CIA veteran discusses Black Ops & Disinformation, Niger Uranium

[dooner]

This editorial is from July 20, 2003, NY Times. A key time period in the Plame affair, around the time of Bush's trip to Africa. Bearden's essay on false intelligence is quite chilling, and raises some serious questions about the forged Niger documents and the manipulation of our intelligence.

This helps explain why someone might need to out Wilson/Plame in order to change the debate, rather than allow the spotlight to dwell on the fake Niger documents. The media around this time seems to have been focused primarily on how the discredited info got into the State of the Union.. hardly at all on who faked the documents and why.

BLACK OPS
The Departments of Disinformation
By MILT BEARDEN

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A case in point is the furor over the forged documents purporting to show that Iraq was buying uranium from the African state of Niger. The storm over how the information found its way into President Bush's State of the Union speech is still playing as a Washington whodunit.

At some point, however, the debate will get around to the other crucial issue: that someone has taken the time and creative energy to cook up a forgery designed to drive American policy.

It will be important to learn who was behind the fake Niger document and why, and what other information driving American policies might carry their fingerprints. It is prudent to assume that additional bogus information has slipped into the mix. The sourcing on the special aluminum tubes purported to reveal Iraq's reconstituted nuclear program might be re-examined, and the chain of acquisition of the information on the mobile biological weapons labs that is still in dispute might again be vetted. Intelligence fabrications are like deer crossing the road — there is almost never just one.

<snip>

An important distinction between cold war black operations and the fake intelligence today is that the old gamesmanship was unlikely to have turned a cold war hot. All that has changed; bogus intelligence is a now a deadly serious component in developing policy. Some could be coming from opposition groups against regimes on the to-be-changed list. Washington will have to be vigilant regarding the intelligence flow on Iran, Syria and even America's Turkish allies in northern Iraq.

In addition, Washington should expect serious misdirection from the adversaries who devised the Sept. 11 attacks. They know America as well as any of its old enemies and are probably convinced they can make Washington dance like a puppet on a chain by simply inserting creative flourishes into the much cited levels of chatter.

The stakes couldn't be higher, since intelligence can now lead the nation to war, not just prevent it.


Milt Bearden, a 30-year veteran in the C.I.A.'s Directorate of Operations, served as senior manager for clandestine operations. He is the co-author with James Risen of "The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the C.I.A.'s Final Showdown with the K.G.B."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/weekinreview/20BEAR.html?pagewanted=1