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WAR
WATCH #8
Disquieting News Respective Hussein's Interrogation
by Joseph D.
Douglass, Jr.
December 17, 2003
This is nothing short of amazing. It is the military who dominate the front lines and who are most in need of the types of information that Hussein might possess. It is the military who captured him. It is simply operationally and bureaucratically neigh onto inconceivable that the Secretary of Defense would “ask” the CIA to take on this responsibility and control unless he was directed to do so and do so in such a manner that it would seem to have been his idea.
Nor does it make sense to “ask” the CIA to take control because, as Secretary Rumsfeld explained, the agency has “the people who have competence in that area; they have professionals in that area.”
If that were case, one might ask, where have these people and professionals been hiding? Intuitively, what Rumsfeld’s said would seem most logical. Clearly, the CIA should have such people and professionals. And, it may well be the case. But, history suggests that this is not the case or, if so, it is irrelevant because the CIA has a long history of bungling interrogations of important people from the enemy’s camp and, as stated in my prior article (War Watch #7), of working harder to silence such people than extract all the important information they may possess.
The CIA was so bad in its handling of enemy defectors that Congressional Hearings were held into this matter in the mid-1970s. If anything changed following these hearings, how could one explain the fact that after the dissolution of the Soviet Union an internal CIA analysis of captured East German Stasi intelligence files and related information led to the conclusion that ninety percent of all CIA-recruited agents from Cuba, Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Middle East should have been regarded as bad – double agents whose mission was to feed the CIA bad information.
Where were all the CIA “professionals” then? How could they have failed so miserably in their task of interrogation and assessment? Moreover, when presented with the highest level source ever to defect whose information was repeatedly confirmed by analysts within the Defense Intelligence Agency, not only did the CIA fail to follow any of the critical leads the source had provided, they worked overtime in an effort to silence him, or failing that, to discredit him behind his back so that no one would pay attention to what he had to say.
This is of enormous importance today insofar as this source, with whom I am personally acquainted, was the single most knowledgeable source in the West on international terrorism and Soviet sponsorship: their organization, material supply, training, intelligence support, objectives, and financial support! But, the CIA did not want to know. They even tried to convince people that there really was no evidence that the Soviet Union was involved in international terrorism, even after the Soviet role in sponsoring terrorism was well recognized in Europe and by several civilian experts in the United States following the capture of extensive documentation.
Further, after two years of intense special forces operations in the Middle East, the U.S. military has to have more than adequate expertise and Middle East language specialists, quite possibly more than the CIA, especially when the near total absence of expertise and language specialists in the CIA was decried by several discouraged former CIA agents with Middle East expertise in various articles and books written prior to 9-11. See, for example, those of Robert Baer and Reuel Marc Gerecht.
How can one explain all this that is clearly inconsistent with the CIA being so competent and professional?
First, the CIA is not a national asset. It was created and chartered to serve as the President’s intelligence arm. It also serves and takes direction from the National Security Council. Uncovering information about America’s enemies is not in its interest except to the extent directed by the White House. ( For further on this, see Wise and Ross, The Espionage Establishment, pp. 168-171.) The primary interests of the White House are political. This is the first essential aspect about U.S. intelligence that has to be recognized.
The second fact is that the inception and growth of present-day terrorism is a product of Communist regimes, especially China, Russia and the Soviet surrogates such as Cuba. Middle East terrorism is no exception. It is a product of Russian military intelligence and it has also been supported by the Chinese.
Consider in particular Iraq and its close Soviet/Russian connections. There were key Russian military and intelligence advisors in Baghdad during the first Gulf War and they were not there for the pleasant weather. Russian military and intelligence advisors were also in Baghdad when Bush unleashed Rumsfeld’s Shock and Awe campaign. Even the top Russian Middle East advisor with long-standing ties to Hussein, Primakov, visited Baghdad on the eve of the 2003 U.S. invasion. Although this has been reported in the non-establishment press, there has been no White House or Defense Department mention of the presence of these Russian military and intelligence advisors or explanations of what they might have been doing there.
The third critical aspect is that since even before the Bolsheviks seized control in 1917, the Soviet Union (Russia following the 1989-1992 changes) has been especially favored by the White House. Several White House advisors have had strong Marxist philosophies (such as Col. House under Wilson and Harry Hopkins, now known to have been a Soviet agent, under Roosevelt), which in part explains the pro-Soviet position of so many White House policies. Complementing this, there have been strong external pressures from financial and industrial interests for U.S. policies that would facilitate the “exploitation” of Communist markets by U.S. industry. As Hoover Institute researcher Antony Sutton concluded following his extensive study of U.S. archives, after 1917 the United States built the Soviet Union into “best enemy money could buy.”
Another reason was provided by the head of the Ford Foundation, Rowan Gaither, to Norman Dodd, chief investigator of the Reece Committee that was formed in 1953 to examine the efforts of the big tax-exempt foundations to influence U.S. policy. Gaither told Dodd that the [unadvertised] mission of the Ford Foundation was to change life in the United States so that a comfortable merger between the United States and the Soviet Union would be possible. Moreover, he explained, this directive came from the White House. This directive meant, among other things, that we needed to silence adverse publicity about the nefarious activities of the Soviet Union and mislead the American people about the true nature of the Communists. Else, how could anyone expect to “comfortably” merge the United States with the Soviet Union, in effect anticipating the problem in voluntarily creating a “new world order”?
This requirement can be seen in the wide spread silence respecting the crimes of Communism. It is well recognized by civilian professionals in the field. One of the best statements of this problem is in The Black Book of Communism, that was published by Harvard University in 1999. The authors explain how it is understandable why we focus attention on the crimes of Hitler. “But,” they next point out, “the revelations concerning Communist crimes cause barely a stir. Why is there such an awkward silence from politicians? Why such a deafening silence from the academic world regarding the Communist catastrophe, which touched the lives of about one-third of humanity on four continents during a period spanning eighty years?”
The crimes of the Communists, especially those of the Soviet Union, are mind-boggling, way beyond anything that Hitler and Hussein can claim. Yet, there has been no White House interest in holding those responsible following the collapse of the Soviet empire. Indeed, the response from U.S. (and other Western) politicians, academicians, and journalists has been to welcome the former Communist leaders with open arms and give them access, speaking engagements, markets for their books, and billions of dollars in aid and financial assistance.
The need to sweep the nature of the Communists under the rug remains the case today, as anyone who cares to look can see. There is also no country with more intelligence assets in the United States and capability to disseminate chemical and biological warfare agents (including the high quality anthrax used in the November 2001 anthrax letters) than Russia. It is quite clear that the policy of maintaining silence respecting adverse information regarding Russia and China remains in force today.
Forth, within the intelligence arena, the people who have worked most assiduously (for the White House) in enforcing this silence has been the CIA. The primary tool that has been employed in the past is to bury adverse information and to control the interrogation of those whose knowledge represents a threat to this mission. This is done by maintaining control of the interrogation process, especially the questions that are posed and the dissemination of any information recovered. When a top Soviet biowarfare expert, Col. Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov, defected, he was perplexed. He could not understand why there was so little interest in debriefing him about Soviet biological warfare interests and its research and development program. He was even cautioned by one U.S. official against speaking out too bluntly against Russia. “Perhaps there are questionable activities going on,” the official said, “but for the moment, diplomacy requires us to keep silent.” (See editorial Assessing the CBW Threat)
The above information is, in greater detail, why I wrote in War Watch 7 that “hopefully the interrogation will be run and controlled by the military without CIA interference.” This also is why I now regard the news that Secretary Rumsfeld has already asked the CIA to take control of the interrogation as most disquieting.
© 2003 Joseph D. Douglass, Jr.
Editorial Archive
Joseph D. Douglass, Jr., Ph.D., is a defense analyst, author of The Soviet Theater Nuclear Offensive and co-author of CBW: The Poor Man’s Atomic Bomb and America the Vulnerable: The Threat of Chemical and Biological Warfare. His most recent books are Red Cocaine: The Drugging of America and Betrayed: The Story of America’s Missing POWs.
