Suing the CIA

IN THE NEWS
A former CIA analyst is suing the agency. According to the unnamed proliferation expert's court documents, his managers at the agency retaliated after he refused to write documents that supported the Bush Administration's assertion that Iraq had an arsenal of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.

As I wrote earlier, I expected there to be a significant number of resignations from the State Department, CIA, and other national security agencies after the November election. Many experts who were not only ignored, but often the target of hostility by members of the Bush Administration, undoutbtedly were waiting to see who would occupy the Oval Office in November before making a career-ending decision. We know the process already started, most notably with the chief of clandestine operations, Stephen Kappes, and his deputy, Michael Sulick, both highly respected and highly experienced--qualities the CIA acutely needs right now, particularly in the operations wing.

But I can't say I expected to see someone suing the agency over retaliation on the job. Maybe I should have.

What has been missing from the discussions of these resignations and intelligence reform plans is how broken the CIA really was before the Bush Administration ever came into office. The first-person narrative of Robert Baer is chilling, since it shows an agency in the late Nineties already too sensitized to the twitches of its political masters, and therefore too uninterested in the proper work of analysts and spies. Plus, we know that in the latest phase of the long-standing feud between the CIA and the FBI, started by the Aldrich Ames investigation, the CIA came out the worse for it. Not only did the agency lose a lot of its bureaucratic clout, but the widescale investigations of CIA employees made them leery about what statements or activities might land them in court.

It's worth remembering that Baer's book is only one account, and perhaps not every part of the CIA was as badly broken as his corner was. (Unfortunately, he was working in the thick of the very issues and countries that are now on the front burner.) Still, the Bush Administration clearly made a bad situation at the Agency and made it worse--and continues to do so. As David Ignatius argued in The Washington Post, if this sort of purge were happening in the military, wouldn't Americans be a lot more worried?

Oh, wait, it is sorta happening. Just not quite on the same relative scale, and a lot more quietly.

Comments

[ali]

Langley has a history of being made scapegoat for the President as this http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17637 review points out.

Things do seem to have gone badly wrong with the US IC. Reading Scheuer’s blistering (and very telling) attack on the FBI counter-terror unit did make me think that Inter-departmental/institutional rivalry is completely out of control. There is an even bigger problem with collaboration with foreign agencies. Fundamental changes are required to get the worldwide IC serving mutual interests.

I’m a little shocked to see you need to be a US citizen to work at Langley.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1207/p03s01-usfp.html
Goss needs to fix that and fast. Langley needs not just Arabists but Arabs.

[J.]

Re: purge in the military - absolutely true, at least in the Army. Rumsfeld started hand-picking the one- and two-star generals when he arrived, a practice virtually unknown for any SecDef to perform. Usually the three- and four-stars pick the lower ranks and the SecDef approves them all, and SecDef of course has a heavy hand in promoting the three- and four-stars.

Shoomaker and the new Army Secretary (Harvey) are blatent suck-ups, every speech or official document you pick up has the SecDef's transformation lines in them. Not that transformation is bad, but it's not like the Army has any originality any more, they are reduced to following whatever OSD wants. It's sad.

[john]

full information re those conducting extraordinary rendition. not limited to technology/ MI6.

those in UK MI6 conducting civil/ constitutional/ human rights viol; war cri9mes 1997 to present

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