June 2008
Bio on Ray McGovern
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He writes and speaks for the arm of Tell the Word called “Speaking Truth to Power.”
Ray’s earlier career as a CIA analyst spanned 27 years—from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. The ethos of intelligence analysis in those days was reflected in the scripture passage chiseled into the marble entrance to CIA headquarters—“You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Ray’s activities are now directed largely at closing the wide gap between that ideal and current reality in the US intelligence community.
In January 2003, after it had become clear that intelligence analysis was being corrupted by political
pressure to “justify” an unprovoked attack on Iraq, a handful of intelligence community alumni, including Ray, created Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. VIPS now includes 67 former professionals from CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence
and Research, Army Intelligence, the FBI, the National Security Agency, and other US intelligence agencies, plus the intelligence agencies of three “coalition” Allies.
VIPS’ first paper, a Memorandum for the President sent on February 5, 2003, was a same-day critique of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s address to the UN. In the memorandum VIPS warned that intelligence analysts were “increasingly distressed at the politicization of intelligence” and “were finding it hard to make themselves heard above the drumbeat for war.” The memo urged the president to “widen the discussion beyond...the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.”
The thrust of VIPS’ next two pre-war memoranda can be gleaned from their titles: “Cooking Intelligence for War” and “Forgery, Hyperbole, Half-Truth: A Problem.”
Documentary evidence dating back to eight months before the attack on Iraq showing that the U.S. and U.K. had doctored intelligence in order to “justify” it appeared on May 1, 2005, when the London’s Sunday Times published the official minutes of a July 23, 2002 meeting at 10 Downing Street. Those minutes, written that same day by a participant, contained the report by the chief of British intelligence, just back from talks with CIA director George Tenet in Washington, that “intelligence and facts were being fixed” around President Bush’s decision for war. VIPS was first off the blocks in providing commentary on this unique documentary evidence, publishing its analysis on May 4—weeks before the corporate press was forced to take note: http://www.tompaine.com/print/proof_bush_fixed_the_facts.php.
The flurry of attention engendered in alternative media eventually embarrassed the corporate media into taking note several weeks later. The corporate media reports were not only late but anemic, carefully steering away from the import of the Downing Street Minutes, which provided documentary proof of what we had long suspected; i.e., that President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair had deliberately lied the “coalition” into an unnecessary war. Since then, report after report have confirmed that the president was a witting participant in the conspiracy to use the ogre of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq to justify launching the first resource war of the 21st Century—which, as former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan has now conceded, was “largely about oil.”
For example, in mid-2002 as war plans went forward, the CIA recruited Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri to work in place and report key information to us. But when he reported in the summer of 2002 that all Iraqi WMD had been destroyed in 1991, the White House told the CIA it was not interested in further reporting from Sabri, according to former CIA officials. Former White House Spokesman Scott McClellan, in his book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, has provided a unique, first-hand account of his former boss and senior aides abandoning “candor and honesty” to wage a “political propaganda campaign” that led the nation into an “unnecessary war.”
Thirteen additional VIPS papers were produced after the war began in Iraq; a list of titles is appended. The texts of all 16 memos can be found at http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/vips. (PDF versions available on request.)
In addition to co-authoring most of VIPS memoranda, Ray has published many articles and op-eds. These have appeared in newspapers around the country and in Europe— The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The Miami Herald, The International Herald Tribune, the Suddeutsche Zeitung, and the Berliner Tagesspiegel, for example). Ray and his VIPS colleagues have also appeared in several video documentaries—notably, Robert Greenwald’s “Uncovered: The War on Iraq” and “Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror” (produced by John Pilger). Cinema Libre Studio has produced a full-length documentary on DVD of Ray discussing US intelligence (Volume 3 in its “Speaking Freely” series of conversations with opinion leaders on world issues: (www.cinemalibrestudio.com).
Ray’s TV and radio interviews have been aired in domestic and foreign media, including:
-- “Trial by Theater: Illegal War.” A 20-minute Culture Project video of Ray being deposed by former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega:
http://www.podango.com/podcast_episode/1527/51599/A_Question_of_Impeachment__Trial_By_Theater/Article_I_Initiation__Continuation_of_Illegal_War_Part_6#51599, November 19, 2007
-- CNN (et al.): Rumsfeld-McGovern Live Exchange in Atlanta, May 4, 2006
-- Major TV-radio networks: replay and commentary re Rumsfeld-McGovern exchange, May 4-8, 2006
-- Washington Journal (C-SPAN), November 14, 2005
-- Testimony on Downing Street Memos before a congressional hearing convened by Congressman John Conyers, then-ranking minority member of the House Committee on the Judiciary, June 16, 2005. The text of Ray’s prepared remarks can be found at http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/289
--News Hour with Jim Lehrer, April 24, 2006 (on leaks about wars of aggression: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/fedagencies/jan-june06/leaks_4-24.html )
-- News Hour with Jim Lehrer, June 16, 2005 and August 10, 2004
-- Charlie Rose Show (debate with James Woolsey), August 20, 2004
-- Panorama (German TV—Erstes Programm, on the coming war), March 6, 2003
Many of Ray’s more recent articles have been posted first on Consortiumnews.com, and often on afterdowningstreet.org, commondreams.org, and counterpunch.org, among other websites.
On May 4, 2006 in Atlanta, at a Q&A session following a speech by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Ray took advantage of the opportunity to quote him back to himself on his earlier claims of
ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda and on weapons of mass destruction. Rumsfeld was untruthful once again—actually twice again. CNN and MSNBC did some fact checking and exposed the fresh lies that evening. Other “mainstream media” finessed them, defending Rumsfeld against “heckling” by an “alleged”
former analyst of the CIA. Youtube has posted the encounter with Rumsfeld on line.
Ray’s responsibilities at CIA included chairing National Intelligence Estimates under presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter, and preparing the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) under presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. These, the two most authoritative kinds of intelligence reporting, have been alluded to in examining the performance of intelligence prior to the war in Iraq—and also the still unresolved issue concerning to what degree the president was warned in advance about the attacks of September 11, 2001 and how he reacted—or didn’t. (Both issues remain unresolved, because the powers that be did not allow them to be investigated. But the evidence is very strong that the president was adequately warned and did nothing; and that he successfully enlisted the help of former CIA director George Tenet in covering that up—to the point where Tenet lied under oath before the 9/11 Commission.)
During the mid-eighties, Ray was one of the senior analysts conducting early morning briefings of the PDB one-on-one with the Vice President, the Secretaries of State and Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. At his retirement ceremony Ray received the Intelligence Commendation Medallion and a letter of gratitude from then-President George H. W. Bush wishing Ray well in his transition to non-profit work. On March 2, 2006, he returned the medallion in a symbolic effort to dissociate himself from CIA participation in torture. (See http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030206A.shtml.)
Ray’s chapter, “A Compromised Central Intelligence Agency: What Can Be Done?” can be found in Patriotism, Democracy, and Common Sense: Restoring America’s Promise at Home and Abroad, Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. In the chapter, Ray draws on his experience serving under nine directors of central intelligence to discuss in some detail the qualities needed in an intelligence director, and improvements that could be made immediately to enhance intelligence analysis and protect it from politicization. One of the recommended improvements, re-establishing the discipline of media analysis, was partially implemented in late 2005.
Ray also wrote a chapter, “Sham Dunk: Cooking Intelligence for the President,” for the book Neo-CONNED Again!, published in September 2005. The text of Ray’s chapter can be found at http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/sham (click on “PDF VERSION” in blue type at the top of first page). There (pp. 3-5) is discussed the remarkable role of a neo-conservative dream-come-true—the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans headed by Undersecretary Douglas Feith. As part of the Bush administration’s promotion for war on Iraq, Feith oversaw an effort to manufacture and market bogus information masquerading as intelligence on meaningful ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda. After an exhaustive search, the intelligence community had determined there were no such ties. But this did not prevent the Feith-based “intelligence” from being stove-piped directly to Vice President Dick Cheney, the president, the Congress, et al. After a protracted investigation, the Pentagon Inspector General determined in early 2007 that Feith’s activities were “inappropriate.”
Ray is fluent in Russian, German, and Spanish. He earned a B.A., summa
cum laude, from Fordham College and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Designated a “Distinguished Military Graduate,” he was commissioned in the U.S. Army and served two years as an infantry/intelligence officer. He holds an M.A. in Russian Studies from Fordham University, a certificate in
Theological Studies from Georgetown, and is a graduate of the Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program. A native of the New York City, Ray has been married to Rita Kennedy, also of New York City, for 46 years; they have five children and seven grandchildren.
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Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
Issuances
1 Memorandum for the President, February 5, 2003
“Secretary Powell’s Presentation to the UN Today”
2 Memorandum for Confused Americans, March 12, 2003
“Cooking Intelligence for War”
3 Memorandum for the President, March 18, 2003
“Forgery, Hyperbole, Half-Truth: A Problem”
4 Memorandum, March 26, 2003
“Arafat Interviewed by the Christisons on Current Impasse”
5 Memorandum, April 24, 2003
“The Stakes in the Search for Weapons of Mass Destruction”
6 Memorandum for the President, May 1, 2003
“Intelligence Fiasco”
7 Letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, May 19, 2003
“On UN Inspectors and Weapons of Mass Destruction”
8 Memorandum for the President, July 14, 2003
“Intelligence Unglued”
9 Memorandum for Colleagues in Intelligence, August 22, 2003
“Now It’s Your Turn”
10 Memorandum for Colleagues in Intelligence, October 13, 2003
“One Person Can Make a Difference”
11 Memorandum for the President, January 13, 2004
“Your State-of-the-Union Address”
12 Memorandum for the President, August 24, 2005
“Recommendation: Try A Circle of ‘Wise Women’”
13 Memorandum for Speaker of the House & Senate Majority Leader
“Denouement on Iraq: First Stop the Bleeding,” March 14, 2007
14 Memorandum, March 29, 2007
“Brinkmanship Unwise in Uncharted Waters”
15 Memorandum, June 17, 2007
“Countering Terrorism — How Not to Do It
16 Memorandum, July 26, 2007
“Dangers of Cornered George Bush”