The Politicization of Intelligence
By Pierre Lacoste
Le Figaro

November 22nd, 2004

The nomination of Bush loyalist Porter Goss to CIA head has triggered new torment in United States’ intelligence circles and violent controversy in Congress. It’s one more episode in the saga of discordant relations between the Agency and the White House. It illustrates a fundamental question, that of the independence and objectivity of intelligence services confronted with executive power ideological and political partisanship. It’s the well-known phenomenon of “politicization of intelligence.”
Several CIA high officials have resigned from their positions, horrified by the aggressive behavior demonstrated by members of Porter Goss’ team, who want to overthrow the service’s structures and functioning.

A few Democratic Senators and Representatives, members of the Congressional committees charged with secret services’ oversight, express the keenest reservations over this new manifestation of White House interference, while the President has still not gained acceptance for creation of the post of supervisor for the totality of the American intelligence community. We may hope that in spite of the Republican majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives, Congressional checks and balances will oppose a departure so extremely worrying for American democracy.

The question is, in fact, an essential problem. It had been illustrated by the false declarations made by official representatives of the United States at the United Nations’ podium to justify the 2003 war against Iraq. Only skillful legal sophistries allowed G. W. Bush and Tony Blair to make their intelligence services “take the fall” to cover up their own errors of judgment with regard to Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. One has only to consult the works of witnesses as unimpugnable as UN Disarmament Inspectors’ Head, Hans Blix, or former White House official in charge of anti-terrorism operations, Richard Clarke, to have no doubt about the way Washington’s ultraconservatives deliberately engaged in diverse manipulations of intelligence. One had only to refer to the first declarations of the newly elected president at the beginning of 2000 to know their intentions. From that moment, the creation of an intelligence analysis unit at the center of the Pentagon allowed one to glimpse how Donald Rumsfeld’s team would go about supplying the President with its own intelligence to influence his decisions, to the detriment of State Department and CIA viewpoints. The evolution of the war in Iraq has shown that, since the Defense Department analyses prevailed, the consequences of the initial battle were totally underestimated.

This deliberate blindness, this form of autism, has already, however, been illustrated by numerous examples from history. One of the most spectacular was Stalin in 1941. Even though the best intelligence networks of the day were at his disposal, he allowed himself to be surprised by Hitler’s June attack. Paralyzed by fear ever since the terrible years of purges and Moscow show trials, NKVD officials transmitted only the raw information, refraining from any commentary that might have contradicted the Kremlin master’s brilliant deductions. Consequently, it was he alone who decided not to take into account the most precise and specific information he was furnished about the imminence of the German attack. He refused to listen to Churchill’s warnings, under the pretext that they were a trap, the proof of an anti-Bolshevik conspiracy between the Germans and the British!

Without going to such extreme demonstrations of paranoia, other leaders have committed errors of the same order. In 1956, Anthony Eden chose not to take the advice of the Joint Intelligence Committee, the most extraordinary organization for the coordination of intelligence ever available to any democratic government, before launching the country in the deplorable 1956 Suez expedition against Nasser’s Egypt.

Under Eisenhower’s presidency, evaluations of the strength of Soviet bombers were deliberately exaggerated by the US Air Force’s intelligence service in order to justify the development of the Strategic Air Command and to allow powerful aerospace and arms industry companies to benefit from considerable budgetary credits. The President remembered the episode, when, as he left office, he warned his compatriots against the excesses of the “military-industrial complex”.

In their present form, the politicization of United States’ intelligence services is a response partly to business and profit motivations, but much more to digressions of an ideological and political order. The ideology of the struggle of Good against Evil is expressed as the “war against terrorism”, which is a poorly targeted response to asymmetric threats that cannot be handled by military power alone. Politics must recover its rights in an effective application of the balance of power between the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. We also hope that the American intelligence community will be capable of overcoming the present crisis to become the model of an independent institution dedicated solely to the search for objectivity, and, as close as possible, for the truth.

Admiral Pierre Lacoste, former commandant of the Ecole supérieur de guerre navale [Naval Warfare School] and of the Mediterranean Squadron, as well as former Director General of French Foreign Intelligence (DGSE).

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