Begin forwarded message:
From: "Mario Profaca" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: November 17, 2008 4:39:22 PM PST
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [SPY NEWS] Stanford University Press Publishes The CIA and
the Culture of Failure
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20081117005495&newsLang=en
November 17, 2008 12:48 PM Eastern Time
Stanford University Press Publishes The CIA and the Culture of Failure
"Diamond has put together a sequence of long, trenchant, truly
eclectic essays on the CIA's internal workings, consistently stressing
its tendency to outsmart itself." —BookForum
PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--One of the most pressing tasks
confronting the new Obama administration is rebuilding and redirecting
the nation's intelligence system. From closing Guantanamo Bay to
ending the abusive treatment of terrorist detainees to halting
warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens, Obama has promised major and
rapid changes in the way our intelligence community does business. He
has also pledged to do everything possible to capture Osama bin Laden,
who remains at large.
How U.S. intelligence reached its current troubled state is the
subject of John Diamond's new book, The CIA and the Culture of
Failure: U.S. Intelligence from the End of the Cold War to the
Invasion of Iraq. Diamond focuses on U.S. intelligence during the
dozen years from the end of the Cold War in 1990-91 to the invasion of
Iraq in early 2003 as a defining period in CIA history. In a story of
political tension as well as intelligence judgment and misjudgment,
Diamond writes, "The short distance between the White House and the
CIA appears greater when measured in other ways. And the tension
between these two power centers during the course of just over a
decade—from about the time that unpainted slab of the Berlin Wall
arrived at Langley to the day when Colin Powell and a room full of
harried intelligence analysts assembled a case for war in Iraq—is the
subject of this book."
The CIA which President Barack Obama will inherit on January 20, 2009
is in many ways a product of the events recounted by Diamond. The
questions raised about whether we even need a CIA following the Soviet
collapse; the Agency's miscues prior to the Persian Gulf War that
contributed to even greater intelligence failures prior to the
invasion of Iraq; the Aldrich Ames spy scandal; the halting attempts
to find and attack Osama bin Laden in the years prior to the 9/11
attacks – all these are recounted in fresh detail, based on original
reporting and interviews with scores of current and former
intelligence professionals, and on recently declassified documents.
A major underlying theme of the book, one the new administration would
do well to heed, is the impact of political pressure on the quality of
intelligence information put on the president's desk every morning.
Political pressure – from the right during the Reagan years over the
scope of the Soviet threat, from the left during the Clinton years
over CIA ties with repressive Latin American regimes – constantly
threatened to distort the intelligence used by the government to shape
its foreign policy.
Diamond contends that a series of intelligence lapses (both real and
alleged) in the decade following the Soviet collapse led "to a
`culture of failure'…a fatal cycle of error, criticism,
overcorrection, distraction, and politicization that undermined the
quality and quantity of information provided to decision-makers who
compounded these failings with major misjudgments of their own."
The book breaks new ground in several areas:
* Shows how a deliberate undermining of the CIA was critical to
the neo-conservative push for the defense build-up in the 1970s and
80s, national missile defense in the 1990s and the invasion of Iraq in
2003.
* Shows how the chance arrest by Pakistan of a suspect, Mohammed
Sadeeq Odeh, in the U.S. embassy bombing in Kenya tipped off bin Laden
and caused al-Qaeda to change its plans for a leadership meeting,
rendering the Clinton administration's retaliatory strike an
embarrassing miss.
* Explains how the Iraq/WMD failure, one of the most consequential
in CIA history, stemmed from one of the Agency's most notable
successes. The great misjudgment prior to the Iraq invasion was the
failure – by the White House, Congress, and the CIA itself – to even
consider the possibility that this combined effort to disarm Iraq had,
in fact, succeeded.
The political and foreign policy agendas of new administrations and
new majorities in Congress have led the CIA astray in the past, and
can do so again, Diamond warns. The CIA and the Culture of Failure
offers a persuasive case for learning from past failures and spelling
out what is at stake, "intelligence disasters surrounding 9/11 and the
war in Iraq did two things simultaneously: they undermined public
confidence in the CIA, and they underscored how much the nation
depends on quality intelligence."
John Diamond has been writing about defense, intelligence, and foreign
affairs in Washington since 1989 for the Associated Press, Chicago
Tribune, and USA Today. He is now researching and writing on nuclear
security, terrorism, and other defense and foreign policy issues.
STANFORD SECURITY STUDIES
An imprint of Stanford University Press
September 2008 552 pages
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