Timothy Naftali Quotes
It’s really really hard to penetrate the leadership circles of your enemy.
Timothy Naftali, Political Historian, Director, Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs, Speech, International Spy Museum, July 17, 2005
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Lewis is referring to his time spent as an Intelligence Officer in Naples, Italy.
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).
It is noteworthy that a U. S. President had such a harsh evaluation of our major intelligence agency. Even more important in this case is that this President justified his 2003 decision to invade Iraq and start the war on the intelligence he claimed was provided to him by the CIA that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. This quotation and the President’s view was not public at the time. I all fairness to the CIA staff, many of them had provided a number of caveats and warnings about the unreliability of the information. However, the CIA Director, George Tenant, advised Bush in a way that the caveats were sublimated. See {633093} for more detail.
While it is true that almost all nations have intelligence agencies and collect intelligence about both friends and foes, our allies did not bug the personal phones of leaders of friendly countries and were very distressed when they discovered that the US NSA had access to the personal calls of world leaders including the leaders of Brazil, Germany and France. Rubio and others believed that they only reason our allies had not done so is that they did not have the technical capability to do so; otherwise they would have been bugging our Presidential and cabinet level phones. President Obama ordered the practice stopped with respect to our allies.
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.
Timothy Naftali is a Canadian-American historian who is clinical associate professor of public service at New York University. He has written four books, two of them co-authored with Alexander Fursenko on the Cuban Missile Crisis and Nikita Khrushchev. He is a regular CNN contributor as a CNN presidential historian.
