THE UNITED STATES AND IRAQ

MILTON BEARDEN

Intelligence failure or policy failure?

As the United States winds down its second stormy year of occupation of Iraq,with no end in sight of the troubles in that most complex piece of the Middle East puzzle, the blame game on how America wandered into its Iraq adventure grinds on. Predictably, the American intelligence community is still taking most of the hits. It seems that the cardinal rule ofWashington politics always applies:

If there is a choice between intelligence failure and policy failure, go with intelligence failure every time.

But this time around, the stakes are too high for the usual dodge. Our intelligence community failed us badly in Iraq, to say nothing of having missed 9/11 completely; and those failures are being addressed and remedied. The principal focus of how this war got started should be where it belongs—on the policymakers’ decision to go to war in the first place. Intelligence is not a tripwire that somehow automatically sets the nation on a course for war. It is part of a policy process. It is, therefore, important that the limitations of intelligence and its relationship with policy be understood more clearly

In his February 5, 2004, address at Georgetown University, former Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) George Tenet provided telling insight into the nature of intelligence when he made the following statement:

In the intelligence business, you are almost never completely right or completely wrong.

At that moment, at least, Tenet did have it completely right. Those words, pointing out the inherent frailty of all intelligence gathering and assessments, including those on Iraq, should have sparked a serious discussion of the relationship between intelligence and policymaking within the budding concept of preemptive war, but, in fact, they have not. Instead, the focus of the superficial debate has been on the faulty intelligence itself. Congressional critics despaired that the intelligence that set us on the road to war in Iraq was flawed, or even clearly fabricated; others obsessed over how bad intelligence could have found its way into the President’s State of the Union speech in January 2003.

Politics-as-usual muted any serious discussion of whether it made good sense for a leader to rely as heavily on intelligence in taking the nation to war, as George W. Bush apparently did. The Bush administration’s defense of its Iraq policy seemed to boil down to the declaration that it was acting on the “best intelligence available at the time.” The implication is clear. If the intelligence was wrong, then the problem must be across the Potomac and out in the woods at Langley, not in the White House.

But that is the wrong argument. It misses the point, and misstates the relationship between intelligence and the policy of making war. To comprehend how intelligence works with policy, it is helpful to look back over the last two decades at those instances where intelligence has been the primary criterion for military action against sovereign states. I would note that the legitimacy of those states we have attacked has been debated, but that should have no bearing on the legality or propriety of the actions involved. The record is mixed.

Libya (1986)—Just after midnight on Saturday, April 5, 1986, a two-kilogram bomb exploded in the La Belle Disco, a West Berlin nightspot frequented by troops from America’s Berlin Brigade. The blast killed two US servicemen and a Turkish woman, and wounded 229. A few hours after the attack, the Libyan Peoples Bureau in East Berlin sent a cipher message to Tripoli. Intercepted and decoded by American intelligence, it read:

At 1:30 in the morning one of the acts was carried out with success, without leaving a trace behind.

It took the Reagan administration 10 days to retaliate for the attack by launching punitive air strikes on two Libyan cities. It was clear that the main target of the attacks was Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi, though that was never officially stated by the administration. Before a shocked world could react to the swift US retaliation, the Reagan administration went public with its evidence, laying the intercepted Libyan communications on the table. The US intelligence community smarted over the revelation of sensitive signals intelligence methods —which meant everybody now knew we had the ability to read Qadhafi’s mail—but political expediency quite rightly won the day.

Criticism of the US action was muted, even in Arab capitals, after seeing what was clearly incontrovertible evidence of the Libyan hand behind the La Belle Disco attack. This was, after all, 1986, and American intelligence was rarely challenged. If we laid a deciphered intercept on the table, few would question it.

It took the German courts 15 years to bring those responsible for the mayhem at La Belle Disco to justice, but in the four-year trial that began in 1997, the same intelligence evidence, supported by a trove of data gleaned from the East German Ministry for State Security files after the fall of the Berlin Wall, provided proof beyond any reasonable doubt that the Libyans were behind the terrorist attack in Berlin. At the end of the trial, the Libyan culprits were convicted and sentenced to jail terms in Germany.

The drama between the United States and Libya continued, however. On December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing the 259 people aboard and 11 people on the ground. It would take another 15 years for the blame for that horrendous act to be laid on Muammar Qadhafi’s doorstep. Once again, American intelligence was critical. In the case of Libya, then, it is reasonable to say that intelligence served the Reagan administration well, but in an after-the-fact role of providing credible justification for a limited, punitive strike.

Afghanistan and Sudan (1998)—On August 7, 1998, almost simultaneous explosions rocked the US embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, killing 12 Americans and over 200 Kenyans in Nairobi, and 11 Tanzanians in Dar es Salaam. Fingers pointed almost immediately at Osama bin Laden, though there was no claim of responsibility for the attacks from his camp at the time.

Two weeks later, on August 20, 1998, the United States launched 77 Tomahawk cruise missiles in retaliation. Sixty-five of the missiles were targeted against suspected terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, and a dozen obliterated the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan. There were an unknown number of casualties in the strikes against the camps in Afghanistan, but Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants, the targets of the attack, escaped harm. The strike against Sudan resulted in a small number of Sudanese casualties, in addition to destroying the El Shifa plant.

That same evening, President Clinton went on national television to tell the nation that he had ordered the missile strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan because of the imminent danger they presented to America’s national security. The mission’s goal was to strike at the network of radical groups affiliated with, and funded by, Osama bin Laden, whom the President described as the preeminent organizer and financier of international terrorism in the world at the time.

There was little domestic or international criticism of the strike against the terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. At the time, Afghanistan was, after all, a failed state that had degenerated into one of the few remaining safe havens for the world’s terrorists, including Osama bin Laden. What domestic criticism there was focused on the ribald “Wag the Dog” scenario of the President seeking a distraction from a tawdry personal scandal involving a young White House intern.

The strike against Sudan was another matter, however. The day after the attack, the Department of State released a summary of the US rationale for the El Shifa bombing, stating that the facilities attacked were central to bin Laden’s conduct of terror around the world. The report said the United States had reliable intelligence that the bin Laden network had been seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD), including chemical weapons (CW). An unidentified senior intelligence official stated that American intelligence had “high con- fidence” that El Shifa produced a precursor unique to the production of the deadly VX gas. The US government claimed that El Shifa was inside a highly guarded perimeter, that it produced no known products associated with pharmaceuticals, and that there was no doubt that it was involved in CW production. Senior administration officials stated that not to have struck El Shifa preemptively would have been “irresponsible.”

By August 22, however, the intelligence-based case against El Shifa had begun to unravel. Foreign residents of Khartoum, including the German ambassador, contradicted the claim that El Shifa was a heavily guarded installation. A British engineer involved in the construction of the plant disputed all of the US allegations, and it was unequivocally determined that El Shifa did, indeed, produce pharmaceuticals. Significant quantities of El Shifa pharmaceutical products were sold to the United Nations oil-for-food program for Iraq, a fact that was well known to US officials at the United Nations.

NBC Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Bob Arnot personally inspected the rubble of the El Shifa plant two days after the attack. He examined the plant’s logs, assembly lines, and associated machinery, and observed thousands of packages and bottles in the remains of the plant. Arnot concluded that while this evidence did not prove that the plant produced only medicines, it did demonstrate that the plant produced tuberculosis drugs and antibiotics.

No financial or other links between bin Laden and El Shifa were ever uncovered, and the owner of the plant, Salah Idris, stepped forward to challenge all US claims. Much to the embarrassment of the United States, Idris won his court case to secure the release of some $24 million frozen in Bank of America accounts. The United States government declined to meet him in court. And the evidence of the production of VX gas precursor elements, the evidence US intelligence claimed to have developed with “high confidence,” turned out to be questionable information sourced to a third-country national.

In 1999, a thorough study of the El Shifa incident conducted by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute for International Studies, concluded that “the balance of available evidence indicates that the facility probably had no role whatsoever in CW development.”

The El Shifa attack was the product of both flawed and intentionally fabricated intelligence supporting a policy apparently driven by the need for a symmetrical response to the attacks on our embassies—two embassies bombed, two terrorist targets struck. As a result of the attack on El Shifa, not only did American interests in the Islamic world suffer, but the reputation of American intelligence was degraded by having been both wrong and, possibly, duped. That combination would play out with even more damaging consequences five years later.

Iraq (2003)—As details of the lead up to the war in Iraq continue to surface, the role of intelligence in advancing the administration’s preemptive war in Iraq takes center stage. The American case against Iraq came into sharp focus in the February 5, 2003, speech before the UN Security Council by Secretary of State Colin Powell. In that appearance, the supporting role of the CIA’s intelligence behind Powell’s speech and the administration’s Iraq policy were captured vividly in a single photographic frame showing Powell at the United Nations, with DCI George Tenet seated behind him and apparently reading along with him as he presented the US case against Saddam Hussein. The visual subtext was dramatic.

According to Bob Woodward, in his book on the Iraq War, Plan of Attack, Tenet had told an apparently skeptical President Bush in January 2003, a month before Powell’s UN speech, that the WMD case against Iraq was a “slam dunk.” The intelligence backing Powell at the United Nations was all America needed to make its case against Saddam Hussein. There were stockpiles of chemical agents secreted around Iraq in locations known by American intelligence, we were assured. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld asserted that the precise locations were pinpointed for that moment when we would move into Iraq and seize territory. There were mobile biological weapons laboratories on the prowl, and Iraq’s nuclear weapons program had been reconstituted, as evidenced by the interdiction of special aluminum tubing for the centrifuges needed to produce enriched, weapons-grade uranium. All of this was backed up by unimpeachable intelligence, we were told.

FACING THE FACTS

Now, almost two years after we invaded Iraq, toppled Saddam Hussein, and settled in for an unsteady occupation of the country, each of the intelligence-backed claims have been proven wrong. The mobile biological weapons labs have been dismissed as probable fabrication by sources close to Ahmad Chalabi, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council; the aluminum tubes were probably intended for conventional weapons; and no reconstituted nuclear program has yet been found. David Kay, the head of the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group, testified on January 28, 2004, before the Senate Armed Services Committee and stunned the world with the words,“...we were almost all wrong.”And the Iraq Survey Group’s report in October 2004 backed up that claim— there were no stockpiles of WMD in Iraq.

Some might counter that it was not only US intelligence that missed the truth about WMD. All of our friends in the “intelligence club” had it wrong, too, including the British, Germans, Russians, and the French. There seemed to be comfort and safety in the company of those who also were wrong about Iraq. But that, too, is a bogus defense.

Until the Iraq intelligence debacle, the American intelligence community still held on to the claim of being the gold standard, however tarnished, for the world’s “key intelligence questions.” With a budget reportedly of around $30 billion per year and ownership of most of the world’s eavesdropping satellites, the US intelligence community sets the pace for intelligence services throughout the world. Other countries would follow our lead on such big issues as whether Saddam Hussein had WMD. Their individual analyses could be at variance with ours on other points, such as his intent to use the weapons, or to share them with terrorist organizations, but on the issue of their existence, they went along with us. So, if they were wrong on the WMD issue, it is largely because they believed our intelligence in the first place.

How did so much go so wrong? The answer is nuanced. In its simplest form, the fault lies in the compelling fact, reported in the Woodward book, that a policy to invade Iraq already had been set, even absent supporting intelligence, as early as January 2003. American intelligence simply played catch up with that reality. The almost steady demands to produce intelligence to support the proposition that Iraq had WMD stockpiles, and was in league with bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, created enough pressure on the CIA’s intelligence analysts that their analytical qualifiers—the use of “might” and “maybe” and “perhaps”—were filtered out of their assessments.

But it didn’t stop there. The rest of the world, friend, foe, and hustler alike, had become conscious in great detail of our intelligence collection requirements on Iraq and joined in the collection game. Sure enough, answers to our intelligence questions started rolling in. The Czech government reported that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had traveled to Prague to meet with an Iraqi intelligence officer, thus establishing the crucial link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and the terror of 9/11. Though the report later was discredited by many, including the 9/11 Commission, the allegation strangely lingers to this day among some leaders of the administration and its defenders.

Then someone or some intelligence service—it is still not clear who—fabricated documents on alleged Iraqi attempts to buy “yellow cake” uranium from the African country of Niger. This misinformation was slipped into the intelligence flow in Europe and, though dismissed as lacking credibility early on by the CIA, ended up in the President’s 2003 State of the Union Speech, attributed, oddly, to British intelligence.

The skewing of intelligence in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq became an international cottage industry taken up by the clever and the bold, by individual intelligence entrepreneurs and possibly less-than-friendly foreign intelligence services whose goals were not always in common with ours. Their intent was to provoke us into war, to stymie us, or simply to fleece us. And all of this was playing into an intelligence vetting system that had broken down, perhaps willingly, perhaps negligently.

So now, with US troops in Iraq having settled down for the long, tough haul, and with the blame game having played such an important role in the stormy political campaign of 2004, the American public needs answers and it needs to make some decisions. Certainly, there is a need to “fix” American intelligence. That is already underway, as US and other intelligence agencies have increased their collaborative efforts to collect information about suspected terrorist activity. But we also need to “fix” our understanding of how policy works, as well. Americans will have to decide whether the concept of preemptive war is valid, in the practical sense, or if it is even possible for a democracy to embrace such a policy in a world where nothing escapes the eye of the 24-hour news machine.

It may be no accident that the wars we treat with that solemn pride that comes only from righteous, hardfought victory are the ones someone else started. The wars the United States has launched from scratch—the Spanish-American War and this round in Iraq—have not, and probably will not, pass the test of history. (Vietnam, perhaps, is a story best left for another article altogether.) War is a brutish game, and for most of America’s history we have had the good sense to wait for someone else to strike the first blow.When that happens, few have asked the question being asked today: “Whose idea was this, anyway?”

Milton Bearden (CC ’03) retired from the CIA in 1994, and is the director of The Steeplechase Group, which is involved in working with the various parties to the civil war in Sudan in their search for peace. He is the author of The Black Tulip, A Novel of War in Afghanistan, and co-author of The Maine Enemy, The Final Showdown of the CIA and the KGB.

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