Ray McGovern is not afraid to speak his mind about what he sees as the corruption of the Central Intelligence Agency, the influence the defense industry exerts on politicians, and the complicity of the national media.

A 27-year veteran of the CIA, McGovern has been an outspoken critic of a CIA that he says tells presidents what they want to hear rather than providing unbiased analysis.

At 3 p.m. Sunday, March 26, he will present a talk, “Russia, Refugees, Pipelines and Greed,” at Tellus360. The forum is sponsored by the 1040 For Peace and Peace Action Network of Lancaster.

Berry Friesen, a member of 1040 For Peace, described McGovern — who now works with Church of the Savior, an ecumenical outreach based in Washington, D.C. — as “uniquely capable of addressing the issues of war and peace in our time.”

Change in culture

McGovern began his government service during the Kennedy administration, retiring in 1990 in the middle of George H.W. Bush’s presidency. During that time, he routinely offered intelligence briefings at the White House.

But in the past 25 years, he said, the culture at the agency has changed. The CIA that President Harry Truman sought to create, McGovern said, was “an analysis group that was responsible only to him — not to the Pentagon, not to the State Department — so they would feel free to tell him what they thought. We were able to do that for most of my career in the analysis group.”

What Truman did not intend — “and he said this before he died” — was an operations department that would overthrow governments. “He was dead set against that.”

McGovern began speaking out after Sept. 11, 2001. In his view, Robert Gates, who worked under McGovern in the Soviet Foreign Policy branch and later became the director of the CIA, was among those who altered the culture at the CIA.

Asked if he experienced a personal transformation after the CIA, McGovern replied: “I didn’t change; the CIA changed.”

The Iraq War

Rather than offering analysis, McGovern said, the job of the CIA during President George W. Bush’s administration was to create a case for war against Iraq.

“In other words,” he said, “the information (about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction) was a fraud. It’s all on the record. The head of the (U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence) said after five years of investigation, the information was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent.

“That,” he said, “is what turned me and my friends, who were used to the ethos of speaking truth to power. We tried to warn President (George W.) Bush with three memoranda before he attacked Iraq.”

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McGovern said the memos were forwarded to the national media but were never reported. In a 2005 article, New York Times reporter Judith Miller acknowledged the media had gotten it wrong: “W.M.D. — I got it totally wrong. The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them — we were all wrong.”

McGovern said Scott Ritter, the Franklin & Marshall College graduate who served as the chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, was correct in his assessment that Iraq had destroyed its weapons of mass destruction after the Gulf War.

In response to the invasion of Iraq, McGovern and former CIA employees founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group dedicated to analyzing and criticizing the use of intelligence in the Iraq War.

McGovern uses the acronym O.I.L. to describe why the U.S. went to war.

He said O is for oil (“If Iraq didn’t have so much oil, there’s no way it would have been judged so important.”); I is for Israel (“The record’s very clear. The Israelis were on record saying, ‘You have to remove this evil dictator.’ ”); and L is for logistical reasons (“the permanent military bases that we coveted”).

Here are other takeaways from a conversation with McGovern:

Iran

Iran, McGovern said, “has a bad rep in this country. It goes back to ’79 when they kidnapped 52 American diplomats. We’ve never gotten over that, and the propaganda drumming here indicates that Iran is No. 1, a threat to Israel — not true; and No. 2, the prime mover for terrorism around the world. That was true about 30 years ago, but it has not been true for the past 25 years.”

The defense industry

McGovern paraphrased Pope Francis’ 2015 remarks to Congress: “ ‘The main problem here is the blood-soaked arms traders.’ All these (members of Congress) are dependent on (defense contractors) for campaign contributions. You know, peace is very bad for business.”

Russian influence on the U.S. election

“I come from the Bronx, and we have an expression: ‘That’s a crock.’ ” Citing the recent WikiLeaks story about the cybertools used by the CIA, he said, “It’s pretty clear that John Brennan, head of the CIA, had the tools ... to leave tell-tale signs (of Russian meddling.) The verdict of our Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity is that ... if this was a hack by the Russians given to (WikiLeaks editor) Julian Assange, there is no evidence to connect the two.

“There are very powerful, potent forces at work that make it very difficult for (President Donald) Trump to even say having a decent relationship with the Russians is a good thing.”