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

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  Clearly, we were on the brink of a momentous decision. What wasn’t clear was whether it would be a good or bad one. B-2 bombers would have to be employed before Iraq’s air defenses could be neutralized. The air crews would have to rely on stealth and surprise to survive such a mission. This upped the stakes.

  The president took all the information in and polled those of us present for our thoughts. You could see him moving from the information-gathering mode to the decision-making mode. Then he moved behind his Oval Office desk and ordered that the strike go ahead. Karen Hughes and Dan Bartlett started crafting remarks for a presidential announcement a few hours hence, announcing the strike and the fact that the war had commenced.

  Back in Doha, Central Command was putting together a strike package. Cruise missiles had to be launched hours ahead of the desired time of impact. Meanwhile, targets were being passed to B-2s already aloft and carrying bunker-busting bombs. Dora Farms was a large complex with a number of buildings. Tommy Franks made a decision to take off the targeting list the villa that was associated with Saddam’s wife. He was concerned that the building would be full of women and children and he didn’t want to increase the likelihood of unintentional collateral damage. We anxiously waited for the results of the attack, hoping that through some miracle the war might be concluded with a minimum loss of life or destruction.

  Several hours later, some forty cruise missiles and a number of bombs from the B-2s smashed into the facility. Before long, the first intelligence reports from the scene started coming in. One of our sources was killed in the attack, and two others escaped and deserted their military units. (Their wives were later reportedly tortured by Saddam’s henchmen.) As daylight broke in Baghdad, another of our sources reported to us that he had spotted someone who looked to be Saddam being pulled from the rubble, looking blue. That person, he said, was loaded into an ambulance and spirited away. For several hours we had reason to hope that our goal of regime change might have happened in the first seconds of the war.

  Unfortunately, it was not to be. The next morning we brought to the Oval Office overhead imagery of Dora Farms. It was clear that a large villa on the compound was still intact. Had Saddam and his sons escaped death in the one building scratched from the target list? We were told after the fact that there had been a meeting of senior Ba’ath Party officials at Dora Farms that evening, but apparently, despite the red lights on the status board, Saddam was not among those who attended. We were confident that the technical source was telling us what he believed to be true. The second source who reported having seen Saddam being pulled from the rubble, however, was probably embellishing his story. When Agency officers were able to reach Dora Farms a few weeks later, they determined that the source could not have seen what he reported from his vantage point.

  Given the same information and the same circumstances, I still would have recommended to the president that he authorize the strike. As to how history might have changed had we been able to remove Saddam on the first night of the war, all we have to go on are questions. How many lives might have been saved? How much damage would have been averted? Without Saddam lingering in the shadows, would the conditions that spawned an insurgency have flourished? We will never know. We do know that many Iraqi military members told us that they would never work with us as long as Saddam was alive because they feared his coming back to power more than they feared the United States.

  Since the long-shot “regime decapitation” failed, the invasion of Iraq proceeded as planned. Inside CENTCOM headquarters and at CIA, plasma screens called “Blue Force Trackers” showed the positions not only of U.S. and allied military units, but also of CIA officers in the field and of the Iraqi sources who were feeding real-time intelligence to the war fighters. Constantly updated, these screens helped prevent attacking U.S. military forces from accidentally targeting our own forward-deployed personnel.

  One of our prewar objectives in the south had been to get two Iraqi divisions opposing us out of the fight. Up to 90 percent of these divisions were populated with Shia. One Iraqi Shia whom we had recruited to conduct sabotage operations was a veteran of the first Gulf War and had many contacts in these Iraqi divisions. Through smuggling networks, we sent in money and phones for him to reach out to relatives and members of his tribe. The military gave us permission to tell these divisions that the United States would provide an unmistakable sign that hostilities were about to commence. When they saw it, they were instructed to change out of their uniforms and go home.

  The sign was indeed unmistakable. Napalm and artillery were fired on top of Mount Jebel Sinam in southern Iraq. As U.S. forces drove through the foxholes and pillboxes of Iraqi divisions, they found weapons, equipment, and uniforms left behind. Any resistance encountered in Nasiriyah came from the Fedayeen Saddam, a group of Ba’athist thugs loyal to Saddam. We had not counted on the Fedayeen being as strong as it was. Our own Iraqi sources and contacts had dismissed them as an ineffective fighting force.

  The invasion was a huge initial success. Iraqi military resistance melted, the regime dispersed, oil fields stayed largely undamaged. But as U.S. and allied forces streaked toward and into Baghdad, a giant sucking sound could be heard in their wake. Clearly, the Coalition lacked adequate troop strength to secure the flanks of the attacking forces. The hope had been that the speed of the advance and the “shock and awe” of the strike would render enemy forces docile, and that, freed from the yoke of oppression, the Iraqis would allow peace and stability to break out. The reality was somewhat different.

  Some of our intelligence networks—scores of human assets in key locations—were reporting to us that the war was not having that much of an impact on the average Iraqi. In some ways, U.S. military precision was too good. Air strikes were so carefully targeted that Iraqi citizens took to referring to it as the “Disney war”—a lot of noise and lights but nothing that was having a significant impact. Indeed, until U.S. troops showed up in Baghdad, many Iraqis did not believe a full-scale invasion was actually under way.

  An old axiom holds that no military plan survives its first contact with the enemy. Parts of this U.S. plan, though, unraveled long before that. Many months in advance of the start of the war, a U.S. Army colonel visited CIA headquarters and told our Iraq Operations Group staff that he had been charged with putting together a fighting force of Iraqi exiles—something he called the Iraqi Freedom Force. The plan, this colonel said, was to train and equip a full division, about fifteen thousand men. Some of our more seasoned Iraqi hands told him that this was fantasy, that he would be lucky if he could get a thousand men. No, we were assured, a force of twelve to fifteen thousand was entirely doable if the United States focused on it, and for that the colonel offered no less an authority than Ahmed Chalabi.

  One of the most controversial characters in the Iraq drama, Chalabi was an émigré whose family had left Iraq in 1958, when he was just a boy. He grew up in Great Britain and the United States. Chalabi had almost no following in Iraq but quite a large one among some circles in the U.S. government. An extremely bright man with a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, Chalabi is slick, charming, and talks a great game. In the late 1980s he was tried and convicted in absentia of bank fraud in Jordan. Following the first Gulf War, he was instrumental in creating, with CIA assistance, the Iraqi National Congress. But in the ensuing years, CIA found him to be a most unreliable partner. Although CIA came to take everything we heard from Chalabi with a healthy dose of skepticism, others, such as the vice president, Paul Wolfowitz, and Doug Feith, welcomed his views.

  Agency officers again suggested caution to the colonel. Many people will tell you they will sign up for such an adventure, but when it comes down to leaving their comfortable homes in Europe, elsewhere in the Middle East, and in the United States, the reality will be quite different. The colonel, however, would not be dissuaded, and so the INC reportedly started distributing in the mosques of Europe applications for joining the Iraqi Freedom Force
. The response was even worse than we had predicted; only a handful of people signed up. By the fall of 2002, Agency officers suggested to DOD that they scrap the idea of a fighting force of Iraqi exiles and focus instead on identifying a reasonable number of people—perhaps twenty-five—who could do something useful, such as serve as translators or interpreters. We were scoffed at once again. By the time the war started, what had once been envisioned as a division amounted to seventy-seven poorly trained individuals.

  I thought we had heard the end of them, but we had not. On Friday, April 5, 2003, I was stunned to learn that the U.S. military had airlifted into southern Iraq hundreds of members of the Iraqi Freedom Force, led by Ahmed Chalabi. I was attending an NSC Principals Committee meeting when someone simply informed us that Chalabi had landed in Nasiriya, 230 miles south of Baghdad. If there had been any discussion of the wisdom of introducing Chalabi and his contingent into the ongoing fight, it had not been conducted within my earshot or that of any of my senior personnel. Long after I left office I heard that Chalabi had been lobbying senior Central Command generals to transport him and his supporters into the war zone so that they could legitimize themselves. Senior CENTCOM officials turned down this request on the night of April 4. When they woke up April 5, they found that their orders had apparently been countermanded by Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon.

  Just as mysterious as how Chalabi had gotten there was the question of where the troops had come from. According to the press accounts, Chalabi’s meager band of seventy-seven would-be warriors suddenly numbered “hundreds” of fighters. We later learned that he had paid many former Badr Corps members to swell his ranks. (The Badr Corps was created by former Iraqi Shia military men who had defected during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and had been operating as a militia in Iran with the support and backing of Tehran.) As a fighting force, the IFF proved to be totally feckless. Some of its members, however, evolved into a private militia for Chalabi, and set about commandeering property, vehicles, and wealth for the use of his Iraqi National Congress. We weren’t the only ones bewildered by the arrival of Chalabi’s small private army. At the time, one Iraqi asked a senior CIA official a pertinent question: “I thought Chalabi ran a political party? In the United States do your political parties have their own militias?”

  Despite such distractions, the plan to take Baghdad was executed with precision. The men and women of the U.S. military, their allies, and our intelligence officers deserve huge credit for their skill, courage, compassion, and restraint. CIA teams entered Baghdad by April 7. On the eighth, Saddam’s government essentially ceased to exist. On a scale of one to ten, the plan to capture the country scored at least an eight. Unfortunately the plan for “the day after” charitably was a two. The war, in short, went great, but peace was hell.

  CHAPTER 22

  The Hunt for WMD

  Sometime around the end of May, shortly after declaring an end to major combat operations in Iraq, I was with President Bush in the Oval Office when he described a meeting he had recently had with Jerry Bremer and Tommy Franks. The president said he had asked them who was in charge of the hunt for weapons of mass destruction. “They went…” the president said, then took his two index fingers and pointed left and right, suggesting that both Bremer and Franks pointed at each other. Not a good sign. The president looked at me and said, “As a result, you are now in charge, George.”

  The Pentagon was still calling the shots in Iraq—that hadn’t changed—but it already had enough to do on the ground and was more than happy to see CIA shoulder the responsibility of the WMD hunt. Logistically, this was a little tricky. Military personnel would have to do the lion’s share of the actual searching and provide almost all of the physical security for those engaging in the mission. To get around that hurdle, we carefully negotiated a memorandum of understanding with DOD, spelling out how a senior advisor appointed by me would work with, but not command, what was called the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), which would stay technically under the command of a two-star general reporting to the secretary of defense. For those who haven’t lived and worked inside the Beltway, such issues might seem minor or arcane, but sorting out lines of authority and chains of command can be some of the most difficult tasks to handle inside a bureaucracy.

  The size of the WMD-hunt would prove mammoth. Iraq had 130 known ammunition depot sites, two of them roughly equal to the square mileage of Manhattan. As many as 1,400 people were attached to the ISG at any single time, mostly Americans but also Brits and Australians. People often cite that number with disapproval—that so many people were dedicated to this mission in a war zone. In truth, the actual commitment was much smaller. The size of the ISG varied considerably over the months, and most of its personnel were engaged in support activities—logistics, security, and admin—for the between 100 and 200 core specialists trained to collect and analyze information related to WMD.

  A lot of time had been lost. The major fighting in Iraq had been over for two months, and we were only now really getting organized to look for the WMD that the U.S. government had cited as a primary justification for having gone to war. In that time, Iraqis had been deliberately destroying records, other potential evidence was being carted off by looters, and still more Iraqi government files were being seized by the truckload by groups such as the Iraqi National Congress (INC)—raising questions about the validity of any information that might later be discovered in those documents.

  As we were grappling with how to organize and conduct such a search, and with finding someone to lead it, David Kay visited CIA headquarters to read a paper and consult with someone on the National Intelligence Council. At the time, his appearance seemed a gift from heaven, but appearances can sometimes be deceiving.

  Kay, a former UN weapons inspector, had just returned from Iraq, where he had served as a consultant for NBC. While he was there, a trailer was found near Mosul in northern Iraq in late April that looked remarkably like the mobile biological weapons facilities featured in Colin Powell’s UN speech and in our NIE. Kay was interviewed on NBC Nightly News on May 11, 2003. Crawling around in the trailer and explaining to the reporter how it supposedly worked, Kay said that after personally examining the vehicle, he was sure “there could be no other use” for it other than to produce biological weapons. He expressed this view again on June 8 on CNN, saying that alternative theories “did not pass the laugh test,” including the idea that the trailers might have been designed to produce hydrogen for meteorological balloons (ironically, the use judged most likely by Kay’s successor, Charles Duelfer, a year or so later). Kay could not have appeared more certain, and his confidence seemed to recommend him as an expert who could sort through all of this.

  Several days later, John McLaughlin and I met with Kay in my office. He shared with us his impressions of the environment in Iraq and the likelihood that we would eventually find the WMD that all of us expected to be there. I realize now that Kay’s public statements and testimony before the war had actually been more confident than even the most assertive statements in our NIE, but back then, all I was certain of was that (a) he talked a good game and had previous experience in Iraq, and (b) we needed to move quickly. Kay was appointed my senior advisor on June 11, and headed out to the region a few weeks later, after getting briefed in Washington.

  Our instructions to Kay were simple. Find the truth. We promised him the resources he needed and an absence of interference from the home front. I am confident that we delivered both.

  Kay apparently had the impression that coming to a resolution on the presence of WMD was not going to be as difficult a task as it turned out to be. But Saddam had been playing cat-and-mouse with his weapons programs for more than a decade. That should have been warning enough. Worse, the deteriorating security conditions in Iraq made searching for anything almost a life-and-death struggle. On arriving in Iraq, Kay set up shop inside the heavily protected Green Zone, in central Baghdad. The majority of his troops, meanwhile, were based on the out
skirts of town, at the far more combustible Baghdad International Airport.

  One of the first things we did when Kay signed on was to streamline Washington’s role in managing the process. While the hunt was still in DOD hands, there had been multiple meetings, phone calls, and video conferences on the issue. We cut this back to one weekly secure video conference with Kay and his team in Baghdad and occasional e-mail exchanges. We wanted to get out of the way and let the experts do their jobs. I attended many of these weekly video gatherings but let John McLaughlin preside most of the time. Kay and his team would report on their activities and needs, and we would do our best to provide what they needed or to sort out problems on the Washington end.

  Three months after arriving in Iraq, Kay returned to the United States to deliver an interim report to Congress. He prepared this report entirely on his own, and John McLaughlin stressed that Kay was to have the final word on everything in it. We protected Kay’s independence fiercely. Of course, the White House was intensely interested in what Kay would say. But McLaughlin did not let anyone there see Kay’s report until the morning it was delivered—not because we feared the White House would try to change it; we simply wanted to be able to say unequivocally that no policy official had even had the opportunity to tinker with it.

  In Kay’s October 2 testimony before Congress, he described how Iraq had intentionally misled United Nations inspectors prior to the war. He stated that the ISG had discovered evidence of Saddam Hussein’s intent to develop WMD and of his having retained some capacity to do so. Kay told reporters that it might take an additional “six to nine months” of searching to reach more definitive conclusions.