The White House war with the CIA

Is the White House in uncharted waters here in terms of how it has manipulated intelligence and exercised executive power?

I think what the Bush administration has done is extremely dangerous. It has conducted what is essentially an illegal war. If circumstances were slightly different in the world, they would be facing a tribunal. It's not legal to go to war against somebody based on just some vague notion ... in this case, the administration was on constructive notice that the [intelligence community] didn't know where any of this WMD was. Their cause for war was weak and they knew it. But they wanted a war. They'd dreamed up a theory about how to make the world a better place and that included invading Iraq, toppling the government, and replacing it with one of their own construction.

It would be natural for the administration to try to blame the CIA, but on the other hand, there's a limit to the egregious charges it can bring without having the [intelligence community] protest. As you said, we've seen plenty of that protest over the past six months, whisperings and then angry bleats about misuse of intelligence and pressure from the White House to toe the line on things that were irrelevant or inaccurate.

What we're watching is the second time in 50 years when the United States got a bee in its bonnet that it wanted to go to war, with the premise that some "good thing" was going to come of it. In 1964 Lyndon Johnson's administration wanted to go to war with Vietnam, and they used the Gulf of Tonkin incident as the rationale. There were two alleged attacks on American naval ships -- there's a lot of complicated history about this -- but the essence of it is that one of the attacks never took place.

So how does the run-up to the Iraq invasion compare? In some ways it seems even more manufactured than Gulf of Tonkin.

It's more manufactured, more deliberate and more coldblooded. And it was done in plain sight. The whole world was watching and saying, "No!" We put tremendous pressure on all these countries at the U.N. to support a resolution, including impoverished ones from Africa and elsewhere, which are heavily dependent on U.S. aid, and we couldn't even persuade most of them to vote for it. But we did it anyway.

How does CIA director George Tenet fit into all this? Since July, he's looked as if he's been yanked in opposite directions, by his boss in the White House and by his own irate troops. Where does his allegiance ultimately come down between the two?

George Tenet is a wholly owned property of the White House. But he's definitely in a hard place. If we were to take all these claims [as reported by the Bush administration in the run-up to the war] at face value, the agency would have been completely wrong in what it told the administration about Iraqi WMD. So Tenet [in fearing for his job] is defending the agency as well as he can, saying it was an honest error, that the integrity of the process was not violated, etc. But clearly he knows the White House misused the intelligence, and he's also under the gun internally. You have to assume his hand was forced when he asked the Justice Department to investigate the Valerie Plame leak. Why else would he do it? That's asking for serious trouble inside the White House. Tenet would never call up the White House and say, "I woke up this morning and decided to get the Justice Department to investigate you." The call would have to be, "I woke up this morning and discovered I have a revolt on my hands at the agency, and I have no choice at all, I have to do this." It has to be that kind of an imperative for Tenet to clash with the White House like this.

So where do you see this battle between the CIA and the White House heading? So far the administration appears to be succeeding in stonewalling investigations by the Justice Department and by the Senate Intelligence Committee -- perhaps with the help of Bush ally and committee chairman Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan.

No doubt it could be extremely embarrassing to the White House, but it's kind of hard to read the whole thing. It seems like the Vietnam scenario [with regard to using manipulated intelligence to promote the war], but with its revelation played out at a much faster rate, as if the film has been speeded up immensely. There's already a lot to look at in terms of what Colin Powell and others said was going on in Iraq, and what [Bush administration chief arms inspector] David Kay has since reported. Kay found nothing that the administration had said we would. It wasn't a weak case -- there was no case at all. That's something you can't just explain away.

My own feeling is we've embarked on a horrific, calamitous mistake in Iraq. We're already in a situation we have very little control over and very little ability to get out of, without leaving everything much worse off. Historically when this kind of thing happens, everybody tries to prevent the consequences as long as they can and the process drags out; I would say this is probably good for 10 years now.

A lot of people have said the White House leak exposing the identity of Joseph Wilson's wife, undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame, was an act of revenge for Wilson bringing the bogus Iraq/Niger intelligence to light. Do you believe it was purely a vindictive move by the White House? Or was there a bigger strategic reason, perhaps a way to discredit the agency, and thereby control it even more closely?

I think they were trying to suggest that Wilson had an ulterior motive or political ax to grind, first in coming back from Niger with the answer that he did, and second by making it public. They did Valerie Plame serious damage: She had an undercover career, and that's over. It's my guess that whoever made the leak, at that moment, had kind of forgotten they were breaking the law -- it seemed casual, a kind of a muddying-the-waters type of maneuver, just to raise questions about how and why Wilson was involved. It was meant to make the whole thing seem petty and small, rather than what it really was: that Wilson had gone to Niger and concluded there was nothing to the story [that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium from Niger], and that this had happened nine months before the president used it in his State of the Union speech anyway.

But how could a high-level leaker in the White House not know that it would be illegal to reveal an undercover CIA agent's identity?

If it wasn't a sloppy mistake, they may have comparably thought they could avoid being caught. And that's probably going to turn out to be the case. Still, I do think it would be possible for somebody under these circumstances not to really recognize they're committing a felony; it's been quite a while since this law was invoked [that revealing the identity of a CIA operative is a federal crime].

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