The Spies Who Pushed for War
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 17 July 2003
Julian Borger re****ts on the shadow rightwing intelligence network set
up
in Wa****ngton to second-guess the CIA and deliver a justification for
toppling Saddam Hussein by force.
As the CIA director, George Tenet, arrived at the Senate yesterday to
give
secret testimony on the Niger uranium affair, it was becoming increasingly
clear in Wa****ngton that the scandal was only a small, well-do***ented
symptom of a complete breakdown in US intelligence that helped steer
America
into war.
It represents the Bush administration's second catastrophic intelligence
failure. But the CIA and FBI's inability to prevent the September 11
attacks
was largely due to internal institutional weaknesses.
This time the implications are far more damaging for the White House,
which stands accused of politicising and contaminating its own source of
intelligence.
According to former Bush officials, all defence and intelligence
sources,
senior administration figures created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts
staffed mainly by ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its
military counterpart, the Defence Intelligence Agency.
The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by the
defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and
operated under the patronage of hardline conservatives in the top rungs of
the administration, the Pentagon and at the White House, including
Vice-President Dick Cheney.
The ideologically driven network functioned like a shadow government,
much
of it off the official payroll and beyond congressional oversight. But it
proved powerful enough to prevail in a struggle with the State Department
and the CIA by establi****ng a justification for war.
Mr Tenet has officially taken responsibility for the president's
unsubstantiated claim in January that Saddam Hussein's regime had been
trying to buy uranium in Africa, but he also said his agency was under
pressure to justify a war that the administration had already decided on.
How much Mr Tenet reveals of where that pressure was coming from could
have lasting political fallout for Mr Bush and his re-election prospects,
which only a few weeks ago seemed impregnable. As more Americans die in
Iraq
and the reasons for the war are revealed, his victory in 2004 no longer
looks like a foregone conclusion.
The White House counter-attacked yesterday when new chief spokesman,
Scott
McClellan, accused critics of "politicising the war" and trying to
"rewrite
history". But the Democratic leader****p kept up its questions over the
White
House role.
The president's most trusted adviser, Mr Cheney, was at the shadow
network's sharp end. He made several trips to the CIA in Langley,
Virginia,
to demand a more "forward-leaning" interpretation of the threat posed by
Saddam. When he was not there to make his influence felt, his chief of
staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was. Such hands-on involvement in the
processing of intelligence data was unprecedented for a vice-president in
recent times, and it put pressure on CIA officials to come up with the
appropriate results.
Another frequent visitor was Newt Gingrich, the former Republican party
leader who resurfaced after September 11 as a Pentagon "consultant" and a
member of its unpaid defence advisory board, with influence far beyond his
official title.
An intelligence official confirmed Mr Gingrich made "a couple of visits"
but said there was nothing unusual about that.
Rick Tyler, Mr Gingrich's spokesman, said: "If he was at the CIA he was
there to listen and learn, not to persuade or influence."
Mr Gingrich visited Langley three times before the war, and according to
accounts, the political veteran sought to browbeat analysts into
toughening
up their *****sments of Saddam's menace.
Mr Gingrich gained access to the CIA headquarters and was listened to
because he was seen as a personal emissary of the Pentagon and, in
particular, of the OSP.
In the days after September 11, Mr Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul
Wolfowitz, mounted an attempt to include Iraq in the war against terror.
When the established agencies came up with nothing concrete to link Iraq
and
al-Qaida, the OSP was given the task of looking more carefully.
William Luti, a former navy officer and ex-aide to Mr Cheney, runs the
day-to-day operations, answering to Douglas Feith, a defence
undersecretary
and a former Reagan official.
The OSP had access to a huge amount of raw intelligence. It came in part
from "re****t officers" in the CIA's directorate of operations whose job is
to sift through re****ts from agents around the world, filtering out the
unsubstantiated and the incredible. Under pressure from the hawks such as
Mr
Cheney and Mr Gingrich, those officers became reluctant to discard
anything,
no matter how far-fetched. The OSP also sucked in countless tips from the
Iraqi National Congress and other opposition groups, which were viewed
with
far more scepticism by the CIA and the state department.
There was a mountain of do***entation to look through and not much time.
The administration wanted to use the momentum gained in Afghanistan to
deal
with Iraq once and for all. The OSP itself had less than 10 full-time
staff,
so to help deal with the load, the office hired scores of tem****ary
"consultants". They included lawyers, congressional staffers, and policy
wonks from the numerous rightwing thinktanks in Wa****ngton. Few had
experience in intelligence.
"Most of the people they had in that office were off the books, on
personal services contracts. At one time, there were over 100 of them,"
said
an intelligence source. The contracts allow a department to hire
individuals, without specifying a job description.
As John Pike, a defence analyst at the thinktank GlobalSecurity.org, put
it, the contracts "are basically a way they could pack the room with their
little friends".
"They surveyed data and picked out what they liked," said Gregory
Thielmann, a senior official in the state department's intelligence bureau
until his retirement in September. "The whole thing was bizarre. The
secretary of defence had this huge defence intelligence agency, and he
went
around it."
In fact, the OSP's activities were a com plete mystery to the DIA and
the
Pentagon.
"The iceberg analogy is a good one," said a senior officer who left the
Pentagon during the planning of the Iraq war. "No one from the military
staff heard, saw or discussed anything with them."
The civilian agencies had the same impression of the OSP sleuths. "They
were a pretty shadowy presence," Mr Thielmann said. "Normally when you
compile an intelligence do***ent, all the agencies get together to discuss
it. The OSP was never present at any of the meetings I attended."
Democratic congressman David Obey, who is investigating the OSP, said:
"That office was charged with collecting, vetting and disseminating
intelligence completely outside of the normal intelligence apparatus. In
fact, it appears that information collected by this office was in some
instances not even shared with established intelligence agencies and in
numerous instances was passed on to the national security council and the
president without having been vetted with anyone other than political
appointees."
The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House
not
only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad
hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel
specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with
more
alarmist re****ts on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.
"None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through
normal channels," said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they
were waved in on Mr Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual
forms.
The exchange of information continued a long-standing relation****p Mr
Feith and other Wa****ngton neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud
party.
In 1996, he and Richard Perle - now an influential Pentagon figure -
served as advisers to the then Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu. In a
policy
paper they wrote, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the
Realm, the two advisers said that Saddam would have to be destroyed, and
Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would have to be overthrown or
destabilised, for Israel to be truly safe.
The Israeli influence was revealed most clearly by a story floated by
unnamed senior US officials in the American press, suggesting the reason
that no banned weapons had been found in Iraq was that they had been
smuggled into Syria. Intelligence sources say that the story came from the
office of the Israeli prime minister.
The OSP absorbed this heady brew of raw intelligence, rumour and plain
disinformation and made it a "product", a prodigious stream of re****ts
with
a guaranteed reader****p in the White House. The primary customers were Mr
Cheney, Mr Libby and their closest ideological ally on the national
security
council, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice's deputy.
In turn, they leaked some of the claims to the press, and used others as
a
stick with which to beat the CIA and the state department analysts,
demanding they investigate the OSP leads.
The big question looming over Congress as Mr Tenet walked into his
closed-door session yesterday was whether this shadow intelligence
operation
would survive national scrutiny and who would pay the price for allowing
it
to help steer the country into war.
A former senior CIA official insisted yesterday that Mr Feith, at least,
was "finished" - but that may be wishful thinking by a rival organisation.
As he prepares for re-election, Mr Bush may opt to tough it out, rather
than acknowledge the severity of the problem by firing loyalists. But in
that case, it will inevitably be harder to re-establish confidence in the
intelligence on which the White House is basing its decisions, and the
world's sole superpower risks stumbling onwards half-blind, unable to
distinguish real threats from phantoms.
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