PREFACE 13reports, sent via secure satellite phone from Sarajevo during the siege and
Srebrenica massacre, were passed directly to the White House and secre-
tary of state—unfiltered and without the usual CIA headquarters analysis.
It doesn’t get any better than that if you’re a CIA operations officer in
the field, even if the “experts” in Washington are initially skeptical of your
100 percent accurate report that the Bosnian Serbs slaughtered eight thou-
sand Bosnian Muslim civilians over the course of a few days.
It’s why the CIA exists: to report the unvarnished truth to policy
makers.
I was also fortunate enough to support the mission even after resigning
from the CIA. I found that I could actually do more for the US government (and
my country) as a private citizen, since I wasn’t bound by bureaucratic or chain
of command restrictions that necessarily constrain staff employees. If I want to
enter Kosovo—or Iraq, or Syria—midwar to set up a business, no one inside
the CIA can stop me. Not that they didn’t try. But since I was free to take more
risks as a civilian than as a CIA officer, I was also able to provide even greater
results in furtherance of America’s global national security mission.
The unfortunate reality is that policy makers do not necessarily do the
right or smart thing, even when they have spot-on intelligence to guide
them. Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton alike both ignored
the CIA’s prescient intelligence on the former Yugoslavia, and as a result
their well-intentioned but misguided policies contributed greatly to the
bloodshed during the protracted and largely avoidable Balkan wars.
Later, the administration of President George W. Bush chose to ignore
my reporting that Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service did not meet with
al-Qaeda in Prague, one of the false justifications given for invading Iraq.
That same administration ignored valuable input from seasoned US intel-
ligence and military professionals before launching the invasion. Iraq had
nothing to do with 9/11 and nothing to do with al-Qaeda. But the Bush
administration was determined to invade Iraq, regardless of what the intel-
ligence showed or failed to show.
After overthrowing Saddam (to the benefit of Iran), the White House
continued to ignore its own experts and made a series of monumentally
bad decisions, from firing the entire Iraqi military to implementing an ill-
conceived de-Ba’athification policy. Iraq, the United States, and the world
all pay the price to this day.