| if there was a mistake made, it needs to be admitted, and the proper actions taken to right it.
I'm sure you've seen the uproar in the media over it. Yesterday the Director chose to take personal responsibility for the decision, and of course that reflects on all of us here and subjects the entire agency to some level of shame. I want you to know that the Director and I both understand very well that you could not possibly have imagined that this kind of an uproar could occur over something like this. Leaving the sentence in the speech can today be seen as a mistake, but only because interim events have caused it to become one. In the ordinary course of events, the decision you made would have been a routine one that disappeared into the past along with thousands of other decisions we all make every day. We hope you learn something from this. This is a rough town, and people play hardball. As you review these things, you need to look past whether they are factual or supportable. You have to ask what sort of hay your worst enemy could make with something if they took it out of context and harped on it. You see what happened here. Subsequent to your approving the item, some documents supporting the estimate were determined to be forgeries. A deep political rift had opened up in the country over the war and its purposes, and your sentence -- now thought to be false -- became a cudgel in the hands of certain partisans in the media. You have to expect this. It is how the town works. There is always going to be a reporter out there who wants to make his mark by skewering the Agency, or the President, or some policy. These people will seize on anything ever said or written, no matter how peripheral or trivial, and try to blow it up into the next Watergate. No one is going to hold you accountable for what happened here. There is no way you could have foreseen it. Learn the lesson from it, imagine enemies watching over your shoulder every time you review these kinds of things, and hopefully you won't be the guy who draws the lightning next time. |
OK, I'll be happy to do that right here. Lucky for us, I was able to arrange with Scotty to have the deputy assistant policy planner at the CIA — the one who signed off on this language — beamed right into the thread. So you can listen in while I try to make sure this never happens again.