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

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  I must have gotten through, because when Allawi returned to Iraq, some of the information he was looking for about the CPA’s vision started to flow to him. Very quickly, he was interested enough that he met with a number of other Iraqi leaders and debated next steps. And then, the next thing I knew, Allawi was sending word to Bremer that he was not interested in the defense minister post. However, he was willing to accept the position of interim prime minister in the provisional government. Allawi, it turned out, had managed to assemble a large number of other Iraqi leaders who fully supported him.

  My first reaction when I heard the news was: Great! Although I wasn’t sure Allawi was the right man for the top job—whether a former Ba’athist, Shia expatriate could effectively lead a coalition—the bigger point to me was that at last Iraqis were emerging on their own to legitimize their future government. But instead of looking on this as a godsend—finally, some home-brewed unity and leadership!—many in Washington viewed Allawi’s emergence as a CIA plot. Almost immediately, Bremer ordered our senior officer in Baghdad to stay away from Allawi, a man whom days earlier we had been asked to meet with and urge into greater involvement in the political process.

  Iyad Allawi was and remains far too independent to be anyone’s puppet. He knew his country, he knew the challenges, and he had perhaps the best chance of bringing order out of the chaos that had become Iraq. In the end he had to fight various sectarian opponents to achieve success. The fight proved too hard. To my mind, it was a loss. But that could be said about Iraq in general, too.

  Perhaps the greatest disappointment of postwar Iraq was trying to create an Iraqi army. By the time Allawi took over as prime minister of the interim Iraqi government in June 2004, it was clear that the training effort was going badly. Although battalion-strength units were being turned out, their discipline was poor, and they would often dissolve in battle. Senior U.S. military officers began to mutter darkly that the problem was not U.S. training but Iraqi leadership. This came as no surprise to some. For months, General Shawani had been complaining loudly, including to senior White House officials, that the U.S. training effort was deeply flawed. Armies, he said, are built from the top down. You’ve got to begin with a respected general who can put together a competent divisional staff. The brigade and battalion staffs and their subordinate units can then be built out in turn. The traditional Iraqi army had always been based on those highly personal ties of loyalty and trust. The United States, Shawani said, was not building an army; it was training a series of militias, with no indigenous logistics or support, no respected leadership above the battalion level, and no Iraqi command and control. As an antidote, Shawani proposed that a number of respected senior Iraqi generals, whom he and others could identify and vet, be called back to reconstitute the five traditional “territorial” divisions of the Iraqi army. They would be allowed to form their own staffs, and then incorporate U.S.-trained units into a coherent division-level command structure. In this way, a provisional Iraqi government could rebuild a unifying national institution in service of a unified state.

  Word was that this was what Prime Minister Allawi intended to do. Immediately after his accession, however, a DOD delegation led by Paul Wolfowitz traveled to Baghdad to meet with Allawi. When he explained his plan to them, they listened politely and then inquired how he intended to pay for it. It was clear that DOD would not; they would continue to train battalions completely dependent upon American support.

  There were many bizarre twists to the Iraq story, none more so than the continuing theatrics of Ahmed Chalabi. During President Bush’s State of the Union speech on January 20, 2004, Chalabi was given a seat of honor in the gallery near the First Lady. Just a few weeks later, he was quoted in the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph saying that he and his INC were “heroes in error” and that he had no qualms about information he had passed to the U.S. government, since his organization had been “entirely successful” in achieving what they wanted, the removal of Saddam Hussein. In March he appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes blaming U.S. intelligence for not doing a good enough job checking out the flawed information his organization was peddling.

  “What the hell is going on with Chalabi?” the president asked me at a White House meeting that spring. “Is he working for you?” Rob Richer, who was with me at the meeting, piped up, “No sir, I believe he is working for DOD.” All eyes shifted to Don Rumsfeld. “I’ll have to check what his status is,” Rumsfeld said. His undersecretary for intelligence, Steve Cambone, sat there mute. “I don’t think he ought to be working for us,” the president dryly observed.

  A few weeks later the president again raised the issue. “What’s up with Chalabi?” he asked. Paul Wolfowitz said, “Chalabi has a relationship with DIA and is providing information that is saving American lives. CIA can confirm that.” The president turned to us. “I know of no such information, Mr. President,” Richer said. The president looked to Condi Rice and said, “I want Chalabi off the payroll.”

  At a subsequent meeting, chaired by Condi Rice, DIA confirmed that they were paying the INC $350,000 a month for its services in Baghdad. We knew that the INC’s armed militia had seized tens of thousands of Saddam regime documents and was slowly doling them out to the U.S. government. Beyond that it was unclear to me what the Pentagon was getting for its money. Somehow the president’s direction to pull the plug on the arrangement continued to be ignored.

  It was about this time that we received reliable information that Chalabi was passing highly sensitive classified information to the Iranians. This should have been the final straw—but nothing is ever final with Chalabi. The CPA ordered a raid on his offices. Chalabi later claimed that CIA was behind a plot to undermine him. In truth we didn’t even know about the raid until after it had taken place. Finally, in May 2004, the INC’s services contract with DIA was terminated. While Chalabi was accused of all manner of malfeasance, nothing ever came of the charges. In the December 2005 elections, Chalabi’s party garnered about 0.5 percent of the vote and won not a single seat in Parliament.

  The true tragedy of Iraq is that it didn’t have to be this way. I can’t begin to say with absolute clarity how things might have worked out, but I have to believe that if we had been more adept at not alienating entire sectors of the Iraqi population and elites; if we had been smarter at the front end; if we had thought about reconstruction from the perspective of how much money we could put in people’s hands so that they would know they had a steady stream of income; if we had figured out a way to let Iraqis know that they actually did have a role in their future that went beyond words, a role they could see being implemented in practice on the ground—we would be far better off today.

  To be certain, we were never going to return to the Iraq of old. Sunnis would never occupy the privileged positions they once enjoyed. We backed an increase in Shia power and we did not allow any sort of equivalent Sunni alternative to form.

  Whenever you decide to take the country to war, you have to know not only that you can defeat the enemy militarily but that you have a very clear game plan that will allow you to keep the peace. There was never any doubt that we would defeat the Iraqi military. What we did not have was an integrated and open process in Washington that was organized to keep the peace, nor did we have unity of purpose and resources on the ground. Quite simply, the NSC did not do its job.

  As early as the fall of 2003, it was becoming clear that our political and economic strategy was not working. The data were available, the trends were clear. Those in charge of U.S. policy operated within a closed loop. Bad news was ignored. Our own subsequent reporting—reporting that eventually would prove spot-on in its predictions of what came to pass on the ground—was dismissed. Yet little was done to make the adjustments necessary to avoid being overwhelmed by a growing domestic insurgency. Too big a burden was placed on the military to deal with problems that at their root could not be solved simply by using more force. We could never subdue an entire country, because we
were not meant to stay.

  Despite the consequences of decisions regarding de-Ba’athification or disbanding of the army, and the inability to use the billions of dollars at our disposal to implement a political strategy that might have succeeded, not much was done to change course. In the way of Washington, it is too easy to blame Jerry Bremer, who gave up a year of his life to serve in difficult circumstances, and who worked in a chain of command. In many ways, he was set up for failure.

  The president was not served well, because the NSC became too deferential to a postwar strategy that was not working. This was no time for a subtle “Socratic dialogue” with Jerry Bremer. The National Security Council was created in 1947 to force important policy decisions to be fully discussed, developed, and decided on. In this case, however, the NSC did not fulfill its role. The NSC avoided slamming on the brakes to force the discussions with the Pentagon and everyone else that was required in the face of a deteriorating situation. By sending Bob Blackwill out to chat with Bremer, NSC substituted a time-tested process for one almost guaranteed to fail.

  The critical missing element was an Iraqi government that could have helped us. We decided instead to have Americans administer Iraq. It may have worked in World War II, after the entire world fought against Nazi Germany for many years. But in the context of the Middle East, it was not going to work any more than the French occupation of Algeria. To Arabs it looked as though this was all about occupation as opposed to liberation. We were dismissive about the capacity of Iraqis to control their own future. We have struggled ever since.

  CHAPTER 24

  Sixteen Words

  Condi, we have a problem.”

  The national security advisor hated it when I would tell her that, but not as much as I hated saying it. Unfortunately, my job sometimes required that I use those words.

  Now, in mid-June of 2003, I was obliged to use them again. I had called to tell her that it was time—past time, actually—that we all admit that some language in the president’s State of the Union speech six months prior should not have been there. The words at issue were: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Those words would later create a firestorm, but at the time of the State of the Union speech, they were barely noticed.

  This story begins on Saturday, October 5, 2002. I was at work in my office when several members of my staff came to say they were having trouble getting the White House to remove some language from a speech the president was preparing to deliver in Cincinnati. The sixth-draft speech asserted that Saddam’s regime 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.” Analytically, the staff said, we could not support such a statement. Having testified to Congress only the day before on the matter, I was well familiar with the controversy. I picked up the phone and called Steve Hadley. Our conversation was short and direct. “Steve, take it out,” I said, telling him that he did not want the president to be a “fact witness” on this issue. The facts, I told him, were too much in doubt.

  My executive assistant followed up with a memo to the speechwriter and Hadley to confirm our concerns. It said in part: “Remove the sentence [regarding Saddam’s attempt to purchase uranium oxide] because the amount is in dispute and it is debatable whether [uranium oxide] can be acquired from the source. We told Congress that the Brits have exaggerated this issue. Finally, the Iraqis already have 550 metric tons of uranium oxide in their inventory.”

  The White House removed the language, but the next day, Sunday, one of our senior analysts sent yet another memo to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, further driving home the reasons why CIA thought the offending words should not be uttered by the president. That memo said in part:

  More on why we recommend removing the sentence about [Saddam’s] procuring uranium oxide from Africa: Three points (1) The evidence is weak. One of the two mines cited by the source as the location of the uranium oxide is flooded. The other mine cited by the source is under the control of French authorities. (2) The procurement is not particularly significant to Iraq’s nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already have a large stock of uranium oxide in their inventory. And (3) we have shared points one and two with Congress, telling them that the Africa story is overblown and telling them this was one of two issues where we differed with the British.

  The memo has a handwritten note on the bottom from Mike Morell: “This has been sent to the White House (Rice, Hadley, Gerson).” (Mike Gerson was then the White House chief speechwriter.) Despite all that, the African yellowcake story would unhappily reemerge three months later, in the president’s 2003 State of the Union address.

  Thanks to some stories in the press, the ill-advised inclusion of those words in the State of the Union had become a flap. I picked up the handset on my “MLP”—a bulky white “secure” telephone over which one can discuss highly classified information without fear of the call being intercepted. If I pressed one button, I could call the president; if I pressed another, I would have the secretary of defense on the line, the secretary of state, or, as I did this day, the national security advisor.

  I was calling from my office on the seventh floor of CIA’s headquarters. Except for the addition of technological advances like the MLP, the office hadn’t changed much in the forty years since the building opened: wood paneled on three sides, with a long expanse of floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over trees along the Potomac and toward Maryland and the District of Columbia.

  Saddam and his search for African uranium had been based on questionable intelligence. In truth, the case suggesting that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program was much weaker than the evidence suggesting that he was working on chemical and biological weapons. But the vision of a despot like Saddam getting his hands on nuclear weapons was galvanizing. The notion provided an irresistible image for speechwriters, spokesmen, and politicians to seize on.

  Our NIE had said that Saddam was unlikely to have a nuclear weapon before the end of the decade. But it had also said that if someone gave him fissile material, he could have a weapon much sooner. If Saddam were smuggling uranium, it would mean he was going to the trouble to enrich his own.

  The issue was not trivial—even if this bit of intelligence, his supposed attempts to obtain uranium suitable for enriching, known as “yellowcake,” was far from solid information. The allegation was worthy of investigation. Based on what we found, however, it was not worthy of inclusion in a presidential speech.

  When President Bush addressed the Joint Session of Congress on January 28, 2003, the handful of words toward the end of the lengthy address received very little attention from most people. But at that moment, they got absolutely no attention from me. I was at home, in bed, asleep. You won’t find many Washington officials who will admit to not watching the most important political speech of the year, but I was exhausted from fifteen months of nonstop work and worry since the tragedy of 9/11. Frankly, too, I was relieved that, unlike in the Clinton administration, where my job had Cabinet status, I no longer was obliged to attend ritual events like the State of the Union.

  In addition to dealing with the usual array of difficult Counterterrorism decisions over the previous few weeks, I had also been handling some political infighting over the planned Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), whose creation the president planned to announce in his speech. TTIC, which later evolved into the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), was very controversial within the intelligence community. The president’s plan called for CIA, FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security to have parts of their organizations stripped away to create this new entity. It wasn’t clear who would be in charge of TTIC, who would select its leadership, or what functions the various agencies might lose. (If you want to stir up a hornet’s nest in Washington, try taking responsibility away from proud agencies.)

  The planning for the move wa
s being held in strict secrecy, so that the announcement in the State of the Union speech would make news. The underlying secrecy made the bureaucratic players even more paranoid. I had to calm jangled nerves of several of my senior deputies, who feared that the loss of people to TTIC would render their own organizations ineffective.

  Six weeks later there was a brief flurry of interest when the International Atomic Energy Administration (IAEA) determined that some documents they had been given by the United States relating to charges of Iraqi interest in Niger’s uranium were forgeries. But the report came out just days before the start of the Iraq war, and the issue was lost in the noise. By that time, the die was already cast, and there was not much debate going on about bits and pieces of the underlying intelligence.

  A second minor squall blew up in May when New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote that a U.S. envoy had been sent to Niger and reported back to the CIA and State Department, debunking the Niger uranium story. But again the story did not have, at least in Washington, what they call “legs.” The column appeared just days after the president declared an end to major combat in Iraq while standing beneath a banner that read, “Mission Accomplished.”

  The story came back to life again in June when Walter Pincus, a veteran intelligence reporter for the Washington Post, started asking questions around town about a former U.S. ambassador who, he said, had been dispatched by CIA in response to questions from the vice president about the Niger uranium allegations. When Pincus first called us, the press office needed a day or two just to figure out what he was talking about. The ambassador’s trip sixteen months earlier had been authorized at a low level within CPD, the Counterproliferation Division of the Directorate of Operations at CIA, and had produced such inconclusive results that the press office had trouble finding people who remembered the details of the trip. Eventually, our spokesman was able to figure out the story behind Pincus’s inquiry. Yes, they told Pincus, there was such a trip but, no, the mission had not been undertaken at the vice president’s behest, and the vice president was never briefed on the trip’s less-than-compelling results.