Misusing the CIA

...This joke has been used before, but now it can be truly said that the President today finds himself between Iraq and a hard place...

...The three-star general was completing his term as director of strategic planning for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and they had no four-star job for him...

...What made Powell's statement so bizarre was that at the time of the poison gas attack, he was President Reagan's National Security Adviser...

...But Congress has not appropriated the money to make that happen...

...But for someone who has spent most of his life in uniform, he also has an unusual ability to address broad concerns...

...charge that the war was a "fraud" made in Texas for electoral reasons...

...One can imagine French President Jacques Chirac rubbing his hands along with Senate Democrats...

...In the most celebrated attempted misuse of the CIA in modern times, President Richard M. Nixon tried to get the CIA to take the rap for Watergate—and, incidentally, recorded the smoking gun tape that drove him from office...

...But Wilson's report only reinforced the conclusion that the uranium story was malarkey, partly based on forged documents...

...The very next day President Bush, seeming to side with Rumsfeld, said "we have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September 11...

...Whereas 63 per cent of Americans supported the decision to invade Iraq, at present a comparable number say Bush has not developed an adequate way out of there...

...I soon learned that television news was not just about conveying information, but about glorifying the conveyor of the information—the Star...

...On NBC's Meet the Press, he criticized abridging of civil liberties in the war against terrorism...

...The quality is the ability to jettison military jargon and address civilians in civilian terms...

...And the latest Gallup poll showing approval of the overall job Bush is doing down to 50 per cent...

...In those days the United States was backing Iraq in its war with Iran...

...That touched offa searing Senate investigation, which concluded that the agency had not actually killed anyone, albeit not for want of trying...

...This served Clark in good stead in 1996 when he faced mandatory retirement under the Army's "Up or Out" policy...

...If asked, I tell them what lessons I have learned over the past 60-odd years...

...Maybe out of this episode will come the realization that an intelligence agency is not an arm of somebody's campaign committee...

...So I'm glad to be considered a walking history book, as long as I'm still walking...

...Little did I realize at the time that television would transform the nature of my chosen profession...

...President Ronald Reagan used the CIA to send arms to Guatemala and Iran...

...Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Misusing the CIA The flap over the "outing" of Central Intelligence Agency officer Valerie Piarne, wife of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson iy has boiled up into one of those periodic clashes between intelligence professionals and White House politicos that sometimes look like subterranean civil war...

...That prompted China, as the host of the six-power meeting, to criticize the United States as the main obstacle to a diplomatic solution...

...I grew up in a world without jet planes or ballpoint pens, without nylon hose or atomic bombs...

...A Rhodes scholar who was first in his class at West Point and was wounded in Vietnam, Clark has the necessary pedigree for a candidate in a time of security concerns...

...Fewer tears and fewer flags...

...President Bush, in his speech to Congress after the 9/11 attacks, announced that we were in a "different kind of war," and summoned Americans to "live your lives and hug your children...

...Only when the issue bubbled up into a hot political controversy did the President ask for an investigation...

...While the Reagan Administration condemned the use of chemical weapons as a "grave violation" of international law, no sanctions were imposed on the Baghdad regime...

...Since leaving Ted Turner's CNN in 1985 andjoining NPR, I have found a satisfying home for the evening of my career...

...A contingent led by France demanded an almost immediate transfer of token sovereignty, and a gradual transfer of real power in six to nine months...

...The more vulnerable the President appears in the international community, the more vulnerable he is likely to appear in an American community not enchanted with going it alone if that means paying alone...

...Challenged by Pyongyang If one were to list the "axis of evil" countries in order of potential nuclear threat, one would likely name North Korea, which supposedly already has nuclear weapons, then Iran, which may be on the road to acquiring them, and finally Iraq...

...The Washington Post reported one no-bid contract worth $ 1.7 billion for a subsidiary of the Halliburton Company, formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney...

...UN delegates could follow on television the sharp Senate debate, including Ted Kennedy's (D.Mass...

...At the meeting in Beijing, North Korea offered to dismantle its nuclear facilities and submit to inspection after the United States signed a nonaggression pact...

...In his May 1 victory speech from the deck of the aircraft earner Abraham Lincoln, the President said the battle of Iraq was "one victory in the war on terror that began on September 11...

...I must admit that I enjoyed a lot of it, especially opening the CBS bureau in Moscow and getting Soviet Party chief Nikita S. Khrushchev to sit down for his first television interview—or covering Watergate and finding my name on Nixon's enemies list...

...But Kim has cleverly contrived to shift the blame for the stalemate from himself to the hard-liners at the White House...

...President John F. Kennedy involved the CIA in a scheme to kill Cuba's Fidel Castro...

...My most consequential scoop was revealing on the CBS Evening News in 1975 that, under several Presidents, the CIA had tried to assassinate Fidel Castro and various other Third World leaders...

...The world should have acted sooner," said Powell to Kurdish families at a mass gravesite...

...But 15 years later, I would be abandoning print journalism and joining Edward R. Murrow at CBS...

...After an unproductive six-power meeting in Beijing in late August that included an unscheduled one-on-one between Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly and his North Korean counterpart, the Pyongyang government pronounced itself no longer interested in the sterile discussions and talked once again of a possible nuclear test...

...Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was less than convincing, at least to Democrats, when he argued before the Senate Appropriations Committee in a stormy session that the $87 billion is an affordable and needed investment in international security...

...President Kennedy, during the Cold War, called on Americans to "pay any price, bear any burden and meet any hardship in defense of liberty...

...Identifying undercover officers can be immensely damaging and, in fact, is a felony under a 1982 statute...

...In a Fox News interview, Bush said that meanwhile the United Nations can work on a constitution because "they're good at that...

...In his United Nations speech six days later, though, Bush said Iraq was "the central front" in the war against terrorism, as if reluctant to give up the theme of an Iraqterrorism link...

...Eight days later, on July 14, syndicated columnist Robert Novak fingers Wilson's wife as an undercover CIA "operative" dealing with weapons of mass destruction, and adds, "Two senior Administration officials told me his wife suggested sending Wilson to Niger...

...Then the White House presumably became aware that Wilson worked in President Bill Clinton's White House and contributed to Democratic campaigns...

...With the official start of the precampaign season, the money issue has immediately become political...

...Four Score and Seven Years Ago A personal aside: National Public Radio (NPR) asked me to reflect on reaching the age of 87...

...The outside world has long speculated on whether Kim Jong II—who deifies himself and luxuriates in feasts, dancing girls and fleets of Mercedes cars while millions of his people starve—can be considered rational...

...On NBC's Meet the Press on September 14, Vice President Cheney said Iraq was "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11...

...Bush's Iraq Dilemma In the United Nations General Assembly on September 23, Secretary-General Kofi Annan drew more applause deploring the "unilateral and lawless use of force" than President George W Bush got appealing for help from "all nations of goodwill...

...With guerrilla attacks continuing, the Bush Administration refused to set any timetable...

...If you can fake that, you've got it made...

...The transfer of power is more than an abstract issue, since it involves who awards the reconstruction contracts, currently flowing almost entirely to American companies...

...The Administration says that would be too great a sacrifice because it would put a damper on the stillshaky economy...

...I interact with journalists a third to a half my age who seem to regard me as a walking history book...

...Neither massive inspections on the ground nor a series of interrogations of scientists and technicians has yet to produce the weapons of mass destruction that were supposed to put the United States in danger imminent enough to justify pre-emptive action...

...Although President Bush commandeered 20 minutes of prime time television to tell us that the ongoing war on terrorism would take time and require sacrifices, he still had trouble defining sacrifice in terms other than money...

...But if there was a detailed American counterproposal, it was not disclosed...

...Then there was the bizarre new justification for the war offered by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell...

...The current episode began with irritation in the White House that the CIA was not more helpful in supporting the Administration claim of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program, badly needed as a justification for war...

...In his State of the Union speech last year, the President called for boosting the AmeriCorps program from 50,000 to 75,000 volunteers...

...Other American companies have shared in reconstruction projects as well...

...So I faked sincerity as best I could, which was not too well, during 23 years at CBS and five years at CNN...

...Little if any money has gone to French, German or other foreign firms...

...It is not surprising that President Chirac would rather deal with an Iraqi official than with former Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III, the chief U.S...

...Now he has summoned Congress to provide an extra $87 billion...

...And yet, the Bush Administration is so consumed with bringing order to Iraq that it is in danger of being outmaneuvered by Kim Jong II's hermit regime...

...That, in turn, served to stiffen the resistance in Congress to voting the President the extra $87 billion he urgently requested for reconstruction in Iraq...

...Some observers believe North Korea will never give up its pursuit of nuclear weapons, the key to its own pre-emption policy...

...So Clark ended up with the Southern Command and four stars...

...Jettisoning Military Jargon Presidential candidate Wesley K. Clark, whom I know slightly, shares a quality with Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of the most popular Presidents of our time, and Colin Powell, who might have been had he chosen to run...

...And the hard place is getting progressively harder as the Pentagon approaches a decision on whether, in the absence of a UN-sponsored multinational division, it would be necessary to call up additional National Guard and reserve troops...

...Since then the Administration has become much less definite about the Iraq-9/11 link...

...Democrats would withhold tax deductions from millionaires...

...The Pew poll sums up the President's dilemma...

...If Kim is crazy, he sure ain't stupid...

...International Discontent There was also an emerging conflict about how soon governing authority should be turned over to the Iraqis...

...President Harry S. Truman, during the Korean War, reimposed wage and price controls that had lapsed after World War II...

...A Different Kind of War The SECOND 9/11 anniversary was different from 9/11 plus one...

...Although Tenet nevertheless said his agency cleared the State of the Union address in which Bush mentioned Niger uranium, that didn't help much...

...The smooth-talking general enlisted the interest of Defense Secretary William J. Perry, and even President Clinton...

...Most of my career was dominated by the search for the scoop...

...They could read in the newspapers, too, that the latest Pew research poll showed 59 per cent of Americans opposing the $87 billion appropriation...

...France, for example, was said to be ready to train Iraqi soldiers and police, but wanted a share of the reconstruction billions for French companies, which have a long history of lucrative dealings with Iraq...

...and concluded that however aberrant his behavior, he is playing a weak hand in masterful fashion...

...I no longer pursue scoops, but concentrate on the context and the meaning of things...

...And without television, which I first saw demonstrated at the New York World's Fair in 1939...

...President Franklin D. Roosevelt, after Pearl Harbor, summoned Americans to pay higher taxes and deny themselves creature comforts...

...When Wilson went public on July 6 with a New York Times Op-Ed article headed, "What I Didn't Find In Africa," one can imagine the explosions around the White House...

...This has all the earmarks of revenge against Wilson by somebody with access to secret information and a score to settle...

...Maybe Bob Novak's Deep Throat will come forward, but don't bet on it...

...As a justification for the invasion of Iraq 15 years later, that is almost embarrassing...

...I was then still of the "Hello, sweetheart, get me rewrite" school...

...administrator in Iraq...

...On CNN's Crossfire, he spoke out against permitting a long-term deficit...

...As one tends to do at my advanced age, I looked back to other Presidents who had called for sacrifice in wartime...

...When I asked a young producer the secret of success for a print reporter going into television, he replied, "Sincerity...

...Under pressure to come up with something solid, CIA Director George J. Tenet recruited Wilson, a veteran Africa hand, to go to Niger and scout out rumors of uranium shipments to Iraq...

...He has argued for affirmative action and against a big tax cut...

...Ranking Democrat Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia demanded to know, "Where is the mandate from the American people to carry out the reconstruction of Iraq...

...Then, as often happens, North Korea abruptly reversed course and said it was interested in further discussion of its nuclear program...

...In Search of a Rationale More than six months after the invasion of Iraq, the war there remains in search of a rationale...

...In the Foreign Relations Committee, ranking Democrat Joseph R. Biden of Delaware said he did not expect more than $2 billion or $3 billion from international donors—"a harsh example of the price of unilateralism...

...And since there are today more pressures than ever to conform, to avoid rocking the boat, I'm prone to advise: At least once in your lifetime take a risk for a principle you believe in, even if it brings you up against your bosses...

...Washington dismissed that idea out of hand, President Bush saying he would not be blackmailed...

...In any event, some who would define sacrifice in terms of service to the community won't get the chance...

...UN members have been slow to come forward with pledges of troops and money...

...In an extensive article in the New Yorker magazine, Philip Gourevitch examined that question under the headline "How Crazy is Kim...

...Two days later Defense Secretary Rumsfeld seemed to contradict the Vice President when he told a news conference that he had no reason to believe Saddam Hussein had a hand in the 9/11 attacks...

...Presidents and their staffs tend to regard the CIA as a private covert action force meant to support White House policy...

...In a visit to the Kurdish region in northern Iraq, Powell said a 1988 poison gas attack that killed some 5,000 Kurds was justification enough for bringing down the Saddam Hussein regime...

...Note that the first request to the Justice Department for an investigation of the leak came from the CIA...

...But don't bet on that either...

...There is a kind of interactive effect between the Potomac and the East River...