Old Hands at Manipulating Intelligence

While we're waiting for the parents to get up so we can open our Fitzmas presents, today's Chronicle has an excellent background piece by Jeff Stein on past and present efforts to subvert or bypass the CIA.

In one case, the cast of characters is oddly familiar. During the 1970s,

Rumsfeld and Cheney wanted to create a "Team B," which would have access to the CIA's data on the Soviets and issue its own conclusions. Cheney, as White House chief of staff, and Rumsfeld, as secretary of Defense, championed Team B, whose members included the young defense strategist Paul Wolfowitz, who a quarter-century later would be one of the chief architects of the 2003 invasion of Iraq
*
*
*
Team B's conclusion that the CIA was indeed soft on the Soviets was leaked to sympathetic journalists and generated public support for a new round of military spending, particularly on missiles. Team B's conclusions turned out, years later, to be false.

"In retrospect, and with the Team B report and records now largely declassified, it is possible to see that virtually all of Team B's criticisms ... proved to be wrong," Raymond Garthoff, a former U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria, wrote in a paper for the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence three years ago. "On several important specific points it wrongly criticized and 'corrected' the official estimates, always in the direction of enlarging the impression of danger and threat." [emphasis added]

None of this is news to readers of Josh Marshall or Sy Hersh, but the article does an excellent job of fitting the current atrocity into a pattern of intelligence manipulation by the same basic group:

The path to Plame's outing also led through Baghdad, this time via Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, who had been abandoned by the CIA in the late 1990s as too troublesome, unreliable and corrupt.

Among Chalabi's key supporters were Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz. When the three came back into power in January 2001, the CIA and State Department still refused to back Chalabi.
*
*
*
Over at the Pentagon, however, Rumsfeld was reprising Team B by creating his own intelligence shop. The Chalabi organization's alarmist reports on Hussein's nuclear weapons, which later proved to be false, bypassed the CIA and went directly to the White House.

Read the whole thing--it's worth it.