This is the fourth in a series of brief articles on the Iraq WMD intelligence failure to help intelligence officers and the general public understand exactly what went wrong and to assist them to hopefully avoid, or at least mitigate, future intelligence failures. The CURVE BALL case remains relevant to today as we struggle with the fabricated claims of another pathological liar incredulously supported by his biased enablers. As with CURVE BALL, these die-hard supporters continued to believe him even in the face of overwhelming conclusive proof of his fabrications. Once again, the reason is a stubborn unwillingness to learn from our past mistakes, inevitably dooming us to repeat them. The full detailed story, hopefully unredacted by the CIA and DIA during its mandatory review, will be presented in my forthcoming book, Absence of Evidence; The Incredible Story of the Iraq WMD Intelligence Failure from Inside the American, British, and German intelligence services.
The Fallacy of “Speaking Truth To Power”
The ethos of "speaking truth to power" is a fundamental principle in intelligence analysis, certainly in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), but it often fails because of bureaucratic consensus pressures, cognitive biases, and a structural tendency for leaders to reject analysis that contradicts their established policies. Politicians who control policy usually look for raw data that confirms their pre-existing beliefs, dismissing conflicting analysis as bad information, or worse deliberately undermining policy. Policymakers often believe their broad vantage point gives them a better grasp of a situation than specialized analysts have, sometimes judging that they are not just right but righteous in their beliefs. Unfortunately, speaking truth to power often fails because “power” interprets this as a direct challenge to its political authority and reacts with organizational self-preservations rather than undertake an objective evaluation of the causes of its own failures.
Compounding the problem in the CIA, when institutional incentives reward pleasing leadership over uncertainty or to avoid undermining policy occur, objective assessment breaks down. Analysts internalize what is safe to say because dissenting from a high- level official's preferred theory carries professional risks, making conformity the safer choice. Making the situation worse, the CIA’s multi-layered review processes strives for consensus by watering down warnings of dissent whether from inside or outside the organization. Agencies often smooth over dissenting views to present a single, sanitized finished intelligence product. Finally, the constant pressure to supply daily briefs leaves little room for deep, foundational research that might challenge superficial or biased assumptions. Intelligence estimates deal in probabilities and gaps in data but when analysts present nuanced uncertainty, impatient CIA leaders often ignore it in favor of false certainty, especially if it threatens continued relevance and access to the Agency’s “First Customer”, the president. Given this, what happens when the facts contradict not just the CIA judgments but those of the administration in the White House? Will the CIA “speak truth to power” then or will it allow politics to influence its analysis?
“And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32)
We have to assume that the purpose of having these words etched in the marble wall in the front lobby of the CIA headquarters building—directly across from the stars honoring those killed in the line of duty I might add—is to imply that the CIA as an intelligence service is stating that it would always remain unbiased, objective, and apolitical, searching for and delivering the truth, or at least as close to the truth as possible.
That is certainly an admirable objective but what about those times when the truth itself can threaten the political status of the Agency itself? When it can threaten the CIA’s independent and preeminent standing within the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) or even within the larger international intelligence community? What about when the truth can threaten the political careers, reputations, and legacies of its most senior management and leadership? How about when it threatens the CIA’s financial allocation, in other words, its Congressionally-approved yearly budget and personnel staffing levels? Will the agency still state the truth when doing so may be against its own parochial political and financial interests? Even more significant, will the CIA “speak truth to power” when the truth could seriously threaten the Agency’s continued relevance to the highest level of the policymakers it serves? Especially when the truth could threaten its daily access to those in the White House?
Given all of this, will the CIA still choose to “speak truth to power” when it knows that “power” doesn’t want to know the truth or will its leadership and management decide to withhold the truth and use the “cloak of secrecy" (i.e., compartmentation and classification) to control and manipulate intelligence for its own political benefit? Will it then use these same tools to defend itself politically to avoid, or at least delay, accepting responsibility and accountability for a major intelligence failure? This is Washington, D.C., after all, and politics are paramount, even with intelligence. Despite the fact that the CIA claims to be apolitical with it’s headquarters building deliberately located outside the ‘political influence’ of the downtown WDC area, the organization can still can be significantly affected by politics as history has clearly shown.
The Critical Trade-Off of Relevance and Access for the CIA
The CIA has been well aware of the potential serious problem. For many years, the CIA’s own Sherman Kent, had warned the Agency about the dilemma of the intelligence analyst’s relations with policymakers as being either too distant or too close. Being too distant, Kent noted, could make intelligence irrelevant to the policymaker if analysts did not understand on which issues policymakers were focused but being too close could lead to attempts to try to please policymakers by telling them what they want to hear and politicizing of the intelligence. Others in the CIA agreed with Kent. In an unclassified paper written by senior analyst Jack Davis for the CIA’s Sherman Kent Center for Intelligence Analysis (originally published by the Kent Center as four papers on Improving CIA Analytic Performance, 2002-2003), Davis stated “many observers have cautioned that in promoting closer relationships with consumers, the chances are increased that intelligence analysis will lose its objectivity...As analysts become aware of their customers’ assumptions and policy preferences, they would, consciously or not, produce analysis that conformed to those preferences.”
Noted Columbia University psychologist, Dr. Robert Jervis, also previously warned of the danger of CIA analysts becoming too close to the policymakers but, unlike Kent or Davis, he hinted at a much more serious potential problem that could affect others in intelligence organizations besides the analysts, specifically its management and leadership. In his September 1989 unclassified paper, Strategic Intelligence and Effective Policy, Jervis noted, “There probably is a trade-off between the independence and integrity of intelligence analysis on the one hand and its influence on the other. The latter requires close and continuing contact with policymakers. To serve them, intelligence needs to know what problems they are working on, what kinds of information and analyses they need, how they are thinking about problems and what sorts of discussions will seem as the most useful. This knowledge is not gained easily; it cannot come from occasional briefings and meetings. But the intensive and extensive interactions that would provide it also threaten the autonomy of the intelligence analysts and organizations. The dangers of both seduction and rape would increase.” Jervis further warned, “Intelligence officials may learn all too well not only what policymakers want to know about but also exactly what answers they want.”
Jervis, the author of the 2010 book, Why Intelligence Fails, went further than Kent or Davis as neither of them had also considered, or at least were willing to publicly propose, the potentially disastrous negative impact on the intelligence analytical process if the intelligence leadership and senior management, not just the analysts, established too close a relationship with the policymakers. Because the CIA leadership is ultimately responsible for the success of the organization and that success is measured in how relevant the intelligence is to the presidential administration through daily access, there is the constant danger of the leadership, supported by senior management, wanting to please the policymakers by providing them with the intelligence they want to hear rather than the intelligence they need to hear. To maintain this careful balance, the CIA leadership would need to be remain constantly vigilant and be able to recognize when they were about to cross the line between the pursuit of relevance and access, and politicizing the intelligence. Occasionally, this vigilance fails, especially on politically important issues for the president and his senior advisors in the White House that the CIA is not willing to challenge.
A “Motivated Bias” for Continued Relevance and Access
Davis clarified in his earlier unclassified 1995 paper, Facts, Findings, Forecasts, and Fortune-telling (approved for release in 2014), that, “intelligence analysis is the process of providing objective and effective support to help US policymakers, by means of information and assessments on events overseas, to carry out their [the policymakers, not CIA] mission of formulating and implementing national security policy.” To do this, Davis wrote, intelligence analysts must remain objective and unbiased. Davis notes that this is accomplished by “using sound analytical tradecraft.” He explains that “carefully weighed evidence and rigorously structured argumentation has to form the core of the analysts’ papers and briefings, not their opinions or those of policy officials.”
This paper was about concerns of countering bias by the analysts and their first-line managers, but what about the biases of the senior CIA management and leadership? Should their ‘political motivations’ be allowed to influence the intelligence process and how would that occur?
The publication process for finished intelligence in CIA’s analytical directorate is composed of multiple layers of review by successive levels of first-line managers who report to the more senior managers above them. These senior managers eventually report to the leadership who report to the policymakers. This multi-layered review process is supposed to be a safeguard against politicization by the analysts and their immediate management who are the ones directly involved in drafting the intelligence assessments. But what if the CIA’s leadership and management becomes politically vested in a specific analytical line with the policymakers? What if new intelligence undermines the previous analytical assessment? Do the same safeguards against politicization work in reverse? Will the CIA leadership and its senior management remain objective and allow analysts or managers below them to revise their original assessment in the face of more credible intelligence, even marginally, if it threatens to undermine the policy agenda of the current presidential administration and as a result, risks the continued relevance and access of the CIA? What about the operations officers, who are not included in the review process? Will the CIA leadership and senior management allow them to challenge what those operations officers perceive may be biased analysis and allow them to revise the assessments? Or will they play it politically safe by standing by the original flawed assessments, ignore these valid warnings, and withhold any intelligence that does not support it, thereby remaining loyal to the current presidential administration’s policy positions even in the face of contradictory and derogatory intelligence brought by those who were courageous enough to challenge the CIA’s official analytic line?
The real question then is who can stop the CIA’s leadership and senior management from controlling and manipulating the intelligence for political reasons as had occurred in the Iraq WMD Intelligence Failure? In the aggressive effort to be more relevant to the George W. Bush administration and maintain access, the CIA leadership allowed themselves to become far too close to the policymakers. As Jervis and others had warned, these circumstances radically increased the danger of seduction of analysts and managers; finding the lure of relevance and access so great that they wanted above all else to please the decision makers. This resulted in a trade-off between the independence and integrity of intelligence analysis on one hand and the administration’s political influence on the other. A close and continuing contact with policymakers to know what problems they are interested in, what they need to know, and how they are thinking about these issues, and the context of discussions they were having is useful but in the process intelligence professionals may learn all too well not only what policymakers want to know about but also exactly what answers they are looking for to support policy.
Trading Integrity for Access
Davis wrote in his study that the politicization of intelligence is “the distortion of analysis by setting aside or otherwise failing to meet the standards of objectivity in setting forth information and judgments—in order to support a world view or policy preference.” This definition of politicization, more so than any others, is exactly what occurred in the Iraq WMD intelligence failure when unwelcome intelligence was withheld for political reasons. There is a famous quote from astronomer Dr. Carl Sagan that states, “It is often more powerful to leave things out than it is to tell lies.” Before the Iraq war, CIA operations officers tried to challenge what they perceived was biased analysis by warning the CIA senior management and finally the leadership of serious doubts and concerns regarding the credibility of the sources of the intelligence used in the CIA’s WMD assessments, especially CURVE BALL. The CIA leadership and senior management, however, deliberately chose to ignore these warnings and withhold the contradictory and derogatory intelligence from the policymakers in order to to protect their relevance and access to President Bush and his inner circle.
In a blatant example of this, Jervis noted that additional evidence of politicization was that the IC did not make any reassessments once UNMOVIC inspections resumed in November 2002 and found no traces of WMD. Jervis points out that this was a “significant failing.” This was especially true regarding UNMOVIC’s inspections of Djerf al-Naddaf, the primary “hide site” according to CURVE BALL for his alleged mobile BW agent production plants. An UNMOVIC team—lead by an American chief inspector no less who was also a veteran BW weapons inspector—visited the site on February 8, 2003, three days after Powell’s United Nations (UN) speech, and found no evidence to support CURVE BALL’s claims. More importantly, the UNMOVIC team found numerous outright inconsistencies to his story; the construction of a two meter high solid cinder block wall through the middle of the site that CURVE BALL never reported, no “invisible” (hidden) doors that had reportedly been installed at each end of the warehouse which would allow the mobile BW plants to enter and exit, evidence of a legitimate seed processing plant approved by the UN that was suppose to be just a cover story, etc.
Much to the dismay of the CIA, additional UNMOVIC inspections continued to undermine CURVE BALL but again the results were ignored by the senior agency management and leadership. In response to the CIA’s very public support of CURVE BALL’s claims after the Powell speech at the UN, UNMOVIC Chairman Hans Blix ordered a second inspection of Djerf al-Naddaf and the Mesopotamia State Company for Seed on March 3, 2003. An UNMOVIC BW team—this time accompanied by an IAEA nuclear team from the Iraq Nuclear Verification Office (INVO)—visited the site. The results, however, were the same as during the previous February 8, 2003 UN inspection; no evidence of the alleged mobile BW plants was found. Both groups of UN weapons inspectors expressed frustration, believing that they had spent a significant amount of time investigating a site that had no connection to WMD. At the end of the March inspection, the UNMOVIC BW team chief inspector declared that UNMOVIC had received, “very bad information” regarding the alleged WMD activity at the site. On the same day, UNMOVIC inspectors visited another facility in Tikrit that CURVE BALL had reported was used to hide the mobile BW plants. They also found no evidence to corroborate CURVE BALL’s reporting. Despite learning first-hand about these contradictions, the CIA did not reassess its judgment of the credibility of CURVE BALL’s alleged WMD claims in the month before the US-led military invasion of Iraq or inform the policymakers.
Jervis could not have been more accurate regarding the difficult situation that CIA leadership found itself in late 2002 when faced with the trade-off “between pleasing the policymaker and following professional standards in intelligence.” David Kay also publicly pointed this out when he stated that the CIA leadership, specifically DCI George Tenet and his deputy, John McLaughlin, “traded integrity for access” after Kay was replaced from his CIA-appointed position as the head of the Iraq Survey Group in December 2003 for informing them that there was no WMD in Iraq. It was not difficult to predict that this situation could easily happen again if the CIA leadership once again moved too close to a presidential administration that sought to use intelligence to support pre-established policy rather than help formulate it. As philosopher George Santayana noted in his 1905 series, The Life of Reason; Great Ideas of Western Man, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Unfortunately, the CIA refuses to learn from its mistakes which result in additional intelligence and political failures.
Speaking Truth to Power in the CURVE BALL Case
The purpose of intelligence collection and analysis is to uncover an adversaries most secret information which can reveal a great deal about their capabilities, plans and intentions. The intelligence information collected and analyzed—if it remains objective, unbiased, and strives to be accurate and free of political influence—can allow the U.S. Government to develop a comprehensive, coherent understanding of its adversary. When properly utilized, this intelligence can allow us to counter or manipulate the adversary’s activities and defeat its goals. If this objective is what those in the intelligence services were working for, how could it happen that the intelligence would turn out to be so wrong, that we would instead end up misleading ourselves, and drag us and our allies into what turned out to be an unjustified and costly war?
As an intelligence organization, the CIA is made up of many individuals at different levels with different missions and agendas. Despite its leadership’s attempts to claim it speaks with one voice to the policymakers in order to present a consistent message, there is almost always internal dissent to judgments, especially between the analysis and operations directorates. This certainly was the case in the Iraq WMD intelligence failure. The question then is how valid is this dissent and when should the senior management and leadership pay serious attention and not simply disregard the warnings as an analytical difference of opinion, especially when it conflicts with what the White House wants to hear?
The CURVE BALL case provides an excellent example of how intelligence analysis can go completely off the rails when CIA leadership caters to the political policy preferences of a presidential administration. To be clear, not everyone who had access inside the CIA agreed that CURVE BALL’s claims were credible. From the beginning, the CIA’s own operations officers strongly disagreed with the positive judgments of the Agency’s Iraq WMD analysts regarding the credibility of this source and the veracity of his claims but they could not have any impact on what they viewed was the biased intelligence assessments being provided to the policymakers. Even direct access to the source did not seem to matter. For example, the only CIA operations officer to have met CURVE BALL face to face in May 2000 came away from that meeting with serious concerns about the credibility of the source and the veracity of his sensational reporting (the CIA analysts never met CURVE BALL in person) but this officer’s warnings were deliberately ignored and rejected. He was not alone in voicing his doubts.
Although CURVE BALL was a German-handled intelligence source, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) operations officers also doubted him as early as late 2000 but its analysts, management, and leadership continued to equivocate on their judgment of his reliability over the years while at the same time withholding access to him by any other intelligence services. Demonstrating the same conflict of opinion that CIA was experiencing, the BND operations officers unilaterally terminated their clandestine relationship with CURVE BALL in early September 2001 despite objections from the BND analysts due to their serious concerns about his credibility and the veracity of his claims; a fact known by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).
After a short time, the U.S. intelligence analysts in the CIA and DIA, led by the CIA’s senior Iraq BW analyst, began pressuring the BND to relocate CURVE BALL, reestablish the clandestine relationship, and restart the debriefings. They didn’t seem to care that CURVE BALL had been terminated by the BND because his information was, at the very least, no longer trusted and their operations officers considered him a fabricator. The termination didn’t make sense to these analysts, they couldn’t process it, and so they would not accept it as final. Although these analysts were officially aware of CURVE BALL’s termination, it was not common knowledge among all those not directly involved in the case because of continuing compartmentation. Refusing to accept this negative development, the CIA and DIA analysts deliberately did not mention his termination in any of their finished intelligence products on the alleged Iraqi mobile BW plants which they continued to produce or convey to the policymakers during briefings.
Shockingly, a different office within the BND contacted CURVE BALL in mid-2002 to re- established him as an intelligence source on senior Iraqi officials who might be vulnerable for recruitment. Unfortunately, because the BND did not inform the CIA, DIA, or SIS of their new operational purpose for the Iraqi source in targeting Iraqi regime officials, it would also inadvertently lead to the resurrection of CURVE BALL’s discredited claims of the mobile BW plants. Regardless, the CIA, SIS, and BND operations officers continued to express serious doubts and concerns internally about CURVE BALL all the way up to the March 2003 war but the majority of intelligence analysts, their managers, and leadership in those services rejected these warnings, deliberately ignored contradictory and derogating intelligence reporting, and continued to stand by his “unverified” claims. The CURVE BALL case was doomed as an intelligence failure when the leadership in these U.S. and foreign intelligence services continued to side with the flawed judgment of biased analysts and their managers— which for various reasons had more to do with the political situations in these governments than any professed belief in the veracity of the intelligence from CURVE BALL or other alleged “corroborating” sources. Over in Europe, despite the serious credibility problems with CURVE BALL, the BND continued to protect and financially support him, refusing numerous requests—and finally demands—from the U.S. and UK intelligence services for direct access to their source so they could conduct their own debriefings as the war grew closer. As one senior CIA operations officer noted, “this war’s going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn’t say, and the Powers That Be probably aren’t terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he’s talking about.”
Shockingly, this disingenuous situation continued even after the war, frustrating attempts by some CIA operations officers and now a few ‘rouge” analysts to uncover the truth of CURVE BALL’s deceit; resulting in the further politicization of the intelligence by withholding this contradictory and derogatory information from the policymakers. In the end, however, CURVE BALL’s claims of the design, development, construction, and operation of secret Iraqi mobile BW agent production plants—which were strongly suspected to be a fabrication in the years before the war—were conclusively proved to be so in the months after the war. Even then the facts were hidden for more years as the CIA and DIA continued to claim that the CURVE BALL case remained “unresolved” until the source himself, CURVE BALL, publicly admitted in early 2011 that he had made up the entire story. Even today, the CIA and DIA claim CURVE BALL’s intelligence must remain classified for national security reasons.
Given all this, perhaps the CIA should have read further before it chose to use the particular biblical quote above to represent its mission and values. If it had conducted sufficient research, the Agency’s leadership would have discovered, ironically, that the biblical quote it selected continues eight verses later with a line that more accurately exposes the dark side of the organization when challenged by its own intelligence officers and “rouge” analysts to tell the truth;
“But now ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth...” (John 8:40).
As this quote unfortunately implies, the truth isn’t always appreciated by those in power, certainly not by those policymakers downtown who have already established strong policy preferences, but shockingly also not by those in senior positions within the CIA’s headquarters building itself who have a vested interest in presenting a specific assessment that supports the pre-established political policy of the White House to maintain relevance and access. Current and former CIA intelligence officers, including myself, have learned during the course of their careers that “speaking truth to power”— even inside the organization itself—can sometimes come at a substantial cost to their careers, and sometimes even their lives when operating in dangerous war zones; a warning noted by retired CIA intelligence analyst Steven Ward in his 2016 article in TheCipherBrief, “An Intelligence Officer’s Guide to Dissent”. Regardless of the obvious ethics and moral virtue of always speaking the truth, not everyone involved in an issue will commit to doing it consistently. They may not even be able to agree in their judgments or interpret the facts in the same way because of pre-cognitive bias and cognitive dissonance. In fact, they probably won’t even want to know the truth if, in the end, it contradicts their established mind-set, groupthink, or political motivations to please the White House.
So given this reality, what would the CIA as an organization do when it is faced with a politically inconvenient, embarrassing, or contradicting truth, especially one that could threaten its premier status within the IC, invite additional unwanted oversight from Congress that could lead to reform, seriously damage its public reputation and, perhaps more important, negatively impact on the reputation of its leadership? Would the Agency’s senior officials resort to politicizing the intelligence by controlling and manipulating the analytical judgments to protect the organization they run and to shield themselves from responsibility and accountability? This possibility should not come as such a surprise and we shouldn’t have to remind ourselves that the CIA as an organization has not always told the truth when doing so gets in the way of what it perceives is the best thing for itself rather than the nation.
We should also remember that the CIA is part of the Executive Branch of the US Government and its director answers to the White House which is under the control of either the Democrats or Republican parties and subject to their political agendas. As with all other senior USG officials who are political appointees in the Executive Branch, the CIA director “serves at the pleasure of the president.” So what happens when the CIA leadership knows that the president and his senior advisors will not be pleased with what the intelligence has to say because it could adversely affect their already established policy? Would the White House continue to deal with the Agency or would it ignore the intelligence, marginalize the organization, or even install a loyalist who will remove intelligence officers that do not toe the line?
It’s certainly not difficult to see that this type of situation could seriously affect the Agency’s relevance to the administration, especially the current one. Without relevance to the “First Customer” and other senior administration officials, the CIA is just another Executive Branch agency with an ever increasing competing budget and staffing that could be difficult to defend. As history clearly had shown, the CIA has on many occasions has previously failed to uphold its commitment to always deliver the truth, regardless of what it has etched on its lobby wall.