The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS (12 page)

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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.

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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.