In My Time (66 page)

On Air Force II watching Saddam Hussein on trial in Baghdad. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

The next day at a Baghdad press conference, when Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, announced simply, “We got him,” Iraqi journalists jumped to their feet, joyfully applauding and cheering. We hoped that having Saddam in custody would give the Iraqi people confidence that he and his Baathist regime were not coming back.

But we still had not found the stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons we had believed Saddam possessed.

AFTER WE LIBERATED IRAQ, we had set up the Iraq Survey Group, an organization made up of American, British, and Australian weapons experts, who were to hunt for Saddam’s WMD stockpiles and programs.

With Don Rumsfeld in his office at the Pentagon. We had just completed a video conference with the commanders in Iraq in the days before our forces took Baghdad. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

David Kay, who had participated in the search for banned weapons in Iraq after the first Gulf War, was selected to lead the group. He reported directly to George Tenet, and throughout 2003 Kay updated us on the investigation’s progress.

In late July, Kay came to the White House to brief us on his investigation. He expressed confidence that he’d find weapons of mass destruction and confirmed the existence of research programs involving
chemical and biological weapons. He was confident we’d find chemical weapons, but was less sure about biological weapons stockpiles. The footprint of a biological weapons program was very small and easy to hide or destroy.

In October, when Kay went before the House and Senate intelligence committees, he reported that while the Iraq Survey Group had not yet found “stocks of weapons,” they had discovered “dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002,” including “a clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment subject to UN monitoring and suitable for continuing chemical and biological weapons research” and “a prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of biological warfare agents, that Iraqi officials working to prepare for UN inspections were explicitly ordered not to
declare to the UN
.”

But by the time Kay resigned in January 2004, he said he no longer expected that we would find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. He did not dismiss the threat Iraq had represented. “I actually think what we learned during the inspections made Iraq a more dangerous place, potentially, than in fact we thought it was even
before the war
,” he said. Kay also said that Saddam had the intention of pursuing WMD activities, a conclusion echoed in the report of his successor, Charles Duelfer. According to Duelfer, “Saddam wanted to re-create Iraq’s WMD capability . . .
after sanctions were removed
.” Duelfer cited Iraqi diplomat Tariq Aziz’s opinion that Saddam would have restarted WMD programs, beginning with the nuclear program, after sanctions and noted that Saddam had purposely retained the men and women who knew how to do so. He also had dual-use infrastructure readily at hand that he could use to reestablish a biological weapons program and produce
chemical weapons within months
.

But there were no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. That was the big news, and it came at the beginning of a presidential election year. The Democrats did not, apparently, want to admit that they
too had accepted and relied on faulty intelligence. Instead they decided to blame us for “misleading” the country, for “lying” the nation into war. This was the most blatant hypocrisy, since they had seen the intelligence—and reached the same conclusions we had. When John Kerry accused the president of trafficking in “untruth,” he was guilty of exactly what he accused the president of doing.

One part of the attack was aimed specifically at me. It was said that I pressured CIA analysts so that they exaggerated the threat that Saddam represented. It wasn’t a charge that made any sense, since the judgments the CIA arrived at were essentially the same as those produced by the agency during the Clinton years. Intelligence services in other countries had also reached similar conclusions. It became something of a journalistic sport during my time in office to portray me as the all-powerful vice president, but not even the most aggressive versions of this story suggested that my influence reached to MI6 or BND, the British and German intelligence services.

The charge seemed to arise out of my visits to the CIA, which began with George Tenet and a few senior analysts briefing me and quickly expanded to include more junior regional or topic experts. We would sit around a conference table where Tenet or his deputy would introduce topics and analysts. I would then ask questions and the analysts could report on what they knew. I found these sessions immensely valuable, and I believe the analysts, who often work long hours in obscurity removed from policymakers, did as well.

The Robb-Silberman Commission and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence produced bipartisan reports on our intelligence failures regarding stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and both concluded that there was no politicization of intelligence or inappropriate pressure from policymakers. The Robb-Silberman report urged, in fact, that “policymakers actively probe and question analysts.” I asked tough questions, no doubt about that. And I asked a lot of them. I pushed hard to get information that would help us develop policies that would ensure America wasn’t attacked again. If I had not been as thorough as I was, I would not have been fulfilling my obligations and
responsibilities as a senior official. In light of subsequent revelations, such as the mistakes in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi WMD, I wish I’d been even tougher.

One line of questioning I pursued had to do with the relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam. It was important to know what the association was in the wake of 9/11, as many besides myself recognized. Senator Evan Bayh, in a closed hearing, parts of which were later made public, asked about Iraqi links to al Qaeda. George Tenet responded in a letter dated October 7, 2002, with a list that included these points:

•
We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda going back a decade.

•
Credible information indicates that Iraq and al Qaeda have discussed safe haven and reciprocal non-aggression.

•
Since Operation Enduring Freedom, we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad.

•
We have credible reporting that al Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq had provided training to al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and
making conventional bombs
.

Despite such statements coming from the agency’s highest levels, I’d find the CIA sometimes seemed hesitant to use the words
al Qaeda
and
Iraq
in the same sentence. In early 2003, for example, I received an intelligence report about Egyptian Islamic Jihad’s activities in Iraq. It described safe houses, for example, that were being established in Baghdad. But by this time EIJ, which was the organization of Ayman Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s number two, had merged with al Qaeda, so I asked my briefer if it wouldn’t be correct, given the merger, to attribute the reported activities to al Qaeda rather than EIJ. It took several weeks for the answer to come back, but finally I was told that yes, they are interchangeable here. Tenet publicly acknowledged that EIJ and al Qaeda
were “
indistinguishable
” from each other, but finished intelligence reports continued to refer to them as separate entities.

As George Tenet and others have noted since, there was a dispute inside the CIA between the terrorism analysts, who looked at the reporting and judged there to be a relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda, and the regional Middle East experts, who didn’t believe there could be a connection between the secular Saddam and the radical Islamist bin Laden. I have long suspected that because of this split, the CIA came up with the phrase “no authority, direction, or control.” The terrorism experts would make their judgments about a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, but then to satisfy the regional analysts, a higher-up at the agency would intone that Saddam had “no authority, direction, or control.” The phrase turned out to be handy for administration critics, because it seemed to say that Saddam had no responsibility for terrorism while we were asserting he did. We had the facts on our side. He harbored terrorists, and he sponsored them. He didn’t have to be in control of al Qaeda in order to be in violation of United Nations resolutions that forbade Iraq’s giving terrorists safe haven. He didn’t have to have authority over al Qaeda—any more than the Taliban had—to be in violation of the Bush Doctrine, which held, in the president’s words, that “any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”

WHEN I APPEARED ON
Meet the Press
on the Sunday after 9/11, Tim Russert asked me whether we had any evidence linking Saddam Hussein or the Iraqis to the 9/11 attacks. “No,” I answered. But shortly afterward, George Tenet brought me information that suggested the possibility: The CIA had a report that Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker of 9/11, had met with a representative of the Iraqi Intelligence Service in Prague prior to the attacks. I was subsequently shown a photograph said to have been taken in Prague and told that there was a high probability that the man in the photo was Mohammed Atta. Thus when I sat down with Tim Russert on December 9, 2001, I mentioned a report, “pretty well confirmed,” that Atta had gone to Prague and met
with a senior Iraqi intelligence official. Colin Powell, apparently shown the same information, went even further, telling Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s
Late Edition,
“Certainly those meetings took place.”

In the summer of 2002, having been told that the case for Mohammed Atta’s Prague meeting was weakening, I began to alter my statements. I said to Tim Russert on September 8 that the meeting was “unconfirmed at this point.” The next year, following along with what the CIA was reporting, I told Tim, “We’ve never been able to develop any more of that yet, either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don’t know.” I was careful with what I said—and disappointed when Director Tenet later erroneously wrote that I continued to claim the story was “pretty well confirmed” after the CIA began to doubt it.

I was also disappointed on June 2, 2004, when Tenet, citing personal reasons, told the president he would be leaving. The Senate Intelligence Committee was soon to issue a report that many thought would be critical of Tenet, and I suspected that entered into his thinking. The president had kept Tenet on when we came into office, a move I had supported. Throughout the intelligence mistakes of Tenet’s tenure, the president and I had backed him. For him to quit when the going got tough, not to mention in the middle of a presidential campaign, seemed to me unfair to the president, who had put his trust in George Tenet.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POLICYMAKERS and the intelligence community has long been complicated. Faulty intelligence in the Bay of Pigs operation infuriated President Kennedy and eventually led to the resignation of CIA head Allen Dulles. The exposure of unsavory intelligence activities during the Vietnam era led to the congressional Pike and Church committees and the public airing of some of the CIA’s most sensitive secrets. During the investigation in the 1980s of covert arms sales to Iran and diversion of proceeds to aid the Nicaraguan Contras, dedicated intelligence professionals doing what they thought they were supposed to do ended up as targets of an independent counsel, and few were the policymakers defending them. Taking a
long-term perspective, it’s easy to see why both sides had become wary of one another.

What we are asking of our intelligence community in today’s world is exceedingly challenging. Compare it, for example, to their task during the Cold War. What mattered then wasn’t so much the activities of individuals. The Soviets posed a massive military threat, which meant divisions and tanks, artillery and missiles, things you could count that were hard to conceal from satellites—and even then we didn’t always get it right because intelligence is such a tough business. The intelligence requirements of the War on Terror are entirely different and in some ways much more difficult. It’s very hard to detect and track nineteen men with box cutters who intend to fly airplanes into buildings. Technology was on our side during the Cold War, but the situation has in some ways shifted. Now it is possible for an individual or a handful of people to acquire the technological means—a dirty bomb or weaponized anthrax—to kill on a massive scale.

The intelligence that Saddam had stockpiles of WMD was wrong, and this intelligence failure would have an impact on policy during subsequent years of our administration. But I recognized the magnitude of the task the intelligence community faced in trying to predict how far along a secretive, rogue regime was in its most highly sensitive top secret programs.