On the Brink
An Insider’s Account of How the White House Compromised American Intelligence
By Tyler Drumheller with Elaine Monaghan
Carikk & Graf Publishers, a Philip Turner Book
New York, 2006
296 pages
When Tyler Drumheller retired in 2005 as the head of the CIA’s clandestine operations in Europe, he took with him a lot of the agency’s institutional memory. As the highest insider yet to discuss the now well-known process of the Bush administration cherry-picking intelligence to feed its unstoppable political agenda to go to war, the author had a prime role in the thankless drama of trying to keep the administration honest with the American people.
Well, now we’ve all seen how that movie ended.
Although the publisher bills the book as chock-full of new revelations, the truth is the author jumped the gun of publication a bit in April of this year by discussing a previously unpublicized high-level contact from inside Saddam’s inner circle on 60 Minutes. Later identified in press reports as Naji Sabri, Iraq’s foreign minister, this source and his information were totally discounted by the Bush administration as a "single source" when Sabri claimed his country had no WMD’s whatsoever. Of course, "Curveball," the "kinda crazy" alcoholic whose identity to this day remains unknown even to Drumheller, was also a single source – one who was used to verify Powell’s assertion of the existence of mobile weapons labs in his UN speech. But no matter. Curveball was saying what Bush and Cheney wanted to hear. Sabri? Not so much. Ironically, the administration was eager to use Sabri at first, until it became clear his information was not helpful to the invasion cause. As Drumheller puts it, "... there was no feedback—except for an expression of interest in the Iraqi source defecting so they could put him on television."
On the Brink, in terms of jaw-dropping new information for those who have followed the intelligence-gathering aspect of the run-up to the war, offers little new. But the escapades with Curveball and the disregard for unwelcome facts is gone into in such detail that it almost feels new. The frustration and growing anger at not being heeded is palatable, as is the sorrow the CIA professionals feel as the agency gets set up to take the whole fall for 9/11, and then, a year or so later, the entirety of blame for the WMD fabrication. Drumheller recounts the conversations that take place among lifers there – and the dawning realization that Porter Goss’s appointment to head the agency means even further politicization of its mission – with a numbed sadness as he watches old hands depart. In 2005, he finally left too.
In many ways, the somewhat disjointed narrative of events has the feel of a survivor of a serious car accident struggling to make sense of the trauma after the fact. First, this happened and then this happened ... oh, wait, this happened first and then this happened .... All the shameful facts of administration pressure and politicizing and stovepiping are there, just rather jumbled. Part of this may be due to the CIA’s vetting of the book (according to the author, one-sixth of the book was removed), but part of it seems indicative of Drumheller narrating to his co-author from a bewildered How did everything go so bad so fast? mind frame.
The book succeeds at giving an informal glimpse of how the CIA operates on a day-to-day basis, how it feels to go under cover in Africa (as Drumheller did), how to rise through the ranks and try to operate efficiently in an ever-growing bureaucracy, the complexities of coordinating with European intelligence agencies that have to remain ever-mindful of their countries’ domestic political audience as well as the demands made by the world’s last remaining –and quite bullying, under Bush – superpower.
But there are two important implications that stem from this book that seem worthy to qualify as revelations in their own right. The first was picked up by Josh Marshall, two days after the aforementioned 60 Minutes interview with Drumheller that aired April 21. In that interview, Drumheller told Ed Bradley about the Bush administration’s dismissal of Sabri’s disavowal of WMD’s. He also told Bradley he had testified about the passage to the White House of this unwelcome information, before both the Senate Intel Committee and the Robb-Silbermann Commission, which were tasked with getting to the bottom of what went wrong with intelligence gathering/application pre-invasion. Marshall thought about this for a bit, and then got on the phone with Drumheller. In a searing post (which I hope he forgives that I quote at length) on April 23, Marshall wrote:
Drumheller's account is pretty probative evidence on the question of whether the White House politicized and cherry-picked the Iraq intelligence.
So why didn't we hear about any of this in the reports of those Iraq intel commissions that have given the White House a clean bill of health on distorting the intel and misleading the country about what we knew about Iraq's alleged WMD programs?
Think about it. It's devastating evidence against their credibility on a slew of levels.
Did you read in any of those reports -- even in a way that would protect sources and methods -- that the CIA had turned a key member of the Iraqi regime, that that guy had said there weren't any active weapons programs, and that the White House lost interest in what he was saying as soon as they realized it didn't help the case for war? What about what he said about the Niger story?
Did the Robb-Silbermann Commission not hear about what Drumheller had to say? What about the Roberts Committee?
I asked Drumheller just those questions when I spoke to him early this evening. He was quite clear. He was interviewed by the Robb-Silbermann Commission. Three times apparently.
Did he tell them everything he revealed on tonight's 60 Minutes segment. Absolutely.
Drumheller was also interviewed twice by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the Roberts Committee) but apparently only after they released their summer 2004 report.
Now, quite a few of us have been arguing for almost two years now that those reports were fundamentally dishonest in the story they told about why we were so badly misled in the lead up to war. The fact that none of Drumheller's story managed to find its way into those reports, I think, speaks volumes about the agenda that the writers of those reports were pursuing.
"I was stunned," Drumheller told me, when so little of the stuff he had told the commission's and the committee's investigators ended up in their reports. His colleagues, he said, were equally "in shock" that so little of what they related ended up in the reports either.
What Drumheller has to say adds quite a lot to our knowledge of what happened in the lead up to war. But what it shows even more clearly is that none of this stuff has yet been investigated by anyone whose principal goal is not covering for the White House.
So there you have it: Whatever "investigations" have thus far been conducted clearly have been, as Marshall puts it, fundamentally dishonest.
A second and unrelated implication stems from a couple of key passages in Drumheller’s book. A great deal of On the Brink is spent explaining the incredible overlap of agencies and tasks, the jealously guarded information they alternatively hoard or force upon one another, the run-arounds that were made to stovepipe information without proper verification, etc. It’s a labyrinthine nightmare that the Bush administration made even more complex through bypassing regular channels of communication. If it weren’t actual national security at stake, it would almost be laughable in a grim Laurel-and-Hardy kind of way. The author, for example, talks about the arguments that went on between the Department of Defense at one layer and two layers of CIA over: (1) who is responsible for verifying the validity of a source; and (2) who is responsible for actually analyzing the material, putting it into context. The answer to both questions, sadly, appears to be: no one. One group says: Hey, all we do is report info. We don’t guarantee the source or if it’s valid. Another group says: No, all we do is pass it along; it’s up to someone else to draw conclusions from it. And so on.
Now into this mess, post-9/11 but pre-Iraq invasion, steps the Bush administration, grabbing information it wants from one place, ignoring information it doesn’t like from another, re-using the same piece of information as if it were supplied by two separate sources, with no analysis or layers in between. Then when the second-guessing starts after the invasion when no WMD’s turn up – the 9/11 Commission, the Senate Intelligence Commission, the Robbs-Silbermann Commission – even more layers of bureaucracy and assistants and "experts" get added, with no clear hierarchy of how reports should flow or verification of sources be administered.
It’s a recipe for even further madness, assuming the goal is to formulate an informational flow that leads to rational decision-making on how to respond to – or, better yet – prevent terrorist strikes. Drumheller himself assumes, of course, that a level-headed, logical process is desired. He says, in expressing his view that the old tried-and-true (and more streamlined) methods employed during the Cold War need to be recovered:
That [Cold War] knowledge hasn’t lost its usefulness with the passing of Soviet power, unless we believe that Islamic militants are driven by something demonic rather than by their own interests, and that their plans cannot be unraveled.
Gee. "Islamic militants are driven by something demonic?" Drumheller’s obvious disavowal of this formulation of the problem, while admirable, doesn’t seem to take into account the simplistic drumbeat rhetoric of Cheney and Bush, who stubbornly insist on the "axis of evil," "they hate us for our freedoms!," "the clash of civilizations" school of international understanding. Drumheller, obviously a man of logic and rationality, rejects this line of thought outright and does the hard work of looking for explicable causes for terrorist loathing of the West:
But our grand declarations about killing or capturing terrorists and defeating terrorism are meaningless unless we define who the terrorists are, what they want, and who supports them. We will have to take the excruciating step of facing the role we share with other Western states in the growth of corrupt, dictatorial governments in the Middle East. This is a legacy of both colonialism and the Cold War, when, to deal with the global threat posed by the Soviet Union, we often made a deal with the devil to gain the support of a dictator or corrupt group of rulers. This was a pragmatic, necessary policy, but we have to clean up the fallout.... The poor and disenfranchised of the region are drawn to Al Qaeda and other radical organizations that offer simple explanations for their plight, and a ready villain: the U.S. government and its allies. The only other possible explanation for the anger that we face there is that Arabs are evil. I don’t buy that.
Well, Drumheller may not buy it – and not many readers at Daily Kos buy it – but Bush sure is trying to sell it to the American people. Arabs are evil. They’re irrational. They are mindless beasts set out to destroy all that’s good in the (western) world, just because they’re .... eeeeeeviiiiill.. This is a Tolkien view of reality that’s mind-boggling in its implications. Panels are convened (however Potemkin), testimony is taken, directors of national intelligence are appointed ... but all for naught. If the enemy is designated as purely demonic, no amount of intelligence gathering, no matter how streamlined or how well-funded, can succeed in predicting where pure evil is going to strike next. We’re trapped in a Stephen King novel, the stupid protagonists who don’t understand when the supernatural will intervene. The whole terrorist problem becomes relegated to a category of uncontrollable phenomenon, like hurricanes or lightning strikes. All a government can do is throw up its hands at the irrationality of it all and respond to the natural terrorist disaster after the devastation. And God help us then, based on FEMA response to Katrina.
On the Brink tries to bring a modicum of common sense and experience to a simplistic and fairy tale view of the world. It’s worth a read – maybe two, since it raises indirectly all kinds of questions about assumptions that don’t belong anywhere outside of Grimm’s fairy tales – despite the hacking job it underwent at the CIA. Consider it one more sorrowful and elegiac volume that documents mistakes made when operating outside the reality-based world. The bookshelf holding these tomes, if you’re collecting them all, must be ten feet long by now.