So by the time the CIA’s Drumheller sat down with the BND station chief in Washington in late September 2002, there was more than sufficient reason for the CIA to worry. After the German intelligence chief told him that Curveball might be a fabricator, Drumheller reported this to Pavitt. “Stay on top of this,” Pavitt told him. Drumheller sent a note to Alan Foley, the WINPAC chief, about what the German station chief had said about Curveball. He also asked his deputy to pull the files on the problematic source. “Find out what the hell is going on with this guy,” Drumheller recalled telling her. She soon reported back, “This is a problem, boss.” Curveball’s information about bioweapons labs had just been accepted for inclusion in the National Intelligence Estimate then being drafted in response to a request from the Senate intelligence committee.
Oh boy, Drumheller thought, they have to have better stuff than this.
If I had to do it all over again, I would say, “Hell no, I’m not going to do that!”
—CIA ANALYST PAUL PILLAR
8
Bent with the Wind
AS SOON as he could, Peter Zimmerman, the scientific adviser to the Senate foreign relations committee, rushed to a secure room in the U.S. Capitol to read the CIA’s classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. This was the report that had been requested three weeks earlier by Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee. The ninety-page paper, delivered to Congress on the night of October 1, was supposed to be the most authoritative summary of the U.S. government’s intelligence on Iraq’s deadly weapons and the threat they posed to America. Zimmerman, who had been unimpressed by the closed-door Tenet briefing a week earlier, was anxious to see what the CIA really had to back up the WMD case for war.
He read the NIE twice. He was, he later said, astonished. The document offered bold and definitive conclusions in its “key judgments”: Iraq, it said, “has chemical and biological weapons” and “is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.” But the actual evidence, he thought, was hardly overpowering. Deeper in the NIE, there was information that undercut those stark conclusions. On critical points—the tubes, the unmanned aerial drones, the nuclear program—some government agencies had argued that the NIE was wrong. “The dissents leaped out—they’re in bold, almost like flashing light,” Zimmerman recalled. He had read NIEs before and never seen dissents as striking as these. “I remember thinking,” he later said, “ ‘Boy, there’s nothing there. If anybody takes the time to actually read this, they can’t believe there actually are major WMD programs.’ ”
The NIE was something of a muddle. It eventually came to symbolize the entire WMD foul-up. The document did maintain that Iraq was full of deadly weapons. It was filled at some points with scary specifics. Iraq had amassed between 100 and 500 metric tons of chemical weapons (including mustard gas, sarin, and VX). Saddam possessed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that were “probably intended” to deliver biological agents. The drones could be “brought close to, or into…the U.S. Homeland.” Iraq had “mobile facilities” for producing toxins and other biological agents that can “evade detection and are highly survivable.” And the NIE stated that Iraq had begun “vigorously trying” to buy yellowcake and was “reportedly” working out a deal to acquire “up to 500 tons” from Niger. Its key judgment section suggested the WMD situation in Iraq might even be worse than what the NIE outlined: “We judge that we are seeing only a portion of Iraq’s WMD efforts.”
But, as Zimmerman noticed, there were plenty of doubts in the fine print. In an annex in the back of the document, the State Department’s intelligence bureau, INR, stated that “claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are…highly dubious.” (Notably, the yellowcake claims were also not included as a “key judgment” of the NIE.) Both the Energy Department’s Office of Intelligence and INR had disagreed with the conclusions about the aluminum tubes—the only hard evidence to support the claim that Iraq had revived its nuclear weapons program. In a sidebar, INR also challenged the entire conclusion about Iraq’s nuclear efforts. As for the UAVs, the Air Force’s intelligence office (home to the government’s main experts on such weapons) had concluded they were primarily intended for reconnaissance, not for spraying deadly biological agents on unsuspecting civilians.
And the details of the consensus portions of the NIE were not in all respects as bold as the overarching conclusions. None of the intelligence agencies claimed that Iraq was on the doorstep of the nuclear club. They concluded Iraq could produce a nuclear weapon “during this decade” (but not likely before 2007 to 2009) only if “left unchecked.” But Iraq was still being checked by sanctions (as problematic as they were) and would soon face a new round of inspections. On chemical weapons, the NIE acknowledged, “we have little specific information on Iraq’s CW stockpile.” As for the mobile biological weapons labs, most of the NIE’s section on this was based on a single source: Curveball.
The NIE said the intelligence community had “high confidence” in its conclusions that Iraq was expanding its chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons program, but it admitted it had little concrete evidence in hand: “we are not detecting portions of these weapons programs.” In the eyes of other readers, the dissents and hedges might not have been as striking as Zimmerman considered them. But they were there, even if the public had no way of knowing they existed.
Only after the war began—when it was too late—would the NIE prompt hard questions about how the intelligence community had produced such a flawed document. It was a consensus paper thrashed out during hours of interagency meetings presided over by senior CIA officials. Had the process been politicized? Had analysts been pressured? Had Tenet and his deputy, John McLaughlin, been unwilling to impose tight standards to avoid displeasing the White House? An Energy Department official later said that the “DOE did not want to come out before the war and say [Iraq] wasn’t reconstituting” its nuclear weapons program. One intelligence analyst subsequently told Senate investigators that when the NIE was being assembled, “the going-in assumption was we were going to war, so this NIE was to be written with that in mind…. This is about going to war and giving the combatant commander an estimate on which he can properly organize.”
Two investigations—one by the Republican-controlled Senate intelligence committee, the other by a White House–appointed commission—would later conclude there had been no “political pressure” from the White House to alter the intelligence community’s conclusions. But asking a blunt question—were analysts bullied into concocting conclusions that bolstered Bush administration policies?—overlooked how bureaucracies work. The dynamics that produced the NIE pervaded the U.S. intelligence community throughout the run-up to the Iraq War. “You were never told what to write,” recalled Bruce Hardcastle, a veteran and widely respected DIA analyst for Near East affairs, who was deeply skeptical about some of the claims relating to Iraqi weapons programs. “But you knew what assessments administration officials would be receptive to—and what they would not be receptive to.” In such an environment, Hardcastle added, what analyst was going to speak up and say “I don’t think Saddam has any of these weapons”? Hardcastle was a walking example of the price that could be paid. After he clashed with a Feith deputy on Mideast issues, Hardcastle found himself shunted aside, bumped at the last minute from an overseas trip to the Middle East, and uninvited to key meetings.
The NIE was the product of a tainted intellectual environment—or so Paul Pillar, then the CIA’s national intelligence officer for Near East and South Asia, argued more than three years later in a Foreign Affairs article. Pillar, a thoughtful, scholarly analyst with degrees from Oxford, Dartmouth, and Princeton, anguished over his own role in the CIA’s handling of the prewar intelligence. “It was clear that the Bush administration would frown on or ignore analysis that called into question a decision to go to war and welcome analysis that supported such a decision,” he wrote. “Intelligence analysts…felt a strong wind consi
stently blowing in one direction. The desire to bend with such a wind is natural and strong, even if unconscious.”
The desire to “bend” with the wind, as Pillar put it, may be the only plausible explanation for one of the enduring puzzles of the NIE: Why did it have any reference at all to the mushy, unproven Niger charge? Barely two weeks earlier, the CIA had told the White House to strike a reference to the uranium deal from the president’s UN speech, and it would do so again for another major speech in the days ahead. During interagency drafting meetings for the NIE, a State Department nuclear analyst, Simon Dodge, had tried to convince his colleagues to take it out of the NIE, arguing that the yellowcake claims were groundless and would draw a stiff dissent from his office. Still, agency officials were reluctant to remove an allegation that White House press secretary Ari Fleischer had already cited. They might also have wanted to make sure they didn’t get criticized later for leaving it out—just in case it might turn out to be true. Robert Walpole, the national intelligence officer who oversaw this document, later told Senate investigators that he had decided to put the Niger charge into the NIE “for completeness” and so “nobody can say we didn’t connect the dots.” It was a decision that would soon cause great turmoil. “It’s crystal clear we shouldn’t have used the Niger allegation,” deputy CIA director John McLaughlin subsequently said.*24
In the end, the actual wording of the NIE probably didn’t matter. By the time it was written, the Bush White House had already made extensive use of the faulty intelligence that had been packaged in the estimate. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, and other administration officials had ignored the disputes (where they existed) and hardly questioned the limited (and flawed) intelligence that had been produced. Bush hadn’t asked for the NIE, nor—as the White House would later acknowledge—did he even read it.†1
Nor would most members of Congress. Senate aides would later calculate that no more than a half-dozen or so members actually went to the secure room where the highly classified NIE was kept under lock and key before the upcoming vote on Bush’s Iraq resolution. Zimmerman, the Senate staffer, urged his colleagues with security clearances to go read the NIE, telling them the dissents were “pretty shocking.” But it was too late. “There was not a goddamn thing I or any staffer could do to stop this. We had an election coming up. The Democrats were afraid of being seen as soft on Saddam or on terrorism. The whole notion was, ‘Let’s get the war out of the way as fast as possible and turn back to the domestic agenda.’ ”
ONE of the few who did read the NIE was Senator Bob Graham, the Democratic chairman of the Senate intelligence committee. Graham, too, was struck by its “many nuances and outright dissents,” he later said. But under committee rules, Graham and other skeptics were unable to say anything in public about them. At an October 2 closed-door hearing of the intelligence committee, Graham and Senator Carl Levin pressed Tenet and McLaughlin on the sourcing behind the NIE’s assertions. Did the CIA have its own spies inside Iraq who could verify information about the country’s supposed WMD stockpiles? Tenet acknowledged that there weren’t any—and that the CIA hadn’t had much in the way of assets in Iraq since UN inspectors had left in 1998. “I was stunned,” Graham recalled. Graham and Levin requested a declassified version of the NIE, so that some of the equivocations and dissents could be shared with the public.
What came next was a crucial moment in the selling of the war. As it happened, in May, the White House had asked the CIA to prepare a white paper on Iraq’s weapons. McLaughlin had passed the request to Pillar. A draft was completed within weeks. But it wasn’t released. When the request came for a declassified NIE, Pillar was told to redo the old white paper and to keep it in sync with the NIE.
The CIA’s new white paper, “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs,” was publicly released on October 4, just as senators and representatives were beginning the floor debate on the resolution that would authorize Bush to launch a war against Iraq whenever he saw fit. The white paper was a slick document on glossy magazine-style paper with color maps, graphics, tables, and photos. One page displayed the location of Iraq’s presumed nuclear facilities, complete with yellow-and-black radiation warning symbols. (They were, Graham would later note, “the modern equivalent of skull and crossbones.”)
The white paper’s conclusions were similar to those of the NIE, only more definitive. The CIA had removed the hedging language. It contained none of the dissents. The white paper falsely stated that “All intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons,” ignoring the State Department’s pointed dissent. It said that “most intelligence specialists” thought the tubes were for a centrifuge program; it left out the fact that the Energy Department didn’t agree. The white paper warned that “Baghdad’s UAVs” could “threaten…the U.S. Homeland”; the Air Force’s disagreement was not mentioned. And it dropped the NIE’s telling concession that U.S. intelligence had “little specific information” on Iraq’s chemical weapons stockpiles.
Afterward, Pillar was embarrassed by the white paper. “In retrospect, we shouldn’t have done that white paper at all,” he said. It wasn’t really intelligence analysis, he believed. “The white paper was policy advocacy.” He wished he had mustered the courage to tell the CIA leadership and the White House that he wouldn’t put out such a document. “One of the biggest regrets of my career is, I didn’t find a way to say no,” he would later say. “If I had to do it all over again, I would say, ‘Hell no, I’m not going to do that!’ ” Pillar, who had always prided himself on his independence and integrity, was ashamed of his role. He and his CIA colleagues, he thought, had been reduced to producing propaganda. He, too, had bent with the wind.
Pillar was operating under his own set of pressures. Shortly before the Bush administration began, he had published a book on terrorism that concluded that the major threat came from freelance groups operating independently of any governments, like al-Qaeda. This had been the CIA’s long-standing position on the issue. But it was a direct challenge to the thinking of the neoconservatives and Laurie Mylroie, who believed that state-sponsored terrorism (meaning Saddam-sponsored terrorism) was the real problem. For administration hard-liners, Pillar was already suspect, a charter member of an imagined CIA cabal hostile to the president’s agenda.
Pillar himself inadvertently sharpened the conflict a few weeks after the president’s 2002 State of the Union speech highlighting the “Axis of Evil.” He had been invited to speak to a class at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He suggested the president, in his speech, should have been a “little clearer” about the distinction between terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. There was, he said, no evidence that the Iraqi government had shared such weapons with terrorists—and no evidence that Iraq had supported any terrorist acts since 1993. Pillar had thought he was speaking off the record. Yet within days, Insight—a conservative newsmagazine published by The Washington Times—carried a story reporting that Pillar had attacked Bush’s speech and criticized Laurie Mylroie. Pillar suddenly found his job on the line and, he said, later heard that Wolfowitz wanted him fired.
The contentious dispute over the Iraq–al-Qaeda link, according to Pillar, was one explanation for the CIA’s exaggerated conclusions on weapons of mass destruction in the NIE and the white paper. “What was going through the back of my mind,” said Pillar, who worked on the NIE, “is that, unlike [the purported] terrorism [connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda], which was a manufactured issue…there was a consensus view on WMD.” That was not entirely so. There was plenty of dispute within the intelligence community on crucial weapons-related issues. But the basic proposition—that Saddam had some chemical and biological weapons—had always been accepted by the CIA, just as it was by all allied intelligence services. The disagreement concerned whether Saddam possessed a vast and growing arsenal or merely “residual” stockpiles, as DIA chief Admiral Thomas Wilson had testified to Congress in March 2002.
/> Battered by administration officials on the al-Qaeda–Baghdad link, Pillar and other CIA officials were looking to be on the team in other ways. So the CIA, perhaps in an act of bureaucratic overcompensation, was willing to give the White House what it wanted on the WMD issue. Indirectly—but significantly—the obsession of Feith and Wolfowitz at the Pentagon and Scooter Libby and Cheney at the White House to find “the connection” between Saddam and Osama bin Laden was a factor that led to the CIA’s overstating the WMD case.
The headlines generated by the white paper were good for the White House. “C.I.A. Says Iraq Revived Forbidden Weapons Program After the UN Inspectors Left,” The New York Times declared. An Associated Press story reported, “Iraq is making new biological and chemical weapons and could have a nuclear weapon by 2010, a new report by U.S. intelligence agencies concludes.”
WHEN Graham read the white paper, he went ballistic. He saw it had been shorn of the dissents and caveats of the classified NIE. “I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan,” Graham later wrote. “Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth—or even had an interest in knowing the truth.”
He called Tenet and lit into him, demanding to know how the CIA could have produced two such different documents: a secret NIE filled with dissents and a public “white paper” that conveyed unanimity and certainty. Tenet grew defensive, according to Graham, telling the senator he resented any questioning of the professionalism or the “patriotism” of his analysts. Graham shot back that he resented Tenet’s suggestion that he lacked respect for the men and women of the CIA. He told Tenet he wanted more of the NIE made public. Tenet replied, testily, that he would look into it.
That night, Graham sent a letter seeking the public release of specific sections of the NIE showing there were doubts within the U.S. intelligence community about significant parts of the administration’s case. He also wanted Tenet to permit the disclosure of a revealing exchange that had taken place at the October 2 closed-door hearing. In that back-and-forth, McLaughlin had been asked by Senator Carl Levin if it was “likely” that Saddam would launch an attack using chemical and biological weapons.
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