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Negroponte and the
CIA's eclipse
By Tom Barry
(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)
Since the US Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) was founded in 1947, it has been under
attack, mainly from the right. Although the
left-center charges that the CIA has engineered
coups against democratically elected governments
and trained death squads have received more public
attention, a phalanx of right-center forces have
been the CIA's most implacable foes.
For
more than five decades, the militarists and
right-wing ideologues have charged the US
government's intelligence apparatus, led by the
CIA, with playing down the national-security
threats posed by the Soviet Union, China and
"rogue states" such as Iraq, Iran, Cuba, North
Korea, Libya and Syria.
Through the
decades of the Cold War and into the 1990s and the
first George W Bush administration, the hawks and
conservative ideologues have complained that the
CIA and other intelligence agencies, along with
the State Department, are bureaucracies overrun,
variously, with liberals, "pinkos", communists,
anti-American internationalists and Arabists.
According to the hawks, the CIA and other
liberal strongholds in government have distorted
their "threat assessments" of the US's real and
potential enemies. In the view of the right-wing's
intelligence reformers, the goal of intelligence
is not truth but victory. What high administration
officials and leading Republicans in Congress
consider to be "good intelligence" is what the
intelligence hawks call "strategic intelligence".
Intelligence reformers on the right can
point to two major achievements in their campaign
to seize command of the government's intelligence
apparatus. First was the appointment of Florida
Republican Porter Goss, the former chairman of the
House Intelligence Committee and a longtime ally
of Vice President Richard Cheney, to head the CIA
and direct its reform. Second was the nomination
of John Negroponte to be the first director of
national intelligence (DNI).
The
Negroponte nomination, preceded by that of Goss,
signaled the end of the CIA's dominant position
among the government's 15 intelligence agencies. A
diplomat with a four-decade history as a ruthless
and highly effective foreign-policy operative,
Negroponte most recently served as the ambassador
to Iraq. Negroponte, who received quick Senate
confirmation for his positions in Iraq and at the
UN, can count on bipartisan support for his latest
nomination.
As a result of the
Intelligence Reform and Terrorist Prevention Act
passed by Congress in late 2004, the newly created
office of DNI - with a staff of 500 - will
exercise oversight over the budgets of the diverse
intelligence agencies.
As the government's
first national intelligence director, Negroponte
has proved an adept provider and user of strategic
intelligence over the past four decades.
Negroponte, 65, comes well prepared to his new
position, after having served as a junior officer
in Vietnam during the war, and as ambassador to
the Philippines, Honduras, Mexico, the United
Nations, and most recently Iraq.
Since the
mid-1960s, Negroponte has moved around the globe
doing whatever is required to further what
successive US administrations have defined as US
economic interests and national security -
including such diverse roles as advising the
puppet US government in South Vietnam during the
war, supervising the Ronald Reagan
administration's use of Honduras as its logistical
center for the counterinsurgency and
counterrevolutionary campaigns in Central America,
ensuring good US-Mexico relations during the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
negotiations, managing relations with UN Security
Council members in the lead-up to the invasion of
Iraq, and overseeing US nation-building and
counterinsurgency operations in the lead-up to the
Iraq elections in January 2005.
Critics
charge that Negroponte has - both as a member of
the National Security Council and during his
various ambassadorships - covered up damaging
information so as to further bad policies. Melvin
Goodman, a former CIA official, warned:
"Negroponte is tough enough. The question is: is
he independent enough?" Referring to his history
of covering up human-rights abuses in Honduras,
Goodman said: "I think the role of intelligence is
telling truth to power" and then, Negroponte's
appointment "doesn't fit."
The nomination
of Negroponte as DNI comes at a time when new CIA
chief Goss has signaled that he intends to rid the
agency of those who do not fall into line with
Bush administration policies in the Middle East
and elsewhere, leading some high officials to
leave the agency and sparking widespread morale
problems. In the view of one former intelligence
official, "The CIA is a wounded gazelle on the
African plain. It's a pile of bleached bones."
Negroponte is not an ideologue, and
certainly not a neo-conservative. Since the 1960s
Negroponte has earned a reputation as a ruthless
and determined political operative who always gets
the job done - however "dirty" or undiplomatic.
Unlike most of President George W Bush's
foreign-policy team, Negroponte has no direct
connections with the network of conservative
policy institutes, think-tanks, or foundations
that have set the administration's foreign and
domestic policy agenda.
Not a theorist or
strategist, Negroponte instead is commonly
regarded as a pragmatic realist with decidedly
hawkish inclinations. Negroponte has throughout
his career maintained a low public profile despite
his high-profile positions - rarely writing or
speaking about US foreign or military policy,
apart from diplomatically worded statements issued
by his office. Ever the flexible diplomat,
Negroponte has proved comfortable in adopting
whatever foreign-policy language - from idealist
to realist - is deemed most appropriate and
effective for the job he has been assigned.
As a practitioner of "strategic
intelligence", Negroponte for four decades has
focused not on truth but on victory. Typical of
other hawks, Negroponte blames the defeat of South
Vietnam on the liberals and moderates in
Washington - not on any misguided notion of US
national security or self-deception by the "war
party" in the US government.
But
Negroponte has presided over numerous short-term
victories, such as deceiving the world about
Iraq's purported ties with terrorism and its
weapons of mass destruction, crushing the leftist
guerrilla and popular movements in Central America
in the 1980s, and implementing NAFTA and the
"Washington Consensus" in Mexico. Problem is, they
were Pyrrhic victories at best. Any intelligence
worth its name would better describe Negroponte's
history of representing US interests as a series
of wrong turns, dead ends and deadly collisions.
Tom Barry is policy director of
the International Relations Center (IRC), online
at www.irc-online.org. Posted with permission
from Foreign Policy in Focus |
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