May 13, 2013 The Next Scapegoat By DAVID BROOKS
Twenty
years ago, when she was a young Foreign Service officer in Moscow, Victoria
Nuland gave me a dazzling briefing on the diverse factions inside the Russian
parliament. Now she is a friend I typically see a couple times a year, at
various functions, and I have watched her rise, working with everybody from
Dick Cheney to Hillary Clinton, serving as ambassador to NATO, and now as a
spokeswoman at the State Department.
Over
the past few weeks, the spotlight has turned on Nuland. The charge is that
intelligence officers prepared accurate talking points after the attack in
Benghazi, Libya, and that Nuland, serving her political masters, watered them
down.
The
charges come from two quarters, from Republicans critical of the Obama
administration’s handling of Benghazi and intelligence officials shifting blame
for Benghazi onto the State Department.
It’s
always odd watching someone you know get turned into a political cartoon on the
cable talk shows. But this case is particularly disturbing because Nuland did
nothing wrong.
Let’s
review the actual events. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was
killed on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2012. For this there is plenty of blame
to go around. We now know, thanks to reporting by Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper
and Michael Schmidt in The Times, that Benghazi
was primarily a C.I.A. operation. Furthermore, intelligence officers
underestimated how dangerous the situation was. They erred in vetting the
Libyan militia that was supposed to provide security.
The
next day, Nuland held a background press briefing, a transcript of which is
available on the State Department’s
Web site. She had two main points. There’s a lot we don’t know. The attack
was conducted by Libyan extremists. She made no claim that it was set off by an
anti-Muslim video or arose spontaneously from demonstrations.
On
Friday, Sept. 14, David Petraeus, then the director of the C.I.A., gave a
classified briefing to lawmakers in Congress. The lawmakers asked him to
provide talking points so they could discuss the event in the news media.
C.I.A.
analysts began work on the talking points. Early drafts, available
on Jonathan Karl’s ABC News Web site, reflect the confused and fragmented
state of knowledge. The first draft, like every subsequent one, said the
Benghazi attacks were spontaneously inspired by protests in Cairo. It also said
that extremists with ties to Al Qaeda participated.
The
C.I.A. analysts quickly scrubbed references to Al Qaeda from the key part of
the draft, investigators on Capitol Hill now tell me.
On
Friday evening of Sept. 14, the updated talking points were e-mailed to the
relevant officials in various departments, including Nuland. She wondered why
the C.I.A. was giving members of Congress talking points that were far more
assertive than anything she could say or defend herself. She also noted that
the talking points left the impression that the C.I.A. had issued all sorts of
warnings before the attack.
Remember,
this was at a moment when the State Department was taking heat for what was
mostly a C.I.A. operation, while doing verbal gymnastics to hide the
C.I.A.’s role. Intentionally or not, the C.I.A. seemed to be repaying the
favor by trying to shift blame to the State Department for ignoring
intelligence.
Nuland
didn’t seek to rewrite the talking points. In fact, if you look at the drafts
that were written while she was sending e-mails, the drafts don’t change much
from one to the next. She was just kicking the process up to the policy-maker
level.
At
this point, Nuland’s participation in the whole affair ends.
On
Saturday morning, what’s called a deputies committee meeting was held at the
White House. I’m told the talking points barely came up at that meeting.
Instead, the C.I.A. representative said he would take proactive measures to
streamline them. That day, the agency reduced the talking points to the bare
nub Susan Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, was given before
going on the Sunday talk shows.
Several
things were apparently happening. Each of the different players had their hands
on a different piece of the elephant. If there was any piece of the talking
points that everybody couldn’t agree upon, it got cut. Second, the administration
proceeded with extreme caution about drawing conclusions, possibly overlearning
the lessons from the Bush years. Third, as the memos moved up the C.I.A.
management chain, the higher officials made them more tepid (this is apparently
typical). Finally, in the absence of a clear narrative, the talking points
gravitated toward the least politically problematic story, blaming the
anti-Muslim video and the Cairo demonstrations.
Is
this a tale of hard intelligence being distorted for political advantage? Maybe.
Did Victoria Nuland scrub the talking points to serve Clinton or President
Obama? That charge is completely unsupported by the evidence. She was caught in
a brutal interagency turf war, and she defended her department. The accusations
against her are bogus.
