Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis (23 page)

The B Team revealed some lasting traits of neo-conservative thinking. It mistrusted empirical research, rejecting analysis of the kind
carried out by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies on the ground that available evidence – whether derived from open sources or covertly acquired – was liable to be disinformation and could not be used as a reliable guide to Soviet abilities or intentions. To some extent this was an echo of the paranoid world-view associated with James Jesus Angleton, for a time CIA chief of counter-intelligence. Under the influence of the KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, Angleton came to believe that the Soviet Union had been engaged for many years in a global campaign of strategic deception in which it projected a view of itself as weak. For Angleton – an intricate personality who had edited a literary magazine at Yale that published T. S. Eliot and other contemporary poets – intelligence was a branch of the theory of knowledge. The aim was to find out the truth about Soviet conditions, but given the Soviet record of disinformation the normal rules for assessing evidence had to be suspended. Any attempt to assess Soviet behaviour using standard empirical methods led into a ‘wilderness of mirrors’ (a phrase he borrowed from Eliot’s poem
Gerontion).
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In this area nothing could be believed or trusted, for even facts could be planted. Acting on this belief, Angleton instigated damaging mole-hunts in the CIA and made wild accusations against several western leaders (including prime minister Harold Wilson, against whom the British intelligence ‘spycatcher’ Peter Wright conspired on the basis of Angleton’s allegations). Discredited within the CIA, Angleton resigned in December 1974.

Because they disdained empirical inquiry, the B Team had no procedures for checking its assessments, and as a result they were wide of the mark. Dr Anne Cahn, who worked in the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency from 1977 to 1980 and who on examining the Team assessments found them ‘all wrong’, has described how the B Team’s failure to detect a Soviet non-acoustic anti-submarine system was viewed by members of the Team as evidence that such a system could well exist. In other words, the Team viewed the absence of evidence as evidence in favour of its view. A methodology of this kind contains no means of detecting actual disinformation. The B Team was vulnerable on this count, and its belief in Soviet military superiority was in part a result of its being fooled by CIA black propaganda. There was an enormous Soviet military-industrial complex,
but much of it was a rustbelt like the rest of the Soviet economy. The reality revealed after the Soviet collapse was closer to the CIA’s estimates than it was to the claims the CIA had concocted for public consumption. The theorists of strategic deception in the B Team were themselves among its dupes.
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The disregard of evidence displayed by the B Team reflected a systematic rejection of empiricism, and here we find a link with Strauss. Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt have consistently attacked America’s intelligence agencies, invoking the method of hermetic interpretation practised by Leo Strauss as a superior alternative to empirical procedures. Shulsky studied under Strauss, and in a paper he co-authored with Schmitt on ‘Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean
Nous)’
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he suggested that Strauss’s doctrine of the hidden meaning of texts ‘alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm.’ The authors describe Strauss as ‘resembling, however faintly, the George Smiley of John Le Carré’s novels in his gentleness, his ability to concentrate on detail, his consequent success in looking below the surface and reading between the lines, and his seeming unworldliness’. While noting that he wrote nothing on intelligence matters, they argue that his insight into the ways in which different political systems operate demonstrates the limited usefulness of social science in intelligence work. Strauss rejected the idea that politics could be understood by ‘an empirical method that observed behaviour, tallied it, calculated correlations between particular actions and particular features of the context in which they occurred, and so on’, on the ground that ‘the regime shapes human political action in so fundamental a way that the very souls appear different’. Schmitt and Shulsky go on to maintain that failure to understand this damaged American policy in the Cold War, when ‘American intelligence analysts were generally reluctant to believe that they could be deceived about any critical question by the Soviet Union or other Communist states. History has shown this view to be extremely naïve.’ In this view, only a method that allows analysts to peer into souls can give the guidance needed for effective policies.
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When Schmitt and Shulsky rejected empirical inquiry they confused
a critique of scientism with a rejection of evidence. Strauss’s attack on the belief that the study of society could be conducted by the methods of natural science was well founded. Differences between cultures, unique historical processes and the intermingling of facts and values will always make the study of society different from any natural science. That does not mean facts can be dispensed with, though. History is not a science but there is a difference between good history and bad that reflects how evidence is used. There is also a difference between a type of thinking that is based on historical knowledge and one that lacks any sense of history. Neo-conservative thinking falls into the latter category, and many of the policy blunders committed under neo-conservative influence are the result of a wilful ignorance of the past.

At the beginning of their paper on Strauss and intelligence, the authors admit that their topic ‘must appear at first a very strange one’, and the link between ‘the tumultuous world of spies and snooping paraphernalia, on the one hand, and the quiet life of scholarship and immersion in ancient texts, on the other’ is far from obvious. Certainly it seems unlikely that an eccentric method of textual interpretation could assist intelligence gathering, but something like this method was used at the highest levels of American government. The Bush aide who scoffed at what he called the ‘reality-based community’ who believe that ‘solutions emerge from judicious study of discernible reality’, and boasted ‘That’s not the way the world really works any more. We’re an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality,’ may have been doing no more than voice the witless triumphalism that was common among neo-conservatives at one time.
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But he was also disclosing a view of truth that shaped some of the administration’s most ill-advised policies, which Schmitt and Shulsky shared.

It is impossible to give a complete account of the disinformation that surrounds the Iraq war. The whole story may not be known for many years, if ever.
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What can be done is to illustrate the attitude to truth – at once hieratic and instrumental – that informed some of the most important episodes of deception. Those who engineered the Iraq war believed they knew the truth and in deceiving others were only promoting it. But their belief that they could decipher the hidden
meaning of events was a delusion, and they may well have ended by being deceived themselves.

This process may be seen at work in the operations of a body set up under the direction of Abram Shulsky to supply intelligence supporting the decision to go to war in Iraq. Shulsky had been a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee in the early 1980s and served in the Pentagon under Richard Perle in the Reagan administration. In 2002 he was made head of the Office of Special Plans (OSP), a Pentagon unit created by Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld and reporting to Bush’s under-secretary for defence Douglas Feith, a protégé of Richard Pipes and Richard Perle. Much of what was done in this Office of Special Plans remains obscure. As George Packer, author of an exhaustive account of the machinations leading up to the war, has written, ‘for the Office of Special Plans, secrecy was not only convenient. One could even say that it was metaphysically necessary.’
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Following Shulsky’s hermetic methods, the OSP rejected established procedures for evaluating intelligence and ‘stove-piped’ their own version of events directly to the White House. Like the B Team the OSP had a definite agenda that featured overriding and discrediting the intelligence provided by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). The OSP became the chief source of claims about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and links with al-Qaeda that were used by Bush to justify the attack on Iraq. Partly because of criticism of its role in the war the unit was renamed in July 2003, when it resumed its original title of Northern Gulf Affairs. (The OSP seems to have been granted another lease on life. In mid–2006 an ‘Iranian Directorate’ was set up in the Pentagon that is run by a number of OSP veterans including the unit’s former director Abram Shulsky. Around the same time the ‘Iran desk’ at the State Department, which reports to the daughter of the vice-president Elizabeth Cheney, was increased to task force size.
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The distinctive features of the OSP were its adherence to a view of the world set in advance of empirical inquiry, its heavy reliance on information provided by Chalabi’s INC and its close links with the vice-president, Dick Cheney.
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The principal result was to leave US policy heavily reliant on unverified intelligence from INC sources. The INC produced Iraqi defectors who made large claims about
Saddam possessing weapons of mass destruction. These claims were disputed by the CIA and conflicted with evidence obtained from UN weapons inspections; but they were used repeatedly by Cheney and president Bush to bolster the case for war until the absence of WMD in Iraq could no longer be denied.

It is often said that Cheney and Bush ‘cherry-picked’ from the intelligence available to them, using items that supported their beliefs while neglecting others that were not useful. In order to suggest a link between Iraq and 9/11, Cheney referred to a meeting that had taken place in Prague between Mohamed Atta (one of the leading 9/11 hijackers) and Iraqi intelligence. He also claimed that ‘intelligence sources’ advised that Saddam had attempted to purchase aluminium tubes for the production of nuclear weapons. In making these claims Cheney was not selecting some intelligence while passing over the rest in silence. As the American writer Joan Didion has noted:

The White House had been told by the CIA that no meeting in Prague between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi intelligence had ever occurred. The International Atomic Energy Agency and the US Department of Energy had said that the aluminium tubes in question ‘were not directly suitable’ for uranium enrichment … What the vice-president was doing, then, was not cherry-picking the intelligence but rejecting it, replacing it with whatever self-interested rumour better advanced his narrative.
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Along with Bush, the vice-president dismissed known facts because they did not support a decision to go to war that had already been made. When Bush and Cheney rejected intelligence that conflicted with the case for war they were not – in their own eyes or those of their advisors in the OSP – suppressing the truth. Like Mr Blair when he argued for war on a basis of disinformation in Britain, they were advancing what they saw as a higher truth. In their book
Silent
War, Schmitt and Shulsky made clear that ‘truth is not the goal’ of intelligence operations but instead ‘victory’.
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Actually, for these seers victory was the same as truth – not truth of the ordinary kind, to be sure, but the esoteric truth that is concealed in the deceiving mirror of fact.

The problem with this methodology was that it left its practitioners open to deception of the kind against which they warned. Those in
charge at the Office of Special Plans based their belief in the existence of WMD in Iraq on the claims of Iraqi defectors, but in doing so they omitted to consider the possibility that these defectors might have been dispatched to foster the belief (which some of them may have believed to be true) that Saddam had an active weapons programme, when in fact he did not. Insofar as it projected an image that enhanced his power in Iraq and throughout the Arab world it was a belief that served Saddam’s interests. At the same time the Iranian regime had a strategic interest in overthrowing the Iraqi dictator. Not only had there been a savagely fought war between the two countries but the Iranians knew that if Saddam was toppled the upshot would be Shia power in what remained of Iraq. Destroying Saddam’s regime could make Iran the dominant power in the region. Against this background it would have been prudent to guard against the danger that the INC could be used as a channel for Iranian as well as Iraqi disinformation.
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The CIA had long warned against the dangers of reliance on Iraqi émigré sources. The theorists who were running the OSP dismissed these warnings. Relying on their capacity to divine the truth, they were confident they could do without empirical verification. As far as they were concerned the defectors only confirmed what their own special methods had already shown to be true. The faith-based methodology of the OSP freed it from the cumbersome procedures of the established American intelligence agencies. It also made the OSP a prime target for strategic deception.

The notion that a type of occult insight into a regime or a person removes the need for factual inquiry is a perilous basis for action. President Bush may have believed that when he met Vladimir Putin in June 2001 he was ‘able to get a sense of his soul’.
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Subsequent events appear to have altered Mr Bush’s perception and one might have expected developments in post-Saddam Iraq to dent confidence in faith-based intelligence, but this is far from the case. In
The New York Times
in February 2004 the neo-conservative columnist David Brooks renewed the attack on American intelligence methods, writing, ‘For decades, the US intelligence community has propagated the myth that it possesses analytical methods that must be insulated pristinely from the hurly-burly world of politics.’ Rather than rely on ‘a conference-load of game theorists or risk assessment officers’,
Brooks declares, ‘When it comes to understanding the world’s thugs and menaces … I’d trust anyone who has read a Dostoyevsky novel over the past five years.’
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Once again, an esoteric insight into the soul of the regime is presented as a superior alternative to the laborious analysis of evidence.