble nation, but strong, they'll welcome us."
But after 9/11, George W. Bush parted ways with the traditions of his father, and that decision has had consequences that are still playing themselves out. Above all, it has led to a disturbing breakdown of the checks and balances within the executive branch of the United States government. Among the consequences: a new domestic spying program, a narco-state in Afghanistan, and chaos in Iraq.
The National Security Council (NSC) at the White House, created during the Cold War to manage the enormous military, intelligence, and foreign policy apparatus of the U.S. government, has been weak and dysfunctional in the Bush administration, according to many officials who have served in the administration. As national security advisor during Bush's first term, Condoleezza Rice had an excellent personal relationship with the president but lacked sufficient power and authority to get crucial things done. Foreign policy was often forged by small groups in unlikely places, including the Office of the Vice President and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Rice was forced to play catch-up and to accept professional indignities, particularly at the hands of Donald Rumsfeld. Some of her chagrined aides believe others in her place would have resigned. Her loyalty was rewarded, however, when Bush named her Secretary of State at the start of his second term.
In many cases, policies weren't debated at all. There never was a formal meeting of all of the president's senior advisors to debate and decide whether to invade Iraq, according to a senior administration source. And the most fateful decision of the postinvasion period -- the move by American proconsul L. Paul Bremer to disband the Iraqi army -- may have been made without President Bush's advance knowledge, according to a senior White House source. The well-placed source said he is virtually certain that the president did not know of the decision before it was taken. The action, almost certainly coordinated with Rumsfeld, contradicted the recommendations of an interagency planning group chaired by the National Security Council.
The absence of effective management has been the defining characteristic of the Bush administration's foreign policy and has allowed radical decisions to take effect rapidly with minimal review.
The ease with which the Bush administration has been able to overcome bureaucratic resistance throughout the government has revealed the weaknesses of both the military's officer corps and the nation's intelligence community. In very different ways, the army and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have traditionally served as gravitational forces supporting the status quo. Dominated by career professionals, both institutions abhor sudden change and tend to force policy toward the middle.
But under Bush, the army and the CIA have failed to put up much of a bureaucratic fight, despite deep anger and frustration within their ranks over the administration's conduct of national security policy. The docility of the American officer corps is particularly striking. One senior administration source notes that during his visits to Iraq, he invariably heard American commanders complain about such problems as the lack of sufficient troops. But during meetings and videoconferences with Bush and Rumsfeld in which this source participated, those same senior military commanders would not voice their complaints. Their silence in the face of authority allowed the White House to state publicly that U.S. commanders in the field were satisfied with the resources at their disposal and that they had never requested additional troops for Iraq.
No other institution failed in its mission as completely during the Bush years as did the CIA. It was already deeply troubled by the time he took office in 2001 (as one rogue operation from 2000, recounted here, attests). By the end of Bush's first term, the CIA looked like the government's equivalent of Enron, an organization whose bankruptcy triggered cries for reform.
It takes only a little more than one decade's worth of history to understand how the CIA found itself, in the period before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, producing what amounted to White House talking points rather than independent and disciplined intelligence reports. The roots of the CIA's corruption can be traced back to the end of the Cold War.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the CIA's original mission ended. The agency had been created in 1947 for a singular purpose, to wage war against Soviet Communism, and for generations of CIA officers all other issues had been secondary.
The post-Cold War era dawned with critics charging that the CIA had overstated the Soviet threat and questioning whether an agency that had been surprised by the fall of the Berlin Wall had become obsolete. The Clinton administration and Congress soon began slashing the intelligence budget in search of a peace dividend, and Bill Clinton showed almost no interest in intelligence matters. His first CIA director, James Woolsey, felt so isolated from the president and the rest of the administration that he lasted barely two years.
In the midst of this public reassessment of the agency's role in the new era, CIA officer Aldrich Ames was arrested as a Russian spy in 1994, triggering an acrimonious period of mole hunting and finger pointing and setting the agency further back on its heels. Senior CIA officers began heading for the exits en masse. Over a three- or four-year period in the early to mid-1990s, virtually an entire generation of CIA officers -- the people who had won the Cold War -- quit or retired. One CIA veteran compared the agency to an airline that had lost all of its senior pilots.
The brief but bitter tenure of CIA director John M. Deutch only hastened the agency's fall. When he arrived at the CIA in 1995, Deutch made no secret of the fact that he didn't want the job and that he had only accepted the post in the belief that President Clinton would later reward him by naming him secretary of defense. Unable to mask his dislike for the CIA, he quickly alienated a crucial constituency -- the Directorate of Operations (DO), the agency's clandestine service. His decision to fire senior officers over a scandal in Guatemala may have been sound management practice, but it led to an open rebellion within the DO, from which he never fully recovered. Morale plunged to new lows, and the agency became paralyzed by an aversion to high-risk espionage operations for fear they would lead to political flaps. Less willing to take big risks, the CIA was less able to recruit spies in dangerous places such as Iraq.
At the same time, the CIA tried to answer public questions about its post-Cold War mission by taking on a series of new problems, including nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and international narcotics trafficking. There would be new "rogue states" to track -- North Korea, Iraq, Iran -- and regional conflicts to contain in places such as the former Yugoslavia.
Woolsey liked to say that the CIA had fought a dragon for forty years but now faced lots of poisonous snakes; an array of smaller problems, rather than one big threat. But these were parallel missions. The CIA no longer had a single focus. And it would soon become obvious that the CIA was not particularly good at multitasking.
In the absence of one overriding priority like the Soviet Union, it became much more tempting for CIA management to shift resources from one target to another, depending on the interests and even the whims of the administration in power. Thanks to Vice President Al Gore, for example, the CIA briefly made the global environment one of its priorities.
More broadly, the growth of cable news networks and later the Internet intensified the pressures on policy makers to respond to the crisis of the moment, and policy makers, in turn, pressured the CIA. Sometimes these whims changed daily. Long-term research and in-depth analysis suffered as CIA managers and analysts became fixated on the race to get late-breaking tidbits of intelligence into the President's Daily Brief. To get ahead, analysts learned, they had to master the trick of writing quick, short reports that would grab the attention of top policy makers. CIA analysts had become the classified equivalent of television reporters, rather than college professors. The result was that fewer analysts were taking the time to go back and challenge basic assumptions.
"If I had to point to one specific problem that explains why we are doing such a bad job on intelligence, it is this almost single-minded focus on current reporting," observes Carl Ford, a former CIA analyst and former chief of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department. In the 1970s, Ford adds, 70 percent to 80 percent of CIA analysts spent their time doing basic research on key topics; today, about 90 percent of analysts do nothing but current reporting. "Analysts today are looking at intelligence coming in and then writing what they think about it, but they have no depth of knowledge to determine whether the current intelligence is correct. There are very few people left in the intelligence community who even remember how to do basic research."
George Tenet walked into this dangerous mix when he became Deutch's accidental successor in 1997. When Deutch resigned at the end of 1996, Clinton's first choice to take over at the CIA was Tony Lake, his national security advisor during his first term. But Lake's nomination succumbed to the Republican-controlled Senate, where he was considered too liberal and too close to Clinton. After Lake withdrew, Clinton turned to Tenet almost by default. Tenet had been serving as Deutch's deputy, had earlier worked on intelligence policy at the White House, and before that had served as staff director of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. His time on Capitol Hill meant that he had the most important asset that Clinton was looking for at the time: George Tenet was confirmable.
In the space of just a few years, Tenet's career had soared from Senate staffer to leader of the American intelligence community, and he was determined not to repeat the mistakes of his predecessors. Woolsey had failed because he had no relationship with the president; Deutch had failed because he alienated the clandestine service. Tenet would devote himself to courting the Oval Office and the Directorate of Operations.
In many ways, Tenet was a fine peacetime DCI. He worked hard to rebuild the shattered morale of the CIA while lobbying Congress and the White House to increase the agency's budget. He dispelled the poisonous climate of the Deutch years and won plaudits by bringing back a legendary Cold Warrior, Jack G. Downing, to run the Directorate of Operations in a bid to return the DO to its espionage roots.
But as one former CIA officer noted, Tenet was a great cheerleader, not a great leader, and while he rebuilt budgets and morale, the structural weaknesses of the U.S. intelligence community were not addressed. The failure to deal with hard management problems during peacetime would come back to haunt Tenet when a new administration, one with a harder edge and a much greater interest in intelligence, came into office.
In hindsight, even many of Tenet's admirers and associates believe he should have quit the CIA when Bill Clinton left office. He could have left with his reputation untainted by 9/11 and the hunt for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and would have been remembered as the man who turned the CIA around. Tenet might also be remembered for the displays of refreshing bluntness that he exhibited early in his time at the CIA, even at a personal cost.
When, for instance, President Clinton considered commuting the sentence of convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard in order to win Israeli concessions in the Middle East peace negotiations, Tenet told Clinton he would quit if Pollard were released. Clinton backed down. And in May 1998, when the CIA was caught by surprise by India's testing of a nuclear bomb, Tenet had to deal with the consequences of the first major intelligence failure to occur on his watch. As soon as the news broke, Tenet talked by phone with Senator Richard C. Shelby, the wily Alabama Republican who was the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
"George, what happened?" Shelby asked.
"Senator," Tenet replied, "we didn't have a clue."
Tenet's blunt comment deeply troubled Shelby, and the senator would later say that it was that conversation that marked the start of his concerns about Tenet's management of the CIA. Shelby would later emerge as Tenet's most vocal critic.
Tenet's comments were painfully honest. In later years, in fact, "We don't have a clue," or words to that effect, might have served George Tenet well.
Throughout the Bush years, the United States has confronted what amounts to an ill-formed yet global Sunni Muslim insurgency, one that has evolved and expanded far beyond the original al Qaeda terrorist network that attacked New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Europe, the Middle East, and southeast Asia, Islamist terrorism has been growing ever more deadly.
The fundamental political question facing Washington is whether or not President Bush's policies have made terrorism worse, by failing to deliver a knockout blow to al Qaeda when he had the chance, and by subsequently deepening the antagonism toward the United States within the Sunni Arab world with his handling of Iraq. It is becoming painfully clear that the number of young Muslims willing to strap on explosives is growing faster than the ability of the United States and its allies to capture and kill them. It sometimes seems as if the Bush administration is fighting the birthrate of the entire Arab world.
Bush's supporters rightly point to a new yearning for democratic reform that has begun to sweep through the Middle East. President Bush certainly deserves credit for making the spread of democracy a centerpiece of his agenda. Eventually, the president's ambitious dream may turn out to be right -- perhaps the war in Iraq will turn out to have been the event that broke the decades-long political stagnation in the Arab world. Perhaps that, in turn, will lead to progress in Arab-Israeli relations and a broader sense of hopefulness that will compete with extremism and terror.
In effect, Bush has taken an enormous gamble with American policy in the Arab world -- and with the lives of American soldiers. He has placed a bet that the popular desire for democracy triggered by the toppling of Saddam Hussein will outpace the rise of Islamic extremism, which has been stoked in part by that same American invasion of Iraq. Bush has unleashed so many competing forces in the Middle East that no one can safely predict the outcome.
These questions may not be answered for years, and they may provide history's ultimate judgment of George W. Bush. Some of the short-term effects of his presidency, however, are now coming into view.
Underneath that broad arc of global events, there is a secret history of the CIA and the Bush administration both before and especially after 9/11. It is a cautionary tale, one that shows how the most covert tools of American national security policy have been misused. It involves domestic spying, abuse of power, and outrageous operations. It is a tale that can only now begin to be told.
Copyright © 2006 by James Risen
Continues...
Excerpted from State of War by James Risen Copyright © 2006 by James Risen. Excerpted by permission.
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