USA Department of State - Shadow warriors: the untold story of traitors, saboteurs, and the party of surrender

CONTENTS

For Diana, Simon, and the next generation of citizens and spies

Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.

Ephesians 6:13

PROLOGUE

THE UNDERGROUND

S ome have called it the CIAs greatest covert operation of all time.

It involved deep penetration of a hostile regime by planting a network of agents at key crossroads of power, where they could steal secrets and steer policy by planting disinformation, cooking intelligence, provocation, and outright lies.

It involved sophisticated political sabotage operations, aimed at making regime leaders doubt their own judgment and question the support of their subordinates.

It involved the financing, training, and equipping of effective opposition forces, who could challenge the regime openly and through covert operations.

The scope was breathtaking, say insiders who had personal knowledge of the CIA effort. All the skills learned by the U.S. intelligence community during fifty years of Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union were in play, from active measures aimed at planting disinformation through cutouts and an eager media, to maskirovkastrategic deception.

It was warbut an intelligence war, played behind the scenes, aimed at confusing, misleading, and ultimately defeating the enemy. Its goal was nothing less than to topple the regime in power, by discrediting its rulers.

Many Americans believe this was the CIAs goal during the 1990s, when the Agency had boots on the ground in northern Iraq, working with Iraqi opponents to Saddam Hussein. Most patriotic Americans probably hope that the CIA today has such an operation to overthrow the mullahs in Tehran, or North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il.

But the target of this vast, sophisticated CIA operation was none of them.

It was Americas 43rd president, George W. Bush.

Many Americans look at the war in Iraq and understandably feel that something has gone dreadfully wrong. Given the way our political system works, the first person they blame is the president of the United States. After all, he is the commander in chief. As Harry Truman famously said of his role in the blame game of American politics, The Buck Stops Here. So arent Americans right to hold Bush accountable for the failures of his administration? And wasnt that the main message of the November 2006 elections?

The short answer, of course, is yes. But the truth is far more nuanced, because it is based on information that is not widely available to the publicor when available, information that has been systematically ignored, denied, or purposefully misconstrued by the presidents political opponents and their cheering section in the elite media.

Take the whole question of Saddam Husseins efforts to build weapons of mass destruction and his ties to terrorist groups. The fear that Saddam would have handed chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons to a terrorist group for use against the United States drove President Bush and his advisorsand everyone else who saw the intelligenceto conclude that the United States had no option but to remove Saddams regime.

After the devastation of the 9/11 attacks, no U.S. president could have failed to act against Saddam once it became clear that the Iraqi dictator would not disarm voluntarily, as required by seventeen United Nations Security Council resolutions. At the time those decisions were made, in the fall of 2002, no one doubted the intelligence, not U.S. allies overseas or even the presidents opponents in Congress.

But as you will learn in this book, some of that intelligence was cookednot by the Bush administration but by its opponentsin an extraordinary covert operation that has never been revealed until now (see Chapter 5). The goal was to lay the groundwork for a political assault on the president of the United States, and by extension, against America and on American troops serving in harms way. Bush lied, people died!

You will learn that from the very start the presidents original war plans were undermined by officials at the State Department and the CIA, who shifted that strategy from liberation to occupation, and in so doing helped to spark the insurgency that caused the deaths of more than 3,000 American servicemen. Four years later, as this book appears, we are stuck with a war that the president never desired and never planned, while those who bear direct, personal responsibility for the train wreck of events have faded back into obscurity.

You will learn of arsenals of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that Saddam and his allies moved or destroyed shortly before the fighting began, to hide them from the coalition. You will learn, too, that there was extensive evidence that Saddam Hussein was funding and training a variety of terrorist groups on Iraqi soil, giving rise to legitimate fears that he might give WMD to terrorists to use against us. But since the war, this evidencewhich has been supplemented by masses of documents and audio recordings seized in the aftermath of the invasionhas been dragged through the mud and its purveyors discredited (see Chapters 9, 14, and 17).

Many of the shadow warriors involved in this extraordinary campaign to impeach the truth have succeeded until now in keeping their role in these events hidden. They are professional bureaucrats, staff directors, intelligence operatives, National Security Council professionals, former ambassadors, and career diplomats. I will name many of them in this book for the first time, so Americans can judge their actions by the light of day.

Otherssuch as Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), Senator John D. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE), and General Brent Scowcroftare public personalities. Until now they have managed to obscure their role in subverting the U.S.-led war against the terrorists who attacked us on September 11 through political subterfuge, outright lies, and a complaisant media.

This book will correct the record and expose their maneuvering.

After President Bush was elected to a second term in November 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell called a town meeting at the State Department in Washington. Faced with a sea of Kerry-Edwards stickers in the parking lot and hearing tales of open insubordination from his aides, Powell decided to confront the problem head-on. We live in a democracy, he said. As Americans, we have to respect the results of elections. He went on to tell his employees that President Bush had received the most votes of any president in U.S. history, and that they were constitutionally obligated to serve him.

One of Powells subordinates, an assistant secretary of state, became increasingly agitated. Once Powell had dismissed everyone, she returned to her office suite, shut the door, and held a mini town meeting of her own. After indignantly recounting Powells remarks to her assembled staff, she commented, Well, Senator Kerry received the second highest number of votes of any presidential candidate in history. If just one state had gone differently, Senator Kerry would be President Kerry today. Her employees owed no allegiance to the president of the United States, especially not to policies they knew were wrong, she said. If it was legal, and it would slow down the Bush juggernaut, they should do it, she told them.

Here was an open call to insubordination. And she was just one among many mid-level government managers, at State and elsewhere, making similar calls to their employees.