The CIA's Long History of Bamboozling The Congress 
Fri May 22, 2009 at 05:38:11 PM EDT
"Let
me be clear about this," CIA director Leon Panetta told his troops last
week, "it was not CIA policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is
against our laws and our values."
Of course,
Panetta is entitled to his opinions, but he cannot create his own
facts. And, as a long-time member of the House of Representatives, he
surely must know that there is a long and substantiated record of CIA
deceit and dissembling to the congressional intelligence committees.
Here are some highlights of that record.
In
1973, CIA director Richard Helms deceived the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, refusing to acknowledge the role of the CIA in overthrowing
the elected government in Chile. Helms falsely testified that the CIA
had not passed money to the opposition movement in Chile, and a grand
jury was called to see if Helms should be indicted for perjury.
In 1977, the Justice Department brought a lesser charge against Helms,
who pleaded nolo contendere; he was fined $2,000 and given a suspended
two-year prison sentence. Helms went from the courthouse to the CIA
where he was given a hero’s welcome and a gift of $2,000 to cover the
fine. It was one of the saddest experiences in my 24 years at CIA.
In the new
Ford administration, Secretary of State Kissinger, Secretary of Defense
Rumsfeld, and White House chief of staff Cheney orchestrated phony
intelligence for the Congress in order to get an endorsement for covert
arms shipments to anti-government forces in Angola.
The CIA lied
to Senator Dick Clark, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, who was a critic of the Agency’s illegal collaborations with
the government of South Africa against Angola and Mozambique. Agency
briefers exaggerated the classification of their materials so that
Senate and House members could not publicize this information. Agency
shields of secrecy and falsehood were extremely effective.
In the 1980s,
CIA director William Casey and his deputy, Bob Gates, consistently lied
to the congressional oversight committees about their knowledge of
Iran-contra. Senator Daniel Moynihan (D-NY) believed that Casey and
Gates were running a disinformation campaign against the Senate
intelligence committee. Casey even managed to alienate Senator Barry
Goldwater (R-AZ), a pro-intelligence, conservative senator who
typically walked through barbed wire for the CIA.
Gates’ lies
on Iran-contra led to the Senate intelligence committee’s unwillingness
to vote him out of the committee in 1985, when he was nominated to be
CIA director by President Ronald Reagan. Gates was nominated again in
1991 and this time he was confirmed, but not before the hearings
produced rhyme and verse on Gates’ tailoring of intelligence to fit the
biases of Bill Casey.
Throughout
the 1980s and the early 1990s, Aldrich Ames performed as the most
destructive traitor in the history of the CIA, but CIA directors Gates,
William Webster, and Jim Woolsey failed to inform the congressional
oversight committees of the serious counter-intelligence problems that
had been created.
In the late
1980s, the CIA concealed from the Congress that Saddam Hussein was
diverting U.S. farm credits through an Atlanta bank to pay for nuclear
technology and sophisticated weapons. The chairman of the Senate and
House intelligence committees, Senator Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ) and
Representative Dan Glickman (D-KS) respectively, were furious with the
deception tactics of CIA briefers.
The greatest
CIA disinformation campaign in the congress took place in 2002-2003,
when CIA director George Tenet and his deputy, John McLaughlin,
consistently lied about Iraqi training for al Qaeda members on chemical
and biological weapons as well as the existence of mobile labs to
manufacture such weapons.
Several days
before the congressional vote on the authorization to use force, CIA
senior analyst Paul Pillar delivered an unclassified memorandum to the
Hill with a series of false charges about Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction. Pillar’s memorandum and a national intelligence estimate
on the same subject were also used to develop Secretary of State Colin
Powell’s address to the United Nations in February 2003.
More
recently, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), the ranking minority member of
the House intelligence committee, documented the dissembling of the CIA
to cover-up the Agency’s involvement in a drug interdiction program in
Peru that led to the loss of innocent lives. Hoekstra accused CIA
director Tenet with misleading the Congress.
The CIA still
has not addressed the serious procedural and institutional problems
that were exposed in a report from the Office of the Inspector General
on the Peru program, which concluded that Agency officials deliberately
misled Congress, the White House, and the Justice Department.
In closing,
Panetta emphasized that it was the CIA’s task to "tell it like it is,
even if that’s not what people always want to hear. Keep it up. Our
national security depends on it."
If only that
were the case in the 1980s, when the CIA hid from the congress the
intelligence on the decline of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact or
more recently when the CIA tailored intelligence on Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction and Iraqi ties to al Qaeda in order to give the Bush
administration an intelligence case to go to war.
Panetta
should understand that there was far less dissembling to the congress
35 years ago when the Agency’s Office of General Counsel only had two
attorneys, but with the addition of 63 attorneys over the next two
decades there was greater politicization of Agency testimony and
briefings.
Today there
are nearly 200 lawyers with the Office of the General Counsel. Panetta
should also understand that it is long past time for him to make sure
that the Agency replaces the current acting directors of the Office of
the Inspector General and the Office of the General Counsel in order to
make sure that the CIA is indeed telling truth to power.
Melvin A.
Goodman is senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and
adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. He spent
42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His
latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the
CIA.
