Craig Unger: A Failure of Intelligence

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from HuffPost:




Craig Unger
A Failure of Intelligence
Posted December 9, 2007 | 06:44 PM (EST)



Intelligence failures, intelligence failures. The United States spends more than $40 billion a year on intelligence, but, gosh darn it, we just can't seem to get it right. The latest fiasco, of course, concerns the now infamous National Intelligence Estimate about Iran which concludes that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program more than four years ago.

Let me suggest, however, that the real problem is not repeated intelligence failures, as conventional wisdom has it. In fact, I believe we have the opposite problem -- namely, intelligence successes. By that I mean successful disinformation operations, black propaganda operations that have promoted falsehoods for decades in an extraordinarily successful series of attempts to mislead the American people and shape U.S. foreign policy to serve neo-conservative ideological ends.

One can trace such operations back to 1976, when a number of young neoconservatives, including Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, helped assemble a group of hawkish anti-Communist foreign policymakers to put together intelligence showing that that the "liberal" CIA had dangerously underestimated the Soviet threat. Even though U.S.-Soviet relations had thawed considerably thanks to détente, Team B, as the group became known, thought that the Soviets wanted to wipe out America, so it created a report showing a Soviet Union hell bent on world domination. It had no factual evidence to back up its assertion that the Soviets had a top secret non-acoustic antisubmarine system. Nevertheless, it concluded that the Soviets had probably "deployed some operational non-acoustic systems and will deploy more in the next few years." The absence of evidence, it reasoned, merely proved how secretive the Soviets were!

Similarly, in the early '80s, neo-con firebrand Michael Ledeen falsely blamed the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II on the KGB. In a 1987 article in The Nation, Italian intelligence operative Francesco Pazienza said that Ledeen "was the person responsible for dreaming up the 'Bulgarian connection' behind the plot to kill the Pope." Again, a disinformation scam heated up the Cold War. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-unger/a-failure-of-intelligence_b_76001.html