The Foreign Service Journal, March 2004

44 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 0 4 I NTELLIGENCE PROFESSIONALS WERE MISUSED , BOTH BY THE SENIOR LEADERSHIP OF THE CIA AND BY THE POLITICAL LEADERSHIP OF THE COUNTRY — NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND . B Y G REG T HIELMANN F O C U S O N I R A Q t all started with a sentence in The New York Times. In his column on May 30, 2003, Nicholas Kristof quoted a remark I had made to him in an earlier phone conversation: “The al-Qaida connection and the nuclear weapons issue were the only two ways that you could link Iraq to an imminent security threat to the U.S., and the administration was grossly distorting the intelligence on both things.” By the end of that day, I had received a barrage of interview requests from television, radio and the print media, from American and foreign entities. I Adam Niklewicz F ROM I NTELLIGENCE A NALYST TO “C ITIZEN W ATCHDOG ”