Whistleblower at the CIA. Melvin A. Goodman

what he believed to be the actions of a Soviet proxy, which North Vietnam wasn’t, and Johnson was insufficiently confident to follow his intuition against the policy arguments of the so-called “best and brightest,” the key players of the Kennedy administration, particularly the Rostow brothers (Walt and Eugene) and the Bundy brothers (McGeorge and Bill) as well as Secretaries Rusk and McNamara.

      Two decades later, if the Reagan administration had been paying attention to CIA intelligence on the Middle East, perhaps President Reagan would have thought twice about accepting the advice of National Security Advisor Colonel Robert McFarlane, who pressed the president to send U.S. Marines into Beirut in 1983 to pull Israeli chestnuts out of the fire in Lebanon. Thus began the downward spiral in Lebanon that continues to this day. If the Bush administration had not been committed to the use of force in Iraq 20 years later, then perhaps the initial intelligence assessments of the Arabists at the CIA would have indicated that Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld were wrong about a “cakewalk” for the U.S. military.

      The policy process will always overrule the intelligence process when there are differences between the two. Policymakers look for intelligence to further their own agenda; they typically reject and even resent a contrary viewpoint. National Security Advisor Rostow displayed typical stubbornness when he believed that “assurance” about preemptive war from the Israeli ambassador would trump authoritative signals intelligence from the National Security Agency and the assessments of the CIA. When intelligence assessments differed from policy assessments, President Nixon dismissed the analysts as “the clowns” at Langley.