Charlie Allen is a bad-ass long-serving member of the intelligence community. Follow the link to get an idea of what kind of guy Allen is. Then check this out from James Risen’s State of War, via emptywheel:
While other top CIA officials, including CIA Director George Tenet and Deputy Director for Operations James Pavitt, dithered and failed to mount any serious operations to get more spies into Iraq to find out what was going on, [Charlie] Allen, an old hand who had little time for Tenet and the circle of yes-men and yes-women on Tenet’s senior staff, began a renegade effort to search for new sources of information.
He pushed for several new collection programs, including one that called for approaching members of families of Iraqi scientists who were believed to be involved in secret weapons programs. At the time, the CIA had no direct access to key Iraqi scientists, and so using family members as intermediaries to find out what the scientists were doing seemed like the next best thing.
And who, pray tell, did Charlie Allen tap to head up the effort? From David Corn:
There was great pressure on the JTFI to deliver. Its primary target was Iraqi scientists. JTFI officers, under [Plame] Wilson’s supervision, tracked down relatives, students and associates of Iraqi scientists–in America and abroad–looking for potential sources. They encouraged Iraqi émigrés to visit Iraq and put questions to relatives of interest to the CIA.
Are you paying attention Fred Hiatt? The JTFI was set up even before 9/11 to gather intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Charlie Allen took the initiative and tapped Valerie Plame Wilson to run the project. Now, let’s look at this from Allen’s biography.
In February 1986, he also was appointed Chief of Intelligence in CIA’s newly established Counterterrorist Center. As NIO for Counterterrorism, he represented the DCI in a number of interagency committees, including the chairing of the Interagency Intelligence committee on Terrorism, and serving as a member of the Interdepartmental Group on Terrorism (IG/T) and the National Security Council’s Terrorist Incident Working Group. Following this assignment, Mr. Allen served as the NIO for Warning from 1988 to 1994. In this capacity, he was the principal adviser to the DCI on national-level warning intelligence and chaired the Intelligence Community’s Warning Committee…
Mr. Allen served as the Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Collection since June 1998.
He was first in charge of counterterrorism, and sat in for the DCI at interdepartmental meetings, including the NSC’s Terrorist Incident Working Group. Then he took over the job of intelligence collection. After 9/11 he picked Plame Wilson to head up a pre-existing intelligence collection program on Iraqi WMD (JTFI).
Now, let’s move on to Dick Cheney.
In the spring of 2002 Dick Cheney made one of his periodic trips to CIA headquarters. Officers and analysts were summoned to brief him on Iraq. Paramilitary specialists updated the Vice President on an extensive covert action program in motion that was designed to pave the way to a US invasion. Cheney questioned analysts about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. How could they be used against US troops? Which Iraqi units had chemical and biological weapons? He was not seeking information on whether Saddam posed a threat because he possessed such weapons. His queries, according to a CIA officer at the briefing, were pegged to the assumptions that Iraq had these weapons and would be invaded–as if a decision had been made.
Though Cheney was already looking toward war, the officers of the agency’s Joint Task Force on Iraq–part of the Counterproliferation Division of the agency’s clandestine Directorate of Operations–were frantically toiling away in the basement, mounting espionage operations to gather information on the WMD programs Iraq might have. The JTFI was trying to find evidence that would back up the White House’s assertion that Iraq was a WMD danger. Its chief of operations was a career undercover officer named Valerie Wilson.
What does this not tell us? It doesn’t tell us whether the chief of operations for the JTFI was one of the officers that “were summoned to brief [Cheney] on Iraq” and tell him “about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. How could they be used against US troops? Which Iraqi units had chemical and biological weapons?”
If she wasn’t one of the analysts, why not? He made a special trip (actually more than one) to CIA headquarters to learn about Iraqi WMD and he didn’t meet the chief of operations in charge of collection? Let’s remember something else. Corn says this visit of Cheney’s occurred in the spring of 2002. Ambassador Joe Wilson went to Niger on February 21, 2002 and returned in early March. He was debriefed by CIA officers sometime in March.
Cheney claims to have never seen the resulting report or to have known that someone was sent to Niger in response to his inquiry. But he cannot have been to happy with the performance of the JTFI that Valerie Plame Wilson was heading.
There was great pressure on the JTFI to deliver. Its primary target was Iraqi scientists…
The JTFI found nothing. The few scientists it managed to reach insisted Saddam had no WMD programs.
So…let’s think about this for a moment. When Dick Cheney discovered that Joe Wilson was married to Valerie Plame Wilson, the chief of operations responsible for uncovering evidence for Iraqi WMD, maybe he was a little miffed?
Do you remember Colin Powell’s trip to the United Nations? He had a tad more than nothing. The JTFI in charge of collection found nothing. And, yet, George Tenet gave Colin Powell quite a bit. Here is Powell’s chief-of-staff, Larry Wilkerson, pondering the latter without necessarily knowing about the former.
What is your view of [former Director of Central Intelligence] George Tenet?
A mystery to me. I spent some of the most intimate hours of my life with George Tenet and John McLaughlin, his DDCI [deputy director of central intelligence]. … [It’s] a mystery to me in the sense that he could be so bamboozled by his own intelligence community and by foreign intelligence communities with whom he was dealing…
… But George Tenet presided over this organization for quite a long time, and I sat in the room looking into his eyes, as did the secretary of state, and heard with the firmness that only George could give it — and I don’t mean terminology like “slam dunk,” although he was a basketball aficionado and used that kind of terminology a lot, but I mean eyeball-to-eyeball contact between two of the most powerful [men] in the administration, Colin Powell and George Tenet — and George Tenet assuring Colin Powell that the information he was presenting at the U.N. was ironclad, only to have that same individual call the secretary on more than one occasion in the ensuing months after the presentation and tell him that central pillars of his presentation were indeed false.
Now, do I believe George Tenet knew they were false when he told him that? Absolutely not. I just don’t believe it. I refuse to believe it. How did we get to that point? How did our intelligence community get us to that point? How did [Undersecretary of Defense for Policy] Douglas Feith, who clearly politicized intelligence, clearly cherry-picked intelligence, clearly provided some of that cherry-picked intelligence to the vice president of the United States — how did we combine all of that, plus a good dose of psychological groupthink, to come up with such an abysmal failure in regards to WMD in Iraq? It’s a mystery to me, and I will never know the answer.
I am somewhat concerned now. To this point I have maintained that no one in the upper echelons of the leadership of this country spun the intelligence in a way that I would find clearly disturbing as a citizen of this country. I believe they believed what they were saying, that they were fooled, just as I was, just as Colin Powell was.
But I’ve heard some things lately that are disturbing to me. One of those things is this business about Sheikh al-Libi, who was an Al Qaeda operative in Afghanistan, who was rendered to another country and whose confession [was] then obtained under methods that were certainly not Geneva Convention-blessed methods. [He] gave some information about Baghdad providing chemical and biological training to Al Qaeda operatives that was later recanted, but was at the time [a major piece of evidence in the case for war against Iraq].
Roughly at the time the information was gained, a major dissent was rendered by the Defense Intelligence Agency. Well, I had a DIA representative with me at the CIA, and DIA was plugged into everything we were doing at the CIA, and no one ever, ever, ever mentioned that dissent to me.
Second: [Iraqi defector] Curveball. I am now reading that there was major dissent on Curveball — Curveball being the source for the biological mobile laboratory which Mr. Tenet presented to the secretary of state as being absolutely firm. If this dissent existed in German intelligence [and] within the American intelligence community, why was it not surfaced during our preparation for the presentation to the U.N.? It was not. I never heard a single word of dissent on that either.
Now, let me tell you what might have happened if we had heard some dissent. Secretary Powell was not reluctant at all to throw things out completely. We threw the meeting between [9/11 hijacker] Mohamed Atta and Iraqi intelligence operatives in Prague out —
Let’s look at Curveball again.
Tyler Drumheller, former chief of the CIA European Division, said he and other senior officials in his office — the unit that oversees spying in Europe — had issued repeated warnings about Curveball’s accounts.
“Everyone in the chain of command knew exactly what was happening,” said Drumheller, who retired in November after 25 years at the CIA. He said he never met personally with Tenet, but “did talk to McLaughlin and everybody else.”
And those aluminum tubes?
[Plame] also went to Jordan to work with Jordanian intelligence officials who had intercepted a shipment of aluminum tubes heading to Iraq that CIA analysts were claiming–wrongly–were for a nuclear weapons program. (The analysts rolled over the government’s top nuclear experts, who had concluded the tubes were not destined for a nuclear program.)
It seems to me that the CIA was trying to do its job and provide good intelligence. But Tenet and McLaughlin were operating under different orders.
July 23, 2002
[Director of SIS (MI6) Foreign Intelligence Service, R. Dearlove] C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
When Wilson went public Cheney had had him on his radar for a month. When the administration decided to pin all the blame on the CIA and outed their chief of operations for Iraq WMD intelligence collection, that was the last straw for many veteran intelligence officers. Tenet had no choice but to call for an investigation.
Now, you tell me? How much of a player was Richard Armitage in all of this? I admit his role is confusing. But the real story has nothing to do with Armitage. It has to do with an administration that decided to go to war, using WMD as a bureaucratic excuse before they ever determined whether Iraq actually had WMD. It’s about the betrayal and abuse of the US intelligence community by both the administration, and George Tenet and John McLaughlin.
