The “Powers that Be” were the CIA’s Top Three

Yesterday Senator Charles Robb spoke on intelligence reform at the Miller Center of the University of Virginia. The talk supports some inferences about who was responsible for intelligence failures prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Close readers of the Robb-Silberman report and the Washington Post have already guessed the identity of the “Powers that Be” identified in a CIA email. These were the persons who had already decided that the Iraq war was going to happen. They were not interested in analytical concerns about the unreliability of information from a critical source. Yesterday Senator Robb said that concerns about the reliability of the questionable source – code named “Curveball” – were conveyed to the top three officials in the CIA. These three officials dismissed these concerns. The inference is that the top three officials in the CIA were the “Powers that Be” in the CIA email. As Walter Pincus reported in the Washington Post on July 13, 2004

”The DIA employee, who was assigned to CIA headquarters, told his CIA superior that he questioned the "validity of the information" and that it warranted "further inquiry before we use the information as the backbone of one of our major findings for the existence of a continuing Iraqi BW [bioweapons] program!"
He also e-mailed the deputy chief of the CIA's Iraq task force. Both officials said they were already aware of his concerns, the Senate report said.
The deputy chief e-mailed him back: "Let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say, and that the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about. However, in the interest of Truth, we owe somebody a sentence or two of warning, if you honestly have reservations."
The deputy chief later told the Senate committee staff that the DIA employee was a personal friend and that "what I was probably trying to do was to calm him down a bit. . . . The war is not going to hinge on what [he] thinks about Curve Ball."

Close analysis of the language in this memo, combined with Senator Robb’s remarks allows the following inferences:

• The powers that be were the top three officials in the CIA
• These officials had decided that the war was going to happen and that their job was to produce intelligence to support it.
• The Robb-Silberman report that policy makers did not pressure intelligence analysts to skew their findings is, taken literally, correct. They did not have to exert any pressure. Top CIA officials did it for them.
• The question of whether the policy makers pressured top CIA officials or were manipulated by them remains open.
• The grudging acceptance to include a sentence or two of warning indicates that analytical integrity has not entirely vanished from the CIA.

While I may be reading too much into the use of upper case letters for the “powers that be,” the usage may indicate a corporate climate hostile to dissent. One normally uses upper case and circumlocutions to refer to a deity – as in “Higher Power.” I’m reminded of the Harry Potter novels. “He who must not be mentioned” is often used to refer to Lord Voldemort. Were CIA officials really afraid to say that George Tenet would not accept dissenting views?

The Robb-Silberman report also states that the community lacked analytic tradecraft. The NIE on WMD programs displays a determination to prove the existence of WMD programs in Iraq. This is understandable, given the determination to break through the deception revealed after the first Gulf War. The policy and intelligence communities must have reasoned as follows: “If Saddam could hide WMD programs before, he must be hiding them now.” Our job is to break the deception.” The NIE and Secretary Powell’s testimony were devoted to breaking this deception. As I’ve written on December 14, 2004 , the community failed to ask the next question: have these programs progressed to the stage of fielding these weapons and training troops to use them?

If the answer to this question was no, the community could have told the policy makers that it found no evidence of an imminent military threat. The two remaining issues 1) leakage of Iraq WMD’s to terrorist organizations and 2) Iraqi tyranny would have continued to be threats to America’s vital interests. Our response might have been a very different kind of war – or no war at all.