MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity
SUBJECT: Ukraine Decision Time
REF:
Nukes Cannot be Un-Invented, VIPS
Mr. President:
September 06, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- "Antiwar"-
Before Defense Secretary Austin
flies off to Ramstein for the meeting Thursday
of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group we owe you
a few words of caution occasioned by our many
decades of experience with what happens to
intelligence in wartime. If he tells you Kyiv is
beating back the Russians, kick the tires – and
consider widening your circle of advisers
Truth is the coin of the realm in
intelligence analysis. It is equally axiomatic
that truth is the first casualty of war, and
that applies to the war in Ukraine as well as
earlier wars we have been involved in. When at
war, Defense Secretaries, Secretaries of State,
and generals simply cannot be relied upon to
tell the truth – to the media, or even to the
President. We learned that early – the hard and
bitter way. A lot of our comrades in arms did
not come back from Vietnam.
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Vietnam: President Lyndon Johnson
preferred to believe Gen. William Westmoreland
who told him and Defense Secretary McNamara in
1967 that South Vietnam could win – if only LBJ
would supply an additional 206,000 troops. CIA
analysts knew that to be untrue and that – worse
still — Westmoreland was deliberately falsifying
the number of forces he faced, claiming there
were only "299,000" Vietnamese communists under
arms in the South. We reported the number was
500,000 to 600,000. (Sadly, we were proven right
during the countrywide communist Tet offensive
in early 1968. Johnson quickly decided not to
run for another term.)
All being fair in love and war, the generals
in Saigon were determined to offer a rosy
picture. In an August 20, 1967 cable from
Saigon, Westmoreland’s deputy, Gen. Creighton
Abrams, explained the rationale for their
deception. He wrote that the higher enemy
numbers (which were supported by virtually all
intelligence agencies) “were in sharp contrast
to the current overall strength figure of about
299,000 given to the press." Abrams continued:
“We have been projecting an image of success
over recent months.” He cautioned that if the
higher figures became public, “all available
caveats and explanations will not prevent the
press from drawing an erroneous and gloomy
conclusion.”
The Demise of Imagery Analysis: Until 1996,
CIA had an independent capability to do
unencumbered military analysis enabling it to
speak the truth – even during war. One
key arrow in the analysis quiver was its
established responsibility to perform imagery
analysis for the entire Intelligence Community.
Its early success in pinpointing Soviet missiles
in Cuba in 1962 had earned the National
Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) a
solid reputation for professionalism and
objectivity. It helped considerably in our
analysis of the Vietnam war. And later, it
played a key role in assessing Soviet strategic
capabilities and in verifying arms control
agreements.
In 1996, when NPIC and its 800 highly
professional imagery analysts were given, kit
and kaboodle, to the Pentagon, it was goodbye to
impartial intelligence.
Iraq: Retired Air Force General James
Clapper was eventually put in charge of NPIC’s
successor, the National Imagery and Mapping
Agency (NIMA) and thus was well positioned to
grease the skids for the "war of choice" on
Iraq.
Indeed, Clapper is one of the few senior
functionaries to admit that, under pressure from
Vice President Cheney, he was "leaning forward"
to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq;
could find none; but went along anyway. In his
memoir Clapper accepts part of the blame for
this consequential fraud – he calls it "the
failure" – in the quest to find the
(nonexistent) WMD. He writes, we "were so
eager to help that we found what wasn’t really
there."
Afghanistan: You will recall the
extreme pressure on President Obama coming from
Defense Secretary Gates, Secretary of State
Clinton, and generals like Petraeus and
McCrystal to double down in sending more troops
to Afghanistan. They were able to push aside
Intelligence Community analysts, relegating them
to strap-hangers at decision-making meetings. We
recall U.S. Ambassador in Kabul Karl Eikenberry,
a former Army Lieutenant General who had
commanded troops in Afghanistan, appealing
plaintively for an objective National
Intelligence Estimate on the pros and cons of
doubling down. We are also aware of reports that
you demurred, sensing that deepening US
involvement would be a fool’s errand. Remember
when Gen. McChrystal promised, in February 2010,
a "government in a box, ready to roll" into the
key Afghan city of Marja?
The President, as you well know, deferred to
Gates and the generals. And, last summer, it was
left to you to pick up the pieces, so to speak.
As for the fiasco in Iraq, the "surge" that
Gates and Petraeus were picked by Cheney and
Bush to implement brought almost a thousand
additional "transfer cases" to the mortuary in
Dover, while allowing Bush and Cheney to go West
without having lost a war.
As for former Defense Secretary Gates’s
undented Teflon coat, after his doubling-down
advice on Iraq and Afghanistan, he had the
chutzpah to include the following in a speech at
West Point on Feb. 25, 2011 shortly before he
left office:
"But in my opinion, any future defense
secretary who advises the president to again
send a big American land army into Asia or into
the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head
examined,’ as General [Douglas] MacArthur so
delicately put it."
Syria – Austin’s Reputation Not Without
Blemish: Closer to home, Secretary Austin is
no stranger to accusations of politicizing
intelligence. He was commander of CENTCOM (2013
to 2016) when more than 50 CENTCOM military
analysts, in August 2015, signed a formal
complaint to the Pentagon Inspector General that
their intelligence reports on the Islamic State
in Iraq and Syria were being inappropriately
manipulated by the top brass. The analysts
claimed their reports were being changed by
higher-ups to dovetail with the administration’s
public line that the US was winning the battle
against ISIS and the al-Nusra Front, al Qaeda’s
branch in Syria.
In February 2017, the Pentagon Inspector
General found that allegations of intelligence
being intentionally altered, delayed or
suppressed by top CENTCOM officials from
mid-2014 to mid-2015 were "largely
unsubstantiated.” (sic)
In Summary: We hope you take the time
to review this history – and to take it into
account before sending Secretary Austin off to
Ramstein. In addition, today’s announcement that
Russia intends to cut off gas through Nord
Stream 1 until Western sanctions are removed is
likely to have a significant impact on Austin’s
interlocutors. It may even make European
government leaders more inclined to carve out
some sort of compromise before Russian forces
advance farther and winter arrives. (We hope you
have been adequately briefed on the likely
outcome of the recent Ukrainian "offensive".)
You may also wish to seek counsel from CIA
Director William Burns and others with
experience in the history of Europe – and
particularly of Germany. Media reports suggested
earlier that in Ramstein Secretary Austin will
commit to providing Ukraine with still more
weaponry and will encourage his colleagues to do
the same. If he follows that script, he may find
few takers – particularly among those most
vulnerable to winter cold.
FOR THE STEERING GROUP: Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
- William Binney, NSA Technical
Director for World Geopolitical & Military
Analysis; Co-founder of NSA’s Signals
Intelligence Automation Research Center
(ret.)
- Marshall Carter-Tripp, Foreign
Service Officer (ret.) and Division
Director, State Department Bureau of
Intelligence and Research
- Bogdan Dzakovic, former Team
Leader of Federal Air Marshals and Red Team,
FAA Security (ret.) (associate VIPS)
- Graham E. Fuller, Vice-Chair,
National Intelligence Council (ret.)
- Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations
Officer (ret.)
- Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC,
Iraq & Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan
(associate VIPS)
- Larry Johnson, former CIA
Intelligence Officer & former State
Department Counter-Terrorism Official (ret.)
- John Kiriakou, former CIA
Counterterrorism Officer and former senior
investigator, Senate Foreign Relations
Committee
- Karen Kwiatkowski, former Lt.
Col., US Air Force (ret.), at Office of
Secretary of Defense watching the
manufacture of lies on Iraq, 2001-2003
- Linda Lewis, WMD preparedness
policy analyst, USDA (ret.)
- Edward Loomis, Cryptologic
Computer Scientist, former Technical
Director at NSA (ret.)
- Ray McGovern, former US Army
infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst;
CIA Presidential briefer (ret.)
- Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy
National Intelligence Officer for the Near
East, National Intelligence Council & CIA
political analyst (ret.)
- Pedro Israel Orta, former CIA and
Intelligence Community (Inspector General)
officer
- Todd Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge
Advocate (ret.)
- Scott Ritter, former MAJ., USMC,
former UN Weapon Inspector, Iraq
- Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent
and former Minneapolis Division Legal
Counsel (ret.)
- Sarah G. Wilton, CDR, USNR,
(Retired)/DIA, (Retired)
- Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret.);
Foreign Service Officer (resigned in
opposition to the war on Iraq)
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity (VIPs) is made up of former intelligence
officers, diplomats, military officers and
congressional staffers. The organization,
founded in 2002, was among the first critics of
Washington’s justifications for launching a war
against Iraq. VIPS advocates a US foreign and
national security policy based on genuine
national interests rather than contrived threats
promoted for largely political reasons.
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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