washingtonpost.com: Jim Hoagland: CIA's New Old Iraq File: Sunday, October 20, 2002; Page B07
washingtonpost.com: Jim Hoagland: Failing Grade for Spies:Sunday, February 1, 2004; Page B07
Imagine that Saddam Hussein has been offering terrorist training and other lethal support to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda for years. You can't imagine that? Sign up over there. You can be a Middle East analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency. Or at least you could have been until recently. As President Bush's determination to overthrow the Iraqi dictator has become evident to all, a cultural change has come over the world's most expensive intelligence agency: Some analysts out at Langley are now willing to evaluate incriminating evidence against the Iraqis and call it just that.
George W. Bush and Tony Blair are momentarily in the clear. But their intelligence services are left stuck in deep doo-doo, as a former CIA chief and ex-president named George H.W. Bush might well put it. Neither outcome is good for the seven Democrats seeking a chance to defeat Bush in November, or for the Tories who hoped finally to break Blair's political mastery on the rocks of an "intelligence hoax" in Iraq. Having to campaign against the ineffectiveness of your nation's spies -- rather than running against your political opponents' vile lies -- is no easy task.
That development has triggered a fierce internal agency struggle pitting officials whose careers and reputations were built on the old analysis of the Iraqis as a feckless, inert and inward-looking bunch of thugs against those willing to take a fresh, untilted look at all the evidence.
In credible, authoritative and at times painfully exacting testimony before a Senate committee last week, David Kay revived the Washington practice of making a sensational discovery out of a known but obscured truth: Saddam Hussein's police state was a very difficult and dangerous place for the U.S. and British intelligence services to try to uncover secrets, and they were usually unsuccessful in their attempts over two decades.
One breeze of change came in President Bush's Oct. 7 speech in Cincinnati. Among the terror-related items that were declassified for the speech was an agency finding that Iraq is developing "a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles" to deliver chemical and biological weapons on U.S. targets.
What was new and most helpful was the clear description by Kay of the non-secrets about Iraq's disintegrating society that the agency apparently also missed. As the United States prepared to invade, the agency did not have human resources inside Iraq able to communicate the existing chaos, corruption and social decomposition that was to explode under the pressure of invasion.
That was new stuff, delivered by a determined and effective CIA collection effort earlier this year. Agency information also allowed the president to assert (accurately) that "Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases." That's actually old new stuff, stored in CIA files since the mid-1990s. But that intelligence was quietly buried during the Clinton years, when the need not to know very much about Iraq and terrorism was very strong.
"The glue that holds people together in a relationship that allows cooperation was destroyed by Saddam Hussein, just as the infrastructure was destroyed," said Kay, the former weapons inspector employed by the CIA to head up the search for Iraq's still-missing chemical and biological weapons and military nuclear program.
This is how war is waged inside the CIA: The upstarts who are challenging the agency's long-standing and deeply flawed analysis of Iraq are being accused of "politicizing intelligence," a label that is a reputation-killer in the intelligence world. It is also a protective shield for analysts who do not want, any more than the rest of us, to acknowledge that they have been profoundly and damagingly mistaken.
Kay correctly cast the huge intelligence failure in Iraq in historic terms: This was on a par with the agency's misreading of the strength of the Soviet Union's economy as it stumbled toward collapse. "What had looked like a 10-foot power turned out to be an economy that barely existed. . . . We are particularly bad about understanding societal trends" because intelligence agencies invest in satellites and other technological means and neglect "our human intelligence capability," Kay added bluntly.
The "politicization" accusation suggests that those who find Iraqi links to al Qaeda are primarily interested in currying favor with the Bush White House. It comes primarily from those who won favor in the Clinton years with an analysis based on the proposition that an Arab nationalist such as Saddam Hussein would never cooperate with the Islamic fanatics of al Qaeda. They are now out in the cold in the Bush-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz era.
Kay's unequivocal denials that agency analysts had given in to political pressure or had the intelligence they supplied falsified or manipulated were echoed in London by Lord Brian Hutton in his report on the Blair government's handling of intelligence. These twin denials put a big dent in the overblown charges from congressional Democrats that Bush (and by implication Blair) perpetrated an "intelligence hoax" on their national legislatures and publics.
Their work is only one part of a monumental record of failure on Iraq by the CIA, which has at different moments sought to understand, support, co-opt and then overthrow Hussein. The agency succeeded in none. Considering the extent of that failure, it is no surprise that Bush has until now relied little on the Langley agency for his information on Iraq. There is simply no way to reconcile what the CIA has said on the record and in leaks with the positions Bush has taken on Iraq.
The truth in Machiavellian terms is worse: Bush and Blair accepted and actually believed the flawed intelligence that their spy bosses and senior aides provided, and then inflated it in their public speeches. Credulity, not chicanery, would be the plea, your honor.
One year before Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the agency produced a National Intelligence Estimate saying that Iraq was too exhausted and internally occupied to think about war. A supervisor's request to analysts to take a second look at those findings triggered accusations of "politicizing intelligence," says a former CIA official involved in that debate. The mistaken view prevailed and guided the CIA's assessment in July 1990 that no invasion of Kuwait was about to occur.
The CIA's failure on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is only one strand, and a somewhat understandable one. Analysts are rewarded for gravitating toward worst-case scenarios. Predicting what could go right -- that U.S. forces would not need chemical protection suits in the desert, or that Saddam might have been fooled by his scientists, who were stealing money for nonexistent programs, as Kay speculates happened -- is an art that does not flourish in Langley or at the Pentagon.
Such misjudgments have continued until today. After four months of inconclusive debate following Sept. 11, the agency produced a new analysis last spring titled: "Iraq and al Qaeda: A Murky Relationship." It fails to make much of a case for anything, I am told. It echoes the views of Paul Pillar, the national intelligence officer for the Middle East and South Asia, and other analysts who have consistently expressed doubts that Iraq has engaged in international terrorism or trained others to do so since 1993.
If yet another investigation of the CIA is needed, it must be broad and not limited to weapons of mass destruction. Why did the agency fail to predict before the war the deadly insurgency that American troops now face? That will lead to examination of the fruitless "decapitation" strategy the agency pursued in Iraq for 15 years, to the detriment of other, more promising approaches.
More damaging to their case than the accumulating new evidence to the contrary is "old" information long available in CIA files: Iraqi intelligence officers meeting in Khartoum and Kandahar with Osama bin Laden, the nonaggression pact Saddam and Osama reached in 1993, training in Baghdad for international terrorism and the multiple trips to Prague made by Mohamed Atta, the head of the Sept. 11 suicide squads, are all there. These specific reports and much more have been explained away and minimized rather than thoroughly investigated.
But trying to conduct such an inquiry in the middle of a war and a presidential campaign is a shaky proposition. It is probably a task best left to an independent commission appointed after the November elections.
Congress should not expect the CIA "to be 100 percent flawless all the time," Director George Tenet complained defensively on Thursday as he was buffeted by questions about the agency's failure to anticipate Sept. 11. The problem is broader, he said: "The country's mind-set has to be changed fundamentally."
The focus for Democrats should be on Bush's competence, not on the sinister but sketchy presentations of his motives that have formed the debate thus far. The most deft Democrat on this issue is Hillary Clinton, who has been forthright in describing Iraq as a justified war that has been subsequently mishandled at the White House and Pentagon.
The man has a point. But Congress can reasonably expect the agency not to be wrong close to 100 percent all the time on such an important subject as Iraq. And the place for Tenet to start changing mind-sets is right there at Langley. Unless, of course, he agrees with that mind-set.
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