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A "Memorandum to Holders" is intelligence jargon for updating a definitive estimate, like the one from November 2007, with any necessary changes. As has been the custom in recent years, one regarding the Iranian nuclear program has been delayed and delayed again. The Washington Post says it is now due in August.
There is no minimizing the importance of this update. It needs to be as honest as the earlier NIE, though that will take courage and clout.
In this sense, I regret Blair's departure. For those now in charge are relative non-entities with, truth be told, sparse experience in intelligence work and little gravitas. It is doubtful they will be able to stand up against the mounting pressures to paint Iran in the most alarmist colors.
The task is complicated by the recent tripartite Iran-Turkey-Brazil deal. With Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her neocon friends and supporters already trashing this viable initiative, it will take courage to point out clearly to the President the relative merits of allowing Iran to transfer half of its low enriched uranium to Turkey and then onward for further processing.
Except for the political pressures, not much courage should be needed. By any objective measure, the relative merits should be pretty obvious, IF one is willing to recognize Israeli demands for what they are, as Turkey and Brazil made bold to do. (Where is Chas Freeman when we need him?)
Nominating a Successor
According to press reports, the leading candidate to succeed Dennis Blair is retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, whose record does not inspire confidence. Clapper has a well-deserved reputation for telling consumers of intelligence what they want to hear.
He now serves as undersecretary of intelligence at the Defense Department, working for Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who was the chief bureaucrat responsible for politicizing U.S. intelligence in the 1980s as an apparatchik for CIA Director William Casey.
Some of my colleagues in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity have the book on Clapper, who served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 1991 to 1995. There, according to Larry Johnson, Clapper earned the reputation of "worst-ever DIA director."
Among other things, he restructured DIA's analytical corps, removing an analysis capability that would have been an invaluable asset in the period before 9/11 and succeeding years. As a direct result, hundreds of the most experienced analysts took early retirement, and DIA has had to play catch-up ever since to reconstruct its analytic capability.
Retired U.S. Army Col. Pat Lang, who held some of the most senior positions at DIA, told me Friday, "Clapper is a man who is just a walking mass of ambition."
What I find most damaging, though, is the fact that Clapper was head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency from 2001 to 2006. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld chose well, for his purposes.
It is abundantly clear that Clapper smothered any imagery analyst who had he temerity to suggest that, since there was not a trace of WMD in the various kinds of available imagery of Iraq, there might not be any WMD.
Clapper, rather, was one to salute smartly. He subscribed enthusiastically to the Rumsfeld dictum: "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
Quick, someone tell Barack Obama about Clapper before the President is led once again down the garden path.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990, serving under seven presidents and nine CIA directors. He now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
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