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No, President-elect Trump: This is not the CIA's WMD fiasco
No, President-elect Trump: Russian hacking is not like the CIA's WMD fiasco
Story highlights
- Iraq WMD misjudgment was huge scandal for CIA; has completely changed how agency forms its views, writes Peter Bergen
- The evidence in the Russian hacking is solid, Bergen says
Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor at Arizona State University. He is the author of "United States of Jihad: Investigating America's Homegrown Terrorists."
(CNN)President-elect
Donald Trump says that he doesn't believe the US intelligence
community's assessment that the hack of the Democratic National
Committee (DNC) was the work of the Russians. To bolster his point,
Trump cites the CIA's faulty intelligence about Saddam Hussein's
supposed weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the invasion of
Iraq in March 2003.
In a
statement about the CIA that he issued late last month, Trump said,
"These are the same people who said Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass
destruction." On Sunday at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Trump made this point
again to reporters, saying, "if you look at the weapons of mass
destruction, that was a disaster and they were wrong."
But
there are some significant differences between the CIA's weapons of
mass destruction fiasco 14 years ago and the evidence that is now being
offered by the American intelligence community about the Russian
hacking.
The WMD fiasco did much to
harm the standing of the George W. Bush administration and its key
figures, such as Secretary of State Colin Powell, who famously made the
case for the impending Iraq War to the United Nations. The war resulted
in hundreds of thousands of deaths, trillions in wasted US spending, and
fomented chaos that continues in the Middle East. It was such a black
eye for US intelligence that large changes were made to the process of
making intelligence assessments.
'Curveball'
The
faulty assumption that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his weapons of
mass destruction program rested, in part, on intelligence sources who
were lying. One of them was an Iraqi defector with the telling alias of
"Curveball," who claimed that Hussein possessed mobile bioweapons labs.
This
became a central exhibit in the George W. Bush administration's
assertions that Hussein had a biological weapons program. But Curveball
later admitted he had made up the whole story.
A
month before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, CIA Director George Tenet
testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that Iraq had
"provided training in poisons and gases to two al Qaeda associates." But
what Tenet didn't know was that this information had come from a militant who had been tortured in Egypt.
In
December 2001, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a Libyan militant affiliated with
al Qaeda, was captured in Pakistan. The CIA then "rendered" Libi to
Egypt. Once in Egypt's grim prisons, to improve his chances of better
treatment, Libi fed his interrogators a number of fairy tales, including
that Osama bin Laden had sent two operatives to Iraq to learn about
biological and chemical weapons.
Trump promises to reveal info on hacking 01:45
Because
Libi's story encapsulated the key arguments for the Iraq War, his tale
was picked up by President Bush in a keynote speech in Cincinnati on
October 7, 2002, in which Bush laid out his rationale for the coming war
with Iraq, saying, "We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda
members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases."
But
once he was back in American custody, on February 14, 2004, Libi
recanted what he had falsely told his Egyptian jailors. Libi told his US
interrogators that he had "fabricated" his tale of the Saddam Hussein-al Qaeda-poison connection to the Egyptians following "physical abuse and threats of torture."
Learning from mistakes
The
intelligence community was determined to learn from these costly
mistakes and instituted more "alternative analysis" and Red Teams to
challenge its conclusions. CIA Director John Brennan made essentially
the same point this week in an interview with PBS' Judy Woodruff: "A
number of steps ... were taken to make sure that we're going to be as
accurate as possible, so it's been light years since that Iraq WMD
report."
The WMD fiasco, which
was probably the most damaging episode for the credibility of the CIA in
decades, made the agency much more careful about its handling of
circumstantial evidence, as was the case during the hunt for Osama bin
Laden.
Throughout the search for
bin Laden there was never any definitive evidence that al Qaeda's leader
was in fact hiding in the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he
was eventually killed by US Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011.
The
CIA's hunt for bin Laden heated up in the summer of 2010 with the
discovery of a possible bin Laden courier living in Pakistan who was
known as "the Kuwaiti."
As I
learned while I was reporting my book "Manhunt," which detailed the long
search for bin Laden, the small cadre of analysts at the CIA who were
aware of the intelligence on "the Kuwaiti" subjected it to a formal
process of structured analytical techniques, drilling down on key
questions: What's the body of evidence that the Kuwaiti is bin Laden's
courier? Who else could the Kuwaiti be if he weren't the courier for al
Qaeda's leader? Was the Kuwaiti even still working for al Qaeda?
Cognizant of the lessons of the WMD fiasco, an intelligence official told me that dissent was actively encouraged
among the analysts leading the hunt for bin Laden. "We kept explaining
to our group: 'If you see something that doesn't make sense, you need to
raise your hand now.'"
Digital fingerprints
The
evidence in the Russian hacking case, however, is not the kind of
circumstantial case that the CIA built during the hunt for bin Laden and
is based instead on "digital fingerprints" that point to Russian involvement.
The
FBI and Department of Homeland Security took the unusual step last week
of releasing publicly an account of the Russian hacking efforts
(codenamed by the US government GRIZZLY STEPPE), which goes into
considerable detail about how and when the hacking was accomplished.
U.S. slaps sanctions on Russia over hacking 05:20
The
report portrays a sophisticated set of spear-phishing campaigns that
began in the spring of 2015. The report says that spear-phishing emails
"tricked recipients into changing their passwords" and through the
harvesting of those credentials the Russians were "able to gain access
and steal content, likely leading to the exfiltration of information
from multiple senior party members."
Interested readers can find the report here.
This
week Trump will hear directly from top US intelligence officials about
their evidence and reasoning for pointing to Russia as the source of the
DNC hacking. If Trump is to retain credibility with the intelligence
professionals who soon will be working for him, he should be listening
carefully to what they have to say rather than dismissively invoking the
CIA's failures in the run-up to the Iraq War.
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