Who believes in intelligence reports? - Haaretz

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Fri., December 14, 2007 Tevet 5, 5768

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Last update - 02:51 13/12/2007

Who believes in intelligence reports?

By Shmuel Rosner

Tags: Iran, intelligence, U.S.

WASHINGTON - Howard Hart's field reports were so gloomy that the head of the CIA office in Tehran refused to send them to Washington. The year was 1978, and that summer, U.S. agents settled down to write the National Intelligence Estimate for Iran.

In describing that period in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, William J. Daugherty, one of the U.S. hostages who was held at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, says that the CIA believed from the mid-1960s that the Iranian opposition had become extinct. No effort was expended in testing that theory.

For three months that summer, U.S. intelligence tried to draft a report on the Shah's ability to continue to rule Iran. Tried, and failed. The head of the CIA, Admiral Stansfield Turner, decided to shelve it. It was political dynamite. In any event, the Shah was deposed, and a chain of mishaps that began with faulty intelligence was already wrapped around the neck of president Jimmy Carter, who excelled at adding to the mix his own bizarre decisions.

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The failures of U.S. intelligence are too numerous to cite in a short column - or a long one. Tim Weiner, in the recently published "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA," devotes an entire book, which is almost funny, to such failures. He quotes Donald Gregg, an agent who became an adviser to vice president George H.W. Bush: "The record in Europe was bad. The record in Asia was bad ... a great reputation and a terrible record."

Nearly every incident was a surprise: the acquisition of nuclear weapons by the U.S.S.R., India, Pakistan and North Korea. In the Middle East, the Americans failed in their analysis of trends in Iran, in Iraq and in Libya. As my Haaretz colleague Amir Oren has reported previously, the record is spotty with regard to Israel as well.

In the absence of any alternatives, U.S. presidents are forced to continue to rely on their intelligence services. As the screw-ups mounted, so did the reforms, in a patchwork, from the 14 reports of the Church Committee to the 9/11 Commission Report - each foul-up to its committee. After being surprised in India and in Pakistan, president Bill Clinton decided to appoint a committee to draw conclusions for the future. It did not help in Iraq. It would appear that last week another future job fell open: investigator of the embarrassing intelligence estimate on Iran.

The more details that come to light about the rush to write the report, and the manner in which the administration was forced into publishing it, the greater the embarrassment. If the incomplete 1978 report should not have been published, then the 2007 report should have been deep-sixed.

We have long since become accustomed to a lack of credible intelligence from within Iran, but as in the case of a newspaper that has betrayed its trust, here too one is tempted to ask: Who wrote the headline, who did the rewrite, and who chose to emphasize what should have been downplayed and to minimize and hide what should have been given prominence?

The attack on the report continues, and it encompasses experts from a variety of institutions and different viewpoints. As if that were not enough, now we have a new revelation about the destruction of video footage documenting the interrogations of members of Al-Qaida by the CIA, to remind everyone that U.S. intelligence remains sick even after the rearrangement of the hospital wards.

The CIA's "criminality and arrogance could perhaps have been partially excused if it had ever got anything right," Christopher Hitchens wrote this week in his column for Slate, calling for the organization to be abolished.

A Harris Poll survey into American attitudes toward government institutions reported this year a rise in trust in the CIA, from 53 percent in 2004, after the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq fiasco, to 61 percent this year. Not that it's had any great successes since then.

Memory, it seems, is short - either that, or Americans' trust in the power of organizational change to bring about a genuine transformation is deceiving them once again. In any event, a Rasmussen Reports poll from last weekend proves that this trust may be on thin ice: Two days after the report was issued, 68 percent of respondents said they do not believe it. Only 18 percent said they thought Iran had indeed halted its nuclear program.

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