Rumsfeld later confirmed to me in an interview that he felt that Bremer had only technically but not really reported to him.
He didn't call home much, Rumsfeld said of Bremer. He was out there in a tough environment, making a lot of decisions, calling audibles, and it's a difficult job.
And he felt he was the president's man, I asked, echoing the language Bremer had used in his book.
You bet. And he was. It wasn't a matter of feeling it. He was.
In early December, Newt Gingrich decided to create some public pressure with his complaints about Bremer. I was planting a flag because the things that had started in September weren't happening fast enough, he later explained. He gave an interview to Newsweek magazine in which he said the U.S. was going off a cliff in Iraq.
I'm told over there that CPA stands for 'Can't Produce Anything,' Gingrich told the magazine. He did not attack Bremer personally, but his core argument was that governing should have been placed in the hands of the Iraqis much sooner. Gingrich then went on Meet the Press on Sunday, December 7, 2003, and said the postwar model should have been what the U.S. had done in Afghanistan, quickly installing Hamid Karzai.
Iraqis wanted their own government, Gingrich said. The longer we keep Americans front and center, the greater the danger that Iraqi nationalism will decide it has to be anti-American.
The next day Bremer called Gingrich. You don't get it, Bremer told him. We're not going off a cliff here. He said he had things under control. Why don't you come visit?
I'll come for a week, Gingrich said. But having been on countless hurry-up, in-and-out briefings as a visiting, gadfly congressman, he added, I'm not coming over for a one-day dog-and-pony show. Bremer agreed and Rumsfeld and Abizaid signed off.
A week before Gingrich's scheduled trip, however, Bremer sent word through an aide: We're too busy. You can't come.
Rumsfeld was not prepared to overrule Bremer, Gingrich later said. They were not prepared to bring him home in a way that would lead him to be an open enemy of the president. As a result, they were in anguish, knowing it's not working and not able to figure out how to change it.
For Rumsfeld, the question was why they couldn't do the same thing in Iraq that they'd accomplished in Afghanistan. Clearly they needed some version of Karzai, somebody the Iraqis could recognize as a leader.
On December 13, the U.S. military captured Saddam Hussein. The former dictator was hiding in a spider hole near a farmhouse outside Tikrit, 90 miles north of Baghdad, where he'd been born in 1937.
Ladies and gentlemen, we got him! Bremer announced on TV. It underscored to the Iraqis that it was an American show.
We've got to really run with this success, Bremer told his deputy. It just might be the tipping point.
He later told one of his aides, Maybe now, the moderate Sunnis will realize Baathism is finally dead.
It was not. The violence continued, though the attacks dropped to about 800 in December.
General Myers thought the first eight months of the Iraqi occupation had been relatively calm. That only proved he wasn't stationed there. In January 2004, he and Rumsfeld were at the White House briefing Bush on a range of issues.
Oh, by the way, Rumsfeld mentioned, we have this incident. There were allegations of prisoner abuse by Army military police at Abu Ghraib, Saddam's old fortress prison. Apparently there are photos involved. He said an investigation was under way. We're on it.
On January 16, Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez put out a press release announcing an investigation of detainee abuse at a Coalition Forces detention facility. Specific details could hinder the investigation, the release said.
Rice's frustrations with Rumsfeld were mounting, although she tried to conceal them. At one point, the president had determined that the hundreds of suspected terrorists who were detainees at the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were unlawful combatants who could be tried in military tribunals and denied access to the U.S. federal court system. This meant that they had been turned over to the Defense Department, but Rumsfeld would not start the tribunal process. The secretary of defense was balking. Rice had overseen an elaborate interagency review that took weeks and involved the senior lawyers in the administration. It was designed to get the president to order Rumsfeld to commence the tribunals.
Attorney General John Ashcroft had become a strong internal advocate for starting the tribunals. One way or another, the detainee cases were going to wind up reviewed by the federal courts. If they didn't have a credible tribunal process up and running, Ashcroft said, the Justice Department would be dead in the water when they tried to defend the system at the federal appeals courts.
At an NSC meeting with the president, Rice began going through a long paper on the issues that everyone was supposed to have read and understood.
Rumsfeld leaned back and made it pretty clear he was not paying much attention. The president also seemed bored. But Rice plowed on.
Don, what do you think about this? Bush asked, interrupting Rice.
They are bad guys, Rumsfeld said. He believed Americans were so oriented to think automatically about the rights of those accused or jailed. The problem was keeping apprehended terrorists off the battlefield and then interrogating them to get useful intelligence. The administration had to find a way to get that story out to the public.
Bush agreed. How? When?
I'm not a lawyer, Rumsfeld reminded them. He couldn't do it and wouldn't do it.
The discussion drifted off and the decision was left hanging. Some of the backbenchers at the NSC meeting were astonished at the deference the president gave Rumsfeld. It was as if Rice and the NSC had one serious, formal process going on while the president and Rumsfeld had another one—informal, chatty and dominant.
General Abizaid vented to Tenet and Rob Richer in January 2004 about Rumsfeld and Steve Cambone, the Pentagon intelligence chief. The world is not as rosy as Cambone and SecDef say, he said, and they need to let me run the war. The draconian de-Baathification policy was crazy and self-defeating. We have got to take the head off the hydra but not the body. Of Bremer, Abizaid added, I can't talk to him.
At another point Abizaid told senior CIA officials that taking the war to the Sunnis who were leading the insurgency in Iraq would not work. You can't kill every Sunni in the heartland.
Jordanian King Abdullah came to visit the president in January 2004. Jordan shared only a 50-mile border with Iraq, Abdullah said, but I'm very concerned I have an insurgency on the other side.
I understand, Bush said. But my generals tell me that 85 percent of the country is completely calm. Only 15 percent has some problems and those are low-level.
Classified reports showed there were about 800 enemy-initiated attacks that January, roughly the same number as there had been in December.
Tenet asked David Kay to hold off on announcing his resignation from the Iraq Survey Group until after the president's State of the Union address on January 20. Kay agreed. In that speech, the president carefully parroted the language Kay had used before the Congress in October, sharply backing off the allegations he had made the year before about the state of Iraq's weapons programs. He referred not to WMD, but to weapons of mass destruction related program activities.
Kay met with some Republican senators and congressmen privately to urge them to follow the president's lead. Stop talking about WMD, he said. Be really careful, because you're not going to find that. Doesn't mean it was a regime that shouldn't have been replaced. Doesn't mean it's a regime you can't build a case up on WMD in the U.N. But it's not on the actual weapons.
On January 23, 2004, Kay officially resigned. That night a reporter for the Reuters news agency tracked down his home phone number and called him.
I don't think they existed, Kay said when asked about the WMD. What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last Gulf War, and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the '90s.
Bill Harlow, Ten
et's CIA spokesman, called Kay. He was angry as hell. Kay was supposed to stay on as a consultant and senior adviser. The message was that he was supposed to stay on the reservation.
Tenet went so far as to tell Powell that the CIA would keep him on the farm.
Kay testified publicly before the Senate Armed Services Committee on January 28, a few days later, and said what would be the headline and make the cover of Newsweek. We were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself. Kay said 85 percent of the work was done and he had no reason to believe they ever would find WMD stockpiles in Iraq. It is important to acknowledge failure, Kay said, adding that an outside investigation was needed.
The next day about 10:30 a.m., Kay was at his Virginia home when Rice called to invite him to lunch with the president. Kay had about an hour and a half, so it was a race to shower, dress and drive into town in time from 30 miles away.
The lunch was with Bush, Cheney, Rice and Andy Card in a small dining room off the Oval Office.
How did you reach your conclusions? Bush wanted to know. And how did U.S. intelligence miss all this?
We missed it because the Iraqis actually behaved like they had weapons, Kay said. And we weren't smart enough to understand that the hardest thing in intelligence is when behavior remains consistent but underlying reasons change. Saddam didn't have WMD but wanted to appear as if he did. His purpose was deception. Kay said he thought Saddam had decided to get rid of his WMD on the theory that they were too easy to find.
Take the aluminum tubes, he said. The high cost, the secrecy, the tighter specifications, and some intelligence that Saddam himself had been following the purchase of the tubes had led to the conclusion they were for a nuclear program.
But Kay and the inspectors had interviewed engineers, gone through the files and found the contracts. The tubes were for conventional artillery, a rework of an Italian rocket system. He explained that the propellant wasn't powerful enough, but the contract to buy the propellant couldn't be changed because the man who ran the propellant factory was close to Saddam's son. They tried to make the tubes thinner—which required tighter specifications—so that the propellant might work. Everyone involved said that was a good thing because tighter specifications made the tubes more expensive. Those involved made their money on commissions so the more expensive, the better. The contracts were cost-plus, like the contracts for many U.S. weapons systems, so no one took a hit except the government.
All kinds of purchases were made through clandestine channels and the black market, Kay told them, rather than through the U.N. export control mechanism. Intelligence analysts assumed that there must be a reason, and that the reason was that these items were for prohibited weapons programs.
The flaw in that is that they attempted to procure almost everything clandestinely, Kay said. They could because the family had a rake-off. The black market was essentially run by Uday Hussein and their friends.
Even bigger and more basic, however, the CIA had not understood the utter corruption within the system and the deterioration of Iraq's society, Kay said. Things had gotten so bad that the regime itself was not capable of purposeful development of WMD programs. Kay's group would ask the Iraqis during investigations, How could you do this? Why did you lie? And the response was Everyone was lying! Everyone was out for their own. The corruption was so acidic and pervasive that it just leached away the government's ability to function.
Bush wanted to know why Kay thought Saddam hadn't just come clean on WMD long ago. Why had he risked his whole life, his government, instead of just throwing the doors open?
Kay said he thought Saddam never believed the U.S. would actually invade. But more important, more than he feared the U.S., he feared the Shiites and Kurds who lived in Iraq. He knew that they in turn feared him because they thought he had WMD.
You know, as you have to recognize, totalitarian regimes generally end up fearing their own people more than they fear external threats. It's just the history of totalitarian regimes, Kay said. We missed that. And, he said, they were especially susceptible to missing it because they had so little human intelligence, and instead relied on technical collection.
Cheney kept quiet as Bush plunged on. He wanted to know more about what Kay thought about the U.S. intelligence process.
The disease of the intelligence community is this over-focus on current intelligence, meaning what was going that day or week, as opposed to longer-term, strategic intelligence. Look, he said, current analysis is better if you turn CNN on or read the paper. Quite frankly, the press does a better job.
A good example of this is the PDB —the President's Daily Brief. Do you understand that if you respond positively to anything in it, you're going to get nothing but that stuff for the next month or so? The president's expression of interest put it at the top of the agenda in the intelligence community. George takes it back and it drives it and it will keep appearing. They respond to it. If you ever respond to a PDB item, it's going to be there for a very long time with more and more information. Presidential interest suggests it is important and the intelligence flow just snowballs out of control.
Bush turned to Cheney. That's why they keep telling me about that SOB in Mozambique, he said. I had to ask a question about it once, and I keep getting stuff on that.
Bush wondered how the CIA and the U.S. intelligence could have been so wrong.
You know, one of the problems for a director is if he's inside the political process, he loses his balance, Kay answered. For example, George comes here every day for the briefing. And inevitably that communicates a sense of the political process to the people at the agency.
Do you think I shouldn't have George here every day? Bush asked.
Kay felt he might be stepping over a line. No, but there is a cost, he said. Now please, don't tell George I told you. Recognize that the problem is current intelligence. It's when you express interest in current events you're going to drive the community.
The questions kept coming. Kay barely had a chance to touch his lunch. Card asked, You told us about the U.S. intelligence service. Who do you think runs a really good intelligence service?
In my experience, it was not the British or the Israelis, despite their reputation, Kay said. MI6 and the Mossad were legends in the intelligence world, but Kay said he was not always impressed with the usefulness of their product. In my judgment, the best one is the Chinese.
Yeah, they're always trying to steal our technical secrets, Bush said.
Afterward, Kay reflected on what he had not said. He believed that the president was faced with a larger problem than just the failure of intelligence in Iraq. He was left with an intelligence service that he couldn't and shouldn't rely on for much of anything.
The next day, Rice called Kay back to the White House.
There was something you said to the president that really hit a nerve, she said. She was struck by a point he'd made about how one of the hardest things to do in intelligence is discern real change, to figure out why someone keeps doing the same thing, but for different reasons.
I should have been smart enough, Rice said. When I heard you say this, I realized that was exactly the same thing that had happened in the DDR, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or East Germany, which had collapsed in 1988. I should have recognized it because of that.
Yeah, Kay replied, I have a German friend who told me, 'Don't feel bad about what you missed in Iraq, because we couldn't even figure out that the DDR couldn't collect its own garbage until after it fell' Intelligence services, he said, don't do a very good job trying to understand the soft side of societies—how well the government is working and the fundamental attitudes of the people.
Powell went to The Washington Post for an interview on February 2, 2004, with a group of reporters and editors that did not include me. He was asked what his position on the war would have been if he had known there were no stockpiles of WMD.
The absence of stockpiles changes the political calculus, Pow
ell said. It changes the answer you get.
His remarks were the lead story in the Post the next day headlined: Powell Says New Data May Have Affected War Decision.
In the Oval Office early that morning, Bush vented to Rice and several other aides. The president claimed in public that he didn't read the newspapers, but that morning he had. I woke up this morning and read the paper and found that I am the only person in Washington willing to defend me, he said.
Rice called Powell. She and the president were mad, she said. Powell had given the Democrats a remarkable tool. His remarks were making headlines throughout the world. Bush's public position was that the jury was still out on WMD. So Powell had to go back out in public and retract his remarks, saying five times that the president's decision to go to war had been right.
Months later, Kay ran into Tenet at a conference in Aspen, Colorado. Tenet clearly knew what Kay had told Bush and Rice. Kay tried to explain that he had only been giving his professional opinion on the intelligence. He hadn't set out to trash the CIA. George, I really like you, Kay said.
Well, I really like you too, David, Tenet said. But some of this has gotten a little personal.
Kay felt there was more than enough blame on the intelligence failures to go around. Some of it definitely fell on Rice's shoulders. Her job had been to guard the president's backside and she had not done so.
Tenet was at fault too. He had been brought in not as an intelligence professional but as a sort of big-picture leader, someone who boosted morale and rebuilt the clandestine service. He had fallen victim to his greatest weakness, Kay felt, which was a lack of affinity for the detailed drudgery of intelligence analysis.
But the real villain at CIA, Kay thought, was McLaughlin. Tenet had made his way on the political side of the intelligence world, but McLaughlin had been with the agency for more than 30 years. He was the professional, and Kay felt he had also been the one who clung most stubbornly to the belief that Iraq had mobile biological weapons labs. Kay also recalled that McLaughlin at one point had told him it didn't matter what Kay said or found—he would always believe the aluminum tubes had been part of a nuclear program. McLaughlin had taken the aluminum tubes account and made it his own, a big mistake for someone as high up as the deputy.
Bob Woodward Page 33