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

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  Discovered were dozens of activities related to a WMD program as well as significant amounts of equipment. He also talked about finding a clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses run by the old Iraqi intelligence service. These facilities contained equipment for continuing research into chemical and biological warfare. Strains of organisms were found concealed in a scientist’s home, at least one of which could have been used to produce biological weapons.

  On the nuclear front, documents and equipment useful in resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation had been found buried outside scientists’ homes and elsewhere. Just as alarming, the ISG had found plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1,000 kilometers—well beyond the 150-kilometer range limit imposed by the UN. Missiles of that range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets throughout the Middle East, including Ankara, Cairo, and Abu Dhabi. The ISG had also uncovered evidence of clandestine Iraqi attempts between late 1999 and 2002 to obtain prohibited North Korean ballistic missile technology.

  Collectively, Kay’s interim testimony was a damning portrait of deception and dissembling by a man capable of horrendous acts. Yet in the resulting headlines, the press stressed only what Kay had not found—stockpiles of WMD. I recall Kay expressing frustration at this—he thought that any of the things he had found would have been headlines had they been known before the war.

  None of it, however, was the “smoking gun” that would justify our NIE estimates and validate the allegations in Powell’s UN speech. Much of the media focus on Kay’s testimony regarded his still being unable to come to any final resolution of the purpose of that mobile biological weapons trailer—the one he had already told NBC Nightly News and CNN had no possible function other than biological weapons production.

  Shortly thereafter, Kay returned to Baghdad to resume the weapons search. In his absence, the already shaky security situation there had deteriorated considerably. On October 9, a suicide bomber drove his car into a group of Baghdad policemen, killing nine and injuring forty-five. Three days later, a bombing outside a Baghdad hotel used by senior Coalition officials killed at least eight. On October 27, the first day of Ramadan, four coordinated suicide attacks against three other Baghdad police stations and the Islamic Red Crescent killed forty-three people and wounded more than two hundred. Six days later, on November 2, sixteen U.S. soldiers were killed and twenty-one injured when a helicopter was shot down. November would go on to be the bloodiest month up to that point for U.S. military personnel, with seventy-five dead.

  Central Command generals were scrambling to try to find out where the attacks were coming from and to figure out ways to stop them. Not surprisingly, they looked to the Iraq Survey Group as a resource for analysts who might help stop the bleeding. The request wasn’t large—Central Command was seeking the temporary loan of a handful of area experts, in the single digits—but Kay objected.

  A senior military officer later told me of a conversation he had with Kay. The official was “flabbergasted,” he said, when Kay refused to lend some of the ISG’s experienced intelligence analysts to help him find insurgents “that are killing us.” Kay said he could not afford to do that because it would “destroy his operation.” He didn’t want any assets pulled away from the weapons hunt, despite the fact that the insurgency was making the mission of his troops nearly impossible to complete.

  After weighing many competing demands, John McLaughlin managed to identify a few other intelligence community personnel who could be sent to Iraq to replace anyone diverted from the ISG staff. Still, Kay could not be placated. On our periodic video conferences with him, he became obstreperous, claiming that he was not getting the support he needed to do his job. In one call with McLaughlin, Kay said that he would not “stake his name and reputation” on this mission unless he got everything he wanted.

  Had he been a regular CIA officer, I would have relieved Kay of his command and ordered him home. American servicemen and women were dying; Gen. John Abizaid needed help. Instead, McLaughlin made a visit to Iraq in November and met with Kay and the ISG leadership. McLaughlin expected at least small thanks for the difficult choices that were being made to divert people to Kay’s mission, but instead he found Kay quite brusque, and insistent that his needs be met.

  On November 19, a month and a half after Kay had told the media his mission would require six to nine more months, I learned from the rumor mill he was planning on quitting that very day. I called him, and he confirmed the rumor. He didn’t provide any rationale for wanting to abandon his post other than expressing a general unhappiness that anyone in the ISG might be asked to help control the increasingly deadly insurgency. His threat to resign would occur on the day President Bush was arriving in London for a state visit to the United Kingdom. “No,” I said in reply. “I won’t allow you to embarrass the president in that way.” I reminded Kay, without much effect, of the extraordinary support and assets he had been provided and the importance of coming to some final resolution on WMD. “Look David,” I said, “why don’t you come home for the holidays, take some time off to think about continuing the job?” He agreed to do so, but when he left Baghdad, his colleagues couldn’t help but notice that he cleaned out the trailer he was living in and took home all his personal effects.

  While Kay spent much of December decompressing, Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, the senior military officer who headed the Iraq Survey Group, led the search for WMD. Then, sometime around Christmas, Kay informed us that his mind was made up and that he was not going back. I asked that he withhold any public announcement of his departure until we could identify a suitable replacement for Kay.

  John McLaughlin undertook the effort to find a replacement for Kay. We developed a list of about five candidates and began checking them out. As McLaughlin gathered recommendations from various proliferation experts, one name kept coming up—Charles Duelfer, a former UN weapons inspector with a wealth of experience on the ground in Iraq and inside the UN, where he had served as the deputy chief of the weapons inspection effort.

  Duelfer had the reputation for being iron-willed and dogged about his work. One person McLaughlin talked to cautioned us that Duelfer had a strong independent streak and was no slave to bureaucracy. But that was exactly what we were looking for. Although the security situation had continued to slide downhill, we felt certain Duelfer wouldn’t be intimidated. After all, the guy does free-fall skydiving for fun. And from his past lengthy time on the ground in Iraq, he knew the country, its culture, and, most important, many of its leaders—a depth of knowledge that would prove invaluable in the months ahead.

  We prepared a press announcement of Kay’s departure and Duelfer’s hiring. As is the form in such matters, I said some nice things about the individual departing. No matter what my personal feelings about him, the man had given up six months of his life to live in Baghdad, and he deserved our thanks. Our press office coordinated the statement with Kay, including a quote from him about there being many unresolved issues for the ISG to pursue.

  In a final meeting in my office, with John McLaughlin present, Kay said that he was going to leave “quietly and like a gentleman.” We invited him to stay on for the swearing in of Duelfer later that morning, but Kay said he had to go. Within forty-five minutes of leaving the CIA headquarters compound, Kay was being quoted by Reuters intelligence correspondent Toby Zakaria as saying that he concluded that “there were no Iraqi (WMD) stockpiles to be found.” Although this later proved to be correct, it was quite a change from his comments just weeks before that it would take another six to nine months to know for sure. As for his promise to go quietly and allow his successor to finish the job, I can only say that I greatly regret the manner of Kay’s departure.

  Five days later, on January 28, 2004, Kay testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, carried live on all the cable networks. He started by saying that “we were almost all wrong.” Kay also inserted the fami
liar theme that the ISG needed more resources, ones that would be devoted entirely to the WMD hunt. Why we would need more resources to hunt for weapons that he had concluded were not present went unexplained.

  Kay proceeded to describe the global significance of what he hadn’t found in Iraq and even added some commentary about how wrong the United States had been about Libya and North Korea, two accounts about which he was not briefed and about which he was spectacularly misinformed. Kay ended his opening statement by saying,

  And let me just conclude by my own personal tribute, both to the president and to George Tenet, for having the courage to select me to do this, and my successor, Charlie Duelfer, as well. Both of us are known for probably, at times, a regrettable streak of independence. I came not from within the administration, and it was clear—and clear in our discussions, and no one asked otherwise—that I would lead this the way I thought best, and I would speak the truth as we found it. I have had absolutely no pressure, prior, during the course of the work at the ISG or after I left, to do anything otherwise.

  I mention the above quote not for the supposed “tribute” he gave me, but because several months later Kay would start telling people that he had concluded Iraq had no WMD before he left his post but had not been allowed to say what he thought. Apparently, this was part of an ongoing revision of his own recent performance because after he returned to the private sector, Kay stopped giving me any tributes altogether and became instead my long-distance psychoanalyst.

  In a widely reported interview taped for PBS’s Frontline, Kay said that “George Tenet wanted to be a player…and if you didn’t give the policy makers what they wanted…your views wouldn’t be taken and you wouldn’t be invited into the closed meetings.” He concluded that I had “traded integrity for access, and that’s a bad bargain any time in life. It’s particularly a bad bargain if you’re running an intelligence agency.”

  Ringing allegations. Great TV drama. And as wrong as any words can be. Never did I give policy makers information that I knew to be bad. We said what we said about WMD because we believed it.

  In October 2004, I ran into David at a conference hosted by Ted Forstmann in Aspen, Colorado. Sir Richard Dearlove and I had appeared on a panel together moderated by Charlie Rose. One of the topics we discussed was how our respective intelligence communities had reached their judgments regarding Iraq and WMD. David approached me afterward and said, “You know, we are not much in disagreement on the substance.” I looked at him and said, “There is one big difference: you have made this personal.” Appearing on PBS, he had talked about my meetings and interactions with senior policy makers that he had never attended. He did not have a shred of evidence to back up his allegation.

  Although Kay expressed the view that the WMD job was almost over, nobody in Baghdad believed it. He didn’t deliver the evidence needed to make that case persuasively and in a definitive way that would put the issue to rest. It was never enough merely to cite Kay’s opinion that there were no WMD and that the job was done. Why? Because to close this chapter of history in a responsible way, we needed hard data, lots of it, organized and presented in a manner that would give future policy makers and historians confidence that we had gone about this thoroughly and professionally. We also wanted our own analysts to have the data necessary to understand what went wrong and what lessons should be drawn from it.

  That is what Charles Duelfer delivered. When he arrived in Baghdad early in 2004, Duelfer installed himself at the ISG’s airport headquarters, not downtown in the relative safety of the Green Zone, and then set about putting his own stamp on the WMD search. A number of the analysts had been working on draft chapters for a possible next report, but Duelfer put that effort on hold. He told the staff he didn’t want to buy into any further interim conclusions unless he personally had had an opportunity to understand the underlying information. In particular, he wasn’t going to make incremental decisions on important issues such as mobile biological weapons trailers.

  We resumed with Duelfer the weekly secure video conferences that we had held with Kay. Duelfer would bring a varying set of participants to the meetings on the Baghdad end, and he kept us carefully apprised of what he was and was not finding. It was apparent even via a long-distance video hookup that he was exercising hands-on leadership and restoring momentum to the effort.

  As it turned out, Duelfer arrived in Baghdad at about the same time that I was making my second visit to that country, in February 2004. Shortly after arriving, I asked for an all-hands meeting of the ISG at the airport. I used the occasion to tell Duelfer’s troops that although he was obviously more than a little crazy for jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, he was going to be a great leader.

  I also wanted to let them know we appreciated their heroic work in what had become a very, very tough environment. I gave them a pep talk about the importance of their mission and how much they were appreciated. My remarks seemed well received at the time, but a couple of years later some of the foreigners present complained anonymously to the media that by ending my remarks with something like “Now, go out and find WMD,” I was subtly suggesting that there was only one permissible result of their mission. That, of course, is nonsense. My guidance to Duelfer—just like my guidance to Kay—and to everyone in the ISG was simply to go out and find the truth.

  Duelfer turned out to be a remarkably good choice for the job. He had a wealth of experience in Iraq and knew senior bureaucrats in almost every one of Saddam’s key government ministries. In a large room at ISG headquarters they turned one entire wall, about twenty feet long, to a time line plotting anything to do with Iraq and WMD. The timeline covered the period from 1980 to 2003. At any point in that time span, they could draw a line down and say, this was Saddam’s worldview at this point. The time line also gave context to the data and the interviews that the analysts were accumulating. On another wall a second time line plotted when Iraq made funds available for weapons programs. The ISG was thus able to track the relationship between funding and WMD activity. Duelfer was convinced that the answer to the questions “Did Saddam have WMD, and if not, why not?” would come not from documents or scavenger hunts but from talking to the right people.

  Getting to the right people was hard to do. The security situation in Iraq made the ISG’s job nearly impossible. Large parts of the country were simply inaccessible for search without a huge military contingent to provide protection.

  Because of the increasingly dangerous environment in Baghdad, to protect our personnel we purchased armored sedans wherever we could find them on the open market. One day an ISG team en route to a suspect site found themselves riding in an armored BMW that we had just had flown into Iraq. Originally intended for some European industrialist, the BMW came equipped with a DVD player in the backseat. One of the team members accidentally hit the DVD’s Play button, not knowing that there was a copy of the movie Saving Private Ryan already in the machine, and the volume was on high. Seconds later the sound of gunfire and explosions came blasting through the car’s speakers. It was the opening scene of the movie. For a few seconds, the vehicle’s driver and security team thought the gunfire was live. While that might have been a humorous incident, most of the travel around Iraq was no joking matter. The threats were real and considerable.

  On April 26, 2004, the ISG conducted a well-planned and well-rehearsed inspection of an area of Baghdad known as the “Chemical Souk,” looking for people and materials that might have been involved in chemical weapons production. Teams of armored military vehicles with .50-caliber gun turrets escorted the ISG team to the scene. Overhead a UAV provided surveillance video. The inspectors, wearing full body armor, which adds up to forty pounds to a person, inspected a building full of leaking barrels of mysterious chemicals. Suddenly, a huge explosion erupted, nearly trapping in the basement an Australian scientist from the team. She narrowly escaped as the building collapsed above her. The fireball blew outward from the building to the rear, where soldiers
were providing perimeter security. Two sergeants were killed, and five other soldiers were very badly burned.

  On November 8, 2004, Charles Duelfer was traveling along the airport highway toward downtown Baghdad with three or four security vehicles. A civilian car loaded with explosives, known as a mobile improvised explosive device (IED), tried to insert itself in the middle of the convoy. Before it could get close enough, one of the security vehicles cut it off. The car detonated, killing two soldiers from the Kansas National Guard and seriously wounding another. Duelfer’s car was severely damaged but he was unhurt. After he returned to the United States, Duelfer traveled to visit the families of the soldiers to thank them personally for their sacrifice. Throughout its existence, the ISG worked heroically to find the truth.

  Duelfer told me much later that when he watched the Powell UN speech, he had the gut feeling that half of the information in it was wrong. “I just didn’t know which half,” he said. “With the Iraqis there was often some wacky, implausible, but true explanation for the way things seemed,” he said.

  From his subsequent conversations with Iraqis, Duelfer said that they were convinced that no matter what they did in the period prior to the war, it was not going to be good enough to satisfy us. Therefore, why try? Given our deep suspicions of Iraq, their track record of deception, and Saddam’s desire to restart his weapons programs as soon as possible, Duelfer’s contacts might have been right.

  A number of the people Duelfer had known during his previous visits to Saddam-controlled Iraq were now in detention. So he spent a lot of time talking to these officials, trying to get to ground truth. He explained that any ability he had to influence the treatment the detainees received would go away when sovereignty was turned over to a new Iraqi government, around June 30. If they had useful information to share, now was the time to share it. Among those he talked to was Saddam himself.