PROLOGUE

THE UNDERGROUND

Some have called it the CIA’s greatest covert operation of all time.

It involved deep penetration of a hostile regime by planting a network of agents at key crossroads of power, where they could steal secrets and steer policy by planting disinformation, cooking intelligence, provocation, and outright lies.

It involved sophisticated political sabotage operations, aimed at making regime leaders doubt their own judgment and question the support of their subordinates.

It involved the financing, training, and equipping of effective opposition forces, who could challenge the regime openly and through covert operations.

The scope was breathtaking, say insiders who had personal knowledge of the CIA effort. All the skills learned by the U.S. intelligence community during fifty years of Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union were in play, from active measures aimed at planting disinformation through cutouts and an eager media, to maskirovka—strategic deception.

It was war—but an intelligence war, played behind the scenes, aimed at confusing, misleading, and ultimately defeating the enemy. Its goal was nothing less than to topple the regime in power, by discrediting its rulers.

Many Americans believe this was the CIA’s goal during the 1990s, when the Agency had “boots on the ground” in northern Iraq, working with Iraqi opponents to Saddam Hussein. Most patriotic Americans probably hope that the CIA today has such an operation to overthrow the mullahs in Tehran, or North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il.

But the target of this vast, sophisticated CIA operation was none of them.

It was America’s 43rd president, George W. Bush.

         

Many Americans look at the war in Iraq and understandably feel that something has gone dreadfully wrong. Given the way our political system works, the first person they blame is the president of the United States. After all, he is the commander in chief. As Harry Truman famously said of his role in the blame game of American politics, “The Buck Stops Here.” So aren’t Americans right to hold Bush accountable for the failures of his administration? And wasn’t that the main message of the November 2006 elections?

The short answer, of course, is yes. But the truth is far more nuanced, because it is based on information that is not widely available to the public—or when available, information that has been systematically ignored, denied, or purposefully misconstrued by the president’s political opponents and their cheering section in the elite media.

Take the whole question of Saddam Hussein’s efforts to build weapons of mass destruction and his ties to terrorist groups. The fear that Saddam would have handed chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons to a terrorist group for use against the United States drove President Bush and his advisors—and everyone else who saw the intelligence—to conclude that the United States had no option but to remove Saddam’s regime.

After the devastation of the 9/11 attacks, no U.S. president could have failed to act against Saddam once it became clear that the Iraqi dictator would not disarm voluntarily, as required by seventeen United Nations Security Council resolutions. At the time those decisions were made, in the fall of 2002, no one doubted the intelligence, not U.S. allies overseas or even the president’s opponents in Congress.

But as you will learn in this book, some of that intelligence was cooked—not by the Bush administration but by its opponents—in an extraordinary covert operation that has never been revealed until now (see Chapter 5). The goal was to lay the groundwork for a political assault on the president of the United States, and by extension, against America and on American troops serving in harm’s way. Bush lied, people died!

You will learn that from the very start the president’s original war plans were undermined by officials at the State Department and the CIA, who shifted that strategy from liberation to occupation, and in so doing helped to spark the insurgency that caused the deaths of more than 3,000 American servicemen. Four years later, as this book appears, we are stuck with a war that the president never desired and never planned, while those who bear direct, personal responsibility for the train wreck of events have faded back into obscurity.

You will learn of arsenals of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that Saddam and his allies moved or destroyed shortly before the fighting began, to hide them from the coalition. You will learn, too, that there was extensive evidence that Saddam Hussein was funding and training a variety of terrorist groups on Iraqi soil, giving rise to legitimate fears that he might give WMD to terrorists to use against us. But since the war, this evidence—which has been supplemented by masses of documents and audio recordings seized in the aftermath of the invasion—has been dragged through the mud and its purveyors discredited (see Chapters 9, 14, and 17).

Many of the shadow warriors involved in this extraordinary campaign to impeach the truth have succeeded until now in keeping their role in these events hidden. They are professional bureaucrats, staff directors, intelligence operatives, National Security Council professionals, former ambassadors, and career diplomats. I will name many of them in this book for the first time, so Americans can judge their actions by the light of day.

Others—such as Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), Senator John D. “Jay” Rockefeller (D-WV), Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE), and General Brent Scowcroft—are public personalities. Until now they have managed to obscure their role in subverting the U.S.-led war against the terrorists who attacked us on September 11 through political subterfuge, outright lies, and a complaisant media.

This book will correct the record and expose their maneuvering.

         

After President Bush was elected to a second term in November 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell called a town meeting at the State Department in Washington. Faced with a sea of Kerry-Edwards stickers in the parking lot and hearing tales of open insubordination from his aides, Powell decided to confront the problem head-on. “We live in a democracy,” he said. “As Americans, we have to respect the results of elections.” He went on to tell his employees that President Bush had received the most votes of any president in U.S. history, and that they were constitutionally obligated to serve him.

One of Powell’s subordinates, an assistant secretary of state, became increasingly agitated. Once Powell had dismissed everyone, she returned to her office suite, shut the door, and held a mini town meeting of her own. After indignantly recounting Powell’s remarks to her assembled staff, she commented, “Well, Senator Kerry received the second highest number of votes of any presidential candidate in history. If just one state had gone differently, Senator Kerry would be President Kerry today.” Her employees owed no allegiance to the president of the United States, especially not to policies they knew were wrong, she said. If it was legal, and it would slow down the Bush juggernaut, they should do it, she told them.

Here was an open call to insubordination. And she was just one among many mid-level government managers, at State and elsewhere, making similar calls to their employees.

Even under the stewardship of Donald Rumsfeld, the Pentagon was filled with mid-and top-level managers who hated Bush and secretly worked to undermine the policies of his administration. At a time when the president was fighting against sagging opinion polls because of the war, for example, a Democratic Party political hack was chosen to run the critical Coalitions for the War office, even though she openly boasted that she had voted against Bush twice. Her boss, Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman—one of the architects of the Iraq War, and a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney—felt she shouldn’t be judged on her political opinions.

While the overwhelming majority of public servants take pride in serving their president loyally, whatever his party affiliation, a dedicated core of shadow warriors were determined to use their position to destroy him. Edelman wasn’t alone among Bush administration managers in his naïve belief that all public servants would put their nation above politics.

         

Addressing a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, just nine days after the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush warned about the coming war with the terrorists and the regimes that backed them.

“Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen,” he said. “It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success.”

Today, many of those stories are no longer secret—not because the Bush administration has decided to declassify them but because they were leaked by shadow warriors to a hostile media in an effort to undermine the president, embarrass America’s friends overseas, and thwart the ability of the United States to wage the war on terror. Such efforts go way beyond partisan differences or a legitimate debate over policy.

During a previously unreported trip to Turkey, then–CIA director Porter Goss witnessed the damage firsthand. He had gone to seek approval for U.S. overflights of Turkey in the event the United States decided to launch a preemptive attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, but he was summarily rebuffed by his Turkish counterparts. “You Americans can’t keep secrets,” the Turks told him.

Details of virtually every covert U.S. intelligence tool used in the war on terror began winding up on the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. Former Democratic senator Zell Miller called the leaks a “second cousin to treason” and accused CIA dissidents of waging a “sting operation” against the Bush administration at the expense of national security. Until now, however, there has been no public outcry against the shadow warriors who were responsible for these travesties. They have hidden their tracks well.

This book is the story of these extraordinary attempts, carried out in time of war, to undermine a sitting president of the United States as he sought to defend the nation from military and terrorist attack. For the shadow warriors, nothing was sacred beyond this goal. They were willing to expose top-secret U.S. intelligence operations, aid and abet America’s enemies, and work covertly to ensure failure in Iraq, all to achieve their goal of defeating the presidency of George W. Bush.

As I will show in this book, at times the motivation of the shadow warriors was purely personal, the result of some long-ago slight, real or imagined, borne in silence for years. Thus, I will tell the extraordinary story of two titans of the Bush administration who fought for control of the U.S. intelligence community. Unbeknownst to one of them, his rival bore him a grudge from college days that went so deep he was willing to gut a major component of U.S. intelligence in order to exact vengeance some fifty years later (see Chapter 19).

         

The elite media likes to portray itself as above the political fray. They are “investigators,” just out to find “the truth.” Their role is to probe the powerful to expose lies and hidden agendas. After all, most government secrets are not classified because they are vital to national security but because they are embarrassing to our political leaders. Right?

Well, sometimes.

The hidden bias of the elite media has been exposed in a spate of recent books. But how many readers are aware that beyond just bias, many reporters feed from secret troughs, tapping into an underground network of sources and informants whose agenda runs counter to what most of us would consider the national interest?

When the Washington Post runs a story about the CIA’s “secret prisons” by Dana Priest (see Chapter 10), do they publish a disclaimer informing readers that the reporter is married to a left-wing political activist who for thirty years has specialized in generating public opposition to the government of the United States of America and has publicly opposed any form of covert action? Or when they run a story by Walter Pincus that lashes out at some failure by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, do they tell you that Pincus is married to a woman who was a Clinton administration political appointee and a steady donor to Democratic candidates and the Democratic National Committee (DNC), who had burrowed into the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), a tiny group of analysts that has no spies and is well known in the intelligence community for second-guessing everybody that does?

Or when the New York Times publishes a story by James Risen exposing a highly classified National Security Agency program to intercept the communications of suspected terrorists, do they ever tell you that Risen once coauthored a book glorifying (and exposing) covert U.S. intelligence operations with Milt Bearden, a former CIA covert operative? As chief of the Soviet/East European Division of the Directorate of Operations, Bearden sent a still infamous cable to CIA chiefs of station worldwide when the Berlin wall collapsed telling them to “stand down” their spy networks against the Soviet Union because the Cold War was over. (“And guess who is still spying on us today?” a retired station chief who had received Bearden’s cable commented to me wryly.)

         

On December 1, 2000, Jesse Jackson brought his troops to Washington for the first day of the Supreme Court hearings on the Florida election recount. “Racist! Fascist!” Jesse’s horde shouted to groups of pro-Bush demonstrators.

Jackson was back ten days later, when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Bush v. Gore. “If this court rules against counting our vote, it will simply create a civil rights explosion,” he said. “People will not surrender to this tyranny…. They will not stand by and accept this with surrender.” Jackson’s inflammatory words were dangerously close to a call for insurrection. Over the next several weeks—indeed, even after the inauguration—Jackson repeated them in rallies all across the United States.¹

It was no surprise that Democrats were gunning for George W. Bush from the very first day of his presidency. Most pundits chalked it up to payback for the impeachment of “their” president, Bill Clinton.

What they didn’t realize at the time was that Bush’s enemies had no intention of giving up, and called on their supporters to create what amounted to an underground resistance movement within every agency of the United States government. To them, Bush was an illegitimate president whose authority they could not accept.

In small ways and large, Bush’s opponents did their best to thwart his actions as president. During the weeks before they left office, for example, the Clinton team enacted hundreds of “midnight regulations,” ramming through last-minute rules in areas where they had failed to win congressional approval to enact their policies.

Each of the last-minute rules was carefully tailored to help a Clinton friend or harm an enemy. Some regulations were merely silly, covering the type of desk chairs private businesses were required to buy for their employees, or the proper size of the holes manufacturers must put in Swiss cheese. But some had serious implications.

Most notable was Clinton’s one-minute-to-midnight agreement to join the International Criminal Court. Under that treaty, which Clinton signed on December 31, 2000, without the advice and consent of the United States Senate, U.S. servicemen could be brought before an international court at the behest of a foreign enemy of the United States, for actions carried out in wartime under the lawful orders of their commanders. It took nearly eighteen months to walk that one back.^*1

Within hours of the inauguration, White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr. imposed a sixty-day review period for rules that had not yet gone into force. But beyond that, the Bush team shrugged off the Clinton efforts as little more than a nuisance, the cost of power under our political system.

It was a huge mistake, for which they are still paying the price.

George W. Bush never got the first rule of Washington: People are policy. He allowed his political enemies to run roughshod over his administration through a vast underground he never dismantled and never dominated. Shadow Warriors tells this story—the when, the where, the how, and especially the who—for the first time.