The Secret Sentry (36 page)

Beyond the diminishing volume of Iraqi radio traffic, Hussein had banned the use of cell phones inside Iraq so as to maintain
a tight grip on the flow of information in his country, and only 833,000 Iraqis out of a population of 26 million had telephones.
This meant, in effect, that NSA’s impressive capability to intercept e-mails and cell phone calls was next to worthless when
confronted by the low-tech Iraqi target.
²²
Every senior Iraqi military and Republican Guard commander had a Thuraya satellite phone for his personal use, but these insecure
phones were rarely used prior to the U.S. invasion in March 2003. After the invasion began, Iraqi commanders stopped using
them altogether, knowing that once they activated the phones, they were inviting an air strike or artillery bombardment on
their position within a matter of minutes.
²³

So, given the lack of high-level access to Iraqi government, diplomatic, and military communications, the best intelligence
NSA was then producing on Iraq came from intercepting and exploiting the thousands of Iraqi commercial and private messages
coming in and out of the country by phone and telex every month. NSA was paying particular attention to the telephone calls,
faxes, and e-mails between representatives of various Iraqi government ministries and private companies (some of them fronts
for the Iraqi government) and a host of foreign companies and individuals in Eu rope, Asia, and the Middle East.
²⁴

There had been high expectations among some NSA intelligence analysts that data mining this traffic would produce some hard
evidence that Hussein was trying to rebuild his capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ballistic missiles.
These same sorts of commercial intercepts had already produced extremely valuable intelligence concerning Iran’s nascent nuclear
weapons research and development program.
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NSA’s commercial intercept program did produce a few successes in Iraq. For example, in the late 1990s SIGINT helped the U.S.
government block a number of attempts by foreign companies to violate U.N.-imposed economic sanctions against the country.
²⁶
Intelligence developed by NSA revealed that in August 2002 a French company called CIS Paris helped broker the sale to Iraq
of twenty tons of a Chinese-made chemical called HTPB, which was used to make solid fuel for ballistic missiles.
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SIGINT also helped the U.S. government keep close tabs on which foreign countries (mainly Russia and its former republics)
were doing business with Iraq.
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The net result was that as of the summer of 2002, NSA’s SIGINT coverage of Iraq was marginal at best. The best intelligence
material that the agency was producing at the time was on the Iraqi air force and air defense forces, both of whom were heavy
users of electronic communications that the agency could easily intercept. But beyond these targets, NSA was experiencing
loads of problems monitoring what was going on inside Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. SIGINT coverage of the Iraqi Republican Guard
and the Regular Army was fair at best. And NSA’s intelligence production on Hussein himself, the activities of his se -nior
Ba’ath Party leadership, and the elite Special Republican Guard was practically nonexistent. As Bob Woodward of the
Washington Post
aptly put it, “the bottom line: SIGINT quality and quantity out of Iraq was negligible.”
²⁹

As the fall of 2002 approached and the blistering summer in Washington began to abate, the rhetoric coming out of the White
House calling for war with Iraq began to heat up dramatically. Virtually everyone inside the Beltway suspected that war with
Iraq was coming. Virtually everyone within the U.S. intelligence community knew that war with Iraq was becoming increasingly
inevitable. A senior U.S. military intelligence official who is still on active ser-vice ruefully recalled, “You didn’t have
to be a mind reader to guess what was about to happen. I read the newspapers. I watched the nightly news. I listened carefully
to what was being said on the Sunday morning talk shows. I read and reread the classified message traffic. The forces were
secretly being mustered and no one thought that we could stop it, even if we wanted to. Everyone I talked to thought that
war was inevitable.” But as one senior White House official put it, “the deal had not been cinched.” Only a few senior White
House and Pentagon officials knew that on August 29 President Bush had personally approved the final version of a war plan
drawn up by General Franks, the commander of CENTCOM in Tampa, Florida, for the invasion of Iraq.
³⁰

Bush still had to sell the war to the United Nations, Congress, and, most important, the American people. On September 12,
he flew up to New York and addressed the U.N. General Assembly, delivering his indictment of Sad-dam Hussein, who, he asserted,
had proved “only his contempt for the United Nations and for all his pledges. By breaking every pledge, by his deceptions
and his cruelties, Saddam Hussein has made the case against himself.” The president’s speech received polite applause from
the assembled world leaders, but fervent approval from American politicians and the U.S. news media.
³¹

Hayden Signs Off on the NIE

Distressing today for many former NSA officials is that a short time after President Bush’s blistering attack on the Iraqi
regime, the agency knowingly and willingly went along with an act that is now widely acknowledged to be one of the saddest
moments in U.S. intelligence history. In late September 2002, NSA director Michael Hayden signed off on a CIA-produced National
Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq’s WMD program that not only turned out to be wrong in almost all respects, but also served
as the principal justification for the Bush administration to lead the United States to war with Iraq.

The Top Secret Codeword NIE was titled
Iraq’s Continuing Programs for
Weapons of Mass Destruction
. Virtually all its conclusions, major and minor, were later determined to be wrong. When congressional investigators began
going through the raw intelligence reporting on which the NIE was ostensibly based, they discovered that there was little
factual evidence to support any of the conclusions contained in the document, except for some very dubious reporting by defectors
and refugees and extremely unreliable information provided by exile groups like Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. Only
the State Department formally dissented from some of the report’s conclusions, but its unwillingness to endorse the NIE carried
little real weight.
³²

Years after the NIE was issued, Hayden defended his having signed off on the document, telling the members of the Senate’s
intelligence committee in 2005 that when he reviewed a draft of the NIE in September 2002, his only concern was to assess
the use of SIGINT in the estimate, and that he approved the NIE based solely on the fact that the available SIGINT did not
contradict the estimate’s conclusions. Hayden claimed, “There was nothing in the NIE that signals intelligence contradicted.
Signals intelligence ranged from ambiguous to confirmatory of the conclusions in the National Intelligence Estimate.”
³³

A year later, Hayden took his campaign to exonerate himself and NSA a step further by asserting that the SIGINT on the Iraqi
WMD program was correct, but that the CIA’s intelligence analysts who wrote the NIE had gotten the conclusions wrong.
³⁴

What We Knew and How We Knew It

General Hayden’s version of events is somewhat different from the recollections of the small cadre of NSA intelligence analysts
who specialized in Iraq and thought that most of the SIGINT at their disposal was ambiguous at best.
³⁵

Based on a combination of postmortem reports, declassified documents, and interviews with NSA and CIA intelligence officials,
the following is what NSA actually knew about the Iraqi WMD program at the time that the NIE was approved, in September 2002.

The Iraqi Nuclear Weapons Program

The NIE stated with “high confidence” that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program since the U.N. weapons inspectors
had left Iraq in 1998, adding that Iraq “probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.” According to former NSA
and CIA analysts, NSA had collected virtually nothing that came close to confirming this assertion prior to the NIE being
issued. The only intercepts that even remotely suggested that the Iraqis were trying to rebuild their capacity to develop
and build nuclear weapons were a small number of very low-level e-mails and telexes from 2000 and 2001, involving attempts
by Iraqi front companies to buy high-speed balancing machines needed for uranium enrichment.
³⁶

In his February 5, 2003, presentation to the U.N. Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell referred to these intercepts
when he said that NSA had evidence “that Iraq front companies sought to buy machines that can be used to balance gas centrifuge
rotors. One of these companies also had been involved in a failed effort in 2001 to smuggle aluminum tubes into Iraq.”
³⁷

The problem was that these balancing machines could also have been destined for use in a variety of routine commercial manufacturing
operations, which is what the Iraqis claimed they were for. Postwar investigations could not refute Iraq’s claim that this
equipment was destined for purely civilian purposes. Interviews with former NSA and CIA analysts confirm that there was nothing
conclusive in the NSA intercepts collected between 2000 and 2002 to indicate whether these components were destined for use
in Iraq’s purported nuclear weapons program or for other purposes. A 2005 report on the matter concluded, “Although signals
intelligence played a key role in some respects that we cannot discuss in an unclassified format, on the whole it was not
useful.”
³⁸

The Iraqi Chemical Weapons Program

Once again, interviews indicate that NSA provided very little usable SIGINT concerning Iraq’s alleged chemical weapons program.
Most of the intercepts— consisting of low-level faxes, telexes, and e-mails—concerned the attempts of Iraqi front companies
in Baghdad and elsewhere in the Middle East to purchase precursor chemicals from a number of companies in Eastern Europe and
the former Soviet Union, with much of the SIGINT reporting indicating the chemical purchases were to be used for producing
fertilizers, not chemical weapons. The problem was that the reams of intercepted material did not specify for what purpose
the chemicals were to be used, so naturally the CIA analysts adopted a worst-case-scenario approach and concluded that the
chemical precursors were “most likely” intended for the production of chemical weapons.
³⁹

Interestingly, the NSA analysts interviewed could not recall that after 1998 the agency ever collected any intelligence information
indicating that the Iraqis were developing or had actually produced biological weapons.
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The Robb-Silberman committee’s findings agree with the recollections of the analysts, concluding, “Signals Intelligence provided
only minimal information regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons programs and, due to the nature of the sources, what was provided
was of dubious quality and therefore of questionable value.”
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Iraqi Unmanned Drones

The most contentious of the NSA SIGINT material used in the NIE alleged that the Iraqis were developing unmanned drones for
the purpose of delivering chemical or biological weapons to targets in the United States. This claim was largely based on
an inferential reading by the CIA analysts of a small number of NSA intercepts concerning Iraqi defense contractor Ibn-Firnas’s
purchase through an Australia-based middleman of mapping software for a prototype drone from a company in Taiwan called Advantech.
Indeed, the mapping covered the United States—and the entire rest of the world.
⁴²
Once again, the CIA opted for the worst-case scenario, basing its conclusions on “
analysis of special
intelligence
.” The phrase “special intelligence” of course refers to SIGINT.
⁴³

Only after the end of the war did U.S. intelligence experts get to examine prototypes of the Iraqi drone, and they found it
incapable of reaching the United States.
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The Iraqi Ballistic Missile Program

NSA’s analysis of intercepts in 2002 was correct, however, in warning that Iraq was in the process of producing a “large-diameter
missile,” which meant a regular ballistic missile with booster rockets attached to it that would give the missile a range
far in excess of what the United Nations permitted Iraq to have. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq, CIA inspection teams confirmed
that two Iraqi ballistic missiles had indeed been flight-tested beyond the 150 kilometers permitted by the United Nations.
⁴⁵

Ambiguous Is Our Business

Apart from the missile data, NSA’s intelligence analysts had, at best, only “ambiguous” SIGINT intelligence about whether
Iraq possessed nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. Immediately after the NIE was issued, the agency’s analysts began
to express reservations about their “confidence levels,” which caused no fair amount of angst at Fort Meade, especially in
General Hayden’s office. Hayden later admitted to Congress that he was not pleased by these reservations, which conflicted
with his assertion that SIGINT confirmed the NIE’s conclusions. NSA’s management held firm on this position until Congress
started to look at the raw material behind the NIE. Only then did it become clear how skimpy the agency’s knowledge was concerning
the Iraqi WMD program.
⁴⁶
According to a former senior CIA official, the NSA intercepts actually revealed that “across the board military expenditures
[by the Iraqis] were down massively. We reported that but it was not what the bosses wanted to hear.”
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