by Nada Bakos
On October 7, 2002, I listened as President Bush, in a prime-time speech delivered in the massive rotunda of the Cincinnati Museum Center, in Ohio, laid out the broad strokes of what he said was the “link between Iraq developing weapons of terror, and the wider war on terror.” Much of the speech focused on Saddam Hussein’s long-standing efforts to develop chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction—and Bush’s assertions that Hussein continued to do so. That particular assessment had come from another CIA branch down the hall, the Weapons, Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center (WINPAC)—which, we in the Iraq unit knew, was feeling similar heat from above to justify the war effort. Thanks to WINPAC’s findings, the president announced that Iraq possessed ballistic missiles theoretically capable of delivering those weapons to nearby countries, “in a region where more than 135,000 American civilians and service members live and work.”
If Bush’s assertion was true, I thought, it would be a serious issue. From my perspective, the president’s remarks had the sheen of grasping at straws, particularly when he turned to his second rationalization, threats against the American homeland. “Of course, sophisticated delivery systems aren’t required for a chemical or biological attack,” Bush said. “All that might be required are a small container and one terrorist or Iraqi intelligence operative to deliver it.”
I immediately recognized that for the president’s assertion to have any real credibility, the administration needed to pinpoint someone who could somehow connect Hussein’s regime to the single international terrorist organization to have struck within the United States.
“We know that Iraq and the al Qaida terrorist network share a common enemy, the United States of America,” the president continued. “Some al Qaida leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al Qaida leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks.”
A “very senior al Qaida leader?” I said to myself. Everyone in the growing Iraq unit recognized that this phrase referred to Zarqawi, even though he was not mentioned by name. We knew he wasn’t part of al Qaida and didn’t seem to coordinate operations with them. We also knew that the CIA had determined that Zarqawi’s organization didn’t know about the 9/11 attacks, much less participate in them. Nor was Zarqawi’s organization capable of developing sophisticated chemical and biological weapons; they were, however, working on the development of crude toxins and poisons—our terminology for Zarqawi’s loose affiliates at the time was the “poisons network.”
Everyone in the Agency realized that the United States was about to invade Iraq, and the role Bush’s administration had chosen for Zarqawi had become clear.
Before the invasion, my standard Agency workday began at 3:00 a.m. Baghdad was eight hours ahead. A typical day started with the drive to the Agency’s sprawling Langley campus in the middle of the night and presenting my ID badge to the heavily armed security guards. As I was one of the first ones to arrive for the day, my ground-floor office in the New Headquarters Building was typically quiet at that hour.
Upon arrival, a colleague and I quickly got to work examining incoming cables from the field, other intelligence reports, cyber collection, signals collection, news material, and written products—memos and briefings for lawmakers—our branch had written the night before to gather the latest insights on terrorism connected to Iraq or the IIS. By 4:00 a.m., we were scouring any last-minute intelligence that had bubbled up before sprinting to the Original Headquarters Building, on the other side of the campus, to update senior Agency briefers who were preparing to brief the president, vice president, and a small number of cabinet-level officials. We had to make sure those senior briefers were up to speed on any late-breaking intelligence and answer any questions they might have about the products our unit had written the day before.
Once the briefers headed off to the White House and other buildings across Washington, DC, to meet with their principals, my colleague and I headed off to the cafeteria for our first shot of Starbucks. Then we dragged ourselves back across campus, punched in the code to the cipher lock on our team’s “vault,” or room, and dug in for a few more hours of reading through traffic before the rest of our branch trickled in for our morning meeting.
For some reason, our vault was always roasting at that hour, so my colleague and I would “sing” Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” because we couldn’t play actual music due to the security policy. Our off-key version of the song was enough to wake us up and counterbalance the increasingly dark reports we were receiving from case officers in the field.
Lunch came around 9:00 a.m., as I wolfed down whatever was within arm’s reach. Then, if all was calm, at around 12:15 p.m. I met with my counterparts on the next shift for the handoff. From there, I was off to the burn chute.
At the Agency, each analyst finds at his or her desk every morning a brown paper bag decorated with red-and-white candy-cane stripes. Known internally as burn bags, they’re used to hold classified documents until they can be irretrievably destroyed. I set mine up under my desk; every incoming cable I would print throughout the day, as soon as I was finished with it, got dropped into the burn bag. Once the bag was full, I folded it over at the top a few times, stapled it as many times as was necessary to keep it shut, then carted it down the hall to the equivalent of a laundry chute, where the bag plummeted to the sub-subbasement of the New Headquarters Building. Eventually, the collected bags were tossed into an incinerator.
The great thing about the burn chute is that it’s part of a long-standing tradition to welcome rookie team members by hazing them by playing on their paranoia of violating a security policy. We insisted that one rookie needed to yell his badge number into the abyss of the chute before he dropped the bags down to ensure that the worker at the bottom knew where they came from. Then, we told the same rookie, he should stand and wait for confirmation from below. “Just keep standing there,” we said. “Sometimes it takes a minute or two.” After around three minutes of standing by the chute, thinking someone in the basement might actually yell back at him, he caught on to the game.
In the run-up to the invasion, it really was the little things that kept us going.
As the administration had begun preparing its case for war, of course, there was less time for fun. If I could climb into bed sometime around sunset, then be back up at 2:00 a.m., it had been a “standard” day. Very quickly, the environment in the Iraq unit became anything but standard.
Hours at the office piled up. I was scouring practically a novel’s worth of written reports, records, and cables every morning—what the other analysts and I called “drinking from the fire hose.” Out of that mass of information, I set aside perhaps a dozen of those reports daily because they contained information that didn’t seem to fit an established pattern or because I simply thought they might come in handy someday. Analysts, like most people, tend to look for patterns; anything that fell outside of (or was inconsistent with) established patterns often warranted closer scrutiny if we deemed the information reliable. I was keeping an eye out for literally one or two sentences that would trigger my next written product, information that would somehow further our understanding of the Iraqi Intelligence Service’s plans or associations, so I could deliver it to a policy maker.
Some of the most intense days came when the information flowed the other way. If a policy maker had a question, it was our mission—and, frankly, our job—to provide that person with a thorough answer ASAP. Even though I learned quickly that that’s not necessarily the same thing as an exhaustive answer.
Analysis is an ambiguous word; new analysts soon learn that analyzing is as much an art as a science. Once I moved beyond the simple recitation of facts, because no single fact explains the larger trend or picture, I then focused on the motivations of the actors, contextual dynamics, likely outcomes, signposts, and their possible implications. In intelligence analysis, there may be
no complete answer to any given question. Painting a detailed picture of the trends is difficult, particularly when there is too little information and even when there’s too much.
Having an incomplete picture of a given topic presents obvious limitations. Today, however, in the era of “big data,” the opposite is often the case. Collecting massive volumes of information these days isn’t the problem; even if you have volumes of documentation at the ready, an analyst has to learn how to make sense of it. How do you teach a gut instinct for accurately and objectively characterizing information?
Experience and expertise with a given topic make it easier to assign a degree of confidence to data. For me, particularly during those months prior to the invasion of Iraq, analysis was about creating a reasonable assessment of events within the context of a specific question—did Iraq have anything to do with 9/11 or al Qaida? Typically, we would approach a topic based on available information and then use our individual expertise, and the expertise of our colleagues, to tell a larger story. This point was made by Michael Hayden during his confirmation hearing to become director of the CIA in 2006: he told Senator Pat Roberts that intelligence gathering “is shrouded in ambiguity… if these were known facts, you wouldn’t be coming to us for them.”
In March of 2003, the Bush administration green-lit Operation Iraqi Freedom, the invasion of Iraq, despite CIA analysis finding no connection between the country’s regime and al Qaida. Three weeks later, US tanks triumphantly rolled into Firdos Square, in central Baghdad.
Soon my teammates and I were provided with an array of new streams of reporting we felt warranted further study. The new reporting did not validate the administration’s original case for war. In the face of a growing number of questions from Congress, the Agency was pressed even harder to search for historical ties. For months, we answered questions about connections Hussein had or might have had with extremist groups in the past that would have helped justify the administration’s case for war.
One frustrating moment that came in 2004 was when a member of Wolfowitz’s team inexplicably asked me what type of underwear Zarqawi wore—a line of inquiry that begged more questions about the person asking. What did they expect to hear? He wears a thong and that might contribute to his inner rage? Indeed, I’d never thought to look into it. Our team was focusing on the growing potential for extremism following the invasion.
By early 2004, the insurgency was beginning to expand across Iraq. Zarqawi was well on his way to solidifying his control over the insurgency, while Iraqi civilians and coalition troops were dying. In Langley, I’d watched many of my exasperated coworkers leave the team for different jobs at the Agency—or simply burn out and leave the CIA for good. Katherine was part of that second group: she quit the Agency to become a successful entrepreneur.
The real intelligence story was the growing connection between Zarqawi and Usama bin Ladin. Zarqawi was not only becoming a subject of interest for the United States; he also was inspiring disparate terrorist networks that had not necessarily trained directly with al Qaida. My colleagues and I kept wondering why the administration wasn’t paying more attention to the growing threat and instead remained focused on trying to piece together a case for the invasion. I was starting to become a very angry person watching people die inside Iraq as the United States struggled to find an effective way to stop the violence.
At work, I could feel the gradually rising tide of frustration as an endless stream of grim cables filtered through my computer system, followed by a never-ending stream of backward-looking questions from the administration. It took a few months, but in June of 2004, I reached the end of my patience and decided to quit.
I was lost in thought about all that when a soft ding snapped me back to the present. The elevator doors opened on the ground floor of the New Headquarters Building, and I walked through the sun-filled lobby. Even through the cloudiness of that early summer afternoon, it felt warm outside. I began to think of a job offer I had waiting for me at home.
I climbed into my car and picked up my cell phone—mobile devices aren’t allowed inside Agency buildings. I cranked the ignition, dialed my boyfriend, Roger, and headed for the George Washington Parkway. He picked up as I merged onto the parkway.
“I did it,” I said into the phone. “I’m done.”
By the time I pulled up outside our house and made my way up the sidewalk, my frustration had lost its edge.
I pushed open our heavy wooden front door and stepped into the entryway. Gus, the three-year-old Saint Bernard we’d recently adopted, poked his head out from around a corner at the top of the staircase. I paused to see what came next: in Gus’s previous life, spent chained in a yard in southern Virginia, he’d never seen stairs. When we first brought him home he spent an hour on the stair landing trying to muster up the courage to make his way down while I tried to convince him with hot dogs. But on that early June afternoon, he trotted right down to see me. He groaned once and flopped onto his side for a belly rub. I might not be able to fix US foreign policy or stop the endless stream of violence in Iraq, but I could do this for my dog.
The light streaming into the living room looked different at that time of day. I was so used to the long and unusual hours in counterterrorism, I didn’t know what the afternoon light looked like in my own home. The shine from the hardwood floor gave the whole room an eerie glow; I felt like I’d stepped into an alternate universe. For as frustrated as I was, I felt like I was playing hooky, and I didn’t like it.
I needed something productive to do—so I headed upstairs to put some laundry away. Then, when I didn’t find any, I did a load just to have some clothes to put away. I noticed how quiet our Barnaby Woods neighborhood was. Lately I’d found that quiet was good.
I’d recently turned thirty-four and was struggling with an all-consuming, incredibly stressful job and new home ownership. My readjustment to life back in DC had been harder than I’d anticipated after a few months in Iraq. Unexpected sounds—even the doorbell—made me jump. I’d been snapping at Roger over little things; I didn’t realize at the time how overblown my reactions had become.
At work, I focused all of my energy on Zarqawi and his network. But at night, distractions were harder to come by. I spent all my time trying to avoid thinking about Iraq, not just my time in country, but also everything I was reading on a daily basis.
Quiet was good, except when it was filled with guilt.
Laundry done, I sat down at the library table I inherited from my great-grandmother. The table had remained in her tiny one-bedroom cabin on Plum Creek Ranch in central Montana for years after her death. That farm and ranch is where her daughter—my grandmother Henrietta Ellis—grew up; sitting at the table in my living room, I thought back to the beautiful wood-burning range in that cabin, which was filled with knickknacks and western art. The whole thing felt like a Norman Rockwell painting. Whenever I stayed at Plum Creek during harvest, or during a few weeks of a lazy childhood summer, I felt a renewed sense of calm. I thought that cabin was paradise. Years later, when the building had fallen into disrepair, I claimed that table and had brought it along to every home I’d lived in since.
At the other end of the table was an offer letter from the Science Applications International Corporation. Better known as SAIC, the contracting giant, based in Virginia, had recently offered me a position managing one of their Middle Eastern counterterrorism research programs. I could have done the work well, I thought, and the federal government pay scale certainly left something to be desired, but no one enters into service at the CIA for the money. Taking a contracting job was a well-worn escape route from the CIA, even more so now that former Agency personnel didn’t necessarily have to change their commutes. After 9/11, the CIA had begun to fill its expanding need for staff by bringing in private contractors with security clearances—who were described as “green badgers” because of the green ID badges they carry (CIA employees carry blue badges). We’d all seen coworkers leave on a Friday, t
hen show right back up on Monday doing the same job—but with a different boss, a different color badge, and twice the pay.
Yet even though I’d thought about leaving the Agency at some point and had wondered how I’d do it, that offer letter had just sat there on the table for days. There, in the middle of the afternoon, it occurred to me that I should probably read it.
As I reached for the letter, I realized I was still wearing my clothes from the office—a purple button-down shirt over black pants. It had the comfortable feel of a uniform I wore often. Fit and function were always the most important things to me in my wardrobe; form, not so much. Government work doesn’t exactly lend itself to high fashion, and that was fine with me. On the table next to my keys, I noticed my blue ID badge, and I drew in a long breath. I thought back to the day they’d first handed it to me.
That morning, in 2000, I and a few dozen other new hires had been led across the gray granite Central Intelligence Agency seal, which dominates the minimalist lobby of the Original Headquarters Building, in Langley. The lobby is surprisingly quiet given that it’s all marble and massive. The eagle’s head sits resolutely above a shield emblazoned with a sixteen-point compass star, representing intelligence gathered from around the world and filtered back to a single point. The symbol is unmistakable in its strength and unwavering in its focus. The seal is the first thing most outsiders envision when they think of the CIA. It’s the first thing I saw on the day I became an insider. Simply walking across it on the way to my new-hire orientation, I felt a rush of pride and a sense of how much my life was about to change.
