Inside the CIA

by Kessler, Ronald

  Nevertheless, at three P.M. on August 1, Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly warned Iraq that its differences with Kuwait must be resolved peacefully. He asked Iraq to pull its forces back. Iraq denied any aggressive intentions.146

  By eight P.M., the invasion had begun.

  “If you go back through the meetings at the NSC [National Security Council] at the deputy level, you’ll see a realistic assessment of Saddam Hussein in terms of a man who was pretty much a cutthroat bully,” Kerr said. “The question was how do you deal with him. Do you deal with him by threatening him or do you try to engage him in some kind of a process? Threatening him without backing it up is not useful. Just saying you better not do it is not going to have much impact.”

  Ideally, the Bush administration would have threatened Saddam Hussein with force if he moved into Kuwait. But whether that would have worked is highly debatable. Over the ensuing months, Saddam Hussein refused to budge even when threatened with massive military force by the U.S. and its allies. In the end, only military action against Iraq’s forces worked. The CIA collected most of the intelligence used.

  First the CIA reassigned at least four photo reconnaissance satellites to orbit over the Middle East. Costing $1 billion to $1.5 billion apiece, the satellites were from the KH-11 and KH-12 series. They orbited 200 to 500 miles above the earth’s surface. In addition to relaying photographic images in real time, the satellites transmitted images based on heat emissions. LACROSSE, a satellite system using radar imaging, saw through cloud cover, darkness, and smoke from 500 miles above the earth. Finally, satellites code-named MAGNUM and VORTEX intercepted Iraqi communications from 22,000 miles above the earth.

  The Directorate of Operations formed a wartime task force of more than two hundred officers. Among other things, they worked to free Americans held by Iraq during the early stages of the conflict, established a clandestine radio station that urged Iraqi troops to surrender, and helped the U.S. Army design leaflets urging surrender.

  Through the National Collection Division within the Directorate of Operations, the CIA was able to obtain the plans for weapons plants and other military installations from American businessmen. The Soviet/East Europe Division obtained similar information from Poland and Hungary, countries that had formerly worked with the Soviets to supply Iraq its armaments.

  Meanwhile, the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center sifted through more than one hundred terrorist threats that came in against the countries allied against Iraq just after the invasion of Kuwait. After war broke out, the CIA recorded one hundred and twenty terrorist acts—not threats—against the allies. Working with law enforcement agencies throughout the world, the CIA helped to foil a number of the efforts.147

  The Directorate of Intelligence established a task force of one hundred analysts who pored over the images, intercepts, and reports from agents. Before the war began on January 16, 1991, they issued some five hundred reports to the White House on the effect of economic sanctions against Iraq and on Saddam Hussein’s preparations for war. After DESERT STORM began, the CIA issued hundreds of additional reports to the White House and the military. Among them were analyses of Saddam Hussein, who was judged to be sane and operating according to the values and traditions of his society.

  Dr. Jerrold M. Post, a former CIA psychiatrist who analyzed personalities of world leaders, described Saddam Hussein as a man who is not “suffering from a psychotic disorder. He is not impulsive, acts only after judicious consideration, and can be extremely patient, indeed uses time as a weapon. While he is psychologically in touch with reality, he is often politically out of touch. Saddam’s advisers do not lightly contradict his views or his plans.”

  According to Dr. Post, the Iraqi leader is able “to justify extremes of aggression on the basis of revolutionary needs. If the aggression is counterproductive, he has always shown a pattern of reversing his course when he has miscalculated, waiting until a later day to achieve his revolutionary destiny.”148

  Dr. Post later expanded his evaluation of the Iraqi leader, saying he suffers from “malignant narcissism,” a severe personality disorder that manifests itself in paranoia, ruthlessness, and grandiose ideas.

  The CIA presented most of its key findings to President Bush at daily eight A.M. briefings, when the agency gave him the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), a compendium of the CIA’s best intelligence and analysis. From the day the CIA began, the agency had prepared a daily current intelligence summary, which evolved into the National Intelligence Daily, now given to 250 senior government officials in Washington and hundreds of other U.S. officials around the world. However, President Kennedy asked for a publication that would more directly address his needs and interests. The result was the PDB.

  Each president designates who should receive the PDB within his administration. Bush wanted it distributed only to the secretaries of defense and state and to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. The PDB also goes to other members of the intelligence community besides the CIA.

  Some presidents, such as Ronald Reagan, did not read the PDB themselves, preferring to have their national security advisers read the document and brief them. Others, such as George Bush and Gerald Ford, read the PDB themselves. When they are reading it, they receive a briefing from a CIA analyst. The briefer jots down questions the president has as he reads the PDB and listens to the briefing. The briefer brings back answers the next morning, or sooner if necessary.

  The PDB is prepared by the CIA’s Office of Current Production and Analytic Support. Located on the seventh floor of the old CIA headquarters building, it is part of the Directorate of Intelligence and includes the CIA’s operations center that keeps track of minute-to-minute developments around the world. The center looks very much like the news anchor studio of a major television network. Like many CIA offices, the windows are protected with devices that vibrate, making it impossible for laser beams from outside to pick up sound from within. Like the offices of most high-ranking CIA officials, it has a television monitor tuned constantly to Cable News Network (CNN).

  The PDB is prepared by ten officers, including a chief and deputy chief who also take turns briefing the president each morning. The officer who will brief the president the next day usually stays until eight P.M. the night before to read a draft of the next day’s PDB. He comes back to the CIA before the PDB’s five-thirty A.M. deadline to insert any late-breaking developments. The CIA’s printing plant, at the northwest end of the CIA compound, then prints the top-secret document. The director of Central Intelligence receives a draft of the PDB at the end of the day so he can read it on the way home. A final copy is delivered when the CIA security guards pick him up in the morning.

  The PDB is usually eight to ten letter-size pages arranged in newspaper column format. The pages on the left are usually reserved for photographs, charts, and tables. Like a newspaper, the PDB presents the most important news near the front, while longer analyses appear near the end. For example, before the war began, the PDB carried an analysis of Saddam Hussein’s personality. The PDB staff refers to it as the “book.”

  As a rule, about half of what are known as “key facts” in the PDB are not yet publicly known. For example, during the war, the PDB addressed the question of whether Israel would respond to Iraq’s Scud missile attacks. Other material, while rumored, was reported with more authority than what appeared in the press at the time. The PDB also conveyed analysis. For example, it summarized William Webster’s prediction in December 1990 that Saddam Hussein would not withdraw until faced with “imminent military attack.” In January 1991, Webster said that economic sanctions alone would not force Saddam Hussein to withdraw his forces from Kuwait for at least a year.149

  The agency thus dismissed the possibility that economic sanctions would work in the foreseeable future, a judgment proven correct by later events. The PDB also correctly pre-dieted that Saddam Hussein would use scorched-earth tactics and spill oil on the Persian Gulf before withdrawing from Kuwait.r />
  When William Webster was DCI, he briefed the president himself, along with the officer from the PDB, three to four times a week. During the war, he briefed him virtually daily. First Webster met with Bush’s national security advisers and gave them a copy of the PDB. Then, for the next fifteen to twenty minutes, they all met with Bush to review it and take questions. The briefer then returned the document to the CIA. If Bush was out of town, he received a copy of the PDB by secure fax.

  “What has been unique in the Bush administration, and was done only once before with Gerald Ford, is that we have daily personal contact with the president when he is in town,” a member of the PDB staff said. “The normal pattern has been for the person we call the PDB briefer to go downtown and see the national security adviser and sit with him while he goes through the book and asks questions, hand over any supplemental material, late-breaking news, and photography that illustrates the point and that came in too late to get in the book. The national security adviser would then see the president.”

  Both Ford and Bush had read the PDB when they were vice president and had come to rely on it. As a former CIA director and someone who was intimately familiar with the foreign policy issues addressed, Bush took a particular interest in the briefing.

  “Bush, after he was elected, I think the first day, said he would like to continue to have someone from CIA brief him,” the staffer said. “He reads it, and the others read it at the same time. The president asks questions: ‘How confident are we of this particular information? Might we be able to get additional information on this using one or another kind of collection technique?’ Then usually the briefer leaves, and usually the director leaves. Occasionally, he’ll stay behind to discuss a sensitive program, or the president will ask him something.”

  In reporting on Iraq, the CIA’s efforts were not without flaws. The agency vastly overestimated the number of Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait. Many had defected from their units, and the agency assumed each unit in place had a full complement of men. The CIA underestimated the number of Iraqi mobile Scud launchers. And the agency did not know that the bunker in the Amariya district in Baghdad used as a secret military command post during the day was packed with hundreds of women and children at night. The reason was that most of the spy satellites passed over Iraq during the day. Many women and children died when an American jet attacked the bunker.

  But overall, the performance of the CIA and related intelligence agencies was a “triumph,” as the Wall Street Journal later called it in a feature article by Walter S. Mossberg. The military was able to see its targets from space in real time, a war-winning advantage. With few exceptions, the CIA pinpointed every tank, every gun emplacement, and every chemical and biological weapons facility. When a defector reported that contrary to earlier reports, not all of Iraq’s equipment for making nuclear explosives had been destroyed, the CIA provided photographs of out-of-date uranium-enrichment machinery being moved around on trucks or being buried to evade United Nations inspections. Most important, the CIA had predicted the outbreak of the war in the first place.

  “The Central Intelligence Agency and its sister services, especially the code-breaking National Security Agency, supplied U.S. military commanders with an immense quantity of timely information,” the Wall Street Journal said. “Spysatellite photos, intercepted Iraqi military communications, and other data gave U.S. generals a capability their predecessors could only dream about—the ability to track just about every important military action Iraq undertook.”150

  A later story by George Lardner, Jr., of the Washington Post sounded a similar theme. “U.S. intelligence during the Persian Gulf War has been widely rated by government officials as superb in many respects, but the conflict also produced hard evidence of the breakdowns that can occur,” the July 5, 1991, story said.

  While Army General H. Norman Schwarzkopf later complained that analyses were too qualified, he said intelligence during the war was excellent, contributing to the allied success. He also singled out for criticism bomb-damage assessments, which conflicted with higher reports of damage from pilots. Which assessments were closest to the truth is still not clear. Like any witnesses, pilots are often wrong. On the other hand, the analysts back in Washington had little experience tracking the kind of destruction wreaked by “smart” weapons. From the air, a tank may appear undamaged because it has not exploded in flames and appears to have only a tiny hole where a missile entered it. But today’s missiles can wipe out the inside of a tank and its occupants without creating outside damage. For that reason, the analysts could very well have underestimated damage, contributing to unnecessary loss of lives from bombing missions that were not militarily necessary. But that kind of analysis, for the most part, was done by military intelligence analysts, not by the CIA.

  Some publications trumpeted what they called “failures” of intelligence during the war. They cited the fact that the CIA had overestimated the number of Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait and had predicted that Saddam Hussein would use chemical weapons. Yet overestimates of opposing forces can never be a failure if the idea is to win the war. Where it overestimated the enemy, the CIA contributed to the allied success by suggesting the need for a large military offensive able to swiftly overrun the enemy.

  “If you know others and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles,” the Chinese warrior-philosopher Sun Tzu said more than two thousand years ago.151

  The fact is that Saddam Hussein, who should have known more about his own forces than did the CIA, also overstated their capabilities and did not take desertions into account. To expect that anyone can predict every tactic that an enemy will use—including use of chemical weapons—is unrealistic.

  Some media critics and a few members of Congress said the CIA should have known earlier on that Saddam Hussein would invade Kuwait.

  “The president could have had very many options” if the plans to invade Kuwait were known weeks earlier, Sen. David L. Boren, the Oklahoma Democrat who headed the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said. Only “in the last few days” before the invasion did U.S. intelligence agencies forecast its occurrence, Boren said.152

  Again, the criticism was unfounded. If there were evidence that Saddam Hussein knew what his own plans were well before the CIA knew about them, the criticism might have been justified. Certainly his officers did not know his plans. In interviewing captured Iraqi officers, the CIA found that the military did not know more than twenty-four hours before the invasion what their leader’s intentions were. Tariq Aziz, Iraq’s foreign minister during the war, told Milton Viorst, on assignment for the New Yorker, that Saddam Hussein did not decide to invade Kuwait until August 1, when talks on oil disputes between Iraq and Kuwait collapsed in Jidda.153

  In effect, the critics were saying that the agency should have known that Saddam Hussein was going to invade Kuwait before he knew it. To suggest that the CIA should have known more than the enemy knew is to require clairvoyance, something that no one has yet been able to achieve. Intelligence is nothing more than information, and to insist that the CIA should have it before it exists is unfair. Unless there is reason to believe that an event is going to happen, the CIA has no business saying it might happen. After all, anything might happen.

  Three weeks before the military offensive took place, the CIA raised the possibility that Iraq would invade. In doing so, the CIA fulfilled its role, which is to take the first cut at world events, to filter out important developments, to bring them to the attention of the White House, and to sound a warning about the possible outcomes so that policymakers can prepare.

  Absent hard evidence, the CIA would have been irresponsible if it had said flatly that Saddam Hussein would invade. Even if the CIA had had hard evidence of Saddam Hussein’s intentions early on, no one—including the Iraqi leader—knew for sure that he would go ahead with the plan until he did. The fact is the CIA did raise the possibility that Iraq would invade Kuwait three weeks before the invasion.
It could not have stated the case more strongly than it did because, even to this day, there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein knew then he would order an invasion. Even when the CIA did sound the alarm, the Bush administration did very little about it.

  “People make critical comments about us all the time,” Kerr observed. “A lot of it is out of frustration. We don’t do what they would like us to do, or we are doing something they would just as soon we didn’t do.”154

  The fact is the U.S. could not have won the war, with its outflanking maneuvers and precise bombing, as quickly and effectively as it did if it had not had good intelligence. In this case, the intelligence overall was nothing short of spectacular. Yet even when the CIA does well, its success is often portrayed as failure.

  Meanwhile, an entire directorate of the CIA goes on about its business largely unaffected by the crisis of the moment. This is the Directorate of Administration, which supports the CIA. Yet in many ways, this is the most fascinating of all the CIA’s directorates. Because it contains the Office of Security, it is also the one with the most problems.

  PART IV

  The Directorate of Administration

  16

  Laundering Money

  THE DIRECTORATE OF ADMINISTRATION, WHILE ONLY A support element, is no different from the other directorates in thinking that its job is the most essential. It is this directorate that keeps the other pieces of the agency in place. Without it, no one in the CIA would get paid, no one would be hired, and no one would have any computers, communications, heat, or electricity. Most important, without the directorate’s Office of Security, opposing spy agencies could infiltrate moles into the CIA or bug the office of the CIA director himself. With nine thousand employees, it is the CIA’s largest directorate.