John Huizenga Quotes
I really do not believe that an intelligence organization in this government is able to deliver an honest analytical product without facing the risk of political contention.
John Huizenga, *, CIA Executive, CIA Oral History Interview
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Bill Casey had an individual ideology of the world and being a strong administrator imposed that on most of intelligence analyses that the agency did during his tenure.
The CIA did not have a long tradition. It was created after WWII when the OSS was are espionage organization had been disbanded In the early days of the Cold War, the CIA went rogue and engaged in covert activities without the knowledge and approval of the President and his cabinet. General Maxwell Taylor conducted a thorough investigation and the agency was brought under control. There hav been several more incidents since then and every few years there have been additional scandals of unauthorized operations which were harmful to American interests and values. In a democracy it is always hard to control a secret organization. Actually, at the beginning of WWII, we had almost no espionage capability and President Roosevelt had a series of friends who provided him with intelligence until William Donavan had time to establish the OSS which did such a wonderful job.
Senator Church was the chairman of the committee. It’s reports (14 in all) are the most extensive documentation of U. S. intelligence ever compiled.
This radical reform did not make much headway. The “need to know" standard used specific knowledge to signify the status of different officials and was intended to minimize the likelihood of intelligence leaking as few people saw the whole picture and understood the implications. But that was the great weakness in that the major purpose of intelligence is to analyze the information and guide the nation’s policies and responses to events and situations. Without all the information available so many intelligence and other officials are unable to ‘connect the dots’ and see the picture emerging. The attack of September 11 was a classic example where much of the information that was known never was conveyed to most people and so no one had a big enough picture. By the time one could establish a ‘need to know’ it was too late to utilize the conclusions even if they were reached in time.
After the invasion, much of the intelligence upon which America relied on Invading Iraq turned out to be completely wrong. It turned out that the Vice President at least, a major supporter of the invasion, had a role in “shaping” the intelligence and analysis to achieve a policy objective.
During the George W, Bush Administration, key politicians, including the vice president pressured and influenced the CIA and to produce intelligence reports that justified their policy of invading Iraq. After the invasion, the weapons of mass destruction were shown to have never existed even though they were the official causes belli (cause of the war).
The CIA has never denied this, and it seems to be corroborated in that none of the CIA reports to the Presidents ever mentioned the failures and there is no CIA official who ever claimed that they informed either of the Presidents. In particular, when Kennedy initially went along with the ill-fated CIA Bay of Pigs invasion plan not realizing that the CIA had a dismal record of major misjudgments and failures of covert operations.
John Robert Huizenga was an American physicist who helped build the first atomic bomb and who also debunked Utah scientists' claim of achieving cold fusion.
