Rowan Scarborough of the Washington Examiner spoke today about his new book, Sabotage: America’s Enemies Within the CIA, at the Heritage Foundation. The book focuses on what Scarborough characterizes as a campaign by some at the CIA to undermine the conduct of the war on terror, spread misinformation about senior officials, and embarrass the president. Scarborough has previously provided excerpts of the book to his paper; you can find the first of five here. Scarborough explains how some at the agency undermined the work of intelligence analysts at the Pentagon, and elsewhere, who drew different conclusions:
. ..The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) pressed the CIA to cooperate. Years of CIA intelligence reports – some mature, others raw and unconfirmed – started arriving at the Pentagon. Maloof and Wurmser set up shop inside the supersecure National Military Intelligence Center on the Pentagon’s third floor. By December, they had produced a 150-slide briefing on contacts among al Qaeda, Iraq and Iran. “The agency blew a gasket,” Maloof recalled. Maloof did not fully realize how his mission offended the extremely territorial Langley. Wolfowitz and others pushed the CIA to do better and some in the CIA did not like it. Soon, Democratic lawmakers, principally U.S. Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, began charging that Feith had set up an illegal organization. Levin, using the friendly Washington Post and New York Times, launched a campaign against a “rogue” intelligence cell inside the Defense Department.
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