Route Irish was the US military code name for the twelve-kilometer stretch of highway that connected the Baghdad International Airport with the secure area known as the “Green Zone.” The Green Zone contained the diplomatic facilities of the United States and our coalition partners, significant coalition military assets and headquarters, the Iraqi prime minister’s office, the country’s parliament, and several other Iraqi government buildings. By the time I first traveled on Route Irish in early 2005, this once-beautiful drive lined by large trees was a terrorist kill zone. Suicide bombers patrolled the highway looking for American or other coalition convoys to ambush.
Climbing into the back of a dusty and mud-covered black armored vehicle, I saw that the two CIA security officers in the front were armed to the teeth—knives, handguns, military assault rifles, and grenade launchers. The grenades were sitting in the open on a console between the driver’s seat and the front passenger seat. Having not seen one of the cylindrical grenades for launchers such as theirs before, I innocently asked, “What are those?” The answer was immediate, direct, and sharp: “Don’t touch those.” And the tone said, “Don’t ask any more questions.” Chagrined, I turned to look out the window and saw a bullet lodged in the inches-thick glass of the armored vehicle.
I, along with another senior Agency officer, was in Baghdad at the request of Director Porter Goss. Our job was to look into an incident in which Charles Duelfer—CIA’s lead man investigating Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program—and the military convoy in which he was riding had been attacked on Route Irish, resulting in the deaths of two Kansas National Guardsmen and severe injuries to a third. Before we pulled out from our parking spot, the lead security agent turned to me and said, “I just want to make something crystal clear. I will take you on one condition. If something happens along the way, you will follow my orders in full—no questions asked.” I swallowed hard and said, “Yes, sir.”
* * *
President Bush, after one post-9/11 briefing at the ranch in Crawford, in which we had discussed a preemptive Israeli air strike against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, told me, “Michael, my most important job is to protect the American people. I now understand why the Israelis act the way they do when it comes to terrorism.” To me, nothing better captured President Bush’s thinking about the war in Iraq than this statement. There is no doubt that the president’s focus on Iraq was born of 9/11. There is no doubt that, while it was a war of choice, President Bush took us there because he thought it necessary to protect the American people. But there is also no doubt that the Iraq War supported the al Qa‘ida narrative and helped spread the group’s ideology, a consequence not well understood before the war. So, both in genesis and in effect, the war in Iraq is very much a part of the terrorism story over the past fifteen years.
* * *
President Bush—from the vantage point of his first intelligence briefer—did not come to office with any particular ax to grind with Saddam Hussein. The conventional wisdom, of course, is that Team Bush arrived in the White House with Iraq already in its gunsights. That might have been true for a small group of Bush appointees, but it is not what I observed from the president. Periodically Iraq would come to the forefront of his attention—for example, when Saddam’s forces would fire on US aircraft enforcing the no-fly zone, or when there would be signs that the international sanctions on Iraq were eroding a bit more. And there was certainly concern about whether the sanctions could be maintained over the long term and what Saddam would do when he was no longer in the box. Nonetheless, for the president, there was no early or inherent obsession with Iraq.
There was one occasion that might have conveyed a different sense, and I share it here only to set the record straight. During a session in the Oval Office in the spring of 2001, I mentioned to the president some improvement that had been made in the Iraqi air defense system and suggested to him that “if the United States were ever to engage Iraq militarily, this is something that US forces would have to deal with.” The president said to me, “It is not a question of if but only a question of when, Michael.” I know that some will read that comment to mean that Bush had already made his mind up about going to war with Iraq and was only looking for the provocation. But at the time—and to this day—I took him to mean only that in his estimation, at some uncertain time in the future Saddam would push us and he or some future president would have to respond.
* * *
Post 9/11, George Tenet and I continued our Saturday trips to Camp David but the routine was different—the briefings were less leisurely, more focused on terrorism and often took place in a conference room rather than the president’s office. On a monitor we could see the vice president, who would be piped in via video teleconference from a “secure location.” At one of these post-9/11 sessions, the president and vice president asked Tenet and me if Iraq had played any role in the attacks. Tenet and I told the president and others that there was no intelligence to suggest that Iraq had had any role in the attack—and that if any nation had supported al Qa‘ida it was more likely to have been Iran, which had been responsible for the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996 that killed nineteen US servicemen and wounded hundreds of others. But we quickly added that there was no evidence of an Iran–al Qa‘ida connection either.
At one point after 9/11, though, it seemed as if we might have discovered an al Qa‘ida–Iraq connection. The Czech intelligence service told us a source had told it that a 9/11 hijacker, Mohamed Atta, had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer named Ahmad Samir al-Ani at the Iraqi embassy in Prague on April 9, 2001, at eleven a.m., just five months before the attack. The Czechs provided a fuzzy surveillance photo of the man they thought to be Atta.
I brought this into the Oval Office. In its initial analysis of the photo, CIA gave some credibility to the report. The US legal attaché (an FBI special agent attached to American embassies overseas) in Prague met with the Czech source, and the assessment of the “LegAtt” and the Czech officers present was that they were 70 percent confident the source was sincere and believed his own story regarding the meeting. The president asked a lot of questions, but unfortunately there was much more that we did not know than that we did know.
The possibility of an Iraqi connection—particularly a connection to the man we believed to have been the lead hijacker—was explosive. The story was leaked very quickly, with the Czech interior minister confirming it publicly. In early December, Vice President Cheney was the first US official to confirm the story, on Meet the Press. The vice president told Tim Russert, “It’s been pretty well confirmed that he [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia [sic] last April.” The vice president went on to note that we did not know the purpose of the meeting and that we needed to investigate more.
The bottom line of the ensuing investigation was that the Czech story did not seem to be true, and I kept the president informed throughout the process. The FBI did an exhaustive review of Atta’s whereabouts during the time in question and, although we were not absolutely certain, every indication was that he had been in the United States. The Czechs did their own investigation and could not find any records of Atta’s having been in the country in April 2001. In addition, Czech investigators put al-Ani seventy miles from Prague when the alleged meeting occurred.
Despite our efforts to un-ring the bell on the Iraqi–al Qa‘ida Prague connection, a few in the administration—Vice President Cheney, in particular—repeatedly raised it in public comments. There was no similar obsession with the matter on the president’s part, however. Once we closed the books on the issue, he never asked about it again.
After spending almost an hour every morning with the president, for four months after 9/11, I came to understand his deep concern about Iraq. To me, the president’s thinking on Iraq was motivated by the soul-crushing impact of 9/11 and the legitimate fear that as bad as 9/11 had been, things could be much worse—if Saddam got it into his head to either use his weapons of mass destruction as a terrorist tool against the West, or provide those weapons to an international terrorist group. Although the intelligence community considered either of these developments unlikely, I believe the president considered both scenarios risks he could not ignore, particularly since the country had just suffered the single worst attack in our history. At the end of the day, it was the threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction being used against the United States that led the president to take us to war in Iraq.
When my year as intelligence briefer to the president ended, I was full of mixed emotions. I was relieved to have the burden of such a demanding job lifted from my shoulders, but I was also saddened by the thought that I might never again be an eyewitness to and occasional participant in the making of so much history.
For a short period after I left the briefing job, I kept my hand in the PDB process by leading the component within CIA that both produces the PDB and supports the briefers. (In addition to the personal briefer for the president, there are a cadre of other briefers who perform a similar mission for senior officials like the vice president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and a handful of other top leaders.) It was an important job, but it lacked the adrenaline rush one got from being quizzed directly by the president of the United States six days a week.
After about nine months, in the early fall of 2002, I was selected to be one of the two deputies to the deputy director for intelligence, Jami Miscik. Miscik, the first woman ever to hold the post of CIA’s top analyst, was a contemporary of mine. She had been Tenet’s executive assistant when Tenet made the transition from deputy director to director, and I’d watched as she managed the nomination process—thinking of everything, leaving nothing to chance, keeping her hand on every lever of the Agency.
In my new role, Miscik asked me to focus on ensuring that the analytic directorate was making the right investments in people, programs, and processes to remain on the cutting edge of analysis—covering everything from hiring the best and brightest to guaranteeing that the analysts had the technology they needed to deal with an ever-increasing volume of information. I also, not surprisingly, helped Miscik and her principal deputy, Scott White, supervise the production of all the intelligence analysis that the Agency created. When it came to Iraq at that time, our focus was on Iraqi links to terrorism. It was, somewhat surprisingly, not on Iraq’s WMD programs.
One of the hallmarks of George Tenet’s leadership style was to form strong relations with talented individuals within the Agency and select point persons on certain subjects, no matter their rank or place in the hierarchy. He referred to this as having a “belly button”—one person he could poke in the stomach (figuratively and sometimes literally) when he needed something done. The Directorate of Intelligence (DI)—my outfit—remained Tenet’s go-to place for dealing with terrorism analysis on Iraq, but for matters dealing with Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction he chose a senior officer on the National Intelligence Council (NIC), Bob Walpole, to be his “belly button.” The NIC is an intelligence community entity of senior analysts that, at the time, reported directly to the director of central intelligence, or DCI (today the NIC reports to the director of national intelligence, or DNI). That is not to say that the DI was not producing intelligence pieces on the subject of Iraq and WMD—in fact, it was producing the vast majority of the analysis in the community. What was different was that on Iraqi WMD, Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin largely interacted with CIA analysts through Walpole, not through the DI front office. This left me with less of a sense of ownership on the WMD issue than on other Iraq issues. This was the downside of Tenet’s belly-button approach, particularly when the chosen individual is outside the regular chain of command. This is not an excuse—it is simply an explanation that will become relevant as this story unfolds.
During the fall of 2002 and into the following winter, interest regarding Iraq grew exponentially, and Miscik asked me to get increasingly involved. I played a role in several events that in retrospect would turn out to be crucial. One occurred in October, when the White House sent the Agency a speech to vet. White House staff wanted the president to deliver remarks in Cincinnati laying out the administration’s concerns about Iraq. Miscik handed me the draft and asked me to review it over a weekend. While the Agency strictly stays away from passing judgment on matters of policy, it plays an important role in making sure that the president and his top aides do not inadvertently get the facts or key analytic judgments wrong or, just as important, say something that would damage our ability to collect intelligence in the future.
Going through the draft, the group of analysts I had assembled came across the statement that Saddam had been “caught attempting to purchase up to 500 metric tons of uranium oxide from sources in Africa—an essential ingredient in the enrichment process.” While there had indeed been a report to that effect provided to us by British intelligence, for a variety of reasons intelligence analysts throughout the US government did not believe it. In fact, just the day before, CIA officers had testified before a closed session of Congress that we did not believe the British report. I explained all this to the White House speechwriters in two memos—one on Saturday and one on Sunday—but found them stubbornly insisting on keeping the language in the speech. After failing to get the language pulled, I walked into Tenet’s office and told him the story. He immediately punched the button on a secure phone that connected him directly with Steve Hadley, the president’s deputy national security advisor. Tenet outlined our concerns with the text, and he told Hadley to take the language out of the speech. Tenet hung up the phone and said to me, “Hadley says it’s gone,” and indeed it was not in the Cincinnati speech. However, the British “yellowcake” assertion would mysteriously reappear in the president’s State of the Union speech just months later, with disastrous political effect.
Throughout that period there were also several visits to CIA headquarters by Vice President Cheney and members of his staff to conduct “deep dives” with Agency analysts into matters involving Iraq. When these visits became known on the outside, some observers suggested that they were an attempt to politicize intelligence, to shape CIA’s analysis. I did not see them that way.
In fact, they were driven by some imprecision on our part. One of the most important aspects of the PDB briefing process was the ability of the recipients to ask questions and, for the most part, get those questions answered within twenty-four hours with a memo written by expert analysts. The National Security Council principals and deputies in the Bush administration were prolific requesters of what we called “PDB Memos.” Many were requested on issues related to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program and its ties to terrorism, and not all of the responses were well done. Different memos seemed to take the reader in different directions, particularly on the terrorism issue. For this reason, and just to understand the issues at a deeper level, the vice president made multiple trips to the Agency.
I attended at least two such sessions, and they seemed to me to be examples of good government. I felt that the senior officials who visited the Agency (Cheney was accompanied by his national security aide Scooter Libby and others) were digging down and trying to understand what we knew and thought. The vice president was thorough and came armed with a lot of questions, but he did not push a particular line of argument. Asking a lot of questions was his right—indeed his responsibility—and it was an analyst’s job to answer the questions fully and honestly. And the analysts did so—even if on a couple of occasions it meant telling the vice president things that he might not have wanted to hear. In my experience, intelligence analysts love to tell policy-makers when they are wrong—and ours missed few opportunities to do so.
It was this flurry of activity in the fall of 2002—a rush to complete analytic assessments on Iraq, the Cincinnati speech, and the intense administration focus on Iraq—that led those of us at CIA to think that we could well be headed to war. There was no naïveté on our part. This realization told us that every piece of analysis we did could have enormous consequences.
* * *
In June 2002, at the direction of Miscik, CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis, part of the Counterterrorism Center, prepared and issued a classified report called Iraq & al Qa‘ida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship. This paper was different in scope and intention from just about any other I can recall. It was more of an intellectual exercise—an effort to see how far the analysts could push the evidence without stretching it beyond plausibility. In doing this, it demonstrated the weakness of the case as much as its plausibility. The report was forward-leaning regarding the possibility of Saddam’s cooperating with al Qa‘ida, and it contained a “scope note” at the top that said, “This intelligence assessment responds to senior policy maker interest in a comprehensive assessment of Iraqi regime links to al Qa‘ida. Our approach is purposefully aggressive in seeking to draw connections, on the assumption that any indication of a relationship between these two hostile elements could carry great dangers to the United States” (emphasis added). On the issue of a relationship between Iraq and al Qa‘ida, the paper left the strong impression that there might be one. Well-placed staffers in the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President liked it.
But the scope note was not read closely enough, and some readers assumed the report represented what CIA really thought about the al Qa‘ida–Iraq relationship. So Miscik now asked the analysts to write not a provocative “worst-case” paper but one on where the evidence really took them, what they really thought. The draft of this paper, also written by the analysts in the Office of Terrorism Analysis, came to very different conclusions from the first paper. It pointed out Saddam’s historical and continuing support of Palestinian terrorist groups, but on the important question of the link between al Qa‘ida and the Iraqi government, it concluded that while there was some contact in the past between the two, there was no evidence of any working relationship before, during, or after 9/11, and no evidence of Iraqi complicity in or foreknowledge of 9/11.
Miscik put me in charge of reviewing the second paper, titled Iraqi Support to Terrorism, to make sure it stood up to scrutiny and that it was supported by all the analysts as the definitive paper, not just a second view on the subject. I did what I always did in those situations—I read the paper closely several times, writing numerous questions in the margins, and then I brought all the analysts—both the authors of the new paper and the authors of the earlier analysis, as well as the terrorism and Iraq analysts—into Miscik’s conference room, where we went over the new paper and its key conclusions. It took several hours. With Miscik joining us—given the importance of the issue—the authors of the latest paper were able to address all my questions and concerns, and all the analysts were able to agree on the key judgments.
With that, the paper was disseminated. It was not well received in all quarters. Scooter Libby called Miscik, saying that the paper’s conclusions were wrong and that it ignored important pieces of intelligence. He said, loudly enough for White and me to hear as we stood in Miscik’s office, “Withdraw the paper!” Miscik refused, saying she was standing by her analysts. Libby escalated the matter to McLaughlin, Tenet’s deputy. Miscik said she would resign before withdrawing the paper. McLaughlin and Tenet both backed Miscik’s principled stance—and the paper stood as CIA’s view of the issue. Finally Tenet called Hadley and said, “We’re done talking about the Iraq terrorism paper.” That ended the matter. Libby’s attempt to intimidate Miscik was the most blatant attempt to politicize intelligence that I saw in thirty-three years in the business, and it would not be the last attempt by Libby to do so.
President Bush even weighed in on the debate. Each Christmas eve, Miscik would herself do the PDB briefing for the president, giving the briefer the day off. And on the morning of December 24, 2002, she traveled to Camp David to see the president. At the end of the briefing, as Miscik was gathering her things to depart, the president told her that he was aware of the debate over the Iraq terrorism paper and that he wanted her to know that he had her back. He said that he wanted her and her analysts to continue to “call ’em like you see ’em.” It was a hugely important thing for the president to say.
Despite the paper and its conclusions, there were senior administration officials, most significantly the vice president, who continued to imply publicly that there was a current connection between Iraq and al Qa‘ida. This was inconsistent with the analysis, but the implications continued—all to the detriment of the American people’s understanding of the truth. In a Washington Post poll conducted in August 2003, 70 percent of respondents believed it was likely that Saddam Hussein had been personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.
As it turns out, the overall judgments in the Iraqi Support to Terrorism paper were largely correct—and to the extent that they were wrong, they actually overstated the ties between Iraq and al Qa‘ida. One error was the judgment that there had been, well before 9/11, contacts between Saddam’s intelligence apparatus and al Qa‘ida. That information had come from an al Qa‘ida operative by the name of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who had provided the information under interrogation by the Egyptian intelligence service. Later, in US custody, al-Libi would recant his statements, saying that he’d only told the Egyptians what he did because he’d thought it was what they wanted to hear.
After the fall of Saddam, the United States never found anything in the files of the Iraqi intelligence service, or any other Iraqi ministry, indicating that there was ever any kind of relationship between the Iraqis and al Qa‘ida.
Unfortunately, Miscik, White, and I did not apply the same kind of rigor to our analysts’ assessments of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program. Although this is something we all regret, it occurred, in part, I believe, because the National Intelligence Council had been placed in the lead by Tenet. The senior officer on the NIC responsible, Bob Walpole, was careful, experienced, knowledgeable, and well liked. It was Walpole who worked directly with the analysts and their immediate managers to draft the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction that was published in the fall of 2002. An NIE represents the authoritative views of the entire intelligence community on an issue. They are carefully considered—the coordination sessions among the analysts are rigorous and NIEs are approved by the leadership of each of the agencies in the community.
This particular NIE, titled Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, stated, “We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions.” The NIE noted that Baghdad had active chemical and biological weapons programs, that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons programs, and that Iraq had missiles with ranges in excess of UN-imposed limits.
There was little controversy regarding the NIE (one agency, the State Department’s intelligence shop, dissented on one aspect of the paper—the nuclear question—but agreed on all others) because almost everyone who had looked at the issue, from intelligence services around the world to think tanks and the United Nations itself, had come to the same conclusion. There were no outliers, no group with a different view, no one to force a broader debate that might have led to a more rigorous assessment on the part of the analysts. Groupthink turned out to be part of the problem. The view that hard-liners in the Bush administration forced the intelligence community into its position on WMD is just flat wrong. No one pushed. The analysts were already there and they had been there for years, long before Bush came to office.
The most significant dissent came from the Department of Energy. While DOE analysts agreed that the Iraqis were in the process of reconstituting their nuclear weapons program, they did not buy the argument that the aluminum tubes being purchased by the Iraqis overseas were for centrifuges. CIA analysts believed that these tubes were exactly the right size for the outer casings for centrifuge rotors capable of producing highly enriched uranium, and too high-end—too expensive—for use in a multiple rocket launcher system, which is what the Iraqis claimed they were building. DOE disputed the CIA view in a lengthy dissent. But, in addition to agreeing with the CIA analysts that the tubes were for centrifuges, the US Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC), the authority on conventional weapons, backed the view that they were not for rockets. Senior leaders in the intelligence community gave considerable weight to NGIC’s view, given its expertise on the issue.
When I was still briefing the president, I did a show-and-tell on the aluminum tubes Iraq had been purchasing from an overseas company. CIA had clandestinely acquired one of the tubes, and one Saturday I carried it to Camp David to show to the president. The tube was about six inches in diameter and about four feet tall. The Secret Service eyed me warily as I carried it into Laurel Lodge for the briefing, but did not stop me. (Once, with prior approval from the Secret Service, I took a new terrorist assassination tool into the Oval Office. CIA will not allow me to describe it here because it remains extremely sensitive, even nearly fifteen years later.) I showed the tube to the president and explained how it worked. But that aspect of the briefing was largely a bust; the president did not seem interested, as the tube, by itself, did not prove anything. I should have known better.
The problem, of course, was not just that the briefing had fallen flat. The much bigger problem is that we were wrong. We were wrong about the tubes; they were for the rocket system, and we never figured out why the Iraqis purchased a much more technically advanced—and therefore much more expensive—tube than they had to. This highlights a problem with the analysis—mirror imaging. In this case, we knew that the US military would never use such high-end aluminum for a rocket launcher, and therefore we assumed that the Iraqis would not do so either.
We were wrong about almost everything else in the NIE, except the judgments about missiles. Saddam, for reasons we would discover later, had ended his weapons of mass destruction programs in order to try to get out from under sanctions that had strangled his economy. Once free of sanctions, he fully intended to restart the programs. But the bottom line for the intelligence community and the Agency was that we got the vast majority of the judgments on Iraq and WMD wrong.
I do not know if it would have made a difference had Miscik, White, and I devoted more time and more focus to the WMD issues, as much time as we had spent on the question of Iraq’s links to al Qa‘ida. Perhaps it would have. Perhaps not. But the best chance of getting to the right answer would have been for us to do so.
* * *
Perhaps my most significant involvement in the Iraq WMD story was my role in the preparation of Secretary Colin Powell’s speech to the UN on Iraq.
In late 2002, John McLaughlin called Bob Walpole and me into his office. McLaughlin, Tenet’s deputy, had, like me, grown up on the analytic side of the business. In addition to being an analyst, John was also a professional magician. He once did a trick for the president of Argentina wherein he took a one-dollar bill, folded it many times until it was a small square, and then slowly unfolded it, revealing a hundred-dollar bill. The Argentine president looked at John and said, “I want you to be my finance minister.” After leaving government, McLaughlin came to dinner at our home and after the meal announced, to the delight of the kids, that he would be happy to perform some magic tricks. As the kids gathered around McLaughlin, each was holding a dollar bill. I had told them the story of the Argentine president, and they were looking to cash in.
McLaughlin was a magician as a leader of analysis as well, and I learned a great deal from him about that particular art. John’s method, which became my method, was to ask question after question to push analysts’ thinking deeper than they would go on their own. Of all the living former deputy directors of the Agency, I consider him the dean for his mastery of our profession.
In his office that day, McLaughlin told Walpole and me, “A decision has been made at the White House that we need an ‘Adlai Stevenson moment’ at the UN.” (This was a reference to the time in August 1962 when Stevenson confronted the Soviets over the missile program in Cuba, with photographs from a U-2 reconnaissance plane.) “I need you guys to work on three papers to help inform the speechwriters for this event,” McLaughlin said.
As usual, Walpole was given the task of preparing the WMD paper. I had the lead on the other two documents—one on Iraq’s links to terrorism and the other on its human rights record. McLaughlin made clear that none of these papers were to be crafted out of whole cloth but that they instead should be pulled from the finished intelligence that had previously been produced. For the WMD paper, Bob relied heavily on the NIE that had been published. I relied on our controversial—at least in Scooter Libby’s office—Iraq terrorism paper, as well as some other work done by our analysts on Iraq’s atrocious human rights record.
The three papers bounced around in revision for a week or so before McLaughlin eventually sent them over to the White House. They were clearly read, because one afternoon White House officials, led by Hadley, came to the Agency to discuss them. They asked questions to understand exactly what we were saying, and occasionally asked why we had left a particular piece of intelligence out of our narrative. The meeting went well, and we never heard another word about the papers from the White House. Sometime thereafter we learned that Secretary Powell had been chosen to be the messenger at the UN and that his speechwriters were working on his remarks.
In late January 2003, Powell wanted to come to CIA, along with a few members of his staff, to work on the speech from inside the Agency itself. I had never heard of such a request before or since, but it was clear what he was doing. He was not going to say anything that George Tenet and John McLaughlin did not think they could stand behind, and Powell wanted it to be seen that way; preparing for the UN speech at CIA and having Tenet sit behind him when he delivered that speech were the best ways to achieve that. Tenet said yes to Powell’s request and gave me the task of making sure that Powell and his aides had everything they needed.
Not everyone agreed with Tenet’s decision. Miscik, Tenet’s head of analysis, believed that crafting a policy speech in the halls of the Central Intelligence Agency was crossing the line between intelligence and policy—that intelligence officers should provide objective analysis of a situation and leave it to policy-makers to make policy. Miscik felt so strongly about this that she recused herself from participating in the process. I was not aware of her principled stance until much later. My own view at the time was that it was our job to fact-check the secretary’s presentation but not to write it. And, while Powell’s preparing for his speech at the Agency might create perception problems, I believed that what mattered was what actually happened. I felt we could do our job and meet our responsibilities to the American people at the same time.
When Powell arrived he had a working draft of his speech, and much of it contained information of unknown origin. I was sent to find out why. Both of the State Department speechwriters were former Agency employees, and I went to see them. “Where did you get the input to draft the speech?” I asked. I expected to see the three papers that Walpole and I had prepared at McLaughlin’s request, but they showed me something completely different. They showed me papers produced by the vice president’s office. As I flipped through the papers, I saw judgments that went well beyond CIA analysis, and facts that I had not seen before.
Not only had the vice president’s staffers written their own analytic papers to get their views into the secretary’s speech, they also parachuted into CIA headquarters to lobby for their point of view. John Hannah, a member of the vice president’s staff, showed up at Langley, bringing with him binders filled with “intelligence” on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction program. He even took over Miscik’s personal conference room.
Part of my job was to take every draft of the speech and sit with Bob Walpole and the analysts and ask, “Are all the facts correct here? Is the analysis right? Can we stand behind this?” This process took time. The analysts would ask, “Where did this come from?” Hannah joined us and would flip through his thick binder and pull out an intelligence report and say, “From here.” The analysts and Hannah would then spend time debating the credibility or the meaning of the information. The analysts won every debate. The speech was slowly being stripped of what had been added by the vice president’s staff.
The degree of analysis being done by political appointees was unprecedented in my career. Officials in the vice president’s office were trying to be both the analysts and the policy-makers. A similar dynamic was occurring in Doug Feith’s office at the Pentagon, where Feith, the most senior policy advisor to the secretary of defense, had created his own unit to conduct intelligence analysis.
My office was just ten or fifteen feet from Miscik’s conference room, and at one point Hannah asked me if I had a minute to talk. I said, “Of course.” He politely asked me why the British information on Iraq’s trying to purchase uranium in Africa was not in the speech. “Because we don’t believe it,” I said. “But,” he correctly pointed out, “it is referenced in the text of Walpole’s NIE.” “Well,” I said, “I think it is caveated in the NIE, and, in any case, the analysts have some very good reasons why they do not believe the information to be true.” I offered to bring the analysts up to explain it to him, and he accepted. One of our top analysts sat with him for several hours going over our thinking on the issue. Hannah never raised the issue with me again, and I did not hear anything more about the alleged attempt to purchase uranium until President Bush talked about it in the State of Union address.
After each of the various drafts went through the vetting process that I had set up with the analysts, Secretary Powell, camped out in Director Tenet’s conference room, would go over it word by word, sentence by sentence. My sense was that he wanted to understand the information fully, to be able to articulate it in a way that the public would understand, and to make sure that Tenet and McLaughlin would stand behind the speech as delivered. In total, the secretary spent dozens of hours, over a weekend, in the conference room, asking question after question.
During this process, mostly with McLaughlin, Walpole, and the analysts answering questions, I began to see a trend. Point by point Powell would ask us for backup information on the assertions, and as we dug into them, many seemed to fall apart before my eyes. And the material falling apart was not the White House additions. My team had already removed those. No, what was collapsing was some of the facts used in the NIE to support the judgments there. I noticed this trend, but I did not share this with Tenet, McLaughlin, or Miscik, as I concluded that there was still plenty of solid information standing behind the judgments in the NIE. I regret not doing so, although I do not know what difference it might have made.
There was another, more significant, missed opportunity, relating to the judgment that Saddam possessed a mobile biological weapons production capability. This judgment was based on information from four sources. One of those sources was a Defense Intelligence Agency asset, and DIA had learned, after the NIE was published in 2002 (but before the sessions with Powell), that he was a “fabricator”—an intelligence source who lies for any one of multiple reasons, usually to make him- or herself appear more valuable. DIA had done the right thing and recalled the original reporting. But a reference to the source and his information made it into the draft speech, and no one—neither the DIA representative in the conference room with the secretary nor our analysts—said a word about the fabrication or the recall. I do not know why they did not speak up. When I learned about this months later, I was stunned and wrote a note to Miscik calling the episode “analytic malpractice.”
One of the other sources of the mobile lab information was a German with the apt code name of “Curveball.” Only after the war had started and stockpiles of WMD had failed to materialize did I hear rumblings that the Germans did not trust their own source. What I did not know during the drafting of the speech was that operatives from the Agency’s European Division wanted McLaughlin to know that the Germans had concerns with Curveball. McLaughlin’s executive assistant chaired a meeting with the operatives and the analysts. The latter insisted they were confident in the source—in large part because there were three other sources backing up his story (usually not a reason to be confident in someone’s credibility)—and that an independent review from the National Labs had stated that the reporting was plausible. (The National Labs are institutions that conduct research for the US government on nuclear and other advanced weapons.) In any event, the analysts apparently made such a persuasive case that the EA did not see a reason to highlight the concerns of the Germans. I have seen nothing to suggest to me that either McLaughlin or Tenet was made aware of the dispute at the time. As it turned out, Curveball was a fabricator and later admitted that he had lied because of a personal agenda to get rid of Saddam.
In retrospect, this could have been a turning point. Had the analysts said to Powell, Tenet, and McLaughlin that two of the four streams of information on the mobile labs lacked credibility, it would have raised eyebrows. It would have at minimum led us to review the mobile lab issue, if not the broader issue. One of the three could well have said, “So, what else lacks credibility here?”
While the secretary’s work on the WMD portion of the presentation was methodical, the discussion on the terrorism portion was short, but dramatic. The first draft of this part of the speech—which was written by Scooter Libby or one of his aides in the vice president’s office, and which did not go through my vetting process—did not say directly but implied that Saddam was complicit in 9/11. It was wrong, and Secretary Powell saw the inaccuracy immediately. Several senior White House officials, including Rice, as well as Hadley, sat in on some of the sessions with the secretary, and with Libby in the room, Powell said to Tenet, “George, you don’t believe this crap about Iraq and al Qa‘ida, do you?” Tenet said, “No, Mr. Secretary, we do not. I do not know where that came from, but we will fix it.” Tenet then turned to the deputy director of CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis, Philip Mudd, and said, “Rewrite this.” Libby did not say a word. It had been yet another attempt to politicize the terrorism analysis. What the secretary ultimately said about Iraq and terrorism at the United Nations matched very closely what Mudd wrote in the hours after the discussion between Powell and Tenet, and was fully consistent with the second CIA paper on the topic, Iraq Support to Terrorism.
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On a number of occasions in recent years, Secretary Powell has expressed chagrin that no one from the intelligence community has publicly come forward and apologized to him for putting his well-deserved reputation for probity at risk by arming him with bad intelligence to use as the basis of his UN speech. I am absolutely confident that no one at CIA intentionally misled him, politicized analysis, or tried to provide anything but the best information—but CIA and the broader intelligence community clearly failed him and the American public. So, as someone in the chain of command at the time the Iraq WMD analysis was provided, I would like to use this opportunity to publicly apologize to Secretary Powell.
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As we approached war, the views among many Middle Eastern specialists at CIA were decidedly antiwar. Many at the Agency were concerned that bringing down Saddam would open a Pandora’s box. While CIA should not put policy advice on the table, I believe we did have a responsibility prewar to produce a detailed analysis of the likely postwar scenarios—with a clear outline of the key factors that would have determined whether we ended up with stability or instability. That paper was never written (given the importance of the president’s decision, it should have been a National Intelligence Estimate). No analyst initiated such a paper and no one in the chain of command, from a first-line supervisor at CIA all the way to the president, requested it.
My own feelings about the war were mixed. On the one hand, based on the views of the analysts, I believed Saddam had chemical and biological weapons, was restarting his nuclear weapons program, and was working on missiles of various ranges to deliver all these weapons. I worried less about Saddam’s giving these weapons to al Qa‘ida than I did about his eventually using them himself. And I worried that his acquisition of a nuclear weapon would give him the confidence to pursue a very aggressive foreign policy in the region. To top it off, Saddam had ignored nearly a dozen UN Security Council resolutions for years, and either the UN matters or it does not. On the other hand, Saddam was not an imminent threat, and I was uncomfortable with US military action—putting the lives of young Americans at risk—in the absence of imminence. And I worried about the unintended consequences of military action, which are always numerous and significant.
In retrospect it is easy to criticize the decision to go to war. But I understand why the president felt it necessary. And it is hard to say that anyone presented with the same facts and burdens would have come to a different conclusion. After all, most of Congress saw the war as necessary for the same reasons that the president did.
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I was well into another assignment by the time we learned that we had been wrong in our judgments. This awareness did not happen overnight. It came on slowly, as coalition forces on the ground in Iraq could find nothing at all related to an Iraqi WMD program and as Tenet set up a survey group to thoroughly investigate the matter. When it finally became clear, we knew that this had been one of the largest intelligence failures in the history of the Agency.
Much has been written and said about what went wrong and my intent here is not to offer excuses or to be defensive. But after spending much time analyzing why we were so wrong, I think I have some explanations of value. This is certainly not a thorough or complete analysis of this massive intelligence failure, but it highlights what I think was most important.
The first thing that should be said is that CIA’s judgment about Saddam and WMD was nothing new, nor was it unique. Neither of these facts makes it OK that CIA was wrong, but they are important to consider. This analytic conclusion went back to the Clinton administration, and it was not just the US intelligence community that believed Saddam had a weapons program. All foreign intelligence services that looked at the issue thought the same, as did think tanks, distinguished university professors, and even the United Nations. If you had polled Iraqi military and intelligence officers in 2002, I am convinced you would have found a large majority saying their boss had active WMD programs.
The perception that the Bush administration pushed the intelligence community toward believing that Saddam had WMD is just wrong. No one pushed us—we were already there. The notion that we were telling the White House what it wanted to hear can easily be debunked. Look at the question of Saddam’s connections to al Qa‘ida. We held our ground and refused to go where the intelligence did not take us. On WMD, if we’d believed it was likely that Saddam had none, it would have been an act of madness to take the position we did. Following an invasion, a stockpile would either turn up or not. To go to war knowing you are soon going to be proven wrong would be insane.
So how could we get it so wrong? The answer is major mistakes on both the analytic and collection sides of the intelligence community—the latter being something that has not often been discussed.
First let me address the analytic question. The problems with the analysis were numerous, although a lack of resources was not one of them (Iraq was a priority focus for analysts at CIA and throughout the intelligence community). One problem was what I call “analytic creep.” What had begun as assumptions about Saddam and his program became firm judgments. It took a team of our smartest analysts, looking back with twenty-twenty hindsight, to identify this analytic creep.
In addition, biases were rampant. One of these was the “hindsight bias” on the part of the intelligence community analysts who had missed Saddam’s nearly acquiring a nuclear weapon in the early 1990s and did not want to make that mistake twice. Another was the “historical bias”—we knew that Saddam had chemical weapons and had used them on Iraqi Kurds and on the Iranians; and if he’d possessed this capability once, he must still have had it. The third was “review bias.” In the late 1990s, Donald Rumsfeld, then a private citizen, had led a commission that assessed the intelligence community’s judgments over time regarding the foreign ballistic missile threat to the United States. His critique of the analysts was blistering. He chastised them—in both his team’s interviews with them and the final report—for focusing on the most likely outcome rather than on what could be the worst-case outcome. The truth is that analysts must do both, but there is no doubt in my mind that the Rumsfeld Commission created its own bias with regard to Saddam’s weapons program.
Another problem was confirmation bias—the tendency to accept facts as true if they support one’s view and to reject them otherwise. Some of the sources on which we relied were clearly sent our way by outside groups with an agenda, like the dissident group the Iraqi National Congress (INC), which never met a “Saddam has WMD” story it didn’t like, and we accepted much of the reporting of these sources as fact. After the invasion, INC leader Ahmed Chalabi bragged about the information provided by members of his group, calling them “heroes in error.” Well, he got that half right.
But by far the biggest mistake made by the analysts—and one that encompasses all the above issues—was not that they came to the wrong conclusion about Iraq’s WMD program, but rather that they did not rigorously ask themselves how confident they were in their judgments. If you took all the intelligence available to the analysts when they drafted the NIE and looked at it today, you would come to the conclusion that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons programs and was on the verge of restarting his nuclear weapons program. But had the analysts at the time thoughtfully and rigorously asked themselves how confident they were in those judgments, they would most likely have said, “Not very.” That would have been a very different message to the president and other policy-makers and potentially could have affected their policy decision.
Anyone who has seen the now-declassified Key Judgments from the NIE knows that a text box at the end briefly discusses confidence levels and notes that analysts had high confidence in their judgments that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons and was reconstituting his nuclear program. But the analysts did not really think about that statement before making it. It was a reflection of their gut view. It did not reflect a thorough assessment of the question of confidence levels. Such a rigorous assessment was missing. It was simply not part of an analyst’s tool kit in those days.
Why do I think we would have reported low confidence if we had carefully considered the question? Because the vast majority of the information we were working with was at least four years old. It dated back to 1998, before UN weapons inspectors were kicked out of Iraq; once they’d left the country, our intelligence became more limited. And to top it off, the case in support of the notion that Saddam had active WMD programs was largely circumstantial. As noted earlier, we also relied too heavily on the knowledge that he’d once had chemical weapons, once used chemical weapons, and, at the start of the first Gulf War, been much closer to having a nuclear weapon than we had previously thought. The fact that he’d once had chemical weapons and had once pursued a nuclear weapon was actually irrelevant to whether he was doing so in 2003.
In addition to the brief sentences on confidence levels in the Key Judgments of the NIE, we created an impression that the analysts had high confidence in other ways. The text of the NIE was nuanced, but the Key Judgments were not. When we wrote pieces for the president, the analysts wrote with authority on the issue. This is why I personally never found fault with George Tenet’s alleged “slam dunk” comment. The way the analysts talked and wrote about their judgments would have led anyone to think it was a slam dunk—that is, that Saddam definitely had active WMD programs. No one ever said to me, Miscik, McLaughlin, Tenet, Rice, or the president, “You know, there is a chance he might not have them.” Such a statement would have gotten everyone’s attention.
In the aftermath of the Iraq debacle, those of us on the analytic side of CIA spent a lot of time thinking about how we had failed. Miscik established a lessons-learned task force called the Iraq Review Group. This was an important step, as it showed the DI was willing to take ownership for the failure. The Review Group did its job with thoroughness and rigor. It identified a number of failures, and it made a number of important recommendations. Stealing an idea from the military, which periodically holds “safety stand-downs” following aviation mishaps, Miscik set aside a couple of days for the Review Group to present its findings to every analyst at the Agency. Miscik is to be commended for how she handled the aftermath. She showed leadership, integrity, and professionalism, and the Agency today is much better off for the effort.
The key recommendation made by the Review Group—which was adopted—was that in all future major intelligence products, analysts be required to include a thorough assessment and explicit statement regarding their level of confidence in the judgments expressed. This practice is now ingrained in both analysts and policy-makers. Confidence levels are part of the normal conversation that happens every day in the Agency, in the intelligence community, and in the Situation Room. They were part of the discussion about whether Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was using chemical weapons against his own people in 2012 and 2013. At first the analysts were at low confidence, but over a period of months they moved to high confidence. Policy-makers were fully aware of the analysts’ changing view on this, as we discussed it regularly in Deputies Committee meetings during this time.
There was a second major factor in the intelligence community’s failure on Iraq WMD intelligence. Unlike the analytic failure, this one has rarely been discussed in public or within government. It was not studied in the aftermath for lessons learned. This was a failure of intelligence collectors—CIA and the NSA—to penetrate Saddam’s inner circle, where they might have been able to learn the truth. The leadership of the operational sides of CIA and NSA should have requested a lessons-learned assessment, but they did not.
Of course, gaining access to the handful of people close to Saddam, who truly understood the status of Iraq’s WMD programs, was hard, in large part because Iraq was a “denied area,” a place where there is minimal or no official US government presence. We face the same problem in other opaque regimes like Iran and North Korea that go out of their way to make sure their actions are shrouded in darkness. But hard can’t be an excuse at the end of the day, because the intelligence community is paid to do hard. And, at a minimum, we should have told the president and his national security team that we did not have good access to Saddam and his inner circle.
I believe that one of the reasons CIA failed on the collection front—which should be a lesson learned moving forward—was our focus on covert action in Iraq. During the 1990s the United States had been intent on regime change in Iraq—in 1998, Congress made it the stated policy of the United States—and CIA had been in the lead. The day-to-day aim of our operations officers at that time had been to build ties to the Kurds in northern Iraq who might play a role in the overthrow of Saddam, and who were providing us with locations from which to operate against him. Our collection focus was on finding Sunnis in Saddam’s military who might be willing and able to overthrow him and take control of the country (and develop a new and much different relationship with the United States in the process). With all this, collection on other issues related to Iraq—including WMD—suffered.
It is important to remember that CIA doesn’t authorize covert action. That’s a policy decision that requires the direction and signature of the president of the United States. Covert action has a number of unseen costs. One is that it diverts you from traditional foreign intelligence collection. When an administration gives CIA the mission of conducting a covert action, it doesn’t assign additional people to perform the mission. The Congressional oversight committees are briefed on covert actions, and they sometimes provide additional funding, but they do not raise the Agency’s personnel ceiling just because there is a new plan. So the folks who could have been trying to figure out how to collect intelligence from Saddam’s inner circle to discover Saddam’s plans, intentions, and capabilities with regard to weapons of mass destruction were diverted to trying to find generals willing to overthrow him.
We had the perfect storm of imperfect intelligence. We were not collecting the kind of information that would have saved us from inaccurate analysis, and we were not rigorously asking ourselves how confident we were in the collected information. Had we done either, the intelligence outcome would have been different—and possibly the policy outcome as well.
Charles Duelfer, who led the US WMD hunt in Iraq after the invasion, concluded that Saddam had wanted to maintain the appearance of having weapons of mass destruction in order to deter his number one enemy, Iran. But Duelfer found that Saddam had thought that US intelligence was good enough to figure out the real story and, therefore, that the United States would eventually lower the sanctions and, more important, not attack him. Even Saddam turned out to be overconfident in US intelligence capabilities.
Charles Duelfer once told me an instructive story about Saddam. In US custody, a clean-shaven Saddam became ill and needed medical attention. He was taken to a US military facility, where he proceeded to flirt with a nurse. The nurse, not surprisingly, was not responsive to the flirtations. On the way back to his cell, Saddam asked his American escort—his US debriefer, with whom Saddam had developed rapport—why the nurse had paid no attention to him. The escort, as a joke, said, “American women like men with facial hair.” The next day Saddam started growing a full beard. When, a few weeks later, Saddam walked into the Iraqi courtroom that would convict him and sentence him to death, he had quite a bit of facial hair. Media commentators, including a former CIA analyst, speculated that Saddam was trying to play to the religious elements of the court by looking Islamic. The real reason—trying to make himself more attractive to a US nurse—was hidden from the public. It was a humorous example of Saddam’s misjudging Americans.
Duelfer also told me that Saddam had told him that he did not believe that the United States would object to his invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Saddam, in essence, said, “Look, if you guys did not want me to go into Kuwait, why didn’t you tell me you would deploy five hundred thousand troops, six carrier battle groups, fourteen hundred combat aircraft and a coalition of thirty-two countries? I am not crazy. If you had simply told me, I would not have gone into Kuwait.” Again, he assumed that the United States was smart enough to know what it was doing and that we did not have a problem with his invasion of Kuwait. Another misjudgment on his part.
Together all of these stories paint a picture of Saddam misjudging us and we misjudging him. It was a recipe that took us to war and caused him to lose his rule.
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The fear of al Qa‘ida, and of the damage that could be done if a rogue state like Iraq ever shared weapons of mass destruction with the group, led us to war. Oddly, one of the main results of the road we went down in Iraq—like Route Irish itself—was the creation of an environment that helped spread al Qa‘ida’s narrative across the Muslim world. The spread of al Qa‘ida’s ideology, which began when some of its operatives left South Asia after the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, was given a new boost by a narrative that said that the United States was intent on bringing war to Muslim lands.