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EDITOR'S NOTE:
The 13th Annual Arab-US Policymakers Conference (AUSPC) was convened in Washington, DC on September 12-13, 2004 with the theme "Restoring Arab-U.S. Mutual Trust and Confidence: What is Feasible? What is Necessary?"�
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A panel of distinguished leaders shared their insights in a panel addressing the "Policy-Intelligence Interface." The panel included: Chair, Dr. Max Gross, Senior Research Fellow, Center for Strategic Intelligence Research, Joint Military Intelligence College; Mr. Milt Bearden, former career intelligence officer; Mr. Frank Anderson, Vice President, Foreign Report; and Mr. Raymond Close, former career intelligence officer.
We are pleased today to share Mr. Close's presentation with you. In it Mr. Close, who served as CIA station chief in Riyadh during his 26 year career, provides insights into the implications of US intelligence failures on developments in the region as well as first hand observations of the history of US-Saudi relations.�
In the coming days we will feature more presentations from the AUSPC. For a complete list of the agenda items presented in SUSRIS
click
here.
The AUSPC conferences are organized by the National Council on US-Arab Relations
(NCUSAR), a Washington-based not for profit organization that seeks to improve understanding of the Arab world among Americans.
Intelligence and Policy Formulation, Implementation and Linkage: A Personal Perspective
Remarks by Raymond Close
13th Arab-U.S. Policymakers Conference
Washington, DC
September 13, 2004
Mr. Raymond Close: �I'm going to pick up on something Frank [Anderson] just said. I'm glad he took that extra minute to add the three different kinds of failures because I have a fourth, which I think is more important than any one of those three. He said we've been faced with a perfect storm of collection problems, analytical problems, and I think implementation problems or something like that. What I want to get to in a minute, but I don't want to forget to draw attention to it right from the start. I think we've been asking the wrong questions, which is one of the reasons we've come up with the wrong intelligence.
I graduated from college 53 years ago and spent 26-and-a-half years in the CIA and then spent an equal amount of time since then. So, exactly half of the time I've been in the workforce, if you will, for 53 years, I've been on the production side of intelligence and involvement in it. I've been more or less a consumer of it since then. I've certainly been an observer of it. On the peripheral sense, I've been a participant of it and either a beneficiary or a victim of bad intelligence. So, I've developed a lot of impressions about what role intelligence should play in our national life, and particularly in policymaking. I've come to a distressing conclusion in the last few months, particularly, that intelligence is beginning to be used for the wrong purposes. It's beginning to be conceived of wrongly in terms of its place in the process.�
I've noticed, and I wonder if you share this feeling, that intelligence now is becoming sort of a monster in itself. It's suddenly developed a capital "I." If you listen to the deliberations of the various commissions that been investigating 9/11 and so forth, you keep hearing intelligence referred to in some sort of awe, as if intelligence with a capital "I" was somehow going to truth with a capital "T." Forgetting that it is information, it's nothing more than what you need to do. It's the gas you put in your car. It's not telling you where to go. I worry about that because it means, I think .. I'm worried because given an Administration we have now, which has the tendency to be dogmatic or to be doctrinaire about things -- the creation of this intelligence czar is going to lead to the institutionalization of the very thing that I'm worried about -- that intelligence with a capital "I," that big gorilla sitting at the table. A subparagraph of that by the way is my concern about something called "actionable intelligence," which by its very name implies that the person who is in possession of it is somehow endowed with not only the authority but sort of the responsibility to act on it without the information going through the regular process that it needs to go through. Does this make any sense? Are we doing what we're supposed to be doing? Or, because we have actionable intelligence, we've got to get on the ball and do something? I worry about that. That's bad culture.�
Of course, Iraq is the example that we have to think about right now. It's overwhelming us -- the whole question about where the intelligence went wrong and why. I suggest to you two examples that illustrate the point -- and I'm concerned about right now about asking the right questions. I remember two particular reports that the CIA issued just before we started that war that attracted a lot of attention. One was, I think, in late November or possibly early December of 2002, three or four months before it started, in which they announced their conclusion, published their conclusion that Saddam Hussein would use weapons of mass destruction almost exclusively if he were attacked. In other words, it would take an attack from us to trigger his use of them. The wisdom of the intelligence community was that these were not things that he would use just for the hell of it. He would use them only in self-defense and in extremis. A very important question; a very important answer. One that never seems to have had much effect on a decision on whether we should go to war or not. I want to draw your attention to the fact that the answer was an answer to the question "What will Saddam do if we attack him?"�
The second question was the famous "slam dunk" expression of George Tenet when he said, "Don't worry boss, it's a slam dunk." Now, I ask you what question he had asked that would evoke that answer? The question was, "If I go ahead and invade, will you produce the information that justifies what I've just done?" Nobody got around to asking the question, "How are the Iraqis going to react to this?" To having their doors kicked down and their country invaded and occupied by a couple of hundred thousand blue-eyed Christian kids from North America and from England, who don't know what they're doing or why they're there, or what they're supposed to be accomplishing when they get there. Nobody ever asked, "What are the Iraqis going to think about this? What's the Muslim world going to think about this? What's the whole world going to think about this?" Nobody asked that question, and nobody gave them the answer.�
Now, since we're talking about intelligence, I ask where is the answer to that question supposed to come from? Who's going to answer that kind of question? Not people, I don't think, whom Condoleezza Rice referred to so derisively as those people in the bowels of the agency. It takes people like you. It doesn't have to be intelligence officers running off and stealing people's secrets. The truth of this question comes from guts, from people who have lived in the countries for a long, long time, who know the language, who know the culture, who know the people, and whose instinct tells them, "Look, you can't kick down that man's door and expect him to respect you." You're not going to end up with the results that your policy wants.�
Now, that's a huge intelligence failure, and nobody's identified it, and not only that, but it's continuing. We're doing the same thing today. Every judgment we make in Fallujah, for example -- Well, we can't go in there and clean it out door by door, so just some more of that nifty guided smart bombs that made the whole winning of the war so easy and so quick to begin with. But, they're not solving the problem. They're making it a lot worse. And, somebody someday is going to write the history of this era, and they're going to condemn the intelligence community for not standing on its own two feet and saying what it believed, finding out what it believed, and by asking people like you.�
One of the problems with this intelligence czar thing that is going on now -- it's going to have the effect eventually of diluting the value of other people who should be contributing to national intelligence. I'm talking about the academic community who talk to each other, and they all agree and are unanimous that they thought this whole thing was a bad idea, but they're not standing up, talking it, shouting it. I'm talking about the business community, like a lot of you people, who have lived out there, who know the country, who knew intuitively and instinctively that this was going to be a bad idea, and it was going to work against your interests. You didn't say anything about it. Were you really doing something, or were you just sitting and complaining in front of your television sets?�
And, the military -- I know any number of retired officers, including Richard Meyers of all things -- I found an old copy of Defense News, an issue of several months before the war in Iraq started, and he said under no circumstances would we go into Iraq in any idea of a preemptive war. He was very emphatic about it and gave all kinds of reasons for it. Brent Scowcroft has done the same thing. George Herbert Walker Bush said the same thing. Colin Powell has said the same thing. But, when it came right down to it, everybody was too gutless to stand up and say, "This is stupid. Don't do it. It's not going to achieve what you want. It's going to cause us a lot of harm and we'll be much worse off."
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Okay, I'm running out of time here. I promised him I would talk 10 minutes, and I've probably already gassed on for another 15. I want to get to the real point, and I've got to take a minute to do this. The thing I'm concerned about is the inability of this community of ours, this fraternity of people who know about the Middle East, to speak up on the issue of linkage to the Palestinian question. We've all known this for 50 years, 60 years, more than that. If we didn't establish once and for all, the earnest and sincere concern of the United States for justice for the Palestinians, that all the other problems that we were seeking in the Middle East were not going to get solved. That's the simple truth.
In all of my career in the agency, every time any of us, myself particularly, spoke out about this question, we were always told, "Oh, come on, get off it. That's a bore. That's not our part. We're not supposed to be involved in that." I want to give you a particular example. I want to read from notes that I took contemporaneously at the time when linkage was keenly important. It's been important up and down at different times. It was very important back in the early 1970s. It was very important again after 1991. The United States began to take serious concern about linkage, and the whole Madrid Conference was a sign of that. George Bush 41 understood this.
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I'm going to read from notes here because I want to be sure I don't say anything wrong. These are exact notes that I wrote. Starting in late 1972, about 10 months before the outbreak of the 1973 war, the late King Faisal began warning President Nixon that other Arab states, led by Iraq and Libya, were beginning to put pressure on him to join them in utilizing what became known as the "oil weapon" against the United States unless the Nixon Administration took a more active interest in resolving the Palestine question. These warnings from Faisal were earnest, and they were urgent, but we ignored them. Faisal never gave up. He sent his Oil Minister Yamani and others to Washington several times over the next few months to convey that message to everyone who would listen inside and outside of government. The warnings were ignored.�
On April 17, 1973, several months before the Yom Kippur War began, I was informed by my official Saudi intelligence counterparts that Anwar Sadat had reached his decision to begin preparing for a major military assault across the Suez Canal. He had informed King Faisal of this decision in a letter received that day, the 17th April 1973. Sadat acknowledged unashamedly in this letter that he did not expect to win a war against Israel, but he explained that only by restoring Arab honor and displaying Arab courage on the battlefield could he hope to capture the attention of Washington and persuade Henry Kissinger to support a peace process. The letter was read to me with King Faisal's expressed permission. In reporting this information, I included news that Prince Saud Al-Faisal, the King's son and present foreign minister, was being sent to Washington to convey the same message again of his father's deep concern, made much more urgent by the letter from Sadat that only a vigorous American peace initiative, urgently undertaken, could avert a regional Middle East war that would inevitably include the imposition of an oil embargo.
On that occasion, King Faisal considered including this message again in written form of a personal note to Richard Nixon but thought better of that idea. He was tired of writing letters to the American president, he explained, recalling the last time he had done so, it had been three months before he received an answer. Prince Saud was, therefore, instructed to convey the message verbally. Again, as usual, Washington paid no heed to the sad monition from a wise and dignified gentleman, a proven friend of our country for many many years. It was no surprise then that when the time that the dire predictions finally came true six months later, Faisal stood resolutely shoulder-to-shoulder with his Arab brothers. Washington had again failed through arrogance and ignorance to appreciate the significance of the term " linkage."�
There is one other example that just took place a few weeks after the end of the Yom Kippur War, but while the oil embargo was still very much in effect. In a personal letter to King Faisal, dated December 3, 1973, Nixon included the remarkable following passages:�
"Looking back over recent years, I recall the many times Your Majesty has written to me of your concern and of your conviction that we should do more to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. You have always given me wise council, and in retrospect, your advice should have been heeded. The latest war and the shadow it has cast over our relations with many of our friends in the Middle East has demonstrated beyond any doubt that the situation, which has existed for so long, can no longer be permitted to remain unresolved. The American people, while they feel a strong commitment to the security and survival of Israel, also harbor friendly feelings toward the Arab world and are well disposed to give responsible Arab views the attention they need. The American people have even understood in the heat of the recent war, the need to demonstrate solidarity with your Arab compatriots led Your Majesty to institute certain measures with respect to the production and supply of oil." Richard Nixon is saying I understand why you imposed that embargo. "With Your Majesty's cooperation, I am prepared to devote the full energies of the United States to bringing about a just and lasting peace in the Middle East based on full implementation of Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 in the adoption of which my government played a major role. You have my total personal commitment to work towards that goal."
Now, that last sentence is written in his handwriting, President Nixon's own handwriting. The word total was underlined three times, and to give it a little touch of personal things, he misspelled the word commitment. He put two "T's" in it.��
Nothing came to pass of these glowing promises from the President of the United States to the King of Saudi Arabia. By his words, Richard Nixon showed that he understood the direct connection, the linkage, between American dedication to peace and justice for the Palestinians and the achievement of America's own national objectives. By his following actions, he demonstrated the hollow spirit of his commitment to uphold America's half of the bargain.
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Now, Shibley Telhami told us this morning a very wise statement. He said, "We're just simply not going to recover our credibility after this Iraq War unless we do something dramatic to get the attention of these people out there in that part of the world and to persuade them that somehow we care enough about their problems, so that they can believe that we are honest -- what we tell them and what we try to do comes from the heart."
I'm sick and tired of being told as it's been going on for 35 years, 50 years, who cares. We're never going to do it. The Palestinians can't produce enough leaders. It's up to us to take them by the scruff of the neck and shake them until they all start behaving themselves. We've got to step in there and suggest some solutions and stand by them and do something about it. Otherwise, we're never going to have credibility, and we're never going to get the problems solved. So, my time is up, twice over. ��
The following is an excerpt from the question and answer session, which followed the panel discussion.
Dr. Max Gross, Chair: �Do you think intelligence failed the President in Iraq by not having the courage to tell the truth, or did the President not care about the intelligence because he wanted to wage a war in Iraq?
Before you try to answer that Ray, let me add this one that just came. It's for you. Mr. Close said that the failure of intelligence is asking the wrong questions, and then states that the U.S.-British war in Iraq was wrong, a bad idea that didn't, wouldn't, couldn't achieve the desired goal or end state. The question is, considering the fact that sanctions were failing and had minimal international and regional support, what questions should have been asked, and what do you believe the answer should have been to the questions that should have been asked?
Mr. Raymond Close: �A perfectly legitimate question. I don't know exactly how to answer that, frankly, because I'm so firmly convinced that the whole concept of going in there was wrong and was going to be counterproductive. Now that we are in as far as we are and as deep of trouble as we're in, I feel a little injured being asked what we should do now to get us out of the problem.��
When you go into something for entirely the wrong reasons, not knowing why you are doing it and you keep changing the reasons once you're there, how can anybody advise you what to do? I know perfectly well now that there's no interest whatsoever -- there never was any interest or any misconception that by removing that one man, you were going to change the whole Middle East. That's a problem. So, I have to start from the assumption that answering the question that was asked to Frank, basically, the intention was, the plan to go into Iraq and invade that country and kick down his front door and change it around was made long before the intelligence really began to be evaluated carefully. I think it was all a done thing.
[Inaudible question off microphone].
I think our alternative was that he wasn't a problem. People have said that Saddam was a huge threat to us because he had these weapons of mass destruction. But, you forget that when he did have them in 1991, he positively had them -- all kinds of weapons of mass destruction -- and we offered him that opportunity. We invaded his country then, and he didn't use it then. He didn't use it then. Why didn't he use it then? Well, he was either afraid of retaliation - deterrence was working obviously. He was certain, I guess, that if he tried it, he would get [inaudible]. If he developed them, he was going to be discovered. There were all kinds of reasons on why he didn't want to do those things that we had dire concerns about. I think logically, he wasn't the danger that everybody says he was. People continue to say that he was. I really don't think so. I don't think that's a question that can be answered necessarily by stealing people's secrets. That's one of those questions that come from just really sitting down and thinking about it, thinking about the logic of it. He didn't do it in 1991, why would he do it now? Why aggravate him and poke him?�
Well, I went up to the United Nations in the mid-1990s at the time that the sanctions were being questioned, and everybody was talking about let's get smart sanctions and let's figure out a way or at least change the nature of the sanction on the regime so that it didn't hurt the children, but it prevented him from developing weapons. I remind you that Madeline Albright was the Secretary of State and Holbrook was the Ambassador to the United Nations. I asked the question at a very high level office, and I won't mention who it was I asked to. I said, "Why can't you figure us out something like this? This is not an insolvable problem. Figure out a way to keep them from getting the weapons that we're worried about and try to bring them out. Let's try to do something with these people." He said, "Ray, you don't understand the instructions I'm under. My instructions are to keep this guy in a box, and to make sure that every time he gets a gleam of light, we're going to slam it down on him and make sure he doesn't do that."��
Well, how would you react under those conditions? It was a deliberate, conscious, determined move to put him in a corner and torment him and to prove to him what a bad guy he was. I'm not saying he was a good man. For heaven's sake, I'd be the last person in the world to say that. But, I do think there were other ways to do it. By all means, there was a different attitude to bring to the table that would have changed the problem and handled it better. I feel very strongly about that.���
About the Speaker
Mr. Raymond Close comes from a family with deep roots in the Middle East. Many of his immediate relatives have been teachers, diplomats, or businessmen in the Arab Middle East for four generations, since his maternal great-grandfather arrived in 1853 and began establishing schools in southern Lebanon. Mr. Close's father was a professor and later Dean of Arts and Sciences at the American University of Beirut from 1910 until 1955. His mother's brother, Colonel William Eddy, served as the interpreter between President Franklin Roosevelt and Saudi Arabian King Abdulaziz bin Abdelrahman Al-Saud at their historic meeting aboard a U.S. Navy cruiser in the Suez Canal immediately following the Yalta Conference in February 1945. Eddy later became the first U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
After graduating from Princeton University in 1951, Mr. Close served for 26 years as a Middle East specialist with the Operations Directorate of the CIA's Clandestine Services. During his career, he served under cover as a political officer at American Embassies in Lebanon, Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. For seven years before his retirement in 1977, he was the CIA's senior representative in Saudi Arabia.
After leaving government service, Mr. Close remained in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for an additional seven years, serving as a private consultant to several American and European corporations. Since returning to the United States in 1984, he has continued to act as an international business consultant and editor of an intelligence newsletter for private clients.
Mr. Close and his wife, Marty, moved to Princeton in August 2001. Mrs. Close is the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries in India, where she was born and lived for many years.
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