On Thursday, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said that the media blew out of proportion a recent unsubstantiated American intel report, emanating from the civilian sector of the intelligence community, that a Russian military intelligence unit placed bounties on the lives of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

“What I know is that our military commanders on the ground did not think that it was as serious a problem as the newspapers were reporting and television was reporting. It got kind of out of control before we really had an understanding of what had happened. I’m not sure we fully understand now… Remember, it’s not the intelligence community that’s going to go fight these guys, it’s the guys on the ground. It’s our troops. It’s our commanders who are going to go deal with this kind of a threat, using intelligence that was given to them by the intelligence community… But that has to be analyzed. It has to be attested. And then you have to go find out who the enemy is. And I think we were on top of that one, but it just got— it got almost hysterical in the first few days.”

Close

Powell brings up several good points. As a former member of the intelligence community myself, I am aware that a fog of sometimes conflicting data can be presented to intelligence consumers by intelligence agencies. Sometimes the intel is good, sometimes it was good but had a short shelf life, and there are times it is clearly wrong but pushed by intel analysts for purely political and funding reasons. The civilian intelligence agencies are the worst perpetrators of either happy-face scenarios, to please decision makers, or the dramatic reveal, to bring attention to themselves, both to increase funding. Military intelligence agencies tend to report with much more accuracy and objectivity.

“The Russia Bounty story is just another made up by Fake News tale that is told only to damage me and the Republican Party,” President Trump said last week. Both the White House staff and Marine Corps General Kenneth McKenzie, the commander of U.S. Central Command, have indicated the intelligence wasn’t strong enough to merit the president’s attention.

McKenzie said that he “did not think this was of that level of importance to us. The intel case wasn’t proved to me —it wasn’t proved enough that I’d take it to a court of law— and you know that’s often true in battlefield intelligence,” he reported Tuesday.

“You see a lot of indicators. Many of them are troubling, many of them you act on. But, in this case there just wasn’t enough there. I sent the intelligence guys back to continue to dig on it, and I believe they’re continuing to dig right now, but I just didn’t see enough there to tell me that the circuit was closed in that regard.”

As the nation saw in the impeachment hoax, the civilian intelligence agencies contain people who will use fake intel to hurt the president. This seems like another example of that sad phenomenon.