I left the briefing without saying good-bye to the president. I thought I might never see him again, as my job as briefer was over. But I did not say anything given his understandable anger at what had just transpired in the mountains of Afghanistan. On the drive from Waco to Dallas to catch a flight back to Washington, my cell phone rang. It was the president’s personal aide, who asked for my home address. Within a few days, a handwritten note arrived from the president thanking me for my service as his briefer. It was clear to me that the president also felt bad about how our last briefing together had gone.
CHAPTER 5
An Imperfect Storm
Route Irish was the US military code name for the twelve-kilometer stretch of highway that connected the Baghdad International Airport with the secure area known as the “Green Zone.” The Green Zone contained the diplomatic facilities of the United States and our coalition partners, significant coalition military assets and headquarters, the Iraqi prime minister’s office, the country’s parliament, and several other Iraqi government buildings. By the time I first traveled on Route Irish in early 2005, this once-beautiful drive lined by large trees was a terrorist kill zone. Suicide bombers patrolled the highway looking for American or other coalition convoys to ambush.
Climbing into the back of a dusty and mud-covered black armored vehicle, I saw that the two CIA security officers in the front were armed to the teeth—knives, handguns, military assault rifles, and grenade launchers. The grenades were sitting in the open on a console between the driver’s seat and the front passenger seat. Having not seen one of the cylindrical grenades for launchers such as theirs before, I innocently asked, “What are those?” The answer was immediate, direct, and sharp: “Don’t touch those.” And the tone said, “Don’t ask any more questions.” Chagrined, I turned to look out the window and saw a bullet lodged in the inches-thick glass of the armored vehicle.
I, along with another senior Agency officer, was in Baghdad at the request of Director Porter Goss. Our job was to look into an incident in which Charles Duelfer—CIA’s lead man investigating Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program—and the military convoy in which he was riding had been attacked on Route Irish, resulting in the deaths of two Kansas National Guardsmen and severe injuries to a third. Before we pulled out from our parking spot, the lead security agent turned to me and said, “I just want to make something crystal clear. I will take you on one condition. If something happens along the way, you will follow my orders in full—no questions asked.” I swallowed hard and said, “Yes, sir.”
* * *
President Bush, after one post-9/11 briefing at the ranch in Crawford, in which we had discussed a preemptive Israeli air strike against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, told me, “Michael, my most important job is to protect the American people. I now understand why the Israelis act the way they do when it comes to terrorism.” To me, nothing better captured President Bush’s thinking about the war in Iraq than this statement. There is no doubt that the president’s focus on Iraq was born of 9/11. There is no doubt that, while it was a war of choice, President Bush took us there because he thought it necessary to protect the American people. But there is also no doubt that the Iraq War supported the al Qa‘ida narrative and helped spread the group’s ideology, a consequence not well understood before the war. So, both in genesis and in effect, the war in Iraq is very much a part of the terrorism story over the past fifteen years.
* * *
President Bush—from the vantage point of his first intelligence briefer—did not come to office with any particular ax to grind with Saddam Hussein. The conventional wisdom, of course, is that Team Bush arrived in the White House with Iraq already in its gunsights. That might have been true for a small group of Bush appointees, but it is not what I observed from the president. Periodically Iraq would come to the forefront of his attention—for example, when Saddam’s forces would fire on US aircraft enforcing the no-fly zone, or when there would be signs that the international sanctions on Iraq were eroding a bit more. And there was certainly concern about whether the sanctions could be maintained over the long term and what Saddam would do when he was no longer in the box. Nonetheless, for the president, there was no early or inherent obsession with Iraq.
There was one occasion that might have conveyed a different sense, and I share it here only to set the record straight. During a session in the Oval Office in the spring of 2001, I mentioned to the president some improvement that had been made in the Iraqi air defense system and suggested to him that “if the United States were ever to engage Iraq militarily, this is something that US forces would have to deal with.” The president said to me, “It is not a question of if but only a question of when, Michael.” I know that some will read that comment to mean that Bush had already made his mind up about going to war with Iraq and was only looking for the provocation. But at the time—and to this day—I took him to mean only that in his estimation, at some uncertain time in the future Saddam would push us and he or some future president would have to respond.
* * *
Post 9/11, George Tenet and I continued our Saturday trips to Camp David but the routine was different—the briefings were less leisurely, more focused on terrorism and often took place in a conference room rather than the president’s office. On a monitor we could see the vice president, who would be piped in via video teleconference from a “secure location.” At one of these post-9/11 sessions, the president and vice president asked Tenet and me if Iraq had played any role in the attacks. Tenet and I told the president and others that there was no intelligence to suggest that Iraq had had any role in the attack—and that if any nation had supported al Qa‘ida it was more likely to have been Iran, which had been responsible for the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996 that killed nineteen US servicemen and wounded hundreds of others. But we quickly added that there was no evidence of an Iran–al Qa‘ida connection either.
At one point after 9/11, though, it seemed as if we might have discovered an al Qa‘ida–Iraq connection. The Czech intelligence service told us a source had told it that a 9/11 hijacker, Mohamed Atta, had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer named Ahmad Samir al-Ani at the Iraqi embassy in Prague on April 9, 2001, at eleven a.m., just five months before the attack. The Czechs provided a fuzzy surveillance photo of the man they thought to be Atta.
I brought this into the Oval Office. In its initial analysis of the photo, CIA gave some credibility to the report. The US legal attaché (an FBI special agent attached to American embassies overseas) in Prague met with the Czech source, and the assessment of the “LegAtt” and the Czech officers present was that they were 70 percent confident the source was sincere and believed his own story regarding the meeting. The president asked a lot of questions, but unfortunately there was much more that we did not know than that we did know.
The possibility of an Iraqi connection—particularly a connection to the man we believed to have been the lead hijacker—was explosive. The story was leaked very quickly, with the Czech interior minister confirming it publicly. In early December, Vice President Cheney was the first US official to confirm the story, on Meet the Press. The vice president told Tim Russert, “It’s been pretty well confirmed that he [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia [sic] last April.” The vice president went on to note that we did not know the purpose of the meeting and that we needed to investigate more.
The bottom line of the ensuing investigation was that the Czech story did not seem to be true, and I kept the president informed throughout the process. The FBI did an exhaustive review of Atta’s whereabouts during the time in question and, although we were not absolutely certain, every indication was that he had been in the United States. The Czechs did their own investigation and could not find any records of Atta’s having been in the country in April 2001. In addition, Czech investigators put al-Ani seventy miles from Prague when the alleged meeting occur
red.
Despite our efforts to un-ring the bell on the Iraqi–al Qa‘ida Prague connection, a few in the administration—Vice President Cheney, in particular—repeatedly raised it in public comments. There was no similar obsession with the matter on the president’s part, however. Once we closed the books on the issue, he never asked about it again.
After spending almost an hour every morning with the president, for four months after 9/11, I came to understand his deep concern about Iraq. To me, the president’s thinking on Iraq was motivated by the soul-crushing impact of 9/11 and the legitimate fear that as bad as 9/11 had been, things could be much worse—if Saddam got it into his head to either use his weapons of mass destruction as a terrorist tool against the West, or provide those weapons to an international terrorist group. Although the intelligence community considered either of these developments unlikely, I believe the president considered both scenarios risks he could not ignore, particularly since the country had just suffered the single worst attack in our history. At the end of the day, it was the threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction being used against the United States that led the president to take us to war in Iraq.
* * *
When my year as intelligence briefer to the president ended, I was full of mixed emotions. I was relieved to have the burden of such a demanding job lifted from my shoulders, but I was also saddened by the thought that I might never again be an eyewitness to and occasional participant in the making of so much history.
For a short period after I left the briefing job, I kept my hand in the PDB process by leading the component within CIA that both produces the PDB and supports the briefers. (In addition to the personal briefer for the president, there are a cadre of other briefers who perform a similar mission for senior officials like the vice president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and a handful of other top leaders.) It was an important job, but it lacked the adrenaline rush one got from being quizzed directly by the president of the United States six days a week.
After about nine months, in the early fall of 2002, I was selected to be one of the two deputies to the deputy director for intelligence, Jami Miscik. Miscik, the first woman ever to hold the post of CIA’s top analyst, was a contemporary of mine. She had been Tenet’s executive assistant when Tenet made the transition from deputy director to director, and I’d watched as she managed the nomination process—thinking of everything, leaving nothing to chance, keeping her hand on every lever of the Agency.
In my new role, Miscik asked me to focus on ensuring that the analytic directorate was making the right investments in people, programs, and processes to remain on the cutting edge of analysis—covering everything from hiring the best and brightest to guaranteeing that the analysts had the technology they needed to deal with an ever-increasing volume of information. I also, not surprisingly, helped Miscik and her principal deputy, Scott White, supervise the production of all the intelligence analysis that the Agency created. When it came to Iraq at that time, our focus was on Iraqi links to terrorism. It was, somewhat surprisingly, not on Iraq’s WMD programs.
One of the hallmarks of George Tenet’s leadership style was to form strong relations with talented individuals within the Agency and select point persons on certain subjects, no matter their rank or place in the hierarchy. He referred to this as having a “belly button”—one person he could poke in the stomach (figuratively and sometimes literally) when he needed something done. The Directorate of Intelligence (DI)—my outfit—remained Tenet’s go-to place for dealing with terrorism analysis on Iraq, but for matters dealing with Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction he chose a senior officer on the National Intelligence Council (NIC), Bob Walpole, to be his “belly button.” The NIC is an intelligence community entity of senior analysts that, at the time, reported directly to the director of central intelligence, or DCI (today the NIC reports to the director of national intelligence, or DNI). That is not to say that the DI was not producing intelligence pieces on the subject of Iraq and WMD—in fact, it was producing the vast majority of the analysis in the community. What was different was that on Iraqi WMD, Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin largely interacted with CIA analysts through Walpole, not through the DI front office. This left me with less of a sense of ownership on the WMD issue than on other Iraq issues. This was the downside of Tenet’s belly-button approach, particularly when the chosen individual is outside the regular chain of command. This is not an excuse—it is simply an explanation that will become relevant as this story unfolds.
During the fall of 2002 and into the following winter, interest regarding Iraq grew exponentially, and Miscik asked me to get increasingly involved. I played a role in several events that in retrospect would turn out to be crucial. One occurred in October, when the White House sent the Agency a speech to vet. White House staff wanted the president to deliver remarks in Cincinnati laying out the administration’s concerns about Iraq. Miscik handed me the draft and asked me to review it over a weekend. While the Agency strictly stays away from passing judgment on matters of policy, it plays an important role in making sure that the president and his top aides do not inadvertently get the facts or key analytic judgments wrong or, just as important, say something that would damage our ability to collect intelligence in the future.
Going through the draft, the group of analysts I had assembled came across the statement that Saddam had been “caught attempting to purchase up to 500 metric tons of uranium oxide from sources in Africa—an essential ingredient in the enrichment process.” While there had indeed been a report to that effect provided to us by British intelligence, for a variety of reasons intelligence analysts throughout the US government did not believe it. In fact, just the day before, CIA officers had testified before a closed session of Congress that we did not believe the British report. I explained all this to the White House speechwriters in two memos—one on Saturday and one on Sunday—but found them stubbornly insisting on keeping the language in the speech. After failing to get the language pulled, I walked into Tenet’s office and told him the story. He immediately punched the button on a secure phone that connected him directly with Steve Hadley, the president’s deputy national security advisor. Tenet outlined our concerns with the text, and he told Hadley to take the language out of the speech. Tenet hung up the phone and said to me, “Hadley says it’s gone,” and indeed it was not in the Cincinnati speech. However, the British “yellowcake” assertion would mysteriously reappear in the president’s State of the Union speech just months later, with disastrous political effect.
Throughout that period there were also several visits to CIA headquarters by Vice President Cheney and members of his staff to conduct “deep dives” with Agency analysts into matters involving Iraq. When these visits became known on the outside, some observers suggested that they were an attempt to politicize intelligence, to shape CIA’s analysis. I did not see them that way.
In fact, they were driven by some imprecision on our part. One of the most important aspects of the PDB briefing process was the ability of the recipients to ask questions and, for the most part, get those questions answered within twenty-four hours with a memo written by expert analysts. The National Security Council principals and deputies in the Bush administration were prolific requesters of what we called “PDB Memos.” Many were requested on issues related to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program and its ties to terrorism, and not all of the responses were well done. Different memos seemed to take the reader in different directions, particularly on the terrorism issue. For this reason, and just to understand the issues at a deeper level, the vice president made multiple trips to the Agency.
I attended at least two such sessions, and they seemed to me to be examples of good government. I felt that the senior officials who visited the Agency (Cheney was accompanied by his national security aide Scooter Libby and others) were digging down and trying to understand what we knew and thought. The vice president was thorough and came armed
with a lot of questions, but he did not push a particular line of argument. Asking a lot of questions was his right—indeed his responsibility—and it was an analyst’s job to answer the questions fully and honestly. And the analysts did so—even if on a couple of occasions it meant telling the vice president things that he might not have wanted to hear. In my experience, intelligence analysts love to tell policy-makers when they are wrong—and ours missed few opportunities to do so.
It was this flurry of activity in the fall of 2002—a rush to complete analytic assessments on Iraq, the Cincinnati speech, and the intense administration focus on Iraq—that led those of us at CIA to think that we could well be headed to war. There was no naïveté on our part. This realization told us that every piece of analysis we did could have enormous consequences.
* * *
In June 2002, at the direction of Miscik, CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis, part of the Counterterrorism Center, prepared and issued a classified report called Iraq & al Qa‘ida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship. This paper was different in scope and intention from just about any other I can recall. It was more of an intellectual exercise—an effort to see how far the analysts could push the evidence without stretching it beyond plausibility. In doing this, it demonstrated the weakness of the case as much as its plausibility. The report was forward-leaning regarding the possibility of Saddam’s cooperating with al Qa‘ida, and it contained a “scope note” at the top that said, “This intelligence assessment responds to senior policy maker interest in a comprehensive assessment of Iraqi regime links to al Qa‘ida. Our approach is purposefully aggressive in seeking to draw connections, on the assumption that any indication of a relationship between these two hostile elements could carry great dangers to the United States” (emphasis added). On the issue of a relationship between Iraq and al Qa‘ida, the paper left the strong impression that there might be one. Well-placed staffers in the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President liked it.
The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS Page 9