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Facts and Fears

Page 13

by James R. Clapper


  That day the State Department demanded in writing that the Taliban government provide all information it had about Osama bin Laden and his whereabouts, and that it expel anyone affiliated with al-Qaida. Similarly, Congress passed a joint resolution authorizing “the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States.” That same afternoon, President Bush stood on a pile of rubble at Ground Zero, holding a bullhorn and trying to address the emergency responders who had crowded around. When one of them yelled, “I can’t hear you,” Bush responded, “I can hear you. I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people—and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” I thought that was an inspired, and inspiring, statement to those responders and to the nation, and I wanted to get to work. On Saturday the fifteenth, when I drove my mighty Mustang onto the NIMA compound and parked in the space marked “Reserved for Director,” a very polite security guard informed me I wasn’t authorized to park in the director’s parking spot. I extended my hand and said, “Hi.”

  On Monday I addressed the senior staff at NIMA for the first time as their director. I told them that I was gratified to return to government, but circumstances were not what any of us had expected or wanted. I said we would all remember what we were doing when we were attacked, much like what many of us had experienced on November 22, 1963, except that in many ways September 11, 2001, would be more profound, because people we personally were acquainted with had been affected. I knew seven DIA employees who had been lost, and a husband-and-wife tandem of flight attendants who were on the airliner that crashed into the Pentagon were related to my son-in-law, Jay. I told the NIMA staff that the real shock would set in as our nation endured three thousand funerals and many more memorial services in the coming weeks.

  Finally, I said that we were in the privileged position of being able to do something about the tragedy, to make a direct contribution to whatever was coming next. My impression was that people in NIMA were thinking of their responsibilities as a sacred public trust, and they were reacting accordingly. I acknowledged that in 1995, as DIA director, I’d been against the formation of NIMA, and that I’d been wrong: NIMA could play a leading role in integrating and unifying the Intelligence Community. I stressed that NIMA drew its institutional strength and relevance from the fact that, fundamentally, “Everything and everyone must be someplace,” including the people who had attacked us on September 11. If NIMA met its potential, managing the functional synthesis of imagery and mapping into a new intelligence field, every other agency and every other discipline would build upon the geospatial foundation we would provide. We would need to make major changes, working simultaneously on three time frames: now, next, and after next.

  Soon after that first meeting, we established a task force for integrating our imagery analysts with the mapping and charting experts, and we set it loose. I authorized my newly arrived deputy director, Joanne Isham, an experienced senior CIA officer, to take whatever steps were necessary to facilitate the transformation. She would work on changes inside the agency, and I would work on support we needed from outside. And then, we went to work, and NIMA went to war.

  One of our big goals was to get people with different skill sets to physically and functionally work together. Under Jim King, NIMA had experimented with assigning mappers and imagery analysts to a single workspace to see what they could accomplish, but NIMA needed to scale Jim’s experiment up so that the entire agency worked that way. In the meantime, we were fixated on filling the blank space that was Afghanistan, where al-Qaida was hiding and training. We started almost from square zero, since the little data we had was not current, and without basic information on the country’s geography, demographics, and infrastructure it would be virtually impossible to conduct military operations there. We began obtaining raw data and buying all the commercial imagery of Afghanistan as it became available. I was accused in some trade media of exercising a “checkbook monopoly,” trying to corner the market on commercial imagery, but I was fine with that criticism, as we needed all the data we could gather, from whatever source—to locate the terrorists, and then produce maps and charts to target them.

  On September 21, in an address to a joint session of Congress, President Bush spoke to the world, saying, “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Even more directly, he addressed the government in Afghanistan: “The Taliban must act and act immediately. They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate.” Before the month was out, CIA operatives were in the country, laying the groundwork to support an invasion. On October 7, less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, the United States began air strikes in Kandahar, Kabul, and Jalalabad. On October 19, Special Operations Forces initiated the ground war. Very quickly, Taliban and al-Qaida fighters were on the run. As someone who had witnessed the gradual buildup to the Gulf War and Operation Desert Storm from the Pentagon, the rapidity of Operation Enduring Freedom was impressive. Everyone at NIMA was working hard to support the war effort. With advances in digital technology, we were pushing imagery not only to the Pentagon, but also to General Tommy Franks and Central Command, and to commanders on the ground in Afghanistan. However, we were still effectively functioning as practitioners of two separate disciplines.

  I’ve never been a big fan of off-site meetings with team-building exercises and other touchy-feely whatnot, but I thought it would be beneficial if the agency leadership and I collectively paused, caught our breath, and took stock of the course we’d charted for the agency. After the Christmas holidays, I asked the top forty leaders to join me at a secluded spot away from Washington to assess the agency’s collective performance. Once I had them captive, I asked, somewhat rhetorically, whether we’d all been “singing ‘Amazing Grace’ at the wake of DMA and NPIC long enough,” and if the time had come to fully unite, integrate our work, embrace “geospatial intelligence” as a new discipline, and ultimately change the name of the agency. They unanimously agreed. It took almost two years for legislation to officially rename NIMA to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in November 2003, but I believe geospatial intelligence was officially born at that off-site meeting in January 2002.

  The prospect of changing the agency’s name turned out to be an emotional, controversial issue with the workforce. I received many cards and letters expressing support, angst, or outright resistance to rebranding after only five years. People also succumbed to the temptation to try to pronounce “NGIA” as a word, and I heard from several black employees that they were uncomfortable with the result. I didn’t disagree, so we added the infamous hyphen to make it the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. When people said “NGA,” they sounded out each letter: N-G-A; and NGA has three letters, like the other big agencies. I still get my chain pulled about the decision to hyphenate the name, even by friends like Mike Hayden and Bob Gates, who consider it “awkward” and “unfortunate.” I don’t regret it. NGA is the only agency I ever got to (re)name, and I still think the name fits.

  On January 29, President Bush delivered his first State of the Union address since the attacks, explaining that the administration’s goals went well beyond taking out the group of al-Qaida terrorists who’d planned and perpetrated the attacks on New York and Washington: “What we have found in Afghanistan confirms that, far from ending there, our war against terror is only beginning.” We would root out terrorism wherever it could be found, and any nation that supported terrorism or allowed terrorists to exist within its borders was complicit. His message for those nations was clear: “Some governments will be timid in the face of terror. And make no mistake about it: If they do not act, America will.”

  What followed became the standard answer among intelligence and national security leaders to the question, What keeps you up at night? “Our second goal,” Bush announced, “is to prevent reg
imes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction.” He cited North Korea, Iran, and Iraq, saying that they “and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil.” He saved his most damning rhetoric for Iraq: “This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens—leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections—then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.” He concluded with the warning, “The price of indifference would be catastrophic.”

  Shortly after that speech, we heard that Vice President Cheney was pushing the Pentagon for intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and then the order came down to NIMA to find the WMD sites. We set to work, analyzing imagery to eventually identify, with varying degrees of confidence, more than 950 sites where we assessed there might be WMDs or a WMD connection. We drew on all of NIMA’s skill sets to determine whether and how the suspect WMD sites might be interconnected and mutually supportive. This served as a compelling, persuasive example of what the integration of our two major legacy professions could achieve . . . and it was all wrong.

  With the same “slam-dunk” certitude expressed by CIA director George Tenet, we fed our findings into the classified work being prepared at that agency, and in September, I represented NIMA as a member of the National Foreign Intelligence Board, participating in the review process that would certify the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction as a consensus view of the IC. The White House aimed to justify why an invasion of and regime change in Iraq were necessary, with a public narrative that condemned its continued development of weapons of mass destruction, its support to al-Qaida (for which the Intelligence Community had no evidence), and the atrocities Hussein had inflicted on the Kurdish people within his borders (which were terrible, but atrocities were not unique to Hussein’s Iraq). After the Intelligence Community presented its consensus, the White House homed in on Iraq’s WMD programs and on Hussein’s flouting of weapons inspections.

  On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell gave an impassioned, persuasive, and seemingly well-documented briefing to the United Nations in which he presented evidence of Iraq’s reconstituted chemical, biological, and nuclear programs. To support his speech, NIMA had gone through the difficult process of declassifying satellite images of trucks arriving at WMD sites just ahead of weapons inspectors to move materials before they could be found, and my team also produced computer-generated images of trucks fitted out as “mobile production facilities used to make biological agents.” Those images, possibly more than any other substantiation he presented, carried the day with the international community and Americans alike.

  Having made its case, the United States led a multinational force, joined by contingents from the UK, Australia, Spain, and Poland, in an invasion of Iraq on March 20, six weeks after Powell’s speech. NIMA provided unprecedented support to the effort, both for the military planning against Iraq’s defenses and for the teams that would seize any weapons of mass destruction they found and secure the sites we’d helped identify. We prepared a prioritized list of our suspect sites with specific locations, the best approach routes, and any noted defenses, transmitting this data directly to the theater, using capabilities that weren’t available during the 1991 war. We maintained secure communications with deployed forces, including the fourteen-hundred-member international Iraq Survey Group. Using this information, they went from site to site but found almost nothing. We were shocked. In September the survey group admitted in its public report that they’d found only trace amounts of chemical weapons, not enough to use in combat. The trucks we had identified as “mobile production facilities for biological agents” were in fact used to pasteurize and transport milk.

  In late October, I spoke at an off-the-record breakfast event with Washington media to discuss the state of the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I talked about the imagery situation in Iraq and explained that we’d made some assumptions we shouldn’t have, though the circumstantial prewar evidence seemed compelling, and admitted that I was still baffled that no WMD sites had been discovered. I mentioned that in the days before the invasion started, we saw a lot of cars and trucks fleeing the country into Syria, and Bill Gertz from the Washington Times asked if it was possible that the vehicles were removing WMD caches ahead of the invasion. I replied that it was impossible to determine who or what was in them. I probably should have clarified what a great stretch it would have been to assert that Syria’s Alawite-led government, aligned with Shia Iran against Iraq’s Sunni-led government, would conspire with Hussein to harbor Iraqi weapons. The following morning, I was amazed to read the Washington Times headline: SPY CHIEF SAYS IRAQ MOVED WEAPONS: SATELLITE IMAGES BEFORE WAR SHOW HEAVY VEHICLE TRAFFIC INTO SYRIA.

  In the years that followed, I’ve heard many, including some in the Intelligence Community, theorize that Saddam Hussein had bluffed his way into a US invasion, that he feared Iran more than the United States, and that he wanted Iran and other neighbors to think he had chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs, to intimidate them and to prove to his own government and people that he was firmly in control, defiant to the world, and a force in the region. This theory holds that he purposely built facilities to look like WMD sites, and that he deliberately moved trucks on and off those sites prior to UN weapons inspections to create the illusion that he was hiding a covert weapons program. This was not, however, the case. The theory accords far too much credit to Hussein and doesn’t attribute the failure where it belongs—squarely on the shoulders of the administration members who were pushing a narrative of a rogue WMD program in Iraq and on the intelligence officers, including me, who were so eager to help that we found what wasn’t really there.

  It wasn’t until a few months later, at a closed hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee, that I first heard the code name “Curveball.” I was seated almost directly behind George Tenet as he and a few of his senior analysts told the committee about a man who had escaped Iraq and fled to Germany. He’d asked for asylum, claiming that he’d worked on a team that built mobile production facilities for biological agents. Listening to Tenet’s account, I felt a sinking feeling. He said that before the war, the CIA had never had direct access to Curveball, only to the intelligence from him the Germans had passed to us, which CIA and DIA sources confirmed through another source in the Middle East—who, it turned out, had gotten his information secondhand from Curveball. Our original and corroborating sources were therefore the same person. Worse, Curveball turned out to have been an alcoholic who’d worked for a TV station owned by Saddam’s son Uday, and he’d fled Iraq because he’d stolen money from his employer, who wasn’t known for lenience with those who’d shown disloyalty. Sitting in that classified hearing and listening to George and his officers brief the committee, I felt a lot more naïve than someone with forty years of experience in the intelligence business should have felt.

  George, to his credit, took all of the heat for the atrocious intelligence work. As DCI, he was ultimately accountable, but we were all responsible. I’d sat as a member of the National Foreign Intelligence Board that had approved the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, and I’d never thought to question CIA’s “spooky source” that had given us all that amazing—too amazing—intelligence. Years later, when I attended National Intelligence Boards to review National Intelligence Estimates (“foreign” was dropped when the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI were added), the procedure had changed so that the very first topic discussed was the sources used to reach any conclusions about the intelligence in question—one of a number of reforms the community instituted after Iraq.

  While the larger IC sorted through these big questions, NIMA pressed on. The idea of geospatial intelligence was taking root within the agenc
y, and we needed the industrial base that we relied on for technical solutions and to supplement our government workforce to get in sync too, so in October 2003, through Joanne’s aegis, we worked with a small number of corporate leaders to hold an unclassified symposium we called “GEO-INTEL 2003” at the New Orleans Marriott Hotel. Notably, Steve Jacques, who had recently left Raytheon to start his own company, and Stu Shea with Northrop Grumman led the corporate effort. We billed the event as an opportunity to hear the government “highlight the role of geospatial technologies in national security,” and discuss geospatial intelligence in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as to see the technology that we were using at nonmilitary events, such as the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.

  NIMA hoped to entice enough industry partners to be worth the effort, but even we were surprised when more than a thousand people showed up. Energized by the showing, Steve and Stu joined with other industry members to form a nonprofit alliance, the US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation, to work across corporate lines on the tradecraft and technology behind geospatial intelligence. They took responsibility for continuing the forum, rebranding it from “GEO-INTEL 2003” to “GEOINT 2004.” The following October, I appeared onstage with Lieutenant General Mike Hayden, who’d become NSA director in 1999, to talk about how signals intelligence and geospatial-intelligence professionals were working together in unprecedented ways. A decade later, more than four thousand GEOINT practitioners in government and industry attend each year, making the GEOINT Symposium the largest such gathering of government and contractor intelligence professionals in the United States.

  I was grateful for the energy our workforce and USGIF put into developing tradecraft and growing the GEOINT community, particularly in the year between GEO-INTEL 2003 and GEOINT 2004, which was a dark period of reckoning for the Intelligence Community. In February 2004, President Bush established the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, known in shorthand as the Iraq WMD Commission. The feeling around the community was that, unlike the 9/11 Commission, which had ostensibly started with a blank slate and set out to discover what happened, the Iraq WMD Commission had already judged the ways in which we’d fallen short, and was looking to document any and all mistakes—even honest ones—and hold everyone involved accountable.

 

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