New Yorker article, continued (Part Two)
>>Tenet, while admitting that his agency made mistakes, said that excessive focus on such mistakes obscures larger truths. "People can fault individual decisions," he said. "But it's vignette-driven. 'Why didn't you watch-list these particular guys?' But with these vignettes you're going to miss the bigger picture—that they're going to come in using different techniques next time." Many intelligence officials assume that watch lists have only limited value; terrorists, they say, will travel to post-9/11 America using false documents.
The desire to identify the people responsible for intelligence failure is natural, but it may be irrelevant, according to Thomas Schelling, who teaches at the University of Maryland. "I tend to think there's too much interest in finding blame for September 11th," Schelling said. "Surprise has two very different meanings. One is 'I didn't expect it,' and the other is 'I couldn't anticipate everything.' It seems to me that if smart people had somehow made a list of one hundred potential Al Qaeda targets, and then from that figured out that they might hijack airplanes and use them in attacks, they would still have a hard time telling the officials of airports what to be on the lookout for, or what these men would need to hijack a plane. I tend to think that what Al Qaeda did was beautifully conceived but not terribly difficult to do. Once they had the concept, the rest was easy."
On the question of failure of imagination, Tenet seemed to disagree with Rumsfeld. "We don't have an absence of imagination," he said. "What we have is threat fatigue. We're inundated by this stuff. We have to guard against numbness as we go through intense periods of threat reporting."
Top C.I.A. officials told me that analysts in the agency's Counterterrorist Center had imagined the airborne suicide attack as a tactic, but had also imagined dozens of other ways in which terrorists could strike American targets. I asked one official why his analysts could not match a target to a technique—why they couldn't guess that the World Trade Center, which had been the target of one terrorist attack, in 1993, would be the target of another, from the air. "We had reports over the last six or eight years that Al Qaeda people are interested in aviation," this person told me. "You have concrete knowledge that the World Trade Center is a target. What keeps those two pieces of information from joining? Well, if we took every credible tactic we hear about and applied it to every credible target, the alarm would be sounded every day."
But Tenet said that his analysts have been encouraged to extend themselves, to lower the threshold for what is credible. In intelligence, he said, "very few snippets of evidence can take you to a judicial conclusion. Nothing is crystal clear." He's also pushing his analysts to think in different ways. "We're moving people away from linear thinking," he said, and added, "It takes years and years to walk back the risk aversion in a bureaucracy, but we're doing it."
In the ideological taxonomy of the Bush Administration,
the C.I.A., because it has long downplayed the theory of an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection, has been regarded as being on the side of the doves. The hawks have accused the C.I.A. of politicizing the intelligence process by dismissing information that would substantiate the connection—and in that way strengthen the Administration's case against Iraq.
A key moment in this argument took place one weekday last August, when a small group of Defense Department officials drove from the Pentagon to the headquarters of the C.I.A., for what they expected to be a tension-filled meeting with the agency's top analysts. Leading the Pentagon team was Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for policy, who is considered to be an Iraq hawk in the style of his superiors, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. Feith brought with him a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, Tina Shelton, and a Naval intelligence reservist, Christopher Carney. The Defense Department had asked Shelton and Carney to reëxamine evidence collected by the C.I.A. about the relationship between terrorist networks and their state sponsors, including Iraq and Al Qaeda, and to re-analyze the data in the manner suggested by Rumsfeld's ballistic-missile-threat commission; that is, to build a hypothesis, and then see if the data supported the hypothesis, rather than the reverse. "If you take thirty movie reviewers and show them the same movie," Feith told me, "they will understand its meaning in thirty different ways, and they will even understand the plot in different ways, and I'm not talking about watching 'Rashomon.' "
The presentation was made in a small conference room, and as many as twenty C.I.A. executives and analysts crowded in, along with the director of the D.I.A., Vice- Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, and Tenet himself. According to several people with knowledge of the meeting, Carney and Shelton told the C.I.A. officials that, based on their own reading of agency intelligence, it appeared likely that Saddam's relationship with Al Qaeda was serious and that it dated back to the terror group's early days in Sudan. Bin Laden had his headquarters in Khartoum in the early nineteen-nineties, before moving to Afghanistan, in 1996. "These people weren't hired to do alternative analysis," Feith claimed. "But once they read deeply into the material, which, by the way, was good C.I.A. material, they came up with some fresh connections and ideas and analysis." Feith went on, "When we fed this analysis back into the C.I.A., they were happy to receive it. Tenet understands, as Rumsfeld understands, that an extra set of eyes on intelligence material is a good thing."
The Defense team had expected resistance from C.I.A. officials, but, to the surprise of many in the room, Tenet was open to the Pentagon analysis. However, one top official familiar with Tenet's thinking told me that early last year, well before the August meeting, C.I.A. officials had asked the agency's Red Cell team, an internal think tank, to undertake "a different sort of analysis, 'go a little more hypothetical on the question, and see what you come up with.' They gave us a report, and it seemed pretty hypothetical. But then it stopped seeming so hypothetical."
There's nothing new about hypothesis-driven analysis. Angelo Codevilla, a Boston University professor of international relations and a former senior staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, pointed to the risks—in particular that "you put the monkey on the back of the policymaker. This is dangerous if you have policymakers who don't want to hear more than one opinion. George Bush, just like his father, doesn't like to be faced with choices." Codevilla also said that analysts could "stray too far from the data," adding that the real problem is that "the C.I.A. has not been gathering enough quality data." According to a senior Administration official, the C.I.A. itself is split on the question of a Baghdad-Al Qaeda connection: analysts in the agency's Near East-South Asia division discount the notion; the Counterterrorist Center supports it. The senior Administration official told me that Tenet tends to agree with the Counterterrorist Center.
When I saw Tenet, I asked if he now considered Saddam to be a primary sponsor of Al Qaeda. "Well, read my letter to Senator Graham," Tenet replied.
In October of 2002, when Bob Graham was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Tenet wrote to him, explaining the C.I.A.'s understanding of the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection. It is a curious letter, which begins with a statement that "Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW"—chemical and biological weapons—"against the United States." At the same time, Tenet said, Iraq has "provided training to Al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs." Tenet added, "Credible information indicates that Iraq and Al Qaeda have discussed safe haven and reciprocal non-aggression," and he suggested that, even without an American attack on Iraq, "Baghdad's links to terrorists will increase."
The evolution of Tenet's beliefs has made those opposed to an invasion of Iraq uneasy. Senator Graham thinks that the C.I.A.'s "evolved" understanding of the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection is the result of pressure from Rumsfeld. "Maybe the C.I.A. has been coöpted in this whole thing," Graham told me. "I'm not personalizing it to George, but institutionally the C.I.A. is being challenged by a very aggressive Defense Department."
Others who have watched Tenet, however, say that he does not trim his opinions for political reasons. "I find him to be a straightforward person on analysis," Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader, who until recently was the ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee, told me. Pelosi added that she considers Iran a greater terrorist threat than Iraq.
Tenet's thinking on the subject was deliberate,
according to several agency sources. Information gleaned from the interrogations of high-level Al Qaeda prisoners pushed Tenet to rethink the opinion, advanced by C.I.A. officials such as Paul Pillar, the National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, that ideological differences between the secular Saddam and Islamic radicals, such as Al Qaeda, made it unlikely that these two enemies of America would form an alliance. Clearly, the Rumsfeld view, which maintains that the commonly held hatred of the United States trumps ideology and theology, is ascendant, at the C.I.A. as well as at the Pentagon. Pillar himself, in a faxed comment, conceded that, "despite major differences, tactical coöperation is possible," but added that "the contingency that would be most likely to motivate Saddam to develop a relationship with radical Islamists that would be deeper than limited tactical cooperation would be a belief that he was about to lose power"—such as in a United States-led attack on Iraq.
According to several intelligence officials I spoke to, the relationship between bin Laden and Saddam's regime was brokered in the early nineteen-nineties by the then de-facto leader of Sudan, the pan-Islamist radical Hassan al-Tourabi. Tourabi, sources say, persuaded the ostensibly secular Saddam to add to the Iraqi flag the words "Allahu Akbar," as a concession to Muslim radicals.
In interviews with senior officials, the following picture emerged: American intelligence believes that Al Qaeda and Saddam reached a non-aggression agreement in 1993, and that the relationship deepened further in the mid-nineteen-nineties, when an Al Qaeda operative—a native-born Iraqi who goes by the name Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi—was dispatched by bin Laden to ask the Iraqis for help in poison-gas training. Al-Iraqi's mission was successful, and an unknown number of trainers from an Iraqi secret-police organization called Unit 999 were dispatched to camps in Afghanistan to instruct Al Qaeda terrorists. (Training in hijacking techniques was also provided to foreign Islamist radicals inside Iraq, according to two Iraqi defectors quoted in a report in the Times in November of 2001.) Another Al Qaeda operative, the Iraqi-born Mamdouh Salim, who goes by the name Abu Hajer al-Iraqi, also served as a liaison in the mid-nineteen-nineties to Iraqi intelligence. Salim, according to a recent book, "The Age of Sacred Terror," by the former N.S.C. officials Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, was bin Laden's chief procurer of weapons of mass destruction, and was involved in the early nineties in chemical-weapons development in Sudan. Salim was arrested in Germany in 1998 and was extradited to the United States. He is awaiting trial in New York on charges related to the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings; he was convicted last April of stabbing a Manhattan prison guard in the eye with a sharpened comb.
Intelligence officials told me that the agency also takes seriously reports that an Iraqi known as Abu Wa'el, whose real name is Saadoun Mahmoud Abdulatif al-Ani, is the liaison of Saddam's intelligence service to a radical Muslim group called Ansar al-Islam, which controls a small enclave in northern Iraq; the group is believed by American and Kurdish intelligence officials to be affiliated with Al Qaeda. I learned of another possible connection early last year, while I was interviewing Al Qaeda operatives in a Kurdish prison in Sulaimaniya. There, a man whom Kurdish intelligence officials identified as a captured Iraqi agent told me that in 1992 he served as a bodyguard to Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's deputy, when Zawahiri secretly visited Baghdad.
Ansar al-Islam was created on September 1, 2001, when two Kurdish radical groups merged forces. According to Barham Salih, the Prime Minister of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the group seized a chain of villages in the mountainous region outside the city of Halabja, and made a safe haven for Al Qaeda fighters. "Our intelligence information confirmed that the group was declared on September 1st at the behest of bin Laden and Al Qaeda," Prime Minister Salih told me last week, in a telephone conversation from Davos, Switzerland. "It was meant to be an alternative base of operations, since they were apparently anticipating that Afghanistan was going to become a denied area to them."
Salih also said that a month before the September 11th attacks a senior Al Qaeda operative called Abdulrahman al-Shami was dispatched from Afghanistan to the Kurdish mountain town of Biyara, to organize the Ansar al-Islam enclave. Shami was killed in November, 2001, in a battle with the pro-American forces of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
The Ansar al-Islam enclave, according to Salih and American intelligence officials, soon became the base of operations of an Al Qaeda subgroup called Jund al- Shams, or Soldiers of the Levant, which operates mainly in Jordan and Syria. Jund al-Shams is controlled by a man named Mussa'ab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian of Palestinian extraction. Zarqawi is believed by European intelligence agencies to be Al Qaeda's main specialist in chemical and biological terrorism. Zarqawi is also believed to be behind the assassination, on October 28th, of an American A.I.D. official in Jordan, and also two unsuccessful assassination attempts: last February 20th, Ali Bourjaq, a Jordanian secret-police official, escaped injury when a bomb detonated near his home; and on April 2nd gunmen opened fire on Prime Minister Salih's home in Sulaimaniya. Salih was unhurt, but five of his bodyguards were killed; two bystanders were killed in the Bourjaq assassination attempt.
The Administration believes that Zarqawi made his way to Baghdad after the United States' invasion of Afghanistan, when he was wounded. According to American sources, Zarqawi was treated in a Baghdad hospital but disappeared from Baghdad shortly after the Jordanian government asked Iraq to extradite him. American intelligence officials believe that Zarqawi was also among an unknown number of Al Qaeda terrorists who have sought refuge in the Ansar al-Islam over the past seventeen months.
Recently, I asked two former C.I.A. directors, James
Woolsey and Robert Gates, to talk about the problem of analyzing an incomplete set of evidence—the same challenge that stymied intelligence analysts in the days before December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001.
Woolsey, who served as President Clinton's first C.I.A. director, said that it is now illogical to doubt the notion that Saddam collaborates with Islamist terrorism, and that he would provide chemical or biological weapons to Al Qaeda. "At Salman Pak"—a training camp near Baghdad—"we know there were Islamist terrorists training to hijack airplanes in groups of four or five with short knives," Woolsey told me. "I mean, hello? If we had seen after December 7, 1941, a fake American battleship in a lake in northern Italy, and a group of Asian pilots training there, would we have said, 'Well, you can't prove that they were Japanese'?"
Gates, who was C.I.A. director under George H. W. Bush, said that the evidence linking Saddam to Al Qaeda is not irrefutable, but he noted that ambiguous evidence is an occupational hazard in intelligence work. Gates suggested that the current debate over Iraq's ties to terrorism is reminiscent of a debate about the Soviet Union twenty years ago. Then, he said, "you had analysts in the C.I.A. who said, 'Absolutely not, it would be contrary to their interests to support unpredictable, uncontrollable groups.' There were other analysts who said, 'Baloney.' They had a lot of good history, and circumstantial reporting on their side, but they didn't have good evidence. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, and we got hold of the East German Stasi records, we learned, of course, that both the East Germans and the Soviets were supporting Baader-Meinhof and other terrorist groups."
Gates continued, "I have always argued, in light of my fairly detailed knowledge of the shortcomings of our intelligence capabilities, that the fact that we don't have reliable human intelligence that proves something conclusively is happening is no proof at all that nothing is happening. In these situations, the evidence will almost always be ambiguous. On capabilities, it's not ambiguous. Can Saddam produce these weapons of mass destruction? Yes."
The ambiguity, Gates said, has to do with "intentions," and he went on, "If the stakes and the consequences are small, you're going to want ninety-per-cent assurance. It's a risk calculus. On the other hand, if your worry is along the lines of what Rumsfeld is saying—another major attack on the U.S., possibly with biological or chemical weapons—and you look at the consequences of September 11th, then the equation of risk changes. You have to be prepared to go forward with a lot lower level of confidence in the evidence you have. A fifty-per- cent chance of such an attack happening is so terrible that it changes the calculation of risk." << |
