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War and Intelligence
New Yorker
May 13, 2003
Issue of 2003-05-12
Posted 2003-05-07
This week in the magazine and here online (see Fact), Seymour M. Hersh looks at a small circle
of analysts and advisers at the Pentagon who came to rival the C.I.A. as the President's primary
source of intelligence about Iraq; Hersh reports that questions have been raised about the
integrity of the intelligence the group relied on. Here he talks to Amy Tübke-Davidson about
his story, and about covering the war.
AMY TÜBKE-DAVIDSON: This week in the magazine, you look at how the case for going to war
with Iraq was made. What did you find out?
SEYMOUR M. HERSH: Well, the biggest thing I found out is that what we think of as the
intelligence community may not be a community at all. For example, I was just listening to
Secretary of State Colin Powell describe how he had briefings from the intelligence community on
weapons of mass destruction. It turns out that the intelligence community is really very much
dominated by a small group of people in the Pentagon. Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense,
has more or less muscled his way into day-to-day intelligence operations. I wrote about an ad-hoc
analytical group that began working in the Pentagon in the aftermath of September 11th, and which
became formally known as the Office of Special Plans last August. The office is the responsibility
of William Luti, the Under-Secretary of Defense, and its director is Abram Shulsky. They argued
that the C.I.A. and other agencies, including the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State
Department, weren't able to understand the connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and the extent
to which Iraq was involved in the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. They felt that these
agencies didn't get it right because they didn't have the right point of view. The Pentagon
group's idea was, essentially: Let's just assume that there is a connection between Al Qaeda and
Iraq, and let's assume that they have made weapons of mass destruction, and that they're still
actively pursuing nuclear weapons and have generated thousands of tons of chemical and biological
weapons and not destroyed them. Having made that leap of faith, let's then look at the
intelligence the C.I.A. has assembled with fresh eyes and see what we can see. As one person I
spoke to told me, they wanted to believe it was there and, by God, they found it.
What's wrong with challenging the C.I.A.? What's wrong with looking for a new perspective or
wondering if the C.I.A. has its own institutional biases?
Absolutely nothing, and, of course, one of the complaints that's always been made about the
C.I.A. is that it's too set in its ways. You can also argue that the C.I.A. had the Cold War
wrong. For example, there were estimates on how much the Soviet Union was producing in terms of
military output, and on how much of a commitment it had to military goods, and these estimates
turned out to be way overblown. There's nothing perfect about the C.I.A. But these guys in the
Pentagon took it a step farther. Their complaint was that the C.I.A. and its analysts were too
concerned about analyzing actual facts. What they wanted to do was take it to the next level:
let's not just analyze what we actually know; let's make assumptions about what we think, and
factor those assumptions in. It really is a very provocative way of thinking. They simply looked
at what they wanted; when they saw things that supported the thesis they believed, they accepted
them as factual.
The real problem, though, is that when you examine the factual basis for some of the Pentagon's
intelligence reviews closely it's not very good. One of their big sources was defector reports,
many of which they got through the Iraqi National Congress (I.N.C.), Ahmad Chalabi's coalition of
Iraqi dissidents. But these accounts were not always what they seemed. In fact, in my article I
quote a former Bush Administration intelligence official who described a case in which a
classified report on what a defector had said—about training in biological and chemical
weapons with members of Al Qaeda—was distributed with the support of the Pentagon. It was
also leaked to newspapers. Later, the C.I.A. found the defector and interviewed him separately,
and he told them, "No, that's not what I said." No Al Qaeda, no chemical or biological weapons.
Chalabi's group offered them little more than intelligence to please—for example, September
11th took place, and almost immediately defectors appeared who could give a dramatic account of
how Iraq was the site of training by Al Qaeda and other terrorists in the high art of hijacking
aircraft. Within a month or two of September 11th, the New York Times and the PBS series
"Frontline" had defectors giving chapter and verse on how strongly Saddam Hussein was connected
not only to Al Qaeda and terrorism training in general but to the World Trade Center attacks. And
the people in the Pentagon were susceptible to their own biases. Whatever intelligence they found
that supported their preëxisting theories was the intelligence they believed. And all of this
has an effect; my article cites a recent poll that showed that seventy-two per cent of the
American public believed it was likely that Saddam had something to do with September 11th.
The war is winding down, and Saddam Hussein is no longer in power. Why does it still matter how
it started and what arguments were made beforehand?
It matters because the threat from Iraq was the whole basis of selling the war to the American
people. There's a striking observation in my article from Bob Kerrey, the former senator from
Nebraska, who wants to see a secular, democratic Iraq and was a strong supporter of the war.
Kerrey said that it's very possible that they thought if they made a public argument on the basis
of Saddam Hussein's being a bad guy the public really wouldn't care enough to endorse a war. But
what they could do to mobilize public opinion was suggest that Saddam was involved in generating
weapons of mass destruction, whose mere existence could potentially be a threat to us, and allow
people to believe that he was involved in 9/11. If it is true that this Administration
deliberately, from the very beginning, understood that the best way to mobilize the American
people was to present Saddam as a direct national-security threat to us, without having the
evidence beforehand that he was, that's, well, frankly, lying. That's the worst kind of deceit a
President can practice. We don't elect our President to not tell us the real situation of the
world, particularly when he sends kids to kill and be killed.
How much honesty can we usually expect from the government? You covered the Nixon White House;
isn't whatever's going on here child's play compared with that?
My view as a journalist is simple: you have to hold public officials to the highest possible
standard. What's happened in America is very disturbing. All of us, as parents, don't want our
children to lie to us, and, earlier, as children, don't want to be lied to by our parents. We all
understand that integrity in a relationship is the core issue. The tragedy in America today is
that we don't begin to impose on our national leaders the same standard which we hold so dear in
our personal life. In other words, if we were to say, "Well, that's always happened," we'd almost
be officially saying that there is a double standard—that what we can't tolerate in our
personal life is O.K. in the most important officials we have, those officials with power not only
over us but over our young men and women who go to fight, and over the people they kill. If we
start saying that anything less than the highest standard is tolerable, we're really destroying
democracy. Democracy exists on the basis of truth.
There have been suggestions from Rumsfeld and others that it's wrong, if not unpatriotic, for
military people, who have often been sources for you, to go public with complaints, to talk to
people like you, when there's a war on. Is that right?
I've been a reporter for forty years, and I can tell you right now that I never report anything
that's operationally important. And no journalist I know would tell a secret that would compromise
the lives of our troops or the ability of our country to defend itself, so let's get that out of
the way. The fact that I can write critically about the war does not suggest that I am in any way
less a hundred per cent red-blooded American than Donald Rumsfeld. And I think he'll acknowledge
that, too. But we're a democracy and the free press has a role to play, and it so happens that the
people who talk to me are often in very sensitive places in the government, and do so because they
understand that function. It's not just a place to air grievances; it's a place to
suggest—to get a different kind of thinking. And one of the things that's very troubling to
me about this Administration, and one of the things that I was writing about in this article, is
that this is a group of people who are very much committed to groupthink. They're committed to the
notion that they know the truth and anybody who disagrees doesn't. I quote somebody as saying that
they see themselves as being on the side of the angels and everybody else as fools. In covering
Washington for forty years, I've never seen a group of people who have been so unwilling to hear
the other side, who are so quick to see criticism not as loyal opposition but as betrayal.
At the same time, this is an Administration that is really fractured. There are deep fault
lines between the State Department and the Pentagon, between the C.I.A. and the Pentagon, and the
Pentagon has won most of the fights. They control intelligence. Rumsfeld also has his finger on
the personnel changes in the military command; he wants his people everywhere. But there's a lot
of differing opinions, a lot of dissension, and a lot of people who don't like what's going
on.
But, in addition to winning the bureaucratic battles, they've also won the war, haven't
they?
Well, they certainly won the battle for Baghdad. But I think anybody would agree that, having
won the battle, we are now left with an amazing and difficult problem that the press is really
just beginning to focus on, and that is the extent of despair throughout that country. This was a
war won with amazing skill and speed, but all the exhaustive plans that were done for postwar
running of the country seem to have disappeared. You could almost argue that the political future
of this Administration might not be judged by the skill in the war but by the next year, as we try
to repair the damage that has been done to daily life in Iraq.
About the quick victory, some of the generals and planners you quoted in an earlier article
felt that we had gone in with too few soldiers. Are people you talk to in the government surprised
at how the war has turned out?
Well, look, a lot of people in the military didn't believe that Saddam would melt away, and
that just the small number of forces we had could sweep through the country, and Baghdad, so
quickly. But the other point that all the planners made from the very beginning was that without
adequate forces after victory you cannot prevent the inevitable reactions to a war, which includes
looting and everything like that. Those consequences are all anticipated. Every planning document
I've ever read on civil war or urban war warns about such things, and I know that there were
months and months of meetings in the Joint Chiefs of Staff over how to handle the postwar days.
And then there simply weren't enough forces to have them do much of anything other than protect
themselves—in the case of Baghdad, the only building I know of that was earmarked for
protection was the oil ministry. And so we may really have set ourselves up for a serious
problem.
Let's talk about someone who played a big role in this week's story: Ahmad Chalabi. He's now
trying to establish himself in a leadership role in Baghdad. You've interviewed him—what
kind of figure is he? Do you think he could be the leader Iraq needs?
Oh, no. But I will say this: he's certainly got a presence. He's charming, he's quick, he's
very bright, full of fun. He's got a Ph.D. in mathematics. He's been friends for a decade with
many people in the Pentagon, including Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense. He's not
afraid to be critical of people in the government. And there are many people in the government who
don't like him. He's been in a war with the C.I.A. and the State Department, who frankly just
don't find him to be an honorable person. They've heard the stories about his wrongdoing—he
has been found guilty in absentia in Jordan of fraud, charges that he denies. The
Pentagon—Wolfowitz and others there—sees him as the solution. But it seems unlikely
that somebody like Chalabi is going to emerge as anything other than a figurehead for us.
Another very interesting figure in your article is the late political philosopher Leo Strauss.
What does Strauss have to do with intelligence?
Normally, you would think not much, beyond the fact that a lot of people in this government are
Straussians. They include Abram Shulsky and some of the men with whom he works, like Wolfowitz and
Stephen Cambone, who is the Under-Secretary of Intelligence. But Shulsky actually co-wrote an
article about Strauss and intelligence that did make the connection. Shulsky's article involves
Strauss's theory of esoteric writing, in which he notes that great philosophers, hesitant to tell
the whole story of what they believed, used concealed messages in their writing. Only the very
wise could understand the real truth. This also brings in Plato's concept of the noble lie. This
is, of course, a great simplification. But what's interesting in terms of Iraq is Strauss's
complaint that, as Shulsky writes, nobody quite understood the extent of deception that exists in
the world, or its role in politics. This includes deception by Saddam Hussein, who deceived us
about what his real intentions and goals were. But you can also extrapolate from that. This idea
may help to explain how the people in Special Plans rationalized whatever concerns they had about
the quality of the day-to-day intelligence about Saddam and weapons of mass destruction.
What did you think of the Pentagon's embedding program? Were you tempted to sign up?
I'm too old. Embedding has some great advantages—it brought the war home—but it
also provided the war as seen through a filter—you could almost say it's a little touch of
the Stockholm syndrome. One thing that interests me which very few people seem to be talking about
is the extent of "collateral damage," in terms of the number of dead. How many civilians were
killed in this war? I don't know, but I've heard some very grisly anecdotal accounts from people
who were embedded about how many noncombatants were killed by the units they were with, very
little of which has gotten into the press. One has to wonder if there ever will be an accounting
of the collateral damage that was done, in terms of civilian deaths and injuries. And there are no
official estimates from the Administration.
Do you think that the presence of reporters in the field changes the war as well as the
reporters? Does an army act differently when reporters are there?
Well, I think in the beginning, of course, the reporters would serve as an enormous restraint
on any excesses by soldiers. But one of the horrible things about war is that a lot of people are
going to get killed. Two or three days after the start of this war, if you remember, there was a
story that people were approaching American troops waving white flags, and they would then attack
the American troops. Word of these incidents was communicated immediately to the forces. You know,
as wonderful as our troops are, there's nothing quite as dangerous as a nineteen-year-old boy with
a weapon who's frightened. So I think that it became very hard for Iraqis to surrender. It's
inevitable that there were more than a few incidents. We certainly saw enough stories about that
at checkpoints in Baghdad.
And, you know, I'm a cynic about the efficacy of having reporters travelling with military
units, in terms of getting the story of a war back to the American people. All sorts of
obligations arise when you have a relationship like that with the military. Here's why I'm a
cynic. I began to report on My Lai in 1969—and I wasn't in Vietnam at the time—and I
initially wrote five stories about the mass murders that took place there. But something
interesting happened after the third story, and after Walter Cronkite picked it up, and any
reservations that the newspapers had about the truth of what I was reporting disappeared. The
third Sunday after I started writing about My Lai, as a freelancer, dozens of newspapers suddenly
had their Vietnam correspondents writing devastating stories about other atrocities they had
witnessed.
Stories that they'd had in their files.
Yes, stories that they'd had. One of the stories that really grabbed me was about an incident
that took place when U.S. troops first landed at Danang, in June or July of 1965. Marines landed
there and within two days some of them deliberately shot a group of civilians in an air-raid
shelter. And the correspondent with them watched the incident, worried about it, and then he wrote
a very graphic account, but not until late 1969, four years later. So I think that eventually some
of these embedded reporters will begin talking or writing a little bit about what they actually
saw.
So you think that reporters are watching each other and trying to figure out what the
parameters are.
I know people who were embedded who have presented somewhat different, or, at least, fuller,
pictures of what went on in private conversations than they have in print or in their broadcasts.
And, look, our military is great. I've been dealing professionally with military men and sources
for forty years. I have many wonderful friends in the military. The military is a vibrant
organization full of people with a lot of integrity. There's nothing as honorable as a good
military guy. But it's in the nature of war that, at the combat level, all sorts of things can
happen. So we'll see. Some of these stories may get written eventually, and that's the press's
job.
Copyright © CondéNet 2003. All rights reserved.
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