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Weapons of Mass Destruction )

• Message 1.Β 

  Posted by vesturiiis (U13688567) on Tuesday, 6th September 2011

  The CIA seemed to sell this to willing audience of various governments
  but how could the info or inference be so off the mark? Seems the turmoil
  of invading Iraq based on inaccurate sources is ludicrous and perhaps criminal.
  Perhaps a good waterboarding (Dick) would give some answers.
  Any other war stories where spy info didn't make the grade and results were
  a disaster.

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• Message 2

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  Posted by baz (U14258304) on Wednesday, 7th September 2011

  Stalin didn't take any notice of intelligence warning of an imminent German invasion in 1941, believing it to be a provocation.
  More recently, there was an article on Newsnight a few weeks back which claimed that the CIA already have plans in place to seize Pakistan's nuclear weapons. If true, we could be on the brink of a conflagration that would make Iraq look like a picnic.

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  Posted by suvorovetz (U12273591) on Wednesday, 7th September 2011

  Perhaps a good waterboarding (Dick) would give some answersΒ  I find this funny. Just when Cheney actually published a book. I can see why Powell would like to waterboard him now, precisely because we have some answers now.

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  Posted by Mutatis_Mutandis (U8620894) on Wednesday, 7th September 2011

  As far as I know, there were analysts in the CIA who had grave doubts about the validity of this intelligence. They -- and officials in other intelligence services -- found the material unconvincing, but although some of them tried to make this clear, the message of the skeptics was filtered out every time at the higher levels.
  
  In R.V. Jones' classic account of scientific intelligence in WWII, "Most Secret War", he provides some advice to his successors, specifically on the need to keep a cool head and not be distracted by bogeys called up by senior people with little knowledge but a fertile imagination: I don't have the book at hand right now, but it seems to fit the situation almost exactly. It is far easier to imagine a risk, than to prove that it does not exist.
  
  I think part of the problem was that in the years after 1991, the Western intelligence services had come to see it as their task to provide their governments with arguments to help maintain the sanctions against Saddam Hussein and keep up the pressure on his regime. This lead to a subtle shift, from political bias in the use of intelligence (understandable) to political bias in the production of intelligence (always unwise). During one of the many inquiries held in the UK, a senior official admitted that the intelligence had been considered credible by them /because/ it fitted with existing ideas about the plans of Saddam and his regime. That, of course, is a dangerous criterion to use.
  
  Another factor was that the "neo-con" hawks in the US administration -- Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bolton, Perle, and others -- had an established tendency to use the worst-case scenario as basis for their intelligence estimates. During the Cold War they had applied this approach to analysis of Soviet capabilities, with rather disastrous results as the result was a load of nonsense; but it fit their political agenda. They did the same in relation to Iraq. They were, of course, not only biased in their pessimistic assessment of Iraqi WMD capabilities, but also in their far too optimistic view on the difficulties that could be expected in a post-Saddam Iraq.
  
  Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 has already been mentioned. Another famous example, in the other sense, was Munich in 1938: The German military might that convinced the French and British to sign a humiliating deal was for a substantial part a figment of effective propaganda, which inflated apparent strengths by basic tricks such as parading the same tanks in front of visitors several times.
  
  Also significant in intelligence history are "Bomber Gap" and "Missile Gap" controversies of the 1950s. At the time, US opposition politicians (notably JFK) attacked the Eisenhower administration by alleging a "Missile Gap", i.e. the theory that the USSR has a large number of nuclear-armed ICBMs, and indeed more than the USA. This was largely the product of a Soviet bluff. Eisenhower, because of spy flights over Soviet territory, knew that there was no gap at all -- the USA was in fact far ahead -- but he refrained from using this secret information for political purposes. (Kennedy toned down his rhetoric after being briefed by the CIA.)
  
  As president, Ike became uncomfortably aware that the military services were deliberately inflating estimates of Soviet strength to help secure their own funding. He reacted by making the director the CIA -- a civilian agency -- his intelligence advisor, and by his famous speech warning of the "military-industrial complex."
  

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• Message 5

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  Posted by cloudyj (U1773646) on Wednesday, 7th September 2011

  How about an opposite example of where the spies did make the garde, but the generals refused to believe them? During the German invasion of Crete Freyberg completely misread the information provided by Ultra and convinced himself the airborne assault was a mere diversion prior to a naval invasion.

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