December 2002: CIA Official: We Will Find the Intelligence to Allow Bush to Go to War

Alan Foley, the director of the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center (WINPAC—see Shortly after February 12, 2002), calls his senior production managers into his office. He tells the gathered officers, who control the output of WINPAC’s analysts, “If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so.” According to Peter Eisner and Knut Royce, authors of The Italian Letter, “The directive was not quite an order to cook the books, but it was a strong suggestion that cherry-picking and slanting not only would be tolerated, but might even be rewarded.” Eisner and Royce will call WINPAC “sycophantic” supporters of the Bush plan to invade Iraq. Reporter Laura Rozen will call WINPAC “a secret cheerleading faction inside the CIA for the administration’s most stretched Iraq intelligence claims.” [Wilson, 2007, pp. 376-377]