Authors: Matthew M. Aid
By 2007, Hayden, now the director of the CIA, had come full circle. He finally admitted that he, like the rest of the U.S.
intelligence community, had been wrong about the nature and extent of Iraq’s WMD program, but with a new twist. Hayden told
an interviewer from National Public Radio,
All of the SIGINT I had, when I looked at the key judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate, my SIGINT ranged from ambiguous
to confirmatory. And therefore, I was—you know, and ambiguous in our business, I told you, is kind of a state of nature. And
so, I was quite comfortable to say, yes, I agree with the NIE. I was comfortable. I was wrong. It turned out not to be true.
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The postmortem investigations of the U.S. intelligence community’s performance on the Iraqi WMD issue were unsparing in their
criticism of NSA. An outside review panel concluded that there was “virtually no useful signals intelligence on a target that
was one of the United States’ top intelligence priorities.”
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One now-retired NSA official recalled, “We looked long and hard for any signs that the Iraqis were attempting to smuggle into
Iraq equipment needed to build nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, or precision machinery that was essential to building
ballistic missiles or their guidance systems. We just never found a ‘smoking gun’ that Saddam was trying to build nukes or
anything else . . . We did find lots of stuff that was on its face very suspicious, but nothing you could hang your hat on.”
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The Imperial Hypocrisy
On October 7, 2002, a week after the fateful NIE was published, President Bush gave a speech, now known to history as the
“Axis of Evil” speech, that concluded with a now-infamous line: “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final
proof—the smoking gun— that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
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But Bush’s speech was also notable because it based the rationale for war on the allegation that Saddam Hussein had, for many
years, aided and abetted “the al Qaeda terrorist network,” which shared “a common enemy— the United States of America.” This
also carried the implication that Iraq had been partly responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
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None of this was based on solid evidence. In fact, what little there was in NSA’s files about a relationship between Hussein’s
Iraq and al Qaeda was fragmentary, and it did not support the notion that there was a close and longstanding relationship
between the Iraqi government and al Qaeda.
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The one tangible item that NSA did have (which, not surprisingly, the White House and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy
Douglas Feith immediately fixated on) was a report that a Jordanian-born al Qaeda leader named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who would
later become the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq during the Iraqi insurgency, had fled to Iran after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan,
then received medical treatment in Iraq in May 2002. Beginning in May 2002, NSA and its foreign partners were monitoring al-Zarqawi’s
phone calls, and NSA forwarded to Feith’s office the intelligence reporting on al-Zarqawi and what little else it had, but
at Hayden’s insistence, each of the NSA reports started with a disclaimer stating that SIGINT “neither confirms nor denies”
that such a link existed.
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It wasn’t much, but as far as the White House and the Pentagon were concerned, it was more than sufficient evidence— according
to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, it was “bulletproof” confirmation of the ties between Saddam Hussein’s government and al
Qaeda, including “solid evidence” that al Qaeda maintained a sizable presence in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s allegations were based on
NSA intercepts of al-Zarqawi’s phone calls to friends and relatives. But according to a U.S. intelligence official, the intercepts
“provide no evidence that the suspected terrorist [al-Zarqawi] was working with the Iraqi regime or that he was working on
a terrorist operation while he was in Iraq.” Nonetheless, the allegations became an article of faith for Bush administration
officials.
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We Can’t Wait for the Politicians
The passage of the Iraq War Resolution by Congress on October 10, 2002, put NSA into high gear. On October 18, General Hayden
went on NSA’s internal tel-e vision network to announce that war with Iraq was coming soon and that NSA had to take immediate
steps to get ready for the impending invasion. He noted that “a SIGINT agency cannot wait for a political decision” and that
weather constraints made it necessary to attack Iraq no later than the end of March 2003.
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General Hayden ordered his agency to immediately intensify its SIGINT collection operations against Iraq. The onus of General
Hayden’s directive fell on the intercept operators, linguists, and intelligence analysts at the Gordon Regional Security Operations
Center at Fort Gordon, Georgia, which was NSA’s principal producer of intelligence on Iraq. The commander of the Fort Gordon
listening post, Colonel Daniel Dailey, was ordered to reinforce his station’s SIGINT collection efforts against the complete
spectrum of Iraqi military and civilian targets. Most of the intelligence information that Fort Gordon collected in the months
that followed was purely military in nature, such as Iraqi Republican Guard maneuvers, flight activity levels for the Iraqi
air force, and details of Iraqi air defense reactions to the accelerating number of reconnaissance flights over northern and
southern Iraq being conducted by U.S. and British warplanes. In addition, a twenty-nine-person special section was formed
at Fort Gordon to concentrate on intercepting and analyzing radio traffic relating to Iraqi WMDs.
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Powell’s Petard
In mid-January 2003, as the drumbeat for war grew ever louder, intelligence analysts working for Pentagon policy chief Douglas
Feith began carefully combing through the SIGINT that NSA had produced about Iraq, looking once again for a “smoking gun”
that would provide conclusive proof that Iraq was producing WMDs, as well as evidence that a link existed between Saddam Hussein’s
Iraq and al Qaeda. Feith was preparing a dossier of intelligence reports that the White House wanted to use to convince the
United Nations to support the U.S. government’s call for war with Iraq. A former NSA official recalled, “There wasn’t much
there, and there certainly was no smoking gun, which is what these guys wanted.”
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To assist Secretary of State Powell in making his U.N. presentation, NSA compiled a complete dossier of all SIGINT reporting
and unpublished material taken from the agency’s databases that related directly or indirectly to Iraq’s WMD programs and
alleged links to al Qaeda. An NSA analyst who reviewed the hefty file recalled that the best material the agency had were
a few tantalizing taped intercepts of telephone conversations among Iraqi military and Republican Guard officers from 2002
and 2003, suggesting that the Iraqis were engaged in a desperate effort to hide things from the U.N. weapons inspectors who
were due to arrive in Iraq soon. But the vague and fragmentary intercepts were devoid of specifics. This, however, did not
prevent one senior White House official from telling
Newsweek
, “Hold on to your hat. We’ve got it.”
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When Powell gave his U.N. presentation on the morning of February 5, he had already decided that some of the best intelligence
he had to offer came from SIGINT. Although their content may have been ambiguous, he thought the tapes were powerful and made
for good presentation—and they were also the kind of material that the Iraqi government could not easily refute.
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Powell in the end chose to use only three of the NSA intercepts, all of which were unencrypted telephone calls among Iraqi
Republican Guard commanders. All three were chosen because they purportedly showed that Iraqi officials were striving to hide
what were believed to be WMDs from U.N. weapons inspectors. But as it turned out, the intercepts were far from conclusive
on this point.
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The first NSA intercept was of a November 26, 2002, telephone conversation between two senior Iraqi Republican Guard officers.
The conversation centered on what was described as a “modified vehicle” that a Republican Guard unit possessed which had previously
been “evacuated.” The vehicle was from the al-Kindi company, which Powell alleged was “well known” to be involved in the development
of WMDs. It turns out that there had been considerable controversy within the U.S. intelligence community about the meaning
of this NSA intercept. Before Powell traveled to New York City to give his presentation at the U.N., Vice President Dick Cheney
and his staff had strongly argued that the import of the intercept was that the “modified vehicles” that the Iraqis were trying
to hide had to be associated with long-range ballistic missiles because that was what al-Kindi historically had specialized
in.
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But declassified documents show that the State Department argued that because the intercept gave no details about the “modified
vehicles,” the intercept could only be used to demonstrate that the Iraqis were trying to hide “something” from the returning
U.N. weapons inspectors. What they were hiding nobody could say. A former NSA analyst at the time agreed with the State Department’s
position, saying, “It could have been a souped-up Volkswagen Beetle that they were talking about for all we know.” The State
Department also disagreed with Cheney and the CIA’s conclusion that the “modified vehicles” were most likely associated with
long-range ballistic missiles because other portions of the intercept that were not played for the U.N. Security Council indicated
that they were used in conjunction with more mundane surface-to-air missiles.
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Only after Baghdad fell in April 2003 did U.S. intelligence officials learn the truth about what the two Republican Guard
officers had been talking about. Captured documents and interrogations of Iraqi officials confirmed that the much ballyhooed
“modified vehicles” were actually trailers modified by al-Kindi that carried equipment used by the Iraqi Republican Guard
to make hydrogen gas to fill weather balloons, which Iraqi artillery units used to measure wind strength and direction for
targeting purposes.
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The second intercept that Powell used, dated January 30, 2003, was again a telephone conversation between two Republican Guard
officers, where the sen-ior officer ordered the subordinate to “inspect” (not “clean out,” as Powell said) portions of the
ammunition depot that he commanded. The conversation referred to “forbidden ammunition,” but did not indicate that there was
any “forbidden ammo” actually at the facility. The order simply was to inspect his depot for anything relating to “forbidden
ammo.” Powell made much of the fact that the senior officer ordered the subordinate to “destroy the message” after he had
carried out the instructions contained therein. But again, there was considerable doubt within the U.S. intelligence community
about the actual meaning of this intercepted message. According to a senior government official interviewed by the
Washington Post
, “U.S. intelligence does not know whether there was ‘forbidden ammo’ at the site where the radio message was received. The
tape recording was included in Powell’s presentation to show that there was concern such ammo could turn up.”
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The third message, intercepted “several weeks before” Powell’s presentation, in mid-January 2003, was a telephone conversation
between two officers of the Second Republican Guard Corps in southern Iraq. The crux of the intercept was that the senior
officer on the call told his subordinate to write down the following order: “Remove the expression ‘nerve agents’ wherever
it comes up in the wireless instructions.” No copies of the wireless instruction in question were presented by Powell. Taken
in isolation, and out of context, the intercept suggested that the Iraqis were trying to hide any references to nerve agents
in their files. But as a now-retired State Department intelligence official put it, “We tried to argue to anyone who would
listen that this snippet didn’t prove anything other than the fact that the Iraqis were trying to purge their files. But no
one wanted to listen to our contrarian viewpoint, so we were ignored.”
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It was not until after the successful conclusion of the U.S. invasion of Iraq that interrogators from the CIA and the U.S.
military finally learned what all three of the intercepts were referring to. In the fall of 2002, Hussein, under enormous
pressure from the French and Russian governments, agreed to comply with U.N. demands that he let weapons inspectors back into
the country. At the same time, he issued an order to his military commanders to destroy any and all records relating to Iraq’s
previous WMD programs “in order not to give President Bush any excuses to start a war.” As the Iraqis hurriedly began sanitizing
their records of anything relating to their long-dormant WMD program in advance of the arrival of the U.N. weapons inspectors,
a few of the instructions from Baghdad to field commanders were intercepted by NSA and led the intelligence community to conclude
that the Iraqis were trying to hide their WMDs. The Iraqis’ attempt to “pretty up” their files so that the inspectors would
find nothing that would give the Bush administration a casus belli backfired badly, providing the administration with exactly
what Hussein had wanted to avoid at all costs— an excuse to invade Iraq.
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But there was a price to be paid for making the intercepts public. NSA had argued strenuously against it, but to no avail.
It did not take the Iraqis or al Qaeda in Iraq long to take appropriate countermeasures. Two weeks after Secretary Powell’s
speech, al Qaeda leader al-Zarqawi suddenly stopped using his cell phone, killing off a vitally important source of intelligence.
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