Global Policy Forum

By Richard Goodwin

In 1846 President James Polk announced that Mexican troops had fired on American soldiers on American soil, and he took the country to a war that eventually gained it California, New Mexico and Arizona. Was the disputed soil ours? Probably not. Did Polk distort the information he had? Almost certainly. He wanted the territory, and he needed a war to get it.

A first-term representative warned that if you "allow the president to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion . . . you allow him to make war at pleasure." For these words, Abraham Lincoln received the usual reward of political courage: he forfeited any chance of a return to Congress and was retired to private life for more than a decade. (Although he would do quite well after that.)

Our current dispute over the intelligence that led to the invasion of Iraq seems to be yet another illustration of this eternal principle: presidents and other decision makers usually get the intelligence they want. This doesn't mean that intelligence reports should be ignored, but that they must be viewed with skepticism. And in my years in government service, I had the misfortune to see desire win out over skepticism too many times.

In 1961, when I was 28 and fresh to the Kennedy White House from the campaign trail, I climbed to the upper reaches of the State Department for a high-level meeting to discuss the planned invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Almost every top official involved in the operation, except for the president, was there. Richard Bissell, a legendary figure of cold war intelligence, the man responsible for the U-2 spy plane, assured us that once the American-backed rebels had established themselves, the Cuban people would rise up against Castro. Rather tentatively, I asked Bissell how we had reached this conclusion. He calmly turned to the general sitting beside him and said, rather casually, "We have an N.I.E. on that, don't we?" referring to a classified National Intelligence Estimate. The general nodded.

In fact, no such intelligence estimate existed. But Bissell's primary interest in intelligence data was that it help him get presidential approval of an operation to which he had devoted so much energy. Perhaps, having received so many assurances from Cuban exiles, he truly believed the claim. But he was wrong and John F. Kennedy was wrong to trust him — and the disaster that unfolded on the Cuban shore in April was the result.

To his credit, President Kennedy learned from the debacle. He reorganized his intelligence apparatus and brought advisers whose instincts and moral compasses he trusted — including his brother Bobby — into the inner circle of foreign policy deliberation. Most important, the lesson that intelligence and military advisers had to be thoroughly challenged guided Kennedy as he later steered the country through the Cuban missile crisis.

Unfortunately, this lesson was largely lost on the next administration. In 1965, the duly elected but deposed president of the Dominican Republic, Juan Bosch, was leading a revolution against the military cabal that had displaced him. A panicky telegram from our ambassador detailing (largely imaginary) horrors in Santo Domingo's streets led Lyndon B. Johnson to send in the Marines.

With our troops already in the air, Johnson called a White House meeting to explain the decision he had already made. Gathered in the Cabinet Room, we were told by William Raborn, the incoming head of the C.I.A., that Communists had infiltrated, perhaps even dominated, the Bosch insurgency. That belief, not any supposed bloodshed, was of course the real reason for Johnson's intervention.

After the meeting, Bill Moyers, also a Johnson aide, and I met privately with some C.I.A. staff members. "Who were these Communists," we asked, "and how do we know?" We were given incredibly flimsy evidence, such as that one Bosch confederate had been seen in an apartment building suspected of housing a Communist cell. It proved nothing. Yet 20,000 marines had been sent to forestall this enemy whose very existence was suspect.

The crisis ended relatively peacefully, but not before a storm of criticism — from the public, the press and Congress — descended on the president, bringing his "honeymoon" to an abrupt end. Unlike Kennedy, Johnson made no change to the intelligence system that had misled us.

After I resigned from the White House, in 1967, I was asked by the Pentagon to attend a meeting to assess our Vietnam intelligence. The group consisted of several Nobel laureate scientists and a few others including the political scientist Richard Neustadt and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith. What concerned us were the military's "body count" figures of how many we had killed and also the "infiltration rate" statistics on the flow of men and supplies from North Vietnam to the South. When we looked behind the comforting figures, it was clear that the method of calculating them was prone to enormous error. The same bodies were counted by different units, and often just guessed at. The infiltration rate was based on the observations of spies along the Ho Chi Minh trail, who often concealed themselves in the nearby jungle to evade death or capture, and therefore had no idea what was contained in the covered trucks rolling by.

We concluded that the figures the government triumphantly publicized to justify its claims of success could have been off by 10 percent or by 300 percent because "the data is so soft that we cannot state with confidence whether we have been doing better or worse militarily over the past year." These conclusions were ignored. The generals and the president wanted higher body counts and lower infiltration numbers. And that's what they got.

Those now trying to figure out what went wrong before the war in Iraq should bear in mind a simple truth: we are more likely to "know" what we want to know than what we don't want to know. That human flaw is built into the very process of making intelligence estimates. Perhaps the only way to counter it is if those who make the final decision beware taking a large risk on what is, inevitably, speculation. As Kennedy told the National Security Council in the days after the Bay of Pigs, "we're not going to have any search for scapegoats . . . the final responsibilities of any failure is mine, and mine alone."

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