As we left the erstwhile flag designer’s office that first time and headed for our own, I was shaking my head in disbelief. Bob was just shaking his head, as well, a bemused expression clouding his face. Later, he told me that one of his bosses at the agency had briefed him on the executive branch’s thinking a couple of months earlier.
“This is crazy,” I said. “You know how busy we were in Pakistan? You know how busy the next year’s going to be? It’ll be hell.”
“I’m not even sure how to proceed here,” Bob said. “Right now, we’re a staff of exactly two. How are we going to organize ourselves?” Pretty simple, really, you’re the boss, and I work for you. Between us, we’ll end up working eighty to one hundred hours a week and get half the job done. The long hours are okay; it’s the prospect of not finishing the job that hurts.
Later that day, Bob heard from his boss, the deputy director of operations, who apparently had signed the secrecy papers, too, because he phoned specifically to name Bob the Iraq mission manager. That meant Bob Grenier would be the agency’s face to the rest of the Washington community on everything having to do with Iraq. Bob would have direct access to the director of central intelligence, George Tenet. If anybody wanted anything done by the CIA, Bob was the go-to guy.
WE HAD BEEN focused almost single-mindedly on al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, and international terrorism. Nobody in our shop had even considered shifting to Iraq. Now, we had to turn on a dime and redirect our attention. We quickly learned that much of the pressure to go to war in Iraq was coming from two sources—the Office of the Vice President (OVP) and the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). In other words, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and their subordinates. The key players below them included several people in the OVP, including Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, and David Addington, his legal counsel; at OSD, the cast of characters below Rumsfeld was led by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith.
As best we could tell, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their two-and three-star subordinates were less than enthusiastic about an Iraq invasion. The generals and admirals could make their best case for caution, but they were in a position of weakness. If the suits, reflecting the commander-in-chief’s will, said the United States was going to war, the uniforms would salute and follow orders. Under our Constitution, there was only one other choice: Resign your commission in protest. To the best of my knowledge, none did.
Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their people put great stock in what they were hearing from the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a group of Iraqi exiles generally based in London. In particular, they looked to Ahmed Chalabi, the INC’s leader. Chalabi was a real piece of work. He was an Iraqi Shiite whose family left the country in 1956 when he was twelve years old. He lived abroad, mainly in England and the United States, got a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, became a banker, made a lot of money, and got in trouble with the Jordanian government over alleged financial fraud. Through the INC, and on his own, Chalabi had been feeding his Washington friends in high places a steady diet of dirt on the Iraqi dictator and his plans. Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. He intended to use them. He had close ties to al-Qaeda and even to bin Laden himself.
As I said before, our intelligence suggested that Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction, certainly chemical and biological weapons and a nuclear program in development; in our view, that’s why he wouldn’t permit international weapons inspectors, whom he had expelled in 1998, to return to Iraq. But the rest of Chalabi’s sales pitch was complete bullshit. There was no evidence to suggest Saddam was intending to use these weapons or that he even had the delivery systems to do so. The Osama-Saddam connection was partly notional: After all, didn’t both men despise the United States? But it also turned on an alleged meeting in Prague in early April 2001 between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer. Atta was one of the key hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11 on September 11, 2001. Ergo, Saddam must have had something to do with 9/11, perhaps even with the planning of it.
The Atta tale of a meeting in Prague, promoted heavily by Vice President Cheney, proved to be untrue. And on the general proposition of an unholy alliance between Iraq and al-Qaeda, there was a large troubling fact that had to be ignored: Osama bin Laden reviled Saddam Hussein as much as he did the United States. There’s that old saw about the enemy of my enemy being my friend, which I suppose encouraged some true believers to buy into the idea of an Osama-Saddam alliance. But at the agency, the alleged partnership between this odious pair was widely known as the Big Lie.
At that point, in 2002, Chalabi was no stranger to me, although I’d never met the man. While I was still an analyst, the agency received a request from one of the congressional oversight committees on Capitol Hill seeking detailed information on Chalabi. The reason, unstated, was almost certainly because Chalabi was continuing to cultivate friends in high places, and committee members wanted to know if he was on the level. I had been following Chalabi for much of my professional life, so I was enlisted to draft the CIA response. I wanted to be especially thorough. There’s an old joke at the agency that you can anger your boss and live to tell the tale, but never run afoul of the security, finance, or medical departments of the CIA because they can end your career. A corollary: While the CIA works for the president, you never want to run afoul of Congress because it can really do you damage.
Working with two junior analysts, I researched and wrote a long response to the committee’s questions, sourced the document, and sent it through the agency’s long coordination and review process. In the Directorate of Intelligence, everybody with a stake in what is said in such papers gets a shot at them. On this one, everybody in the building agreed with what I was saying—that Ahmed Chalabi was completely unreliable, a serial fabricator who should be avoided at all costs. We sent the paper to the State Department for comments. What we got back was our document with every critical point deleted; what remained was only his personal information. Stunned and outraged, I called the analyst—someone I respected enormously—at State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. She chuckled at my initial reaction and then turned serious. She had nothing to do with the changes, she insisted. It had been a policy decision, made far above our pay grades.
I consulted a colleague about what to do next. We were mystified; State’s Near East experts knew Chalabi well—well enough to know he was a con man. We were confident about what I had written, and we could ignore State in responding to Congress if we saw fit. Which is what we did: We sent my original paper, the one vetted by my CIA colleagues, to the committee, putting us on record. Ahmed Chalabi richly deserved the figurative scarlet letter: an order that no agency officer was to have contact with him.
Still, no-contact order or not, the willing suspension of disbelief seemed to be epidemic in certain Bush administration quarters during those days. In the vice president’s office and at Defense, they were just lapping up Chalabi’s stuff. The question was why. These guys weren’t stupid. Yes, we knew ideology played a big part: They thought they could remake the Middle East, and toppling Saddam was central to the effort. They really did think our troops would be greeted as liberators in Baghdad and everywhere else in Iraq. I attended meetings on Iraq nearly every day, often by teleconference, and heard one NSC official actually say the words: “They’re going to throw flowers at us on the streets of Baghdad.” Who knows, it might have worked out that way if the administration had used the plan envisioned by some experts after the regime was toppled in April 2003. That plan, and it had several permutations, would have saturated Iraq with an occupation force of at least three hundred thousand soldiers, marines, and allied troops; the idea was to secure critical infrastructure, win hearts and minds with a benign, overwhelming presence, get Iraq back on its feet, nurture political pluralism, and leave as quickly as events would permit.
But as numerous books in recent years have pointed out, the administration
completely botched the critical months after President Bush announced an end to major combat operations. The answer to why we’re still in Iraq to this day has almost everything to do with the failures of leadership in 2003 and 2004 and, in some cases, the ascendance of rank deception—deliberate distortions of the facts on the ground.
It’s also important to concede that we probably dropped the ball on our reading of Saddam and what he would do. In many respects, during the period leading up to the beginning of the war, Saddam seemed to be goading us to invade. Why would he do that if he didn’t actually have weapons of mass destruction? In retrospect, I believe it’s because we didn’t understand the importance of “face” in Arab culture. Saddam couldn’t act in ways that made him look weak among his Arab neighbors and especially to his own people. There were no chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, but he couldn’t simply go public and say, “All right, all right, I give up. In fact, I destroyed all those programs. Come in and see for yourselves. And, by the way, would you please lift the sanctions now?”
Conversely, Saddam wasn’t very smart in his reading of the American side. He didn’t understand that an American president generally means what he says when he threatens war. He probably thought Bush was posturing by sending troops to Kuwait and two carrier groups to the Gulf; by negotiating with the Turks, Jordanians, and Syrians for overflight clearance; and by going to the United Nations for a new resolution. In Saddam’s world, this was all part of the game—what he expected from us because we had to look tough even when we’d finally come to some accommodation and let him lose with dignity. He probably calculated that our spies would be able to learn, without admitting inspectors, that his programs were history and that we’d eventually back away rather than risk a real shooting war.
What our spies and informants were noticing, of course, was that Iraqi scientists specializing in chemistry, biology, and, to a lesser extent, nuclear power kept showing up at international symposia. They presented papers, listened to the presentation of others, took copious notes, and returned to Jordan, where they could transit overland back to Iraq. We also saw Iraq’s embassy in Amman, Jordan, used as an active agent to circumvent sanctions. Throughout the 1990s, Iraq had an aggressive program to buy “dual use” products—that is, components and subcomponents that could be used for both civilian and military purposes.
Chalabi’s “intelligence,” meanwhile, kept worming its way into our collective work product, even though our no-contact order meant that he was persona non grata to the CIA. He managed this because he fed material to his civilian friends at the Pentagon, who then put it into the larger pool of intelligence as DODIR, or Department of Defense Intelligence Reporting. DODIR tends to be, at best, spotty in its reliability, since any Defense Department official, in a suit or a uniform, can collect information and write it up as a military intelligence report. We would often see reports that were largely cut-and-paste jobs of newspaper articles classified as “confidential” and sent along as intelligence. The attribution needed only to be “a reliable source.” Some of these reports became very detailed on Iraq’s WMD programs and on the purchase of component parts for those programs. But there was no specific sourcing. The sources were Chalabi and his underlings.
Was it an intelligence failure? Yes. Bad information was getting into our intelligence system. Was it a failure of analysis? No. The agency’s protocols for analyzing the quality of information are very detailed. Although I cannot discuss the specifics, suffice it to say that the CIA does a credible job of distinguishing between untested sources and genuinely reliable sources. There was no way for us to prevent the corruption of DOD intelligence when Chalabi’s recipients were drooling over his awesome sources and insisting that we take what they were saying with utmost seriousness. We simply were not permitted to vet these “reliable” sources.
Secretary of State Colin Powell raised some red flags about Chalabi and questioned the stuff he was funneling into the intelligence mix. But he got outmaneuvered by Vice President Cheney at every turn. Cheney managed to run circles around everyone, including my boss, George Tenet, and even the president of the United States.
On Sunday, January 26, 2003, I had just returned from a weekend visiting Chris and Costa at my folks’ house in Pennsylvania; in those days, my routine was to leave Pennsylvania in the late afternoon; when I hit the D.C. area, I’d head straight for the office, arriving around 10 p.m. to read cables. I’d then go home for a few hours, then return at 4 or 5 a.m. Monday. The objective was to clear my in-box, or at least reduce the size of the stack in it, so I wouldn’t be overwhelmed when the regular workday began later Monday morning. That evening, Bob Grenier was still at the office; at a conference table near him was a familiar face in unfamiliar clothes—Colin Powell, in jeans and a T-shirt.
“What’s he doing here tonight?” I had no idea what was going on.
“Oh, he’s going over the latest draft of the State of the Union,” Bob said. “We’re in a battle over the line about the yellowcake.” I shrugged and went about my business.
This particular battle dated back to the previous fall, when President Bush was preparing to deliver a national security address in Cincinnati. His draft included language suggesting that Saddam had sought “yellowcake,” a mix of uranium oxides, in Niger, a country in northwest Africa. The context was that the Iraqi dictator wanted the stuff to help him develop his nuclear weapons program. As the draft circulated among the various agencies and departments on the review list, we got involved in a game of ping-pong with the White House. Director Tenet, relying on agency analysts, insisted that the yellowcake line could not be supported by intelligence and needed to go. In the back-and-forth, Tenet finally prevailed and Bush gave the speech in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002, with no mention of Niger, Africa, or yellowcake.
Now, our people and Secretary Powell, probably the most admired person in the Bush administration, were trying to keep the genie in the bottle once again. We had seen the original report, which contained misspellings, multiple fonts, and other indications that it was a forgery. With Powell’s support, we managed to purge the language from the State of the Union address, or so we thought. But on Tuesday night, January 28, 2003, George Bush delivered an address that included the following sixteen words: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Between Sunday night and Tuesday night, someone had overruled the CIA and the secretary of state and, presumably, the National Security Council staff to reinsert the suspect line. The someone, the world would later learn, was Vice President Dick Cheney.
Director Tenet would not tender his resignation until July 2004. By then, he had become a party to Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003, making the case for the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction—a spectacle of flimsy evidence supported by visual props, including the director of central intelligence seated prominently behind the secretary of state. Tenet would have his integrity sullied and his judgment called into question. The words “slam dunk” would attach to him in a pejorative context that had nothing to do with basketball and everything to do with politics as a contact sport. But if there was a beginning to the end of Tenet as DCI, it was probably Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address.
Tenet deserved better. He was director during one of the most tumultuous times in CIA history, and he made plenty of mistakes. Who doesn’t? But the sharp criticism of him, in isolation from the White House he served, strikes me as unfair. He did the best he could, for the most part, trying to be an honest broker for the intelligence community in an executive branch with more hidden agendas than even Richard Nixon could have dreamed up. He wanted—perhaps too much—to please.
16
I FIRST SAW George Tenet up close in the early 1990s when JoAnne and I attended the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint George in Bethesda, Maryland, where the parents of Tenet’s wife, Stephanie, were regulars. At the time, he was d
irector for intelligence programs at the National Security Council, so every once in a while, the priest would make a comment about how honored we were to have such a distinguished man in our congregation. I made a mental note: This guy’s in the White House and involved in intel, so he must be pretty important.
He came to the CIA in July 1995 as deputy director of central intelligence, the DDCI in the world of intel alphabets. I confess that the idea of a fellow Greek near the top of the pyramid was appealing. We Greeks are a clannish bunch, I suppose; we stick together and try to help one another. How could having Tenet near the top possibly hurt?
Still, the CIA is a massive organization, with thousands of employees. It wasn’t until the summer of 1997 that I first met him, shortly after he took over the top job. He was standing in the shish kebab line behind my brother, Emanuel, and me at the Saint George Greek Food Festival. I was saying that I thought the best loukoumades, or Greek doughnuts with honey and cinnamon on them, were made on the island of Chios. The voice behind me piped up: “Me, too! Chios definitely has the best loukoumades.” I turned and stared into the face of George Tenet. Okay, junior, there’s no better time to meet the boss than right now. Think of something clever. Or witty or wise.
“Oh, hello, Mr. Tenet. I’m one of your analysts, John Kiriakou. Nice to meet you,” I said, extending my hand. Well, that was bright, I thought.
The Reluctant Spy Page 17