In My Time - Dick Cheney [220]
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POLICYMAKERS and the intelligence community has long been complicated. Faulty intelligence in the Bay of Pigs operation infuriated President Kennedy and eventually led to the resignation of CIA head Allen Dulles. The exposure of unsavory intelligence activities during the Vietnam era led to the congressional Pike and Church committees and the public airing of some of the CIA’s most sensitive secrets. During the investigation in the 1980s of covert arms sales to Iran and diversion of proceeds to aid the Nicaraguan Contras, dedicated intelligence professionals doing what they thought they were supposed to do ended up as targets of an independent counsel, and few were the policymakers defending them. Taking a long-term perspective, it’s easy to see why both sides had become wary of one another.
What we are asking of our intelligence community in today’s world is exceedingly challenging. Compare it, for example, to their task during the Cold War. What mattered then wasn’t so much the activities of individuals. The Soviets posed a massive military threat, which meant divisions and tanks, artillery and missiles, things you could count that were hard to conceal from satellites—and even then we didn’t always get it right because intelligence is such a tough business. The intelligence requirements of the War on Terror are entirely different and in some ways much more difficult. It’s very hard to detect and track nineteen men with box cutters who intend to fly airplanes into buildings. Technology was on our side during the Cold War, but the situation has in some ways shifted. Now it is possible for an individual or a handful of people to acquire the technological means—a dirty bomb or weaponized anthrax—to kill on a massive scale.
The intelligence that Saddam had stockpiles of WMD was wrong, and this intelligence failure would have an impact on policy during subsequent years of our administration. But I recognized the magnitude of the task the intelligence community faced in trying to predict how far along a secretive, rogue regime was in its most highly sensitive top secret programs.
Intelligence is by its very nature an extremely difficult business, and the public almost never hears about intelligence successes—of which there have been many, very many, particularly in the War on Terror. I have tremendous respect for the men and women who serve our nation in America’s intelligence services. Thousands upon thousands of them go to work every day committed to doing all they can to defend the nation from our enemies, and their commitment is unchanged regardless of which party is in power. Their work has saved countless American lives.
THREE TIMES BEFORE THE 2004 campaign got under way I offered to the president to take myself off the Republican ticket. I had become a lightning rod for attacks from the administration’s critics, and given the challenges we were facing in the War on Terror, in particular, it was critically important that George Bush be reelected. If President Bush felt he had a better chance to win with someone else as his running mate, I wanted to make sure he felt free to make the change.
The first two times I suggested that he might consider replacing me, he brushed it off. So I brought it up again and emphasized the seriousness with which he should consider the matter. He went away and thought about it. A few days later, he told me he wanted me to run with him again. I was honored to do so. We had a record of accomplishment during our first term in office that I was proud to take before the American people.
As I thought about the case we would present to the voters in the 2004 election, I found it useful to think back to what the world had looked like when we took office in January 2001. Unbeknownst to us, planning for 9/11 was well under way. The hijackers had been recruited, funds raised, training was ongoing, and some of the hijackers