TYPHOID MARY'S DEATH DIDN'T STOP TYPHUS:

President Bush Cites 'Personal Reasons' in Announcement (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, 6/03/04)

CIA Director George Tenet, who weathered storms over intelligence lapses about suspected weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, has resigned, President Bush said Thursday.

"I will miss him," Bush said.

Tenet came to the White House to inform Bush about his decision Wednesday night. "He told me he was resigning for personal reasons," Bush said. "I told him I'm sorry he's leaving. He's done a superb job on behalf of the American people."

Bush said that deputy, John McLaughlin, will temporarily lead America's premier spy agency until a successor is found. Among possible successors is House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss, R-Fla., a former CIA agent and McLaughlin.

"He's been a strong and able leader at the agency. and I will miss him," Bush said of Tenet as he got ready to board Marine One for a trip to Andrews Air Force Base, Md., and on to Europe.

"George Tenet is the kind of public servant you like to work with," the president added. "He's strong, he's resolute. He's served his nation as the director for seven years. He has been a strong and able leader at the agency. He's been a strong leader in the war on terror."

"I send my blessings to George and his family and look forward to working with him until he leaves the agency," Bush said.

Mr. Tenet's tenure was an unmitigated disaster and he should have been fired years ago, but was saved by the President's desire to settle a score on behalf of his father--who was fired by Jimmy Carter in contravention of Washington tradition and the fiction that the CIA is not a primarily political institution. But getting rid of one Director won't solve the problem--the CIA has been a fiasco since it was created and should be put out of our misery. Former agent Robert Baer was coincidentally on Diane Rehm today and said he quit when he realized the Washington Post and NY Times provided better intelligence than the agency. Duh? Such open source intelligence is inevitably far more effective and more consistent with democracy than a secretive intelligence bureaucracy.

MORE:
THE MANIPULATOR: Ahmad Chalabi pushed a tainted case for war. Can he survive the occupation? (JANE MAYER, 2004-05-29, The New Yorker)

Ahmad Chalabi, the wealthy Iraqi Shiite who spent more than a decade working for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, prides himself on his understanding of the United States and its history. “I know quite a lot about it,” he told me not long ago. It was after midnight in Baghdad, but he was still in his office in the new headquarters of the Iraqi National Congress, the exile opposition group that Chalabi helped found in 1992. As a young man, he said, he spent several years in America, earning an undergraduate and a master’s degree in mathematics from M.I.T., and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago. Chalabi began studying the uses of power in American politics, and the subject developed into a lifelong interest. One episode in American history particularly fascinated him, he said. “I followed very closely how Roosevelt, who abhorred the Nazis, at a time when isolationist sentiment was paramount in the United States, managed adroitly to persuade the American people to go to war. I studied it with a great deal of respect; we learned a lot from it. The Lend-Lease program committed Roosevelt to enter on Britain’s side—so we had the Iraq Liberation Act, which committed the American people for the liberation against Saddam.” The act, which Congress passed in 1998, made “regime change” in Iraq an official priority of the U.S. government; Chalabi had lobbied tirelessly for the legislation.

Three days after our conversation, Chalabi’s Baghdad home was raided at gunpoint by Iraqi police, who were supported by American troops. His offices were also searched. Chalabi had sensed that a confrontation with the Bush Administration was imminent. As he put it, “It’s customary when great events happen that the U.S. punishes its friends and rewards its enemies.” For years, he had been America’s staunchest Iraqi ally, and he had helped the Bush Administration make its case against Saddam, in part by disseminating the notion that the Baathist regime had maintained stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, and was poised to become a nuclear power. Although Chalabi developed enemies at the C.I.A. who disputed his intelligence data and questioned his ethics, he forged a close bond with Vice-President Dick Cheney and many of the top civilians at the Pentagon, such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Under-Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, and Under-Secretary of Defense William J. Luti. Yet now that the occupation of Iraq appeared to be headed toward disaster, he said, many in the Administration had united in making him the scapegoat. As Chalabi saw it, he had understood America too well, and had been too successful in influencing its foreign policy. “There is a smear campaign that says I am responsible for the liberation of Iraq,” he said. Then he added with a chuckle, “But how bad is that?” [...]

Some observers of the I.N.C. wondered what return the U.S. government was getting for its multimillion-dollar investment. In 1994 and 1995, Robert Baer, the former C.I.A. officer, met Chalabi several times in Kurdistan, in northern Iraq, an autonomous area protected from Saddam by the United States. Chalabi had established an outpost in Kurdistan. “He was like the American Ambassador to Iraq,” Baer recalled. “He could get to the White House and the C.I.A. He would move around Iraq with five or six Land Cruisers.” But Baer added that Chalabi’s long absence from Iraq diminished his power there, and his ineffectiveness made him a useful foil for Saddam. “If he was dangerous, they could have killed him at any time. He was the perfect opposition leader,” he said.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars were flowing each month “to this shadowy operator—in cars, salaries—and it was just a Potemkin village,” Baer said. “He was reporting no intel; it was total trash. The I.N.C.’s intelligence was so bad, we weren’t even sending it in.” Chalabi’s agenda, he said, was to convince the United States that Saddam’s regime was “a leaking warehouse of gas, and all we had to do was light a match.” But when the agency tried to check Chalabi’s assertions about troop movement or palace plans, Baer said, “there was no detail, no sourcing—you couldn’t see it on a satellite.”

In retrospect, one detail of Chalabi’s operation seems particularly noteworthy. In 1994, Baer said, he went with Chalabi to visit “a forgery shop” that the I.N.C. had set up inside an abandoned schoolhouse in Salahuddin, a town in Kurdistan. “It was something like a spy novel,” Baer said. “It was a room where people were scanning Iraqi intelligence documents into computers, and doing disinformation. There was a whole wing of it that he did forgeries in.” Baer had no evidence that Chalabi forged any of the disputed intelligence documents that were used to foment alarm in the run-up to the war. But, he said, “he was forging back then, in order to bring down Saddam.” In the Los Angeles Times, Hugh Pope wrote of one harmless-seeming prank that emerged from Chalabi’s specialty shop: a precise mockup of an Iraqi newspaper that was filled with stories about Saddam’s human-rights abuses. Another faked document ended up directly affecting Baer. It was a copy of a forged letter to Chalabi, made to look as if it were written on the stationery of President Clinton’s National Security Council. The letter asked for Chalabi’s help in an American-led assassination plot against Saddam. “It was a complete fake,” Baer said, adding that he believed it was an effort to hoodwink the Iranians into joining a plot against Saddam; an indication of American involvement, Chalabi hoped, would convince them that the effort was serious. Brooke acknowledged that the I.N.C. had run a forgery shop, but denied that Chalabi had created the phony assassination letter. “That would be illegal,” he said. To Baer’s dismay, the letter eventually made its way to Langley, Virginia, and the C.I.A. accused him of being involved in the scheme. Baer said he had to pass a polygraph test in order to prove otherwise.

The bulk of Mr. Baer's appearance on Diane Rehm today was dedicated to a discussion of Mr. Chalabi and it was very interesting. He was very complimentary and quite dismissive of the alleged signifigance of Mr. Chalabi's ties to Iran. As he pointed out: we funded the INC office in Tehran; Chalabi tried introducing him to Iranian intelligence officers in Kurdistan--arguing, correctly, that if we were serious about getting rid of Saddam we should work with Iran to do so; and Chalabi made no bones about the need for Iraqis to reckon with Iran, which will remain there long after America forgets about the region.

MORE:
-Chalabi denies leaking US intelligence (JANINE ZACHARIA, 6/02/04, Jerusalem Post)
-Chalabi accused of spy codes tip-off to Iran: FBI inquiry focuses on Pentagon officials as Iraqi National Congress leader denies warning Tehran that US was intercepting messages (Julian Borger, June 3, 2004, The Guardian)
-Tip of the Iceberg?: The probe into alleged Chalabi leaks to the Iranians may widen
(Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, June 02, 2004, Newsweek)

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 3, 2004 11:19 AM