Regarding Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction, the justification for the 2003 invasion, Hussein admits to Mr. Nixon that it was a mistake for him not to make clear before the war that he had long since gotten rid of them. “Saddam turned philosophical when asked how America got it so wrong about weapons of mass destruction,” Mr. Nixon writes. He quotes him as saying that “the spirit of listening and understanding was not there ... I don't exclude myself from this blame.”
Hussein never understood the United States, and Mr. Nixon describes him as repeatedly mystified by American intentions in the Middle East. After the Sept. 11 attacks, Hussein fatally misread how America would react. He thought the attacks would bring the United States and Iraq closer together to jointly combat Islamic extremists.
“In Saddam's mind, the two natural allies in the fight against extremism,” Mr. Nixon writes, “and, as he said many times during his interrogation, he couldn't understand why the United States did not see eye to eye with him.”
The findings from Mr. Nixon's interrogations of Hussein that cast doubt on the Bush administration's original justifications for the war, Mr. Nixon says, were ignored by senior officials at the C.I.A. and the White House. “The policy makers at the White House and the leadership on the seventh floor at the C.I.A. didn't want to hear that many of the reasons for going after Saddam were based on false premises,” he writes.
Mr. Nixon's most scathing criticism is reserved for the C.I.A., which he describes as a haven for yes-men excessively eager to please the White House. When he joined the C.I.A., Mr. Nixon says, he was told that analysts should “dare to be wrong” - in other words, be willing to take chances when the evidence called for counterintuitive reasoning. But he says experience taught him that the C.I.A. didn't reward out-of-the-box thinking. “As I found out in the Clinton, Bush and Obama years, the agency's real operating principle was ‘dare to be right.’”
Mr. Nixon, who left the C.I.A. in 2011 when, he says, the work no longer excited him, depicts a sclerotic agency not much different from the Agriculture Department or any other large bureaucracy, complaining that the agency “was governed by lines of authority that were often clogged by people who got ahead by playing it safe and who regarded fresh thinking as a danger to their careers.” Since he had to submit the book to the C.I.A.'s censors, he doesn't identify the bureaucrats and timeservers, although he does reserve special wrath for one boss he names only as “Phil,” who, he says, “as a schmoozer, had few equals.”
Mr. Nixon thoughtfully argues that the C.I.A's overeagerness to please the White House has led to a serious degradation in the quality of its intelligence. Virtually the entire analytical arm of the C.I.A. is focused on the issues of the day that are immediately read at the White House. But the agency has largely abandoned its tradition of freeing up analysts to engage in deeper, long-term research. As a result, Mr. Nixon writes, few analysts at the agency now know very much about anything. “Expertise is not valued, indeed not trusted.”
The C.I.A.'s brief memos have become like “crack cocaine for consumers of classified information,” Mr. Nixon says. It's as if the C.I.A's analytical branch has been transformed from a college faculty into a cable news network.
The trend toward quick-hitting but shallow intelligence reports which other former C.I.A. analysts have also criticized in recent years, particularly since 9/11 - makes the agency much more susceptible to manipulation and politicization, and to repeating the kinds of mistakes it made when it inaccurately concluded that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
When it came to Iraq, Mr. Nixon writes, the “agency slavishly sought to do the president's bidding - as it usually does - in an effort to get a seat nearer the center of power and justify its budget. That was the institutional imperative.”
Mr. Trump may soon test whether the C.I.A. has learned any lessons.
