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Cooking the Intelligence Books

by mcjoan

Tue May 29, 2007 at 05:26:24 PM PDT

I've had The Italian Letter, Peter Eisner's and Knut Royce's book about the forged intelligence document the Bush administration used to take us into Iraq, sitting in my "to-read" stack for a couple of weeks now. I need to move it up to the top of the pile.

Jonathon Schwartz has been reading his copy, and finds some astounding information about Alan Foley, the head of the CIA's Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC), and the CIA's efforts. As Schwartz explains, WINPAC was the lead organization in the CIA's intelligence gathering on Iraq WMD.

First there's this passage, outlining Foley's thinking before the war.

There were strong indications that Foley all along was toeing a line he did not believe. Several days after Bush's State of the Union speech, Foley briefed student officers at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, DC. After the briefing, Melvin Goodman, who had retired from the CIA and was then on the university's faculty, brought Foley into the secure communications area of the Fort McNair compound. Goodman thanked Foley for addressing the students and asked him what weapons of mass destruction he believed would be found after the invasion. "Not much, if anything," Goodman recalled that Foley responded. Foley declined to be interviewed for this book.

One would presume this was a private conversation in which Foley was speaking with great candor. But here's the message he gave to the staff at WINPAC:

One day in December 2002, Foley called his senior production managers to his office. He had a clear message for the men and women who controlled the output of the center's analysts: "If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so." The directive was not quite an order to cook the books, but it was a strong suggestion that cherry-picking and slanting not only would be tolerated, but might even be rewarded.

Schwartz finds corraboration for this account in two other recent books about the false intelligence that led us into war. Foley doesn't appear in these other accounts. I second both Schwartz and Kevin Drum in saying that maybe Congress should think about interviewing Mr. Foley, extensively and under oath.