Abstract
More than a year and a half ago Bush administration National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice warned Americans that the “smoking gun” proving the danger posed by Iraq's nuclear weapons was likely to be a mushroom cloud rising over an American city. Rice attained her goal–a green light for the invasion of Iraq–that her boss, President George W. Bush, wanted so much. But from then to now the only thing that has mushroomed is the suspicion that Bush's charges against Iraq were contrived, wild exaggerations of greater-than-expected and highly improbable threats postulated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other U.S. intelligence organizations.
When I last visited this scene (“Will the Real Revisionists Please Stand Up?” September/October 2003 Bulletin), written 90 days after the fall of Baghdad, no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction had been found, the weapons searchers who accompanied the U.S. invasion troops were handing their job over to a specialized Iraq Survey Group, and President Bush and other officials were steadily pelting Americans with declarations that the weapons would be found. A year after the U.S. invasion, there are no weapons and U.S. interrogators have finally begun believing the Iraqi scientists who surrendered or were captured and told them there were no weapons.
Both the Senate and House intelligence committees are investigating pre-war intelligence reporting, as was the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and the CIA itself. Public statements from members of the congressional oversight committees, and correspondence exchanged between the committees and Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet last September, made it clear the overseers were coming to the conclusion that the intelligence had been hyped. The presidential board's judgment is not available to the public, but leaks over the Christmas holidays showed that the group, led by former national security adviser Gen. Brent Scowcroft, was concerned that White House staff had made too much of limited predictions made by U.S. intelligence agencies, and had not exercised their usual discretion in assembling speeches for the president, in particular regarding the controversy over the “16 words” in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, in which he claimed that Iraq was seeking uranium for nuclear weapons from Africa.
March 7: U.S. soldiers on guard in Baghdad; fires burn in the background.
The CIA's internal review, led by former deputy director for intelligence Richard J. Kerr, concluded that all its Iraq reporting had been adequately sourced. Only last November was Kerr's writ extended to whether the CIA had missed signs that Iraq had disarmed, and not until early this year was the review panel's scope enlarged to examine whether the sources themselves were legitimate ones and whether poor descriptions led intelligence analysts to believe that they had multiple reports of different origin–when in reality they were reading different descriptions of information from the same source.
George Tenet has indeed had a problem with his Iraq reporting, particularly the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was issued in October 2002. That report has been widely criticized by the public and in every government review excepting the CIA's internal look. It is fair to say that in five decades of its history the agency has never had to defend an intelligence estimate as strenuously as this one. In no fewer than three public statements in 2003, as well as in a letter to the chairpersons of the House intelligence committee, Tenet has desperately insisted his NIE was accurate and adequate. Agency spokesman Bill Harlow made another such statement, and Kerr has been presented to journalists on several occasions to outline conclusions of his review as a rebuttal to criticisms of the Iraq NIE. The vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which compiled the NIE, has also presented a public defense of the estimate. The CIA director's most unusual effort took the form of a major speech at Georgetown University on February 5, 2004.
The Tenet speech became necessary because Bush administration claims were undercut by its own weapons searchers. The Iraq Survey Group had been in place then for more than six months without finding much in the way of weapons of mass destruction. Tenet had himself appointed its technical director, David Kay, a hard-nosed investigator who had gone into the war insisting that Saddam Hussein had these weapons and needed to be stopped. Kay had made his mark in the U.N. weapons inspections shortly after the first Gulf War, when his teams made important discoveries. Now Tenet expected Kay to discover data that validated CIA estimates.
Instead the opposite happened. In an interim report last October the searcher found precious little: Iraqi missile “programs” (delivery systems without weapons to deliver), only short-range missiles stored anywhere near weapons, and only “program-related activities” in other weapon areas. Checking through 85 percent of what were considered possible hiding places, the searchers had found no weapons, no factories or equipment necessary for their manufacture, no stockpiles of weapons, and barely significant quantities of materials even for weapons engineering or scientific purposes. Kay resigned in January 2004, and went out with testimony before Congress that admitted, “It turns out we were all wrong, probably, in my judgment.”
This development led to the spectacle of Tenet's speech. The CIA had responded initially through a spokesman, who stated that the agency was “not ready to declare yet that there are no unconventional weapons in Iraq.” This proved insufficient. As Kay's affirmations were bandied about, pressure grew for yet more reviews of pre-war intelligence, and the searcher himself was invited to lunch with the president. Press reports indicate that top CIA officials wrestled for days on how to respond. Exactly one year after Tenet sat behind Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, lending a patina of CIA approval to Powell's allegations of Iraqi weapons plots to the United Nations, Tenet mounted his own full-scale defense in his Georgetown speech.
Even at this writing, however, George Tenet and the CIA remain reluctant to acknowledge imperfections in their views of the putative Iraqi threat. Careful to hedge his defense, Tenet made the points that intelligence is almost never completely wrong or completely right, and that “estimates” are, by their nature, projections, “because not everything we analyze can be known to a standard of absolute proof.” He also left some wiggle room for the CIA by terming his conclusions “provisional,” but the director of central intelligence then went on to concede very little.
Leading with the NIE's strong suit, Iraqi missile programs, which the CIA had tracked accurately for some time, Tenet concluded “we were generally on target.” On unmanned aerial vehicles the CIA director proceeded to insist the United States had detected development programs–which were in fact never in dispute–but that the “jury is still out” on the question of whether Iraq intended to use them as chemical or biological agent dispensers. (Baghdad had given up its efforts on large, weapons-capable drones in the mid-1990s, and by 2002 was developing models suited for aerial surveillance only.)
True, on nuclear weapons the CIA chieftain admitted, “We may have overestimated the progress Saddam was making” (Iraq had made zero progress and had no detectable program at all), but on biological weapons Tenet credited U.S. intelligence with success at divining Saddam Hussein's intentions, and on chemical ones both Iraq's intentions and capability, though he was obliged to concede “we have not yet found the weapons we expected.”
On the captured Iraqi trailers–which the CIA had insisted in May 2003 were mobile biological weapons plants, and on which the intelligence consensus is now that they were mere producers of hydrogen gas for balloons–Tenet maintained instead that intelligence agencies remain divided as to their intended purpose. He explained the failure to find any Iraqi weapons or plants as a function of Baghdad being at such an early stage of development, making the lack of discoveries by American weapons inspectors understandable, and justifying Tenet's appeal for more time for the Iraq Survey Group to explore the country where Saddam Hussein had been overthrown.
President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Powell, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Rice, and other senior administration officials did everything they could in the period up until the Kay resignation to continue feeding the public hysteria they had created on Iraqi weapons programs. Cheney and Rumsfeld continued to insist that Saddam had had the weapons, seizing upon the limited evidence of Iraqi scientific research into weapons to argue the issue, and continuing to make everything they could of discredited discoveries like the alleged mobile biological weapons plants. Rice demanded the public draw no conclusions from the lack of discoveries of stocks of and insisted the searchers needed more time. “Mushroom Cloud” Condi and other officials suggested that Saddam had had the weapons but somehow spirited them out of the country to hide them in Syria or elsewhere.
All the officials continued to make their defense of the war with equally somber rhetoric based on successively smaller slices of evidence–shifting over time from “weapons” to “weapons programs,” to “program-related activities,” to hidden laboratories, until David Kay's public testimony cut the ground out from under them.
Since June 2003, Bush and his allies in Congress have resisted inquiries into pre-war intelligence, shunning in particular any independent inquiry such as the one examining 9/11. When both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence nevertheless found it impossible to avoid their own postmortems, Republican leaders headed off initiatives to look beyond the NIE and the CIA's reporting to the way the president and other officials made use of the intelligence in their statements to the public. That effort collapsed after David Kay's resignation and commentaries on the Iraq intelligence. As so often happens in American political scandals, a whiff of real information sweeps away a barrage of obfuscation. Within days of the Kay testimony the Senate committee had decided to expand its investigation to include how the intelligence was used, and Bush appointed a nine-member presidential commission of inquiry. The White House hopes to control the damage by expanding the investigation's mission to all issues bearing on proliferation, selecting commissioners with little expertise in intelligence matters, giving the commission no subpoena power, and ensuring that it reports to the president, and to the president alone, after the November presidential election.
What George Tenet's speech did not do was supply an alibi for the Bush administration's policy on Iraq. If there were no Iraqi threat to the United States, Bush's rationale for the war he had insisted was so necessary evaporates. Whether or not the CIA correctly divined Saddam's intentions, if Iraqi weapons development was only in its infancy, the problem of proliferating Iraqi weapons of mass destruction could have been handled by U.N. inspectors and was therefore susceptible to a diplomatic solution.
“Don't be silly, dear. Your foreign policy isn't a complete disaster. We're still on fairly good terms with Uruguay.”
At the same time, Pakistan, a U.S. ally, has emerged as a true proliferator of nuclear technology. Tenet's speech also contained indications that this was known at the secret level, to the CIA and therefore to the U.S. government, for at least a year before Bush unleashed his war on Iraq. The problem of North Korean nuclear weapons was known even to the public. Suspicions about Iran and Libya were also in the public domain.
The picture that emerges is not a pretty one. The Bush administration did nothing about the problems it knew about, but instead fought a war to avert a potential future problem that was amenable to diplomatic action. The recently fashionable doctrine of “counterproliferation” was thereby turned on its head.