John Prados is a senior analyst with the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. He is author of Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (The New Press).
Nomination hearings last week for John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations brought into sharp focus a key issue that bedevils us today: the politicization of intelligence. The newly appointed director of national intelligence is charged by law with responsibility for producing objective intelligence, and the law explicitly targets politicization. Yet Bolton's confirmation hearings and other recent developments show we do not even understand what "politicization" is.
Undersecretary of State Bolton is undoubtedly furious at the way his path to the East River headquarters of the United Nations has become so rocky. The public face of accusation—the man who called Bolton a "serial bully"— is Carl W. Ford, Jr., former head of State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), the only shop to emerge unsullied from the fiasco on prewar intelligence about Iraq. Ford, a card-carrying Republican, felt so strongly that he torched some political bridges to oppose Bolton's nomination. His April 12 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee appears to have opened the sluice—every day, it seems, some new story surfaces of Bolton's aggressive, arrogant behavior. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's defense of Bolton as exactly the man the United States needs at the United Nations today, whatever else it means, indicates that Washington intends a coercive rather than diplomatic approach at the world body. But the dangers of politicization of intelligence—not foreign affairs strategy—should determine the action in this matter.
Something Carl Ford said at the Bolton hearings jogged this writer. Ford thinks that no politicization occurred in the events that brought him to oppose John Bolton's promotion. (For those joining us late, Bolton attempted to present especially incendiary charges against Cuba as the considered judgment of U.S. intelligence but was torpedoed by an INR analyst. Bolton then attempted to have the INR man fired or transferred—for many months after the events in question—and then prohibited the man from dealing with him. He made the same efforts to get rid of a senior CIA analyst when the latter briefed Congress that Bolton's final speech did not represent the opinion of U.S. intelligence.)
Chilling indeed. But Carl Ford maintains no "politicization" took place because the INR analyst stood his ground and Bolton's speech lost its original incendiary language. Clearly, this is what Ford believes—he said it three times, in slightly different words, to senators Lincoln Chaffee, John Kerry and Christopher Dodd.
As Ford puts it, politicization is "A team sport. It requires someone to pressure [analysts] and what I refer to as a weasel in the intelligence community to act inappropriately to that pressure." In other words, politicization exists only if the pressure works. The commissioners of President Bush's commission on intelligence on weapons of mass destruction must have had something similar in mind. In their recent report, they described instances of CIA analysts being threatened or transferred for protesting mishandling of agents or analysed data, and then declared in the next sentence or page that no evidence of politicization could be found.
This is a phenomenon with a history. There are notorious examples of politicization in U.S. intelligence history, cases where the reality of the act is beyond dispute. None of those involves "success" per se. For present purposes, two examples will suffice. The first happened in 1969, when the Nixon administration wanted to deploy missile defenses and the Pentagon claimed that a certain nuclear-tipped Russian missile had independent capability to attack multiple targets. That claim got no support from the National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs). The national security adviser of the time, Henry Kissinger, made the CIA go back and redo its homework, repeatedly and finally browbeat the CIA into removing the offending judgment from the NIE, except that the INR of that day reinserted that very conclusion as a dissent to the estimate. But subsequent estimates on the Russians assumed a noticeably more alarmist tone. In our second case, in 1976, the Ford administration presided over an "alternative analysis" of the kind in which so much stock is being put today, in which a panel of outside consultants made a broadside attack on the Soviet estimates, culminating in a full-scale debate with the CIA's own analysts. The agency's analysts refused to budge and made no immediate changes in the NIEs, but later estimates throughout the Carter years exaggerated Soviet nuclear striking capability.
In each case, the essence of politicization lay in creating an atmosphere—an environment in which analysts felt a certain range of possible conclusions ruled out. This has been exacerbated over the years as U.S. intelligence added more managers above the line analysts, staff whose attention focused more on the consumers of intelligence than the data itself. In that situation, direct threats to jobs or assignments raise the vulnerability of intelligence analysts to a whole new level.
Now fast-forward to the prewar intelligence on Iraq and John Bolton's bullying. From early 2002 on, CIA's analysts could read in the papers of the Bush administration's very strong intention to move against Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney began visiting CIA headquarters to push the analysts on Iraqi weapons claims, making them redo their homework. In August, Cheney put an intelligence conclusion—that Saddam had nuclear weapons—out to the public in a speech. The writing was on the wall. Meanwhile, John Bolton's dust-up with INR took place that February. In July, he went to CIA to demand the transfer of national intelligence officer Fulton Armstrong. Stuart Cohen, vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the man who two months later managed compilation of the Iraq National Intelligence Estimate, listened to Bolton's diatribe. Not only was Cohen on notice that greater personal vulnerability now prevailed, but so were the officers who wrote the Iraq NIE.
This adds up to a classic atmosphere for politicization. And the proof is in the intelligence, not in whether somebody caved. The WMD Commission's report—and before it, that of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence—focus on the trees rather than the forest when it condemns the CIA for poor intelligence estimates. Everybody, all the CIA analysts, those at INR, in the Pentagon and elsewhere, knew there was no fresh data on Iraq after 1998. They all knew they were using assumptions rather than data to cast projections. They all knew the Iraqi defectors were an undependable lot, and there were reviews of the defector "take" on the books at the time, that put their reliability in doubt. Those things posed no obstacles to an NIE because those questions were ruled out given the prevailing atmosphere. Politicization.
Ford's highly dangerous reading of "politicization" cannot stand. If we grant Ford's view, we need a new word for the kind of pressure that restricts intelligence reporting. John Bolton's actions played a crucial role in reinforcing that prevailing atmosphere. So let's call it "Boltonization."
Whether administration demands for Bolton as U.N. ambassador will succeed remains to be seen. But it is now clear that there is another reason why the Bolton nomination should be rejected: the promotion of a serial bully after his attempts to manipulate the intelligence process effectively declares open season for politicization.
President George W. Bush has declared against this kind of pernicious manipulation. The president should put substance into his words and withdraw the Bolton nomination.
