The Fatal Cost of Twisting Intelligence

This column first appeared on Spytalk.co. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Military.com.

News that DNI Tulsi Gabbard had fired two senior intelligence officials because their findings on Venezuela had displeased her sent me scurrying for the origin of the phrase, “Don’t kill the messenger.“

Turns out there are lots of strands to its provenance, but one I’m partial to was the story told by Plutarch about an ancient Armenian general, Tigranes, who so disliked a messenger’s word that a Roman general was close on his heels that “he had his head cut off for his pains; and no man dared to bring further information.” The ensuing battle did not go well for the Armenian.

Gabbard’s dismissals of Mike Collins, who was the acting head of the National Intelligence Council, and Maria Langan-Riekhof, a career senior CIA and NIC intelligence analyst, was merely a virtual beheading, Washington-style. But her imperious act was an unmistakable warning to other top intelligence professionals not to “dare”—quoting Plutarch here—to cross her with information that contradicts the Trump administration’s narrative, however false, on any subject related to national security. Similar dismissals have been carried out at the CIA.

Certainly to many outsiders, the episode was no more than a bureaucratic kerfuffle in a Washington teacup—merely a routine demonstration that, as partisans of all stripes like to say, “elections have consequences.” The public’s attention quickly moved on to other Trump amusements, like his gleeful acceptance of an old 747 from Qatar’s clever monarch.

But fence sitters on Trump’s foreign and national security policies need reminding that skewering intelligence to fit an administration’s story can have fatal consequences, measured in staggering body counts, as well as unexpected, devastating reversals of fortune.

The Bush administration’s ill-advised, 2003 invasion of Iraq, driven in large measure by bending intelligence to make a false case that Saddam Hussein was an al-Qaeda ally in possession of nuclear weapons, comes first to mind. The butcher’s bill, according to various and combined sources: At least 200,000 and possibly a million Iraqi civilians dead due to war-related action; at least 4,492 U.S. servicemen and servicewomen killed and over 32,000 wounded in theater. “As many as 30%“ of some 1.5 million Iraq War veterans were stricken by PTSD, the surveys also say, which would add up to almost 500,000 walking wounded among us.

Worse, in some sense, the invasion and occupation turned Iraq into an incubator of ISIS and a virtual client state of Iran. This was not a failure of intelligence so much (although the CIA’s miscues were astounding) as the corruption of it by an administration hell bent on fitting manufactured evidence to its hubristic ignorance.

Jungle Bungle

Less well known, but at least as damaging, was the skewering of American intelligence on communist troop strength in Vietnam to bolster the false claims of President Lyndon Johnson and his military leaders in 1967 that the U.S. was winning the war. The lonely fight to correct the picture was led by a CIA intelligence analyst, Sam Adams (a descendant, by the way, of President John Adams) who, after careful study, concluded that the U.S. command, under Gen. William Westmoreland, was deliberately undercounting the enemy’s strength by excluding from the chart the tens of thousands of underground Viet Cong agents in the villages. Much to Adams’ dismay, then-CIA Director Richard Helms had gone along with the Pentagon’s undercount, which fit the White House’s knowing lie that the war would be soon won.

The communists’ surprise Tet offensive in late January 1968, which saw attacks on more than 100 towns and cities, including Saigon, where the American embassy came under assault, shattered the pretense. But while the U.S. command eventually included the “Viet Cong Infrastructure” in its enemy Order of Battle estimates, the damage set in motion by years of false intelligence could not be undone—nor stopped. At the end of 1967, the U.S. counted just under 20,000 (19,950) Americans killed in Vietnam. Another 38,000+ would be added to the death rolls by the time the U.S. escaped at the end of April 1975. Of the 2.7 million men and women who served in Vietnam, over 303,000 suffered battlefield wounds. Moreover, “up to 31% of men and 27% of women had suffered from PTSD at some point in time after their return from Vietnam,” a recent study says. Many still are, the Veterans Administration says.

The obvious point here is that scuttling facts—or worse, punishing the bearers of “bad” tidings—can, and has had—immensely fatal consequences. Trump’s false claim that Venezuela weaponized the Tren de Aragua criminal gang to “invade” the United States, buttressed by Tulsi Gabbard, the nation's top intelligence official, is small beans compared to Vietnam and Iraq (not to mention Afghanistan, another case of self-delusion), of course. But the table has been set. What about the cases Trump has ginned up against Canada and Greenland (where, according to reports, U.S. intelligence is now prowling)? Or, come a showdown with Russia or China, will intelligence analysts—moderately paid government employees with kids in school and mortgages to pay—go out on a limb and tell the ideologues and boot lickers essential truths? Given recent events, it’s hard to be optimistic.

It’s only war and peace at stake. Or put more starkly, living and dying.

SpyTalk Editor-in-chief Jeff Stein was a U.S. Army Intelligence case officer in Vietnam.