Jan. 13, 2006 – 8:28 p.m.
Every so often, the decibel levels on Washington’s politico-media cocktail circuit tick into the red over a book that, it turns out, few people have actually read.
That seems to be the case with James Risen’s “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush administration.”
Most of the chatter focuses on the book’s blockbuster finding, first disclosed on the front page of Risen’s employer, The New York Times: that the National Security Agency (NSA), an arm of the Pentagon, has been carrying out domestic telephone intercepts without warrants. This practice is, depending on your point of view, either justified in these terror-stricken times, or a gross violation of U.S. law and presidential assurances to the contrary.
Yet the book also delivers other revelations about U.S. intelligence that equally merit the attention the book has garnered so far. Getting far less discussion, for example, is Risen’s hair-raising account of how the CIA inadvertently supplied Iran with nuclear bomb secrets (the CIA, it should be noted, now says the work contains “serious inaccuracies”).
But one of the more astounding of them involves Charlie Allen, now the first chief intelligence officer of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where he quietly landed last September after 47 years at the CIA.
A year before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Allen was a top CIA official in charge of foreign information collection, and according to Risen was alarmed at the utter dearth of CIA spies in Baghdad. (The agency had one CIA spy recruiter-handler undercover as a diplomat in the Baghdad embassy of a U.S. ally.)
While the CIA had almost no intelligence, the Pentagon, White House and many reporters were seizing on phony information about Iraqi weapons served up by an Iraqi exile group that wanted the United States to overthrow Saddam Hussein and put them in his place.
Allen, a legendary volcano of ideas, came up with a plan to scour the United States for émigré relatives of Iraqi military scientists, to induce them to visit Baghdad, make contact with their relatives and elicit details about Saddam’s secret nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs.
About 30 such people agreed to undertake the missions, Risen reports, one of which he details extensively. When they came back, “All of them — some 30 — said the same thing,” Risen writes. “They all reported to the CIA that the scientists had said that Iraq’s program to develop nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons had long since been abandoned.”
It was valuable information, certainly worth rushing to the White House to head off an invasion whose main reason was supposedly to rid Iraq of such weapons.
“Charlie Allen’s program to use family members to contact dozens of Iraqi scientists had garnered remarkable results and given the CIA an accurate assessment of the abandoned state of Iraq’s weapons programs months before the U.S. invasion in March 2003,” Risen reports.
But top CIA officials, led by George J. Tenet, had already decided not to give the White House, hell-bent for war, information it didn’t want to hear, Risen alleges.
“CIA officials ignored the evidence and refused to even disseminate the reports from the family members to senior policy members in the Bush administration,” he writes, expanding on earlier reporting in the Times.
This may be as disturbing an allegation as any dug up by all the Sept. 11 commissions, blue-ribbon panels, congressional hearings, inspectors general and government watchdog agencies combined.
It centers on integrity, not skills or bureaucracy or resources or politics. If true, the story portrays top CIA officials not only as provincial and feckless — the general explanation for the “intelligence failures” of Sept. 11 — but also perhaps as criminally irresponsible.
If Sen.
Risen’s tale also bodes well for the possibility that Charlie Allen might actually be able to work a miracle and make some sense of the muddled bureaucracy that is DHS.
“If he can’t make things right there,” said John T. Schuhart, who worked for Allen for nearly eight years before heading off to become deputy financial executive officer for the new Directorate of National Intelligence, “then nobody can.”
Lying in Wait: Al Qaeda “knows that polygraphs are unreliable and has an idea of how to beat them,” says a former U.S. Army linguist.
George W. Maschke, a translator fluent in Arabic and Farsi, discovered an article on an al Qaeda-linked Web site last week that instructs followers on specific countermeasures to use when U.S. interrogators hook them up to polygraph machines.
“There are many tricks for fooling the device,” says “ The Myth of the Lie Detector,” originally posted on the al-Tawhed Web site in 2004. “We must realize that the idea of the device is based on measuring the body’s physiological changes. Thus, if the mujahid [holy warrior] is able to control these changes, it will enable him to fool the device.”
The article goes on to describe numerous methods a prisoner can use to control his breathing and blood pressure, evidently taken from articles and discussions challenging the science behind polygraphs posted by former U.S. intelligence and law enforcement personnel at an anti-polygraph Web site in the United States.
Maschke, who also worked with the FBI on terrorism cases in the 1990s, posted the original Arabic version along with his translation at the site.
He and other former intelligence personnel, including a retired senior FBI scientist, maintain that certain kinds of polygraph tests are unreliable and can be defeated easily. U.S. interrogators have been using them in Iraq with mixed results.
Pass/Fail: John T. Schuhart, the former Charlie Allen associate mentioned above, gladdened intelligence community contractors and officials last week by revealing that a single security badge was in the offing for access to the CIA, FBI, Defense Intelligence Agency, NSA and other top intelligence agencies. The long-sought reform won’t mean much to anyone outside the Beltway, Schuhart told a happy Jan. 11 luncheon of the National Military Intelligence Association in Arlington, Va. “But for anyone who’s spent an hour and a half waiting to be cleared” for entrance to an agency, it will. “It’s huge,” blurted out an Air Force intelligence official. On the other hand, Schuhart conceded, there hasn’t been much progress in clearing up the average 18-month waiting time for contractor security clearances.
Still Plugging: Zalmai Azmi, chief of the FBI’s legendarily troubled information technology effort for the past two years, plans to offer a contract this month or next for somebody to build Sentinel, its second try at an investigative case file system, Federal Computer Week says. Last year the FBI pulled the plug on its never-deployed, $170 million Virtual Case File management system after years of delays and cost overruns.
And While We’re on the FBI: Its hand has surfaced in the already bizarre saga of how executives at Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey ran a secret spying and sabotage campaign against a Washington-based journalist and the animal rights group PETA. Ringling documents obtained in a multimillion-dollar suit filed by PETA show that in 1990 its security chief began sharing his reports with the FBI. Ringling also hired former top CIA official Clair George to run a “neutralization” effort against a freelance writer who was working on a book about the Feld family, owners of the circus. The writer’s suit against the circus is ongoing.
Bob Dylan surely didn’t have this event in mind when he wrote “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: a joint appearance by former Vietnam-era Weather Underground member Bill Ayers and Don Strickland, a former FBI agent assigned to investigate the violence-prone group, at the Spy Museum, Jan. 26.
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.