Dirty Wars (17 page)

CIA Iraq specialists and the State Department were causing problems for the administration's drive to war with Iraq. Cheney and his top aide, Scooter Libby, began
visiting the Agency
to pressure analysts to deliver intel linking Iraq to 9/11 or proving that Iraq had an active WMD program. At the time, the pro-Iraq-war clique was receiving
significant push-back
from Powell's State Department and CIA analysts. The intelligence community, on clear orders from President Bush and under tremendous pressure from the vice president's office, was poring over all intelligence going back to the early 1990s, looking for a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, Iraq and 9/11. A consensus was building in the intelligence community that no significant links existed, that there was “
no credible information
” that Iraq was involved with 9/11 “or any other al-Qaida strike” and that rather than a cooperative partnership, according to a CIA brief presented to Congress, Iraq's relationship with al Qaeda “more closely resemble[d] that of two independent actors trying to exploit each other.” Dissatisfied with this response, Rumsfeld and Cheney began establishing their own, private
intelligence apparatus as they plotted out plans for an expansion of JSOC's direct action capabilities around the globe.

Within weeks of 9/11, Douglas Feith's office in the Pentagon became home to a secret “parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation” that would serve two purposes: collecting “intelligence” that would bolster the case for a “preemptive” war against Iraq and to provide Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith with “data they can use to disparage, undermine and
contradict the CIA's own analyses
.” When it was revealed, Rumsfeld attempted to downplay the significance of the parallel intelligence operation. “
It's [Feith's] shop
. The people work for him,” Rumsfeld said. “They have been looking at terrorist networks, al Qaeda relationships with terrorist states, and that type of thing.” Wolfowitz told the
New York Times
that the parallel intelligence team was “
helping us sift
through enormous amounts of incredibly valuable data that our many intelligence resources have vacuumed up,” describing “a phenomenon in intelligence work, that people who are pursuing a certain hypothesis will see certain facts that others won't, and not see other facts that others will.” He added that “the lens through which you're looking for facts affects what you look for” but insisted that the team was “not making independent intelligence assessments.”

By mid-2002, Feith's “shop” had grown into the Office of Special Plans, the primary plan being to create a
justification for an invasion of Iraq
, as would later become clear after the much-hyped WMDs failed to materialize and a somewhat embarrassed mainstream media began to reexamine the run-up to war. Wilkerson charged that Cheney and Rumsfeld, and their aides, insisted on viewing and analyzing raw, uninterpreted intelligence data from the field, believing that “they could
do it a lot better
than the Agency did,” adding that their “read” of raw intelligence “would always produce a far more frightening threat scenario than would be produced by the Agency,” because, in their view, “the Agency just couldn't do anything but equivocate.” Wilkerson saw this as a dangerous development. “Any intelligence person of stature would tell you that you don't give raw intelligence to the laymen, because they don't know how to read it,” he told me. “That's how Cheney, Feith and those people patched together a patchwork quilt—which is what it was—of Iraqi violations of the sanctions and Iraq [having a] WMD program and so forth and so on. They just picked out the [intelligence] that supported their own preexisting views and pieced them together.”

In 2002 alone, Cheney personally made approximately ten visits to the CIA. His top aide,
Libby, made repeated trips
, as did former House speaker
Newt Gingrich
, at the time a Pentagon “consultant.”
William Luti
, Feith's deputy for the Near East and South Asia, would also go to the Agency.
Some analysts said they felt pressured to conform their assessments with Cheney and company's political agenda and that Libby had inundated the CIA with requests for hundreds of documents that the analysts said would have
taken a year to produce
. Cheney would arrive at Langley and then
commandeer a conference room
on the seventh floor of CIA headquarters, to which he would summon various analysts and senior CIA officials. Cheney's staff, in particular, was “
hell-bent
on connecting Saddam and his regime to al Qaeda,” recalled Jose Rodriguez, who was running the high-value interrogation program and the black sites at the time. The “connections between Iraq and AQ were remarkably thin,” he conceded. “I could have given you a list of a half-dozen countries that had more substantial ties to bin Laden's organization than did Iraq.”

It was not unheard of for a vice president to visit the CIA, but according to former senior CIA analyst Ray McGovern—who served as the national security briefer for Vice President George H. W. Bush in the 1980s—Cheney's “multiple visits” were “
unprecedented
,” adding that Cheney was putting “unrelenting pressure” on analysts to produce the intelligence he wanted. “This is like inviting money changers into the temple. It's the inner sanctum,” McGovern asserted. “You don't have policy makers sitting at the table, helping us come up with the correct conclusions, and that is the only explanation as to why Dick Cheney would be making multiple visits out there.”

An investigative report prepared by Senator Carl Levin of the Senate Armed Services Committee concluded that Feith's office “developed and disseminated an ‘
alternative' assessment
of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda that went beyond the judgments of intelligence professionals in the IC [Intelligence Community], and which resulted in providing unreliable intelligence information about the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship to policymakers through both direct and indirect means.”
Feith edited his reports
depending on whom he was briefing. Cheney's office received all access briefings, but Feith's presentations to CIA director Tenet omitted PowerPoint slides critical of the Agency. The presentations to Cheney's staff, according to Levin's report, “
conveyed a perception
that the U.S. had firm evidence of a relationship between the Hussein regime and al Qaeda when it did not.” Tenet was unaware that Feith's office was briefing the president and vice president behind his back and did not find out until a year after Iraq had already been invaded. “The nation's foremost intelligence experts, and the President's chief intelligence officer, were
deprived of the opportunity
...to correct inaccuracies” in Feith's briefings, Levin's report asserted. More important, the CIA was “deprived of the opportunity to inform the White House of significant concerns about the reliability of
some of the reporting upon which Under Secretary Feith's White House briefing was based.”

In August 2002, Feith's staff showed up at an Intelligence Community meeting at which a final draft of the US intelligence on Iraq was to be nailed down. Professional intelligence analysts who attended the meeting said that it was “
unusual
” because “members of an intelligence consumer organization” such as Feith's office “normally do not participate in the creation of intelligence products.” At the meeting, Feith's staff complained that the report was not direct enough and contained too many caveats. They also pressured the analysts to include
discredited intelligence
that one of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, had met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague before the attacks. Feith's staff wrote a memo to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz after the meeting. They alleged that the “
CIA attempts to discredit
, dismiss, or downgrade” the information Feith wanted included in the final report resulted in “inconsistent conclusions in many instances.” They concluded: “Therefore, the CIA report should be read for content only—and CIA's interpretation ought to be ignored.”

In the end, under great pressure from Cheney's team and Feith's office, the US Intelligence Community's final Iraq report included “
questionable intelligence reports
,” according to a US Senate investigation, that fit the administration's predetermined policy of invading Iraq. Feith later presented a classified report to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The
Weekly Standard
obtained the memo and held it up as evidence of a rock-solid connection between al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime. Feith's memo, author Stephen Hayes alleged, proved that “Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had an
operational relationship
from the early 1990s to 2003,” stating bluntly that “there can no longer be any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein's Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to plot against Americans.” Cheney's targeted pressure campaign at the CIA and other intelligence agencies, along with Feith's briefings, would form the basis for the dubious claims that would ultimately make the Iraq invasion a reality.

WASHINGTON, DC
, 2002-2003—The November 2002 drone strike in Yemen was the opening salvo in the Bush administration's drive to expand US military action beyond the stated battlefield of Afghanistan. Although much of the media focus at the time was on the Bush administration's campaign to justify the invasion of Iraq, in secret the CIA was building up a black-site archipelago to deal with the rest of the world. Prisoners who had been snatched from various countries across the globe were being held in the gulags of foreign intelligence services, where they were interrogated and often tortured under the direction of US intelligence agents. CIA black sites were being constructed and “high value” detainees were being interrogated.

But infighting between the FBI and the CIA was becoming untenable.
Some FBI personnel were disgusted
with what they believed were extreme tactics being employed by the Agency's interrogators. Others, like Rumsfeld and Cheney, believed the CIA was not going far enough and was too restrained by its requirements to keep congressional committees abreast of its operations. By December 2002, CIA director George Tenet would boast that the United States and its allies had already
detained more than 3,000
suspected al Qaeda operatives and associates, in more than one hundred countries. But despite such proclamations, the game was only just beginning. The post-9/11 fervor that had allowed Cheney's “dark side” operations to flow largely unabated and unchallenged by Congress and the media was fading. Journalists and lawyers were poking around. A few members of Congress were starting to ask questions. There were rumblings about “secret prisons.”

Cheney and Rumsfeld were not content with the intelligence they were receiving from the CIA or the military's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) interrogators. “We have to start pushing on intel,” Rumsfeld had noted in an internal memo in March 2002. “
It is not going right
.” Rumsfeld asserted, “We are faced with the job of trying to find individual terrorists. That never used to be a DoD job. But terrorists today are well-organized and well-financed, they are trying to get weapons of mass destruction and can impose enormous damage on the United States. So finding them has
become a
Defense Department task
.” Rumsfeld and his deputies began seeking assistance from a secretive military program. The Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) was responsible for coordinating the
rescue
of US military personnel trapped in enemy territory, including in “denied areas,” where their very presence—if exposed—could cause a major international crisis or scandal. But of particular relevance to Rumsfeld was JPRA's other work: preparing US forces for resisting enemy attempts to extract information from captured US personnel. All US special operators went through JPRA's horrid torture mill, a program known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape.

The SERE program was created to introduce US soldiers, sailors and airmen to the full spectrum of torture that “a
totalitarian evil nation
with a complete disregard for human rights and the Geneva Convention” could use on them if captured. At SERE training, soldiers would be subjected to a hellish regimen of torture tactics drawn from the techniques of vicious dictatorships and terrorists.
During training
, soldiers could be kidnapped from their quarters, beaten, hooded, shackled and stuffed into vans, flown in helicopters. They could be waterboarded, beaten with canes, have their heads slammed against walls. They would often be deprived of food and sleep and subjected to psychological torture. “At SERE school, ‘enhanced interrogation techniques' are
enemy torture methods
,” said Malcolm Nance, who worked on the SERE program from 1997 to 2001 and helped develop and modernize its curriculum. Nance and other SERE instructors studied the debriefings of US prisoners of war throughout history. They dissected the interrogation tactics of Communist China, North Korea, the Vietcong, Nazi Germany and scores of other
regimes and terror groups
. The institutional knowledge at SERE was “built in blood. They are written in blood. Everything we use at SERE, a US service member—or thousands of them in some instances—died from.” SERE, Nance said, “was a repository of every known [torture tactic] out there. We had debriefs that went back—literally, the original debriefs—that went back to the Civil War.” SERE's intended purpose was to prepare US military personnel to face the tactics of lawless foes. But Rumsfeld and his allies saw a different value for the program.

In the early stages of the High Value Detainee program, the CIA and the DIA were
running the interrogation
show, but personnel from JSOC were watching closely. Internally, JSOC had concluded that the methods being used by the US interrogators in Afghanistan were not producing results—not because they were too harsh but because they were not harsh enough. “
From the beginning
, there was incredible pressure on interrogators to elicit actionable intelligence from practically every individual we took into custody.
Some of these detainees were complicit, others innocent; some were knowledgeable, some truly clueless,” recalled Colonel Steven Kleinman, who spent twenty-seven years working in US intelligence and was one of the most experienced interrogators in modern US history. Among his positions was director of intelligence at JPRA's Personnel Recovery Academy. “In far too many cases, we simply erred in pressing interrogation and interrogators beyond the edge of the envelope. As a result, interrogation was no longer an intelligence collection method; rather, it had morphed into a form of punishment for those who wouldn't cooperate.” Kleinman added that when the torture tactics “proved ineffective in producing the type of actionable intelligence required by senior leaders,” veteran US interrogators, including some from the FBI and US military, suggested using alternative, noncoercive, nonviolent tactics. Top White House officials “ignored or rejected” those tactics as “irrelevant.” “We instead opted for more of the same, except the pressure would be ratcheted up...in some cases to an alarming degree,” Kleinman said. “When presented with the choice of getting smarter or getting tougher, we chose the latter.”