With all the hoopla going on these days about the uses and misuses of intelligence, I feel a little as if I was a sportscaster trying to talk about the fine points of the contest between the New England Patriots and the Carolina Panthers against a backdrop of the half-time show at the Super Bowl. We’re all totally immersed in the sound and fury of analyzing the alleged abuse of intelligence by the Bush Administration to justify launching a preemptive war against Iraq. So you are all well-informed about the details of that debate. There is no point in my trying to summarize the findings of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, or David Kay’s failure to find WMD in Iraq, or George Tenet’s and Colin Powell’s efforts to justify their questionable actions and statements over the past few months, or the President’s inclusion of sixteen silly little words in last year’s State of the Union speech, or Robert Novak’s mischievous outing of Valerie Plame, or the subtle implications of the so-called Zarqawi letter to Osama bin Ladin, made public this week. That’s all old hat to you, and to rehash it would be a waste of your Sunday afternoon. In short, I don’t want to bore you by adding my two cents to what you already know, and probably have carefully-considered opinions about.

Instead, I’m going to describe to you the details of a few specific situations that took place a number of years ago where the intelligence process was seriously mishandled in much the same manner that we have observed in the past few months, and from an assessment of those experiences observe how lessons learned in the past should have better prepared our intelligence officials today to advise policy-makers more intelligently and appropriately. I realize, of course, that in using these old personal vignettes to illustrate broad principles applicable in today’s world I’m running the risk of sounding as if I thought my own experiences were unique, or that I was especially sensitive and far-sighted. I don’t mean that at all. I’m simply trying to make today’s discussion more animated and the conclusions more meaningful by drawing on empirical evidence to make my case. Not that I can make any claim to perfect objectivity. I gave a talk at the Nassau Presbyterian Church exactly a year ago in which my opening statement was that the United States was about to embark on the wrong war at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. Today I’m going to try to be studiously pragmatic rather than partisan, and more professional than polemical. I wonder how successful I will be!

Let me start by making a very quick review of certain factors that have brought about profound changes in the general field of “Intelligence” in the last few decades, because I am going to have to narrow my focus very sharply within that broad range, and I don’t want to leave you with the impression that I have completely overlooked or dismissed large and important aspects of the general topic.

The end of the Cold War has profoundly altered the playing field on which our intelligence services conduct their games. When the enemy was International Communism, our universe was comparatively simple. It was in every sense a bi-polar world. We knew exactly who the Bad Guys were, and anything we did to frustrate the plans and activities of the Evil Empire was easy to justify. Today, the overwhelming preponderance of power in the hands of the United States has made it infinitely more difficult for us to identify threats to our national security, despite the fact that we spend as much on our own defence establishment as the next sixteen governments combined. Our reaction to an environment of unpredictable danger has been to adopt a strategy calling for the aggressive employment of preventive or preemptive countermeasures, up to and including violent military intervention, against suspected enemies. This threatening posture, as we see every day, has aroused fear and resentment everywhere in the world, including among some of our oldest and most trusted friends and allies. We live in an America “with attitude”. One of the most disturbing results of this provocative stance on the part of the United States has been that all the other intelligence services of the world, whether of old allies or new adversaries, feel obliged to focus attention and resources on trying to anticipate what America is planning to do next with its power --- and whether its actions will, directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally, cause damage or create instability in societies that lie in the path of American ambitions to control and dominate the world order. And keep in mind that these other countries, in trying to arrive at an intelligence estimate of US intentions, have to judge whether in any given instance the Administration in power in Washington has the political determination, the economic strength, the military resources and the support of willing allies to carry out its national security strategy as articulated by the President.

Second, the impact of terrorism on the conduct of intelligence activity has obviously been profound. The questions used to be simple. Will the British Redcoats come by land or by sea? Will Hitler invade England? Will Japan strike Pearl Harbor? Simple questions, compared to dealing with the plans and intentions of a lethal enemy that has no territory to invade, no industrial base to bomb, no air force or tanks to observe by satellite, and whose combatants wear no uniforms. I’ll have more to say about that later on.

Then, third, there is the impact that technology has had on intelligence, not just in the means by which it is collected, but in the manner by which it is communicated, evaluated, and finally disseminated and marketed to decision-makers in the highly competitive world of information overkill. We hear a lot these days on this subject --- with frequent mention by pundits and consultants of the neglected element of human intelligence. Sophisticated technology has both a complimentary and a competitive role to play as opposed to so-called “Humint”. The experts tell us, as if this were not perfectly obvious, that the United States should have an agent sharing Osama Bin Ladin’s tent in the mountains of Afghanistan, implying, I suppose, that somebody simply forgot to search for such an agent on E-Bay. Not quite as easy as it sounds.

My own experiences in the twenty years that I spent actually engaged in clandestine operations in the Middle East were entirely in the areas of old-fashioned espionage and so-called covert action --- which I define as the effort to achieve specific strategic objectives for the United States through secret intervention in the political processes of another country.

Let me start by telling you about some of my experiences in Lebanon during the years 1952-1958, from which some lessons can still be drawn, I think.

My first assignment for the CIA fifty years ago was to set up a network of agents and informants in the squalid and wretched Palestinian refugee camps of southern Lebanon --- some of which, ironically, were located barely a stone’s throw from American Christian mission schools that had been established by my grandfather and great-grandfather under the Ottoman Empire during the second half of the 19th Century. Today, squalor and desperation are still very evident in those same miserable, crowded, refugee camps, but the danger is no longer communism, but Islamic extremism -- a much more complex problem to deal with. Hizballah, the Party of God, is feeding on the same reservoir of resentment and despair today, where atheistic communism once tried (with much less success, by the way), to recruit fanatic enemies of America.
At exactly the same time that I was recruiting sources of intelligence in the Palestinian refugee camps in the autumn of 1953, the Prime Minister of Israel was planning to retire from public life. In those days, just five years after the end of the 1948 War of Independence, the ceasefire lines between Arab and Jewish lands and villages were often marked with temporary barbed wire fencing. The Arab village of Qibya, just north of Tel Aviv (long since overrun by Tel Aviv’s modern suburbs), was separated from the agricultural lands that its inhabitants and their ancestors had farmed for countless generations. The Prime Minister was angered by reports that Palestinian youths from Qibya had begun crossing into their village’s former lands and sabotaging Israeli farm machinery and other equipment. It was time to teach the Palestinians a lesson, and to prove the effectiveness of the strategy of massive retaliation of which he considered himself the originator. As his last important official act, this Prime Minister approved a large raid against Qibya, to be carried out by a military group called Unit 101 of the Israeli army, a special commando formation that did not wear uniforms or badges of rank, and was trained to perform actions for which the government could plausibly deny any knowledge or responsibility. The Qibya raid, however, was explicitly ordered by the Prime Minister and approved by the Israeli cabinet. It was planned as a classic example of officially-sanctioned state terrorism --- not an uncontrolled and spontaneous breach of discipline like our My Lai incident in Viet Nam many years later. On the night of October 14, 1953, Unit 101 entered the sleeping village of Qibya and tossed grenades into the defenseless homes. At dawn a group of UN military observers arrived and filed an official report, describing the deaths of sixty-eight villagers, mostly women and children. Their report to the Security Council was detailed and horrifying. The Prime Minister of Israel vehemently protested his government’s innocence. Moshe Sharett, Foreign Minister at the time of the raid and soon to become Israel’s next Prime Minister, later described in his published diaries his personal anguish and despair over the affair in these words: QUOTE: I walked up and down in my room, feeling horrified and helpless and utterly depressed by my feeling of impotence. I must underline that I did not even remotely expect such a bloodbath.” UNQUOTE
The individual who planned and approved the Qibya raid was the beloved and widely respected first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion. The young lieutenant who commanded Unit 101 on that bloody raid was the present Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon. Terrorism is not a new phenomenon in the Holy Land, nor has it always been practiced by only one side over the long life of this tragic conflict.

Two months ago, I spent an evening in London with a former head of Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service. This is a man who admits to having carried out the officially sanctioned practices of torture and selective assassination. A days before I met him, in early November of 2003, he and three other former heads of Shin Bet got together and issued statements in which they declared that the Sharon government’s handling of the Palestinian Intifada had gravely damaged Israel and its people. The four, who variously headed the Shin Bet security agency from 1980 to 2000 under governments that spanned the political spectrum, said that Israel must end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, that the government should recognize that no peace agreement can be reached without the involvement of the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, and that it must stop what one of them called the immoral treatment of Palestinians. "We must once and for all admit that there is another side, that it has feelings and that it is suffering, and that we are behaving disgracefully," said my friend in his public statement. "Yes, there is no other word for it: disgracefully. . . . We have turned into a people of petty fighters using the wrong tools.

The lesson first learned in 1953, and reiterated again by these prominent Israeli security experts fifty years later, is that terrorism’s greatest weapon, not susceptible to elimination by high explosives, is the fire in the bellies of its young people, and that the best way to oppose it is not by violent retaliation but by demonstrating genuine commitment to impartial justice. The very week that I met with that kind and wise Israeli policeman, the US command in Iraq announced the initiation of “Operation Iron Hammer”, dedicated to extinguishing the Iraqi insurgency by the vigorous application of more lethal firepower. (It would be only fair to note that Coalition forces in Iraq seem to be modifying their tactics recently, and are trying very hard to lower the intensity and visibility of their counter-insurgency operations. It may be, however, that too much damage has already been done.) In the early months of the occupation we were deliberately imitating the retaliatory tactics employed relentlessly by the Israelis for fifty years --- with consistent and conspicuous failure.

Now let’s look at an example of Covert Action gone astray. (I wish time allowed me to give several examples, but I’ve chosen one that I think is most appropriate to consider in the light of current US policy in Iraq.)

In 1957, I participated in a covert action operation in Lebanon, explicitly ordered by President Eisenhower, in which it was our objective to keep a government in power that was committed to the open and enthusiastic support of American policy objectives in the region, but was under assault by internal elements that opposed open alignment with Washington and were determined that their country should adopt a more independent and nationalistic stance. We were initially successful, but our crude manipulation of the democratic process during Lebanon’s 1957 parliamentary elections contributed directly to a civil war that was ended only on the landing of a large US Marine and Army military force one year later. To justify that armed intervention, we deliberately and knowingly provided false intelligence to the United Nations purporting to prove that our forces had responded to indirect aggression against the freely elected government by forces inspired and supported by international communism. This was pure fabrication. By the autumn of 1958, following our military intervention, the government that we had supported by our covert action had been replaced,, by a regime composed primarily of individuals who had been leaders of the political opposition, but who were not by any objective standard enemies of the United States. (For example, the man who assumed the Prime became Prime Minister of the Republic, Mr. Saeb Salam, was a graduate of the American University of Beirut, and just five years earlier had pinned an Order of the Cedar of Lebanon medal on my father at the time of his retirement as Dean of the University.) The supreme irony, I always thought, was that shortly thereafter Barry Goldwater wrote a book extolling the glorious success of our dangerously ill-advised and patently unsuccessful covert action operation in Lebanon. He got his facts totally wrong, but was never challenged. Goldwater recorded that, in a triumphant demonstration of how to employ US power in the cause of freedom, a communist regime had been overthrown in Lebanon and replaced by a pro-western government. This breathtaking contradiction of well-known historical fact was an example to me of how effective the big lie can be, and has, particularly in recent months, reminded me to keep an open mind when it comes to assertions of fact by senior American policy-makers. A case in point: On February 5th, 2003, just one year ago, Secretary of State Colin Powell, in his now-famous report to the United Nations Security Council, said this: “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” Secretary Powell’s use of the pronoun “we” in this statement was clearly intended to include CIA Director George Tenet, whose face appeared right over Powell’s shoulder throughout the presentation. Tenet’s presence could only have been intended to put the CIA’s official stamp of approval on everything Powell was reporting. “Facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” I don’t have to tell you that a team of more than 1,000 American technical experts, working for several months under the direction of the CIA’s own David Kay, have found no evidence of any significance whatsoever to substantiate “facts” obtained from the “solid sources” solemnly attested to by our Secretary of State.
Even playing on the horrendous psychological trauma engendered by the 9/11 attacks, the need to generate public support for a major overseas war (a war of choice, as we now know, not a war of necessity) turned out to be a difficult sell, and so the Bush Administration apparently felt under pressure to strengthen its case by persistent enhancement of whatever intelligence happened to be available that seemed to support their policy objectives. The details of how that corruption was implemented are much less important, however, than the violation of principles that allowed a preemptive war to be initiated on the basis of evidence that was known by the senior levels of our government to be inconclusive, and even demonstrably false in some cases. The uncertain long-term results of those violations of principle pose very significant questions: First, whether American and world public opinion will, in future crisis situations, be so dubious about the credibility of American intelligence that approval and support of other US military actions overseas will be withheld by the international community even in situations where intervention is urgently called for; Secondly, whether the image of an American president relying on questionable information to make life and death decisions will impair his credibility and effectiveness as a national and world leader; and Thirdly, whether the present crisis has revealed flaws in the way various intelligence agencies in Washington evaluate their product, and how honestly and objectively it is packaged and marketed to their customers in a competitive atmosphere in which knowledge is indeed power.

Another appropriate example, from which valuable lessons can still be derived today, concerns events in Africa in the late summer of 1998, when the Clinton Administration retaliated against terrorist bombings of the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam by launching long-range Tomahawk missiles at targets in Afghanistan and the Sudan. The missile attack on Khartoum, in particular, because it was based on embarassingly inaccurate intelligence, made subsequent American counter-terrorism strategy much more difficult to implement. At that time, in September 1998, I wrote the following in an op-ed piece published in the Sunday Outlook Section of the Washington Post under the headline: “We Can’t Defeat Terrorism with Bombs and Bombast”. This is an extract from that article, written exactly three years before 9/11:

To launch missiles into countries with which we are technically at peace -- and to kill their citizens -- is to declare that the United States is free to make its own rules for dealing with the international problem of terrorism. What standing will we have in the future to complain about any other country that attacks the territory of its neighbor, citing as justification the need to protect itself from terrorism? Did those who authorized these attacks think through the long-term implications of this short-sighted and dangerous precedent?

“Let's get down to practical realities. The new threat we face is often stateless, without sovereign territory or official sponsorship. Friendly governments around the world -- especially those with large Muslim populations such as India, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Gulf states and the new republics of Central Asia -- share a common need for internal and regional stability. Terrorism is a weapon that threatens all civil authority. This set of circumstances provides an unprecedented incentive, which is to say a God-given opportunity, to establish new systems and procedures for intergovernmental cooperation, even among states that may differ on other basic issues. But the fight against a silent and hidden common enemy requires infinite patience and tact on the part of law enforcement agencies and intelligence services. It demands absolute secrecy, mutual trust and professional respect. If the United States loses its cool without warning, if it is seen by others as a loose cannon that resorts to sudden violent action on a massive scale, the critically needed cooperation will not be there.” UNQUOTE Later in the same article I added: “President Clinton and others have labeled all Islamic terrorists as members or ‘affiliates’ of the ‘Osama bin Laden Network of Terrorism.’ This is, of course, the common mistake of demonizing one individual as the root of all evil. In fact, elevating bin Laden to that status only gives him a mantle of heroism now and, more ominously, will guarantee him martyrdom if he should die. Informed students of the subject have known for years that although the various militant Islamist movements around the world share a common ideology and many of the same grievances, they are not a monolithic international organization. Our recent attacks, unfortunately, may have inflamed their common zeal and hastened their unification and centralization --- while probably adding hosts of new volunteers to their ranks. We are rolling up a big snowball.” END OF QUOTE

I received many complimentary messages after that article appeared in the Washington Post, including one from Robert Bryant, Deputy Director of the FBI, who invited me to lunch and told me that he had instructed all his officers who were working on the terrorism target to read it. He particularly appreciated the emphasis that I had put on dealing with terrorism by patient criminal investigation and cooperation with other international law enforcement agencies rather than by what I had dubbed “bombs and bombast”. The intelligence indicating that the pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum was producing a precursor of biological weapons was completely incorrect --- another case of bad intelligence having been seized upon to justify a violent military initiative that proved to be unjustified and seriously counter-productive. Thomas Pickering was Deputy Secretary of State for Political Affairs at the time. I clearly remember when this distinguished and highly respected statesman, a former US ambassador to Jordan, Israel, India, the Philippines and the United Nations, appeared on national television to explain and defend the Clinton Administration’s Tomahawk missile attack on the Sudan, offering confident and positive assurances of the accuracy of US intelligence reports that the Dar-al-Shifa plant was a critically dangerous installation --- putting himself in exactly the same humiliating position that Colin Powell is in today as a result of his similarly inaccurate testimony before the United Nations one year ago.

Moving ahead five and a half years from the time of the Khartoum incident and my criticism of it, it happens that last week in London I was shown the transcript of a recent message addressed to his supporters by a prominent Saudi opposition figure --- not an Al-Qa’ida activist, as it happens, but still an avowed enemy of both his own government and the United States. At one point in his presentation, this dissident explained how and why Osama Bin Ladin and the al-Qa’ida movement had profited so much from the bombing of our two embassies in East Africa in August 1998. He pointed out that although most of the casualties of the attacks had been Kenyans and Muslims, not Americans, the US had over-reacted in a manner that only obscured that significant fact and precisely accomplished Bin Ladin’s objectives. My source said: QUOTE: “If the Americans had not over-reacted to that attack, they would have won a great moral victory (i.e. the many Muslim victims of al-Qa’ida’s action). But Clinton himself identified Bin Ladin as the enemy, and, in effect, delivered a hero to the whole Muslim world.” UNQUOTE. In the final event, patient and efficient police work solved the case, and the al-Qa’ida operatives responsible for the bombings were caught and successfully prosecuted, demonstrating that patient and professional law enforcement procedures, supported by competent assistance from allied services --- not long-range missile bombardment --- is indeed the right way to deal with such acts of terrorism.

Finally, I would like to take a look at some important features of the present situation in Iraq, looking again for lessons that should have been drawn from earlier experience, but were ignored. Here I am prepared to go out on a limb with some current intelligence estimates of my own. In other words, I’m ready to make some predictions about the future, based on my own past experiences, that will, I’m afraid, sound very ominous to most of you. I offer these predictions with confidence, but with sincere hopes that they will prove to be wrong.

The United States began its invasion of Iraq with a number of specific objectives, never announced publicly but all easily discernible to anyone reading and listening carefully to what key members of the Administration have been saying.
One objective has been a stern determination not to allow any militantly Islamist group to gain control of the central government. As early as last April, Don Rumsfeld assured his audience at a Pentagon press briefing that this would never be allowed to happen. He has kept silent on this point recently, as the possibility of that actually happening seems less and less remote.

Secondly, the US has maintained a confident expectation that a new government of Iraq would grant the US long-term leases on military bases from which the US could project its power throughout the entire Middle East and Central Asian region for a long time into the future.

Another expectation has been that the new Iraqi government would cooperate closely with the United States in the management of its oil and gas resources, becoming a reliable supporter of US efforts to keep markets stable, production high and prices within a reasonable range --- even, presumably, at times when Iraq’s own economic situation might call for policies more appropriate to its independent requirements.

And fourthly, the Bush Administration leadership (and especially the neo-conservatives and their allies in Congress) have all confidently expected that Iraq would become a fully cooperative partner in dealing with other Middle East crisis situations, particularly the Israeli-Palestinian problem. The neo-cons already feel that the liberation of Iraq has given them a right to demand that Iraq henceforth align its policy on Middle East peace with that of Washington, even if (or rather particularly since) this would mean breaking Iraq’s traditional solidarity with the other Arab states in advocating a more equitable deal for the Palestinians.
My prediction is this: If the United States follows through on its pledge to restore full sovereignty to a new government of Iraq, whether in July 2004, as originally promised, or later, as now seems more probable, any new leadership group in Baghdad will recognize that its popularity, its credibility and even its legitimacy will depend on the degree of independence of American influence that it can demonstrate. If and when an election is scheduled, and when it becomes clear to Washington that the projected winner in a full and free democratic process is likely to be strongly Islamic in character, will probably ask for early withdrawal of US military forces, will adopt an independent energy policy and will refuse to normalize relations with Israel, the United States Government will consider that result intolerable, and will decide to interfere with the political process to whatever extent, and by whatever means are necessary, to ensure the defeat of that party, and to engineer the election of acceptably compliant alternatives. I think that such an operation would of necessity be anything but covert, and I’m ready to predict that it will be a messy failure. Whether a failure to ensure the installation of a cooperative Iraqi government will prolong our military occupation of the country, or simply make an early and disorderly withdrawal more likely, is too difficult to predict. Karl Rove, I suspect, will have more to say about that than our Defence Department. What I am saying, in effect, is that our high-minded promises and expectations that the war would bring true democracy to Iraq through free and fair elections are unrealistic, even cynical. I’m saying also that this fiasco will constitute another critical failure of the intelligence process --- caused primarily by a faulty expectation, originating with the neo-cons, that the majority of Iraqis, out of gratitude for their liberation from Saddam Hussein, will graciously accept American tutelage and choose new political and economic systems concocted in conservative think tanks in Washington, DC.

This pessimism on my part has nothing to do with the simplistic notion, too often articulated here on this Princeton campus, that Arab and Muslim culture and tradition have produced societies in which democratic values will not easily take root. I strongly disagree with that proposition. Rather, my pessimism derives from my lack of faith in the ability of the United States of America to understand the sensibilities of a people whose personal dignity and national pride we have inadvertently but rudely violated, whose economy and physical infrastructure we have severely damaged, and whose future obedience we are blithely taking for granted. My conviction that the CIA will be directed to ensure the selection of a compliant new regime in Iraq is based on my experiences in Lebanon and elsewhere, which demonstrated that men who occupy the Oval Office seem inevitably to develop an irrational confidence that by pushing a button they can have their dirty tricks department across the Potomac River in Langley perform a covert action operation to fix the problem --- justifying the action as necessary to protect the freedom of the American people and the welfare of all humanity.
Today there are a great number of highly-principled Americans who are sincerely and earnestly dedicated to bringing true freedom and democracy to Iraq. They richly deserve our deep gratitude and our unqualified admiration. In my opinion, however, the hard reality is that when push comes to shove, the Bush Administration, for all its exalted protestations of virtue and Godliness, is not going to allow a government that defies US policy objectives to take power in Baghdad. High principles will, as I have seen so many times in my own experience, be compromised as necessary to produce results that can be presented as justification for a preemptive war costing thousands of human lives and uncounted billions of dollars. George W. Bush is NOT going to fail in his mission, and thereby admit that those lives, and that mountain of treasure, were sacrificed in vain.
In his State of the Union address in 2003, President Bush said: “The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world; it is God’s gift to humanity.” That sounds remarkably generous and humble, until you think about it more carefully. If the blessing of an American value system is in fact God’s gift to the world, and if the United States (i.e. George W. Bush himself) has been anointed by God as His chosen instrument to bestow this gift on all people, then does it not follow that anyone who opposes the policies of George W. Bush is actually rejecting God’s priceless gift to humanity? Our national goals are thus being articulated in terms that are arrogant and exclusionary, but also authoritarian, seen as very threatening by people who subscribe to cultures and religious faiths different from his. I sincerely regret sounding such a dismal note on this pleasant Sunday afternoon in beautiful and peaceful Princeton.
Since you are a captive audience, perhaps you won’t object if I close with a favorite benediction of mine.

These are some powerful words once spoken by Dwight Eisenhower, one of America’s greatest soldiers, who led the world’s most powerful army against one of history’s cruelest and most evil despots. He was a man of war, but a man who knew the limits and dangers of power. He had the sensitivity and humility to be a man of peace, who spoke out from his heart against the dangers of arrogance and pride of power. This is what Ike said many years ago, that should echo today everywhere in this great country:

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children... This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."