The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS

by Michael Morell

  But the scope note was not read closely enough, and some readers assumed the report represented what CIA really thought about the al Qa‘ida–Iraq relationship. So Miscik now asked the analysts to write not a provocative “worst-case” paper but one on where the evidence really took them, what they really thought. The draft of this paper, also written by the analysts in the Office of Terrorism Analysis, came to very different conclusions from the first paper. It pointed out Saddam’s historical and continuing support of Palestinian terrorist groups, but on the important question of the link between al Qa‘ida and the Iraqi government, it concluded that while there was some contact in the past between the two, there was no evidence of any working relationship before, during, or after 9/11, and no evidence of Iraqi complicity in or foreknowledge of 9/11.

  Miscik put me in charge of reviewing the second paper, titled Iraqi Support to Terrorism, to make sure it stood up to scrutiny and that it was supported by all the analysts as the definitive paper, not just a second view on the subject. I did what I always did in those situations—I read the paper closely several times, writing numerous questions in the margins, and then I brought all the analysts—both the authors of the new paper and the authors of the earlier analysis, as well as the terrorism and Iraq analysts—into Miscik’s conference room, where we went over the new paper and its key conclusions. It took several hours. With Miscik joining us—given the importance of the issue—the authors of the latest paper were able to address all my questions and concerns, and all the analysts were able to agree on the key judgments.

  With that, the paper was disseminated. It was not well received in all quarters. Scooter Libby called Miscik, saying that the paper’s conclusions were wrong and that it ignored important pieces of intelligence. He said, loudly enough for White and me to hear as we stood in Miscik’s office, “Withdraw the paper!” Miscik refused, saying she was standing by her analysts. Libby escalated the matter to McLaughlin, Tenet’s deputy. Miscik said she would resign before withdrawing the paper. McLaughlin and Tenet both backed Miscik’s principled stance—and the paper stood as CIA’s view of the issue. Finally Tenet called Hadley and said, “We’re done talking about the Iraq terrorism paper.” That ended the matter. Libby’s attempt to intimidate Miscik was the most blatant attempt to politicize intelligence that I saw in thirty-three years in the business, and it would not be the last attempt by Libby to do so.

  President Bush even weighed in on the debate. Each Christmas eve, Miscik would herself do the PDB briefing for the president, giving the briefer the day off. And on the morning of December 24, 2002, she traveled to Camp David to see the president. At the end of the briefing, as Miscik was gathering her things to depart, the president told her that he was aware of the debate over the Iraq terrorism paper and that he wanted her to know that he had her back. He said that he wanted her and her analysts to continue to “call ’em like you see ’em.” It was a hugely important thing for the president to say.

  Despite the paper and its conclusions, there were senior administration officials, most significantly the vice president, who continued to imply publicly that there was a current connection between Iraq and al Qa‘ida. This was inconsistent with the analysis, but the implications continued—all to the detriment of the American people’s understanding of the truth. In a Washington Post poll conducted in August 2003, 70 percent of respondents believed it was likely that Saddam Hussein had been personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.

  As it turns out, the overall judgments in the Iraqi Support to Terrorism paper were largely correct—and to the extent that they were wrong, they actually overstated the ties between Iraq and al Qa‘ida. One error was the judgment that there had been, well before 9/11, contacts between Saddam’s intelligence apparatus and al Qa‘ida. That information had come from an al Qa‘ida operative by the name of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who had provided the information under interrogation by the Egyptian intelligence service. Later, in US custody, al-Libi would recant his statements, saying that he’d only told the Egyptians what he did because he’d thought it was what they wanted to hear.

  After the fall of Saddam, the United States never found anything in the files of the Iraqi intelligence service, or any other Iraqi ministry, indicating that there was ever any kind of relationship between the Iraqis and al Qa‘ida.

  Unfortunately, Miscik, White, and I did not apply the same kind of rigor to our analysts’ assessments of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program. Although this is something we all regret, it occurred, in part, I believe, because the National Intelligence Council had been placed in the lead by Tenet. The senior officer on the NIC responsible, Bob Walpole, was careful, experienced, knowledgeable, and well liked. It was Walpole who worked directly with the analysts and their immediate managers to draft the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction that was published in the fall of 2002. An NIE represents the authoritative views of the entire intelligence community on an issue. They are carefully considered—the coordination sessions among the analysts are rigorous and NIEs are approved by the leadership of each of the agencies in the community.

  This particular NIE, titled Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, stated, “We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions.” The NIE noted that Baghdad had active chemical and biological weapons programs, that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons programs, and that Iraq had missiles with ranges in excess of UN-imposed limits.

  There was little controversy regarding the NIE (one agency, the State Department’s intelligence shop, dissented on one aspect of the paper—the nuclear question—but agreed on all others) because almost everyone who had looked at the issue, from intelligence services around the world to think tanks and the United Nations itself, had come to the same conclusion. There were no outliers, no group with a different view, no one to force a broader debate that might have led to a more rigorous assessment on the part of the analysts. Groupthink turned out to be part of the problem. The view that hard-liners in the Bush administration forced the intelligence community into its position on WMD is just flat wrong. No one pushed. The analysts were already there and they had been there for years, long before Bush came to office.

  The most significant dissent came from the Department of Energy. While DOE analysts agreed that the Iraqis were in the process of reconstituting their nuclear weapons program, they did not buy the argument that the aluminum tubes being purchased by the Iraqis overseas were for centrifuges. CIA analysts believed that these tubes were exactly the right size for the outer casings for centrifuge rotors capable of producing highly enriched uranium, and too high-end—too expensive—for use in a multiple rocket launcher system, which is what the Iraqis claimed they were building. DOE disputed the CIA view in a lengthy dissent. But, in addition to agreeing with the CIA analysts that the tubes were for centrifuges, the US Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC), the authority on conventional weapons, backed the view that they were not for rockets. Senior leaders in the intelligence community gave considerable weight to NGIC’s view, given its expertise on the issue.

  When I was still briefing the president, I did a show-and-tell on the aluminum tubes Iraq had been purchasing from an overseas company. CIA had clandestinely acquired one of the tubes, and one Saturday I carried it to Camp David to show to the president. The tube was about six inches in diameter and about four feet tall. The Secret Service eyed me warily as I carried it into Laurel Lodge for the briefing, but did not stop me. (Once, with prior approval from the Secret Service, I took a new terrorist assassination tool into the Oval Office. CIA will not allow me to describe it here because it remains extremely sensitive, even nearly fifteen years later.) I showed the tube to the president and explained how it worked. But that aspect of the briefing was largely a bust; the president did not seem interested, as the tube, by itself, did not prove anything. I should have known better.<
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  The problem, of course, was not just that the briefing had fallen flat. The much bigger problem is that we were wrong. We were wrong about the tubes; they were for the rocket system, and we never figured out why the Iraqis purchased a much more technically advanced—and therefore much more expensive—tube than they had to. This highlights a problem with the analysis—mirror imaging. In this case, we knew that the US military would never use such high-end aluminum for a rocket launcher, and therefore we assumed that the Iraqis would not do so either.

  We were wrong about almost everything else in the NIE, except the judgments about missiles. Saddam, for reasons we would discover later, had ended his weapons of mass destruction programs in order to try to get out from under sanctions that had strangled his economy. Once free of sanctions, he fully intended to restart the programs. But the bottom line for the intelligence community and the Agency was that we got the vast majority of the judgments on Iraq and WMD wrong.

  I do not know if it would have made a difference had Miscik, White, and I devoted more time and more focus to the WMD issues, as much time as we had spent on the question of Iraq’s links to al Qa‘ida. Perhaps it would have. Perhaps not. But the best chance of getting to the right answer would have been for us to do so.

  * * *

  Perhaps my most significant involvement in the Iraq WMD story was my role in the preparation of Secretary Colin Powell’s speech to the UN on Iraq.

  In late 2002, John McLaughlin called Bob Walpole and me into his office. McLaughlin, Tenet’s deputy, had, like me, grown up on the analytic side of the business. In addition to being an analyst, John was also a professional magician. He once did a trick for the president of Argentina wherein he took a one-dollar bill, folded it many times until it was a small square, and then slowly unfolded it, revealing a hundred-dollar bill. The Argentine president looked at John and said, “I want you to be my finance minister.” After leaving government, McLaughlin came to dinner at our home and after the meal announced, to the delight of the kids, that he would be happy to perform some magic tricks. As the kids gathered around McLaughlin, each was holding a dollar bill. I had told them the story of the Argentine president, and they were looking to cash in.

  McLaughlin was a magician as a leader of analysis as well, and I learned a great deal from him about that particular art. John’s method, which became my method, was to ask question after question to push analysts’ thinking deeper than they would go on their own. Of all the living former deputy directors of the Agency, I consider him the dean for his mastery of our profession.

  In his office that day, McLaughlin told Walpole and me, “A decision has been made at the White House that we need an ‘Adlai Stevenson moment’ at the UN.” (This was a reference to the time in August 1962 when Stevenson confronted the Soviets over the missile program in Cuba, with photographs from a U-2 reconnaissance plane.) “I need you guys to work on three papers to help inform the speechwriters for this event,” McLaughlin said.

  As usual, Walpole was given the task of preparing the WMD paper. I had the lead on the other two documents—one on Iraq’s links to terrorism and the other on its human rights record. McLaughlin made clear that none of these papers were to be crafted out of whole cloth but that they instead should be pulled from the finished intelligence that had previously been produced. For the WMD paper, Bob relied heavily on the NIE that had been published. I relied on our controversial—at least in Scooter Libby’s office—Iraq terrorism paper, as well as some other work done by our analysts on Iraq’s atrocious human rights record.

  The three papers bounced around in revision for a week or so before McLaughlin eventually sent them over to the White House. They were clearly read, because one afternoon White House officials, led by Hadley, came to the Agency to discuss them. They asked questions to understand exactly what we were saying, and occasionally asked why we had left a particular piece of intelligence out of our narrative. The meeting went well, and we never heard another word about the papers from the White House. Sometime thereafter we learned that Secretary Powell had been chosen to be the messenger at the UN and that his speechwriters were working on his remarks.

  In late January 2003, Powell wanted to come to CIA, along with a few members of his staff, to work on the speech from inside the Agency itself. I had never heard of such a request before or since, but it was clear what he was doing. He was not going to say anything that George Tenet and John McLaughlin did not think they could stand behind, and Powell wanted it to be seen that way; preparing for the UN speech at CIA and having Tenet sit behind him when he delivered that speech were the best ways to achieve that. Tenet said yes to Powell’s request and gave me the task of making sure that Powell and his aides had everything they needed.

  Not everyone agreed with Tenet’s decision. Miscik, Tenet’s head of analysis, believed that crafting a policy speech in the halls of the Central Intelligence Agency was crossing the line between intelligence and policy—that intelligence officers should provide objective analysis of a situation and leave it to policy-makers to make policy. Miscik felt so strongly about this that she recused herself from participating in the process. I was not aware of her principled stance until much later. My own view at the time was that it was our job to fact-check the secretary’s presentation but not to write it. And, while Powell’s preparing for his speech at the Agency might create perception problems, I believed that what mattered was what actually happened. I felt we could do our job and meet our responsibilities to the American people at the same time.

  When Powell arrived he had a working draft of his speech, and much of it contained information of unknown origin. I was sent to find out why. Both of the State Department speechwriters were former Agency employees, and I went to see them. “Where did you get the input to draft the speech?” I asked. I expected to see the three papers that Walpole and I had prepared at McLaughlin’s request, but they showed me something completely different. They showed me papers produced by the vice president’s office. As I flipped through the papers, I saw judgments that went well beyond CIA analysis, and facts that I had not seen before.

  Not only had the vice president’s staffers written their own analytic papers to get their views into the secretary’s speech, they also parachuted into CIA headquarters to lobby for their point of view. John Hannah, a member of the vice president’s staff, showed up at Langley, bringing with him binders filled with “intelligence” on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction program. He even took over Miscik’s personal conference room.

  Part of my job was to take every draft of the speech and sit with Bob Walpole and the analysts and ask, “Are all the facts correct here? Is the analysis right? Can we stand behind this?” This process took time. The analysts would ask, “Where did this come from?” Hannah joined us and would flip through his thick binder and pull out an intelligence report and say, “From here.” The analysts and Hannah would then spend time debating the credibility or the meaning of the information. The analysts won every debate. The speech was slowly being stripped of what had been added by the vice president’s staff.

  The degree of analysis being done by political appointees was unprecedented in my career. Officials in the vice president’s office were trying to be both the analysts and the policy-makers. A similar dynamic was occurring in Doug Feith’s office at the Pentagon, where Feith, the most senior policy advisor to the secretary of defense, had created his own unit to conduct intelligence analysis.

  My office was just ten or fifteen feet from Miscik’s conference room, and at one point Hannah asked me if I had a minute to talk. I said, “Of course.” He politely asked me why the British information on Iraq’s trying to purchase uranium in Africa was not in the speech. “Because we don’t believe it,” I said. “But,” he correctly pointed out, “it is referenced in the text of Walpole’s NIE.” “Well,” I said, “I think it is caveated in the NIE, and, in any case, the analysts have some very good reasons why they do not believe the information t
o be true.” I offered to bring the analysts up to explain it to him, and he accepted. One of our top analysts sat with him for several hours going over our thinking on the issue. Hannah never raised the issue with me again, and I did not hear anything more about the alleged attempt to purchase uranium until President Bush talked about it in the State of Union address.

  After each of the various drafts went through the vetting process that I had set up with the analysts, Secretary Powell, camped out in Director Tenet’s conference room, would go over it word by word, sentence by sentence. My sense was that he wanted to understand the information fully, to be able to articulate it in a way that the public would understand, and to make sure that Tenet and McLaughlin would stand behind the speech as delivered. In total, the secretary spent dozens of hours, over a weekend, in the conference room, asking question after question.

  During this process, mostly with McLaughlin, Walpole, and the analysts answering questions, I began to see a trend. Point by point Powell would ask us for backup information on the assertions, and as we dug into them, many seemed to fall apart before my eyes. And the material falling apart was not the White House additions. My team had already removed those. No, what was collapsing was some of the facts used in the NIE to support the judgments there. I noticed this trend, but I did not share this with Tenet, McLaughlin, or Miscik, as I concluded that there was still plenty of solid information standing behind the judgments in the NIE. I regret not doing so, although I do not know what difference it might have made.

  There was another, more significant, missed opportunity, relating to the judgment that Saddam possessed a mobile biological weapons production capability. This judgment was based on information from four sources. One of those sources was a Defense Intelligence Agency asset, and DIA had learned, after the NIE was published in 2002 (but before the sessions with Powell), that he was a “fabricator”—an intelligence source who lies for any one of multiple reasons, usually to make him- or herself appear more valuable. DIA had done the right thing and recalled the original reporting. But a reference to the source and his information made it into the draft speech, and no one—neither the DIA representative in the conference room with the secretary nor our analysts—said a word about the fabrication or the recall. I do not know why they did not speak up. When I learned about this months later, I was stunned and wrote a note to Miscik calling the episode “analytic malpractice.”