More from Ron Suskind

Page 190:

On Friday afternoon, January 10, jami Miscik, the head of the DI, walked down the hall on the seventh floor shaking with rage. John Moseman, Tenet's chief of staff, saw her as she passed his office. "You okay?" "No. I'm not okay. I'm definitely not okay!". A moment later, she'd made it to Tenet's suite. She barely could get out the words. Stephen Hadley, Condi's second, had called from the office of 'Scooter' Libby, Cheney's chief of staff. They wanted her down at Libby's office in the White House by 5 p.m. At issue was the last in an endless series of draft reports about the connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. How many drafts? Miscik couldn't remember. The pressure from the White House - and from the various intelligence divisions under the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense - had started a week after 9/11.

Cheney's office claimed to have sources. And Rumsfeld's, too. They kept throwing them at Miscik and CIA. The same information, five different ways. They'd omit that a key piece had been discounted, that the source had recanted. Sorry, our mistake. Then it would reappear, again, in a memo the next week. The CIA held firm: the meeting in Prague between Atta and the Iraqi agent didn't occur...

A few days before, when she had sent the final draft over to Libby and Hadley, she told them, emphatically, This is it. There would be no more drafts, no more meetings where her analysis sat across from Hadley, or Feith, or the guys in Feith's office, while the opposing team tried to slip something by them. The report was not what they wanted. She knew that. No evidence meant no evidence.

'I'm not going ack there, again, George,' Miscik said. 'If I haave to go back to hear their crap and rewrite this goddamn report... I'm resigning, right now." She fought back tears of rage. Tenet picked up the phone to call Hadley. 'She is not coming over,' he shouted into the phone. 'We are not rewriting this fucking report one more time. It is fucking over. do you hear me! And don't you ever fucking treat my people this way again. Ever!'

They did not rewrite the report. And that's why, three weeks later, in making the case for war in his State of the Union address, George W. bush was not able to say what he'd long hoped to say at such a moment: that there was a pre-9/11 connection between al Qaeda and Saddam.

Now fast forward to p. 340, a couple of years later:

In mid-November 2004, a few weeks after the President's reelection, one of Miscik's deputies returned from briefing the Vice President. He had a request for her. Cheney wanted a portion of a particular CIA report declassified and made public. Miscik knew the report - it was about the complex, often catalytic connections between the war in Iraq and the wider war against terrorism. The item the Vice President wanted declassified was a small part that might lead one to believe that the war was helping the broader campaign against violent jihadists. The report, she knew, concluded nothing of the sort. Many of its conclusions flowed in the opposite direction. To release that small segment would be willfully misleading. She told the briefer to tell Cheney that she didn't think that was such a good idea.

The Vice President expressed his outrage to Porter Goss. A few days later, a call came from Goss's office... The deputy [to Goss] expressed the DCI's displeasure. He urged Miscik to reconsider. He described Goss's position succinctly. 'Saying no to the Vice President is the wrong answer.'...

'Actually,' she replied, 'sometimes saying no to the Vice President is what we get paid for.' She hung up and fired off a memo to Goss... A few days later, Miscik got word, again from a Goss deputy, that the DCI would reluctantly support her decision. A few weeks after that, she was gone. 'It was only a matter of time at that point,' she recalled.

This points out how subtly the politicization of intelligence worked. Here's one case where the subject of pressure from the VP's office held her ground. But after years of this kind of pressure, she ultimately resigned, replaced, one assumes, by someone more willing to give the 'right' answers to the DCI or VP when called upon. The next must-read insiders' account of the War on Terror should be about the Porter Goss - era CIA. One of Suskind's points in his book is that those in the CIA with expertise and the willingness to resist the White House were mostly pushed out with the arrival of Porter Goss, leaving behind a much weaker, much more compliant agency - and, by implication, one much less capable of effectively prosecuting the WoT.

20 years after Iran-Contra, I'm amazed that I find myself thinking of the CIA as the good guys!