To double-check John’s recall and mine, I asked another CIA officer who was sitting next to me in the Oval Office that morning and who had accompanied me to daily presidential briefings for nearly three years what the officer remembered about the incident. “I am sure you said ‘slam dunk,’ but it was no more than a passing comment. I have been with you when you are really trying to make a point, so I have a basis for comparison. The picture that has been incorrectly portrayed is: You said, ‘slam dunk’ and they all went, ‘Well, we’re done. Let’s go to war.’ But that’s not the way it was.”
In thinking about all this, I have a few tips for future CIA directors, and for anyone who aspires to participate in government at a similar level. First, you are never offstage. Anything you say can be used down the road to make someone else’s point. That’s the way Washington has evolved—there are no private conversations, even in the Oval Office.
Second, in a position such as mine, you owe the president exactness in language. I didn’t give him that, and as a result I ended up writing the talking points for those anxious to shift the blame for Iraq away from them and onto CIA in general and me in particular.
Third, I advise future directors of the Agency to be wary of the pitfalls when engaging with policy makers on intelligence related to their policies. On the one hand, if you keep hands off, chances are the intelligence may be misused. On the other, if you engage, you run the risk of seeming to support policy even when you are striving for neutrality.
I can honestly say that we always sought to give the president our best judgments. We did not go beyond our conclusions to justify a policy. Those who feel that we were stretching the case or telling the president what he wanted to hear are simply wrong.
That said, how influential was my comment to the president’s thinking? In a way, President Bush and I are much alike. We sometimes say things from our gut, whether it’s his “bring ’em on” or my “slam dunk.” I think he gets that about me, just as I get that about him. What’s more, I think each of us regularly factored that into his understanding of what the other was saying. Other than that, I don’t pretend to know what was going through his mind that Saturday morning or in the weeks afterward, but there are some hints.
That Christmas Eve, three days after our Oval Office meeting, Jami Miscik was up at Camp David providing the PDB for the president. One of my predecessors was also there, the president’s father.
The first President Bush mentioned to Jami that he had heard that there had been an Iraq WMD briefing a few days earlier and that it “hadn’t gone well.” She later told me that she informed both presidents Bush, father and son, that while there was no “smoking gun” on Iraq WMD, she offered to review the data that had been presented a few days before. In discussing the matter further, she said she was troubled by the lack of intercepted communications one would expect to find with an active WMD program. Human intelligence in a place like Iraq is hard to get, but why there wasn’t more signals intelligence was a mystery, she told them.
The second President Bush responded to Jami that there had to be better information that could be presented, but in doing so he made no mention of the “slam dunk” incident. Jami says she never heard that phrase until she read about my purported performance in Bob Woodward’s book. That certainly doesn’t sound to me like a seminal moment in the decision to go to war.
How is it, then, that an offhand comment made in a closed-door meeting on a Saturday morning has come to symbolize so much? I don’t think it was an accident. Back in early 2001, when my old mentor Senator David Boren advised me to assist the new administration for six months before resigning, he added a cautionary note: “Be careful, you are not one of the inner circle going back to the campaign. It doesn’t matter how the president may feel; if it suits that group, they will throw you overboard.”
If I had cared less about carrying out the Agency’s mission in a time of war, I would have heeded the caution.
From the fall of 2003 onward, the security situation in Iraq continued to deteriorate. Rather than acknowledge responsibility, the administration’s message was: Don’t blame us. George Tenet and the CIA got us into this mess. To this day, certain administration officials continue to use the phrase “slam dunk” as a talking point. In his September 10, 2006, appearance on Meet the Press, in response to a question from Tim Russert, Dick Cheney referenced me and cited “slam dunk” not once but twice. I remember watching and thinking, “As if you needed me to say ‘slam dunk’ to convince you to go to war with Iraq.”
Like the vice president and many others, Bob Woodward has not been above using this phrase for his own ends. Shortly after the start of the Iraq war in 2003, White House communications officials had strongly urged CIA cooperation with Woodward on his latest book. We had provided some background, again at White House request, for Woodward’s previous book, Bush at War, and the administration wanted to replicate what they saw as the PR success of that effort.
I was not at all certain that cooperating this time was a good idea. While the Afghan campaign was then a clear success, the war in Iraq was still unresolved, the hunt for WMD was ongoing, and the rising insurgency in Iraq was proving problematic. Nonetheless, we kept getting calls from the White House saying, “We’re cooperating fully with Woodward, and we would like CIA to do so, too.”
Accordingly, we provided some senior officials to give Woodward background information, describing our role in the preparation for and conduct of the war. We believed that there was a way, without giving away any secrets, to talk about, for example, the dangerous and vital work done by our case officers who had spent months in northern Iraq gathering intelligence prior to the war.
Woodward was in frequent contact with my spokesman, Bill Harlow, chasing down things he had heard elsewhere and trying to set up interviews. In one background session with a senior CIA official in early 2004, at which I was not present, Woodward offhandedly raised the subject of the December 21, 2002, meeting and the phrase “slam dunk.” He made no special issue of it then. Nor did he request that Harlow ask me about the meeting or the context in which the words had been used.
After his manuscript had gone to print, Woodward mentioned to Harlow that there was going to be something in it that we might find a bit dicey, and he described in greater detail the supposed “slam dunk” scene. Still, he downplayed it and said it was not that big a deal. Maybe that really is how he felt, but when the book came out, following extensive excerpting in the Washington Post, “slam dunk” seemed to be all anyone talked about.
Reporters later told Harlow that when they called the White House for reaction to the Woodward book, administration spokesmen were quick to point out the quote. It was, after all, the perfect public-relations deflection. In a situation as complex as the war in Iraq, the public yearns for a simple explanation. Now they had one.
Woodward quotes the president in his book as saying that my “slam dunk” comment was a very important moment. I truly doubt President Bush had any better recollection of the comment than I did. Nor will I ever believe it shaped his view about either the legitimacy or timing of waging war. Far more likely, the president’s staff brought up the “slam dunk” scene in the course of prepping him for the Woodward interview—quite possibly the same staff member or members who originally fed the scene to Woodward. They might even have suggested that the president work “slam dunk” into one of his answers if the question was never directly asked. Then, with all the prep work done, the memories “refreshed,” Woodward was ushered into the Oval Office, the tape recorder was turned on, and the rest is now history.
I’ve spoken to Woodward several times since his book came out, and he, of course, doesn’t think that he was used or was unfair. He believed the phrase wasn’t as big a deal as some might make it. But when he was on television in 2005, defending himself over not originally reporting what he knew about the Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson incident, Woodward said he was too busy in 2003, working on his book and
learning important stuff like “slam dunk.”
“Slam dunk,” he said, “was the basis of this incredibly critical decision the President and his war cabinet were making on, do we invade Iraq?”
I have another two-word reaction to that statement. The first word is “bull.”
CHAPTER 20
Taking “the Case” Public
The last thing I ever expected was to be a member of a Greek chorus. But there I was, on international TV, a prop on the set, sitting behind Colin Powell as he spoke to the UN General Assembly on February 5, 2003. Little did I know that as Powell ran through chapter and verse of what we thought we knew about Saddam’s WMD programs, this drama would later turn out to be a tragedy.
The speech was the end result of several months of planning, extrapolating, and negotiating. If the United States and our allies were going to win international support for an invasion of Iraq, it was going to take a compelling argument that would turn the legions of skeptics into the “coalition of the willing.” The administration debated who could make such a presentation, to whom it would be given and, most important, what would be said.
On a Saturday morning shortly after Christmas 2002, John McLaughlin and Bob Walpole were attending yet another meeting at the White House. The subject turned to trying to improve upon the unsatisfactory presentation we had given a week or so before, during the “slam dunk” meeting, and how we could improve on it. The NSC staff suggested drawing from the NIE to bolster the public argument for toppling Saddam. Condi asked Walpole to summarize the Estimate’s key judgments. He began doing so from memory, citing all the “we assess” and “we judge” language that appears in the document.
“Wait a minute,” Condi interrupted. “Bob, if you are saying these are assertions, we need to know this now.” That was the word she used. “We can’t send troops to war based on assertions.”
Walpole calmly said that the NIE was an “assessment” and that these were analytical judgments. He explained that the agencies attached certain levels of confidence to the various judgments—some matters we had high confidence in, others moderate or low—but there was a reason the document’s title contained the word “estimate.”
Condi asked what he meant about confidence levels. Walpole said that, for example, the analysts had “high confidence” that Saddam had chemical weapons.
“What’s high confidence, ninety percent?” she asked.
“Yeah, that’s about right,” Bob replied.
Condi said, “That’s a heck of a lot lower than we’re getting from reading the PDB.” After the war, as part of our lessons-learned efforts, we went back and had analysts review everything the Agency had written regarding Iraq and WMD. We had in fact been much more assertive in what we were writing for the president on some issues, such as aluminum tubes, than we had been in some of our other publications, including the NIE. Walpole told her that the strongest case for Saddam having weapons of concern was missiles. Walpole was aware that the Iraqis had recently made a declaration to the UN about their Al-Samoud missile. Our experts studied the data and had just concluded that the missile was badly designed and would not reach as far as previously feared. “But you cannot go to war over missiles that exceed authorized ranges by just a few tens of kilometers,” he said.
Relying on the information that we would later learn was wrong, Walpole assured her that the next strongest case was biological weapons. While we had confidence about chemical weapons, Walpole said, that case was largely built on analytical inference. “The weakest case,” he explained, “was nuclear.” There were alternative views, and the agencies had only moderate confidence in the views that they expressed.
Turning to John McLaughlin, the national security advisor said, “You [the intelligence community] have gotten the president way out on a limb on this.”
McLaughlin was stunned and not at all happy about being chastised. He later came back to Langley and told me about the conversation. “We’ve got them out on a limb?” he said. It wasn’t, after all, the intelligence community that had been clamoring to go to war in Iraq. We had had our hands full with the war on terrorism.
On January 6, 2003, I attended another meeting in Condi’s office along with McLaughlin, Walpole, and Steve Hadley. Hadley noted that the Iraq nuclear case in the proposed speech, a presentation that did not yet have an audience, was weak and needed to be “beefed up.” Walpole replied that the draft was weak because the case was weak. That was why there were alternative views expressed on the issue in the NIE.
On January 24, 2003, at still another meeting, Hadley asked Walpole to provide him information on what Saddam needed if he were to obtain nuclear weapons. Walpole replied that that information was contained in the NIE published three months previously.
“Humor me,” Hadley said. “The NIE is ninety pages. Can you just excerpt that part and send it to me?”
Walpole subsequently faxed twenty-four pages of material to Hadley for background purposes. Out of that, and out of context, White House officials much later seized on one paragraph from page twenty-four of the NIE to justify including Niger yellowcake and Saddam’s nuclear weapons ambitions in the president’s State of the Union speech, delivered only days later. Not only did doing so completely ignore the tenor of what we had been telling Rice, Hadley, and others in these meetings, but it also ignited the “sixteen words” flap that would come back to bite us a half year later.
By late January, Colin Powell was picked to make the case for going to war before the United Nations. His mandate was to give a speech that would tell the world why time was running out for Iraq. At one point, Condi Rice and Karen Hughes had urged Powell to speak on three consecutive days. Their vision was that he would speak one day only about Iraq and terrorism. The next day he would address Iraq and human rights. Then he would finish with a lengthy speech about Iraq and WMD. Colin wisely nixed that notion, but it was clear to everyone that this was going to be a speech of extraordinary importance.
Colin asked to come out to CIA headquarters along with several of his speechwriters and senior aides to work through the speech and make sure it was as solid as possible. Although he didn’t say so explicitly, I believe one of the reasons he wanted to have the speech worked on at the Agency was the sense that, within our barbed wire–encircled headquarters compound, we were relatively free from interference from downtown.
This was an unusual role for us. We had two undesirable options from which to pick. We could let the administration write its own script, knowing that they might easily mischaracterize complex intelligence information, or we could jump in and help craft the speech ourselves. We chose the latter.
We believed Colin would use as a template for his speech a document that grew out of John McLaughlin’s infamous presentation in the “slam dunk” session. Bob Walpole had sent the NSC a revised draft weeks earlier based on the NIE, as they requested. When Colin’s team first arrived at CIA, they had in their hands a fifty-nine-page document on WMD with which they presumed we were familiar. Powell assumed that the White House had pulled the document together in coordination with the intelligence community. But what the White House handed him was something very different, something that we had never seen before and that had not been cleared by CIA. Powell’s team kept asking us about intelligence underlying elements in the draft, and my staff found themselves repeatedly saying, “We don’t know what you are talking about.” Colin later told me he saw Scooter Libby at one point and asked, “What are you guys thinking, giving me a draft like that?” Libby reportedly gave him a sheepish look and said, “I wrote it as a lawyer presenting a brief.” Powell said the draft looked like it was “a lawyer’s brief, not an analytical product.”
Eventually, those working on the speech figured out that John Hannah of the vice president’s staff was quite familiar with the WMD brief. So, despite the desire to shield the information vetting from kibitzers, they had to ask Hannah to come out to Langley to explain the origins of the material in t
he speech draft.
Hannah arrived with a stack of raw intelligence, and each time he was asked about some item that had mysteriously appeared in the speech draft, he cited a fragment of information. Time and again, CIA analysts would explain that the information being relied on was fragmentary, unsubstantiated, or had previously been proved wrong. In the end, line after line of the speech draft was thrown out. At one point Hannah asked Mike Morell, who was coordinating the review of the speech for CIA, why the Niger uranium story wasn’t in the latest draft. “Because we don’t believe it,” Mike told him. “I thought you did,” Hannah said. After much wrangling and precious time lost in explaining our doubts, Hannah understood why we believed it was inappropriate for Colin to use the Niger material in his speech.
Some members of Secretary Powell’s team who participated in assembling the speech have subsequently spoken out about the ordeal and given the impression that they were standing alone on the bulwark, keeping out the bad intelligence. That is not how CIA participants remember it. We had a number of senior intelligence professionals assigned to check the accuracy of what was being said against the intelligence reporting, and others charged with examining the reliability of the sources. Our memory is that CIA and State Department officials worked side by side to rid the draft of material that would not stand up. Our goal from beginning to end was to come up with rhetoric that was both supported by underlying intelligence and worthy of what we all hoped would be a defining moment. Despite our efforts, a lot of flawed information still made its way into the speech. No one involved regrets that more than I do. But I have often wondered whether we might have uncovered more of those flaws if our people had not had to spend two days getting the garbage out of a White House draft that we had never seen before.
At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA Page 39