February 2005

after taking the oath of office... a laugh they know at home

The Coming Wars


by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

0117/05 "New Yorker" -- George W. Bush’s reëlection was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control—against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism—during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way.

Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the Bush Administration has not reconsidered its basic long-range policy goal in the Middle East: the establishment of democracy throughout the region. Bush’s reëlection is regarded within the Administration as evidence of America’s support for his decision to go to war. It has reaffirmed the position of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon’s civilian leadership who advocated the invasion, including Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-secretary for Policy. According to a former high-level intelligence official, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the election and told them, in essence, that the naysayers had been heard and the American people did not accept their message. Rumsfeld added that America was committed to staying in Iraq and that there would be no second-guessing. 

“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”

Bush and Cheney may have set the policy, but it is Rumsfeld who has directed its implementation and has absorbed much of the public criticism when things went wrong—whether it was prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib or lack of sufficient armor plating for G.I.s’ vehicles in Iraq. Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have called for Rumsfeld’s dismissal, and he is not widely admired inside the military. Nonetheless, his reappointment as Defense Secretary was never in doubt. 

Rumsfeld will become even more important during the second term. In interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld’s responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagon’s control. The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia. 

The President’s decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books—free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) “The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “They don’t even call it ‘covert ops’—it’s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it’s ‘black reconnaissance.’ They’re not even going to tell the cincs”—the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)

In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. “Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’” the former intelligence official told me. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned—not militarily, but how we did it politically. We’re not going to rely on agency pissants.’ No loose ends, and that’s why the C.I.A. is out of there.”



For more than a year, France, Germany, Britain, and other countries in the European Union have seen preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon as a race against time—and against the Bush Administration. They have been negotiating with the Iranian leadership to give up its nuclear-weapons ambitions in exchange for economic aid and trade benefits. Iran has agreed to temporarily halt its enrichment programs, which generate fuel for nuclear power plants but also could produce weapons-grade fissile material. (Iran claims that such facilities are legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or N.P.T., to which it is a signator, and that it has no intention of building a bomb.) But the goal of the current round of talks, which began in December in Brussels, is to persuade Tehran to go further, and dismantle its machinery. Iran insists, in return, that it needs to see some concrete benefits from the Europeans—oil-production technology, heavy-industrial equipment, and perhaps even permission to purchase a fleet of Airbuses. (Iran has been denied access to technology and many goods owing to sanctions.) 

The Europeans have been urging the Bush Administration to join in these negotiations. The Administration has refused to do so. The civilian leadership in the Pentagon has argued that no diplomatic progress on the Iranian nuclear threat will take place unless there is a credible threat of military action. “The neocons say negotiations are a bad deal,” a senior official of the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.) told me. “And the only thing the Iranians understand is pressure. And that they also need to be whacked.”

The core problem is that Iran has successfully hidden the extent of its nuclear program, and its progress. Many Western intelligence agencies, including those of the United States, believe that Iran is at least three to five years away from a capability to independently produce nuclear warheads—although its work on a missile-delivery system is far more advanced. Iran is also widely believed by Western intelligence agencies and the I.A.E.A. to have serious technical problems with its weapons system, most notably in the production of the hexafluoride gas needed to fabricate nuclear warheads. 

A retired senior C.I.A. official, one of many who left the agency recently, told me that he was familiar with the assessments, and confirmed that Iran is known to be having major difficulties in its weapons work. He also acknowledged that the agency’s timetable for a nuclear Iran matches the European estimates—assuming that Iran gets no outside help. “The big wild card for us is that you don’t know who is capable of filling in the missing parts for them,” the recently retired official said. “North Korea? Pakistan? We don’t know what parts are missing.”

One Western diplomat told me that the Europeans believed they were in what he called a “lose-lose position” as long as the United States refuses to get involved. “France, Germany, and the U.K. cannot succeed alone, and everybody knows it,” the diplomat said. “If the U.S. stays outside, we don’t have enough leverage, and our effort will collapse.” The alternative would be to go to the Security Council, but any resolution imposing sanctions would likely be vetoed by China or Russia, and then “the United Nations will be blamed and the Americans will say, ‘The only solution is to bomb.’”

A European Ambassador noted that President Bush is scheduled to visit Europe in February, and that there has been public talk from the White House about improving the President’s relationship with America’s E.U. allies. In that context, the Ambassador told me, “I’m puzzled by the fact that the United States is not helping us in our program. How can Washington maintain its stance without seriously taking into account the weapons issue?”

The Israeli government is, not surprisingly, skeptical of the European approach. Silvan Shalom, the Foreign Minister, said in an interview last week in Jerusalem,with another New Yorker journalist, “I don’t like what’s happening. We were encouraged at first when the Europeans got involved. For a long time, they thought it was just Israel’s problem. But then they saw that the [Iranian] missiles themselves were longer range and could reach all of Europe, and they became very concerned. Their attitude has been to use the carrot and the stick—but all we see so far is the carrot.” He added, “If they can’t comply, Israel cannot live with Iran having a nuclear bomb.”

In a recent essay, Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert who is the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (and a supporter of the Administration), articulated the view that force, or the threat of it, was a vital bargaining tool with Iran. Clawson wrote that if Europe wanted coöperation with the Bush Administration it “would do well to remind Iran that the military option remains on the table.” He added that the argument that the European negotiations hinged on Washington looked like “a preëmptive excuse for the likely breakdown of the E.U.-Iranian talks.” In a subsequent conversation with me, Clawson suggested that, if some kind of military action was inevitable, “it would be much more in Israel’s interest—and Washington’s—to take covert action. The style of this Administration is to use overwhelming force—‘shock and awe.’ But we get only one bite of the apple.”

There are many military and diplomatic experts who dispute the notion that military action, on whatever scale, is the right approach. Shahram Chubin, an Iranian scholar who is the director of research at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, told me, “It’s a fantasy to think that there’s a good American or Israeli military option in Iran.” He went on, “The Israeli view is that this is an international problem. ‘You do it,’ they say to the West. ‘Otherwise, our Air Force will take care of it.’” In 1981, the Israeli Air Force destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor, setting its nuclear program back several years. But the situation now is both more complex and more dangerous, Chubin said. The Osirak bombing “drove the Iranian nuclear-weapons program underground, to hardened, dispersed sites,” he said. “You can’t be sure after an attack that you’ll get away with it. The U.S. and Israel would not be certain whether all the sites had been hit, or how quickly they’d be rebuilt. Meanwhile, they’d be waiting for an Iranian counter-attack that could be military or terrorist or diplomatic. Iran has long-range missiles and ties to Hezbollah, which has drones—you can’t begin to think of what they’d do in response.”

Chubin added that Iran could also renounce the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. “It’s better to have them cheating within the system,” he said. “Otherwise, as victims, Iran will walk away from the treaty and inspections while the rest of the world watches the N.P.T. unravel before their eyes.”



The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer. Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and missile sites, both declared and suspected. The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids. “The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible,” the government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told me.

Some of the missions involve extraordinary coöperation. For example, the former high-level intelligence official told me that an American commando task force has been set up in South Asia and is now working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists and technicians who had dealt with Iranian counterparts. (In 2003, the I.A.E.A. disclosed that Iran had been secretly receiving nuclear technology from Pakistan for more than a decade, and had withheld that information from inspectors.) The American task force, aided by the information from Pakistan, has been penetrating eastern Iran from Afghanistan in a hunt for underground installations. The task-force members, or their locally recruited agents, secreted remote detection devices—known as sniffers—capable of sampling the atmosphere for radioactive emissions and other evidence of nuclear-enrichment programs. 

Getting such evidence is a pressing concern for the Bush Administration. The former high-level intelligence official told me, “They don’t want to make any W.M.D. intelligence mistakes, as in Iraq. The Republicans can’t have two of those. There’s no education in the second kick of a mule.” The official added that the government of Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani President, has won a high price for its coöperation—American assurance that Pakistan will not have to hand over A. Q. Khan, known as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, to the I.A.E.A. or to any other international authorities for questioning. For two decades, Khan has been linked to a vast consortium of nuclear-black-market activities. Last year, Musharraf professed to be shocked when Khan, in the face of overwhelming evidence, “confessed” to his activities. A few days later, Musharraf pardoned him, and so far he has refused to allow the I.A.E.A. or American intelligence to interview him. Khan is now said to be living under house arrest in a villa in Islamabad. “It’s a deal—a trade-off,” the former high-level intelligence official explained. “‘Tell us what you know about Iran and we will let your A. Q. Khan guys go.’ It’s the neoconservatives’ version of short-term gain at long-term cost. They want to prove that Bush is the anti-terrorism guy who can handle Iran and the nuclear threat, against the long-term goal of eliminating the black market for nuclear proliferation.”

The agreement comes at a time when Musharraf, according to a former high-level Pakistani diplomat, has authorized the expansion of Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons arsenal. “Pakistan still needs parts and supplies, and needs to buy them in the clandestine market,” the former diplomat said. “The U.S. has done nothing to stop it.”

There has also been close, and largely unacknowledged, coöperation with Israel. The government consultant with ties to the Pentagon said that the Defense Department civilians, under the leadership of Douglas Feith, have been working with Israeli planners and consultants to develop and refine potential nuclear, chemical-weapons, and missile targets inside Iran. (After Osirak, Iran situated many of its nuclear sites in remote areas of the east, in an attempt to keep them out of striking range of other countries, especially Israel. Distance no longer lends such protection, however: Israel has acquired three submarines capable of launching cruise missiles and has equipped some of its aircraft with additional fuel tanks, putting Israeli F-16I fighters within the range of most Iranian targets.) 

“They believe that about three-quarters of the potential targets can be destroyed from the air, and a quarter are too close to population centers, or buried too deep, to be targeted,” the consultant said. Inevitably, he added, some suspicious sites need to be checked out by American or Israeli commando teams—in on-the-ground surveillance—before being targeted. 

The Pentagon’s contingency plans for a broader invasion of Iran are also being updated. Strategists at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, have been asked to revise the military’s war plan, providing for a maximum ground and air invasion of Iran. Updating the plan makes sense, whether or not the Administration intends to act, because the geopolitics of the region have changed dramatically in the last three years. Previously, an American invasion force would have had to enter Iran by sea, by way of the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Oman; now troops could move in on the ground, from Afghanistan or Iraq. Commando units and other assets could be introduced through new bases in the Central Asian republics.

It is possible that some of the American officials who talk about the need to eliminate Iran’s nuclear infrastructure are doing so as part of a propaganda campaign aimed at pressuring Iran to give up its weapons planning. If so, the signals are not always clear. President Bush, who after 9/11 famously depicted Iran as a member of the “axis of evil,” is now publicly emphasizing the need for diplomacy to run its course. “We don’t have much leverage with the Iranians right now,” the President said at a news conference late last year. “Diplomacy must be the first choice, and always the first choice of an administration trying to solve an issue of . . . nuclear armament. And we’ll continue to press on diplomacy.”

In my interviews over the past two months, I was given a much harsher view. The hawks in the Administration believe that it will soon become clear that the Europeans’ negotiated approach cannot succeed, and that at that time the Administration will act. “We’re not dealing with a set of National Security Council option papers here,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “They’ve already passed that wicket. It’s not if we’re going to do anything against Iran. They’re doing it.”

The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran’s ability to go nuclear. But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership. “Within the soul of Iran there is a struggle between secular nationalists and reformers, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic movement,” the consultant told me. “The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will collapse”—like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said.

“The idea that an American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would produce a popular uprising is extremely illinformed,” said Flynt Leverett, a Middle East scholar who worked on the National Security Council in the Bush Administration. “You have to understand that the nuclear ambition in Iran is supported across the political spectrum, and Iranians will perceive attacks on these sites as attacks on their ambitions to be a major regional player and a modern nation that’s technologically sophisticated.” Leverett, who is now a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, at the Brookings Institution, warned that an American attack, if it takes place, “will produce an Iranian backlash against the United States and a rallying around the regime.”



Rumsfeld planned and lobbied for more than two years before getting Presidential authority, in a series of findings and executive orders, to use military commandos for covert operations. One of his first steps was bureaucratic: to shift control of an undercover unit, known then as the Gray Fox (it has recently been given a new code name), from the Army to the Special Operations Command (socom), in Tampa. Gray Fox was formally assigned to socom in July, 2002, at the instigation of Rumsfeld’s office, which meant that the undercover unit would have a single commander for administration and operational deployment. Then, last fall, Rumsfeld’s ability to deploy the commandos expanded. According to a Pentagon consultant, an Execute Order on the Global War on Terrorism (referred to throughout the government as gwot) was issued at Rumsfeld’s direction. The order specifically authorized the military “to find and finish” terrorist targets, the consultant said. It included a target list that cited Al Qaeda network members, Al Qaeda senior leadership, and other high-value targets. The consultant said that the order had been cleared throughout the national-security bureaucracy in Washington.

In late November, 2004, the Times reported that Bush had set up an interagency group to study whether it “would best serve the nation” to give the Pentagon complete control over the C.I.A.’s own élite paramilitary unit, which has operated covertly in trouble spots around the world for decades. The panel’s conclusions, due in February, are foregone, in the view of many former C.I.A. officers. “It seems like it’s going to happen,” Howard Hart, who was chief of the C.I.A.’s Paramilitary Operations Division before retiring in 1991, told me. 

There was other evidence of Pentagon encroachment. Two former C.I.A. clandestine officers, Vince Cannistraro and Philip Giraldi, who publish Intelligence Brief, a newsletter for their business clients, reported last month on the existence of a broad counter-terrorism Presidential finding that permitted the Pentagon “to operate unilaterally in a number of countries where there is a perception of a clear and evident terrorist threat. . . . A number of the countries are friendly to the U.S. and are major trading partners. Most have been cooperating in the war on terrorism.” The two former officers listed some of the countries—Algeria, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, and Malaysia. (I was subsequently told by the former high-level intelligence official that Tunisia is also on the list.)

Giraldi, who served three years in military intelligence before joining the C.I.A., said that he was troubled by the military’s expanded covert assignment. “I don’t think they can handle the cover,” he told me. “They’ve got to have a different mind-set. They’ve got to handle new roles and get into foreign cultures and learn how other people think. If you’re going into a village and shooting people, it doesn’t matter,” Giraldi added. “But if you’re running operations that involve finesse and sensitivity, the military can’t do it. Which is why these kind of operations were always run out of the agency.” I was told that many Special Operations officers also have serious misgivings. 

Rumsfeld and two of his key deputies, Stephen Cambone, the Under-secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, will be part of the chain of command for the new commando operations. Relevant members of the House and Senate intelligence committees have been briefed on the Defense Department’s expanded role in covert affairs, a Pentagon adviser assured me, but he did not know how extensive the briefings had been. 

“I’m conflicted about the idea of operating without congressional oversight,” the Pentagon adviser said. “But I’ve been told that there will be oversight down to the specific operation.” A second Pentagon adviser agreed, with a significant caveat. “There are reporting requirements,” he said. “But to execute the finding we don’t have to go back and say, ‘We’re going here and there.’ No nitty-gritty detail and no micromanagement.”

The legal questions about the Pentagon’s right to conduct covert operations without informing Congress have not been resolved. “It’s a very, very gray area,” said Jeffrey H. Smith, a West Point graduate who served as the C.I.A.’s general counsel in the mid-nineteen-nineties. “Congress believes it voted to include all such covert activities carried out by the armed forces. The military says, ‘No, the things we’re doing are not intelligence actions under the statute but necessary military steps authorized by the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to “prepare the battlefield.”’” Referring to his days at the C.I.A., Smith added, “We were always careful not to use the armed forces in a covert action without a Presidential finding. The Bush Administration has taken a much more aggressive stance.”

In his conversation with me, Smith emphasized that he was unaware of the military’s current plans for expanding covert action. But he said, “Congress has always worried that the Pentagon is going to get us involved in some military misadventure that nobody knows about.”

Under Rumsfeld’s new approach, I was told, U.S. military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists. This could potentially involve organizing and carrying out combat operations, or even terrorist activities. Some operations will likely take place in nations in which there is an American diplomatic mission, with an Ambassador and a C.I.A. station chief, the Pentagon consultant said. The Ambassador and the station chief would not necessarily have a need to know, under the Pentagon’s current interpretation of its reporting requirement.

The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls “action teams” in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. “Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?” the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. “We founded them and we financed them,” he said. “The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.” A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, “We’re going to be riding with the bad boys.”

One of the rationales for such tactics was spelled out in a series of articles by John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, and a consultant on terrorism for the rand corporation. “It takes a network to fight a network,” Arquilla wrote in a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle: 

When conventional military operations and bombing failed to defeat the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya in the 1950s, the British formed teams of friendly Kikuyu tribesmen who went about pretending to be terrorists. These “pseudo gangs,” as they were called, swiftly threw the Mau Mau on the defensive, either by befriending and then ambushing bands of fighters or by guiding bombers to the terrorists’ camps. What worked in Kenya a half-century ago has a wonderful chance of undermining trust and recruitment among today’s terror networks. Forming new pseudo gangs should not be difficult. 


“If a confused young man from Marin County can join up with Al Qaeda,” Arquilla wrote, referring to John Walker Lindh, the twenty-year-old Californian who was seized in Afghanistan, “think what professional operatives might do.”

A few pilot covert operations were conducted last year, one Pentagon adviser told me, and a terrorist cell in Algeria was “rolled up” with American help. The adviser was referring, apparently, to the capture of Ammari Saifi, known as Abderrezak le Para, the head of a North African terrorist network affiliated with Al Qaeda. But at the end of the year there was no agreement within the Defense Department about the rules of engagement. “The issue is approval for the final authority,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “Who gets to say ‘Get this’ or ‘Do this’?”

A retired four-star general said, “The basic concept has always been solid, but how do you insure that the people doing it operate within the concept of the law? This is pushing the edge of the envelope.” The general added, “It’s the oversight. And you’re not going to get Warner”—John Warner, of Virginia, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee—“and those guys to exercise oversight. This whole thing goes to the Fourth Deck.” He was referring to the floor in the Pentagon where Rumsfeld and Cambone have their offices. 

“It’s a finesse to give power to Rumsfeld—giving him the right to act swiftly, decisively, and lethally,” the first Pentagon adviser told me. “It’s a global free-fire zone.”



The Pentagon has tried to work around the limits on covert activities before. In the early nineteen-eighties, a covert Army unit was set up and authorized to operate overseas with minimal oversight. The results were disastrous. The Special Operations program was initially known as Intelligence Support Activity, or I.S.A., and was administered from a base near Washington (as was, later, Gray Fox). It was established soon after the failed rescue, in April, 1980, of the American hostages in Iran, who were being held by revolutionary students after the Islamic overthrow of the Shah’s regime. At first, the unit was kept secret from many of the senior generals and civilian leaders in the Pentagon, as well as from many members of Congress. It was eventually deployed in the Reagan Administration’s war against the Sandinista government, in Nicaragua. It was heavily committed to supporting the Contras. By the mid-eighties, however, the I.S.A.’s operations had been curtailed, and several of its senior officers were courtmartialled following a series of financial scandals, some involving arms deals. The affair was known as “the Yellow Fruit scandal,” after the code name given to one of the I.S.A.’s cover organizations—and in many ways the group’s procedures laid the groundwork for the Iran-Contra scandal.

Despite the controversy surrounding Yellow Fruit, the I.S.A. was kept intact as an undercover unit by the Army. “But we put so many restrictions on it,” the second Pentagon adviser said. “In I.S.A., if you wanted to travel fifty miles you had to get a special order. And there were certain areas, such as Lebanon, where they could not go.” The adviser acknowledged that the current operations are similar to those two decades earlier, with similar risks—and, as he saw it, similar reasons for taking the risks. “What drove them then, in terms of Yellow Fruit, was that they had no intelligence on Iran,” the adviser told me. “They had no knowledge of Tehran and no people on the ground who could prepare the battle space.”

Rumsfeld’s decision to revive this approach stemmed, once again, from a failure of intelligence in the Middle East, the adviser said. The Administration believed that the C.I.A. was unable, or unwilling, to provide the military with the information it needed to effectively challenge stateless terrorism. “One of the big challenges was that we didn’t have Humint”—human intelligence—“collection capabilities in areas where terrorists existed,” the adviser told me. “Because the C.I.A. claimed to have such a hold on Humint, the way to get around them, rather than take them on, was to claim that the agency didn’t do Humint to support Special Forces operations overseas. The C.I.A. fought it.” Referring to Rumsfeld’s new authority for covert operations, the first Pentagon adviser told me, “It’s not empowering military intelligence. It’s emasculating the C.I.A.”

A former senior C.I.A. officer depicted the agency’s eclipse as predictable. “For years, the agency bent over backward to integrate and coördinate with the Pentagon,” the former officer said. “We just caved and caved and got what we deserved. It is a fact of life today that the Pentagon is a five-hundred-pound gorilla and the C.I.A. director is a chimpanzee.”

There was pressure from the White House, too. A former C.I.A. clandestine-services officer told me that, in the months after the resignation of the agency’s director George Tenet, in June, 2004, the White House began “coming down critically” on analysts in the C.I.A.’s Directorate of Intelligence (D.I.) and demanded “to see more support for the Administration’s political position.” Porter Goss, Tenet’s successor, engaged in what the recently retired C.I.A. official described as a “political purge” in the D.I. Among the targets were a few senior analysts who were known to write dissenting papers that had been forwarded to the White House. The recently retired C.I.A. official said, “The White House carefully reviewed the political analyses of the D.I. so they could sort out the apostates from the true believers.” Some senior analysts in the D.I. have turned in their resignations—quietly, and without revealing the extent of the disarray. 



The White House solidified its control over intelligence last month, when it forced last-minute changes in the intelligence-reform bill. The legislation, based substantially on recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, originally gave broad powers, including authority over intelligence spending, to a new national-intelligence director. (The Pentagon controls roughly eighty per cent of the intelligence budget.) A reform bill passed in the Senate by a vote of 96-2. Before the House voted, however, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld balked. The White House publicly supported the legislation, but House Speaker Dennis Hastert refused to bring a House version of the bill to the floor for a vote—ostensibly in defiance of the President, though it was widely understood in Congress that Hastert had been delegated to stall the bill. After intense White House and Pentagon lobbying, the legislation was rewritten. The bill that Congress approved sharply reduced the new director’s power, in the name of permitting the Secretary of Defense to maintain his “statutory responsibilities.” Fred Kaplan, in the online magazine Slate, described the real issues behind Hastert’s action, quoting a congressional aide who expressed amazement as White House lobbyists bashed the Senate bill and came up “with all sorts of ludicrous reasons why it was unacceptable.”

“Rummy’s plan was to get a compromise in the bill in which the Pentagon keeps its marbles and the C.I.A. loses theirs,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Then all the pieces of the puzzle fall in place. He gets authority for covert action that is not attributable, the ability to directly task national-intelligence assets”—including the many intelligence satellites that constantly orbit the world. 

“Rumsfeld will no longer have to refer anything through the government’s intelligence wringer,” the former official went on. “The intelligence system was designed to put competing agencies in competition. What’s missing will be the dynamic tension that insures everyone’s priorities—in the C.I.A., the D.O.D., the F.B.I., and even the Department of Homeland Security—are discussed. The most insidious implication of the new system is that Rumsfeld no longer has to tell people what he’s doing so they can ask, ‘Why are you doing this?’ or ‘What are your priorities?’ Now he can keep all of the mattress mice out of it.”

Copyright © CondéNet 2005

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seymour hersh talks to amy goodman on radio - transcript

• DAVID GREGORY: About Iran, will you rule out the potential for military action against Iran, if it continues to stonewall the international community about the existence of its nuclear weapons program?

  GEORGE W. BUSH: I hope we can solve it diplomatically, but I will never take any option off the table.

AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh is on the line with us now, investigative reporter for The New Yorker magazine. Your response to what President Bush has said?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, I mean, that's -- the thing that's wonderful about that is that, of course, if he really hopes we're doing something politically, he should join in with the talks that have been underway for more than a year. Since 2003, the E.U., the European Union, primarily led by England, France and Germany, have been in extensive negotiations with the Iranians. I think there's an understanding that Iran has ambitions to become a nuclear power. It's not there yet. The goal of these talks is to offer them, I guess, to use a cliche, the carrot they need in terms of increased trade and increased credits and dual-use goods, goods that they have been denied by sanctions because of their activities, in exchange for a commitment to stop. The United States has not joined in those talks, absolutely has nothing to do with them. In the article, as I'm sure you know, I quoted senior western diplomats – everyone’s so nervous about being quoted about anything these days with this administration -- anyway, a senior European diplomat said to me, we're in a lose-lose position, because as long as America doesn't join in these negotiations we really don't have the leverage. What kind of a commitment can we make for Iran's security if America stays out of it. And as long as they don't join in, we're -- we'll eventually going to have to go to the United Nations for sanctions because we can't do it through diplomacy to stop them, and at that point, everybody understands that Russia and China will probably veto it, and then the Bush administration can claim, “A-ha, U.N. is not working again,” which is analogous to what happened in 2003 when we went into Iraq. We didn't give the negotiations there a chance to work. So, if you really are interested in negotiations, it's simple. Start talking to Iran.

AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, can you explain where the C.I.A. and the Pentagon fits into this picture?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, that's actually to me the most interesting part to the story that I wrote, not about Iran, because you can almost argue that, of course, we're doing surveillance. I'm sort of amazed that it became such a big story in the last 24 hours or 36 hours. The real issue is that in -- what the story is about is the fact that the diminuation of the C.I.A. is unbelievable, the President has really gone after the agency with Cheney and Rumsfeld, and at this point, as I say, there's never been more significant or more intellectual or more intelligence capability for not only operations, but for analysis. More is totally centralized in the White House and the Pentagon than since the rise of the national security state after World War II in the Cold War. We now have the White House and a Pentagon that basically dominates the process. The C.I.A. has been marginalized. All of the noise that you heard about the new C.I.A. director, Goss, going after people in the operations division, so-called dirty tricks division, really has masked what's going on. His real mission, his real agenda – and it wasn't his, he was carrying out a White House agenda -- was to get rid of a number of analysts, senior analysts who work for the intelligence side of the C.I.A., old-timers who have been skeptical of many of the White House's and Pentagon's operations, and so, as somebody said to me, they really went after the apostates, and they want only true believers in there. That's what the mission has been. The Pentagon now, under a series of Pentagon -- on the series of presidential formal findings and also just declarations, you know -- I think the President's got a lot of legal power here. The way the world shakes down is this, when it comes to covert secret operations abroad. If the C.I.A. does it, under the law now they must tell the President. The President has to issue a finding approving it, and the Congress has to be told. The House and Senate Intelligence Committees have to be briefed. If the military does a covert operation, their interpretation of the law is simply that the President's rights as Commander-in-Chief trump any other requirement. That is, the military is there to prepare the battlefield with these operations. This is a military deal, totally. Nothing to do with intelligence. No need to inform anybody. So, now Rumsfeld has won a major bureaucratic fight. He is now operating, as you said in the intro, in up to ten countries. He is sending in covert teams. That is -- the word they use inside is “wiped clean.” The soldiers are wiped clean. Their I.D.’s are totally non-American and non-military. They're going in to make contact with groups inside various countries, set up operations, trying to do some war games, some terrorism themselves. You have to -- you run with the bad boys to find the bad boys is the way somebody said to me. In other words, look like bad boys to attract other bad boys so we find out who they are. We can't find the terrorists too often. This is one way of getting at them. And we're going to be doing that with military people. We're not going to be telling the American ambassador in the country. We’re not going to be telling the C.I.A. station chief. It's going to be done by Rummy and his people. That's a huge shift, an unprecedented shift, in the last 60 years.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about, when it comes to Iran, the role of Pakistan and Israel?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, Israel's role is simply to say, yeah, if you guys don't do it, we're going to do it. Nobody wants that. And so Israel is sort of there. Israel is playing it very cleverly, and they understand that a lot of Americans, pro- and anti-Israel, are troubled by the Israeli connection to this administration as it played out in the Iraqi invasion. There's a lot of questions about whether Israel was a major player in this or a major factor. So, they don't want that scene replicated in case we do something in Iran. So, they have been low-balling it, but the reality is they have been putting a lot of pressure. The message really to us is either you do it or we do it. Nobody wants them to do it. That would be chaotic. I don't know why they think it's much better for us to do it, but in any case – And so their role, the Pakistani role, is much more -- much more devious in a way, much more complicated, because Musharraf is allegedly our ally in the hunt for bin Laden and all that. Meanwhile, he's going along, making weapons, more nuclear weapons, but he has given us access to some of the Pakistani scientists who work in Iran. One of the things that we learned -- one of the reasons we learned about Iran's secret ambitions is the International Agency for Atomic Energy, I.A.E.A., the watchdog in Europe in Vienna, a non-proliferation regime, of which by the way, Iran is a member of the N.P.T., Pakistan is not. Anyway, I.A.E.A. announced a couple of years ago that they discovered there was cheating, you know, gambling on the premises, that not only was Iran cheating, but they had been working with the Pakistanis for years. That all ended, but Musharraf has given us some of the Pakistani intelligence, some of the information they know from their own work about where certain facilities are inside Iran. The exchange is we are laying off A.Q. Khan. A.Q. Khan is the sort of – the mythical, it’s not quite real, but we always call him the father of the Pakistani bomb, actually another man named Khan did much more with it. Nonetheless, A.Q. Khan was the guy that generated the dual-use goods, the materials they needed to get nuclear in the 1970s and 1980s. He is a famous person, and he was caught out in Libya doing this kind stuff a couple of years ago. There was a public ceremony where Musharraf had him – A.Q. Khan went and apologized. Now he has been under house arrest. Musharraf has not given us or the I.A.E.A. in Vienna access to this guy. So we don't know what he's doing. My friends inside tell me we made a Faustian bargain. We told Musharraf, give us the intelligence we need to get more information about sites, nuclear sites, the suspected sites in Iran, and we will not pressure you on A.Q. Khan, coughing him up to us or the I.A.E.A. And meanwhile, of course, Musharraf is making more bombs. My other people tell me that people that know Pakistan, former Pakistanis tell me that he's going and doing more work with the plutonium route. And, of course, they're into the international black market buying the parts right now. So it's amazing. We're sort of playing the short run game. We need the intel. I think the reason we need the intel is simply this, this president – you just have to listen to what he says -- in the Washington Post last weekend an astonishing interview, he's going ahead with the war on terror. He's continuing to do what he thinks is right to bring democracy. He almost basically -- Iran, he said, is eagerly -- they're eagerly awaiting our help in becoming secular, or something like that, he said in, the Washington Post. I think we don't want to get the wrong targets. We don't want to be embarrassed again as in Iraq with not coming up with W.M.D. when we need to. I think it all sort of fits together.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh. We have to break for just one minute. When we come back, I want to ask you quickly, about the conviction of Charles Graner, and also about Jerry Boykin's role in plans for Iran.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN:As we continue our discussion with investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh. His latest piece is in The New Yorker magazine this week. It is called, “The Coming Wars: What the Pentagon Can Now Do In Secret” and talks about Pentagon plans to deal with Iran. Is it fair to say to attack Iran? Seymour Hersh?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Yeah, I think that's fair to say. Of course they're planning to attack Iran. The goal of the -- the, you know, what we always call the neo-conservatives -- the Paul Wolfowitzes and Doug Feiths in the Pentagon, the civilian leadership in the Pentagon. Their theory is: Look, one of the things They’ve learned in Iraq (they have learned something) which is that regime change by overwhelming force isn't working so well. So the goal in Iran, since it's also three times as large as Iraq, and it does have a large secular population and there's a lot of reason to believe that if we hadn't gone into Iraq, there would be a lot of dissent right now in Iran over the leadership; but nonetheless, I think their thinking is, that if we hit three or four dozen targets in the spring -- [sneezes] excuse me -- in the summer, late spring or summer, which I think is the tentative plan -- that would be roughly at the time Sharon is beginning his pullout of Gaza, and so their -- the theory is in the Pentagon there would be more good feelings towards America in the Muslim world once this begins. And if Iraq can be stabilized, which they think it will (I don’t know why, but they do.) after the elections, if that gets stabilized, then the goal is you hit three or four targets quickly and cleanly and you be sure you’re right and you have evidence to show that the Iranians are cheating more than they might -- than the world [inaudible] knows, this could lead to the secular population, those millions of young people, et cetera, who don't like the clerical leadership, to overthrowing or beginning to agitate against the mullahs once again. And the only problem with that thinking, of course, is that it's pretty much unique to those group of civilians in the Pentagon; because almost everybody else I talked to, in and out of the government, were scathing in their critique of this, saying it's absolutely hogwash, that what's going to happen, of course, is that the White House and the Pentagon is ignoring the nationalism that exists, the enormous feelings of togetherness inside Iran and love for country. And, essentially, the reason I think people talk to me -- because it's very clear with this group that's now in the White House and in the Pentagon, you can’t get to the meetings unless you drink the Kool-Aid. And so, if you don't agree with them, you can’t get in. And so, yeah, I think they really believe this is one way -- sort of on the cheap, without committing a lot of troops, an air raid, maybe some commandoes, you know, some guerrillas, American S.E.A.L.S or other teams go in with the Israelis, some of Israeli commando units go in to certain targets about which we’re not clear. But, basically, they think that's the ticket.

AMY GOODMAN: What are the other countries that the Pentagon is operating secretly in?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, you know, unfortunately, one of the things I do is, I like to avoid writing about anything where there's any chance that Americans there, this -- you know, I can’t say there's any Americans going in and out of Iran right now. I know it started last summer, so that's – there’s plenty of protection there, besides which, they don't go in as Americans; but in the other countries, the countries I name, I can tell you we just did something in Algeria. What we are doing is we’re sending in teams that are completely disguised as terrorists, and their -- the C.I.A. has a number of rules they have to live by, which is they cannot, under the rules, they cannot have their assets, their people, posing as journalists or clerics. And there's no such rules for the Pentagon. So, you know, the military people going in could be journalists, they could be religious people, they could be plain tourists undercover. And I think North Africa is a place of enormous interest for us, because we -- the Bush administration believes there's a lot of al Qaeda or al Qaeda-like terrorist activities there. So, that's an area of concern, you know, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia. Obviously, they're still interested in the Philippines and Indonesia, and there's other countries where we have an enormous amount of interest.

AMY GOODMAN: The government has finally responded to your piece, if it didn't when you actually were calling the White House for response, saying, “It's so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the credibility of [your] entire report has been destroyed.”

SEYMOUR HERSH: Yeah. I heard that.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, I mean, my response is pretty much the same as, I must say, even the mainstream media. To their everlasting credit it is all pointed out that while it's wonderful to go after me personally, none of the attacks dealt with the substance of what I was writing about. Are we operating in Iran? Is there a new understanding of what the Pentagon can do? All of that is not dealt with. So, you know, I'm really very untroubled by what the Pentagon spokesmen say. I think that when I did my stuff on Abu Ghraib and suggested that what was going on in The New Yorker, I suggested, and there were a bunch of articles I wrote, suggesting that what went on in Abu Ghraib was certainly not just there, it went on into Guantanamo in Cuba, into Afghanistan and other places in Iraq and led to the highest leadership. When I wrote that stuff, they accused me of throwing mud up, I think it was mud, against the wall and seeing what sticks. So, you know, we can just -- you know, I -- you know, you cannot worry about what public relations people say.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of which, the conviction of Charles Graner, sentenced to ten years in prison for torture at Abu Ghraib.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, there's a couple of thoughts. One, of course, is that just last week, somebody got one year for murdering somebody in Iraq. It was a manslaughter case. So there's always a question of somebody else who plead guilty got eight years, which are most of the people who committed -- who shoot prisoners are getting three years or so. There's that question of that, the fairness of the sentencing. Look, Graner was obviously -- was certainly at fault, moronic, etc., but until this government -- he is -- there are eight people have now been accused of activities in Abu Ghraib. A couple have plead guilty, three or so, a couple are waiting trial, and a couple are found guilty. They’re all enlisted people. This is an operation that -- what happened in Abu Ghraib, which was excessive, went on for three or four months. Everybody knew what was going on in the night shift at the prison. I’m sure the same thing was going on in the day shift. Officer after officer was -- there's all sorts of allegations about visiting the site. As even including the major general or the three-star general in charge of the whole Iraqi operation. So, we have all of -- Sanchez, I'm talking about. We have all of these allegations. Not one officer has been charged. Graner's defense was moronic, but one of the things his lawyer did raise, they tried very hard to get some officers as witnesses, and of course they all plead -- the military equivalent of the fifth and they were excused. They didn’t testify. So we really don't -- this trial doesn't do anything to get us -- I thought the coverage in The Washington Post, by the way, which I read -- I thought was really quite brilliant because they kept on focusing in the trial, the Graner trial, about higher-ups. I didn't see as much of that in the Times unfortunately, but in the Post, it was really terrific coverage. Because that was the real theme of what Graner was saying, is there were a lot of other people involved. Until we deal with that in a legal way -- the army -- and prosecute some people – you know, we're still in the scapegoat business here. You know, I -- it's hard to have much sympathy for Graner, but I learned when I did a lot of work on My Lai, I initially started out thinking all those kids in Lieutenant Calley's company who murdered people were the worst sort of people. In the end, I came to realize they were as much victims as the people they executed, because of the wrong war, wrong time, wrong training, wrong everything. And there is a lot more responsibility than just Charlie Graner.

AMY GOODMAN: And your belief in having written Chain of Command, the book, how far up it goes?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh my god, I don't think there's any question that I would never say that anybody in the White House or Pentagon knew. Civilian leadership knew what was going on in Abu Ghraib, but that everybody from the President on down understood that as -- the cliche was, the gloves are off. Rumsfeld kept on saying that we were going to get very tough with prisoners. There's no question, it was widespread inside, and as you know, as you remember, we talked about it, the book I wrote begins with the meeting with Condoleezza Rice about this issue. There was a lot more high-level information. You know, this President's hard for to us reach. We don't know -- we don't know where he is at any time. But I am increasingly convinced, and I have enough data that I'm getting. I’m just talking, not writing, that the President, when it came to prisoner interrogation issues and the intelligence from it and operational stuff, is much more actively involved in a way we don't see than we might think. We always see him as sort of not really getting tuned in. I think in this stuff, he's really more tuned in, but I -- you know, I have to prove that.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, as we move into the Condoleezza Rice confirmation hearings today in the Senate, that opening scene in your book, Condoleezza Rice.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Yes. Condoleezza Rice convenes. She was convinced, to her credit, to hold a meeting on all these allegations that came out of Guantanamo, a C.I.A. official going down to Guantanamo. We're talking about in the summer of 2002. Six, nine months before the invasion of Iraq, long before Abu Ghraib, went down without clearance. Went down and just spent time. Most of the Congressional people and other visitors to Guantanamo were seeing what amounted to Potemkin Village. They would clean it up and give them the show and tell and hide what was really going on, the kind of daily brutality. He saw it and wrote a report. It got circulated. He was in the C.I.A. It ended in Condoleezza Rice's hands. People with a lot of integrity inside the N.S.C., National Security Council, insisted that it be dealt with. She convened a meeting. Rumsfeld came. He said he would do something about it. Nothing happened. Everybody was disillusioned. Everybody knew, and it just kept on going. It just never – you know, it’s one of those issues. She did have a meeting about it, but nothing happened. It just sort of whittled away, and people kept on whacking people. So, the guys in the inside in the White House, including a four-star general, were discouraged by it. And then when I wrote about Abu Ghraib, I learned about all of this, and that was what I wrote about. That's actually the whole scene, the first 30 or 40 pages of the book is about this. Where does responsibility lie? Condoleezza Rice was not at Abu Ghraib sticking feathers in people, but she certainly knew in general that things were not basically going right, and we were mistreating prisoners, and also it's real simple. Two simple rules every military guy knows. One is you don't do to them what you don't want done to your soldiers. And two, you cannot get good intelligence from people that want to fly airplanes into the buildings to kill the infidels, to kill us. You can't get it by pushing them around. They have a story and they will just give you the story. You have to convince them otherwise. You have to establish rapport. Everybody knows that. That's one of the -- anybody who argues that torture is acceptable is really missing the boat on that issue. Most of the really good guys in the profession, which is one reason some of the guys in the F.B.I. protested so much, because they knew that you -- you know, if you are rational and smart, you don't get it by pushing people around. In any case, you know, it remains -- I must say in the last six months, thank god for the American A.C.L.U., and Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International, they have really pressed this issue. There's a group, a bar group in New York, Scott Horton involved in it, a legal group that's also doing a lot of work. People at N.Y.U. There's an awful lot of stuff going on now to try and hold, you know, in some way, because Congress isn't going to do it. The one thing we know is Congress is not going to do its job.

AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Investigative reporter, wrote the latest piece in The New Yorker magazine.