Excerpt from "The Dark Side."
JAMES BAMFORD, Author, The Puzzle Palace: Every morning, the Presidential Daily Brief, the PDB, will be given. It'll be given both to the president and the vice president. And Cheney complained numerous times that the information coming from the CIA was not very good.
NARRATOR: Cheney wanted information that linked Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein
JAMES BAMFORD: But they weren't getting that information from the CIA. And so he put pressure, I think, on Rumsfeld and on the Pentagon to come up with their own estimates.
...
MELVIN GOODMAN, Fmr. CIA Officer: They needed an office that would produce the intelligence that the CIA wouldn't produce. Rumsfeld said, "I can solve your problem," and he put Douglas Feith on that issue.
DANIEL BENJAMIN, National Security Council 1994-99: So they're going to do their own analysis. They're going to show what the CIA's been missing all along about the true relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda.
NARRATOR: They needed people with experience in the world of intelligence, but they hired politically connected policy analysts....
F. MICHAEL MALOOF, DoD 1982-2004: I went into the system, our classified system, to see whether we know about terrorist groups and the relationships, as well as their connection, associations with not only al Qaeda, but also with state sponsors.
NARRATOR: The information was rarely vetted. Instead, it moved up the chain of command to the office of the vice president.
MELVIN GOODMAN: And this became material that was then used, sort of in white paper-like fashion, to be leaked to journalists or to create links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.
NARRATOR: One story involved the leader of the 9/11 attacks, Mohammed Atta, who allegedly had met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague.
Vice Pres. DICK CHENEY: ["Meet the Press," December 9, 2001] It's been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service.
JOHN McLAUGHLIN, Dpty. Director, CIA 2000-04: We came to a different conclusion. We went over that every which way from Sunday. I mean, we looked at it from every conceivable angle. We peeled open the source and examined the chain of acquisition. We looked at photographs. We looked at timetables. We looked at who was where, when.
VINCENT CANNISTRARO, Fmr. CIA Officer: Very early on, both CIA and FBI knew it wasn't true because the FBI had Atta in Florida at the time.
MICHAEL F. MALOOF: And number two, I'm told there was a photograph of the meeting.
NARRATOR: The 9/11 commission report would later find that there was no photograph and Atta was not in Prague at that time.
MICHAEL F. MALOOF: And I sought to get for our people to get that photograph. They never did, to my knowledge. Or at least, they never got it so that I could see it.
NARRATOR: And despite the CIA's conclusion that the story wasn't true
Vice Pres. DICK CHENEY: Mohammed Atta, who was the lead hijacker
NARRATOR: the vice president continued to tell it.
Vice Pres. DICK CHENEY: did apparently travel to Prague and
NARRATOR: He would repeat it regularly for the next two years.
Vice Pres. DICK CHENEY: The Czechs alleged that Mohammed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack, but we've never been able to develop any more of that yet.
RICHARD CLARKE, Dir. NSC Counterterrorism 1998-01: I remember vividly, in the driveway outside of the West Wing, Scooter Libby grabbing me from the vice president's office and saying, "I hear you don't believe this report that Mohammed Atta was talking to Iraqi people in Prague." And I said, "I don't believe it because it's not true." And he said, "You're wrong. You know you're wrong. Go back and find out. Look at the rest of the reports and find out that you're wrong." And I understood what he was saying, which was, "This is a report that we want to believe, and stop saying it's not true. It's a real problem for the vice president's office that you, the counterterrorism coordinator, are walking around saying that this isn't a true report. Shut up." That's what I was being told.
MICHAEL SCHEUER, CIA 1982-2004: Tenet, to his credit, had us go back 10 years in the Agency's records and look and see what we knew about Iraq and al Qaeda. And I was available at the time and I led the effort. And we went back 10 years. We examined about 20,000 documents, probably something along the line of 75,000 pages of information. And there was no connection between Iraq and Saddam.
Lt. Gen. MICHAEL DeLONG: He saw it as his job, and he told the president, "Here's what I think." And the president didn't like it, fine. But I never saw him hold back on what I knew. He told him everything that I knew, he told the president.
INTERVIEWER: Like what?
Lt. Gen. MICHAEL DeLONG:You know, things that were going on. Here's it's the al Qaeda in Afghanistan. It's not the Iraqis. It's not the Iranians. If they do have something to do with it, it'll be a side issue, but that's not the main issue now. Boom, just like that.
INTERVIEWER: So from the very beginning, he was saying it's al Qaeda.
Lt. Gen. MICHAEL DeLONG: It's al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
INTERVIEWER: And Bush is hearing that.
Lt. Gen. MICHAEL DeLONG: Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: He was hearing that?
Lt. Gen. MICHAEL DeLONG: Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick. I mean, that here it is. Yeah. ...
MIKE SCHEUER: Clearly, by 2002 in the springtime, it was almost taken for granted that we were going to go to war with Iraq, in addition to having missed Osama bin Laden. It was a nightmare, and I know Tenet was briefed repeatedly by the head of the bin Laden department that any invasion of Iraq would break the back of our counterterrorism program. ...
Vice Pres. DICK CHENEY: [August 26, 2002, VFW address] Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions....
NARRATOR: The National Intelligence Estimate, the NIE, is the highest-level document generated by the intelligence agencies.
W. PATRICK LANG, Fmr. Def. Intel. Agency Officer: A National Intelligence Estimate becomes the truth accepted by the United States government. They hold this thing up, the NIE, and they say, "On page 6, it says so and so," and that is an irrefutable truth.
Sen. BOB GRAHAM: The answer that we got from Director Tenet is, "We've never done a National Intelligence estimate on Iraq, including its weapons of mass destruction." Stunning. We do these on almost every significant activity, much less significant than getting ready to go to war. We were flying blind.
MELVIN GOODMAN, Fmr. CIA Officer: The fact of the matter is, the CIA didn't want to produce one. The White House didn't want one because they didn't want to allow any venting of whatever opposition there was to what they wanted to be the conventional wisdom on weapons of mass destruction.
NARRATOR: And Tenet said the CIA was primarily focused on al Qaeda, not really paying attention to WMD and Iraq. ...
NARRATOR: Congress demanded that the White House prepare an NIE. Tenet was supposed to provide a tough-minded analysis of the WMD allegations in a hurry. A process that ordinarily takes months or years would be reduced to just over two weeks.
DANIEL BENJAMIN, National Security Council 1994-99: I know some of the people who did that, and it's, you know, a mind-boggling task to have to put together an NIE in that amount of time, and particularly in those kinds of very charged circumstances.
NARRATOR: Many members of the CIA believed the vice president himself was determined to control the content of the NIE. The vice president and his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, had made about 10 trips to CIA headquarters, where they personally questioned analysts.
MELVIN GOODMAN: I was at the CIA for 24 years. The only time a vice president came to the CIA building was for a ceremony, to cut a ribbon, to stand on the stage, but not to harangue analysts about finished intelligence.
W. PATRICK LANG, Fmr. Def. Intel. Agency Officer: Many, many of them have told me they were pressured. And there are a lot of ways pressure takes a lot of forms.
PAUL PILLAR, National Intel. Officer 2000-05: The questions every morning, the tasks, the requests to look into this angle one more time, turn over that rock again. If you didn't find anything last week, look again to see if there's something there for that about that connection.
VINCENT CANNISTRARO: So you start looking very hard for anything at all that will support the answer that the vice president wants, that the Defense Department wants.
PAUL PILLAR: Intelligence analysts listen to speeches and read newspapers, too, and they can see what senior policy makers are saying publicly. And they can make their own judgments about, "Well, does this really conform or does it not conform with what our analytic judgments are." And there was there was a clear tension.
[www.pbs.org: Read Pillar's extended interview]
NARRATOR: One particular Sunday morning, September 8, 2002, serves as an example. It began with a New York Times story.
"Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium."
JAMES BAMFORD: There were a number of other headlines based on faulty information that Judy Miller would write. She would go and interview a senior Bush administration official on, say, a Saturday, and it would be off the record. And then Condi Rice is on a show on Sunday morning, and she points to the paper and says
CONDOLEEZA RICE, National Security Adviser: We do know that there have been shipments going into Iraq, for instance, of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to high-quality aluminum tools that are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs.
NARRATOR: It is just before the delivery of the NIE to Congress.
Vice Pres. DICK CHENEY: ["Meet the Press," September 8, 2002] is that he now is trying through his illicit procurement network to acquire the equipment he needs to be able to enrich uranium specifically, aluminum tubes. There's a story in The New York Times this morning
CONDOLEEZZA RICE: [September 8, 2002] acquire nuclear weapons, but we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
DONALD RUMSFELD: [September 8, 2002] "Smoking gun" is an interesting phrase. It implies
NARRATOR: The media blitz, the visits by the vice president and his chief of staff some in the CIA say it was all a kind of subtle arm-twisting, but later, in a controversial report, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found no pressure.
"The committee did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments."
PAUL PILLAR: Politicization, real politicization, rarely works that way. That is to say, you know, blatant, crude, arm-twisting. It's always far more subtle.
NARRATOR: In early October, Tenet delivered the hastily produced NIE. This was the top secret NIE. Much of the evidence was outdated, from the 1990s. There were four or five new allegations. The aluminum tubes, mobile biological, chemical and nuclear programs were alleged. And there were some footnotes where technical disagreements were aired.
VINCENT CANNISTRARO: The CIA's assessment was sheep-herded by a national intelligence officer who works very closely with the vice president's office. It's a flawed fatally flawed document, and it should never had seen the light of day.
DAVID KAY: When I read the NIE, I thought they were protecting sources and methods and trying to paint just an adequate job to get past the vote, that there must be more there. When I read it in 2003, after I took this responsibility there's an old Peggy Lee song that I like that came to mind, "If That's All There Is."
NARRATOR: The NIE was kept in a locked room where Congress could read it, but few did. In mid-October, they voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Iraqi war resolution. A declassified version of the NIE, known as the "white paper," was prepared by the CIA and released three days later.
Sen. BOB GRAHAM: And one of the surprising things about it was it was of a very high production level graphs, photographs in color. It was an advocacy piece.
INTERVIEWER: What does it say to you?
Sen. BOB GRAHAM: Oh, it says to me that the decision had been made that we're going to go to war with Iraq, all of this other was just window dressing, and that the intelligence community was being used as almost a public relations operation to validate the war against Saddam Hussein.
NARRATOR: Paul Pillar, a veteran high-ranking CIA analyst, was one of the primary authors of the white paper.
PAUL PILLAR: It was clearly requested and published for policy advocacy purposes. This was not informing a decision. What was the purpose of it? The purpose was to strengthen the case for going to war with the American public. Is it proper for the intelligence community to publish papers with that purpose? I don't think so. And I regret having had a role in that.
MICHAEL SCHEUER, CIA 1982-04: Paul Pillar is a man that I have tremendous respect for and who I think is an ideal intelligence officer. If there was pressures that resulted in Mr. Pillar not being happy with what he finally authored, I can only imagine those pressures must have been extraordinary because he is a man that I would want my son to model himself after. So that to me, that says the pressure from the White House through Mr. Tenet on professional CIA officers was nearly overwhelming. ...
NARRATOR: In February of 2003, Secretary Powell arrived at the united nations to put his personal prestige on the line.
ROBIN WRIGHT, The Washington Post: Colin Powell was the most powerful voice within the administration cautioning against the dangers of going to war and the costs human, political, diplomatic. At the end of the day, however, Colin Powell is a team player. He wasn't going to walk away from the administration on the eve of going to war, which was not only abandoning his commander-in-chief, but also the troops, many of which he still knew.
COLIN POWELL, Secretary of State: [U.N., February 5, 2003] Let me turn now to nuclear weapons
NARRATOR: Powell insisted George Tenet sit in camera range right behind him. The usual allegations were made.
COLIN POWELL: Saddam Hussein is so determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb
NARRATOR: Aluminum tubes.
COLIN POWELL: that he has made repeated covert attempts to acquire high-specification aluminum tubes.
DAVID KAY, Iraq Weapons Inspector: I think the on the aluminum tubes, that test data was cooked, and it was portrayed upward in a very dishonest fashion.
NARRATOR: Curveball.
COLIN POWELL: We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails. The source was an eyewitness, an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of these facilities. He actually was present during
DAVID KAY: George Tenet knew we had no agents inside Iraq. George Tenet knew that on the case of Curveball, no American had ever talked to Curveball directly. No American had been given his name by the Germans. And you go down the line, he knew the holes in the data.
NARRATOR: And Powell used that information from Sheik al Libi, who was rendered and tortured in Egypt.
COLIN POWELL: I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to al Qaeda. Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story.
NARRATOR: But this information had been coerced out of al Libi. Eventually, he would recant and admit he made it up.
COLIN POWELL: Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option, not in a post-September 11th world.
DONALD RUMSFELD: The scenes of free Iraqis celebrating in the streets, riding American tanks, tearing down the statues of Saddam Hussein in the center of Baghdad are breathtaking.
BOB WOODWARD: Cheney has a dinner at the residence and has his chief aide, Scooter Libby, Wolfowitz, Ken Edelman and Cheney's wife. And it's a kind of celebration that they'd done it. "We got it right." And they talked at that dinner about, "We're going to find weapons of mass destruction. Don't worry," you know? And it was a celebration.
RICHARD KERR, Fmr. Deputy Director, CIA: Early on in the war, it seemed quite clear that they were not going to find major stockpiles of weapons, that we were looking at a kind of empty shelf.
NARRATOR: Finding the weapons was left to the CIA. They hired former U.N. weapons inspector David Kay. Before long, he called Tenet.
DAVID KAY: From very early on I said, "Things are not panning out the way you thought they existed here." And it was specific cases, whether we were talking about the aluminum tubes or we're talking about the nuclear program, in general, or the biological program or the chemical program.
NARRATOR: Powell received the bad news directly from Tenet.
LAWRENCE WILKERSON, Chief of Staff, State Dept. 2002-05: I remember these scenes where he would come through my door and say, "Well, George just called and he took another pillar out. Another substantial aspect of my presentation is gone." He took it like a soldier, but it was a blow. It was a blow to me. I mean, I wrote out my resignation. I put it in my center drawer, typed it myself. I wouldn't even make my staff assistant type it. "Dear President Bush, I've come to the point in my service where I no longer can serve, given the nature of your foreign policy," and so forth. "And therefore, I respectfully submit my resignation." And once a week or so, I would take it out and look at it and fold it back up carefully and put it back in my center drawer, never having the intestinal fortitude to submit it. You know, I won't speak for Colin Powell, but I'll tell you it really affected me.
DAVID KAY, Iraq Weapons Inspector 1991-92: I think it is true that George Tenet wanted to be a player and he understood that if you didn't give the policy makers what they wanted, he believed I think wrongly that you weren't a player, and therefore, your views wouldn't be taken and you wouldn't be invited into the closed meetings, et cetera. He traded integrity for access, and that's a bad bargain any time in life. It's particularly a bad bargain if you're running an intelligence agency.
Pres. GEORGE W. BUSH: [June 3, 2004] Today George Tenet, the director of the CIA, submitted a letter of resignation. I met with George last night in the White House. I had a good visit with him. He told me he was resigning for personal reasons.
NARRATOR: The CIA would have a new director, and there would be a bloodbath. Dozens of high-ranking officials would leave.
RICHARD KERR, Fmr. Deputy Director, CIA: I didn't mind thinking that CIA was a dangerous, difficult organization. I didn't mind them thinking that we were even evil sometimes. But I didn't like them thinking that we were incompetent. If that is the view of your intelligence organization, you have a real problem.
NARRATOR: In the farthest reaches at headquarters, one could find the weapons inspector David Kay.
DAVID KAY: It's almost comical to me. And in fact, I'd laughed at the time because it was so much like a poor spy novel. I was given an office that didn't have a working telephone, that was surrounded by packing cases, you know, at the at the depths of Langley, with a secretary that usually wasn't there. And I mean, you know, you'd have to have been pretty dumb not to have caught the signals. What it said to me is these guys really don't want the message. The message wasn't, "There are no weapons there," the message was our system completely broke down and failed. It gave not only the wrong answer, it mishandled every piece of evidence that we have.
pbs.org |
