When Presidents Deceive

Democrats have pounced indignantly on the recent revelation that President Bush relied on forged documents when he asserted last January that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Niger. “This may be the first time in recent history that a president knowingly misled the American people during the State of the Union address,” said Democratic Party Chairman Terry McAuliffe.

But far from being an aberration, presidential manipulation of intelligence is an American tradition practiced by Democrats and Republicans alike. During the past century, presidents, in displays of both self-deception and deliberate chicanery, have used highly suspect intelligence to justify action or inaction abroad.

The manipulating began with America’s rise to empire early in the 20th century. The architect of that empire, Theodore Roosevelt, relied upon America’s only organized espionage unit, the Office of Naval Intelligence, to provide him with inflated threat assessments. To help justify building more American battleships, he seized on rumors reported by the U.S. naval attache in Berlin that Japan’s Adm. Heihachiro Togo was traveling around Germany buying weapons with bags of Chinese gold. He also demanded and got inflated estimates of foreign navies’ shipbuilding programs. Naval intelligence officers were too cowed by Roosevelt to dispute his notion that battleships were key to American military supremacy. The result, writes Christopher Andrews in “For the President’s Eyes Only,” was that “at the outbreak of the First World War, the United States was to be desperately short of destroyers.”

Nor was Roosevelt’s domestic foe, Woodrow Wilson, immune to the temptation to exaggerate intelligence findings. With U.S. entry into World War I looming, Wilson played up German subversion, going far beyond what was actually known in insisting that Germans had filled “unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators, and sought to corrupt the opinion of our people in their own behalf.... And many of our own people were corrupted.”

After World War II broke out, in an attempt to frighten the U.S. into entering the war, the British provided Franklin Roosevelt with false intelligence documents suggesting a Nazi plot to take over Latin America. Roosevelt was warned by the State Department and FBI that the British claims were greatly exaggerated. In particular, they questioned the authenticity of a letter that was supposedly from the Bolivian military attache in Berlin.

Nevertheless, in a fireside chat Sept. 11, 1941, Roosevelt warned that Hitler was infiltrating Latin American governments to gain “footholds and bridgeheads in the New World, to be used as soon as he has gained control of the oceans. ... Conspiracy has followed conspiracy.” On Oct. 27, in his most important foreign policy speech before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt relied on a map he had been warned had probably been forged by British intelligence: “I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler’s government -- by planners of the New World Order.... This map, my friends, makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States as well.”

On Aug. 4, 1964, Lyndon Johnson took the plunge into intelligence manipulation. In order to justify radically escalating the Vietnam War, he appeared on national TV with the sobering news that a U.S. ship had been attacked that day in the Gulf of Tonkin. Although there had been a skirmish in the area two days earlier, the events of Aug. 4 were not at all clear. Johnson delivered his message to the American people despite the fact that the ship’s captain had already reported to the Joint Chiefs of Staff his doubts about whether the attack had taken place, saying that “reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. Freak weather reports and overeager sonar men may have accounted for many reports.” The captain concluded by suggesting a “complete evaluation before further action.”

Richard M. Nixon and his secretary of State, Henry A. Kissinger, also showed themselves willing to exaggerate or downplay threats in order to justify actions. In the administration’s early years, Kissinger exaggerated the Russian missile threat, as he wanted Congress to approve an antiballistic missile system. But by 1972, he was soft-pedaling the Russian threat in an attempt to win approval for the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks treaty. Later, when the CIA spotted Soviet infractions of SALT I, Kissinger, according to Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones in “The CIA and American Democracy,” “exploited his dominant position to hush up the evidence.”

During the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, intelligence again became highly politicized. Pressure from the administration for worst-case estimates prompted a declaration from the CIA that the Soviet Union was in no danger of collapse -- even as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was dismantling the “evil empire.” And while the administration was trying to sell arms for hostages to Iran, CIA official Robert Gates prevented Iran analysts from disseminating information to a White House that was uninterested in hearing news that didn’t support the overture to the mullahs. Gates’ reward for his loyalty to the Reagan administration was to be promoted in 1991 to head the agency by President Bush, who had himself been CIA director.

Given the historical record of the presidents who came before, it would have been more surprising if Bush had not manipulated intelligence.