Known and Unknown (52 page)

I thought Franks' December 2001 briefing was a solid early cut, considering the relatively short time he had had to prepare. Bush seemed satisfied as well. The President expressed the hope I shared that diplomacy would persuade the Iraqis to comply with UN Security Council resolutions. Franks, Myers, and I would happily throw many thousands of hours of work into the shredder if it meant the men and women of the U.S. military would not have to go to war. Nonetheless, we all believed, as the President did, that the intelligence about Iraq and Saddam's documented history of aggression and deception were too unsettling to not at least be ready for a military confrontation if diplomacy were to fail.

Though the intelligence failures surrounding Iraq are now well-known, recent history is abundant with examples of flawed intelligence that have affected key national security decisions and contingency planning. They include, for example: the poor quality of the intelligence gathered on the ground in Vietnam; the underestimates of the scale of the Soviet Union's military efforts during the Cold War; a lack of awareness about the brewing Iranian revolution that forced the Shah, an American ally, to flee the country; the failure to detect preparations for India's nuclear test; and consistently underestimating the number of missiles that China had deployed along the Taiwan Straits. For Iraq, there was a similar pattern of intelligence estimates that had dangerously miscalculated Saddam's capabilities. In 1991, experts actually underestimated Saddam Hussein's nuclear capability. After the Gulf War, UN weapons inspectors were surprised to discover that Iraq had been no more than a year or two away from having enough fissile material to produce a nuclear bomb.
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Less than perfect intelligence reports are, of course, a fact of life for national security decision makers. Intelligence officials have some of the most difficult jobs in the world. Uncertainty, gaps in knowledge, and outright errors are inevitable. Targets are hostile and working to deceive and conceal the very information that is most sought after. Closed, repressive regimes and their terrorist allies can make their decisions in small, tightly controlled cliques without regard to public opinion, parliaments, or media scrutiny, making it particularly difficult to discover their intentions.

It wasn't only our enemies that compounded the intelligence community's challenges. Budget cuts during the 1990s amounting to 10 percent of the intelligence community's budget were a costly self-inflicted wound that weakened our capabilities for years, particularly in the area of human intelligence. I had worked with our intelligence agencies off and on over some three decades, and intensely when I chaired the Ballistic Missile Threat Commission in 1998. That experience was sobering. Compartmentalization hampered intelligence analysis. Policy makers did not engage sufficiently with intelligence professionals in setting intelligence priorities and asking informed questions about their analyses and conclusions.
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In a unanimous letter to CIA Director Tenet, our bipartisan commission members shared our concerns about the quality of the intelligence community's products. In the letter we wrote:

What was unique about Iraq was that the intelligence community reported near total confidence in their conclusions. Their assessments appeared to be unusually consistent. In August 2002, Deputy CIA Director John McLaughlin presented to the principals committee the intelligence community's judgments about Iraq's WMD activities. McLaughlin, a serious and measured career intelligence professional, described the situation in stark terms. According to my notes, his briefing concluded that:

• Iraq had reconstituted its facilities for biological and chemical weapons.
  
• There were 3,200 tons of chemical weapons the regime previously had that remained unaccounted for.
  
• Saddam had a mobile biological warfare capability, and a variety of means to deliver them, likely including UAVs.
  
• Saddam had retained many of the same experts who had developed nuclear weapons prior to the Gulf War.
  
• There was construction at old nuclear facilities, and Iraq was “clearly working” on fissile material, which meant that Saddam could have a nuclear weapon within one year.
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McLaughlin's briefing covered many of the same points that were emphasized in the intelligence community's analyses of Iraq's WMD programs, and later in Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the UN. As McLaughlin gave the Agency's official and authoritative briefing, I wrote a note to myself. It said “caution—strong case,” but I added, “could be wrong.”
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There were few qualifiers in the briefing. In the run-up to the war in Iraq, we heard a great deal about what our intelligence community knew or thought they knew, but not enough about what they knew they didn't know.

Two months after McLaughlin's briefing, in October 2002, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the coordinating body for the U.S. intelligence community's analytical products, issued the authoritative National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq. The NIE, which is now declassified, was an alarming report on Iraq's weapons systems. The report included the following:

• We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.
  
• Iraq has largely rebuilt missile and biological weapons facilities damaged during Operation Desert Fox and has expanded its chemical and biological infrastructure under the cover of civilian production.
  
• Although we assess that Saddam does not yet have nuclear weapons or sufficient material to make any, he remains intent on acquiring them. Most agencies assess that Baghdad started reconstituting its nuclear program about the time that [UN] inspectors departed—December 1998.
  
• If Baghdad acquires sufficient fissile material from abroad it could make a nuclear weapon within several months to a year.
  
• Baghdad has mobile facilities for producing bacterial and toxin BW agents; these facilities can evade detection and are highly survivable. Within three to six months these units probably could produce an amount of agent equal to the total that Iraq produced in the years prior to the Gulf war.
  
• Saddam, if sufficiently desperate, might decide that only an organization such as al-Qa'ida—with worldwide reach and extensive terrorist infrastructure, and already engaged in a life-or-death struggle against the United States—could perpetrate the type of terrorist attack that he would hope to conduct.
  
• In such circumstances, he might decide that the extreme step of assisting the Islamist terrorists in conducting a CBW [chemical or biological weapon] attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.
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American intelligence officials were joined in many of these startling assessments by intelligence services from other nations—Britain, Australia, Spain, Italy, and Poland among them—all of whom judged that Saddam's regime possessed WMD and was expanding its capabilities. Even Russia, China, Germany, and France, then skeptical of any military action against Iraq, agreed. “There is a problem—the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq,” said French President Jacques Chirac. He added, “The international community is right ... in having decided Iraq should be disarmed.”
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On the subject of Iraq's nuclear weapons program, the German chief of intelligence actually held a grimmer view than the U.S. intelligence community: “It is our estimate that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years.”
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Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak cautioned General Franks that Saddam had biological weapons and would use them on American forces.
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A multitude of specific, seemingly credible reports, some even illustrated with satellite photographs, provided supporting evidence.

Early in the war, while major combat operations were still underway, I was asked on a news program if I was concerned about the failure to find WMD in Iraq. I had always tried to speak with reserve and precision on intelligence matters, but on this occasion, I made a misstatement. Recalling the CIA's designation of various “suspect” WMD sites in Iraq, I replied, “We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad.”
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I should have used the phrase “suspect sites.” My words have been quoted many times by critics of the war as an example of how the Bush administration misled the public.

One of the challenges for historians is distinguishing the essential from the inessential, the predominant from the marginal, the characteristic from the exceptional. Promoters of the frequently repeated “Bush lied, people died” line have scoured a voluminous record of official statements on Iraqi WMD to compile a small string of comments—ill chosen or otherwise deficient—to try to depict the administration as purposefully misrepresenting the intelligence. While I made a few misstatements—in particular the one mentioned above—they were not common and certainly not characteristic. Other senior administration officials also did a reasonably good job of representing the intelligence community's assessments accurately in their public comments about Iraqi WMD, despite some occasionally imperfect formulations.

 

I
ntelligence evidence about WMD had a way of taking pride of place in the litany of reasons for going to war. In fact, that should have been only one of the many reasons. There was a long list of other charges against Saddam Hussein's regime—its support for terrorism, its attacks on American pilots in the no-fly zones, its violation of the United Nations Security Council resolutions, its history of aggression, and its crimes against its people. At one point I cautioned Torie Clarke, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, that the administration's spokespeople were not using all of the many arguments that had been presented against Iraq.
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Obviously the focus on WMD to the exclusion of almost all else was a public relations error that cost the administration dearly.

In October 2002, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq. This often overlooked but significant congressional action reflected a strong, broad, and bipartisan view that Saddam Hussein's regime would need to be toppled by force to protect the United States and international peace and security. Rather than focusing solely on WMD programs, the legislation listed twenty-three separate indictments against the regime. The points included:

• violating resolution of the United Nations Security Council by continuing to engage in brutal repression of its civilian population ...
  
• attempting in 1993 to assassinate former President Bush ...
  
• firing on many thousands of occasions on United States and Coalition Armed Forces engaged in enforcing the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council; ...
  
• members of al Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq; ...
  
• Iraq continues to aid and harbor other international terrorist organizations, including organizations that threaten the lives and safety of United States citizens.
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The House of Representatives passed that authorization by a margin of 297 to 133. The legislation, in fact, garnered 47 more votes of support in the House than the congressional authorization of the 1991 Gulf War. The Senate vote—77 to 23—was similarly lopsided. In later years, when things got tough, some who supported the military force authorization tried to explain away their votes. They claimed they were hoodwinked and misled on the intelligence or that they didn't think the legislation had actually authorized military action. In the military there is a phrase accorded to people like that: You wouldn't want to be in a foxhole with them.

The views of a number of prominent legislators were in fact quite different before the war began than their later statements.

“We have no choice but to eliminate the threat,” Senator Joe Biden said in August 2002. “This is a guy who is an extreme danger to the world.”
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“In the four years since the inspectors,” Senator Hillary Clinton stated, “intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program.” Stepping into what would become a controversial issue, Clinton volunteered that Saddam “has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaida members.”
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“When I vote to give the President of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security and that of our allies in the Persian Gulf region,” said Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, who later adopted a quite different tone as the Democratic Party's presidential standard-bearer in 2004.
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