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

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  There is another factor that few people outside the intelligence community would recognize or credit, and that is how the remedy for one so-called intelligence failure can help set the stage for another. Following the controversy over some of our missile analysis in the mid-1990s, a commission headed by Donald Rumsfeld had taken us to task for not leaning forward more boldly and imaginatively in projecting missile development in countries such as Iran and North Korea. In response, we began to give more weight in these assessments to what could occur, rather than stopping with what we confidently knew. This is perhaps another way of saying, connect all the dots in order to warn adequately. I have often wondered if this was the prevailing sentiment among analysts as we did our Iraq work. Did it push us to be more assertive than we should have been?

  Saddam was a genius at what the intelligence community calls “denial and deception”—leading us to believe things that weren’t true. But he was a fool for not understanding, especially after 9/11, that the United States was not going to risk underestimating his WMD capabilities as we had done once before. The irony is that he could have allowed UN inspectors free run of the country—and if they found nothing, UN sanctions would have melted. In that case, he might be alive and living in a palace today. Without sanctions, he would be well on his way to possessing WMD. Before the war, we didn’t understand that he was bluffing, and he didn’t understand that we were not.

  When we finally did complete the nineteen-day Estimate late on the evening of October 1, the document was rushed to Capitol Hill with the ink still wet on its covers.

  The morning of October 2, 2002, twelve hours after we had delivered the NIE to Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence held a closed-door hearing to discuss its contents. My staff had informed the committee several days earlier that I would be unable to attend because I was required to be at the White House at the same time, ironically to meet with other congressional leaders. In my place, I sent John McLaughlin and Bob Walpole, the lead national intelligence officer for the NIE, to brief members. The members, though, seemed to have forgotten that I had advised them I could not be present. Several were upset about my absence and about the NIE having been delivered so late the night before, around 10:30 P.M. Their anger was misplaced—McLaughlin and Walpole were well qualified to respond to the senators’ interests.

  With great difficulty, McLaughlin persuaded the committee to go ahead with the hearing, and then only by promising that he and I would return to brief the senators again two days later. We did that on Friday, October 4. That closed-door session was very contentious.

  One senator asked us how our views differed from those of our British allies, who had just published their own white paper days before. Bob Walpole cited two points of divergence. First, he said, we differed by a few months with the British on how quickly Saddam could make a nuclear weapon. Second, we differed with the Brits on intelligence suggesting that Saddam had been trying to obtain uranium from Africa. Senator Kyl pointed out that there was reference to yellowcake in our Estimate. Walpole said, yes, we mention it as a possibility, but only after we say that we are much more worried about the 550 tons of yellowcake that Saddam already has access to inside Iraq. Even then, Walpole pointed out, yellowcake is not mentioned in the Key Judgments or in our unclassified paper.

  As soon as we delivered the classified Estimate to the Hill, calls began for us to instantly produce an unclassified version. This, too, was virtually impossible in the time allotted, but our efforts to be accommodating led to another major error. Someone came up with the bright idea of taking an unclassified white paper that the NIC had drafted months before on the same subject, and had sat unpublished on a shelf, and modifying it for this purpose. Doing so would be far faster than trying to come up with an unclassified version of the NIE. But there’s a saying that “if you want it bad, you get it bad,” and that was precisely what we got.

  In an effort to meld the white paper and the NIE, analysts took the Key Judgments from the NIE, declassified them, and stuck them on the front of the white paper. Because they are written from the point of view of the entire intelligence community, NIEs are replete with statements such as “we assess that” and “we judge that.” The white paper had been crafted in a different style, and in merging the two documents, those responsible opted for the latter style. Out went the “we”s, and what remained were bolder assertions, such as “Saddam has.” The classified NIE already had too few cautionary “we judge”s in the Key Judgment section. Now, with a few strokes of a keyboard, the unclassified paper—the only one most Americans would ever see—came out sounding far too assertive, even though it did note that there were differences among specialists over issues such as the aluminum tubes and UAVs. The moral to the story is that white papers should never be written before a classified estimate has been completed.

  Following McLaughlin and Walpole’s October 2 appearance before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, several Democratic senators demanded that a few sentences from the testimony be declassified and cleared for public release. The senators also wanted released some language that was contained in the classified NIE but not in the unclassified white paper.

  On October 7, McLaughlin signed a letter to them on my behalf containing the words they were seeking from the NIE:

  Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or C.B.W. [chemical and biological weapons] against the United States.

  Should Saddam conclude that a U.S.-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions. Such terrorism might involve conventional means, as with Iraq’s unsuccessful attempt at a terrorist offensive in 1991, or C.B.W.

  Saddam might decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamic terrorists in conducting a W.M.D. attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.

  The letter also authorized the release of some dialogue between Senator Carl Levin and John McLaughlin, who testified in a closed hearing. The witness said that the likelihood of Saddam’s initiating a terrorist attack in the foreseeable future was, in our judgment, “low,” but that if Saddam felt cornered, the chances of his using WMD were “pretty high.”

  Democratic members of the committee released the letter to the media almost immediately, provoking a flurry of stories. The articles suggested that the letter contradicted President Bush’s assertion on the imminent threat posed by Iraq and implied that the use of force by the United States would only increase the likelihood that Saddam would either use WMD himself or share it with terrorists. The articles prompted a frantic call from Condi Rice. She wanted me to “clarify” the issue right away. So, at her request, I spoke with a New York Times reporter who was working on the story. “There was no inconsistency in the views in the letter and those of the president,” I told the reporter. The sentence seized upon in the letter was about a judgment call as to whether and when Saddam might use WMD and whether he might share them with terrorist organizations. We labeled our views as “low confidence” judgments—in other words, we were not very sure we had a good idea what Saddam would do if cornered.

  In retrospect, I shouldn’t have talked to the New York Times reporter at Condi’s request. By making public comments in the middle of a contentious political debate, I gave the impression that I was becoming a partisan player. That certainly wasn’t my intention.

  The intelligence reports and analysis used over the years on the WMD issue, and repeated in the NIE, were flawed, but the intelligence process was not disingenuous nor was it influenced by politics. Intelligence professionals did not try to tell policy makers what they wanted to hear, nor did the policy makers lean on us to influence outcomes. The consistency of our views on these weapons programs was carried forward to two presidents of different political parties who pursued vastly different courses of action. Even though the daily reports the president
saw in the run-up to the production of the NIE were uneven and assertive in tone, and at times more assertive on some issues than the NIE, they were a reflection of honest analysis.

  Policy makers also have the responsibility to challenge the analysis they receive. Their uncritical attitude in this case was highlighted by a question posed by Brent Scowcroft in a recent speech: “What happens when the intelligence community provides intelligence that policy makers want to hear?” He could have added: particularly when war and peace hang in the balance.

  An NIE had never been relied upon as a basis for going to war, and, in my view, the decision to invade Iraq was not solely predicated on this one. But if we had done a better job in all our analysis and in this NIE, war critics would have had a harder time today implying that “the intelligence community made us do it.”

  The notion that we somehow cooked the books on the Iraq NIE is only part of current mythology. Maybe the greater exaggeration is the profound effect the NIE supposedly had on decision makers. In a little-remembered article in April 2004, the Washington Post reported, “No more than six senators and a handful of House members who did not serve on the house and senate Intelligence Committees read beyond the five-page National Intelligence Estimate executive summary, according to several congressional aides responsible for safeguarding the classified material.” The full NIE ran some ninety pages.

  Some who later rightly criticized the NIE had previously made their own public statements that went beyond what was in the Estimate. Senator Jay Rockefeller, the respected ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on the floor of the Senate on October 10, 2002, that “There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years” (emphasis added). The first sentence of the Key Judgments of the October 2002 estimate itself says only that “if left unchecked,” Saddam “probably” will have a nuclear weapon “during this decade” (emphasis added).

  Rather than being “unmistakable,” the evidence was a matter of some dispute among analysts, a point made clear in pages of dissenting opinions in the NIE. Rockefeller went on to remind his colleagues of the same history that caused our analysts much concern. He said, “We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.”

  Congress was not alone in its lack of genuine interest in the NIE before the war. Senior administration officials in the NSC, Department of Defense, and elsewhere had also put the document at the bottom of their reading lists. Everyone seemed to think they knew either what was in the document or what ought to be in it.

  Few people may have read the NIE, but in no way does this excuse the many shortcomings of our Iraqi analysis over the years, in the Estimate or in the testimony we presented to Congress. Misinformation and misimpressions go to the heart of our credibility, our mission, even our reason for being.

  Given what we knew then, the NIE should have said:

  We judge that Saddam continues his efforts to rebuild weapons programs, that, once sanctions are lifted, he probably will confront the United States with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons within a matter of months and years. Today, while we have little direct evidence of weapons stockpiles, Saddam has the ability to quickly surge to produce chemical and biological weapons and he has the means to deliver them.

  We should have said, in effect, that the intelligence was not sufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Saddam had WMD. The evidence was good enough to win a conviction in a civil suit but not in a criminal case. Would we have gone to war with such conclusions? I don’t believe the war was solely about WMD, so probably yes. But more accurate and nuanced findings would have made for a more vigorous debate—and would have served the country better.

  In the spring of 2004, during one of my final appearances before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Congressman Norm Dicks commented on the NIE. Norm is a longtime friend of the intelligence community and of mine personally, yet he had harsh words that day. Regarding the Estimate, and the faith he had in me, he said, “We depended on you, and you let us down.” For me, it was one of the lowest moments of my seven-year tenure, because I knew he was right.

  CHAPTER 18

  No Authority, Direction, or Control

  Mr. President,” I said one morning in March 2003, “the vice president wants to make a speech about Iraq and al-Qa’ida that goes way beyond what the intelligence shows. We cannot support the speech, and it should not be given.”

  The Iraq WMD issue had been around for years. People believed they knew it backward and forward. There was no raging debate within the administration about our conclusions. But there was debate, intense focus, and, in the eyes of some analysts, pressure regarding the question of Iraq’s relationship with al-Qa’ida and complicity in 9/11. We could go as far as outlining contacts between Iraq and al-Qa’ida going back a decade, to Bin Ladin’s time in the Sudan, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi finding safe haven in Iraq, and to at least a dozen Egyptian Islamic Jihad operatives who showed up in Baghdad in the spring and summer of 2002. We could cite training that may have been provided, particularly regarding chemical and biological weapons. But one thing is certain, we consistently told the Congress and the administration that the intelligence did not show any Iraqi authority, direction, or control over any of the many specific terrorist acts carried out by al-Qa’ida.

  Let me say it again: CIA found absolutely no linkage between Saddam and 9/11. At best, all the data in our possession suggested a plausible scenario where the “enemy of my enemy might be my friend,” that is, two enemies trying to determine how best to take advantage of each other. In the world of terrorism, nothing is ever very clear, and the murkiness of the intelligence required an exhaustive effort to run down every lead to satisfy ourselves that there was no state complicity with al-Qa’ida’s actions on 9/11.

  We told the president what we did on Iraq WMD because we believed it. However, we did not bend to pressure when it came to a possible past Iraq–al-Qa’ida connection. The absence of such a connection would have been impossible for others to disprove following an invasion, unlike WMD, which were either there or not. Those who say that we cooked the books or knowingly let the administration say things that we knew to be untrue are just wrong.

  People often forget what it was like after 9/11. A senior analyst put it this way, “Intelligence is central to the Bush administration. Every single day it was the discipline around which they started their day. And then after 9/11, the first attack on American soil of any magnitude in sixty years, they were in fear. In fairness to them, people do not understand how goddamn dangerous we thought it was. The absence of solid information on additional threats was terrifying.”

  It took us a while to understand how important the Iraq connection was for some in the administration, but we learned quickly. The vice president and others pushed us hard on this issue, and our answers never satisfied him or some of our other regular “customers.” Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby, for example, were relentless in asking us to check, recheck, and rerecheck. Wolfowitz’s strong views on the matter were no secret. He even wrote a blurb for Laurie Mylroie’s 2000 book, Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America, in which he said the book “argues powerfully” that the perpetrator of the 1993 World Trade Center attack was actually “an agent of Iraqi intelligence,” and it asks, if that is true, what that would tell us about Saddam’s ultimate ambitions.

  The truth was that CIA was not initially prepared for the intense focus that the administration put on the Iraq–al-Qa’ida relationship. We had devoted little analytic attention to it prior to September 11. We were instead consumed with the very hot war with Sunni extremists all over the world. People were coming to kill us. We had no preconceived conclusions on the Iraq–al-Qa’ida connection—unlike our certainty on Iraqi WMD—and it would require us to start from
the bottom up, do a zero-based review and look at the whole issue dispassionately. On one level, this was a blessing.

  It was also a curse, because initially, and for some time, our answers to the elaborate, nuanced, and voluminous questions the administration asked were inconsistent and incomplete, and often had to be revisited. Early on we probably did not inspire much confidence in policy makers who knew their brief and knew where they wanted to end up. Senator Fritz Hollings once said that going to a press conference with Vice President Hubert Humphrey was like jumping into a swimming pool with Olympic champion Mark Spitz. Well, that was what it was like briefing Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, and Paul Wolfowitz on this subject. They were smart, tough, and had command of the data. Initially, we did not. But over time, that changed in a dramatic way.

  The first time I recall a briefing at our headquarters on Iraq and al-Qa’ida was in September of 2002. The briefing was a disaster. Libby and the vice president arrived with such detailed knowledge on people, sources, and timelines that the senior CIA analytic manager doing the briefing that day simply could not compete. We weren’t ready for this discussion. We determined that from that moment on we would have multiple lower-level subject-matter expert analysts—people who knew a lot about a narrow range of topics—meet with them.