At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  According to Duelfer, “Saddam Husayn so dominated the Iraqi regime that its strategic intent was his alone. He wanted to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) when sanctions were lifted.” Duelfer wrote that Saddam wanted WMD to deter Iran, in his view Iraq’s principal enemy. The belief that he had such weapons would also, Saddam thought, deter hostile groups inside Iraq. Maintaining a calculated position of ambiguity on whether he had WMD was, in Saddam’s view, essential to deterring these external and internal threats. The Oil-for-Food (OFF) program (a UN program that allowed Iraq to sell oil on the world market and use the proceeds for food and medicines but not to rebuild its military), and the associated corruption, had terminally undermined the effect of sanctions on Iraq. Saddam believed he could simply wait out the sanctions and then begin re-creating Iraq’s WMD capabilities.

  In April of 2004, Duelfer met me in Amman, Jordan, where he asked me to support the release of an entirely declassified final report. I quickly agreed, viewing the report as a way to renew some faith in the intelligence community. I knew Charlie Duelfer would be thorough and fair and that he wouldn’t pull any punches or spare anyone’s feelings, including CIA’s. In the end, that’s just what happened. I had been gone from office for three months before Duelfer delivered his roughly thousand-page report to the new DCI, Porter Goss. As with Kay, Duelfer was given complete independence in putting the report together. He had the final word on what it said, but CIA did give a last-minute heads-up to a few key policy makers on what Duelfer had discovered about corruption in the UN Oil-for-Food program, because the documents he uncovered would prove embarrassing to several of their foreign counterparts.

  In Duelfer’s report, the ISG noted, as had just about everyone else, that Saddam had cheated consistently on United Nations sanctions, but on the critical issue that had been used as justification for the war, the report concluded that Saddam did not possess stockpiles of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons at the time of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and that he had no active program to produce them. Asked in testimony by Senator Edward Kennedy what the chances were that WMD might still be uncovered, Duelfer replied, “The chance of finding a significant stockpile is less than five percent.” That still sounds right to me.

  Throughout this process, CIA and the intelligence community were committed to finding the truth and learning lessons from it. This is quite remarkable, and not very typical of what normally goes on in Washington. We oversaw a process that independently and unflinchingly drew unflattering conclusions about our work. Duelfer’s report, produced solely under our guidance, was then used as the basis for many of the harsh judgments of the intelligence community rendered by the Silberman-Robb Commission. This willingness to look at itself critically is one of the strengths of the community I was privileged to lead and one of the few points of pride to come out of the whole WMD episode.

  CHAPTER 23

  Mission Not Accomplished

  I first flew into Iraq just about the time Jerry Bremer took over as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA, during the third week of May 2003. I took a helicopter ride with Jerry right over Baghdad. It was daylight. The helicopter door was wide open, and I was looking out as we flew. I remember thinking, as we scudded along, how precise the U.S. military action had been. There had been no massive carpet bombing; whatever they intended to get, they’d hit.

  On the ground, the environment was strikingly permissive, considering that a foreign army had just invaded the capital and deposed the country’s long-term dictator. People were going out, eating in restaurants. You half expected to see double-decker buses rolling down the main streets, with curious tourists gaping out the windows.

  That same sense of optimism pervaded our station in Baghdad. Half the people there were young men and women who had just finished up their training. Mixed in with them were seasoned older pros and retired guys who had come back to work as contractors. I knew a lot of the veterans from odd spots all around the globe. Now they were in Baghdad, to help finish up the job of launching a new and democratic nation.

  When I returned to Iraq in February 2004, the environment had changed dramatically. We flew into Baghdad at night, because you couldn’t come in during the day. The C-17 bringing us there made a full-combat landing—a steep dive, quick on the ground. I was seated far forward, wearing flak jacket and helmet. There was no sightseeing this time. We flew into the Green Zone at treetop level and landed in the dark, on an unlit tarmac. I never felt in anything other than competent hands, but when you are flying black and wearing Kevlar, the pucker factor is hard to ignore.

  By this time, CIA’s presence in Iraq had grown quite large. Many of our officers showed up for a get-together that our senior man in Baghdad had arranged. Just about everyone arrived in body armor. I’d never seen so many stressed-out young people in one place in my life. I stayed three or four hours, talking with them. Then I was off again. I had to be somewhere else the next day, and in Baghdad in early 2004, you could fly out only at night.

  In those intervening ten months, Iraq had become a very different place, but not at all in the way that the U.S. government had intended. How did it get that way? Through a series of decisions that, in retrospect, look like a slow-motion car crash.

  In fact, the problems started well before the war. There was little planning before the invasion concerning the physical reconstruction that would follow. But regarding the political reconstruction of Iraq—how the country was to be administered and what role, if any, Iraqis would play in determining their political future—there was a great deal of spirited interagency discussion, often at the highest levels. Condi Rice and the vice president took an intense interest and often participated directly. The usual deputy-and undersecretary-level officials represented their respective agencies. John McLaughlin and Bob Grenier, a senior CIA operations officer who was our “mission manager” for Iraq, split the duty from our side.

  The debates generally broke down along familiar lines: State, CIA, and NSC favored a more inclusive and transparent approach, in which Iraqis representing the many tribes, sects, and interest groups in the country would be brought together to consult and put together some sort of rough constituent assembly that might then select an advisory council and a group of ministers to govern the country. No one advocated immediate introduction of Jeffersonian democracy, but many believed that the Iraqis should be encouraged to participate in a process that would quickly help identify—and legitimize—genuine leaders of a future democratic Iraq.

  The vice president and Pentagon civilians, however, advocated a very different approach. Rather than risking an open-ended political process that Americans could influence but not control, they wanted to be able to limit the Iraqis’ power and handpick those Iraqis who would participate. In practice, that meant Ahmed Chalabi and a handful of other well-known, longtime exiled oppositionists, along with the leaders of the essentially autonomous Kurdish areas. The differences in approach were clear and starkly articulated. The vice president himself summed up the dilemma: The choice, he said, was between “control and legitimacy.” Doug Feith clearly stated his belief that it would not be necessary for the Iraqi exiles to legitimize themselves: “We can legitimize them,” he said, through our economic assistance and the good governance the U.S. would provide. They never understood that, fundamentally, political control depends on the consent of the governed.

  No consensus was ever reached, and no clear plan ever devised. In early January 2003, however, President Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive Number 24, giving the Department of Defense total and complete ownership of postwar Iraq. We didn’t fully realize it at the time, but in the end, NSPD 24 would determine who made the final decisions on these momentous questions, and set the direction of the postwar reconstruction.

  Hovering over this entire process was the figure—seldom acknowledged, almost never mentioned—of Ahmed Chal
abi. Time and again, during the months leading up to the invasion and for months thereafter, the representatives of the vice president and Pentagon officials would introduce ideas that were thinly veiled efforts to put Chalabi in charge of post-invasion Iraq. Immediately before the invasion, the effort took the form of a proposal, put forward insistently and repeatedly, to form an Iraqi “government in exile,” comprised of the exiles and the Kurdish leaders. These exiles would then be installed as a new government once Baghdad fell. My CIA colleagues were aghast. As Grenier later recalled, it was as though Defense and the vice president’s staff wanted to invite comparison with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when Russian troops deposed the existing government and installed Babrak Karmal, whom they had brought with them from Moscow.

  At an NSC meeting about three months before the war got under way, President Bush asked Gen. Tommy Franks what he was going to do about security and law and order in the rear areas. Franks told the president, “It’s all taken care of, sir. I have an American officer who will be lord mayor of every city, town and hamlet.” That simply did not turn out to be the case. Whether that was part of CENTCOM’s planning early on or not, I cannot say. In practice, though, the U.S. troop strength was sufficient to defeat the Iraqi army, but woefully inadequate to maintain the peace—just as Gen. Rick Shinseki, the former army chief of staff, had predicted.

  Before the Iraq war began, an NSC staffer prepared an estimate of the troop strength necessary to stabilize postwar Iraq. The answer: 139,000 if the model was Afghanistan; more than 360,000 if the model was Bosnia; and a little shy of 500,000 if it was Kosovo. Which one was Iraq? Well, the war strategists erred on the side of Afghanistan when they went into Iraq, and we’ve been paying ever since.

  The Pentagon’s first man in charge of “post–major conflict” Iraq was retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner. Named to his position some months before the invasion, Garner was then sent forward to Kuwait to assemble and prepare his team. When he and his team arrived in Iraq on April 18 to take responsibility for the newly created Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), it quickly became apparent that the task before Garner was monumental and the advance planning woefully insufficient. ORHA was set up in one of Saddam’s abandoned palaces, but found itself without adequate communications, short of sufficient Arabic speakers, and lacking in contacts and understanding of the Iraqi people. Garner was a good man with an impossible mission. He had responsibility without authority, and a bad situation immediately got worse.

  The CIA tried to help. They set up meetings with a cross section of important Iraqi technocrats—people who could help make the country work—and brought them together to meet with senior U.S. military. Right off the bat, however, they ran into difficulty. Did the groups we were assembling include members of the Ba’ath Party? they were asked. Of course they did. You couldn’t advance in Saddam’s Iraq without joining the Ba’ath Party. Just as the governments in newly democratic Eastern Europe would inevitably include former members of the Communist Party, any group of skilled bureaucrats in Baghdad would have to include people who once held Ba’ath Party membership. Nobody questioned this initially, but the understanding that was obvious to us was less so to the new ORHA, a portent of far more serious problems to follow.

  Similar problems arose when the United States started looking for candidates to populate an Iraqi provisional government. U.S. officials kept searching for, as one Agency officer put it, “Mohammed Jefferson,” to launch Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq. The problem was that anyone who neatly fit that description would have long before been killed off by Saddam.

  In the spring of 2003, Jay Garner, with NSC senior director Zal Khalilizad’s assistance, began the process of holding regional conferences in Iraq in the hope of recognizing and taking advantage of different centers of power. According to CIA officers with him, Khalilizad believed that it was essential that Iraqis legitimize themselves. There were inherent risks in this. You can guide such a process, but you cannot control it. This was, after all, the essence of the democracy we had been preaching. It was important for the future stability of the country that Iraqis see people whom they recognized as having specific gravity being involved in the political process. This did not happen. The messy process of Iraqis legitimizing themselves came to a screeching halt. And Zal and Garner were out.

  The assumption the U.S. government was working under was that this was going to be like the occupation of Germany, a supine country at our feet that we could remake in essentially whatever way we chose. The United States was going to completely demolish the Ba’ath Party. In the view of Paul Wolfowitz and others, you could replace “Ba’athist” with the word “Nazi.” It soon became clear to us and very clear to the Iraqis that the purpose of the U.S. invasion was fundamentally to remake their society.

  In early May 2003, I got a call from Colin Powell asking what I knew about Jerry Bremer. “I don’t really know him,” I said. From what I’d heard, Bremer was a tough-minded former ambassador who for a while had been head of the State Department’s office of counterterrorism. “I certainly haven’t heard anything bad about him.”

  Colin went on to say that the administration was considering Bremer as a replacement for Jay Garner. A few days later, on May 6, the White House made it official: Bremer had been selected to lead the effort to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure and help set up a new government. Although he was a presidential envoy, Bremer would report directly to the secretary of defense. His organization was given the title Coalition Provisional Authority. Once CPA had been established, Condi Rice ordered the interagency committee that had been constituted to deal with postwar planning issues to fold its tent. It was only a short while later, however, that, as one White House official told me, “The shit hit the fan and we had to rely on the British to tell us what was going on because we were getting no political reporting out of CPA.” Rice then ordered the NSC process to start up again. But by then, fundamental decisions on disbanding the army and de-Ba’athification had already been made. The early returns filtering back to me on CPA indicated that it was not running smoothly.

  The news was disquieting. It was just as worrisome that CPA was not being staffed with people with the requisite skills to enable our success. Many possessed the right political credentials but were unschooled in the complicated ways of the Middle East. What Iraq needed were Arabists and Foreign Service officers who understood the country’s tribal allegiances, or who at least knew a Sunni from a Shia. What CPA seemed to be getting were people anxious to set up a Baghdad stock exchange, try out a flat-tax system, and impose other elements of a lab-school democratic-capitalist social structure. One of my officers returned from a trip to Iraq a month or two after CPA had taken over and told me, “Boss, that place runs like a graduate school seminar, none of them speaks Arabic, almost nobody’s ever been to an Arab country, and no one makes a decision but Bremer.”

  The State Department had earlier assembled a team of experts to plan for a postwar Iraq, and Rich Armitage had 737s all lined up to fly them and their computers and some eighty Arabic linguists with regional knowledge out to Baghdad to begin setting up an embassy-in-waiting. The Pentagon, though, had other plans, and they certainly didn’t include the Department of State, which many in Rumsfeld’s circle thought had performed poorly in Afghanistan. Time and again, Marc Grossman, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, would raise the matter with Doug Feith, and time and again, Feith would say he was going to look into it. Before long it became apparent that, from the Pentagon’s point of view, the State Department team of experts could sit on the runway at Dulles or Andrews Air Force Base, waiting for a lift to Baghdad, until hell froze over.

  The security situation in Iraq started heading south remarkably soon after Saddam’s statues fell. A reasonable question is: Did the U.S. intelligence community fail to predict the possibility of civil strife? Did we buy into the notion that Americans would be “greeted as liberators”? The answer, as so often
is the case, is not black or white.

  Although CIA was not among those who confidently expected Coalition forces to be greeted as liberators, we did expect the Shia in the south, long oppressed by Saddam, to open their arms to anyone who removed him. And, initially, Coalition troops were well received in the south.

  Our expectation, though, wasn’t open-ended, and it wasn’t blind to other possibilities. Simultaneously, we produced a document that we titled, prophetically as things turned out, “The Consequences of Catastrophic Success.” Our analysis said that there would be a feeling of relief among the Iraqi people that Saddam was gone but that this would last for only a short time before old rivalries and ancient ethnic tensions resurfaced. During this critical period, we needed to demonstrate an ability to provide the services that a country demands—food, water, electricity, jobs—while creating also a sense of safety and security that was absent under Saddam.

  That, to me, is where plans went awry. Our analysis assumed there was a plan for ensuring the peace. In fact, there was no strategy for when U.S. forces hit the ground. This playbook wasn’t written until long after kickoff.

  In a January 2003 CIA paper, we said:

  Iraq would be unlikely to split apart, but a post-Saddam authority would face a deeply divided society with a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other unless an occupying force prevented them from doing so. Rogue ex-regime elements could forge an alliance with existing terrorist organizations or act independently to wage guerilla warfare against the new government. In the early months after the forceful ouster of Saddam, stability in Iraq would depend partly on the perspectives of Iraqis towards whatever interim authority, military or civilian, foreign or indigenous was in control, as well as the ability of the authority to perform the administrative and security tasks of governing the country. The top priorities of most Iraqis would be to obtain peace, order, stability and such basic needs as food and shelter…. US-led defeat and occupation of Arab Iraq probably would boost proponents of political Islam. Calls by Islamists for the people of the region to unite probably would resonate widely. Fear of US domination and a widespread belief probably would attract many angry young recruits to extremists’ ranks.