At The Center Of The Storm Part 16

Drumh.e.l.ler has told the media in various interviews that he personally went to see John McLaughlin about the time of Colin Powell's UN speech to express concern about Curve Ball's information. He has said he doesn't remember John's exact response but that it was something to the effect of "Oh my, I hope that's not true." John is convinced that this did not happen. I have absolute confidence that had such a meeting taken place, John would have pursued the matter in the meticulous style for which he is well known. He fought steadfastly against White House attempts to stretch the evidence on Iraqal-Qa'ida ties. He understood the importance being placed on Curve Ball's information, and he would have battled just as hard to keep Curve Ball's information out of the Powell speech had someone made the case to him that it posed problems.

If Drumh.e.l.ler or anyone had brought to John McLaughlin or me these doubts about Curve Ball's credibility, let alone his sanity, we would have gone to great lengths immediately to resolve the matter. Unfortunately, the first either of us learned of Tyler Drumh.e.l.ler's lunch with the German BND official and of the latter's supposed warnings-and his refusal to stand publicly behind them-was when we were interviewed by the Silberman-Robb Commission as it prepared its March 2005 report, two years too late to do a d.a.m.n thing about it. Our senior officer in Germany at the time says Drumh.e.l.ler never apprised him of the luncheon conversation, nor did the Silberman-Robb Commission ever interview him. The German BND representative was asked by CIA officers in 2005 about his 2002 lunch with Drumh.e.l.ler. He denied ever having called Curve Ball a "fabricator" and said he only warned that he was a "single source" whose information the Germans could not independently verify.

A search of CIA records in 2005 revealed that a cable did come in to our headquarters from our rep in Germany on December 20, 2002. The cable went to Drumh.e.l.ler's office for action. It contained a letter addressed to me from the chief of the BND saying that Curve Ball would not agree to go public himself and that CIA would not be able to debrief him in person. It said that the Germans did not object to the public use of Curve Ball's information, as long as we protected the source. The letter went on to explain how the Germans had shared his information with at least two other foreign intelligence services and three U.S. intelligence agencies. It said they found his information "plausible" but that they could not independently verify what he was saying.

As far as I can tell, that cable never left Drumh.e.l.ler's desk in the European Division at Langley. Our senior officer in Berlin was expecting to get a response from me to my German counterpart, because he cabled and e-mailed our headquarters numerous times seeking one. That, too, would be standard protocol. But none was forthcoming. I had never seen the German letter but had simply been told that the German BND had cleared our use of the Curve Ball material.

On January 27, 2003, right before the Powell UN speech, our man in Germany sent another cable, this one expressing his own reservations about the source. He did so because he had received no response to his December 20 cable. Curve Ball's reporting was problematic, he said, and should be relied on only after "most serious consideration." This cable, too, went to Drumh.e.l.ler for action. In the three days and nights we sat at headquarters working on the secretary's speech, n.o.body ever told us of our senior man in Germany's reservations or of the letter from the BND chief.

Finally, frustrated at the lack of response to the December 20 cable, on the day of Colin Powell's UN speech, February 5, 2003, our Berlin rep translated the original letter from the BND chief and sent it, along with the original in German, via diplomatic pouch to headquarters. It arrived on February 26 and was delivered to Drumh.e.l.ler's European Division. My successor, Porter Goss, asked his staff to run down the Curve Ball story. They found in 2005 that the letter, located in the European Division, had not been formally logged in as received. Despite extensive searching, no records have been found that the letter was sent to either John McLaughlin or me.

Above and beyond the formalities, cables, and letters, though, were a number of critical break points-before, at the outset of, and during the Iraq war-when this information clearly was of vital importance. I did not believe that there could be any doubt among senior CIA officials at the time that the Agency was depending heavily on Curve Ball's information. Why so many opportunities to sound the alarm were missed is a mystery to me. Powell's UN speech was one such moment, but there were many others, such as when the National Intelligence Estimate was being written and approved. It was precisely during this time or just shortly afterward when Drumh.e.l.ler presumably had his revelatory lunch with the German. The issue could also have been mentioned when my staff was helping prepare my multiple testimonies before the Senate Intelligence, Foreign Relations, and Armed Services Committees. But it was not.

In May 2003, CIA and DIA issued a report following the discovery of a trailer found in Iraq that closely matched the one described by Curve Ball. We went back to the Germans, again through Drumh.e.l.ler's division, and had them show Curve Ball a spread of photos of trailers-much as you would display in a criminal lineup. Curve Ball picked out the picture of the trailer we found in Iraq and said, "That's it." Even then, neither Drumh.e.l.ler nor anyone else said to John or me, "Stop. This is a fabricator, you cannot rely on him."

In February of 2004 and in subsequent appearances before the Senate Intelligence Committee in closed session on March 4, 2004, I raised the subject of our concerns about Iraq's capability to produce biological weapons in the trailers cited by Curve Ball. Every presentation of the "evidence" for such a capability was vetted far and wide through the upper echelons of the Agency. Yet at no time did anyone in the a.n.a.lytic or operational chain of command come forward to tell me of the specific information supposedly imparted by the German BND to the CIA European Division chief in the fall of 2002.

In 2005 Drumh.e.l.ler told the Silberman-Robb Commission that he spoke with me on the telephone around midnight when I was in New York on the eve of Colin Powell's UN presentation in February 2003. In a Frontline Frontline special in 2006, Drumh.e.l.ler claimed that he said, "Boss...there's a lot of problems with that German reporting, you know that?" And that I replied, "Yeah, don't worry about it; we've got it." I remember no such midnight call or warning. Drumh.e.l.ler and I did speak very briefly earlier in the evening, but our conversation had nothing to do with Curve Ball; rather it involved getting clearance from the British to use some of their intelligence in the speech. According to a CIA memorandum for the record, in speaking to Senate Intelligence Committee staffers in 2005, Drumh.e.l.ler said that "way too much emphasis" was being placed on the phone call, and when asked if he could confirm that I understood what he was trying to convey in the purported phone call about Curve Ball, he responded, "No, not really." special in 2006, Drumh.e.l.ler claimed that he said, "Boss...there's a lot of problems with that German reporting, you know that?" And that I replied, "Yeah, don't worry about it; we've got it." I remember no such midnight call or warning. Drumh.e.l.ler and I did speak very briefly earlier in the evening, but our conversation had nothing to do with Curve Ball; rather it involved getting clearance from the British to use some of their intelligence in the speech. According to a CIA memorandum for the record, in speaking to Senate Intelligence Committee staffers in 2005, Drumh.e.l.ler said that "way too much emphasis" was being placed on the phone call, and when asked if he could confirm that I understood what he was trying to convey in the purported phone call about Curve Ball, he responded, "No, not really."

Drumh.e.l.ler had dozens of opportunities before and after the Powell speech to raise the alarm with me, yet he failed to do so. A search of my calendar between February 5, 2003, the date of the Powell speech, and July 11, 2004, the date of my stepping down as DCI, shows that Drumh.e.l.ler was in my office twenty-two times. And yet he seems never to have thought that it might be worth telling the boss that he had reason to believe a central pillar in the case against Saddam might have been a mirage.

In fact, it seemed that just the opposite was communicated. In May 27, 2003, the head of the German BND, August Hanning, paid me a visit in Washington. My office received an e-mail from Drumh.e.l.ler's deputy, with a copy that went to Tyler, recommending that I be sure to thank Hanning for agreeing to allow us to use the Curve Ball material in our public discussions.

In advance of Hanning's visit, I received a memo laying out our goals for the session, a matter of course before every meeting with a foreign intelligence official. The memo was signed by Tyler Drumh.e.l.ler. signed by Tyler Drumh.e.l.ler. The first page included a list of five suggested talking points to advance our goals. Number three, all in bold, suggests that I: The first page included a list of five suggested talking points to advance our goals. Number three, all in bold, suggests that I:

Thank Dr. Hanning for the Iraqi WMD information provided by the BND a.s.set "Curve Ball." Inform Dr. Hanning that we would like to work with the BND to craft an approach to Curve Ball to secure his cooperation in locating evidence of Iraq's biological weapons (BW) programs, and about the direct involvement of Dr. Rihab Taha al-Azzawi in Iraq's mobile BW program.

If the chief of the European Division believed that it was a mistake for us to use the Curve Ball material and knew that the Germans had warned us off it, why was he asking me to thank the Germans?

The meeting happened, and I presume I used the talking point that was suggested. In any case, Drumh.e.l.ler sat there through that meeting, and a lunch in Hanning's honor that followed, and never mentioned any concerns.

How can you explain these huge disconnects? Why would good men and women argue behind closed doors about Curve Ball's reliability, yet not come forward to express their concerns at an appropriate level? I've asked myself that question dozens of times. We were under enormous pressure to meet our own standards of excellence and from an administration that was moving toward war. But were we, as an inst.i.tution, in some sort of meltdown? I don't believe that for a second.

The best reason I can come up with is that the people who knew that Curve Ball might be a fabricator figured that coming forward wouldn't make any difference. The rush to Baghdad wasn't going away. They would just be stepping in front of a roaring train. If that was their thinking, then their reticence is inexcusable.

But why would people be a.s.serting things now about trying to alert me to the problems of Curve Ball-claims that have been proved untrue? Perhaps some people's recollections of "if only someone had listened to me" have become sharper than reality. I don't know. What I do know is that concerns about Curve Ball did not get disseminated far and wide through the Agency as they should have been. We allowed flawed information to be presented to Congress, the president, the United Nations, and the world. That never should have happened.

CHAPTER 21

Diplomacy by Other Means

The runaway freight train that was the war in Iraq arrived in March 2003. For CIA, this war was, in every respect, different from the one we had fought in Afghanistan. There, we had been, in military parlance, the "supported" command. In Iraq, we were "supporting." The difference is far more than semantic-it speaks to our performance in both theaters.

In Afghanistan, CIA largely came up with the plan. Indeed, we had been nurturing and refining the strategy for months before the attacks of September 11, hoping to get permission to go after al-Qa'ida in their sanctuary. With the help of a small number of Special Forces troops and overwhelming U.S. airpower, we had been able to marshal the strength of various warlords and tribal factions to oust the Taliban.

We told the administration from the very beginning that an entirely different model would have to be used for Iraq. Shortly after the Bush administration came to office, we briefed senior officials, particularly the vice president, that CIA covert action would almost certainly be unable to topple Saddam.

CIA came to this conclusion through painful experience in the mid-nineties. Our attempts to identify a Sunni military leader with the capability and following to take on Saddam's elite units proved difficult. Saddam regularly shuffled or even killed senior officers just for the sport of it, and this greatly increased the challenge of getting access to the right networks without being compromised. A combination of Saddam's ruthlessness and our own mistakes had resulted in scores of Iraqis in our employ being killed.

Covert action against Saddam in the past had not been as large or as well funded as our activities in Afghanistan against the Russians during the cold war. Some of our potential partners in the region had judged that we were not serious because of the paucity of resources devoted and because we had never committed ourselves to supporting covert action with military force. There was always the possibility that U.S. airpower might come into play once we had validated the feasibility of a potential overthrow of Saddam. In practice, the execution of such a plan was extremely difficult and unlikely.

What we learned in Afghanistan was that covert action, effectively coupled with a larger military plan, could succeed. What we were telling the vice president that day was that CIA could not go it alone in toppling Saddam; all instruments of U.S. power had to be aligned to achieve the objective. Some may have believed that by saying so, we in essence were saying that we were more than willing to hold the military's coat, thus making war inevitable. In truth, we were simply conveying the reality of our historical experience.

Thus in Iraq, unlike in Afghanistan, CIA's role was to provide information to the military about the whereabouts and capabilities of enemy forces, a.s.sess the political environment, coordinate the efforts of indigenous networks of supporters who paved the way for U.S. military advances, and conduct sabotage operations and the like. That's a more traditional role for intelligence to play, but none of it came easily.

The first action the Agency undertook in February 2002 was to resurrect the Northern Iraq Liaison Element (NILE) teams of CIA officers that had historically encamped with the Kurds in northern Iraq. Arriving in early July, they began the painstaking effort of recruiting agents, creating networks of people and tribes not only willing to gather data but also to take action. We wanted them to take aggressive actions to challenge the legitimacy of the regime wherever they could, sabotage railheads, disrupt communications nodes, attack local Ba'ath Party headquarters, and communicate their actions with the military to maximize their effectiveness.

We operated out of northern Iraq and over the borders of neighboring countries to the south and west. We gave the military full transparency to the contacts we were making, introducing U.S. Special Forces to individuals inside Iraq who held some promise in persuading military units to defect once a ground war started, either by switching sides or surrendering. In the end, while few if any units did defect, neither did many regular army units fight. And changing sides was not a very appealing option for them. Regular army forces often had Iraqi Republican Guard units behind them. They faced likely death if they advanced on U.S. military units in front of them, and almost certain death if Saddam's Special Forces to the rear felt they were not supporting the regime.

That left us with encouraging surrender, and our case officers worked with clandestine sources to deliver that message to the Iraqi army. But not too long before the war got under way, this choice was taken off the table. The reason was quite simple. The U.S. had so few forces on the ground that a successful campaign to induce capitulation would have quickly resulted in the prisoners of war outnumbering the invading army.

The fallback position was to suggest to the Iraqi military units that they simply lay down their arms and go home. The U.S. military started air-dropping leaflets bearing that message, and Iraqi soldiers took it to heart, walking away in large numbers once the shooting got under way. (Later, when he was trying to justify his controversial May 23, 2003, edict disbanding the Iraqi army, Jerry Bremer would say that the army had already disbanded itself. True enough, but the Iraqi army did so largely at the behest of the U.S. government, and certainly not in the expectation that its soldiers would be cut adrift, taking their weapons with them, often with no means to support their families.) I visited CIA officers at several secret bases in the desert west and south of Iraq just prior to the war. The bases had been created in the middle of nowhere in large part to train and equip Iraqi tribal networks so they could reenter their country to conduct surveillance and sabotage, and send back data to the U.S. military. The officers I met with had been living in tents for months preparing for the war, and they were eager to get started. Many of them were young-quite a few were on their first tours of duty-and I was the only DCI they had ever served under. My visit was intended to give them a morale boost and to let them know that I was very proud of them and confident in their ability to meet any challenge. Privately, though, I could not help but worry that many of these young men and women could soon die.

At one of these visits, I met with a contingent led by Gen. Mohammed Abdullah Shawani, who had been chief of Iraqi Special Forces during the Iran-Iraq war. General Shawani was introduced to the Agency in 1991, quickly becoming one of the U.S. government's most critical partners in working against Saddam's regime. A physically imposing figure with the size and strength of a football offensive lineman, Shawani was a born leader with a significant following within the traditional and Special Operations elements of the regular Iraqi army. A special operator and pilot by training, he gained fame and the highest Iraqi military honors when he led a heliborne attack against an Iranian-occupied hilltop during the Iran-Iraq war.

Shawani, or "the General," as he was known to his Iraqi followers, quickly became key to developing a strong network inside Iraq for the Agency. Unfortunately, the network was compromised by Saddam's security services in the mid-1990s, resulting in the torture and execution of Shawani's three sons. Shawani continued to work tirelessly to develop agent networks within Iraq and a.s.sisted the Agency in contacting Iraqi tribal and religious leaders in the months leading up to the invasion in the spring of 2003. During the prosecution of the war, Shawani helped develop and lead the Agency-sponsored Iraqi paramilitary group known as "the Scorpions." Such was his following in the regular Iraqi military that when Shawani went to talk to a large group of Iraqi soldiers being held prisoner in Kuwait, he was immediately recognized by a number of the senior Iraqi officers, who stood at attention and saluted him.

Thanks to Shawani and many others, in the hours and days before the war got under way, CIA teams were able to slip into Iraq and meet up with established networks to try to prevent the Iraqi military from destroying the bridges crossing the Euphrates and leading into Baghdad. Others met up with agents working to prevent Saddam from torching the southern oil fields.

As war approached, our designated senior officer for Baghdad, "Charlie S.," moved to Doha, where he sat at Gen. Tommy Franks's side. Charlie became an important member of the military team. He was constantly providing information from our networks of sources about potential military targets. Sometimes he would even give advice not not to bomb. An example: When Central Command (CENTCOM) learned where a senior Iraqi intelligence officer was hiding, the military's first reaction was to target a Tomahawk cruise missile on his coordinates. However, as our liaison to Tommy Franks's headquarters, Charlie convinced his military counterparts of the intelligence value of taking this Iraqi officer alive. Though difficult, the effort to get ground forces to this officer's location proved to be very worthwhile based on the information subsequently obtained from him. to bomb. An example: When Central Command (CENTCOM) learned where a senior Iraqi intelligence officer was hiding, the military's first reaction was to target a Tomahawk cruise missile on his coordinates. However, as our liaison to Tommy Franks's headquarters, Charlie convinced his military counterparts of the intelligence value of taking this Iraqi officer alive. Though difficult, the effort to get ground forces to this officer's location proved to be very worthwhile based on the information subsequently obtained from him.

The Northern Iraq Liaison Element (NILE) teams operated continuously in northern Iraq after July 2002, working under extremely arduous conditions, far from any military support, and in constant danger from Saddam's security forces. Nonetheless, they produced some extraordinary successes. They managed to recruit whole networks of Iraqi agents dedicated to helping us overthrow Saddam's regime.

One group of Iraqis, united by religious affiliations, was particularly important. Once we were able to convince the group's leaders that this time the United States was serious about getting rid of Saddam, and, not coincidentally, once we provided their leaders a couple million dollars to demonstrate our resolve, they began to produce highly actionable intelligence. The group secretly brought in four Iraqi military officers a week to be debriefed by the CIA NILE team. The head of the religious sect, someone our guys referred to as "the Pope," sat in on the sessions. Often those being debriefed refused to answer some questions, saying that what we were asking for was "too sensitive." Each time, "the Pope" would interrupt. "You will answer the question!" he would instruct, and they would obey. Every military officer we debriefed told us that Saddam did indeed possess WMD.

One early windfall came when a member of the group handed us a CD-ROM that was essentially a personnel roster of Saddam's Special Security Organization. We cross-checked the list against some of the names we already knew. It proved legitimate and enabled us to identify and expose several double agents that the Iraqi intelligence apparatus was trying to infiltrate into our midst.

Other members of this network gave us the locations of Iraqi missile emplacements and would tell us precisely when the batteries would be tested. Using U.S. reconnaissance aircraft, we were able to validate that the information we were given was accurate. The missiles were precisely where our sources told us we would find them. As a result, the U.S. military was able to make short work of eliminating Saddam's surface-to-air missiles when the shooting war started.

In the run-up to the war, the United States had promised to deliver a large amount of weapons to the two main Kurdish factions in northern Iraq (the PUK and the KDP) so that they could effectively join in the coming fight. Obtaining the weapons was not a problem for us, but getting them there was another matter. The Turks refused to allow the weapons to transit their country.

CIA then chartered several large transport aircraft but kept getting turned down when we requested overflight rights from all the neighboring countries. The Kurds were exasperated at the delay. "Where are the weapons you promised us?" they asked over and over again. We had no satisfactory answer. Finally, in February 2003, about a month before the start of the war, Tom S., the head of our NILE team in Suleimaniya, was told by the local PUK representative, "Never mind." He was stunned to watch as trucks rolled up to a warehouse only fifty feet from his base and tons of weapons were delivered to the Kurds by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The NILE team stayed in close contact with Langley, pa.s.sing back to headquarters hundreds of intelligence reports. In turn, they would be kept apprised of what was going on in Washington. In one conversation, operations officers in Washington told the field of a major development back home. The Starbucks at CIA headquarters had just switched over to a twenty-four-hour-a-day operation. Agency officers in the field speculated that this move signaled an imminent start to the war, and they were right.

Operation Iraqi Freedom began a little bit earlier than we antic.i.p.ated because of a tip-off from one of the NILE's best sources on the possible whereabouts of Public Enemy Number One: Saddam Hussein. Some of the group's members were involved in providing communications for top Iraqi officials, including Saddam. A status board in the regime's communications headquarters showed green lights when Iraqi networks were functioning correctly and red lights when they were not. Generally, the lights were green. Our source noticed that Saddam's security forces always cut off communications in the areas where he was about to travel-presumably to prevent disloyal military personnel from revealing his whereabouts to enemies.

Temporarily cutting off communication, however, caused red lights to go on near Saddam's intended destination. Over time our source was able to confirm his suspicions. The red lights would go on, and he would later learn that Saddam had been at that location. Saddam would leave and the green lights would return. Thanks to this glitch in the system, the status board was basically broadcasting Saddam's whereabouts.

Two days before a U.S. deadline for Iraqi compliance was to expire, our source got wind of a possible meeting that evening at Dora Farms, an estate owned by Saddam's wife. Although it was unclear who was going to be present, indications were that Saddam's sons and perhaps the entire family might be planning a meeting there, presumably to discuss what might happen should the United States invade.

Our source relayed this news to the NILE team in northern Iraq. They immediately flashed the news back to headquarters and to the CIA liaison with Gen. Tommy Franks, in Doha, Qatar.

The next morning, March 19, the CIA officer briefed Franks on the previous evening's intelligence. Later that evening, our source rang in again. The red lights on the status board were once more showcasing Dora Farms. Odds were that the Iraqi leader would be going there again that evening. Other human sources involved in providing security near Dora Farms had also heard that a major meeting of Saddam's family might happen at the farm that night.

At that point, we ordered U.S. overhead reconnaissance to examine the site closely. What we saw was a large contingent of security vehicles, precisely the kinds that would typically precede and accompany Saddam's movements, hidden under trees at the farm.

It just seemed too good a scenario to pa.s.s up, so I called Don Rumsfeld and asked if we could come brief him right away on something potentially significant. He said yes, by all means. I gathered John McLaughlin and the head of our Iraq Operations Group and we made our way to the garage. En route we ran into Steve Kappes, the number-two in our Directorate of Operations. "Come with us," I shouted, and we dragged him into the elevator. We whisked Steve into our armored SUV and roared off the CIA compound before he could find out where we were going or why.

When we got to the Pentagon, we were immediately ushered into Rumsfeld's s.p.a.cious office. We quickly laid out the facts for him. He understood the importance in an instant and said, "We've got to take this downtown." Seconds later he was on the phone and had arranged for all of us to see the president right away. Back in the SUV, we sped off to the White House, but Rumsfeld's limo and accompanying security vehicles handily beat us there.

We got right in to see the president. The vice president, Andy Card, and Condi Rice were already there, and before long the president asked that Colin Powell join us. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, d.i.c.k Myers, had come along with Secretary Rumsfeld.

In the private dining room just off of the Oval Office, we rolled out some maps and briefed the president on the intelligence we had. We were honest with him about the limits of our knowledge. We thought the information was pretty good-very good, as these things go-but we could not guarantee that the information was not wrong. Nor could we swear that this wasn't a trick, or prove that Saddam hadn't moved an orphanage onto the site to set us up for a PR disaster. Ultimately, deciding to strike would not be an easy call.

We told the president that we were unlikely to get any additional information to help him make the decision. Then, moments later, we got more. A source providing security on the scene had gotten another call out. He said that there were rumors among his colleagues that Saddam himself might show up between 3:00 and 3:30 A.M. A.M., Baghdad time.

Soon another report came in. Real-time intelligence reports arriving in the middle of a crisis happen all the time in Hollywood, but this is highly unusual in reality. The chief of our Iraq Operations Group was called away from the Oval Office to take a secure telephone call at the desk of the president's scheduler. The latest information said that whoever was going to be there would be in a malja malja-an Arabic word that could mean "bas.e.m.e.nt" or "place of refuge." If it were a bunker, cruise missiles would not be able to penetrate it. That meant that manned bombers would be required as well.

Clearly, we were on the brink of a momentous decision. What wasn't clear was whether it would be a good or bad one. B-2 bombers would have to be employed before Iraq's air defenses could be neutralized. The air crews would have to rely on stealth and surprise to survive such a mission. This upped the stakes.

The president took all the information in and polled those of us present for our thoughts. You could see him moving from the information-gathering mode to the decision-making mode. Then he moved behind his Oval Office desk and ordered that the strike go ahead. Karen Hughes and Dan Bartlett started crafting remarks for a presidential announcement a few hours hence, announcing the strike and the fact that the war had commenced.

Back in Doha, Central Command was putting together a strike package. Cruise missiles had to be launched hours ahead of the desired time of impact. Meanwhile, targets were being pa.s.sed to B-2s already aloft and carrying bunker-busting bombs. Dora Farms was a large complex with a number of buildings. Tommy Franks made a decision to take off the targeting list the villa that was a.s.sociated with Saddam's wife. He was concerned that the building would be full of women and children and he didn't want to increase the likelihood of unintentional collateral damage. We anxiously waited for the results of the attack, hoping that through some miracle the war might be concluded with a minimum loss of life or destruction.

Several hours later, some forty cruise missiles and a number of bombs from the B-2s smashed into the facility. Before long, the first intelligence reports from the scene started coming in. One of our sources was killed in the attack, and two others escaped and deserted their military units. (Their wives were later reportedly tortured by Saddam's henchmen.) As daylight broke in Baghdad, another of our sources reported to us that he had spotted someone who looked to be Saddam being pulled from the rubble, looking blue. That person, he said, was loaded into an ambulance and spirited away. For several hours we had reason to hope that our goal of regime change might have happened in the first seconds of the war.

Unfortunately, it was not to be. The next morning we brought to the Oval Office overhead imagery of Dora Farms. It was clear that a large villa on the compound was still intact. Had Saddam and his sons escaped death in the one building scratched from the target list? We were told after the fact that there had been a meeting of senior Ba'ath Party officials at Dora Farms that evening, but apparently, despite the red lights on the status board, Saddam was not among those who attended. We were confident that the technical source was telling us what he believed to be true. The second source who reported having seen Saddam being pulled from the rubble, however, was probably embellishing his story. When Agency officers were able to reach Dora Farms a few weeks later, they determined that the source could not have seen what he reported from his vantage point.

Given the same information and the same circ.u.mstances, I still would have recommended to the president that he authorize the strike. As to how history might have changed had we been able to remove Saddam on the first night of the war, all we have to go on are questions. How many lives might have been saved? How much damage would have been averted? Without Saddam lingering in the shadows, would the conditions that sp.a.w.ned an insurgency have flourished? We will never know. We do know that many Iraqi military members told us that they would never work with us as long as Saddam was alive because they feared his coming back to power more than they feared the United States.

Since the long-shot "regime decapitation" failed, the invasion of Iraq proceeded as planned. Inside CENTCOM headquarters and at CIA, plasma screens called "Blue Force Trackers" showed the positions not only of U.S. and allied military units, but also of CIA officers in the field and of the Iraqi sources who were feeding real-time intelligence to the war fighters. Constantly updated, these screens helped prevent attacking U.S. military forces from accidentally targeting our own forward-deployed personnel.

One of our prewar objectives in the south had been to get two Iraqi divisions opposing us out of the fight. Up to 90 percent of these divisions were populated with Shia. One Iraqi Shia whom we had recruited to conduct sabotage operations was a veteran of the first Gulf War and had many contacts in these Iraqi divisions. Through smuggling networks, we sent in money and phones for him to reach out to relatives and members of his tribe. The military gave us permission to tell these divisions that the United States would provide an unmistakable sign that hostilities were about to commence. When they saw it, they were instructed to change out of their uniforms and go home.

The sign was indeed unmistakable. Napalm and artillery were fired on top of Mount Jebel Sinam in southern Iraq. As U.S. forces drove through the foxholes and pillboxes of Iraqi divisions, they found weapons, equipment, and uniforms left behind. Any resistance encountered in Nasiriyah came from the Fedayeen Saddam, a group of Ba'athist thugs loyal to Saddam. We had not counted on the Fedayeen being as strong as it was. Our own Iraqi sources and contacts had dismissed them as an ineffective fighting force.

The invasion was a huge initial success. Iraqi military resistance melted, the regime dispersed, oil fields stayed largely undamaged. But as U.S. and allied forces streaked toward and into Baghdad, a giant sucking sound could be heard in their wake. Clearly, the Coalition lacked adequate troop strength to secure the flanks of the attacking forces. The hope had been that the speed of the advance and the "shock and awe" of the strike would render enemy forces docile, and that, freed from the yoke of oppression, the Iraqis would allow peace and stability to break out. The reality was somewhat different.

Some of our intelligence networks-scores of human a.s.sets in key locations-were reporting to us that the war was not having that much of an impact on the average Iraqi. In some ways, U.S. military precision was too good. Air strikes were so carefully targeted that Iraqi citizens took to referring to it as the "Disney war"-a lot of noise and lights but nothing that was having a significant impact. Indeed, until U.S. troops showed up in Baghdad, many Iraqis did not believe a full-scale invasion was actually under way.

An old axiom holds that no military plan survives its first contact with the enemy. Parts of this U.S. plan, though, unraveled long before that. Many months in advance of the start of the war, a U.S. Army colonel visited CIA headquarters and told our Iraq Operations Group staff that he had been charged with putting together a fighting force of Iraqi exiles-something he called the Iraqi Freedom Force. The plan, this colonel said, was to train and equip a full division, about fifteen thousand men. Some of our more seasoned Iraqi hands told him that this was fantasy, that he would be lucky if he could get a thousand men. No, we were a.s.sured, a force of twelve to fifteen thousand was entirely doable if the United States focused on it, and for that the colonel offered no less an authority than Ahmed Chalabi.

One of the most controversial characters in the Iraq drama, Chalabi was an emigre whose family had left Iraq in 1958, when he was just a boy. He grew up in Great Britain and the United States. Chalabi had almost no following in Iraq but quite a large one among some circles in the U.S. government. An extremely bright man with a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, Chalabi is slick, charming, and talks a great game. In the late 1980s he was tried and convicted in absentia of bank fraud in Jordan. Following the first Gulf War, he was instrumental in creating, with CIA a.s.sistance, the Iraqi National Congress. But in the ensuing years, CIA found him to be a most unreliable partner. Although CIA came to take everything we heard from Chalabi with a healthy dose of skepticism, others, such as the vice president, Paul Wolfowitz, and Doug Feith, welcomed his views.

Agency officers again suggested caution to the colonel. Many people will tell you they will sign up for such an adventure, but when it comes down to leaving their comfortable homes in Europe, elsewhere in the Middle East, and in the United States, the reality will be quite different. The colonel, however, would not be dissuaded, and so the INC reportedly started distributing in the mosques of Europe applications for joining the Iraqi Freedom Force. The response was even worse than we had predicted; only a handful of people signed up. By the fall of 2002, Agency officers suggested to DOD that they sc.r.a.p the idea of a fighting force of Iraqi exiles and focus instead on identifying a reasonable number of people-perhaps twenty-five-who could do something useful, such as serve as translators or interpreters. We were scoffed at once again. By the time the war started, what had once been envisioned as a division amounted to seventy-seven poorly trained individuals.

I thought we had heard the end of them, but we had not. On Friday, April 5, 2003, I was stunned to learn that the U.S. military had airlifted into southern Iraq hundreds of members of the Iraqi Freedom Force, led by Ahmed Chalabi. I was attending an NSC Princ.i.p.als Committee meeting when someone simply informed us that Chalabi had landed in Nasiriya, 230 miles south of Baghdad. If there had been any discussion of the wisdom of introducing Chalabi and his contingent into the ongoing fight, it had not been conducted within my earshot or that of any of my senior personnel. Long after I left office I heard that Chalabi had been lobbying senior Central Command generals to transport him and his supporters into the war zone so that they could legitimize themselves. Senior CENTCOM officials turned down this request on the night of April 4. When they woke up April 5, they found that their orders had apparently been countermanded by Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon.

Just as mysterious as how Chalabi had gotten there was the question of where the troops had come from. According to the press accounts, Chalabi's meager band of seventy-seven would-be warriors suddenly numbered "hundreds" of fighters. We later learned that he had paid many former Badr Corps members to swell his ranks. (The Badr Corps was created by former Iraqi Shia military men who had defected during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and had been operating as a militia in Iran with the support and backing of Tehran.) As a fighting force, the IFF proved to be totally f.e.c.kless. Some of its members, however, evolved into a private militia for Chalabi, and set about commandeering property, vehicles, and wealth for the use of his Iraqi National Congress. We weren't the only ones bewildered by the arrival of Chalabi's small private army. At the time, one Iraqi asked a senior CIA official a pertinent question: "I thought Chalabi ran a political party? In the United States do your political parties have their own militias?"

Despite such distractions, the plan to take Baghdad was executed with precision. The men and women of the U.S. military, their allies, and our intelligence officers deserve huge credit for their skill, courage, compa.s.sion, and restraint. CIA teams entered Baghdad by April 7. On the eighth, Saddam's government essentially ceased to exist. On a scale of one to ten, the plan to capture the country scored at least an eight. Unfortunately the plan for "the day after" charitably was a two. The war, in short, went great, but peace was h.e.l.l.

CHAPTER 22

The Hunt for WMD

Sometime around the end of May, shortly after declaring an end to major combat operations in Iraq, I was with President Bush in the Oval Office when he described a meeting he had recently had with Jerry Bremer and Tommy Franks. The president said he had asked them who was in charge of the hunt for weapons of ma.s.s destruction. "They went..." the president said, then took his two index fingers and pointed left and right, suggesting that both Bremer and Franks pointed at each other. Not a good sign. The president looked at me and said, "As a result, you are now in charge, George."

The Pentagon was still calling the shots in Iraq-that hadn't changed-but it already had enough to do on the ground and was more than happy to see CIA shoulder the responsibility of the WMD hunt. Logistically, this was a little tricky. Military personnel would have to do the lion's share of the actual searching and provide almost all of the physical security for those engaging in the mission. To get around that hurdle, we carefully negotiated a memorandum of understanding with DOD, spelling out how a senior advisor appointed by me would work with, but not command, what was called the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), which would stay technically under the command of a two-star general reporting to the secretary of defense. For those who haven't lived and worked inside the Beltway, such issues might seem minor or arcane, but sorting out lines of authority and chains of command can be some of the most difficult tasks to handle inside a bureaucracy.

The size of the WMD-hunt would prove mammoth. Iraq had 130 known ammunition depot sites, two of them roughly equal to the square mileage of Manhattan. As many as 1,400 people were attached to the ISG at any single time, mostly Americans but also Brits and Australians. People often cite that number with disapproval-that so many people were dedicated to this mission in a war zone. In truth, the actual commitment was much smaller. The size of the ISG varied considerably over the months, and most of its personnel were engaged in support activities-logistics, security, and admin-for the between 100 and 200 core specialists trained to collect and a.n.a.lyze information related to WMD.

A lot of time had been lost. The major fighting in Iraq had been over for two months, and we were only now really getting organized to look for the WMD that the U.S. government had cited as a primary justification for having gone to war. In that time, Iraqis had been deliberately destroying records, other potential evidence was being carted off by looters, and still more Iraqi government files were being seized by the truckload by groups such as the Iraqi National Congress (INC)-raising questions about the validity of any information that might later be discovered in those doc.u.ments.

As we were grappling with how to organize and conduct such a search, and with finding someone to lead it, David Kay visited CIA headquarters to read a paper and consult with someone on the National Intelligence Council. At the time, his appearance seemed a gift from heaven, but appearances can sometimes be deceiving.

Kay, a former UN weapons inspector, had just returned from Iraq, where he had served as a consultant for NBC. While he was there, a trailer was found near Mosul in northern Iraq in late April that looked remarkably like the mobile biological weapons facilities featured in Colin Powell's UN speech and in our NIE. Kay was interviewed on NBC Nightly News NBC Nightly News on May 11, 2003. Crawling around in the trailer and explaining to the reporter how it supposedly worked, Kay said that after personally examining the vehicle, he was sure "there could be no other use" for it other than to produce biological weapons. He expressed this view again on June 8 on CNN, saying that alternative theories "did not pa.s.s the laugh test," including the idea that the trailers might have been designed to produce hydrogen for meteorological balloons (ironically, the use judged most likely by Kay's successor, Charles Duelfer, a year or so later). Kay could not have appeared more certain, and his confidence seemed to recommend him as an expert who could sort through all of this. on May 11, 2003. Crawling around in the trailer and explaining to the reporter how it supposedly worked, Kay said that after personally examining the vehicle, he was sure "there could be no other use" for it other than to produce biological weapons. He expressed this view again on June 8 on CNN, saying that alternative theories "did not pa.s.s the laugh test," including the idea that the trailers might have been designed to produce hydrogen for meteorological balloons (ironically, the use judged most likely by Kay's successor, Charles Duelfer, a year or so later). Kay could not have appeared more certain, and his confidence seemed to recommend him as an expert who could sort through all of this.

Several days later, John McLaughlin and I met with Kay in my office. He shared with us his impressions of the environment in Iraq and the likelihood that we would eventually find the WMD that all of us expected to be there. I realize now that Kay's public statements and testimony before the war had actually been more confident than even the most a.s.sertive statements in our NIE, but back then, all I was certain of was that (a) he talked a good game and had previous experience in Iraq, and (b) we needed to move quickly. Kay was appointed my senior advisor on June 11, and headed out to the region a few weeks later, after getting briefed in Washington.

Our instructions to Kay were simple. Find the truth. We promised him the resources he needed and an absence of interference from the home front. I am confident that we delivered both.

Kay apparently had the impression that coming to a resolution on the presence of WMD was not going to be as difficult a task as it turned out to be. But Saddam had been playing cat-and-mouse with his weapons programs for more than a decade. That should have been warning enough. Worse, the deteriorating security conditions in Iraq made searching for anything almost a life-and-death struggle. On arriving in Iraq, Kay set up shop inside the heavily protected Green Zone, in central Baghdad. The majority of his troops, meanwhile, were based on the outskirts of town, at the far more combustible Baghdad International Airport.

One of the first things we did when Kay signed on was to streamline Washington's role in managing the process. While the hunt was still in DOD hands, there had been multiple meetings, phone calls, and video conferences on the issue. We cut this back to one weekly secure video conference with Kay and his team in Baghdad and occasional e-mail exchanges. We wanted to get out of the way and let the experts do their jobs. I attended many of these weekly video gatherings but let John McLaughlin preside most of the time. Kay and his team would report on their activities and needs, and we would do our best to provide what they needed or to sort out problems on the Washington end.

Three months after arriving in Iraq, Kay returned to the United States to deliver an interim report to Congress. He prepared this report entirely on his own, and John McLaughlin stressed that Kay was to have the final word on everything in it. We protected Kay's independence fiercely. Of course, the White House was intensely interested in what Kay would say. But McLaughlin did not let anyone there see Kay's report until the morning it was delivered-not because we feared the White House would try to change it; we simply wanted to be able to say unequivocally that no policy official had even had the opportunity opportunity to tinker with it. to tinker with it.

In Kay's October 2 testimony before Congress, he described how Iraq had intentionally misled United Nations inspectors prior to the war. He stated that the ISG had discovered evidence of Saddam Hussein's intent to develop WMD and of his having retained some capacity to do so. Kay told reporters that it might take an additional "six to nine months" of searching to reach more definitive conclusions.

Discovered were dozens of activities related to a WMD program as well as significant amounts of equipment. He also talked about finding a clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses run by the old Iraqi intelligence service. These facilities contained equipment for continuing research into chemical and biological warfare. Strains of organisms were found concealed in a scientist's home, at least one of which could have been used to produce biological weapons.

On the nuclear front, doc.u.ments and equipment useful in resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation had been found buried outside scientists' homes and elsewhere. Just as alarming, the ISG had found plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1,000 kilometers-well beyond the 150-kilometer range limit imposed by the UN. Missiles of that range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets throughout the Middle East, including Ankara, Cairo, and Abu Dhabi. The ISG had also uncovered evidence of clandestine Iraqi attempts between late 1999 and 2002 to obtain prohibited North Korean ballistic missile technology.

Collectively, Kay's interim testimony was a d.a.m.ning portrait of deception and dissembling by a man capable of horrendous acts. Yet in the resulting headlines, the press stressed only what Kay had not not found-stockpiles of WMD. I recall Kay expressing frustration at this-he thought that any of the things he found-stockpiles of WMD. I recall Kay expressing frustration at this-he thought that any of the things he had had found would have been headlines had they been known before the war. found would have been headlines had they been known before the war.

None of it, however, was the "smoking gun" that would justify our NIE estimates and validate the allegations in Powell's UN speech. Much of the media focus on Kay's testimony regarded his still being unable to come to any final resolution of the purpose of that mobile biological weapons trailer-the one he had already told NBC Nightly News NBC Nightly News and CNN had no possible function other than biological weapons production. and CNN had no possible function other than biological weapons production.