The one possible connection that analysts viewed as most disturbing was training. There were solid reports from senior al-Qa’ida members that raised concerns about al-Qa’ida’s enduring interest in acquiring chemical and biological expertise from Iraq. In the public debate that has since occurred, this has now all come down to the recantation of an individual named Ibn Sheikh al-Libi. A senior military trainer for al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan, al-Libi was detained in late 2001 and transferred into military custody in Afghanistan in early January of 2002. At the time, he was the highest ranking al-Qa’ida member in U.S. custody.
We believed that al-Libi was withholding critical threat information at the time, so we transferred him to a third country for further debriefing. Allegations were made that we did so knowing that he would be tortured, but this is false. The country in question understood and agreed that they would hold al-Libi for a limited period, and then return him to U.S. military custody, where he would be registered with the International Committee of the Red Cross.
In the course of questioning while he was in U.S. custody in Afghanistan, al-Libi made initial references to possible al-Qa’ida training in Iraq. He offered up information that a militant known as Abu Abdullah had told him that at least three times between 1997 and 2000, the now-deceased al-Qa’ida leader Mohammad Atef had sent Abu Abdullah to Iraq to seek training in poisons and mustard gas. Another senior al-Qa’ida detainee told us that Mohammad Atef was interested in expanding al-Qa’ida’s ties to Iraq, which, in our eyes, added credibility to the reporting.
Then, shortly after the Iraq war got under way, al-Libi recanted his story. Now, suddenly, he was saying that there was no such cooperative training. Inside CIA, there was sharp division on his recantation. It led us to recall his reporting, and here is where the mystery begins.
Al-Libi’s story will no doubt be that he decided to fabricate in order to get better treatment and avoid harsh punishment. He clearly lied. We just don’t know when. Did he lie when he first said that al-Qa’ida members received training in Iraq or did he lie when he said they did not? In my mind, either case might still be true. Perhaps, early on, he was under pressure, assumed his interrogators already knew the story, and sang away. After time passed and it became clear that he would not be harmed, he might have changed his story to cloud the minds of his captors. Al-Qa’ida operatives are trained to do just that. A recantation would restore his stature as someone who had successfully confounded the enemy. The fact is, we don’t know which story is true, and since we don’t know, we can assume nothing.
The additional context I had to consider was this: the kind of training al-Qa’ida may have been pursuing with Iraq in the chemical and biological arena was part of a larger, more robust and compartmented WMD program that al-Qa’ida was pursuing and continues to pursue. It is a program sanctioned and directed by the senior leadership. Would they have sought to attain building blocks from more sophisticated programs? My view at the time was that it was completely possible.
Did we look at Zarqawi’s operations at the lower-level poisons facility in northeastern Iraq as part of al-Qa’ida’s intention to both use these lesser capabilities and also obscure their more important and lethal programs? Of course, you can pull out the al-Libi recantation and say, “You see, this was all hyped.” Yet if you ignore the Iraqi context we were operating in with regard to al-Qa’ida’s pursuit of WMD capability, you end up missing the larger and more important picture. This was my mind-set. Run it all down, put all the concerns on the table, and give everybody your best judgment.
There was more than enough evidence to give us real concern about Iraq and al-Qa’ida; there was plenty of smoke, maybe even some fire: Ansar al-Islam; Zarqawi; Kurmal; the arrests in Europe; the murder of American USAID officer Lawrence Foley, in Amman, at the hands of Zarqawi’s associates; and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad operatives in Baghdad. But for some in the administration, it was never enough. They had pushed the data farther than it deserved. They made command linkages where we could not see them. They sought to create a connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks that would have made WMD, the United Nations, and the international community absolutely irrelevant. The first problem is that case was never, ever true. The second problem is that in trying to make more out of the case, advocates ended up undermining the case we had. People just stopped listening.
It was during this period that we dealt with another high-profile issue. Reports dating back to late 2001 alleged that one of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, might have met with Ahmad Khalil al-Ani, a member of the Iraqi intelligence service, in Prague just months before the 2001 attack. The White House, Department of Defense, and CIA were all intensely interested in the allegation. If it could be shown that Iraq was an active participant in the planning for the 9/11 attacks, there would be no question regarding an immediate effort to oust Saddam.
We devoted extraordinary effort to the issue but could never find any convincing evidence that the visit had happened. In fact, over time the intelligence suggesting such a meeting eroded. Proving something didn’t happen is problematic, but in this case, we and the FBI concluded that such a meeting was highly unlikely. Nonetheless, we kept being asked to reinvestigate the matter, and while doing so, we kept hearing highly placed officials, including the vice president, say on television that it was “pretty well confirmed” that the visit had occurred. By May of 2002, FBI and CIA analysts voiced increased skepticism that these meetings had taken place. The case for the meetings continued to weaken from that time forward.
It is my understanding that, in 2006, new intelligence was obtained that proved beyond any doubt that the man seen meeting with the member of the Iraqi intelligence service in Prague in 2001 was not Mohammed Atta.
A second possible linkage to 9/11 and Iraq involved an Iraqi national named Shakir who worked at the airport in Kuala Lumpur as a part-time facilitator for Arab visitors, a job he had obtained through an Iraqi embassy employee. In January 2000, Shakir facilitated the travel of 9/11 hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar from the airport. Shakir’s immediate departure from Malaysia one week after helping al-Mihdhar through the airport, and previous travel and contacts with extremists, raised red flags. After months of exhaustive analytic work, we could not establish that Shakir was an Iraqi agent.
The Iraq–al-Qa’ida controversy continued, even after Saddam was long gone from power. Once U.S. forces reached Baghdad, they discovered—stacked where they could easily find them—purported Iraqi intelligence service documents that showed much tighter links between Saddam and Zarqawi and Saddam and al-Qa’ida. CIA analysts worked with the U.S. Secret Service to have the paper and ink checked and tried to verify the names and information in the documents. Time and again, documents that were supposedly produced in the early 1990s turned out to be forgeries. CIA officers interviewed Iraqi intelligence officers in Baghdad who also discounted the authenticity of the documents. It was obvious that someone was trying to mislead us. But these raw, unevaluated documents that painted a more nefarious picture of Iraq and al-Qa’ida continued to show up in the hands of senior administration officials without having gone through normal intelligence channels.
As one senior analyst put it to me, “The administration is relying too much on flawed information. These are documents found on the floor of burnt-out buildings, strewn all over the floor, and taken at face value and not being looked at by trained analysts. Trained analysts would ask questions like, ‘What is the source? What do I know about the source?’ ‘Do they have the access that they claim?’ So there is absolutely no standard of analytic tradecraft applied to any of this. Rather, it was presented to us as proof, evidence and confirmation.”
On March 13, 2003, we received for our clearance review a speech that had been drafted for the vice president to give on the eve of the war. The proposed speech was sharply at odds with our paper of January 28, 2003, going far beyond the notion of Iraq as a possible training site for al-Qa’ida operatives. The speech draft came t
o conclusions we could not support, suggesting Iraqi complicity in al-Qa’ida operations.
This prompted a heated conversation between John McLaughlin and Scooter Libby. John subsequently provided in writing detailed reasons why we could not support the speech. “Clearly a policy maker is free to say ‘given my read of the intelligence, here is what I make of it,’” John wrote, but he went on to say that the text “goes further than most of our analysts would, implying that Iraq has operational direction and control over al-Qa’ida terrorists.” The next morning, just before the president’s intelligence briefing, I raised the issue.
“Mr. President,” I said, “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.” Although I never learned why, the vice president chose not to give his speech.
The push to make the Iraq–al-Qa’ida connection didn’t end with the start of the war. The November 24, 2003, issue of the Weekly Standard magazine had a lengthy article called “Case Closed,” which was based on a top-secret memorandum that Doug Feith had sent Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts and ranking member Jay Rockefeller a few weeks before. The article claimed that much of the information in the memo contained intelligence “detailed, conclusive and corroborated by multiple sources” showing an “operational relationship” between Usama bin Ladin and Saddam Hussein going back to the early 1990s.
In fact, much of the material in the memo was the kind of cherry-picked, selective data that Feith, Libby, and others had been enamored of for so long. The Pentagon issued a press statement noting that the memo contained a lot of raw reports but claimed, inaccurately, that the intelligence community had cleared its submission to Congress.
Two months later, Vice President Cheney was in Denver and was asked about the Iraq–al-Qa’ida connection. He cited the Weekly Standard article containing the leaked Feith memo as “your best source of information” on possible ties. I disagree. The best source of information was our January 2003 paper, which said that there was no Iraqi authority, direction, or control over al-Qa’ida.
Stretching the case continues to this day. On the eve of the fifth anniversary of September 11, the vice president appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press. Asked about previous administration comments seeming to link Iraq to 9/11, the vice president ducked the question but referred to testimony I had given a few years before, about contacts between Iraq and al-Qa’ida. “The basis for that is probably best captured in George Tenet’s testimony before the Senate Intel Committee, in open session, where he said specifically that there was a pattern of relationship that went back at least a decade between Iraq and al-Qa’ida.” On Fox News Sunday, Condi Rice was asked a similar question and gave a similar answer. “What the president and I and other administration officials relied on—and you simply rely on the central intelligence. The Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, gave that very testimony, that, in fact, there were ties going on between al-Qa’ida and Saddam Hussein’s regime going back for a decade. Indeed, the 9/11 Commission talked about contacts between the two.”
They quoted my testimony accurately, as far as they went, but both failed to mention that, at the same time, I told them and Congress that our intelligence did not show Iraq and al-Qa’ida had ever moved beyond seeking ways to take advantage of each other. We were aware of no evidence of Baghdad’s having “authority, direction and control” of al-Qa’ida operations. In other words, they told only half the story.
CHAPTER 19
Slam Dunk
Many people today believe that my use of the phrase “slam dunk” was the seminal moment for steeling the president’s determination to remove Saddam Hussein and to launch the Iraq war. It certainly makes for a memorable sound bite, but it is belied by the facts. Those two words and a meeting that took place in the Oval Office in December 2002 had nothing to do with the president’s decision to send American troops into Iraq. That decision had already been made. In fact, the Oval Office meeting came:
• ten months after the president saw the first workable war plan for Iraq;
• four months after the vice president’s Veterans of Foreign Wars speech in which he said there was “no doubt” that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction;
• three months after the president told the United Nations that the Iraqi regime should “immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose, and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction, long-range missiles, and all related material”;
• several months after the U.S. military began repositioning assets to be used in war to facilities throughout the Middle East;
• two months after Congress had authorized the use of force in Iraq; and
• two weeks after the Pentagon had issued the first military deployment order sending U.S. troops to the region.
As so often happens with these matters, the context has disappeared, and all that is left are the words themselves, two words that have taken on a significance that far exceeds their import at the time. Let me set the scene.
On Saturday, December 21, 2002, I went to the White House for the usual briefing that we delivered to the president six days a week. But that day an additional meeting had also been scheduled after the morning briefing. About two and a half weeks earlier, NSC officials had asked us to start assembling a public case that might be made against Saddam regarding his possession and possible use of WMD. Although this presentation by CIA would eventually evolve into the speech that Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered to the United Nations, at the time it was not clear who the ultimate audience would be—or even who would present the case. That morning, our charge was simply to assemble materials for a briefing that might someday go public. White House staffers had made it clear that they were looking for an “Adlai Stevenson moment,” a reference to Stevenson’s famous UN presentation during the Cuban missile crisis, but Bob Walpole had told them that our collected intelligence was nowhere near that categorical.
In the intervening few weeks, a small team of senior analysts had pulled together the requested material. Now it was our turn to deliver it to the president, vice president, Andy Card, Condi Rice, and a few others. The presentation itself fell to John McLaughlin. A champion debater in college, John is not one to go beyond the facts or to stray into bombast. Within and beyond the Agency, John’s briefings were well known for being precise, measured, and low key. He had brought some charts with him to illustrate his points and an executive assistant to help with the visual presentation.
It’s important to remember both what John was doing that morning and what our charge had been. This meeting was not called for us to mull over the entire issue of Iraq and WMD. Everybody in the room—as well as the most credible intelligence services in the world—already believed that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons and was working on a nuclear program. The incomplete data declarations Saddam was giving to the UN and a stream of information from well-placed intelligence sources served only to buttress our confidence. Our job that day wasn’t to prove the WMD case, or validate the claim. Our job was to lay out the information relevant to WMD that we believed (a) to be true, and (b) could be cleared for public release without doing damage to intelligence sources and methods. We weren’t going to put anything in a public presentation that would jeopardize the lives or continued productivity of precious intelligence sources. Nothing John said in his briefing should have been new to anyone in the room.
Inevitably perhaps, given the high expectations, the substance of John’s presentation underwhelmed the audience. This was a first cut, and as most first drafts go, it was very rough. Clearly this didn’t compare to the Stevenson moment the White House was searching for. I was disappointed, too. I was sure there was more supporting data in the recently produced NIE, and I felt certain we could find a way to release some of it to the public. Worse, I felt that we had wasted the president’s time by giving him an inferior briefin
g.
George Bush was gracious. “Nice try,” he told John, but he quickly added that what he had just heard was not likely to convince “Joe Public.” The president suggested that maybe we could add punch to the presentation by bringing in some lawyers who were accustomed to arguing cases before juries. At no time did he or anyone else in the room suggest that we collect more intelligence to find out if the WMD were there or not. As I said, everyone in the room already believed Saddam possessed WMD. The focus was simply on sharpening the arguments. Some might criticize us for participating in what was essentially a marketing meeting, but intelligence was going to be used in a public presentation and it was our responsibility to ensure that the script was faithful to what we believed to be true and that it placed no sensitive intelligence sources or methods at risk.
To that end, I was asked if we didn’t have better information to add to the debate, and I said I was sure we did. I wanted to convey that I thought it would be possible to declassify enough additional information—communications intercepts, satellite reconnaissance photos, sanitized human intelligence reports, and so forth—to help the public understand what we believed to be true. If I had simply said, “I’m sure we can do better,” I wouldn’t be writing this chapter—or maybe even this book. Instead, I told the president that strengthening the public presentation was a “slam dunk,” a phrase that was later taken completely out of context and has haunted me ever since it first appeared in Bob Woodward’s book Plan of Attack.
Whoever later described the scene to Bob Woodward painted a caricature of me leaping into the air and simulating a slam dunk, not once but twice, with my arms flailing. Credit Woodward’s source with a fine sense of the ridiculous, or at least a fine sense of how to make me look ridiculous, but don’t credit him or her with a deep sense of obligation to the truth. Even though I am often blunt and prone to talk with my hands, both McLaughlin and I know that this basketball pantomime never happened. In fact, neither John nor his executive assistant even remember my statement. I certainly don’t deny using the term “slam dunk” or strongly believing that Saddam had WMD. But the phrase has, in my view, been intentionally misused and thus completely misunderstood by the public at large.
At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA Page 38