The Secret Sentry

by Matthew M. Aid

  NSA’s commercial intercept program did produce a few successes in Iraq. For example, in the late 1990s SIGINT helped the U.S. government block a number of attempts by foreign companies to violate U.N.-imposed economic sanctions against the country.26Intelligence developed by NSA revealed that in August 2002 a French company called CIS Paris helped broker the sale to Iraq of twenty tons of a Chinese-made chemical called HTPB, which was used to make solid fuel for ballistic missiles.27SIGINT also helped the U.S. government keep close tabs on which foreign countries (mainly Russia and its former republics) were doing business with Iraq.28

  The net result was that as of the summer of 2002, NSA’s SIGINT coverage of Iraq was marginal at best. The best intelligence material that the agency was producing at the time was on the Iraqi air force and air defense forces, both of whom were heavy users of electronic communications that the agency could easily intercept. But beyond these targets, NSA was experiencing loads of problems monitoring what was going on inside Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. SIGINT coverage of the Iraqi Republican Guard and the Regular Army was fair at best. And NSA’s intelligence production on Hussein himself, the activities of his se -nior Ba’ath Party leadership, and the elite Special Republican Guard was practically nonexistent. As Bob Woodward of the Washington Post aptly put it, “the bottom line: SIGINT quality and quantity out of Iraq was negligible.”29

  As the fall of 2002 approached and the blistering summer in Washington began to abate, the rhetoric coming out of the White House calling for war with Iraq began to heat up dramatically. Virtually everyone inside the Beltway suspected that war with Iraq was coming. Virtually everyone within the U.S. intelligence community knew that war with Iraq was becoming increasingly inevitable. A senior U.S. military intelligence official who is still on active ser-vice ruefully recalled, “You didn’t have to be a mind reader to guess what was about to happen. I read the newspapers. I watched the nightly news. I listened carefully to what was being said on the Sunday morning talk shows. I read and reread the classified message traffic. The forces were secretly being mustered and no one thought that we could stop it, even if we wanted to. Everyone I talked to thought that war was inevitable.” But as one senior White House official put it, “the deal had not been cinched.” Only a few senior White House and Pentagon officials knew that on August 29 President Bush had personally approved the final version of a war plan drawn up by General Franks, the commander of CENTCOM in Tampa, Florida, for the invasion of Iraq.30

  Bush still had to sell the war to the United Nations, Congress, and, most important, the American people. On September 12, he flew up to New York and addressed the U.N. General Assembly, delivering his indictment of Sad-dam Hussein, who, he asserted, had proved “only his contempt for the United Nations and for all his pledges. By breaking every pledge, by his deceptions and his cruelties, Saddam Hussein has made the case against himself.” The president’s speech received polite applause from the assembled world leaders, but fervent approval from American politicians and the U.S. news media.31

  Hayden Signs Off on the NIE

  Distressing today for many former NSA officials is that a short time after President Bush’s blistering attack on the Iraqi regime, the agency knowingly and willingly went along with an act that is now widely acknowledged to be one of the saddest moments in U.S. intelligence history. In late September 2002, NSA director Michael Hayden signed off on a CIA-produced National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq’s WMD program that not only turned out to be wrong in almost all respects, but also served as the principal justification for the Bush administration to lead the United States to war with Iraq.

  The Top Secret Codeword NIE was titled Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction. Virtually all its conclusions, major and minor, were later determined to be wrong. When congressional investigators began going through the raw intelligence reporting on which the NIE was ostensibly based, they discovered that there was little factual evidence to support any of the conclusions contained in the document, except for some very dubious reporting by defectors and refugees and extremely unreliable information provided by exile groups like Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. Only the State Department formally dissented from some of the report’s conclusions, but its unwillingness to endorse the NIE carried little real weight.32

  Years after the NIE was issued, Hayden defended his having signed off on the document, telling the members of the Senate’s intelligence committee in 2005 that when he reviewed a draft of the NIE in September 2002, his only concern was to assess the use of SIGINT in the estimate, and that he approved the NIE based solely on the fact that the available SIGINT did not contradict the estimate’s conclusions. Hayden claimed, “There was nothing in the NIE that signals intelligence contradicted. Signals intelligence ranged from ambiguous to confirmatory of the conclusions in the National Intelligence Estimate.”33

  A year later, Hayden took his campaign to exonerate himself and NSA a step further by asserting that the SIGINT on the Iraqi WMD program was correct, but that the CIA’s intelligence analysts who wrote the NIE had gotten the conclusions wrong.34

  What We Knew and How We Knew It

  General Hayden’s version of events is somewhat different from the recollections of the small cadre of NSA intelligence analysts who specialized in Iraq and thought that most of the SIGINT at their disposal was ambiguous at best.35

  Based on a combination of postmortem reports, declassified documents, and interviews with NSA and CIA intelligence officials, the following is what NSA actually knew about the Iraqi WMD program at the time that the NIE was approved, in September 2002.

  The Iraqi Nuclear Weapons Program

  The NIE stated with “high confidence” that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program since the U.N. weapons inspectors had left Iraq in 1998, adding that Iraq “probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.” According to former NSA and CIA analysts, NSA had collected virtually nothing that came close to confirming this assertion prior to the NIE being issued. The only intercepts that even remotely suggested that the Iraqis were trying to rebuild their capacity to develop and build nuclear weapons were a small number of very low-level e-mails and telexes from 2000 and 2001, involving attempts by Iraqi front companies to buy high-speed balancing machines needed for uranium enrichment.36

  In his February 5, 2003, presentation to the U.N. Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell referred to these intercepts when he said that NSA had evidence “that Iraq front companies sought to buy machines that can be used to balance gas centrifuge rotors. One of these companies also had been involved in a failed effort in 2001 to smuggle aluminum tubes into Iraq.”37

  The problem was that these balancing machines could also have been destined for use in a variety of routine commercial manufacturing operations, which is what the Iraqis claimed they were for. Postwar investigations could not refute Iraq’s claim that this equipment was destined for purely civilian purposes. Interviews with former NSA and CIA analysts confirm that there was nothing conclusive in the NSA intercepts collected between 2000 and 2002 to indicate whether these components were destined for use in Iraq’s purported nuclear weapons program or for other purposes. A 2005 report on the matter concluded, “Although signals intelligence played a key role in some respects that we cannot discuss in an unclassified format, on the whole it was not useful.” 38

  The Iraqi Chemical Weapons Program

  Once again, interviews indicate that NSA provided very little usable SIGINT concerning Iraq’s alleged chemical weapons program. Most of the intercepts— consisting of low-level faxes, telexes, and e-mails—concerned the attempts of Iraqi front companies in Baghdad and elsewhere in the Middle East to purchase precursor chemicals from a number of companies in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, with much of the SIGINT reporting indicating the chemical purchases were to be used for producing fertilizers, not chemical weapons. The problem was that the reams of intercepted material did no
t specify for what purpose the chemicals were to be used, so naturally the CIA analysts adopted a worst-case-scenario approach and concluded that the chemical precursors were “most likely” intended for the production of chemical weapons.39

  Interestingly, the NSA analysts interviewed could not recall that after 1998 the agency ever collected any intelligence information indicating that the Iraqis were developing or had actually produced biological weapons.40

  The Robb-Silberman committee’s findings agree with the recollections of the analysts, concluding, “Signals Intelligence provided only minimal information regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons programs and, due to the nature of the sources, what was provided was of dubious quality and therefore of questionable value.”41

  Iraqi Unmanned Drones

  The most contentious of the NSA SIGINT material used in the NIE alleged that the Iraqis were developing unmanned drones for the purpose of delivering chemical or biological weapons to targets in the United States. This claim was largely based on an inferential reading by the CIA analysts of a small number of NSA intercepts concerning Iraqi defense contractor Ibn-Firnas’s purchase through an Australia-based middleman of mapping software for a prototype drone from a company in Taiwan called Advantech. Indeed, the mapping covered the United States—and the entire rest of the world.42Once again, the CIA opted for the worst-case scenario, basing its conclusions on “analysis of special intelligence.” The phrase “special intelligence” of course refers to SIGINT.43

  Only after the end of the war did U.S. intelligence experts get to examine prototypes of the Iraqi drone, and they found it incapable of reaching the United States.44

  The Iraqi Ballistic Missile Program

  NSA’s analysis of intercepts in 2002 was correct, however, in warning that Iraq was in the process of producing a “large-diameter missile,” which meant a regular ballistic missile with booster rockets attached to it that would give the missile a range far in excess of what the United Nations permitted Iraq to have. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq, CIA inspection teams confirmed that two Iraqi ballistic missiles had indeed been flight-tested beyond the 150 kilometers permitted by the United Nations.45

  Ambiguous Is Our Business

  Apart from the missile data, NSA’s intelligence analysts had, at best, only “ambiguous” SIGINT intelligence about whether Iraq possessed nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. Immediately after the NIE was issued, the agency’s analysts began to express reservations about their “confidence levels,” which caused no fair amount of angst at Fort Meade, especially in General Hayden’s office. Hayden later admitted to Congress that he was not pleased by these reservations, which conflicted with his assertion that SIGINT confirmed the NIE’s conclusions. NSA’s management held firm on this position until Congress started to look at the raw material behind the NIE. Only then did it become clear how skimpy the agency’s knowledge was concerning the Iraqi WMD program.46According to a former senior CIA official, the NSA intercepts actually revealed that “across the board military expenditures [by the Iraqis] were down massively. We reported that but it was not what the bosses wanted to hear.”47

  By 2007, Hayden, now the director of the CIA, had come full circle. He finally admitted that he, like the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, had been wrong about the nature and extent of Iraq’s WMD program, but with a new twist. Hayden told an interviewer from National Public Radio,

  All of the SIGINT I had, when I looked at the key judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate, my SIGINT ranged from ambiguous to confirmatory. And therefore, I was—you know, and ambiguous in our business, I told you, is kind of a state of nature. And so, I was quite comfortable to say, yes, I agree with the NIE. I was comfortable. I was wrong. It turned out not to be true.48

  The postmortem investigations of the U.S. intelligence community’s performance on the Iraqi WMD issue were unsparing in their criticism of NSA. An outside review panel concluded that there was “virtually no useful signals intelligence on a target that was one of the United States’ top intelligence priorities.” 49

  One now-retired NSA official recalled, “We looked long and hard for any signs that the Iraqis were attempting to smuggle into Iraq equipment needed to build nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, or precision machinery that was essential to building ballistic missiles or their guidance systems. We just never found a ‘smoking gun’ that Saddam was trying to build nukes or anything else . . . We did find lots of stuff that was on its face very suspicious, but nothing you could hang your hat on.”50

  The Imperial Hypocrisy

  On October 7, 2002, a week after the fateful NIE was published, President Bush gave a speech, now known to history as the “Axis of Evil” speech, that concluded with a now-infamous line: “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun— that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”51

  But Bush’s speech was also notable because it based the rationale for war on the allegation that Saddam Hussein had, for many years, aided and abetted “the al Qaeda terrorist network,” which shared “a common enemy— the United States of America.” This also carried the implication that Iraq had been partly responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.52

  None of this was based on solid evidence. In fact, what little there was in NSA’s files about a relationship between Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaeda was fragmentary, and it did not support the notion that there was a close and longstanding relationship between the Iraqi government and al Qaeda.53The one tangible item that NSA did have (which, not surprisingly, the White House and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith immediately fixated on) was a report that a Jordanian-born al Qaeda leader named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who would later become the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq during the Iraqi insurgency, had fled to Iran after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, then received medical treatment in Iraq in May 2002. Beginning in May 2002, NSA and its foreign partners were monitoring al-Zarqawi’s phone calls, and NSA forwarded to Feith’s office the intelligence reporting on al-Zarqawi and what little else it had, but at Hayden’s insistence, each of the NSA reports started with a disclaimer stating that SIGINT “neither confirms nor denies” that such a link existed.54

  It wasn’t much, but as far as the White House and the Pentagon were concerned, it was more than sufficient evidence— according to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, it was “bulletproof” confirmation of the ties between Saddam Hussein’s government and al Qaeda, including “solid evidence” that al Qaeda maintained a sizable presence in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s allegations were based on NSA intercepts of al-Zarqawi’s phone calls to friends and relatives. But according to a U.S. intelligence official, the intercepts “provide no evidence that the suspected terrorist [al-Zarqawi] was working with the Iraqi regime or that he was working on a terrorist operation while he was in Iraq.” Nonetheless, the allegations became an article of faith for Bush administration officials.55

  We Can’t Wait for the Politicians

  The passage of the Iraq War Resolution by Congress on October 10, 2002, put NSA into high gear. On October 18, General Hayden went on NSA’s internal tel-e vision network to announce that war with Iraq was coming soon and that NSA had to take immediate steps to get ready for the impending invasion. He noted that “a SIGINT agency cannot wait for a political decision” and that weather constraints made it necessary to attack Iraq no later than the end of March 2003.56

  General Hayden ordered his agency to immediately intensify its SIGINT collection operations against Iraq. The onus of General Hayden’s directive fell on the intercept operators, linguists, and intelligence analysts at the Gordon Regional Security Operations Center at Fort Gordon, Georgia, which was NSA’s principal producer of intelligence on Iraq. The commander of the Fort Gordon listening post, Colonel Daniel Dailey, was ordered to reinforce his station’s SIGINT collection efforts against the complete spectrum of Iraqi military and civilian targets. Most of the intelligence information that Fort Gor
don collected in the months that followed was purely military in nature, such as Iraqi Republican Guard maneuvers, flight activity levels for the Iraqi air force, and details of Iraqi air defense reactions to the accelerating number of reconnaissance flights over northern and southern Iraq being conducted by U.S. and British warplanes. In addition, a twenty-nine-person special section was formed at Fort Gordon to concentrate on intercepting and analyzing radio traffic relating to Iraqi WMDs.57

  Powell’s Petard

  In mid-January 2003, as the drumbeat for war grew ever louder, intelligence analysts working for Pentagon policy chief Douglas Feith began carefully combing through the SIGINT that NSA had produced about Iraq, looking once again for a “smoking gun” that would provide conclusive proof that Iraq was producing WMDs, as well as evidence that a link existed between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaeda. Feith was preparing a dossier of intelligence reports that the White House wanted to use to convince the United Nations to support the U.S. government’s call for war with Iraq. A former NSA official recalled, “There wasn’t much there, and there certainly was no smoking gun, which is what these guys wanted.”58

  To assist Secretary of State Powell in making his U.N. presentation, NSA compiled a complete dossier of all SIGINT reporting and unpublished material taken from the agency’s databases that related directly or indirectly to Iraq’s WMD programs and alleged links to al Qaeda. An NSA analyst who reviewed the hefty file recalled that the best material the agency had were a few tantalizing taped intercepts of telephone conversations among Iraqi military and Republican Guard officers from 2002 and 2003, suggesting that the Iraqis were engaged in a desperate effort to hide things from the U.N. weapons inspectors who were due to arrive in Iraq soon. But the vague and fragmentary intercepts were devoid of specifics. This, however, did not prevent one senior White House official from telling Newsweek, “Hold on to your hat. We’ve got it.”59