Bolton The Fixer
John Prados
June 09, 2005
...The heart of the matter lies in the months before the Iraq war. The evidence shows that Bolton at the State Department acted in parallel with the Office of Vice President Richard Cheney at the White House and with the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon—the unit created by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith. The combination of their efforts had a chilling effect on the U.S. intelligence community, particularly that unit of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that would be responsible for actually crafting the top level report, called a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), on Iraq.
Cheney focused directly on the Iraq intelligence, the allegation that Saddam Hussein’s regime was busily producing weapons of mass destruction. The vice president actively participated, visiting CIA headquarters to press analysts on their data, pushing back when CIA brought him Iraq items in the President’s Daily Brief reports, and sending his chief of staff I. Lewis Libby out to CIA to underline Cheney’s demands. Not surprisingly, many sources have reported that Cheney’s office cooperated closely with both John Bolton at State and Douglas Feith at the Pentagon. When things potentially useful in buttressing the White House position appeared, Cheney specifically followed up on them. This is exactly what happened with the (false) allegation that Saddam was seeking uranium ore in Niger, an intelligence story that came to a head in March 2002.
The Pentagon piece in this ensemble had built up speed by precisely that time. Soon after 9/11, Douglas Feith convinced Donald Rumsfeld to back his initiative for a special intelligence staff. Cutting through the palaver about how that unit was intended merely to find bits of data overlooked in conventional intelligence reporting, in fact the staff explicitly crafted a frontal attack on CIA’s terrorism data, rearranging it so as to maximize the impression there existed some alliance between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. That exercise came to a head at a meeting at CIA headquarters in August 2002.
Which brings us to John Bolton. Over the months culminating in July 2002 Bolton tried to have two different analysts fired for refusing to accede to intelligence claims he wanted to make in behalf of the administration. A State Department analyst, Christian Westerman, became the target in February. That amounted to more than an in-house fight because the analyst was known throughout the intelligence community (read CIA) and his troubles became known as well. In fact, Bolton made sure of it: his chief of staff, Frederick Fleitz, a CIA officer on detail from the Weapons Intelligence Proliferation and Arms Control (WINPAC) Center at the agency, kept his home office informed at every step along the way.
It would be WINPAC chief Alan Foley who, one month later, had to deal with the report from Ambassador Joseph Wilson that there was nothing to the Niger uranium claims. The debrief of Wilson’s trip to Niger, the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Iraq tells us, was held within CIA headquarters and not briefed to Vice President Cheney. Instead Cheney was told (on March 5, 2002) simply that the agency which had originally put out the uranium allegation had no new information...
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