Looking closely at this tangle

JAMES RISEN’S “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration” is a damning and dismaying book.

Its underlying thesis is that the Bush administration has mucked up virtually everything it has touched when it comes to terrorism, the international Sunni Muslim insurgency created by jihadism and nuclear proliferation.

As a national security reporter for the New York Times, Risen has produced some of this era’s best journalism on the Central Intelligence Agency and the dysfunctional relationship between the White House and the U.S. spy community.

“No other institution failed in its mission as completely during the Bush years as did the CIA,” Risen writes. “It was already deeply troubled by the time he took office in 2001.... By the end of Bush’s first term, the CIA looked like the government’s equivalent of Enron, an organization whose bankruptcy triggered cries for reform.”

Some of the counts supporting that indictment are now familiar ground: how the CIA enabled the administration to make the case for the invasion of Iraq by falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of acquiring weapons of mass destruction as well as conducting warrantless electronic spying inside the United States by the National Security Agency at Bush’s behest.

Still, Risen provides valuable and troubling detail on both those situations, particularly with regard to the treatment of intelligence and diplomatic professionals whose analysis contradicted what the White House wanted to hear. For example, the CIA’s post-invasion station chief in Baghdad was dismissed when he insisted on telling the truth about how the overthrow of Hussein had plunged the country into chaos and had turned it, in fact, into a center for an Al Qaeda-backed insurgency with regional and global implications.

Similarly, a State Department official who attempted to sound the alarm about American tolerance for post-Taliban Afghanistan’s degeneration into a narco-state was ignored and punished. Today, Afghanistan is the world’s leading producer of heroin, and proceeds from drug trafficking account for an estimated 52% of the country’s gross domestic product.

Risen has other urgent and disturbing things to say about the almost willfully botched hunt for Osama bin Laden as well as the administration’s and CIA’s extraordinary diffidence toward Saudi Arabia, despite evidence that sympathy and financial support for the jihadi insurgents runs through the uppermost levels of the Wahhabi kingdom. As Risen points out, that diffidence has led the United States to rely totally on the Saudis for its information on what’s going on inside that strategically vital country. In other words, we don’t have any spies there.

Equally disconcerting, a mistake by a CIA communications officer working out of the agency’s headquarters in 2004 handed the Tehran government the identities of every American agent inside Iran. A few years earlier, another incompetent operation by the agency actually put in the mullahs’ hands the plans for a Russian-designed nuclear trigger.

An investigative reporter, particularly one who is trolling in the opaque bureaucratic pools of national security, inevitably finds himself in deep waters.

The loyal, satisfied and discreet don’t talk; the rash, disgruntled and self-interested often do. That doesn’t mean they aren’t telling the truth. It just means that their information must be handled with care. Books like “State of War” are not works of scholarship with footnotes that can be checked. They’re sourced like extended newspaper or magazine stories, which is essentially what they are.

This is particularly true of Risen’s volume, which -- despite bookish affectations, like a prologue and afterword -- makes no pretense to narrative structure. It is episodic and told in unornamented prose. In this case, that’s less a criticism than an observation. There are times when artfulness is entirely beside the point.

What isn’t beside the point is a consideration of motives and methods. In other words, did Risen’s collection of facts proceed according to an agenda and are his sources to be trusted? Before publication, “State of War” was denounced in some conservative quarters as anti-Bush propaganda bordering on treason and cited on the left as evidence that the New York Times had been sitting on information regarding domestic spying that might have prevented Bush’s reelection. Others can plumb these particular fever swamps. (If Risen is an ideologue and the New York Times editors Bush apologists, the terms have lost all meaning and there is no hope for any of us. In fact, when Risen and I worked together on the Los Angeles Times’ national staff, I don’t recall that he ever expressed a political view.) The question of sourcing, though, is a substantive one.

In an introductory note, Risen confronts the issue: “Many people have criticized the use of anonymous sources of late. Yet all reporters know that the very best stories -- the most important, the most sensitive -- rely on them.” As one of the Washington press corps’ best reporters on national security issues, Risen has a record of being right. It’s not an unblemished record, however. In 1999, he and New York Times colleague Jeff Gerth went spectacularly wrong when they relied on a disgruntled energy department investigator’s allegations that a Taiwanese American scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Wen Ho Lee, was passing nuclear secrets to the Chinese. Lee was innocent, a victim -- if not of xenophobic bigotry, then of official paranoia and hysteria abetted by the New York Times’ reporting and commentary. Risen, among others, is still in court, fighting legal orders that he disclose his sources’ names.

So, when it comes to assessing journalism -- which is what “State of War” is, and its standards are the ones by which it must be judged -- it’s a good idea to follow Ronald Reagan’s maxim: “Trust, but verify.”

When you apply that criterion, Risen’s book looks very good. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and original reporting by the Los Angeles Times and others essentially supports Risen’s reconstruction of how the administration willed itself into believing otherwise. The allegations of widespread and, probably, illegal domestic spying by the NSA first reported in the New York Times by Risen and Eric Lichtblau have turned out to be true.

This week, a stunningly detailed Wall Street Journal report completely supported “State of War’s” contentions concerning Afghanistan’s emergence as a narco-state. The odds are, therefore, that when other news organizations follow his reporting on the unfolding Iran debacle and the sinister implications of the Saudi situation, the broad outlines of Risen’s reporting on those situations also will prove to be true.

Considered in that light, “State of War” is a welcome reminder that American journalism has a higher purpose than shallow pandering to the lowest pop-cultural denominator. Somewhere, beyond celebrity, there are issues and ideas that matter. James Risen’s book is an urgent contribution to the country’s common good by a skillful and courageous reporter.

Beginning Wednesday, Tim Rutten’s book reviews will appear weekly in Calendar, for which he will also continue to write the Regarding Media column.