At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  Steve sent me a memo he had received from Michael Ledeen dated January 18, 2002. In the memo, Ledeen talked about how he had arranged the meeting with Iranian officials who were “in violent opposition to the regime.” It also said that Pentagon officials suggested that the initiative working with these people be “managed entirely by DOD personnel” and that “the Iranians have stipulated that they are totally unwilling to deal with anyone from CIA, but they are quite comfortable with Pentagon officials.”

  I was furious. Don’t these guys remember the past? I thought. I called Hadley after reviewing the Ledeen memo. “Steve,” I said, “this whole operation smells.” I followed up with a memo of my own on February 5, 2002, strongly recommending he immediately get on top of the matter.

  When Colin Powell found out, he hit the roof. Powell had become national security advisor in 1987 to help clean up the first Iran-Contra mess; he didn’t want to be around for another one. Powell contacted Condi Rice and told her that the issue needed to be taken care of immediately and that if it were not, he would raise the matter directly with the president.

  Hadley told John McLaughlin in mid-February that the situation had been resolved and that Ledeen was out of the picture. John asked for a written response to my earlier note, but none was ever received.

  On July 11, 2002, a senior CIA officer was told by the ambassador to Italy that Ledeen had called him to say he would be returning to Rome the next month to “continue what he had started.” Our Rome rep met with his Italian counterparts and asked them not to provide any assistance to Ledeen unless the ambassador or CIA requested that they do so. A senior CIA lawyer contacted his NSC opposite number and asked whether anyone at the NSC had authorized Ledeen’s visit. If not, he suggested, CIA might have to file a “crimes report” with the Justice Department, a requirement when we learn of a possible violation of the law.

  About two weeks later, the NSC lawyer contacted CIA to say that Steve Hadley had called Ledeen in and “read him the riot act,” telling him to “knock it off.” In light of that, he said, they didn’t see any need for a crimes report.

  There was a series of Ledeen-inspired inquiries that would come in over the transom, via Congress, the White House, DOD, and elsewhere. The common thread was that he had urgent and highly sensitive information and would like to talk about a reward. These tips led nowhere.

  On August 6, 2003, after the United States had ousted Saddam, Ledeen contacted DOD with word that he had a source who knew that a significant amount of enriched uranium was buried in Iraq some thirty to forty meters deep, underneath a riverbed, but that some of it had been moved to Iran. Ledeen told a DOD official that he had already briefed Scooter Libby and John Hannah of the vice president’s staff, and he intended to share the info with the Senate Intelligence Committee staff but would not tell CIA. Like most Ledeen tips, this one proved worthless.

  Two days later, on August 8, word leaked to the media about Ledeen and Ghorbanifar’s earlier meetings with Pentagon officials, possibly to discuss regime change in Iran. Various White House and DOD officials admitted that, yes, there were some meetings, but nothing came of them. I called Condi Rice and urged the NSC staff, once again, to get to the bottom of the matter. “If you don’t,” I said “this will all end up on the president’s desk, and he will take the blame.” Condi mentioned that after the first meeting in Rome, the DOD officials had “accidentally bumped into” the Iranians again in Paris, while crossing the street or some such thing. “Condi,” I said, “in this line of work there is no such thing as an accidental meeting.”

  Later that month, in one of my weekly NSC meetings, once again I raised my concerns about what was going on and that the NSC needed to get to the bottom of the matter. I reiterated to Steve Hadley that we had no intention of meeting with Ghorbanifar. CIA had issued a “burn notice” (a formal declaration that a source is deemed to be untrustworthy) on him nearly two decades previously, and we had no reason to revise our opinion of his credibility. DOD opened an investigation into the contacts between their staff and Ghorbanifar. I do not know the outcome.

  Ultimately, the Ledeen follies on Iran were a distraction from the administration’s main focus: Iraq. Back in May 2002, the NSC expressed interest in putting out an unclassified publication that would lay out some of what we knew—or thought we knew—about Iraq’s WMD programs. The National Intelligence Council, or NIC, had produced a similar document that the Clinton administration used to help justify the December 1998 Desert Fox bombing campaign. The NIC stepped up to the plate again, and the assignment went to Paul Pillar, one of the national intelligence officers. As is common with projects such as this, the drafting proceeded only intermittently. There was discussion of releasing the draft as a U.S. government “white paper”—one that would not carry the seal of any one agency—but ultimately the document was put on the shelf after the NSC seemed to lose interest in it.

  Separately, in the summer and fall of 2002, the NSC asked John McLaughlin to have the Agency assemble its intelligence on Saddam’s WMD programs and his human rights record, and outline what we believed about Iraq’s connection to terrorism. While these efforts were going on in the background, the public debate was roiling. On August 15, 2002, Brent Scowcroft, who had served as national security advisor under President Ford and the first President Bush, and was then chairman of George W. Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, published a hard-hitting Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal titled “Don’t Attack Saddam.” In the article, Scowcroft argued that an attack would divert U.S. attention from the war on terrorism. It is no surprise that the advice was not well received at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. As moderate voices joined in the debate for caution in Iraq, the Bush administration pledged to listen carefully to the various sides, but its rhetoric seemed considerably ahead of the intelligence we had been gathering across the river in Langley.

  I was surprised, for example, when I read about a speech Vice President Cheney gave to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on August 26, 2002, in which he said, “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” Later in the speech, the vice president would tell the VFW, “Many of us are convinced that [Saddam] will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.”

  The speech caught me and my top people off guard for several reasons. For starters, the vice president’s staff had not sent the speech to CIA for clearance, as was usually done with remarks that should be based on intelligence. The speech also went well beyond what our analysis could support. The intelligence community’s belief was that, left unchecked, Iraq would probably not acquire nuclear weapons until near the end of the decade.

  In his VFW speech, the vice president reminded the audience that during the first Gulf war, the intelligence community underestimated Iraq’s progress toward building a nuclear weapon. No doubt that experience had colored the vice president’s view of U.S. intelligence gathering ever since, but it also had a profound impact on my views and those of many of our analysts. Given Saddam’s proclivity for deception and denial, we, too, were haunted by the possibility that there was more going on than we could detect.

  The VFW speech, I suspect, was an attempt by the vice president to regain the momentum toward action against Iraq that had been stalled eleven days earlier by Scowcroft’s Op-Ed piece. I have the impression that the president really wasn’t any more aware than we were of what his number-two was going to say to the VFW until he said it. But if the speech was meant mostly as a wake-up call, it was a very loud one.

  In the aftermath of Iraq, I was asked by Senator Carl Levin at a hearing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, on March 9, 2004, if I should have intervened when I heard officials make public comments that went beyond our intelligence. It was a fair question. Clearly, decision makers are entitled to come to their own conclusions with regard to policy. Intelligence is an important part of t
he decision-making process but hardly the sole component. Policy makers are allowed to come to independent judgments about what the intelligence may mean and what risks they will tolerate. What they cannot do is overstate the intelligence itself. If they do, they must clearly delineate between what the intelligence says and the conclusions they have reached. In fairness to the vice president, prior to the production of the National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002, we at CIA had written pieces in key publications, such as the President’s Daily Brief, that were very assertive about Iraq’s WMD programs. However, none that I can recall put Iraq’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon on the time line suggested in the VFW speech. Perhaps when policy makers who remember previous history, such as the vice president, read “overly assertive” analysis, their views are quickly hardened.

  Policy makers have a right to their own opinions, but not their own set of facts. I had an obligation to do a better job of making sure they knew where we differed and why. The proper place to make that distinction is in one-on-one discussions with the principals, and I did so on a number of occasions. No one had elected me to go out and make speeches about how and where I disagreed on thorny issues. I should have told the vice president privately that, in my view, his VFW speech had gone too far. Would that have changed his future approach? I doubt it, but I should not have let silence imply agreement. We did a much better job of pushing back when it came to desires on the part of some in the administration to overstate the case on possible Iraq connections to al-Qa’ida.

  On Friday afternoon, September 6, 2002, a week after the vice president delivered his VFW speech, the president’s National Security Team gathered at Camp David and remained overnight for meetings about Iraq the next day. In advance, the NSC staff sent around thick briefing books packed with background information for the participants to read. One paper toward the front of the book listed things that would be achieved by removing Saddam—freeing the Iraqi people, eliminating WMD, ending threats to Iraq’s neighbors, and the like.

  Toward the middle of the book was a paper that discussed in general terms how Iraq would be dealt with following Saddam’s removal. The paper said that we would preserve much of Iraq’s bureaucracy but also reform it. An appendix listed for the attendees certain lessons learned from the occupations of Germany and Japan after World War II. Near the back of the book, at Tab P, was a paper CIA analysts had produced three weeks earlier. Dated August 13, 2002, it was titled “The Perfect Storm: Planning for Negative Consequences of Invading Iraq.” The paper provided worst-case scenarios that might emerge from a U.S.-led regime-change effort. The summary said that following an invasion:

  The US will face negative consequences with Iraq, the region and beyond which could include:

  • Anarchy and the territorial breakup of Iraq;

  • Regime-threatening instability in key Arab states;

  • A surge of global terrorism against US interests fueled by deepening Islamic antipathy toward the United States;

  • Major oil supply disruptions and severe strains in the Atlantic alliance.

  It’s tempting to cite this information and say, “See, we predicted many of the difficulties that later ensued”—but doing so would be disingenuous. The truth is often more complex than convenient. Had we felt strongly that these were likely outcomes, we should have shouted our conclusions. There was, in fact, no screaming, no table-pounding. Instead, we said these were worst case. We also, quite accurately, labeled them scenarios. We had no way of knowing then how the situation on the ground in Iraq would evolve. Nor were we privy to some of the future actions of the United States that would help make many of these worst-case scenarios almost inevitable.

  The Perfect Storm paper ended with a series of steps the United States could take to help reduce the chance of some of these negative consequences taking hold, including diplomatic initiatives to enhance the chances of Arab-Israeli peace. Promoting the notion that, although we were acting militarily in Iraq, we remained committed to an equitable resolution of this critical issue, which would have great resonance in the Islamic world, we advised. It was important that we be able to show the Arab world that we could make war and peace at the same time.

  The meeting on Saturday morning, September 7, sparked considerable debate about the wisdom of trying to revive a UN inspection regime. Colin Powell was firmly on the side of going the extra mile with the UN, while the vice president argued just as forcefully that doing so would only get us mired in a bureaucratic tangle with nothing to show for it other than time lost off a ticking clock. The president let Powell and Cheney pretty much duke it out. To me, the president still appeared less inclined to go to war than many of his senior aides.

  A week later, on Saturday, September 14, Steve Hadley convened another meeting in the White House Situation Room, attended by second-echelon officials from the NSC, State Department, DOD, and CIA. The agenda was titled, “Why Iraq Now?” Bob Walpole, the national intelligence officer for strategic programs, was among those present. He recalls telling Hadley that he would not use WMD to justify a war with Iraq. Someone, whom he did not know at the time but now recognizes as Scooter Libby, leaned over to another participant in the meeting and asked, “Who is this guy?”

  Walpole explained to Hadley that the North Koreans were ahead of Iraq in virtually every category of WMD. Bob knew that we had recently discovered Pyongyang’s covert program to produce highly enriched uranium, and he correctly assumed this would become public knowledge soon. “When that gets out, you guys will have a devil of a time explaining why you are more worried about a country that might be working on nuclear weapons rather than one that probably already has them and the wherewithal to deliver them to the U.S.,” he told the group.

  Someone suggested that the confluence with terrorism made Iraq a bigger threat. Two other CIA analysts present spoke up, saying that a much stronger case could be made for Iran’s backing of international terrorism than could be made for Iraq’s. They recall Doug Feith saying that their objections were just “persnickety.”

  CHAPTER 17

  “The One Issue That Everyone Could Agree On”

  The United States did not go to war in Iraq solely because of WMD. In my view, I doubt it was even the principal cause. Yet it was the public face that was put on it.

  The leaders of a country decide to go to war because of core beliefs, larger geostrategic calculations, ideology, and, in the case of Iraq, because of the administration’s largely unarticulated view that the democratic transformation of the Middle East through regime change in Iraq would be worth the price. WMD was, as Paul Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in Vanity Fair in May 2003, something that “we settled on” because it was “the one issue that everyone could agree on.”

  In early September 2002, with a vote looming on authorizing the use of force in Iraq, CIA came under pressure from members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to produce a written assessment of Iraq’s WMD programs. Specifically, they wanted a National Intelligence Estimate to aid their deliberations regarding whether or not to authorize the president to take the nation to war.

  NIEs are intended to provide senior policy makers with the consensus of the American intelligence community on a given subject and to portray honestly dissenting and alternative views. Typically, NIEs require several months of preparation and jawboning by CIA, DIA, NSA, INR, DOE, NGA, and other agencies.

  An NIE on Iraq should have been initiated earlier, but at the time I didn’t think one was necessary. I was wrong. While there was no decision to go to war yet, the clock had begun to tick. We had not done an NIE specifically on Iraqi WMD in a number of years, but we had produced an array of analysis and other estimates that discussed Iraqi weapons programs, in the context of broader assessments on ballistic missiles and chemical and biological weapons. We all believed we understood the problem. In hindsight, even though policy makers were not showing much curiosity, that was the time we should have initiated a new series of analytical r
eports on Iraqi WMD and other issues regarding the implications of conflict in Iraq. This was my responsibility. But back then, I was consumed with al-Qa’ida—the people really trying to kill us—and I didn’t pay enough attention to another gathering storm.

  On September 9, 2002, Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois wrote me urging that I direct the production of an NIE and also an unclassified summary to explain the issue to the American public. The next day, Senator Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, followed that up with a letter requesting the production of an NIE “on the status of Iraq’s programs to develop weapons of mass destruction and delivery systems, the status of the Iraqi military forces, including their readiness and willingness to fight, the effects a U.S.-led attack on Iraq would have on its neighbors, and Saddam Hussein’s likely response to a U.S. military campaign designed to effect regime change in Iraq.”

  I reluctantly agreed and, on September 12, 2002, directed the National Intelligence Council staff to initiate a crash project to produce an NIE on the “status of and outlook for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs.” The NIE was to answer two key questions on nuclear weapons: Did Saddam have them, and if not, when could he get them? I expected no surprises.

  Like those of us in the intelligence community, the NSC staff questioned whether an NIE was needed. Steve Hadley thought that the data were already available in other documents.