[Mb-civic] Ray McGovern: Bolton's Yellowcake

[Mike Blaxill]

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050511/boltons_yellowcake.php

Bolton's Yellowcake
Ray McGovern

May 11, 2005

Ray McGovern spent 27 years as a CIA analyst and
is a founding member of Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity, a group of 50 former
intelligence community members formed in January
2003.  He now works at Tell the Word, the
publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the
Saviour in Washington, DC.

------------------------------------------

What role did John Bolton play in the Bush
administration's efforts to manufacture the
intelligence needed to justify the invasion
of Iraq? As it turns out, a hidden but important
role. Remember the "yellowcake from Niger?"


Briefly reported last week in Steve Clemons' The
Washington Note was that a Congressional
subcommittee, citing a State Department inspector
general's report, found that Bolton ordered and
received updates on the notorious "Fact Sheet" of
Dec. 19, 2002 that claimed Iraq had been trying
to procure uranium "yellowcake" from Niger. In
other words, John Bolton played a key role in
ordering that discredited intelligence be used to
support the president's case for war, three
months before the attack on Iraq.
 
A Plan To Fix The Facts
 
TomPaine.com readers, unlike those malnourished
by "mainstream media," were among the first to
learn of the leaked document published by the
London Sunday Times on May 1, in which the head
of British intelligence told Prime Minister Tony
Blair that President George W. Bush had decided
to make war on Iraq.  The date, you will
remember, was July 23, 2002—long before the
president consulted Congress, and long before any
intelligence was cooked up to "justify" such a
decision.


The official minutes of that meeting show that
the U.K. intelligence chief, Richard Dearlove,
just back from consultations in Washington with
then-CIA director George Tenet and other
officials, announced matter-of-factly that the
attack on Iraq is to be "justified by the
conjunction of terrorism and weapons of mass
destruction."  British Foreign Secretary Jack
Straw is quoted as confirming that Bush has
decided on war, but interjects ruefully that the
case for WMD was "thin."  Not a problem, says
Dearlove, "Intelligence and facts were being
fixed around the policy."


Boltonization


But how does this kind of "fixing" play out? 
Insights leap out of recently declassified email
messages from the office of Undersecretary of
State John Bolton, archdeacon of politicization. 
I was particularly struck today to learn from the
Washington Post that Bolton's principal aide and
chief enforcer, Frederick Fleitz, is actually a
CIA analyst on loan to Bolton.  In this light,
his behavior in trying to cook intelligence to
the recipe of high policy is even more
inexcusable.  CIA analysts, particularly those on
detail to policy departments, have no business
playing the enforcer of policy judgments, have no
business conjuring up "intelligence around the
policy."


Fleitz must have flunked Ethics and Intelligence
Analysis 101.  Or perhaps the CIA does not offer
the course any more.  This is the same Fleitz who
"explained" to State Department's intelligence
analyst Christian Westermann that it was "a
political judgment as to how to interpret this
data [on Cuba's biological weapons program] and
the I.C. [intelligence community] should do as we
asked."


Emails released more recently show Fleitz acting
as stalking horse for Bolton to make sure the
intelligence fit the policies Bolton was
pushing.  Fleitz is furious that State Department
intelligence experts feel it their duty to demur
on Bolton/Fleitz judgments regarding the efficacy
of missile export controls against China. 
Fleitz, whose home office at CIA is the one which
gave us "high confidence" judgments on the
presence of WMD in Iraq, apparently ordered up
analysis from CIA to suit his boss' strongly held
judgment that the controls on exports to China
were deficient.


Not surprisingly, Bolton liked the analysis that
was served up by Fleitz' CIA colleagues and told
him to pass it to Deputy Secretary of State
Richard Armitage.  But State's intelligence
analysts had the temerity to do their job, and
attached a cover memo taking the opposite
position, viewing the export controls
positively. Questioned on this by Senate staffers
last week, Fleitz admitted that his experience in
his CIA home office gave him a personal stake in
how the analysis was treated.  This is doubly
inappropriate.


The idea of seconding intelligence analysts to
policy departments dates back almost three
decades to a time when many analysts found
themselves working in a vacuum, blissfully
unaware of policymakers' interests and needs. 
The analysts' (otherwise laudable) search for
relevance has now swung the pendulum too far in
the other direction, with folks like Fleitz
"cherry-picked" by folks like Bolton to "support"
policy in wholly inappropriate ways.  That top
CIA officials allow the Boltons of this
administration to get away with that shows CIA
managers to be weak, witting and
willing accomplices in this corruption of the
intelligence process.


Enter The Yellowcake


The Fleitz technique is one way to Boltonize
intelligence, but there are other ways to counter
attempts by intelligence analysts to "tell it
like it is," when "like it is" needs to be
"fixed" around a policy.  Just go around the
analysts. 


An instructive example of this can be seen by
harkening back to a key juncture in the saga on
Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction," in which
Bolton achieved his aims by simply cutting State
Department intelligence analysts out of the flow.


Painful as it is to bring up the embarrassing
canard about Iraq seeking uranium in Niger, that
sad chapter illustrates how Bolton operates when
he knows he cannot bully intelligence community
analysts to come up with the desired "analysis." 
Before President Bush's key speech on Oct. 7,
2002 setting the stage for Congress' vote on the
war three days later, then-CIA director Tenet
personally intervened to prevent the president
from using spurious "intelligence" on the alleged
attempts to acquire "yellowcake" (the ore from
which unenriched uranium is extracted) from
Africa.


Just two months later, however, this canard
reappeared in an official State Department "Fact
Sheet" dated Dec. 19, debunking Baghdad's
submission to the U.N. Security Council
accounting for Iraqi weapons programs.  The "Fact
Sheet" directly cited the "yellowcake" deal as
proof that Saddam Hussein was lying to the United
States about his nuclear program (which had been
"reconstituted" only in the rhetoric of Bolton's
patron, Dick Cheney).


Small problem: State's intelligence analysts had
long shared CIA's skepticism about that report. 
Indeed, in the National Intelligence Estimate of
Oct. 1, 2002 they had branded it "dubious."


What accounts for new life being injected into
this canard?  We learned some time ago from a
former senior Bush State Department official that
the impetus came from Bolton's office.  And now
we have documentary proof, thanks to a State
Department Inspector General investigation, the
results of which were shared with a congressional
subcommittee.  In sum, when Bolton realized that
the Iraq-Niger report itself left most analysts
holding their noses (even before it was
established that it was based on crude
forgeries), his office inserted the bogus story
into the official State Department "Fact Sheet"
without clearing it with the department's own
intelligence analysts.  Easy.


This strongly suggests that it was also no
accident that a month later the yellowcake fable
found its way into the president's
state-of-the-union address. Bolton's rogue
operation ensured the subsequent embarrassment of
one and all when the head of the U.N.'s
International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed El
Baradei declared the reports "not authentic,"
forcing both White House officials and George
Tenet to apologize.


Bolton kept his head down during all this, doing
all he could to disguise his involvement in the
"Fact Sheet" misadventure.  Indeed, the House
Committee on Government Reform's Subcommittee on
National Security found that "the State
Department deliberately concealed unclassified
information about the role of John Bolton, Under
Secretary of State for Arms Control, in the
creation of a fact sheet that falsely claimed
that Iraq sought uranium from Niger."


In a letter of Sept. 25, 2003, State told the
subcommittee that "Bolton did not play a role in
the creation of this document."  However,
subcommittee investigators subsequently obtained
access to a State Department Inspector General
report that showed that Bolton not only ordered
that the Fact Sheet be created, but also received
updates on its development.


Later, Bolton fell back on his default modus
operandi-the by-now-familiar attempts to fire for
their insolence analysts, managers, senior U.N.
officials—it doesn't matter.  Late last year,
Bolton led a one-man, one-country vendetta aimed
at preventing the well-respected El Baradei from
getting another term as Director of the U.N.'s
International Atomic Energy Agency.  That
quixotic campaign was unprecedented in its
vindictiveness and won the U.S. no friends. 


And this is the president's nominee for
ambassador to the United Nations. Remarkable.