CAPÍTULO V: ELEMENTOS SALA DE CALDERAS

Intelligence agencies provided an early description of the attacks in Benghazi in the early morning of September 12, 2012, in a document entitled, “Executive Update: Middle East and North Africa Situation Report.”

Although the full situation report remains classified, it included the following now- unclassified sentence: “The presence of armed assailants from the incident’s outset suggests this was an intentional assault and not the escalation of a peaceful protest.”61

Evidence obtained by the Select Committee indicates that the CIA did not consider this conclusion to be supported by the evidence at the time, and it was removed from subsequent intelligence products that were disseminated the next day.

In explaining the origin of this sentence, Deputy Director Morell stated in 2015: It was written by a senior CIA editor with expertise in military matters but no expertise in Libya or what had just happened in Benghazi. This editor added the sentence because she thought the early-morning update on the twelfth [of September] needed a bottom line. She never showed the sentence to the analysts; had she done so, they would have removed it. When the analysts came in the next morning, they complained vehemently about the edit.62

HPSCI investigated this matter and found: “This assessment lacked source information or any formal intelligence reporting to support it. For those reasons, it was not included in any subsequent products. But it proved to be accurate.”63

The Select Committee interviewed the senior editor from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) who inserted this sentence and the two senior CIA managers who supervised the analysts who prepared the original draft of the document. These interviews corroborated Mr. Morell’s previous account. All of the witnesses agreed that this sentence was inserted by the senior ODNI editor after CIA analysts submitted their draft, but prior to the update being disseminated. According to the CIA managers, the analysts disagreed with the sentence because they had not received evidence to support the finding. The Director of the CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis (OTA) explained:

A: That final DNI check in that process at the time wanted to insert information that is this particular line, about the presence of armed assailants from the outset suggest it was an intentional assault and not the escalation of a peaceful protest. The analysts argued that they did not think that was something that they had enough information to actually make that assertion.

Q: So when you say the analysts argued—

A: The analysts had a discussion with that officer, with that DNI officer. Q: So they’re there with that person at the time?

A: Yes.

Q: Either on phone or in person? A: Yes.

Q: And they’re talking about it in realtime? A: In realtime.

Q: Okay. Great.

A: It is my understanding that they left, not having seen the final version of the executive update, and this DNI officer went ahead and inserted the language. The next morning, I received a phone call when I came in, so it was about 7:30, 8:00 in the morning. And one of the first phone calls I got was from the management of the team. ... Called me to complain to say that there was information that had been inserted into the executive update that the analyst ... that was not agreed to.

Q: Okay.

A: I called. I lodged a complaint with the DNI staff. And unfortunately, that line got repeated again in this situation report at 7:00 a.m.64

The senior editor from ODNI acknowledged that she disagreed with the CIA analysts and overruled them based on her personal military experience and judgment rather than any

additional evidence:

Q: And so on this particular occasion, the analyst, at least one or two of the analysts, held a different view than you did, right?

A: Correct.

Q: I think you mentioned that you decided to keep that sentence in based on you had quite a bit of experience in the military as an intelligence

analyst, and that was much of the reason you decided to put that sentence in. Is that right?

A: Correct.

Q: And possibly the CIA analyst may not have had that experience to draw upon?

A: Correct.

Q: Is it your sense that it was anything other than a difference of opinion of trying to get this right?

A: No. I think it was absolutely a difference of opinion. It was just analysts doing what analysts do. They analyze, right, to boil it down to its

simplest form. We take information, we look at it, we break it down into its simplest components and then we try to put it back together in a way that makes sense.65

The senior ODNI editor explained that politics played no part in her assessment or the assessments of the CIA analysts:

Q: I would just like to ask you if you have any reason to believe that the analysts from the CIA or the Defense Intelligence Agency or the NCTC made these assessments for any reason other than assessing what information they actually had at that time?

A: What other reason would there be. No. No. I mean, analysts don’t do that. There is no political agenda when you are analyzing intelligence. Q: And you don’t have any reason to believe that it was different here, that

unlike usually what analysts do throughout the community that everyone broke from that tradition and allowed politics to influence their

assessment of what happened in Benghazi?

A: I absolutely do not believe that, especially given the quality and caliber of the analysts that were working on this problem set. We’re very professional. And that would be an aberration of, I mean, for no reason, it would be out of character for any of these people that are producing this product.66