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It will take decades for the US intelligence services to recover from the self inflicted damage caused by the political and irresponsible publication of the recent NIE report on Iran. It is one thing for Chris Hitchen to call for the abolition of the CIA and quite another for Henry Kissinger to recommend a complete reevaluation of the intelligence agencies role in the executive branch:
Intelligence personnel need to return to their traditional anonymity. Policymakers and Congress should once again assume responsibility for their judgments without involving intelligence in their public justifications. To define the proper balance between the user and producer of intelligence is a task that cannot be accomplished at the end of an administration. It is, however, one of the most urgent challenges a newly elected president will face.
But if you really wish for an enumeration of the repeated failures of the intelligence community especially in the nuclear field, former French intelligence officer, Claude Moniquet, spells them out:
Before rolling out the peace banners, though, it’s worth looking at the agencies’ track record in getting these sorts of “estimates” right. As a matter of fact, U.S. intelligence services have so far failed to predict the nuclearization of a single foreign nation. They failed to do so with regard to the Soviet Union in 1949, China in 1964, India and Pakistan in 1998, and North Korea in 2002. They also got Saddam’s weapons program wrong — twice. First by underestimating it in the 1980s and then by overplaying its progress before the 2003 invasion.But on the possible nuclearization of a regime that sounds fanatic enough to use this doomsday weapon, the NIE, contradicting everything we have heard so far about the issue, including from a previous NIE report, is suddenly to be trusted?
It’s not just on the nuclear front where American intelligence services have failed their country. They foresaw neither the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 nor the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later. In Afghanistan, during the 1980s, while other friendly services, among them the French, urged the CIA to support more “moderate” tribal chiefs in the fight against the Red Army, the agency relied on the enlightened advice of its Saudi friends and supported the most extreme Islamists. U.S. troops are fighting and dying today for that blunder.
More recently, the CIA conducted those “extraordinary renditions” of terrorist suspects in such an amateurish manner that several American intelligence officers were exposed and are now being tried in absentia in Italy. Allied services in other countries were also compromised, souring future cooperation between the agencies.
To sum up, the worst mistake an American president can do is to take seriously the analysis of the American intelligence services.
What a sobering thought at war time.
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