Errors Are Seen in Early Attacks on Iraqi Leaders
June 13, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL and ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON, June 12 - The United States launched many more
failed airstrikes on a far broader array of senior Iraqi
leaders during the early days of the war last year than has
previously been acknowledged, and some caused significant
civilian casualties, according to senior military and
intelligence officials.
Only a few of the 50 airstrikes have been described in
public. All were unsuccessful, and many, including the two
well-known raids on Saddam Hussein and his sons, appear to
have been undercut by poor intelligence, current and former
government officials said.
The strikes, carried out against so-called high-value
targets during a one-month period that began on March 19,
2003, used precision-guided munitions against at least 13
Iraqi leaders, including Gen. Izzat Ibrahim, Iraq's No. 2
official, the officials said.
General Ibrahim is still at large, along with at least one
other top official who was a target of the failed raids.
That official, Maj. Gen. Rafi Abd al-Latif Tilfah, the
former head of the Directorate of General Security, and
General Ibrahim are playing a leadership role in the
anti-American insurgency, according to a briefing document
prepared last month by the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The broad scope of the campaign and its failures, along
with the civilian casualties, have not been acknowledged by
the Bush administration.
A report in December by Human Rights Watch, based on a
review of four strikes, concluded that the singling out of
Iraqi leadership had "resulted in dozens of civilian
casualties that the United States could have prevented if
it had taken additional precautions."
The poor record in the strikes has raised questions about
the intelligence they were based on, including whether that
intelligence reflected deception on the part of Iraqis, the
officials said. The March 19, 2003, attempt to kill Mr.
Hussein and his sons at the Dora Farms compound, south of
Baghdad, remains a subject of particular contention.
A Central Intelligence Agency officer reported, based
primarily on information provided by satellite telephone
from an Iraqi source, that Mr. Hussein was in an
underground bunker at the site. That prompted President
Bush to accelerate the timetable for the beginning of the
war, giving the go-ahead to strikes by precision-guided
bombs and cruise missiles, senior intelligence officials
said.
But in an interview last summer, Lt. Gen. T. Michael
Moseley, of the Air Force, who directed the air campaign
during the invasion, acknowledged that inspections after
the war had concluded that no such bunker existed. Various
internal reviews by the military and the C.I.A. have still
not resolved the question of whether Mr. Hussein was at the
location at all, according to senior military and
intelligence officials, although the C.I.A. maintains that
he was probably at Dora Farms.
One possibility, a senior intelligence official and a
senior military officer said, is that Mr. Hussein was above
ground in one of the houses that were not destroyed in the
raid.
In the raid, the Air Force primarily used deep-penetrating
munitions because of their ability to destroy an
underground bunker. The person who was the primary source
of the information about the bunker was killed in the raid,
according to intelligence officials, but had described it
using an Arabic word, manzul, that could have been
translated either as place of refuge or as bunker.
A C.I.A. officer who relayed that report from a base in
northern Iraq translated the word as bunker, said a senior
intelligence official, who confirmed a detailed report that
first appeared in "Plan of Attack," a book by the
journalist Bob Woodward.
A Warning Sign
In retrospect, the failures were an early warning sign
about the thinness of American intelligence on Iraq and on
Mr. Hussein's inner circle. Some of the officials who
survived the raids, including General Ibrahim, have become
leaders of what the Defense Intelligence Agency now
believes has been a planned anti-American insurgency,
several intelligence officials said.
"It was all just guesswork on where they were," said a
senior military officer. Another official, a senior Army
officer who served in Iraq, described early intelligence on
the Iraqi leadership as producing "a lot of dry holes."
A third senior military officer described the quantity of
"no kidding, actionable intel" as having been limited, but
added, "In a real fight, you go with what you've got."
Senior military officials said they were not sure whether
the Iraqis deliberately deceived the United States, in the
information that they provided or that was intercepted.
They described the intelligence as problematic at best, but
said intelligence agencies were engaged in a hard task.
An unclassified Air Force report issued in April 2003
categorized 50 attacks from March 19 to April 18 as having
been time-sensitive strikes on Iraqi leaders. An up-to-date
accounting posted on the Web site of the United States
Central Command shows that 43 of the top 55 Iraqi leaders
on the most-wanted list have now been taken into custody or
killed, but that none were taken into custody until April
13, 2003, and that none were killed by airstrikes.
An explicit account of the zero for 50 record in strikes on
high-value targets was provided by Marc Garlasco, a former
Defense Intelligence Agency official who headed the joint
staff's high-value targeting cell during the war. Mr.
Garlasco is now a senior military analyst for Human Rights
Watch, and he was a primary author of the December report,
"Off Target: The Conduct of the War and Civilian Casualties
in Iraq."
The broad failure rate was confirmed by several senior
military officials, including some who served in Iraq or
the region during the war, and by senior intelligence
officials.
Immediately after the March 19 attack and others, including
an April 5 strike aimed at Gen. Ali Hasan al-Majid, a top
official known as Chemical Ali for his role in the gassing
of Kurds in 1988, top American officials expressed
confidence that the strikes had been successful. On April
7, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B.
Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, played a
videotape of the strike, and Mr. Rumsfeld declared, "We
believe that the reign of terror of Chemical Ali has come
to an end."
But General Majid survived that raid and others, and was
not captured until August. Mr. Hussein was not captured
until Dec. 13, and his sons Uday and Qusay were at large
until they were killed on July 22. General Ibrahim, General
Tilfah and perhaps others who were singled out have not yet
been captured.
An unclassified analysis prepared last month by the Defense
Intelligence Agency and obtained by The New York Times
describes Mr. Ibrahim as having "assumed Saddam's duties"
as the titular head of the insurgency after Mr. Hussein's
capture. It lists General Tilfah, a cousin of Mr.
Hussein's, as one of the leaders of former government
leaders involved in the insurgency.
The Iraqi officials singled out during the war were all
from the top-55 "blacklist," which was drafted by the
C.I.A. and depicted on playing cards distributed to
American troops, military officials said.
Other leaders singled out in repeated strikes included Gen.
Abid Hamid Mahmud, Mr. Hussein's secretary and senior
bodyguard, who was taken into custody on June 16, and Mr.
Hussein's half brother Barzan Ibrahim Hasan, a presidential
adviser, according to current and former military
officials.
Rules for the Raids
General Moseley, the top Air Force commander during the war
who is now the Air Force vice chief of staff, said in the
interview last summer that commanders were required to
obtain advance approval from Mr. Rumsfeld if any planned
airstrike was likely to result in the deaths of 30 more
civilians. More than 50 such raids were proposed, and all
were approved, General Moseley said.
But raids considered time-sensitive, which included all of
those on the high-value targets, were not subject to that
constraint, according to current and former military
officials. In part for that reason, the report by Human
Rights Watch concluded, "attacks on leadership likely
resulted in the largest number of civilian deaths from the
air war."
The four case studies examined by the organization included
the failed March 19, 2003, strike on Mr. Hussein and his
sons at Dora Farms, which it said killed a civilian.
According to Human Rights Watch, a failed April 5 strike
that singled out General Majid in a residential area of
Basra killed 17 civilians; a failed April 8 strike that was
aimed at Mr. Hussein's half brother Watban Ibrahim Barzan
in Baghdad killed 6 civilians; and the second raid on Mr.
Hussein and one or both of his sons, on April 7 in the
Mansur district of Baghdad, killed an estimated 18
civilians.
In an e-mail message, Mr. Garlasco described the campaign
to attack high-value targets as "abject failure," saying,
"We failed to kill the H.V.T.'s and instead killed
civilians and engendered hatred and discontent in some of
the population."
Senior military officers said some of the strikes might
have failed because the Iraqi leaders were on the move
during the war. On occasion, they said, reports from spies
or communications intercepts may have given their locations
accurately, but the strikes may have come too late.
But according to a senior defense official and two former
intelligence officials, there were also indications that
some intelligence had been wrong, and might have reflected
deliberate disinformation from Iraqis enlisted as spies by
the United States or from Iraqis who suspected that
American intelligence agencies were listening in on their
communications.
According to a former defense official, Iraqi leaders who
were singled out included Lt. Gen. Muzahim Sab Hassan,
commander of Iraqi Air Defense Forces; Brig. Gen. Barzan
Abd Ghafur Sulayman Majid, commander of the Special
Republican Guard; Taha Yassin Ramadan, the Iraqi vice
president; Brig. Gen. Rukan Razuki Abd al-Ghafar Sulayman,
a senior bodyguard to Mr. Hussein; and Watban Ibrahim
Barzan and Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hasan, Mr. Hussein's half
brothers.
There were conflicting accounts about whether another Iraqi
leader who is still at large, Col. Hani Abd al-Latif
al-Tilfah, the director of the special security
organization under Qusay Hussein, had been a target in the
raids. The colonel, the brother of General Tilfah and
another maternal cousin of Mr. Hussein, is listed by the
D.I.A. as among the leaders of the insurgency.
Another Iraqi leader from the top 55 list who is still at
large and is identified in the D.I.A. report as a leader of
the insurgency is Abd al-Baqi Abd al-Karim al Abdallah
al-Sadun, chairman of the Baath Party regional command for
Diyala. The current and former military officials said they
had no indication that he had been a target.
Since April 2003, senior American officials have
acknowledged that the intelligence reports that placed Mr.
Hussein and at least one of his sons in the Mansur district
of Baghdad had been regarded as less than solid at the time
of that strike. Even now, a senior intelligence official
said the C.I.A. believed that Mr. Hussein was "possibly" at
the site in Mansur, which was stuck by four 2,000-pound
satellite-guided bombs.
By contrast, the intelligence reports that preceded the
March 19 strike on Dora Farms, which was carried out with
four 2,000-pound satellite-guided bombs and more than 30
Tomahawk cruise missiles, were regarded as highly credible,
according to senior intelligence officials. At the C.I.A.,
George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, told
other administration officials that he was certain that Mr.
Hussein had been killed in the raid, citing a report that
had been relayed by satellite phone to the C.I.A. officer
in northern Iraq by one Iraqi agent on the scene.
Mr. Hussein, since his capture on Dec. 13, has not directly
answered when American interrogators have sought to
determine whether he was at either location at the time of
the two strikes, according to two senior government
officials.
At the Pentagon last October, Brig. Gen. Robert W. Cone of
the Army, director of the military's Joint Center for
Lessons Learned, acknowledged that the intelligence
necessary to carry out attacks like these had not measured
up to expectations.
"When you take a large country the size of Iraq, with all
those sensors and communications, how do you get the right
information to the right person who needs it in a timely
manner?" General Cone said.
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