Legacy of Ashes (The History of the C.I.A.)

by Tim Weiner

  It was the last thing he should have said, and he knew it. “It was the wrong thing to do,” Tenet testified almost four years later. Throughout his years of public service, Tenet had been a fundamentally decent man. But under the enormous pressures he faced after 9/11, his one flaw, his all-consuming desire to please his superiors, became a fault line. Tenet’s character cracked, and the CIA did too. Under his leadership, the agency produced the worst body of work in its long history: a special national intelligence estimate titled “Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

  A national estimate is the best judgment of the American intelligence community, produced and directed by the CIA, and distributed with the authority and imprimatur of the director of central intelligence. It is his word.

  The estimate was commissioned by members of the Senate intelligence committee, which thought it might be wise to review the evidence before going to war. At their request, the CIA’s analysts spent three weeks gathering and reviewing everything the agency knew from spy satellites; from foreign intelligence services; and from recruited Iraqi agents, defectors, and volunteers. The CIA reported in October 2002 that the threat was incalculable. “Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons,” the top secret estimate said. Saddam had bolstered his missile technology, bulked up his deadly stockpiles, and restarted his nuclear weapons program. “If Baghdad acquires sufficient fissile material from abroad,” said the estimate, “it could make a nuclear weapon within several months.” And most terrifying of all, the CIA warned that Iraq could conduct chemical and biological attacks inside the United States.

  The CIA confirmed everything the White House was saying. But the agency was saying far more than it knew. “We did not have many Iraqi sources,” Jim Pavitt, the chief of the clandestine service, admitted two years later. “We had less than a handful.” The agency produced a ton of analysis from an ounce of intelligence. That might have worked if the ounce been solid gold and not pure dross.

  The CIA as an institution was betting that American soldiers or spies would find the evidence after the invasion of Iraq. It was a hell of a gamble. It would have appalled Richard Helms, who died at age eighty-nine on October 22, 2002, after the estimate was completed. In tribute to his legacy, the CIA reprinted parts of a speech he had made years before. The full text was buried in the agency’s archives, but its power had not dimmed. “It is sometimes difficult for us to understand the intensity of our public critics,” Helms had said. “Criticism of our efficiency is one thing, criticism of our responsibility quite another. I believe that we are, as an important arm of government, a legitimate object of public concern…. I find it most painful, however, when public debate lessens our usefulness to the nation by casting doubt on our integrity and objectivity. If we are not believed, we have no purpose.”

  “WE HAD NO ANSWERS”

  To understand how the CIA was able to say that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction existed, go back to 1991 and the end of the first Gulf war. After the war came seven years of intensive international scrutiny, led by United Nations inspectors looking for evidence that Saddam had a hidden arsenal. They combed the country and captured what they could.

  In the mid-1990s, Saddam feared international economic sanctions more than another attack from the United States. He destroyed his weapons of mass destruction in compliance with the commands of the United Nations. But he kept his weapons-production facilities, he lied about it, and the United States and the United Nations knew he was lying. That legacy of lying caused the inspectors and the CIA to distrust everything Iraq did.

  In 1995, General Hussein Kamal, Saddam’s son-in-law, defected along with a few of his aides. Kamal confirmed that Saddam had destroyed the weapons. The CIA disregarded what he said, judging it as deception. The fact that Kamal went back to Iraq and was assassinated by his father-in-law did not alter the agency’s belief.

  His aides told the CIA about Iraq’s National Monitoring Directorate, which aimed to conceal Saddam’s military intentions and capabilities from the world. The CIA wanted to pierce that system of concealment, and a stroke of good fortune made it possible. Rolf Ekeus, the chairman of the United Nations inspection team, was Swedish. So was Ericsson, the telecommunications giant that made the walkie-talkies used by the National Monitoring Directorate. The CIA, the NSA, Ekeus, and Ericsson devised a way to tap the Iraqis’ telecommunications. In March 1998, a CIA officer in the guise of a United Nations weapons inspector went to Baghdad and installed the eavesdropping system. Intercepted conversations were beamed to a computer in Bahrain, which searched for key words such as missile and chemical. A sterling operation, with one exception: the CIA learned nothing about the existence of any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

  That spring, the weapons inspectors found what they thought were remnants of VX nerve gas in Iraqi missile warheads. Their report was leaked to The Washington Post. Baghdad called it an American lie. Charles Duelfer, who had led some of the inspection teams in the 1990s and returned to Iraq as Tenet’s lead weapons hunter in 2004, concluded, “Ultimately, I think, the Iraqis were right. They did not weaponize VX.”

  The confrontation over the VX report was a turning point. Iraq no longer trusted the inspectors, who had never trusted Iraq. In December 1998, the United Nations pulled its inspectors out and the United States once again started bombing Baghdad. The information the CIA had gleaned from its Ericsson taps was used to target American missiles on the people and institutions it penetrated—including the home of the man who ran the National Monitoring Directorate.

  Iraq declared to the United Nations that it had rid itself of weapons of mass destruction. The declarations were essentially accurate; the substantial violations were minor. But Saddam had been deliberately ambiguous about his arsenal, fearing he would stand naked before his enemies if they believed he did not have the capability to produce the weapons. He wanted the United States, his foes in Israel and Iran, his internal enemies, and above all his own troops to believe that he still had the weapons. Illusion was his best deterrent and his last defense against attack.

  This was the state of affairs that confronted the CIA after 9/11. Its last reliable reports from inside Iraq were very old news. “We were bereft of any human intelligence—zero, nada, in terms of agents on the ground,” said David Kay, who also had led the United Nations team and preceded Duelfer as the CIA’s chief weapons hunter in Iraq. The White House wanted answers. “We had no answers,” Kay said.

  Then, in 2002, “suddenly, what looked like a golden source of human intelligence stepped forward: defectors,” he said. “These defectors coming out of Saddam’s regime told us about his weapons programs and weapons progress. Not all of them came out to the United States; many came out to the intelligence services of France, Germany, Britain, and other countries. The information seemed to be unbelievably good.” One of the most riveting stories was the one about mobile biological weapons laboratories. The source was an Iraqi in the hands of the German intelligence service, code-named Curveball.

  “The Iraqi defectors understood two things: one, we shared a mutual interest in regime replacement; and, two, the U.S. was very concerned about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” Kay said. “So they told us about weapons in order to get us to move against Saddam. It was basic Newtonian physics: give me a big enough lever and a fulcrum, and I can move the world.”

  Only one thing was worse than having no sources, and that was to be seduced by sources telling lies.

  The clandestine service had produced little information on Iraq. The analysts accepted whatever supported the case for war. They swallowed secondhand and thirdhand hearsay that conformed to the president’s plans. Absence of evidence was not evidence of absence for the agency. Saddam once had the weapons. The defectors said he still had them. Therefore he had them. The CIA as an institution desperately sought the White House’s attention and approval. It did so by telling the president what he wanted to hear.

  “FACTS AND
CONCLUSIONS BASED ON SOLID INTELLIGENCE”

  President Bush presented the CIA’s case and more in his State of the Union speech on January 28, 2003: Saddam Hussein had biological weapons sufficient to kill millions, chemical weapons to kill countless thousands, mobile biological weapons labs designed to produce germ-warfare agents. “Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” he said. “Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.”

  All of this was terrifying. None of it was true.

  On the eve of the war, on February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose international stature was unmatched in the Bush administration, went to the United Nations. With George Tenet at his shoulder, ever the loyal aide, his presence a silent affirmation—and the American ambassador to the United Nations, the future director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, at his side—the secretary of state began: “Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”

  Powell said: “There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and he has the ability to dispense these lethal poisons and diseases in ways that can cause massive death and destruction.” He again warned of Iraq’s mobile biological-weapons laboratories, how they could park in a shed, make their poison, and move on undetected. He said Saddam had enough lethal chemical weaponry to fill sixteen thousand battlefield rockets. And perhaps worst of all, there was the threat of the “much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network.”

  This was not a selective use of intelligence. It was not “cherry-picking.” It was not fixing the facts to fit the war plans. It was what the intelligence said, the best intelligence the agency had to offer. Powell had spent days and nights with Tenet, checking and rechecking the CIA’s reporting. Tenet looked him in the eye and told him it was rock solid.

  On March 20, 2003, the war began ahead of schedule with a bad tip from the CIA. Tenet ran to the White House with a flash report that Saddam Hussein was hiding at a compound south of Baghdad called Doura Farms. The president ordered the Pentagon to destroy the compound. The bunker-busting bombs and the cruise missiles rained down. Vice President Cheney said, “I think we did get Saddam Hussein. He was seen being dug out of the rubble and wasn’t able to breathe.” It was a false report: Saddam was nowhere to be found. The first targeting failure of the war was not the last. On April 7, 2003, the CIA reported that Saddam and his sons were meeting at a house next to the Saa Restaurant in the Mansur district of Baghdad. The air force dropped four one-ton bombs on the house. Saddam was not there either. Eighteen innocent civilians were killed.

  The agency had predicted that thousands of Iraqi soldiers and their commanders would surrender all along the route of the attack once it was launched over the border from Kuwait. But the American invading force had to fight its way through every town of any size on the road to Baghdad. The CIA envisioned the wholesale capitulation of Iraqi military units, and its intelligence was specific: the Iraqi division based at An Nasiriya would lay down its arms. The first American troops into the city were ambushed; eighteen marines were killed, some by friendly fire, in the first major combat of the war. American forces were told they would be welcomed by cheering Iraqis waving American flags—the clandestine service would provide the flags—and showered with candy and flowers on the streets of Baghdad. In time, they were met with bullets and bombs.

  The CIA compiled a list of 946 suspect sites where Saddam’s arsenals of mass destruction might be found. American soldiers were wounded and killed hunting for the weapons that never were. The agency missed the threat posed by the assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades stockpiled by the Fedayeen, the irregular forces led by Saddam’s son Uday Hussein. The failure led to the first major series of combat deaths of American soldiers. “The Fedayeen and other paramilitary forces proved more of a threat than anyone had expected,” wrote the authors of On Point, the U.S. Army’s official history of the invasion of Iraq. “The intelligence and operations communities had never anticipated how ferocious, tenacious, and fanatical they would be.”

  The CIA organized a paramilitary squad of Iraqis called the Scorpions to conduct sabotage before and during the war. During the occupation, the Scorpions distinguished themselves by beating an Iraqi general to death. Major General Abed Hamed Mowhoush, who was suspected of directing insurgent attacks but had turned himself in voluntarily to American forces, was clubbed senseless with sledgehammer handles by the Scorpions in the presence of a CIA officer who led them, a retired Special Forces officer who had signed on with the agency for the war. Mowhoush died of his injuries two days later, on November 26, 2003. Earlier that month, an Iraqi prisoner named Manadal al-Jamadi was tortured to death at the Abu Ghraib prison while in the custody of a CIA officer. The brutal interrogations were part of what the White House had called upon the agency to do when the gloves came off.

  As the CIA concluded three years after the invasion, the American occupation of Iraq became “the cause celebre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.” The assessment came far too late to be much use to American forces. “Every Army of liberation has a half-life beyond which it turns into an Army of occupation,” wrote Lieutenant General David H. Petraeus, who commanded the 101st Airborne Division in the first year of the war, oversaw the effort to train the Iraqi army on a second tour, and returned as the commander of American forces in 2007.

  “Intelligence is the key to success,” he said. Without it, military operations fall into “a catastrophic downward spiral.”

  “JUST GUESSING”

  The agency went pouring into Baghdad when the war was over. “As Iraq transitions from tyranny to self-determination, Baghdad is home to the largest CIA station since the Vietnam war,” proclaimed Jim Pavitt, the chief of the clandestine service. “I am extremely proud of our performance in Iraq, and of our role in liberating its people from decades of repression.” The officers at the Baghdad station worked with Special Forces soldiers, trying to create a new political climate in Iraq, selecting local leaders, paying off politicians, trying to rebuild society at the grass roots. They tried to work with their British counterparts to create a new Iraqi intelligence service. But very little came of all that. When the Iraqi insurgency began to rise up against the American occupation, those projects started to fall apart and the leadership at the CIA’s Baghdad station began breaking down.

  As the occupation spun out of control, the CIA’s officers found themselves pinned down at the American embassy compound in the capital, unable to escape the protection of the high walls and razor wire. They became prisoners of the Green Zone, powerless to comprehend the Iraqi insurgency, spending far too many hours drinking at the Babylon bar, run by the Baghdad station. Many would not accept a rotation of more than one to three months, barely enough time to get their bearings in Baghdad.

  The station, whose ranks approached five hundred officers, ran through three chiefs in the course of a year. The CIA simply could not find a replacement for the first station chief in 2003. “They had grave, grave difficulty finding a competent individual to go out,” said Larry Crandall, a veteran Foreign Service officer who had worked closely with the CIA during the Afghan jihad and served as the number-two manager of the $18 billion American reconstruction program in Iraq. The agency had no one from the clandestine service willing or able to serve. It finally selected an analyst with next to no experience in running operations. He lasted for a matter of months. It was an extraordinary failure of leadership in a time of war.

  The CIA sent the best of the American inspectors who had hunted down Saddam’s arsenal in the 1990s back to Iraq. David Kay led a team of 1,400 specialists, the Iraq Survey Group, working directly for the director of central
intelligence. Tenet continued to stand by the CIA’s reporting, rejecting the growing criticism as “misinformed, misleading, and just plain wrong.” But the survey group scoured Iraq and found nothing. When Kay returned to report that, Tenet put him in purgatory. Kay nonetheless went before the Senate Armed Services Committee on January 28, 2004, and spoke the truth.

  “We were almost all wrong,” he said.

  When it became certain that the agency had only imagined Iraq’s doomsday arsenal, a moral exhaustion began to settle over the CIA. A dark bitter anger overtook the fiery spirit that had gripped it after 9/11. It was evident that it no longer mattered much to the White House or the Pentagon or the State Department what the agency had to say.

  President Bush disdained the CIA’s increasingly dire reports on the course of the occupation. The agency was “just guessing,” he said.

  This was a death knell. If we are not believed, we have no purpose.

  “THE EVIDENCE WAS COMPLETELY FRAIL”

  “We’re at war,” said Judge Laurence Silberman, whom President Bush appointed on February 6, 2004, to lead an investigation into the ways in which the CIA had conjured Saddam’s weaponry. “If the American Army had made a mistake anywhere near as bad as our intelligence community, we would expect generals to be cashiered.”

  He continued: “It would have been eminently justifiable to have told the President and the Congress that it was likely that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction based on his past use, insufficient indications of destruction, and his deceptive behavior.” But the CIA had made “a grave, grave mistake in concluding that there was a ninety percent degree of certainty that he had weapons of mass destruction. And it was a grave mistake not based on hindsight,” he said. “The evidence was completely frail, some quite faulty, and their tradecraft wasn’t good. Moreover, there was such an abysmal lack of internal communication within the intelligence community that often the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing.”