Bolton Tried to Intimidate Analyst, Ex-Official Says

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The White House nominee for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations attempted to politicize intelligence by intimidating a State Department analyst over the question of whether Cuba had a biological weapons program, a former senior State Department official testified yesterday (see GSN, April 12).

“Clearly, there was at least an attempt at pressuring this analyst to do something that he didn’t want to do,” said former Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research Carl Ford, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the nomination of Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton.

The attempt was unsuccessful, he said. “It wasn’t politicization because thankfully the analyst was strong enough to say no, and the State Department management, from the top down, backed that analyst up and said, ‘you did it fine.’”

The committee of 10 Republicans and eight Democrats could vote as soon as tomorrow on Bolton. A majority vote is needed for the nomination to go to the Senate for consideration.

Ford said Bolton in 2002 personally chastised Christian Westermann, a senior biological weapons analyst in the State Department’s intelligence bureau, and sought to have him fired for opposing a claim Bolton sought to include in a speech that Cuba had a biological warfare program.

After the scolding, Ford said he met with Bolton and told him that he could include the contended language in a speech, as long as he made it clear it was a personal opinion and not one of the U.S. intelligence community.

He said he essentially told Bolton that if “he was going to say the U.S. government, or that the intelligence community, said X, Y and Z, that he couldn’t say just anything he wanted to. He would have to make sure that that accorded with sources and methods declassification and was in tune with the view of the intelligence community.”

“I left that meeting with the perception that I had been asked for the first time to fire an intelligence analyst for what he had said and done,” he said.

Ford yesterday described himself as a loyal Republican, “conservative to the core,” and a “huge fan of Vice President [Dick] Cheney.” “So the notion of coming before you and making critical remarks about a presidential nominee is not something I take lightly,” he said.

Bolton told the committee Monday he had sought to have Westermann removed from his position because of the way he had opposed inclusion of the language, not because of the analysis itself.

“It has nothing to do with the substance of intelligence, the analysis or anything. There’s no substance disagreement here,” he said.

Bolton said the analyst went behind his back by distributing the language to other agencies without first clearing it with his office.

Senator Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) noted that then-acting Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Research Thomas Fingar had concluded Westermann should not have noted the intelligence bureau’s opposition to the language when circulating the speech language.

Ford said, “as best as I can tell, the analyst followed the procedure.”

In congressional testimony later in 2002, Ford used “essentially exactly the same language” on Cuba that Bolton sought, the undersecretary said yesterday. At that time Ford said Havana had a biological weapons “effort,” not a “program” (see GSN, June 6, 2002).

After failing to find any banned weapons in Iraq as officials had predicted, the Bush administration in 2004 conducted a new assessment of Cuba’s biological weapons capacity and concluded that it is no longer clear that Cuba has an active offensive biological weapons program, the New York Times reported last September.

Committee member Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) yesterday charged that Bolton’s confrontation with Westermann and two other analysts, one at the CIA, effectively intimidated intelligence analysts who might disagree with him.

“We are kidding ourselves if we don’t think that these incidents have had a chilling effect on other analysts,” he said.

Ford said that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell met with agency intelligence staffers following the Westermann incident and urged them to maintain their objectivity. Powell communicated that “we should not be impacted by this episode,” Ford said.

Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) said that appointing Bolton could undermine U.S. credibility at the United Nations, in light of inaccurate U.S. assertions regarding suspected Iraqi banned weapons program in 2003 prior to the war.

“Would it be fair to say that this kind of incident, this kind of attitude about intelligence, might affect the level of credibility with which Mr. Bolton might be viewed as a spokesperson at the United Nations?” he asked Ford.

“I think that it may indeed be a factor in the perceptions that others have of Secretary Bolton,” Ford said.

Committee Chairman Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) said that Ford had told committee staff last week that his main criticism of Bolton was his management style, not over the intelligence.

Senator Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.), considered to be a potential “no” vote that could create a tie blocking the nomination, reportedly said after Ford’s testimony he was still “inclined” to vote in favor of Bolton’s appointment.

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