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Back to the thing here.
I'm Scott Horton.
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All right.
So now it is, I think it's part eight.
Yes.
Part eight of our interview series with Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist, Gareth Porter, from Interpress Service and Truthout.com.
We're going to talk a little bit about Gareth Porter.
We're going to talk a little bit about Gareth Porter.
We're going to talk a little bit about Gareth Porter.
We're going to talk a little bit about Gareth Porter.
You see how many times I've interviewed Gareth?
I got the whole thing just on rote.
You know, this piece as though it's a new article, even though I'm staring with my eyeballs directly at the book in front of me.
The book is Manufactured Crisis, the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, and it's got a big, stinking, ugly Benjamin Netanyahu on the front, and it's for sale at your local book website and or brick and mortar bookstore.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
Appreciate you joining us again.
Thanks for having me back, Scott.
Good to be here.
Very happy to have you here.
Part eight, I think it's chapter nine, Manufactured Crisis, again, is the title of the book.
No, it's chapter seven, Intelligence Failure.
And you know, this was a known unknown to me, something that I've always wondered, always wanted a hell of a lot more background on.
And you know, I've read everything you ever wrote about this before, but this is exactly what I wanted to know, was what the hell is going on at the CIA this whole time while they're, you know, at least somewhat lying us into this conflict with Iran over their alleged nuclear weapons program?
You know, we get to see the results and even the footnotes sometimes on the declassified version of this and that, but what the hell is the story about what is really going on there?
And you've really done a great bit here in chapter seven at talking with Paul Pilar and Thomas Fingar and some of these other people inside the CIA about their massive intelligence failure on the Iran issue and really helped clarify a lot of things for me.
So I was really glad to see that.
Well, the whole book is just great.
You're a born holiday journalist.
Thanks so much, Scott.
Well, you know, I think this chapter really is something that nobody else has really thought about very much, I think it's safe to say.
That is to say the failure of U.S. intelligence, the intelligence community to really get Iran right from the beginning.
I mean, they have just been, they started out getting it wrong and then it just got worse and worse.
And I mean, it really is a question of sort of building on your past mistakes.
You know, I mean, it's layer upon layer of assessments on Iran that have been made over the years that simply repeated and worsened, sort of dug a deeper hole, if you will, about the Iranian nuclear program.
And I think I've talked about this.
I know I've talked about this before in a program, but what started it was this business of the telexes, the interception of hundreds of telexes that the people who were looking at them said, oh boy, we've got them now, because they saw these requests from Sharif University for technology and material that could be used possibly for a nuclear program.
And they thought they saw the telex number of an outfit that was connected with the Defense Ministry of Iran.
And therefore they put it together and they concluded that the Iranian military had its own secret nuclear program, which of course was for the purpose of getting nuclear weapons.
And they failed to really consider the alternative, which was far more plausible, which turned out to be the case that this few, this handful of telexes that had to do with things that were dual use, quote unquote, were in fact for Sharif University professors and their students, all of which was documented later on by the Iranians to the satisfaction of the IAEA in November, or I guess it was early 2008 when it was published in the IAEA report.
It was all there in black and white how essentially there was a perfectly innocent explanation for every one of those cases.
And well, so now let me ask you, then, I mean, it seems like and we've talked about the telexes before, and it seems like, OK, if I'm just using my imagination about, you know, Ray McGovern, another nice guy, CIA analysts up there doing their best or something like that, right?
I could see why they would say something like, OK, let's pretend for a minute in this, you know, blue folder, we'll start with the assumption that, oh, yeah, this definitely means something and we'll work from there.
And, OK, it's kind of inductive and backwards thinking, but at least we'll see if we can really build a case and we'll try to test our hypothesis, but without necessarily being married to all the assumptions in the blue folder over here.
But still, it's it's worth being suspicious.
It's worth, you know, going ahead and really taking the time and making sure we're wrong then something like that.
But what you're telling me is they start with the assumption they get married to exactly whatever they think it is in there.
But then are you further saying that they should have known not just after the the Iranians fessed up every last little detail of what was really going on to the IAEA years later, but they should have known all along that they were, you know, simply just connecting for where they didn't really belong?
It should have been nothing more than a hypothesis that would guide, you know, the look for evidence.
Nothing more than that under the circumstances.
But it wasn't.
They did get married to the notion that this was evidence of Iranian nuclear intent during the 1990s.
And the reason that that happened, and this is, I think, the real contribution of this part of the book.
What I show is that there was a fundamental problem here of incentives, which was created by the knowledge that senior officials at the CIA, i.e.
Robert Gates, Robert M. Gates, who had become CIA director in late 1991, and the people at the Defense Department, all those people had a stake in showing that Iran was a threat to get nuclear weapons.
And I've mentioned this again before.
But what the significance of that is that these people who were analysts knew that they were expected, their job was to come up with evidence to show that Iran was a nuclear threat, a threat to get nuclear weapons.
And I mean, it was never stated explicitly that that was the case.
But I just point out in the chapter that there was a new center created just around that time that had the job of providing the evidence to the policymakers so that they can make policy on this new threat of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, proliferation.
So I mean, it didn't take a genius to see that there would be an effect on the expectations of the policymakers was going to have a very strong effect on how the ambiguous, inherently ambiguous evidence was going to be interpreted by the analysts.
And that pattern continued year after year, forever since, essentially, because the policy has hardened over time that, you know, that the accusation that Iran wants to get nuclear weapons became more and more entrenched in the official declaratory policy of the United States, particularly after the Clinton administration came into power.
And so the analysts were clearly under a very subtle form of, I don't want to call it pressure, but incentive.
It was it was positive incentive.
They knew that their careers would be rewarded, they'd be rewarded.
Their careers would would benefit from being able to come up with the evidence that they understood the policymakers wanted.
And I also show that this is exactly the problem that caused the massive intelligence failure on Iraq.
That's why you had a 2002 Iraq WMD and National Intelligence estimate that just went completely off the rails, because these people knew that the policymakers expected evidence to support their policy.
And, you know, to some extent, you know, that was Vice President Dick Cheney going over to the CIA and kind of putting pressure on them very clearly.
But in addition to that, I mean, just at a larger sense, there was a constant drumbeat of statements indicating that we know that Iran has nuclear weapons or is after nuclear weapons.
And I'm sorry, we're not talking about Iraq.
So going back to Iraq, that that, you know, we know, we know that Iraq wants nuclear weapons.
And so the the assumption came to be in the intelligence community that, yes, we know that Iraq wants nuclear weapons.
And therefore, the evidence was interpreted precisely in that way.
And the Rob Sullivan Commission, which examined the failure of intelligence on Iraq, points this out very clearly, this is a this is a major contribution to understanding about what happened in the case of Iraq.
That is not well known.
But I talk about it at some length in my book.
And I see the failure on Iran precisely paralleling that failure on Iraq.
I mean, this almost sounds just, you know, as simple as Yeah, come on.
Everybody knows that the CIA exists to tell whatever lies the government needs it to tell or to kill whoever it's supposed to kill.
And the idea that they're really after objective analysis or anything just sort of sounds silly at this point, if the CIA, especially the way you describe it, if anyone at the CIA, the director, the deputy director, anybody in charge of the thing over there really wanted the truth, they would have an entire room full of guys whose entire job was simply to argue with the other guys and try to debunk them.
But they're not doing that.
They're simply trying to prove Dick Cheney, right, because that's what you're right.
You know, Scott, I mean, the fact is that intelligence is always politicized in some sense, sometimes far more subtly, and to a lesser degree than other times.
And what I'm talking about here, I think is a case which is an extreme sort of example or not an extreme example.
It's a case which is far more influenced by politics than the normal even the norm is the normal situation is that politics intrudes in some way and this is an exacerbation of that normal situation is what I'm trying to argue.
Right?
Well, yeah.
And I think it's important to that, you know, the the much less cynical take is really obviously the more accurate one and also the more acceptable to regular people to that.
Okay, yes, Doug Fythe might have lied us into war, but not everybody at CIA lied us into war.
They lied themselves into war they they that was their job was believe in this stuff.
And so they did their job and was much less subtle than than really being liars and in the simplest sense.
But anyway, I'm sorry, we got to take this break.
We'll be right back with the great Gareth Porter.
The book is manufactured crisis.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here for Braswell business communication services at fusepowder.com Braswell communications can provide a credentialed media presence for your company industry conferences and trade shows as well as support services and consultation for publishing editorial and technical writing business to business and marketing communications, research and information campaigns.
Braswell also does website development and complete web content maintenance to include voiceover audio and copywriting strengthen your business fusepowder.com Alright, y'all Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show the Scott Horton show.
I'm talking with the great Gareth Porter, author of the new book manufactured crisis, the untold story of the Iran nuclear scare.
And just in time to we're in this intermediate period before the final Iran deal, if it ever is truly negotiated by some time early next summer, they say this summer this coming summer.
So yeah, we're talking about chapter seven, intelligence failure here and all the incentives is sort of like the old pincher strategy, right?
You've got politicians like Newt Gingrich, and Scooter Libby and Dick Cheney coming over to CIA saying, Hey, where's all your stuff on Iraq, man, let's see some dirt here.
And so then that becomes, you know, basically the profession of the CIA is coming up with stuff for Scooter to use.
And they start doing that job.
And then also worst, you have worst you had a case where the the the part of the CIA that was supposed to be the specialist on weapons and proliferation was actually declaring at a meeting of the staff that the you know, the White House wants its war and our job is to make the case for them.
When you say Bolton took them all out to dinner and made friends with them all and you guys are part of our little neocon crew members for a little while.
Let me just add one other point.
Let people get the idea that everybody in the CIA and the intelligence community was equally sucked into this system.
Because people should understand that there there were honest analysts like Paul Pillar, for one who I interviewed on several occasions for this book, who were taking a different viewpoint, who were trying to suggest that it was much more complex, that in fact, there was no real reason to believe that Iran had made a decision to go for nuclear weapons.
And that, you know, if they if they ever did, it would be because of circumstances changing.
And the United States had something to say about those circumstances.
So let's kind of relax a little bit.
I mean, those are my words, of course.
But I mean, Pillar and other people who were the regional specialist, rather than the proliferation specialist and the weapons specialist, had a very different slant, a different way of looking at this issue.
And there was a continuing dialogue, at least from 2001 on between those people, and the weapons and proliferation specialist.
So, you know, the part of the story is how the weapons and proliferation specialist prevailed, in their view, which was, you know, don't don't give us this stuff about they haven't decided yet.
We know they have.
And basically, just on the basis of inference, and Paul Pillar points out that all these assessments from 2001 2005, which said that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, it was all on inference, there was no real solid evidence.
Oh, yeah.
And then my favorite quote, well, I don't know, out of the whole book, certainly out of this chapter, is sacred text, any previous national intelligence estimate, man, you don't go back and challenge those assumptions.
We don't have time for all this, we move forward from here.
And yet, it doesn't matter.
In other words, it doesn't matter how wrong the previous NIE is, to ask them to challenge the assumptions in it is virtually unheard of.
Yeah, and I mean, this is extremely important, because that was precisely what was happening in 2007.
When the final but you know, not the final, but the big and national intelligence estimate that everybody is aware of, in November 2007, basically reaffirmed most of what had been said in past national intelligence estimates about the Iranian nuclear program.
Basically, they were concluding, yeah, the Iranians want nuclear weapons, just like they always had.
And they were doing so not because they really, you know, had such new, convincing evidence, but because they were simply relying on the idea that they were right in the past.
And in many cases, it's the same people.
I mean, they were relying on the same offices, the same people who had been putting forward that, that inference, not the evidence, but the inference in the past.
And also, I have to add, they were relying on the same old damn documents that we've been talking about all along, that is to say, the documents that were turned over to Western intelligence by the Mujahedini calc.
They believed that they were authentic, or at least they accepted that, whether they believe it or not.
That was the premise of the decisions, the judgments that were made in the in the November 2007 estimate.
And I conclude that that estimate's been misunderstood, both by the supporters and the opponents.
The opponents saying it's a terrible thing, because, you know, it took away the military option and the supporters because it took away the military option.
But, but in the process, I think it made a serious error when it said that it showed that they had evidence that Iran had a nuclear weapons program.
I don't think it's evidence of a nuclear weapons program.
I think it was evidence that somebody was doing some work that related to nuclear weapons.
And the indication, all of the circumstantial evidence, and even more direct evidence, indicates that this was not a government program.
This was people who were operating outside the framework of government policy.
And are you sure about that?
Or it was just covert, maybe?
Well, I think it was, it was covert.
And in fact, I think, you know, I have evidence in the book that that the Supreme Leader, according to one of his advisors, who's the conservative editor of Kahan newspaper, told a US reporter, Robert Collier of San Francisco Chronicle, in October 2003, that the people who had been working on nuclear weapons, doing research related to nuclear weapons, were being stigmatized for doing so covertly by the Supreme Leader, who had made a speech saying, you know, nuclear weapons are illegal under Islam.
It was not the first time he'd said it.
But the timing of this was at the same time that, that Hassan Rouhani, who was in charge of the nuclear file, set out a circular to all government offices and wanted to know, okay, what has been what has been done by your office on anything relating to nuclear?
And if it's not, if it hasn't been authorized, then it has to cease.
And that was what was being objected to.
So in other words, just to make sure I got this right, because I couldn't tell you how many times I've heard people say otherwise about this.
Well, of course, I mean, you know, this is almost absolute holy text on this issue.
Well, now, you know, I mean, they always say, you know, that, yeah, the NIE of 07, in fact, I saw some sophisticated critics saying, aha, this is actually propaganda.
They're giving us a little bit, but they're actually still lying, saying that there was a program up through 03.
And really, as you describe in this chapter, no, it was just the bureaucratic fight and the compromise that ended up going with the previous assumptions.
Then even after they decided that they said that there's not a nuclear weapons program, and there hadn't been since 03.
But you're saying, first of all, we can dispense with that, just that it was the bureaucratic compromise is what made it say what it said.
But you're telling me that the intelligence behind the they did have some kind of program up until 03, the evidence that they ever had any program, it's just the telexes and a smoking laptop and the rest of this nonsense that we've already discussed.
And then what what made the CIA decide that whatever it was, was no longer ongoing was the cancellation of some rogue projects that never amounted to anything in the first place.
And that was where they sort of got a half right and, and good enough to slow Bush down on his bombing campaign.
Anyway, right.
But but they had very, very weak evidence.
I think that is the bottom line, from my point of view, what they had was maybe a couple of people who were complaining that they were shut down or something was shut down.
And believe me, I mean, you know, there's, we have no reason to believe, at this point, that they had anything more than something that they they inferred meant that there was a nuclear weapons program, nothing more than that.
And given the degree to which the the inference had been made that that Iran had a nuclear weapons program for years and years based on nothing, there's absolutely no reason to believe that they had anything more than something that could have been interpreted and should have been interpreted otherwise.
All right.
So now and I'm sorry, because we're almost out of time here.
But tell me all about John Doe.
This is an important story.
Who's this?
And how do you know very quickly that this is this is a story that has been misreported, or only partial reported, I guess, is a better way to put it in the newspapers in the New York Times and Washington Post and elsewhere.
It was an undercover agent for the CIA who developed a very high value source in Iran in 2001.
And who was told by his high value source, that the Iranian government has no intention of weaponizing.
He passed it on to his bosses at the CIA, they did not want that to go out to the analysts or anybody else in the US government.
And they told him that they would personally brief the president.
Now that indicates, of course, that this was regarded as extremely sensitive, and and would obviously affect US policy.
And it's clear that there were very powerful interests in the CIA, and in the Bush administration who did not want that information to go out.
Well, and then you talk about how Operation Merlin and I don't know if we need to go over all I guess you can tell it real fast if you could.
About in a nutshell, the CIA accidentally on purpose sort of kind of gave some nuclear weapons blueprints to the Iranians on the assumption that they'll try to use it and make their bomb.
But what there'll be flawed blueprints and the rest is people can read about that.
But you're saying, then part of the cover up was, oh, we can't admit that we would take such a risk over a nuclear weapons program that never existed.
So that was one of the main reasons that they had.
The very people who were in charge of that program, who were part of the, I call it a conspiracy to suppress this vitally important intelligence.
I don't think I'm sure that they never told President George Bush that that's what the undercover CIA agent told his lawyer, and said so, sorry, didn't tell the lawyer said so in a court filing when he he actually sued the CIA for having basically fired.
And so, you know, this is this is a major move to suppress intelligence that would have conflicted with the dominant viewpoint and the viewpoint that these powerful interests wanted to make sure wouldn't would remain the CIA's position.
And that's why you all ought to buy manufactured crisis, the untold story of the Iran nuclear scare.
It's just great, man.
You got to read this thing.
Thank you so much for your time, Gareth.
Thanks for having me on again.
Appreciate it.
We're gonna wrap up here in a day or two, I promise.
All right.
See y'all tomorrow.
Thanks again for listening.
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On March 7th at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the Council for the National Interest is co-hosting the first ever National Summit to reassess the U.S.-Israel special relationship.
Confirmed speakers include Walt Shoyer, Giroldi, McGovern, Kutowski, Porter, McConnell, Weiss, Raimondo, USS Liberty survivor Ernie Gallo, as well as co-sponsors Alison Ware of If Americans Knew and the great Grant Smith of the Institute for Research, Middle East Policy.
That's the National Summit to reassess the U.S.-Israel special relationship, Friday, March the 7th, all day at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
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