In written testimony, Cannistraro said that Vice President Dick Cheney and his top aide, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, went to CIA headquarters to press mid-level analysts to provide support for the claims. Cheney, he said, “insisted that desk analysts were not looking hard enough for the evidence.” Cannistraro indicated his information came from current agency analysts.
“Analysts feel more politicized and more pushed than many of them can ever remember,” one intelligence official told Greg Miller and Bob Drogin of
The Los Angeles Times,
speaking on condition of anonymity. “The guys at the Pentagon shriek on issues such as the link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. There has been a lot of pressure to write on this constantly, and to not let it drop.”
“After 9/11,” said another DO case officer who also still works in the intelligence community, “I think a lot of people at the agency sought a renewed sense of mission—like ‘Okay, now I’m really going to have something to go after, now we have something to focus on.’” But for many, that was lost when the administration began pushing for intelligence on behalf of their war in Iraq. Yet the agency simply went along instead of fighting back.
“I was working from the headquarters end in our Iraqi operations,” said the official. “In talking to the specialists, people who had worked on Iraqi issues or Iraqi WMD for years, they said to me, ‘I always knew we didn’t have anything.’ This was before the war. But I mean, it was sort of horrific to me. . . . I talked to analysts and I talked to WMD experts, and I said, ‘Okay, is there a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq?’ ‘No, there’s not a link.’ ‘Do we have evidence of all this WMD we’re talking about?’ ‘No, we don’t have it.’ And then it was like a snowball, and all of a sudden we were at war.
“Everybody that I was talking to who did know about the issues were saying we didn’t have anything, and of course nobody’s speaking up. Who can they speak up to? There’s no forum for someone who’s involved in operations to talk to anyone and say, ‘We don’t have any Iraqi assets, we don’t have information on WMD, we don’t have anything there.’ But yet we all kind of knew it.”
The CIA, said the official, was deliberately misused by the Bush administration. “I understand that it [the CIA] serves the President and the administration, but my thought is that it should serve the President and the administration in providing intelligence. And what has happened is that it serves the agenda—or at least for the Bush administration it’s serving the agenda of this administration, which is not what the CIA is supposed to do.”
The official then brought up the order issued at the staff meeting that “if Bush wants to go to war, it’s your job to give him a reason to do so. . . . The fact that someone could say that in the agency and get away with it is just disgusting,” said the official. “He said that to his full staff. I can’t believe that someone would say that openly and get away with it. But there was a lot of that. . . . My dissent was that the role of the agency had become: provide support for what the administration’s viewpoint was. And for me that was the final straw. It was criminal the way we were implicitly deceiving people. . . . You know, what I heard from everyone was that this had been planned for a long time.”
Still another longtime DO officer, who primarily worked in the Central Asia Division, heard directly from a colleague about the outside pressure on agency personnel. “He was saying to me,” said the DO officer, “‘Well, the administration pressured us to say things that probably weren’t true.’ And I said, ‘Whether that’s true or not, we’re still responsible, because we walk around saying we’re not a political animal, we have no political ties to anybody, we are our own organization, yet we caved.’
“If that’s really what happened,” added the DO officer, “this leadership needs to go, because we’re not supposed to cave. Our leadership needs to go, they need to be run out on a rail, because that’s not our charter and we walk around saying that we would never do that. It’s so much of a cult, and we’re so insulated. We have pretend oversight from Congress, but really we have no oversight.”
Compounding the problem was the fact that the agency had virtually no reliable sources in Iraq. “What was happening from my view,” said the DO officer assigned to the headquarters Iraq unit, “was that the agency was scrambling at the eleventh hour to get some kind of agents in Iraq and we didn’t really have any, or if we did it was so compartmentalized that I, working in Iraqi operations, didn’t know about it. And it was sort of disheartening to me, because I thought ‘Okay, now here’s really a critical moment and we’re a critical agency,’ and I can see what’s going on behind the scenes with a bunch of bubblers sitting here at headquarters supporting this war that we don’t really have any intelligence to at least provide the support that the administration was looking for.”
Instead of ethnically compatible CIA case officers with native language skills, most of the DO employees assigned to Iraq were standard collegiate-looking officers with, at best, rudimentary language skills and Cold War tradecraft. As a result, the intelligence community continued to depend heavily on Chalabi and his INC, despite the group’s severe credibility problems.
As part of the long-awaited plan to put their man in charge of Iraq, senior Pentagon officials had Chalabi and several dozen of his men flown to Kuwait and then transported to Baghdad. There they were driven through the city in a parade—widely ignored—as if the conquest of Iraq had been their personal handiwork. Chalabi was named to the unelected twenty-five-member Iraqi Governing Council, but he and his followers were shunned by many because he had last lived in the country when he was a young boy.
The INC’s primary intelligence organization is its Information Collection Program (ICP). Because of the lack of qualified CIA case officers, it is the ICP that conducts approximately 20 percent of all verbal debriefings of Iraqi prisoners, insurgents, and defectors. Originally, Chalabi and his INC were handled by the State Department, but officials there discovered that the organization was improperly handling taxpayers’ dollars. Thus, in 1992 oversight of the INC was transferred to the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, which pays the group about $4 million a year. The question is, what does the United States get for that large amount of money?
To answer the question, the DIA conducted an internal assessment of the information on Iraq provided by Chalabi’s defectors and concluded that most of it “was of little or no value.” To make matters worse, several of the defectors introduced to American intelligence agencies “invented or exaggerated their credentials as people with direct knowledge of the Iraqi government and its suspected unconventional weapons program.” The DIA review, said the report, “concluded that no more than one-third of the information was potentially useful, and efforts to explore those leads since have generally failed to pan out.”
“A huge amount of what was collected hasn’t panned out. Some of it has turned out to have been either wrong or fabricated,” said one senior administration official. “The evidence now suggests that at some points along the way, we may have been duped by people who wanted to encourage military action for their own reasons.” But Chalabi has his country back and is unrepentant. “As far as we’re concerned, we’ve been entirely successful,” said Chalabi. “That tyrant Saddam is gone, and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important.”
For much of the 1990s, the CIA spent little time attempting to penetrate the upper reaches of the Iraqi government, because the country was crawling with United Nations weapons inspectors—in essence, free spies. But once the inspectors suddenly left in 1998, following a major flap over their connections to the CIA, the agency was left out in the cold. “Back then we did not have any high-level penetration of the Iraqi Ministry of Health or Defense—no high-level penetrations there at all,” said a DO case officer who worked in the Iraq chemical-biological warfare area during that period.
With such a paucity of raw intelligence, analysts were reduced to little more than guesswork when it came to Iraq’s capabilities. “We had bits and pieces of things, but nothing to indicate that there was this massive, active program,” said the case officer. “They had experimented, they had produced some, but we had no evidence that at that time in 2000 there were large quantities. So when I went back, in 2003, I was briefly . . . back there so I talked to some of my friends still working at the [Iraq] counterproliferation desk, and they were just all surprised. The first question was: ‘What weapons of mass destruction?’” This was before the start of the war, the officer said. “So they were just asking, ‘What weapons of mass destruction?’”
By the time the war was approaching, the agency had only three sources, none of whom were apparently still in Iraq and none who had ever been close to Saddam Hussein’s upper leadership. Desperate, the DO was simply reduced to spreading large amounts of cash around Baghdad in little more than a fishing expedition. Virtually all the sources turned out to be bad. One passed on Saddam Hussein’s supposed hidden location, thus triggering the start of the war two days prematurely. But, like the rest, the information was wrong.
“We had some information from the Central Intelligence Agency, that they had an unimpeachable source that Saddam Hussein was going to be in a residence in a bunker at Dora Farm,” said Marc Garlasco. Working in the bowels of the Pentagon on the opening days of the war in Iraq, Garlasco was chief of high-value targets on the Joint Staff. But there was no bunker and no Hussein. “We were zero for fifty in all the strikes against high-value targets,” he said. “The problem was, while the weapons were extraordinarily accurate, and they hit the targets precisely, none of the fellows were actually there.” Instead, Garlasco said, the missiles killed more than one hundred innocent civilians.
“We did not have enough of our own human intelligence,” conceded George Tenet. “We did not ourselves penetrate the inner sanctum.” It was the same story as in Afghanistan, as well as in Iran, North Korea, and most other trouble spots around the world. Instead of developing their own penetration agents, the agency instead depended on the questionable reliability of “émigrés and defectors,” said Tenet.
Of the CIA’s three sources, one came through Ahmed Chalabi and provided bad information on Iraq’s supposed mobile germ-weapons labs. The agency received information from the other two via liaison relationships with friendly foreign intelligence agencies—poor substitutes for its own agents.
One of the two, according to Tenet, had “direct access to Saddam and his inner circle.” With CIA case officers present in the room, the source told his handlers that Iraq had developed no nuclear capability and was simply “dabbling” in germ warfare to no effect. But he also said that Iraq maintained a stockpile of chemical weapons, along with mobile missiles tipped with chemical warheads aimed at Israel. The other source, whom Tenet described as having “access to senior Iraqi officials,” stated flatly that chemical and biological weapons were being produced. In that case, however, the CIA case officers were not allowed to be in the room during the interrogation.
Lack of knowledge about the human sources providing the information they were supposed to evaluate was a critical problem for CIA analysts before and during the war. The analysts were told only about the “reliability” of the source, but they were given no other information regarding such critical factors as the amount of actual access to the information the person was providing—did the person have firsthand, secondhand, or thirdhand access to the data, for example. “This is something the analysts have sought for years and have never been able to get,” said one former senior agency analyst.
Ostensibly, the purpose of restricting the information had to do with protecting the agent’s identity, but it also had a great deal to do with turf battles between the case officers in the Directorate of Operations and the analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence. According to the agency’s director of intelligence, Jamie Miscik, DO case officers working the Iraq issue would sometimes deliberately mislead analysts by trying to boost the credibility of reports coming from only a single source. To make it seem that multiple sources were involved—and enhance the credibility of their reports—they would occasionally describe a single source several different ways in the same report.
Still another problem analysts faced when reviewing the Iraq information was reliance on what was known as “inherited assumptions.” This was when the analysts failed to recalibrate their viewpoints in examining reports despite the changing political or social environment in the area they were studying. Following the war, Miscik saw this problem as “the single most important aspect of our tradecraft that needs to be examined.” The issue was especially acute when experienced analysts passed on information to those fresh to the field. “How do we ensure that we are not passing along assumptions that haven’t been sufficiently questioned or reexamined?” she asked.
In the end, the three Iraq sources—who often contradicted one another—were hardly the proper basis on which to make a decision to go to war. In fact, Tenet would later admit that his agency “never said there was an ‘imminent’ threat.”
But if the intelligence didn’t indicate that Iraq posed an imminent threat, then what was the reason for the constant “imminent threat” drumbeat coming out of the administration? Given the end result, it appears that the real purpose of the “imminent threat” fearmongering was to serve as a pretext for war. A war that had nothing to do with “imminent threat” but everything to do with rearranging the map of the Middle East.
In an incredible irony, it was the CIA—not Iraq—that was hiding suspected weapons locations from the inspectors. While Iraqi officials were allowing the inspectors to go anywhere they wished throughout the country in the months prior to the war, the CIA was secretly keeping from them the locations of many of the sites they needed to inspect.