So What Good Is The CIA?

Ray McGovern writes about the failure of the Obama Administration to seek a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) about the Afghanistan decision:

My experience in providing intelligence support to administrations from John Kennedy to George H. W. Bush was that NSC “procedure and protocol” in addressing key foreign policy decisions almost always included a request for intelligence support in the form of a National Intelligence Estimate. And yet, retired Marine general Jones deferred to active duty four-stars Mullen, Petraeus, and McChrystal. This time—no need for an NIE, thank you very much.

At his confirmation hearings, CIA chief Leon Panetta, a 16-year veteran in the House of Representatives, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that he “would always be a creature of Congress.” That is the kiss of death; no one with that mindset should be director of any intelligence organization.

Woodward writes that Panetta never volunteered his opinion to the President and that Obama never asked for it. Remarkable. Jones should have insisted on getting an “opinion” from the lawyer Obama appointed to head the CIA, but didn’t. Neither did Congress.

Not that Panetta lacked an opinion. I don’t mean an unexpressed intelligence opinion on the projected effects of this or that course of action in Afghanistan. Panetta’s opinion, Woodward writes, pertained to the fact that “Obama was facing a huge political reality.”

From the point of view of an intelligence professional, retired with no stars, the following may just be the most damning two sentences in Woodward’s book. The author says that Panetta told other principal advisers:

“No Democratic president can go against military advice, especially if he asked for it … So just do it. Do what they say.”

(Harry Truman, who created the CIA not to conduct assassinations or fire missiles from drones but rather to give the president, without fear or favor, unadulterated intelligence on developments abroad, must be rolling over in his grave.)

Small wonder that retired four-star admiral Dennis Blair, as Director of National Intelligence nominally Panetta’s boss, called the Afghanistan review process “the goddamndest thing I’ve ever seen.”

(Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served as an Army infantry/intelligence officer in the early Sixties and for the next 27 years as an analyst at CIA, where he chaired NIEs and prepared and briefed the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.)