Because of the impending vote on the use of force, scheduled for early October, a production process that normally stretched for six to ten months had to be truncated to less than three weeks. Even that was not fast enough for some unsympathetic members of Congress who wanted the NIE delivered almost instantly. Senator Graham went so far as to make statements to the press chastising us for foot-dragging. Not satisfied with the demands for this NIE, some senators were also pressing us to do another one evaluating the effectiveness of planned U.S. covert and military actions in Iraq. Assessing U.S. plans has never been a function of a National Intelligence Estimate. We were startled to have to explain this to a committee charged with overseeing intelligence—but that didn’t stop the drumbeat.
The press of business and the shortened time available to produce the document meant we were headed uphill from the beginning. Had we started the process sooner, I am confident we would have done a better job highlighting what we did and didn’t know about Saddam’s WMD programs, and we would have sorted out some of the inconsistencies in the document. The lack of time, however, did not relieve us of the responsibility to get the information right. The flawed analysis that was compiled in the NIE provided some of the material for Colin Powell’s February 5, 2003, UN speech, which helped galvanize public support for the war.
Some observers have gone so far as to suggest that our Iraq NIE is evidence that senior members of the intelligence community, like some senior policy makers, were hell-bent on war. The truth is just the opposite. The person in charge of managing the NIE was Bob Walpole, the national intelligence officer for strategic programs. Not your typical bureaucrat—he’s a Mormon bishop who often comes to work on a motorcycle—Bob is both a brilliant analyst and one of the most unlikely people to be accused of being a war hawk that you could imagine. When he was given the mission of coordinating the NIE, he came to me quite concerned. “I just don’t believe in this war,” he said with considerable angst. “Some wars are justifiable, but not this one.”
“Look,” I told him, “we don’t make policy. Our job is to tell the people who do what we know and what we think. It’s up to them to decide what to do about it.”
“All right,” Bob sighed, but I could tell he wasn’t happy with the prospect. Nonetheless, in the weeks ahead he would spend many nights sleeping in his office to get the job done.
Because of the time pressures, analysts lifted large chunks of other recently published papers and replicated them in the Estimate. Twelve previous intelligence community publications formed the spine of the NIE. To meet the deadline, on September 23 a quickly assembled draft was sent around to intelligence community agencies for review. A day-long coordination meeting with intelligence community analysts was held two days later. The next day, a draft incorporating the analysts’ changes and comments was sent back to the various Agency leaders.
On Tuesday, October 1, senior representatives of all the contributing agencies met with me to discuss, debate, and approve a final document. This is a standard part of the NIE process—the meeting was called the National Foreign Intelligence Board, or NFIB—but the narrow time frame, combined with often highly technical material, pushed standard procedures to the breaking point. Consider, for example, the controversial issue of aluminum tubes.
In early 2001, Iraq had been caught trying to clandestinely procure sixty thousand high-strength aluminum tubes manufactured to extraordinarily tight tolerances. The tubes were seized in the Middle East. The Iraqi agent tried in vain to get the tubes released, claiming they were to be used in Lebanon to make race car components. Whatever their intended use, under UN sanctions, Saddam was prohibited from acquiring the tubes for any purpose. All agencies agreed that these tubes could be modified to make centrifuge rotors used in a nuclear program. CIA analysts believed that these tubes were intended for the enrichment of uranium. Others thought they were intended to make rockets.
To test the theory, CIA brought together a “red team” of highly experienced experts from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory—people who had actually built centrifuges. Their assessment was that the tubes were more suited for nuclear use than for anything else. The Department of Energy’s representative at the NFIB delivered his agency’s assessment that the tubes were probably not part of a nuclear program. He was not a technical expert, however, and, despite being given several opportunities, he was unable to explain the basis of his department’s view in anything approaching a convincing manner. About all we could take away from his statement was that DOE did not disagree with the assessment that Saddam was trying to revive or “reconstitute” his nuclear weapons program—a program that was within months of producing a weapon when it was interrupted at the time of the first Gulf war. Although the U.S. Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center was not represented at the meeting, their view that it was highly unlikely that the tubes were intended for rockets gave added impetus to those who believed the tubes had a nuclear purpose.
With more time, I’m certain we would have delayed a decision on the aluminum tubes until greater clarification emerged—we were staring at a jumbled mess, basically—but in the end, the majority of agencies believed that the tubes were part of the evidence of nuclear reconstitution. But there was certainly no unanimity of thought.
The dissenting views were clearly and extensively laid out in the report. Not only did the Estimate make that point, but Colin Powell would go on to underline it in his UN speech the following February.
Perhaps the most widely misunderstood section of the NIE dealt with yellowcake, an element that can be enriched to make nuclear weapons–grade uranium. The Estimate included an account of Saddam’s reported attempts to procure yellowcake from the African nation of Niger, taken from a September 2002 paper by the Defense Intelligence Agency. That account, told in a few paragraphs on page twenty-four of the document, was not a major pillar of the NIE. The Estimate noted that Saddam already had access to large amounts of yellowcake in Iraq—550 tons of it, enough to produce as many as 100 nuclear weapons. This yellowcake was supposed to be under seal by international inspectors, but that was at best a flimsy wall of protection.
Although it would loom large in subsequent criticisms of the NIE, the Niger yellowcake was not among the half dozen reasons cited why all agencies, with the exception of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), believed that Iraq was resuming its nuclear weapons program. Even INR wrote in the NIE that it believed Iraq was pursuing “at least a limited effort” to “acquire nuclear weapons related capabilities” and that the evidence indicated “at most a limited reconstitution effort.”
We assessed that Saddam did not have a nuclear weapon and that if he had to make his own fissile material, he probably would not be able to do so until 2007 to 2009. However, we indicated in the NIE that we had only moderate confidence in that judgment. We also indicated that INR thought that, although Saddam clearly wanted nuclear weapons, there was inadequate evidence to prove that he had an ongoing integrated and comprehensive program to develop them.
If Saddam could obtain fissile material elsewhere, it would not be hard for the regime to make a weapon within a year. After all, we believed that some terrorist groups could do so if they came into possession of the all-important highly enriched uranium or plutonium.
None of the intelligence agencies challenged the judgments regarding Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons programs. The NIE said that Saddam was continuing and expanding his ballistic missile efforts in contravention of UN sanctions. The missile assessment turned out to be on target.
Contrary to popular misconception, the NIE also gives full voice to those agencies that wanted to express alternative views. Dissenting opinions are not relegated to footnotes and, indeed, often appear in boxes with special colored backgrounds to make them stand out. These make up an unprecedented sixteen pages of the ninety-page NIE. Agency heads had approval of not only the language that is used to express their reservations, but also wh
ere those reservations are displayed in the document.
What isn’t emphasized, however, is the poor human access to Saddam’s WMD programs and the limitations of our knowledge. It would have been helpful to have clarified that the use of the words “we judge” and “we assess” meant we were making analytical judgments, not stating facts. As the founding father of CIA analysis, Sherman Kent, wrote in the Foreign Service Journal in 1969, “Estimating is what you do when you do not know.”
A careful reading of the NIE gives a more nuanced impression of its comments than the public has been led to believe. The phrase “we do not know” appears some thirty times across ninety pages. The words “we know” appear in only three instances. Unfortunately, we were not as cautious in the “Key Judgments,” a five-page summary at the front of the document. The Key Judgments is written with language that, especially on chemical and biological weapons, is too assertive and conveys an air of certainty that does not exist in the rest of the paper. The nuance was lost.
The first key judgment states, “We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction/WMD programs in defiance of UN resolution and restrictions.” Characterized as a “judgment,” that’s not bad, but the second sentence drops uncertainty regarding chemical and biological weapons: “Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade. (See INR alternative view at the end of these Key Judgments.)” Although the missile statement is accurate and the nuclear judgment has its caveats (“if left unchecked” and “probably”) and the reference to INR’s alternative views, the chemical and biological judgments are stated as facts. They were not facts and should not have been so characterized.
The second key judgment states clearly that “We lack specific information on many aspects of Iraq’s WMD programs.” The problem was that statement followed a boldface assessment stating that “we judge that we are seeing only a part of Iraq’s WMD efforts, owing to Baghdad’s vigorous denial and deception efforts. Revelations after the Gulf War starkly demonstrate the extensive efforts undertaken by Iraq to deny information.”
The absence of evidence and linear thinking, and Iraq’s extensive efforts to conceal illicit procurement of proscribed components, told us that a deceptive regime could and would easily surprise us. It was never a question of a known imminent threat; it was about an unwillingness to risk surprise.
More troubling to me than the technical issues, over which experts can disagree, were instances where information from possible fabricators was included in the NIE. The most notorious example of bad information came from a German-run source dubbed “Curve Ball,” whose information about mobile biological production trailers would figure largely both in the NIE and in Colin Powell’s February 2003 speech to the UN. Curve Ball’s information made its first appearance in our December 2000 NIE on biological weapons, where we stated, “new intelligence acquired in 2000 provides compelling information about Iraq’s ongoing BW activities…and causes us to adjust our assessment upward of the BW threat posed by Iraq…the new information suggests Baghdad has continued and expanded its offensive BW program by establishing a large scale, redundant and concealed BW capability.” At the time, Curve Ball’s reporting was given added credence by the UN discovery in 1995 of Iraqi military documents pertaining to a secret mobile fermentation project.
We also had trouble with information from sources we used to validate what we heard from Curve Ball. For example, the Estimate contains information obtained in March 2002 from an Iraqi defector, a former Iraqi major by the name of al-Asaaf, who had been referred to the Defense Intelligence Agency by the Iraqi National Congress. DIA had concerns about al-Asaaf’s story regarding Iraq’s mobile BW program, its interest in “dirty bombs,” and its work on proscribed long-range missiles. The Iraqi major passed a DIA polygraph, but those who administered it felt that he had been “coached” in his story. Soon, much of what he had to say to DIA also appeared in a May 2002 article in Vanity Fair. The Iraqi National Congress arranged al-Asaaf’s interview with the publication. The fact that his information was being peddled as if it were a PR campaign should have set off alarm bells.
DIA officials eventually concluded that the man was unreliable and was quite possibly feeding the United States fabricated information. But senior DIA officials sat through the hour-and-a-half NFIB meeting without ever mentioning that possibly bogus information was being cited in the Estimate we were all evaluating. Perhaps they didn’t recognize their own information when they saw it, but that strains credulity.
DIA is not alone in bearing responsibility for the error. In July 2002, the National Intelligence Council staff did a study of the value, or lack thereof, of intelligence provided by the INC and cited this same source, al-Asaaf, as a possible fabricator. Three months later, they, too, failed to mention the matter as the NFIB reviewed the draft Estimate. I subsequently learned that some CIA analysts were also aware of al-Assaf’s fabrication and failed to notice its inclusion in the NIE.
Although not mentioned in the Estimate, my views about Iraq’s pursuit of WMD were greatly influenced by a very sensitive, highly placed source in Iraq. Little has been publicly said about this source. Indeed, at the time the NIE was being produced, because of the sensitivity of the source, most of the analysts involved were not even aware of the source’s existence. The reporting, as it continued to stream in after the production of the Estimate, however, gave those of us at the most senior level further confidence that our information about Saddam’s WMD programs was correct.
This source reported that production of chemical and biological weapons was taking place, biological agents were easy to produce and to hide, and prohibited chemicals were also being produced at dual-use facilities. This source stated that a senior Iraqi official in Saddam’s inner circle believed, as a result of the UN inspections, that Iraq knew the inspectors’ weak points and how to take advantage of them. The source said there was an elaborate plan to deceive inspectors and ensure that prohibited items would never be found.
Every once in a while, doubts would creep in about why so much of our evidence was indirect or why it had been so long since inspectors had found something. Right about then, this source would pop up with something incredibly specific that would not only affirm our intelligence but eliminate the doubts we might be having.
Sometimes a single source can make all the difference. Oleg Penkovsky was a single source whose reporting proved indispensable in helping the United States get through the Cuban Missile Crisis forty years earlier.
In many ways, we were prisoners of our own history. The judgments we delivered in the NIE on Iraq’s chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs were consistent with the ones we had given to the Clinton administration. Yet by 2002, we made some leaps based on technical analysis that led us to assume that Saddam had more capability, particularly with regard to chemical weapons, than we later learned was warranted.
Inevitably, the judgments were influenced by our underestimation of Iraq’s progress on nuclear weapons in the late 1980s and early 1990s—a mistake no one wanted to repeat.
Martin Indyk, with whom I served on the NSC staff early in the Clinton administration and who went on to be assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, illustrated for me the mind-set that we were all operating with in the mid-1990s. Martin and I were convinced that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction because Saddam had an entire organization dedicated to concealing them. “We observed how they operated,” Martin said. “Saddam refused to account for the material that was missing from the previous war, and logically it did not make sense, since if he would just come clean he could get out of sanctions and we would be screwed.”
“I remember going to bed at night,” Martin recalled, “expecting to wake up the next morning and find that UNSCOM would go to the secret site and catch Saddam red-handed. We’d wake up in the morning and there was n
othing there. There was never anything there. With the benefit of hindsight, we should have thought: wait a minute, if we never find it, maybe it is not there. I didn’t think about the possibility that Saddam was bluffing us.”
I did not believe he was bluffing, either. With the quality of UN inspections growing weaker over time, the political will to maintain sanctions fading, and Saddam’s coffers ballooning through the Oil-for-Food program, I had little doubt in my own mind what Saddam was up to. I believed he had WMD, and I said so.
From then on, after UNSCOM’s departure, we had to rely more on analysis and extrapolation of more nuanced technical data. We divorced technical analysis from our understanding of Iraqi culture, however, and this hurt us in central ways. We failed, for example, to factor in how the regime’s harsh treatment of its citizens would make truthful reporting to superiors on the status of weapons programs less likely. We did not fully consider the impact of nearly a decade of international sanctions, UNSCOM inspections, continuous overflights, and U.S. military actions. Yet Saddam gave us little reason to believe that he had changed his stripes or his trajectory.
Nevertheless, in 2002, to conclude that Saddam was not pursuing WMD, our analysts would have had to ignore years and years of intelligence that pointed in the direction of active programs and continuing evidence of aggressive attempts on Iraq’s part to conceal its activities. Even with more time, could analysts have concluded that Saddam had no weapons programs, or even the ability to quickly surge to produce the weapons themselves? I doubt it.
In retrospect, we got it wrong partly because the truth was so implausible. We knew plenty of countries that were working on WMD programs and desperately trying to conceal that fact. But we had no previous experience with a country that did not possess such weapons but pretended that it did. Saddam made a speech in June 2000 in which he said you cannot expect Iraq to give up the rifle and live only with a sword when his neighbor [Iran] had a rifle. After his capture in December 2003, Saddam was asked by George Pirro, an FBI Special Agent, what he had meant by that statement. Saddam said that he had two audiences in mind. One was the UN Security Council, as Saddam wanted the disarming of Iraq to be part of a broader disarming of the Middle East. The other audience was Iran. Saddam then said, “You guys just don’t understand. This is a rough neighborhood.”
At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA Page 35