Spy tales lack street smarts

If the events of the last few weeks have reminded readers and viewers of the American news media of anything, it’s that reporting from and about spies is a worse-than-tricky proposition.

First came the admission that wannabe Iraqi strongman Ahmad Chalabi and members of his circle greased the skids to war by duping the Bush administration and the New York Times with a series of fabricated and exaggerated claims regarding Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

That was followed by articles Wednesday that said the Iraqi exile leader and at least one of his aides had informed the Iranian intelligence agency that the United States had cracked its secret code and was monitoring its communications. According to an account in the New York Times, Chalabi met with the Baghdad station chief of Tehran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security about six weeks ago and told him the Americans had broken his agency’s encryption system.

The Los Angeles Times reported Thursday that FBI counterintelligence agents were planning to question officials of the U.S. Department of Defense, where just a handful of individuals knew of the code-breaking, in an attempt to discover whether any of them might have slipped Chalabi the information. For his part, the Iraqi -- a longtime pet of the administration’s neoconservative wing -- denies the accusations, which he says are a CIA smear. (Maybe the agency didn’t get the joke after 1,000 of its specialists spent fruitless months combing the Iraqi wastes for those illusive weapons of mass destruction.)

Thursday, CIA Director George J. Tenet, looking down the barrel of not one but two forthcoming reports that savage his agency’s performance during the Al Qaeda and Iraqi crises, abruptly resigned. He wants, he said, to spend more time with his family. One would like to take public servants at their word, but if that’s the best cover story America’s spook-in-chief can come up with, no wonder we’re in this mess. The conventions of journalism, however, require reporting such things with a straight face.

Both the Chalabi and Tenet stories reflect an unsurprising lack of skepticism on the part of the media about stories involving, in one way or another, the intelligence community. Intelligence sources and their activities long have exerted a seductive attraction to journalists precisely because of the spies’ presumed possession of secret knowledge, a hidden truth available only to the elect -- what the ancient Greeks called gnosis. It always has been a problematic attraction, made even more so by this administration’s predilection for what one CIA veteran calls “faith-based intelligence.”

The peril has been amplified by the easy compatibility between many journalists and the neoconservative intellectuals, who have dominated the Defense Department’s thinking under Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. One of the reasons the neocons swing so easily between think tanks, government service and high-profile media slots is that, like many reporters, they have a glib, wiseguy fluency derived from a theoretical rather than experiential understanding of the world.

The inconvenient real world, however, yields grudgingly to theory. Take the case of Chalabi, the neoconservatives’ putative liberator, a cloaked De Gaulle-in-waiting. With all respect to Paul D. Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and their confreres and journalistic admirers, just how street smart do you have to be to know that you shouldn’t put too much faith in a guy wanted for bank fraud -- in Jordan?

Unwelcome surprises

Even when intelligence sources aren’t engaged in overt manipulation or wishful thinking, there’s ample reason for reporters and editors not to accept their aura of omniscience -- or, at least, to keep it in historical context. As Thomas Powers, one of America’s foremost scholars of intelligence and the author of the forthcoming “Intelligence Wars: American Secret History From Hitler to Al-Qaeda,” recently wrote, “In its first half-century the CIA got lots of things wrong.... In 1950 it failed to foresee intervention by the Chinese in the Korean War, a mistake that almost resulted in American armies being driven entirely from the peninsula. In 1968 the agency was surprised by the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, a failure repeated in 1979 when the agency failed to predict the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.

“Ten years after that the [CIA] estimators continued to issue new alarms about Soviet power and intentions almost until the very moment the Berlin Wall came down, signaling the true end of the cold war, an event soon followed by a still greater astonishment -- the actual collapse and breakup of the Soviet Union itself.”

Not long after the latter event, in fact, this columnist happened to lunch with Judge William H. Webster, then director of central intelligence. Assertions about the Soviet empire’s inherent instability and speculation about its collapse, Powers had pointed out, long had been the province of passionately anti-communist scholars, like Robert Conquest and Richard Pipes. But, given the trillions of dollars and man-hours the agency had expended spying on Moscow since 1948, the director was asked, was there anyone within the CIA who ever had foreseen the Soviets’ utter collapse?

Webster murmured, no, then reconsidered, looked up and, half-smiling, said, “Well, there was one guy....”

Was there any chance to know his name or, perhaps, speak with him?

“No,” the director laughed.

This columnist has since imagined that lone, heretical analyst spending the last years of his dead-end career analyzing the figures on gross wool production collected by the agency’s Ulan Bator station.

For all the talk of investigations and getting to the bottom of things, we probably will never know precisely what carnage was created by Chalabi’s compromise of our Iranian code-breaking operation. Historians only recently have come to understand how decisively the history of World War II was determined by Britain’s ability to read the German’s Enigma code and by America’s decipherment of the Japanese navy’s encrypted messages.

One of the attributes that breeds journalistic infatuation with intelligence stories and sources is the tantalizing permission they confer to play “what if?” How, for example, might the Second World War have played out if the Soviet moles in British intelligence had not betrayed Munich’s anti-Nazi White Rose circle to Berlin? What might have occurred, had the OSS’ man in Switzerland, Allen Dulles, been permitted to respond encouragingly to any of the overtures that Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, Germany’s intelligence agency, made about betraying Hitler?

This week, a former CIA station chief passed along some fascinating speculation said to be circulating among some veterans of the agency’s operational directorate: What if Chalabi was an Iranian double agent all along? Tehran’s virulent hatred of Saddam Hussein was matched only by its antipathy to the United States. By using Chalabi’s disinformation to goad the United States into attacking Hussein, Iran got rid of him and enmeshed Washington in a costly occupation that leaves it increasingly discredited throughout the Mideast. Tehran is free of two enemies and free to angle for a kind of Shiite mini-state in southern Iraq over which it could act as a patron.

The ultimate winners of the second Persian Gulf War, in other words, may be the hard-eyed mullahs of Qom.

Could that ultimately be the secret history of this war?

We may never know. As John le Carre’s George Smiley once said, “That’s the thing about secrets.”