Published on Tuesday, July 15, 2003 by the Boston Globe
 
by James Carrroll
 
SO THE INTELLIGENCE community has provided faulty information to policy makers who then used it to justify disastrous decisions. When have I heard this story before?

Was it in 1944 when a savage Allied air war against cities was based on British intelligence assessments (disputed by some Americans) that bombing would destroy enemy ''morale''?

Or was it in 1945 when Manhattan Project intelligence, overseen by Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, provided estimates (disputed by scientists) that the Soviet Union would not have the atomic bomb for up to 20 years?

Or was it in the 1950s when American intelligence so emphasized the monolithic character of world communism that it missed the obvious anti-Moscow nationalist fractures in Yugoslavia and China?

Or was it in 1960 when US Air Force intelligence, having seen a ''bomber gap,'' then discovered a ''missile gap,'' sparking major escalations in the arms race with the Soviet Union?

Or was it in 1968 when military intelligence, obsessed with ''body counts,'' had so exaggerated the progress of the war (counting dead women and old people as soldiers) that the Tet offensive took Washington by surprise?

Or was it in 1969 when Richard Nixon, to justify his anti-ballistic missile proposal, cited intelligence reports (disputed by the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency) that the Soviet Union was preparing to launch a first strike?

Or was it in the 1970s when US intelligence, propping up the shah of Iran, dismissed as irrelevant the tape-recorded rantings of an exiled mullah named Khomeini?

Or was it in the 1980s when, emphasizing the ''evil empire,'' American intelligence missed entirely both the internal collapse of the Soviet economy and the historic significance of the nonviolent democracy movements?

Failure of intelligence leading Washington to make world-threatening policy mistakes is not the exception but the rule. Analysts are conditioned to emphasize worst-case scenarios, but something else equally governs such instances. Notice what each involves: an information system that is at the service of the preexisting desires and assumptions of those in authority. Intelligence assessments moving up the chain of command have a way of confirming presuppositions at the top. Truman wanted to believe in a long-term American nuclear monopoly so that he could berate Moscow - and Groves assured him it would be so. Nixon wanted a justification for the ABM, and a slanted reading of Soviet missile deployments gave it to him. And so on. This is not to say that intelligence officials ''lie'' but that at each level of gathering and analysis - from the ''body count'' in the field through a dozen intermediate stages of reporting and refinement to the National Intelligence Estimate provided to the president - contradictions are eliminated and ambiguities are shaded, perhaps unconsciously, to meet the expectations of superiors.

In 1960, US reconnaissance photos showed many monuments in vast Soviet graveyards, upright granite obelisks honoring Red Army war dead. The first photo analyst would have identified the structures as ''almost certainly'' grave markers; the second, ''probably grave markers, but small chance they are missiles''; the third, ''could well be missiles''; the fourth, ''probably missiles, although may be grave markers.'' By the time John F. Kennedy was warning of the missile gap, he would have been depending on a report that had seen ''hard evidence'' of missile deployments across the Soviet Union. Not incidentally, those reports, having supported Air Force budget requests, fueled Kennedy's criticism of the Republican administration.

One needn't believe that George W. Bush ''lied'' about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Following the tradition, he simply relied on reports that gave him what he wanted - reports having filtered out the warnings, contradictions, and ambiguities that did not square with his oft-stated purpose. It was to such filtering that George Tenet pled guilty. No duh.

And lest one think of this as heinous, it should also be noted that this ''filtering'' is exactly what the vast majority of Americans, politicians, and ''opinion makers'' employed in their eager rush to war last fall and winter. Many of the Democrats and pundits now condemning an intelligence ''deception'' did exactly the same thing to support a war they were too cowardly to oppose - ignoring the much noted evidence (enough to sustain UN opposition) that contradicted patently ludicrous Bush administration claims.

Not all intelligence officials willingly participate in this corruption, either today or in the past. Each of the instances outlined above involved officials who dissented from the top-down consensus, sometimes at their peril. I happen to know of one such case personally, and it is why I find this pattern of smug American self-deception so painful. The director of the Defense Intelligence Agency who defied the Nixon administration in 1969 by contradicting its claim about Soviet ''first strike'' intentions was my father, Lieutenant General Joseph Carroll. Speaking that truth cost him his career.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company

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