Also joining Wurmser’s secret intelligence unit was another neocon and Perle protégé, F. Michael Maloof, a longtime Pentagon civilian who had worked for Perle during the Reagan years. But within months of his joining the unit, he would be stripped of his Top Secret security clearance after an FBI probe linked him to a Lebanese-American businessman, Imad El Haje, under federal investigation for arms trafficking. Maloof’s clearance had originally been suspended during the Clinton years, but in an unusual move, Feith personally fought to get it restored soon after Bush took office.
Given the cover name Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, Wurmser’s unit was little more than a pro-war propaganda cell. It was designed to produce evidence to support the pretexts for attacking Iraq. This involved going through old and new intelligence collected by the various agencies and finding loose ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. A similar project was a “sociometric diagram” of links between Al Qaeda and other fundamentalist Islamic terrorist organizations, such as Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, and secular states such as Iraq.
But the primary purpose of the unit was to come up with some basis to counter the CIA, whose analysts had consistently found no credible links between Al Qaeda and Hussein. The CIA’s analysis, said Perle with his trademark arrogance, “isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”
“Let me be blunt about this,” he said. “The level of competence on past performance of the Central Intelligence Agency in this area is appalling. They are defensive—and I think quite destructive—in suggesting that anybody who didn’t stand up and salute and accept that the CIA was the source of all wisdom on this is somehow engaged in nefarious activity. [That’s] really outrageous.” Speaking of Wurmser’s intelligence unit, Perle said, “Within a very short period of time, they began to find links that nobody else had previously understood or recorded in a useful way.”
But instead of an honest, unbiased review of intelligence such as the CIA was charged with producing, the Wurmser intelligence unit would pluck selective bits and pieces of thread from a giant ball of yarn and weave them together into a frightening tapestry.
Until he retired in October 2002, Gregory Thielmann was in charge of military assessments within the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. He said the makeup of the intelligence unit was a giveaway, indicating that they had no interest in true analysis. Like Feith, Wurmser spent most of his career as a pro-Israeli activist and had no background at all in intelligence. “Are they missile experts?” Thielmann asked. “Nuclear engineers? There’s no logical explanation for the office’s creation except that they [the Bush administration] wanted people to find evidence to support their answers about war.”
Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski agrees. “It wasn’t intelligence, it was propaganda,” she said. “They’d take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don’t belong together.”
The forty-three-year-old former Pentagon official worked in the office that housed the intelligence unit at the time, Feith’s Near East South Asia (NESA) division. By the spring of 2002, Kwiatkowski had been in the military for nearly twenty years, published two books, earned a master’s degree from Harvard, and had recently passed her comprehensive doctoral exams at Catholic University. In May of that year, when she was transferred to NESA from the Sub-Saharan Africa desk, the lifelong conservative found the atmosphere almost surreal.
“I was chatting with my new office mate, a career civil servant working the Egypt desk,” she recalled. “As the conversation moved into Middle East news and politics, she mentioned that if I wanted to be successful here, I shouldn’t say anything positive about the Palestinians. In nineteen years of military service, I had never heard such a politically laden warning.” Kwiatkowski also discovered that most of the longtime career Pentagon civilians in the office, and some of the military, were quickly being transferred out to make room for new appointments, mostly from neoconservative and pro-Israel think tanks.
“I came to share with many NESA colleagues a kind of unease, a sense that something was awry,” she said. “What seemed out of place was the strong and open pro-Israel and anti-Arab orientation in an ostensibly apolitical policy-generation staff within the Pentagon. There was a sense that politics like these might play better at the State Department or the National Security Council, not the Pentagon, where we considered ourselves objective and hard-boiled.”
Beyond the cherry-picked items from the various intelligence reports, a key source of intelligence for Perle, Feith, and Wolfowitz came from the Iraqi National Congress. Exiled in London with a guerrilla army based in northern Iraq, an area protected for many years by a U.S.-enforced no-fly zone, the group was led by Ahmed Chalabi.
A fellow neoconservative, Chalabi was born in Iraq, received his Ph.D. in math from the University of Chicago—Paul Wolfowitz’s alma mater—and had even studied under Albert Wohlstetter. Raised in a Shiite Muslim family with close ties to the monarchy, he fled Iraq when he was fourteen. After receiving degrees from both Chicago and MIT, he went to Jordan and a career in banking, but ended up with an absentee conviction for embezzlement and a twenty-two-year sentence.
Balding and with a slight paunch, an aristocratic manner, and a passion for finely tailored conservative suits, Chalabi fit in well with the neocons. They were his main base of support in the United States, where he spent much of his time. His relationship with Wolfowitz and Perle went back more than a decade. In 1985, Wohlstetter introduced Chalabi to Perle, then at the Pentagon, and later to Wolfowitz. The three have been close ever since.
Throughout much of the 1990s, Perle and the CIA were at war with each other over Chalabi and the issue of how best to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Perle favored a popular insurrection that would eventually install his man as president of Iraq. But the CIA and others had little trust in Chalabi or the idea of an internal uprising, believing it would be quickly crushed and lead to a sort of desert version of Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs fiasco. “The CIA doesn’t like him,” said Perle, “because they don’t control him, and they only like people they control.”
Among those opposed was retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, the former commander of the U.S. Central Command, responsible for U.S. forces in the Middle East. Calling Chalabi and his associates “silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London,” he said the price of American support for the INC would be high. “The Bay of Pigs could turn into the Bay of Goats,” he said. And a 1999 article in
Foreign Affairs,
titled “The Rollback Fantasy,” said the INC plan was “militarily ludicrous and would almost certainly end in either direct American intervention or a massive bloodbath.”
Instead, the CIA was in favor of a palace coup, led by a group of Army generals and the Iraqi National Accord, a rival exile organization. Eventually, the coup plot was discovered and a number of generals were arrested and executed. Chalabi says he warned the CIA in advance. But the CIA never trusted the intelligence Chalabi was providing, believing it was largely self-serving and unverifiable, certainly not worth the $326,000 a month they were supplying to his INC. As a result, they dropped him in the mid-1990s and have never since regretted it.
For Perle and the neoconservatives, their dream has always been to install Chalabi as president of Iraq. He was especially appealing as a future leader of Iraq because of his friendly relationship with Israel, as someone who would eventually grant diplomatic recognition of the state. “A senior administration official, who requested anonymity,” noted Knight-Ridder reporters Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel, “said the Pentagon officials were enamored of Chalabi because he advocated normal diplomatic relations with Israel. They believed that would have ‘taken off the board’ one of the only remaining major Arab threats to Israeli security.”
For that reason, Perle spent a considerable amount of energy attempting to get not only U.S. backing to overthrow Hussein and replace him with Chalabi, but also American Jewish and Israeli support.
“The arguments against Chalabi have been without substance,” said Perle. “If he emerged in a leadership position, that would be highly desirable, from the point of view of the future of Iraq. . . . He worked tirelessly to achieve Saddam’s removal, and is the kind of modern liberal leader that we would hope to see not only in Iraq but throughout the Arab world.”
In 1998, Wurmser met with Israel’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Dore Gold, in an effort to get Israel to put pressure on the American Congress to approve a $10 million grant to Chalabi’s group to fund an invasion. “Israel has not devoted the political or rhetorical time or energy to Saddam that they have to the Iranians. The case for the Iraqi opposition in Congress would be a lot more favorable with Israeli support,” said Perle.
With regard to the American Jewish community, Perle said: “One can only speculate what it might accomplish if it decided to focus its attention on Saddam Hussein.” The neocon-dominated Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs—where Perle, Feith, and Cheney all served on the board of advisors—had also worked closely for years with Chalabi. Its executive director, Tom Neumann, said, “It is a good idea for the American Jewish community to do anything it can to change the government of Iraq.”
Beginning in the mid-1990s, Chalabi and his crew of INC defectors were shunned by the CIA and the State Department. They considered him little more than a con man trying to wrangle large payments and to get them to start a war so he could be installed as president. In addition to his Jordanian bank-fraud conviction, he was unable to account for much of the money the CIA had given his group in the past.
The Pentagon, however, had a different agenda, and in the spring of 2002 both Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld began seeking Bush’s intervention to grant Chalabi $90 million from the Treasury. Although Congress had authorized $97 million for Iraqi opposition groups under the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, because of State Department objections most of that had not been expended. State had argued that it would be throwing good money after bad because Chalabi hadn’t accounted for previous monies given to him.
“The [INC’s] intelligence isn’t reliable at all,” said Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA’s former chief of counterterrorism. “Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear. And much of it is used to support Chalabi’s own presidential ambitions. They make no distinction between intelligence and propaganda, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice-presidential speeches.”
Nevertheless, to his fellow neocons now running the government, Chalabi had always been their Iraqi “president in waiting,” and the waiting was now over. Thus, a major effort was made to use Chalabi’s unreliable defectors and hyped anti-Saddam charges to channel disinformation to the media and help sell their war to the American public through the press.
One of their biggest coups came in 2001 when Chalabi offered
The New York Times
’s Judith Miller a worldwide print exclusive opportunity to interview a recent Iraqi defector then living in exile in Thailand. The man, an engineer named Adnan Ishan Saeed al-Haideri, claimed that he had personal knowledge of hundreds of bunkers for chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons research hidden throughout Iraq. Some of them, he said, he helped build himself. Among the locations was one located beneath Baghdad hospital and others in Saddam’s presidential compounds.
At the same time, a similar exclusive TV deal was offered to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation through freelance telejournalist Paul Moran. It was expected that hundreds of both print and television organizations around the world would quickly latch on to the story and start an avalanche of publicity, greatly influencing public opinion against Iraq.
But it was later discovered that Moran was anything but a disinterested journalist. It turns out he had previously worked extensively for Chalabi and the INC, making anti-Saddam propaganda films. Worse, he also worked for a shadowy American company, The Rendon Group, that had been paid close to $200 million by the CIA and Pentagon to spread anti-Saddam propaganda worldwide.
The firm is headed by John W. Rendon, a rumpled man often seen in a beret and military fatigues, who calls himself “an information warrior and a perception manager.” Its specialty is manipulating thought and spreading propaganda. Working quietly for the American government, Rendon’s company has played roles in the toppling of Panama’s President Manuel Noriega, the first Gulf War, the Balkans, and Haiti. “They’re very closemouthed about what they do,” said Kevin McCauley, one of the editors of
O’Dwyer’s PR Daily
. “It’s all cloak-and-dagger stuff.”
Soon after the attacks of September 11, the company received a $100,000-a-month contract from the Pentagon to offer media strategy advice. Among the agencies to whom it provided recommendations was the Orwellian-sounding Office of Strategic Influence, another Feith creation that was apparently intended to be a massive disinformation factory. “When I get their briefings,” said one senior official, “it’s scary.” As a storm of protests began to mount, Torie Clarke, the Pentagon’s chief spokeswoman and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, warned Feith of “blowback.” She argued that OSI would undermine “the trust, credibility, and transparency of our access to media.”
The Rendon Group has taken in a great deal of cash vilifying Saddam Hussein. In 1991, following the Gulf War, President George H. W. Bush signed a presidential order directing the CIA to launch a covert operation to undermine the Iraqi leader. The CIA, in turn, passed along a sizable amount of money to The Rendon Group to turn world opinion against Hussein.