At the start of the Bush administration, Secretary Powell in particular pushed the notion of introducing “smart sanctions.” In meetings early in 2001, he noted that the United States was getting killed in the court of public opinion by the incorrect impression that UN sanctions were causing the starvation of Iraqi babies. To restore our public image, Powell urged new sanctions that would more clearly be focused on military-related procurement. Other senior administration officials argued that this would only increase Saddam’s opportunities to evade the sanctions, refill his coffers, and restore his weapons programs. Powell did eventually gain approval for the “smart sanctions,” but this was rapidly overtaken by other efforts within the administration.
On February 7, 2001, little more than two weeks into the new administration, Condi Rice chaired a Principals Committee meeting in the White House that focused on Iraq. My deputy, John McLaughlin, sat in for me that day. Like many meetings in the early days of the Bush administration, this one appeared to be intended to gather information and to assign bureaucratic missions so that a government-wide policy could later be developed.
The topic of Iraq faded into the background during that spring and summer—at least for me—as plenty of other issues demanded my attention. The forcing down of a Navy EP-3 by China in April, an event now almost completely forgotten, caused eleven days of intense concern. And I spent a good part of early June in the Middle East trying to come up with a work plan that would stabilize the security situation between the Israelis and Palestinians. But Saddam wasn’t being ignored.
Within our Directorate of Operations, the Iraq Operations Group (IOG) was planning for any covert actions that might be ordered inside Iraq or on the periphery of the country. In August 2001, we appointed a new head of IOG (whom I can’t name because he is still under cover). An articulate, passionate, smart, and savvy Cuban American, this officer used to tell people that he was in this country as the result of one failed U.S. covert action, the Bay of Pigs, and that he didn’t plan to preside over another. To make sure that didn’t happen, he conducted a review of the lessons learned from our long, not-too-happy history of running operations against Iraq since the end of the Gulf war in 1991. The principal message taken away from the review was that Saddam was not going to be removed via covert action alone. As much as some would wish for an “immaculate deception”—some quick, easy, and cheap solution to regime change in Iraq—it was not going to happen.
A number of otherwise savvy senior government officials and media pundits concluded in early 2002 that the CIA was simply unwilling to take on so difficult a job. That wasn’t the case at all. Rather, our analysis concluded that Saddam was too deeply entrenched and had too many layers of security around him for there to be an easy way to remove him. Whenever we talked to Iraqis, either expatriates or those still living under Saddam’s rule, the reaction was always: “CIA, you say you want to get rid of Saddam. You and whose army? If you are serious about this, we want to see American boots on the ground.” My own aversion to a CIA go-it-alone strategy was based both on our estimate of the chance of success (slim to none) and my belief that our plate was already overflowing with missions in the war on terrorism.
There was another, unstated, reason why the “silver bullet” option was never going to fly. Even if we had managed to take Saddam out, the beneficiary was likely to have been another Sunni general no better than the man he replaced. Such an out-come would not have been consistent with the administration’s intent that a new Iraq might serve as a beacon of democracy in the Middle East.
After 9/11, everything changed. Many foreign policy issues were now viewed through the prism of smoke rising from the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. For many in the Bush administration, Iraq was unfinished business. They seized on the emotional impact of 9/11 and created a psychological connection between the failure to act decisively against al-Qa’ida and the danger posed by Iraq’s WMD programs. The message was: We can never afford to be surprised again. In the case of Iraq, if sanctions eroded and nothing were done (and the international community had little patience for maintaining sanctions indefinitely), we might wake up one day to find that Saddam possessed a nuclear weapon, and then our ability to deal with him would take on an entirely different cast. Unfortunately, this train of thought also led to some overheated and misleading rhetoric, such as the argument that we don’t want our “smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat. (In truth, it was not about imminence but about acting before Saddam did.) Nor was there ever a significant discussion regarding enhanced containment or the costs and benefits of such an approach versus full-out planning for overt and covert regime change. Instead, it seemed a given that the United States had not done enough to stop al-Qa’ida before 9/11 and had paid an enormous price. Therefore, so the reasoning went, we could not allow ourselves to be in a similar situation in Iraq. Even without a 9/11, however, the skepticism that had greeted Powell’s “smart sanctions” proposal revealed a pretty clear split between its proponents and those who thought we needed a more robust approach to pressuring Saddam. Still, had 9/11 not happened, the argument to go to war in Iraq undoubtedly would have been much harder to make.
Whether the case could have been made at all is uncertain. But 9/11 did happen, and the terrain shifted with it.
My odd encounter with Richard Perle in front of the West Wing on the morning of September 12 was just the first hint of things to come. It was not an isolated incident. I recently talked with a senior military officer who happened to be in Europe when the attacks of 9/11 occurred. Struggling to get a flight back to the United States, he made his way to the U.S. airbase at Mildenhall, England, where he bumped into another temporarily stranded senior official, Doug Feith. They caught a ride aboard an Air Force tanker, one of the few planes permitted to transit the closed airspace of the United States. Onboard the flight, the military officer told Feith that al-Qa’ida was responsible for the previous day’s attacks and a theater-wide campaign would need to be launched against them starting in Afghanistan. To his amazement, Feith said words to the effect that the campaign should immediately lead to Baghdad. The senior military officer strongly disagreed. During meetings at Camp David the weekend following the terrorist attacks, Paul Wolfowitz in particular was fixated on the question of including Saddam in any U.S. response. He spoke of Iraq in the context of terrorism alone. I recall no mention of WMD. The president listened to Paul’s views but, fairly quickly, it seemed to me, dismissed them. So did I. Rumsfeld did not seem nearly as consumed with the Iraqi connection as was his deputy, and he did not join in this portion of the debate in any meaningful way. When an informal vote was taken on whether to include Iraq in our immediate response plans, the principals voted four to zero against it, with Don Rumsfeld abstaining.
I am sure that Wolfowitz genuinely believed that there was a connection between Iraq and 9/11. I am also certain that he felt deeply that the first step toward altering the face of the Middle East for the better began with leadership change in Iraq. But again, for me, Iraq was not uppermost in my mind. In the weeks following the attacks of 9/11, we quadrupled the size of CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, made massive shifts in personnel and money, and closed down and scaled back operations in many parts of the world to support the offensive that was being launched against al-Qa’ida. It wasn’t just that we wanted revenge against Bin Ladin. More important was the fact that there were clear, unmistakable signs that the United States might be hit again, even signs that the next attack would dwarf 9/11 in violence and casualties. If someone had told me to quit paying so much attention to terrorism in the months following September 11 and to start boning up on Iraq instead, I would have stared at them in disbelief.
To be sure, a number of people were fixated on Iraq, and a number of decisions and actions during the late fall of 2001 and into early 2002 created a momentum all their own.
One of CIA’s senior Middle East experts recently told me of a meeting he had in the White House a few days after 9/11. A senior NSC official told him that the administration wanted to get rid of Saddam. Our analyst said, “If you want to go after that son of a bitch to settle old scores, be my guest. But don’t tell us he is connected to 9/11 or to terrorism because there is no evidence to support that. You will have to have a better reason.” The National Security Council staff held meetings in the White House Situation Room with increasing regularity to discuss Iraq. Many of the meetings were so-called Deputies Committee meetings, or DCs, usually attended by the second in command from the various agencies. Others involved the Principals Committee, or PC. Although I went to some of the PC meetings, I frequently delegated the task to my long-suffering deputy, John McLaughlin. The DCs were already his burden.
Before long, the NSC staff started hosting another series of meetings that included representatives from State, Defense, the Joint Chiefs, the Vice President’s Office, Treasury, and CIA, in addition to the NSC. These meetings had no formal title but were informally called “small group” meetings. Usually held twice a week over lunch, these get-togethers were frustratingly unproductive from the point of view of those who attended. After a while, McLaughlin started bringing along senior CIA analysts and operations officers to backbench him. Then he quit going altogether and had his seconds moved up to the front-row seats.
In talking now to those who did attend, I’m told that the sessions, in retrospect, seemed odd. A presidential decision on going to war was always alluded to by the NSC in hypothetical terms, as though it were still up in the air and the conferees were merely discussing contingencies. Sometimes there would be lengthy debates over such arcane details as how quickly after the war began could we replace Iraq’s currency and whose picture should be on the dinar; the old currency had Saddam’s mug on it. In none of the meetings can anyone remember a discussion of the central questions. Was it wise to go to war? Was it the right thing to do? The agenda focused solely on what actions would need to be taken if a decision to attack were later made. What never happened, as far as I can tell, was a serious consideration of the implications of a U.S. invasion. What impact would a large American occupying force have in an Arab country in the heart of the Middle East? What kind of political strategy would be necessary to cause the Iraqi society to coalesce in a post-Saddam world and maximize the chances of our success? How would the presence of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, and the possibility of a pro-West Iraqi government, be viewed in Iran? And what might Iran do in reaction? In looking back, there seemed to be a lack of curiosity in asking these kinds of questions, and the lack of a disciplined process to get the answers before committing the country to war. And in hindsight, we in the intelligence community should have done more to answer those questions even though not asked. One of our senior analysts subsequently told me that the impression given was that the issue of “should we go to war” had already been decided in meetings at which we were not present. We were just called in to discuss the “how” and occasionally the “how will we explain it to the public.”
There was never any doubt of the military outcome, but there was precious little consideration, that I’m aware of, about the big picture of what would come next. While some policy makers were eager to say that we would be greeted as liberators, what they failed to mention is that the intelligence community told them that such a greeting would last for only a limited period. Unless we quickly provided a secure and stable environment on the ground, the situation could rapidly deteriorate.
In addition to the “small group” meetings at the White House, the Pentagon hosted similar meetings referred to as the “Executive Steering Group” meetings, or ESGs, generally attended by officials one echelon below those going to the “small group” sessions downtown. But once again, reports coming back to CIA headquarters said that the meetings started out talking about what actions would need to be taken “if we went to war,” and quickly segued into discussions of what should happen “when we went to war,” without stopping for any debate on “should we.”
Over the past couple of years, I have asked various people who were in senior positions at CIA at the time, “When did you know for sure that we were going to war in Iraq?” The answers are instructive. Those involved in assembling support for the U.S. military had the sense from early in the Bush administration that war was inevitable. By and large, the analysts whom I have talked to—the ones who were following Saddam’s weapons programs or who were examining possible links between Iraq and al-Qa’ida—came much later to the conclusion that we were going to war.
Richard Haass, the former director of policy planning at the State Department, has said that Condi Rice told him in July of 2002 that “the decisions were made,” and unless Iraq gave in to all our demands, war was a forgone conclusion.
In May of 2002, my counterpart in Great Britain, the head of MI-6, Sir Richard Dearlove, traveled to Washington along with Prime Minister Blair’s then national security advisor, David Manning, to take Washington’s temperature on Iraq. Sir Richard met with Rice, Hadley, Scooter Libby, and Congressman Porter Goss, who was then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
In the spring of 2005 some documents dating back to July 2002 were leaked to the British press. The documents, which came to be known as “the Downing Street Memos,” reported on a “perceptible shift” in the attitude in Washington, saying that military action was now seen as “inevitable.” One memo records “C,” the designation the Brits use for the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, as saying that “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
Sir Richard later told me that he had been misquoted. He reviewed the draft memo, objecting to the word “fixed” in particular, and corrected it to reflect the truth of the matter. He said that upon returning to London in July of 2002, he expressed the view, based on his conversations, that the war in Iraq was going to happen. He believed that the momentum driving it was not really about WMD but rather about bigger issues, such as changing the politics of the Middle East.
Dearlove recalled that he had a polite but significant, disagreement with Scooter Libby, who was trying to convince him that there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qa’ida. Dearlove’s strongly held view, based on his own service’s reporting, which had been shared with CIA, was that any contacts that had taken place between the two had come to nothing and that there was no formal relationship. He believed that the crowd around the vice president was playing fast and loose with the evidence. In his view, it was never about “fixing” the intelligence itself but rather about the undisciplined manner in which the intelligence was being used.
In a memo that Doug Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, sent to John McLaughlin on September 6, 2002, he forwarded a cable summarizing his comments at a recent conference in Berlin attended by U.S., British, French, and German officials. The cable quotes Feith as having told the gathering that “war is not optional.” “At stake,” he reportedly said, “is the survival of the United States as an open and free society.” The summary went on to say that Feith told his colleagues that U.S. action was based on self-defense. “So with regard to Iraq, the question of whether one can prove a connection with Iraq and the September 11th attack is not (repeat not) of the essence.” One of the foreign attendees apparently agreed, saying that we should not get caught up in the “legalisms about clear evidence of imminent threat,” given Saddam’s history of deception.
While we at CIA were intensely focused on al-Qa’ida, and others in the administration were obsessed with Iraq, there was a third subset of people who seemed to have Iran on their minds. A strange series of events brought this to our attention. In late December 2001, the U.S. ambassador to Italy, Melvin Sembler, told CIA’s senior man responsible for Italy that Michael Ledeen, an American conservative activist, was in Rome, along with some DOD officials, talking to the Italians about secret contacts
with Iranians. Ledeen had figured prominently in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s and had introduced Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian middleman, con man, and fabricator, to Oliver North. Ledeen’s latest mission was news to us.
A few weeks later, on January 14, 2002, a senior representative of Italian intelligence was in Washington and visited me. He asked me what I knew about U.S. government officials exploring contacts with Iranians. I shot a look at other members of my staff in the meeting. It was clear that none of us knew what he was talking about. The Italian quickly changed the subject.
On February 1, 2002, Ambassador Sembler told our senior officer in Italy that he was getting questions from the State Department about the DOD visitors, who apparently were Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode of Doug Feith’s staff. The ambassador said there were reports that the two men were talking about a twenty-five-million-dollar program to support Iranians who opposed the Tehran regime. We still had no idea what this was about, but what we were hearing sounded like an off-the-books covert-action program trying to destabilize the Iranian government. Without the appropriate presidential authorities, normally run through the CIA, and without congressional notification, such a program might well be illegal. This started to give the appearance of being “Son of Iran-Contra.”
I picked up the phone and called Steve Hadley and asked him what the hell was going on. Hadley appeared to know something about this initiative. He reminded me that he had mentioned to me in early December 2001 that DOD might meet with some Iranians in Europe who had terrorist threat information. True, but there’d been no mention of anything like this; no discussion of Ledeen, Ghorbanifar, or Iranian opposition. I remember being uncomfortable about the previous discussion and didn’t understand why CIA wasn’t being asked to get directly involved. But if there was information available about a threat to U.S. interests, I wasn’t going to let bureaucratic reasons stand in the way of our getting the details. But what I was hearing now was something entirely different. Hadley asked me if Paul Wolfowitz hadn’t called me before to explain all this. My answer was no.
At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA Page 33