The topic of Iraq faded into the background during that spring and summer-at least for me-as plenty of other issues demanded my attention. The forcing down of a Navy EP-3 by China in April, an event now almost completely forgotten, caused eleven days of intense concern. And I spent a good part of early June in the Middle East trying to come up with a work plan that would stabilize the security situation between the Israelis and Palestinians. But Saddam wasn't being ignored.

Within our Directorate of Operations, the Iraq Operations Group (IOG) was planning for any covert actions that might be ordered inside Iraq or on the periphery of the country. In August 2001, we appointed a new head of IOG (whom I can't name because he is still under cover). An articulate, pa.s.sionate, smart, and savvy Cuban American, this officer used to tell people that he was in this country as the result of one failed U.S. covert action, the Bay of Pigs, and that he didn't plan to preside over another. To make sure that didn't happen, he conducted a review of the lessons learned from our long, not-too-happy history of running operations against Iraq since the end of the Gulf war in 1991. The princ.i.p.al message taken away from the review was that Saddam was not going to be removed via covert action alone. As much as some would wish for an "immaculate deception"-some quick, easy, and cheap solution to regime change in Iraq-it was not going to happen.

A number of otherwise savvy senior government officials and media pundits concluded in early 2002 that the CIA was simply unwilling to take on so difficult a job. That wasn't the case at all. Rather, our a.n.a.lysis concluded that Saddam was too deeply entrenched and had too many layers of security around him for there to be an easy way to remove him. Whenever we talked to Iraqis, either expatriates or those still living under Saddam's rule, the reaction was always: "CIA, you say you want to get rid of Saddam. You and whose army? If you are serious about this, we want to see American boots on the ground." My own aversion to a CIA go-it-alone strategy was based both on our estimate of the chance of success (slim to none) and my belief that our plate was already overflowing with missions in the war on terrorism.

There was another, unstated, reason why the "silver bullet" option was never going to fly. Even if we had managed to take Saddam out, the beneficiary was likely to have been another Sunni general no better than the man he replaced. Such an out-come would not have been consistent with the administration's intent that a new Iraq might serve as a beacon of democracy in the Middle East.

After 9/11, everything changed. Many foreign policy issues were now viewed through the prism of smoke rising from the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. For many in the Bush administration, Iraq was unfinished business. They seized on the emotional impact of 9/11 and created a psychological connection between the failure to act decisively against al-Qa'ida and the danger posed by Iraq's WMD programs. The message was: We can never afford to be surprised again. In the case of Iraq, if sanctions eroded and nothing were done (and the international community had little patience for maintaining sanctions indefinitely), we might wake up one day to find that Saddam possessed a nuclear weapon, and then our ability to deal with him would take on an entirely different cast. Unfortunately, this train of thought also led to some overheated and misleading rhetoric, such as the argument that we don't want our "smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat. (In truth, it was not about imminence but about acting before Saddam did.) Nor was there ever a significant discussion regarding enhanced containment or the costs and benefits of such an approach versus full-out planning for overt and covert regime change. Instead, it seemed a given that the United States had not done enough to stop al-Qa'ida before 9/11 and had paid an enormous price. Therefore, so the reasoning went, we could not allow ourselves to be in a similar situation in Iraq. Even without a 9/11, however, the skepticism that had greeted Powell's "smart sanctions" proposal revealed a pretty clear split between its proponents and those who thought we needed a more robust approach to pressuring Saddam. Still, had 9/11 not happened, the argument to go to war in Iraq undoubtedly would have been much harder to make.

Whether the case could have been made at all is uncertain. But 9/11 did happen, and the terrain shifted with it.

My odd encounter with Richard Perle in front of the West Wing on the morning of September 12 was just the first hint of things to come. It was not an isolated incident. I recently talked with a senior military officer who happened to be in Europe when the attacks of 9/11 occurred. Struggling to get a flight back to the United States, he made his way to the U.S. airbase at Mildenhall, England, where he b.u.mped into another temporarily stranded senior official, Doug Feith. They caught a ride aboard an Air Force tanker, one of the few planes permitted to transit the closed airs.p.a.ce of the United States. Onboard the flight, the military officer told Feith that al-Qa'ida was responsible for the previous day's attacks and a theater-wide campaign would need to be launched against them starting in Afghanistan. To his amazement, Feith said words to the effect that the campaign should immediately lead to Baghdad. The senior military officer strongly disagreed. During meetings at Camp David the weekend following the terrorist attacks, Paul Wolfowitz in particular was fixated on the question of including Saddam in any U.S. response. He spoke of Iraq in the context of terrorism alone. I recall no mention of WMD. The president listened to Paul's views but, fairly quickly, it seemed to me, dismissed them. So did I. Rumsfeld did not seem nearly as consumed with the Iraqi connection as was his deputy, and he did not join in this portion of the debate in any meaningful way. When an informal vote was taken on whether to include Iraq in our immediate response plans, the princ.i.p.als voted four to zero against it, with Don Rumsfeld abstaining.

I am sure that Wolfowitz genuinely believed that there was a connection between Iraq and 9/11. I am also certain that he felt deeply that the first step toward altering the face of the Middle East for the better began with leadership change in Iraq. But again, for me, Iraq was not uppermost in my mind. In the weeks following the attacks of 9/11, we quadrupled the size of CIA's Counterterrorism Center, made ma.s.sive shifts in personnel and money, and closed down and scaled back operations in many parts of the world to support the offensive that was being launched against al-Qa'ida. It wasn't just that we wanted revenge against Bin Ladin. More important was the fact that there were clear, unmistakable signs that the United States might be hit again, even signs that the next attack would dwarf 9/11 in violence and casualties. If someone had told me to quit paying so much attention to terrorism in the months following September 11 and to start boning up on Iraq instead, I would have stared at them in disbelief.

To be sure, a number of people were fixated on Iraq, and a number of decisions and actions during the late fall of 2001 and into early 2002 created a momentum all their own. One of CIA's senior Middle East experts recently told me of a meeting he had in the White House a few days after 9/11. A senior NSC official told him that the administration wanted to get rid of Saddam. Our a.n.a.lyst said, "If you want to go after that son of a b.i.t.c.h to settle old scores, be my guest. But don't tell us he is connected to 9/11 or to terrorism because there is no evidence to support that. You will have to have a better reason." The National Security Council staff held meetings in the White House Situation Room with increasing regularity to discuss Iraq. Many of the meetings were so-called Deputies Committee meetings, or DCs, usually attended by the second in command from the various agencies. Others involved the Princ.i.p.als Committee, or PC. Although I went to some of the PC meetings, I frequently delegated the task to my long-suffering deputy, John McLaughlin. The DCs were already his burden.

Before long, the NSC staff started hosting another series of meetings that included representatives from State, Defense, the Joint Chiefs, the Vice President's Office, Treasury, and CIA, in addition to the NSC. These meetings had no formal t.i.tle but were informally called "small group" meetings. Usually held twice a week over lunch, these get-togethers were frustratingly unproductive from the point of view of those who attended. After a while, McLaughlin started bringing along senior CIA a.n.a.lysts and operations officers to backbench him. Then he quit going altogether and had his seconds moved up to the front-row seats.

In talking now to those who did attend, I'm told that the sessions, in retrospect, seemed odd. A presidential decision on going to war was always alluded to by the NSC in hypothetical terms, as though it were still up in the air and the conferees were merely discussing contingencies. Sometimes there would be lengthy debates over such arcane details as how quickly after the war began could we replace Iraq's currency and whose picture should be on the dinar; the old currency had Saddam's mug on it. In none of the meetings can anyone remember a discussion of the central questions. Was it wise to go to war? Was it the right thing to do? The agenda focused solely on what actions would need to be taken if a decision to attack were later made. What never happened, as far as I can tell, was a serious consideration of the implications of a U.S. invasion. What impact would a large American occupying force have in an Arab country in the heart of the Middle East? What kind of political strategy would be necessary to cause the Iraqi society to coalesce in a post-Saddam world and maximize the chances of our success? How would the presence of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, and the possibility of a pro-West Iraqi government, be viewed in Iran? And what might Iran do in reaction? In looking back, there seemed to be a lack of curiosity in asking these kinds of questions, and the lack of a disciplined process to get the answers before committing the country to war. And in hindsight, we in the intelligence community should have done more to answer those questions even though not asked. One of our senior a.n.a.lysts subsequently told me that the impression given was that the issue of "should we go to war" had already been decided in meetings at which we were not present. We were just called in to discuss the "how" and occasionally the "how will we explain it to the public."

There was never any doubt of the military outcome, but there was precious little consideration, that I'm aware of, about the big picture of what would come next. While some policy makers were eager to say that we would be greeted as liberators, what they failed to mention is that the intelligence community told them that such a greeting would last for only a limited period. Unless we quickly provided a secure and stable environment on the ground, the situation could rapidly deteriorate.

In addition to the "small group" meetings at the White House, the Pentagon hosted similar meetings referred to as the "Executive Steering Group" meetings, or ESGs, generally attended by officials one echelon below those going to the "small group" sessions downtown. But once again, reports coming back to CIA headquarters said that the meetings started out talking about what actions would need to be taken "if we went to war," and quickly segued into discussions of what should happen "when we went to war," without stopping for any debate on "should we."

Over the past couple of years, I have asked various people who were in senior positions at CIA at the time, "When did you know for sure that we were going to war in Iraq?" The answers are instructive. Those involved in a.s.sembling support for the U.S. military had the sense from early in the Bush administration that war was inevitable. By and large, the a.n.a.lysts whom I have talked to-the ones who were following Saddam's weapons programs or who were examining possible links between Iraq and al-Qa'ida-came much later to the conclusion that we were going to war.

Richard Haa.s.s, the former director of policy planning at the State Department, has said that Condi Rice told him in July of 2002 that "the decisions were made," and unless Iraq gave in to all our demands, war was a forgone conclusion.

In May of 2002, my counterpart in Great Britain, the head of MI-6, Sir Richard Dearlove, traveled to Washington along with Prime Minister Blair's then national security advisor, David Manning, to take Washington's temperature on Iraq. Sir Richard met with Rice, Hadley, Scooter Libby, and Congressman Porter Goss, who was then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

In the spring of 2005 some doc.u.ments dating back to July 2002 were leaked to the British press. The doc.u.ments, which came to be known as "the Downing Street Memos," reported on a "perceptible shift" in the att.i.tude in Washington, saying that military action was now seen as "inevitable." One memo records "C," the designation the Brits use for the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, as saying that "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Sir Richard later told me that he had been misquoted. He reviewed the draft memo, objecting to the word "fixed" in particular, and corrected it to reflect the truth of the matter. He said that upon returning to London in July of 2002, he expressed the view, based on his conversations, that the war in Iraq was going to happen. He believed that the momentum driving it was not really about WMD but rather about bigger issues, such as changing the politics of the Middle East.

Dearlove recalled that he had a polite but significant, disagreement with Scooter Libby, who was trying to convince him that there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qa'ida. Dearlove's strongly held view, based on his own service's reporting, which had been shared with CIA, was that any contacts that had taken place between the two had come to nothing and that there was no formal relationship. He believed that the crowd around the vice president was playing fast and loose with the evidence. In his view, it was never about "fixing" the intelligence itself but rather about the undisciplined manner in which the intelligence was being used.

In a memo that Doug Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, sent to John McLaughlin on September 6, 2002, he forwarded a cable summarizing his comments at a recent conference in Berlin attended by U.S., British, French, and German officials. The cable quotes Feith as having told the gathering that "war is not optional." "At stake," he reportedly said, "is the survival of the United States as an open and free society." The summary went on to say that Feith told his colleagues that U.S. action was based on self-defense. "So with regard to Iraq, the question of whether one can prove a connection with Iraq and the September 11th attack is not (repeat not) of the essence." One of the foreign attendees apparently agreed, saying that we should not get caught up in the "legalisms about clear evidence of imminent threat," given Saddam's history of deception.

While we at CIA were intensely focused on al-Qa'ida, and others in the administration were obsessed with Iraq, there was a third subset of people who seemed to have Iran Iran on their minds. A strange series of events brought this to our attention. In late December 2001, the U.S. amba.s.sador to Italy, Melvin Sembler, told CIA's senior man responsible for Italy that Michael Ledeen, an American conservative activist, was in Rome, along with some DOD officials, talking to the Italians about secret contacts with Iranians. Ledeen had figured prominently in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s and had introduced Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian middleman, con man, and fabricator, to Oliver North. Ledeen's latest mission was news to us. on their minds. A strange series of events brought this to our attention. In late December 2001, the U.S. amba.s.sador to Italy, Melvin Sembler, told CIA's senior man responsible for Italy that Michael Ledeen, an American conservative activist, was in Rome, along with some DOD officials, talking to the Italians about secret contacts with Iranians. Ledeen had figured prominently in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s and had introduced Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian middleman, con man, and fabricator, to Oliver North. Ledeen's latest mission was news to us.

A few weeks later, on January 14, 2002, a senior representative of Italian intelligence was in Washington and visited me. He asked me what I knew about U.S. government officials exploring contacts with Iranians. I shot a look at other members of my staff in the meeting. It was clear that none of us knew what he was talking about. The Italian quickly changed the subject.

On February 1, 2002, Amba.s.sador Sembler told our senior officer in Italy that he was getting questions from the State Department about the DOD visitors, who apparently were Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode of Doug Feith's staff. The amba.s.sador said there were reports that the two men were talking about a twenty-five-million-dollar program to support Iranians who opposed the Tehran regime. We still had no idea what this was about, but what we were hearing sounded like an off-the-books covert-action program trying to destabilize the Iranian government. Without the appropriate presidential authorities, normally run through the CIA, and without congressional notification, such a program might well be illegal. This started to give the appearance of being "Son of Iran-Contra."

I picked up the phone and called Steve Hadley and asked him what the h.e.l.l was going on. Hadley appeared to know something about this initiative. He reminded me that he had mentioned to me in early December 2001 that DOD might meet with some Iranians in Europe who had terrorist threat information. True, but there'd been no mention of anything like this; no discussion of Ledeen, Ghorbanifar, or Iranian opposition. I remember being uncomfortable about the previous discussion and didn't understand why CIA wasn't being asked to get directly involved. But if there was information available about a threat to U.S. interests, I wasn't going to let bureaucratic reasons stand in the way of our getting the details. But what I was hearing now was something entirely different. Hadley asked me if Paul Wolfowitz hadn't called me before to explain all this. My answer was no.

Steve sent me a memo he had received from Michael Ledeen dated January 18, 2002. In the memo, Ledeen talked about how he had arranged the meeting with Iranian officials who were "in violent opposition to the regime." It also said that Pentagon officials suggested that the initiative working with these people be "managed entirely by DOD personnel" and that "the Iranians have stipulated that they are totally unwilling to deal with anyone from CIA, but they are quite comfortable with Pentagon officials."

I was furious. Don't these guys remember the past? I thought. I called Hadley after reviewing the Ledeen memo. "Steve," I said, "this whole operation smells." I followed up with a memo of my own on February 5, 2002, strongly recommending he immediately get on top of the matter.

When Colin Powell found out, he hit the roof. Powell had become national security advisor in 1987 to help clean up the first Iran-Contra mess; he didn't want to be around for another one. Powell contacted Condi Rice and told her that the issue needed to be taken care of immediately and that if it were not, he would raise the matter directly with the president.

Hadley told John McLaughlin in mid-February that the situation had been resolved and that Ledeen was out of the picture. John asked for a written response to my earlier note, but none was ever received.

On July 11, 2002, a senior CIA officer was told by the amba.s.sador to Italy that Ledeen had called him to say he would be returning to Rome the next month to "continue what he had started." Our Rome rep met with his Italian counterparts and asked them not to provide any a.s.sistance to Ledeen unless the amba.s.sador or CIA requested that they do so. A senior CIA lawyer contacted his NSC opposite number and asked whether anyone at the NSC had authorized Ledeen's visit. If not, he suggested, CIA might have to file a "crimes report" with the Justice Department, a requirement when we learn of a possible violation of the law.

About two weeks later, the NSC lawyer contacted CIA to say that Steve Hadley had called Ledeen in and "read him the riot act," telling him to "knock it off." In light of that, he said, they didn't see any need for a crimes report.

There was a series of Ledeen-inspired inquiries that would come in over the transom, via Congress, the White House, DOD, and elsewhere. The common thread was that he had urgent and highly sensitive information and would like to talk about a reward. These tips led nowhere.

On August 6, 2003, after the United States had ousted Saddam, Ledeen contacted DOD with word that he had a source who knew that a significant amount of enriched uranium was buried in Iraq some thirty to forty meters deep, underneath a riverbed, but that some of it had been moved to Iran. Ledeen told a DOD official that he had already briefed Scooter Libby and John Hannah of the vice president's staff, and he intended to share the info with the Senate Intelligence Committee staff but would not tell CIA. Like most Ledeen tips, this one proved worthless.

Two days later, on August 8, word leaked to the media about Ledeen and Ghorbanifar's earlier meetings with Pentagon officials, possibly to discuss regime change in Iran. Various White House and DOD officials admitted that, yes, there were some meetings, but nothing came of them. I called Condi Rice and urged the NSC staff, once again, to get to the bottom of the matter. "If you don't," I said "this will all end up on the president's desk, and he will take the blame." Condi mentioned that after the first meeting in Rome, the DOD officials had "accidentally b.u.mped into" the Iranians again in Paris, while crossing the street or some such thing. "Condi," I said, "in this line of work there is no such thing as an accidental meeting."

Later that month, in one of my weekly NSC meetings, once again I raised my concerns about what was going on and that the NSC needed to get to the bottom of the matter. I reiterated to Steve Hadley that we had no intention of meeting with Ghorbanifar. CIA had issued a "burn notice" (a formal declaration that a source is deemed to be untrustworthy) on him nearly two decades previously, and we had no reason to revise our opinion of his credibility. DOD opened an investigation into the contacts between their staff and Ghorbanifar. I do not know the outcome.

Ultimately, the Ledeen follies on Iran were a distraction from the administration's main focus: Iraq. Back in May 2002, the NSC expressed interest in putting out an uncla.s.sified publication that would lay out some of what we knew-or thought we knew-about Iraq's WMD programs. The National Intelligence Council, or NIC, had produced a similar doc.u.ment that the Clinton administration used to help justify the December 1998 Desert Fox bombing campaign. The NIC stepped up to the plate again, and the a.s.signment went to Paul Pillar, one of the national intelligence officers. As is common with projects such as this, the drafting proceeded only intermittently. There was discussion of releasing the draft as a U.S. government "white paper"-one that would not carry the seal of any one agency-but ultimately the doc.u.ment was put on the shelf after the NSC seemed to lose interest in it.

Separately, in the summer and fall of 2002, the NSC asked John McLaughlin to have the Agency a.s.semble its intelligence on Saddam's WMD programs and his human rights record, and outline what we believed about Iraq's connection to terrorism. While these efforts were going on in the background, the public debate was roiling. On August 15, 2002, Brent Scowcroft, who had served as national security advisor under President Ford and the first President Bush, and was then chairman of George W. Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, published a hard-hitting Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal Wall Street Journal t.i.tled "Don't Attack Saddam." In the article, Scowcroft argued that an attack would divert U.S. attention from the war on terrorism. It is no surprise that the advice was not well received at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. As moderate voices joined in the debate for caution in Iraq, the Bush administration pledged to listen carefully to the various sides, but its rhetoric seemed considerably ahead of the intelligence we had been gathering across the river in Langley. t.i.tled "Don't Attack Saddam." In the article, Scowcroft argued that an attack would divert U.S. attention from the war on terrorism. It is no surprise that the advice was not well received at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. As moderate voices joined in the debate for caution in Iraq, the Bush administration pledged to listen carefully to the various sides, but its rhetoric seemed considerably ahead of the intelligence we had been gathering across the river in Langley.

I was surprised, for example, when I read about a speech Vice President Cheney gave to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on August 26, 2002, in which he said, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of ma.s.s destruction. There is no doubt he is ama.s.sing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." Later in the speech, the vice president would tell the VFW, "Many of us are convinced that [Saddam] will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon."

The speech caught me and my top people off guard for several reasons. For starters, the vice president's staff had not sent the speech to CIA for clearance, as was usually done with remarks that should be based on intelligence. The speech also went well beyond what our a.n.a.lysis could support. The intelligence community's belief was that, left unchecked, Iraq would probably not acquire nuclear weapons until near the end of the decade.

In his VFW speech, the vice president reminded the audience that during the first Gulf war, the intelligence community underestimated Iraq's progress toward building a nuclear weapon. No doubt that experience had colored the vice president's view of U.S. intelligence gathering ever since, but it also had a profound impact on my views and those of many of our a.n.a.lysts. Given Saddam's proclivity for deception and denial, we, too, were haunted by the possibility that there was more going on than we could detect.

The VFW speech, I suspect, was an attempt by the vice president to regain the momentum toward action against Iraq that had been stalled eleven days earlier by Scowcroft's Op-Ed piece. I have the impression that the president really wasn't any more aware than we were of what his number-two was going to say to the VFW until he said it. But if the speech was meant mostly as a wake-up call, it was a very loud one.

In the aftermath of Iraq, I was asked by Senator Carl Levin at a hearing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, on March 9, 2004, if I should have intervened when I heard officials make public comments that went beyond our intelligence. It was a fair question. Clearly, decision makers are ent.i.tled to come to their own conclusions with regard to policy. Intelligence is an important part of the decision-making process but hardly the sole component. Policy makers are allowed to come to independent judgments about what the intelligence may mean and what risks they will tolerate. What they cannot do is overstate the intelligence itself. If they do, they must clearly delineate between what the intelligence says and the conclusions they have reached. In fairness to the vice president, prior to the production of the National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002, we at CIA had written pieces in key publications, such as the President's Daily Brief, that were very a.s.sertive about Iraq's WMD programs. However, none that I can recall put Iraq's acquisition of a nuclear weapon on the time line suggested in the VFW speech. Perhaps when policy makers who remember previous history, such as the vice president, read "overly a.s.sertive" a.n.a.lysis, their views are quickly hardened.

Policy makers have a right to their own opinions, but not their own set of facts. I had an obligation to do a better job of making sure they knew where we differed and why. The proper place to make that distinction is in one-on-one discussions with the princ.i.p.als, and I did so on a number of occasions. No one had elected me to go out and make speeches about how and where I disagreed on th.o.r.n.y issues. I should have told the vice president privately that, in my view, his VFW speech had gone too far. Would that have changed his future approach? I doubt it, but I should not have let silence imply agreement. We did a much better job of pushing back when it came to desires on the part of some in the administration to overstate the case on possible Iraq connections to al-Qa'ida.

On Friday afternoon, September 6, 2002, a week after the vice president delivered his VFW speech, the president's National Security Team gathered at Camp David and remained overnight for meetings about Iraq the next day. In advance, the NSC staff sent around thick briefing books packed with background information for the partic.i.p.ants to read. One paper toward the front of the book listed things that would be achieved by removing Saddam-freeing the Iraqi people, eliminating WMD, ending threats to Iraq's neighbors, and the like.

Toward the middle of the book was a paper that discussed in general terms how Iraq would be dealt with following Saddam's removal. The paper said that we would preserve much of Iraq's bureaucracy but also reform it. An appendix listed for the attendees certain lessons learned from the occupations of Germany and j.a.pan after World War II. Near the back of the book, at Tab P, was a paper CIA a.n.a.lysts had produced three weeks earlier. Dated August 13, 2002, it was t.i.tled "The Perfect Storm: Planning for Negative Consequences of Invading Iraq." The paper provided worst-case scenarios that might emerge from a U.S.-led regime-change effort. The summary said that following an invasion:

The US will face negative consequences with Iraq, the region and beyond which could include:* Anarchy and the territorial breakup of Iraq;* Regime-threatening instability in key Arab states;* A surge of global terrorism against US interests fueled by deepening Islamic antipathy toward the United States;* Major oil supply disruptions and severe strains in the Atlantic alliance.

It's tempting to cite this information and say, "See, we predicted many of the difficulties that later ensued"-but doing so would be disingenuous. The truth is often more complex than convenient. Had we felt strongly that these were likely outcomes, we should have shouted our conclusions. There was, in fact, no screaming, no table-pounding. Instead, we said these were worst case worst case. We also, quite accurately, labeled them scenarios. We had no way of knowing then how the situation on the ground in Iraq would evolve. Nor were we privy to some of the future actions of the United States that would help make many of these worst-case scenarios almost inevitable.

The Perfect Storm paper ended with a series of steps the United States could take to help reduce the chance of some of these negative consequences taking hold, including diplomatic initiatives to enhance the chances of Arab-Israeli peace. Promoting the notion that, although we were acting militarily in Iraq, we remained committed to an equitable resolution of this critical issue, which would have great resonance in the Islamic world, we advised. It was important that we be able to show the Arab world that we could make war and peace at the same time.

The meeting on Sat.u.r.day morning, September 7, sparked considerable debate about the wisdom of trying to revive a UN inspection regime. Colin Powell was firmly on the side of going the extra mile with the UN, while the vice president argued just as forcefully that doing so would only get us mired in a bureaucratic tangle with nothing to show for it other than time lost off a ticking clock. The president let Powell and Cheney pretty much duke it out. To me, the president still appeared less inclined to go to war than many of his senior aides.

A week later, on Sat.u.r.day, September 14, Steve Hadley convened another meeting in the White House Situation Room, attended by second-echelon officials from the NSC, State Department, DOD, and CIA. The agenda was t.i.tled, "Why Iraq Now?" Bob Walpole, the national intelligence officer for strategic programs, was among those present. He recalls telling Hadley that he would not use WMD to justify a war with Iraq. Someone, whom he did not know at the time but now recognizes as Scooter Libby, leaned over to another partic.i.p.ant in the meeting and asked, "Who is this guy?"

Walpole explained to Hadley that the North Koreans were ahead of Iraq in virtually every category of WMD. Bob knew that we had recently discovered Pyongyang's covert program to produce highly enriched uranium, and he correctly a.s.sumed this would become public knowledge soon. "When that gets out, you guys will have a devil of a time explaining why you are more worried about a country that might be working on nuclear weapons rather than one that probably already has them and the wherewithal to deliver them to the U.S.," he told the group.

Someone suggested that the confluence with terrorism made Iraq a bigger threat. Two other CIA a.n.a.lysts present spoke up, saying that a much stronger case could be made for Iran's backing of international terrorism than could be made for Iraq's. They recall Doug Feith saying that their objections were just "persnickety."

CHAPTER 17

"The One Issue That Everyone Could Agree On"

The United States did not go to war in Iraq solely because of WMD. In my view, I doubt it was even the princ.i.p.al cause. Yet it was the public face that was put on it.

The leaders of a country decide to go to war because of core beliefs, larger geostrategic calculations, ideology, and, in the case of Iraq, because of the administration's largely unarticulated view that the democratic transformation of the Middle East through regime change in Iraq would be worth the price. WMD was, as Paul Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in Vanity Fair Vanity Fair in May 2003, something that "we settled on" because it was "the one issue that everyone could agree on." in May 2003, something that "we settled on" because it was "the one issue that everyone could agree on."

In early September 2002, with a vote looming on authorizing the use of force in Iraq, CIA came under pressure from members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to produce a written a.s.sessment of Iraq's WMD programs. Specifically, they wanted a National Intelligence Estimate to aid their deliberations regarding whether or not to authorize the president to take the nation to war.

NIEs are intended to provide senior policy makers with the consensus of the American intelligence community on a given subject and to portray honestly dissenting and alternative views. Typically, NIEs require several months of preparation and jawboning by CIA, DIA, NSA, INR, DOE, NGA, and other agencies.

An NIE on Iraq should have been initiated earlier, but at the time I didn't think one was necessary. I was wrong. While there was no decision to go to war yet, the clock had begun to tick. We had not done an NIE specifically on Iraqi WMD in a number of years, but we had produced an array of a.n.a.lysis and other estimates that discussed Iraqi weapons programs, in the context of broader a.s.sessments on ballistic missiles and chemical and biological weapons. We all believed we understood the problem. In hindsight, even though policy makers were not showing much curiosity, that was the time we should have initiated a new series of a.n.a.lytical reports on Iraqi WMD and other issues regarding the implications of conflict in Iraq. This was my responsibility. But back then, I was consumed with al-Qa'ida-the people really trying to kill us-and I didn't pay enough attention to another gathering storm.

On September 9, 2002, Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois wrote me urging that I direct the production of an NIE and also an uncla.s.sified summary to explain the issue to the American public. The next day, Senator Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, followed that up with a letter requesting the production of an NIE "on the status of Iraq's programs to develop weapons of ma.s.s destruction and delivery systems, the status of the Iraqi military forces, including their readiness and willingness to fight, the effects a U.S.-led attack on Iraq would have on its neighbors, and Saddam Hussein's likely response to a U.S. military campaign designed to effect regime change in Iraq."

I reluctantly agreed and, on September 12, 2002, directed the National Intelligence Council staff to initiate a crash project to produce an NIE on the "status of and outlook for Iraq's weapons of ma.s.s destruction programs." The NIE was to answer two key questions on nuclear weapons: Did Saddam have them, and if not, when could he get them? I expected no surprises.

Like those of us in the intelligence community, the NSC staff questioned whether an NIE was needed. Steve Hadley thought that the data were already available in other doc.u.ments.

Because of the impending vote on the use of force, scheduled for early October, a production process that normally stretched for six to ten months had to be truncated to less than three weeks. Even that was not fast enough for some unsympathetic members of Congress who wanted the NIE delivered almost instantly. Senator Graham went so far as to make statements to the press chastising us for foot-dragging. Not satisfied with the demands for this this NIE, some senators were also pressing us to do another one evaluating the effectiveness of planned U.S. covert and military actions in Iraq. a.s.sessing U.S. plans has never been a function of a National Intelligence Estimate. We were startled to have to explain this to a committee charged with overseeing intelligence-but that didn't stop the drumbeat. NIE, some senators were also pressing us to do another one evaluating the effectiveness of planned U.S. covert and military actions in Iraq. a.s.sessing U.S. plans has never been a function of a National Intelligence Estimate. We were startled to have to explain this to a committee charged with overseeing intelligence-but that didn't stop the drumbeat.

The press of business and the shortened time available to produce the doc.u.ment meant we were headed uphill from the beginning. Had we started the process sooner, I am confident we would have done a better job highlighting what we did and didn't know about Saddam's WMD programs, and we would have sorted out some of the inconsistencies in the doc.u.ment. The lack of time, however, did not relieve us of the responsibility to get the information right. The flawed a.n.a.lysis that was compiled in the NIE provided some of the material for Colin Powell's February 5, 2003, UN speech, which helped galvanize public support for the war.

Some observers have gone so far as to suggest that our Iraq NIE is evidence that senior members of the intelligence community, like some senior policy makers, were h.e.l.l-bent on war. The truth is just the opposite. The person in charge of managing the NIE was Bob Walpole, the national intelligence officer for strategic programs. Not your typical bureaucrat-he's a Mormon bishop who often comes to work on a motorcycle-Bob is both a brilliant a.n.a.lyst and one of the most unlikely people to be accused of being a war hawk that you could imagine. When he was given the mission of coordinating the NIE, he came to me quite concerned. "I just don't believe in this war," he said with considerable angst. "Some wars are justifiable, but not this one."

"Look," I told him, "we don't make policy. Our job is to tell the people who do do what we know and what we think. It's up to them to decide what to do about it." what we know and what we think. It's up to them to decide what to do about it."

"All right," Bob sighed, but I could tell he wasn't happy with the prospect. Nonetheless, in the weeks ahead he would spend many nights sleeping in his office to get the job done.

Because of the time pressures, a.n.a.lysts lifted large chunks of other recently published papers and replicated them in the Estimate. Twelve previous intelligence community publications formed the spine of the NIE. To meet the deadline, on September 23 a quickly a.s.sembled draft was sent around to intelligence community agencies for review. A day-long coordination meeting with intelligence community a.n.a.lysts was held two days later. The next day, a draft incorporating the a.n.a.lysts' changes and comments was sent back to the various Agency leaders.

On Tuesday, October 1, senior representatives of all the contributing agencies met with me to discuss, debate, and approve a final doc.u.ment. This is a standard part of the NIE process-the meeting was called the National Foreign Intelligence Board, or NFIB-but the narrow time frame, combined with often highly technical material, pushed standard procedures to the breaking point. Consider, for example, the controversial issue of aluminum tubes.

In early 2001, Iraq had been caught trying to clandestinely procure sixty thousand high-strength aluminum tubes manufactured to extraordinarily tight tolerances. The tubes were seized in the Middle East. The Iraqi agent tried in vain to get the tubes released, claiming they were to be used in Lebanon to make race car components. Whatever their intended use, under UN sanctions, Saddam was prohibited from acquiring the tubes for any purpose. All agencies agreed that these tubes could be modified to make centrifuge rotors used in a nuclear program. CIA a.n.a.lysts believed that these tubes were intended for the enrichment of uranium. Others thought they were intended to make rockets.

To test the theory, CIA brought together a "red team" of highly experienced experts from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory-people who had actually built centrifuges. Their a.s.sessment was that the tubes were more suited for nuclear use than for anything else. The Department of Energy's representative at the NFIB delivered his agency's a.s.sessment that the tubes were probably not part of a nuclear program. He was not a technical expert, however, and, despite being given several opportunities, he was unable to explain the basis of his department's view in anything approaching a convincing manner. About all we could take away from his statement was that DOE did not disagree with the a.s.sessment that Saddam was trying to revive or "reconst.i.tute" his nuclear weapons program-a program that was within months of producing a weapon when it was interrupted at the time of the first Gulf war. Although the U.S. Army's National Ground Intelligence Center was not represented at the meeting, their view that it was highly unlikely that the tubes were intended for rockets gave added impetus to those who believed the tubes had a nuclear purpose.

With more time, I'm certain we would have delayed a decision on the aluminum tubes until greater clarification emerged-we were staring at a jumbled mess, basically-but in the end, the majority of agencies believed that the tubes were part of the evidence of nuclear reconst.i.tution. But there was certainly no unanimity of thought.

The dissenting views were clearly and extensively laid out in the report. Not only did the Estimate make that point, but Colin Powell would go on to underline it in his UN speech the following February.

Perhaps the most widely misunderstood section of the NIE dealt with yellowcake, an element that can be enriched to make nuclear weaponsgrade uranium. The Estimate included an account of Saddam's reported attempts to procure yellowcake from the African nation of Niger, taken from a September 2002 paper by the Defense Intelligence Agency. That account, told in a few paragraphs on page twenty-four of the doc.u.ment, was not a major pillar of the NIE. The Estimate noted that Saddam already had access to large amounts of yellowcake in Iraq-550 tons of it, enough to produce as many as 100 nuclear weapons. This yellowcake was supposed to be under seal by international inspectors, but that was at best a flimsy wall of protection.

Although it would loom large in subsequent criticisms of the NIE, the Niger yellowcake was not among the half dozen reasons cited why all agencies, with the exception of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), believed that Iraq was resuming its nuclear weapons program. Even INR wrote in the NIE that it believed Iraq was pursuing "at least a limited effort" to "acquire nuclear weapons related capabilities" and that the evidence indicated "at most a limited reconst.i.tution effort."

We a.s.sessed that Saddam did not have a nuclear weapon and that if he had to make his own fissile material, he probably would not be able to do so until 2007 to 2009. However, we indicated in the NIE that we had only moderate confidence in that judgment. We also indicated that INR thought that, although Saddam clearly wanted wanted nuclear weapons, there was inadequate evidence to prove that he had an ongoing integrated and comprehensive program to develop them. nuclear weapons, there was inadequate evidence to prove that he had an ongoing integrated and comprehensive program to develop them.

If Saddam could obtain fissile material elsewhere, it would not be hard for the regime to make a weapon within a year. After all, we believed that some terrorist groups could do so if they came into possession of the all-important highly enriched uranium or plutonium.

None of the intelligence agencies challenged the judgments regarding Saddam's chemical and biological weapons programs. The NIE said that Saddam was continuing and expanding his ballistic missile efforts in contravention of UN sanctions. The missile a.s.sessment turned out to be on target.

Contrary to popular misconception, the NIE also gives full voice to those agencies that wanted to express alternative views. Dissenting opinions are not relegated to footnotes and, indeed, often appear in boxes with special colored backgrounds to make them stand out. These make up an unprecedented sixteen pages of the ninety-page NIE. Agency heads had approval of not only the language that is used to express their reservations, but also where those reservations are displayed in the doc.u.ment.

What isn't emphasized, however, is the poor human access to Saddam's WMD programs and the limitations of our knowledge. It would have been helpful to have clarified that the use of the words "we judge" and "we a.s.sess" meant we were making a.n.a.lytical judgments, not stating facts. As the founding father of CIA a.n.a.lysis, Sherman Kent, wrote in the Foreign Service Journal Foreign Service Journal in 1969, "Estimating is what you do when you do not know." in 1969, "Estimating is what you do when you do not know."

A careful reading of the NIE gives a more nuanced impression of its comments than the public has been led to believe. The phrase "we do not know" appears some thirty times across ninety pages. The words "we know" appear in only three instances. Unfortunately, we were not as cautious in the "Key Judgments," a five-page summary at the front of the doc.u.ment. The Key Judgments is written with language that, especially on chemical and biological weapons, is too a.s.sertive and conveys an air of certainty that does not exist in the rest of the paper. The nuance was lost.

The first key judgment states, "We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of ma.s.s destruction/WMD programs in defiance of UN resolution and restrictions." Characterized as a "judgment," that's not bad, but the second sentence drops uncertainty regarding chemical and biological weapons: "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade. (See INR alternative view at the end of these Key Judgments.)" Although the missile statement is accurate and the nuclear judgment has its caveats ("if left unchecked" and "probably") and the reference to INR's alternative views, the chemical and biological judgments are stated as facts. They were not not facts and should not have been so characterized. facts and should not have been so characterized.

The second key judgment states clearly that "We lack specific information on many aspects of Iraq's WMD programs." "We lack specific information on many aspects of Iraq's WMD programs." The problem was that statement followed a boldface a.s.sessment stating that The problem was that statement followed a boldface a.s.sessment stating that "we judge that we are seeing only a part of Iraq's WMD efforts, owing to Baghdad's vigorous denial and deception efforts. Revelations after the Gulf War starkly demonstrate the extensive efforts undertaken by Iraq to deny information." "we judge that we are seeing only a part of Iraq's WMD efforts, owing to Baghdad's vigorous denial and deception efforts. Revelations after the Gulf War starkly demonstrate the extensive efforts undertaken by Iraq to deny information."

The absence of evidence and linear thinking, and Iraq's extensive efforts to conceal illicit procurement of proscribed components, told us that a deceptive regime could and would easily surprise us. It was never a question of a known imminent threat; it was about an unwillingness to risk surprise.

More troubling to me than the technical issues, over which experts can disagree, were instances where information from possible fabricators was included in the NIE. The most notorious example of bad information came from a German-run source dubbed "Curve Ball," whose information about mobile biological production trailers would figure largely both in the NIE and in Colin Powell's February 2003 speech to the UN. Curve Ball's information made its first appearance in our December 2000 NIE on biological weapons, where we stated, "new intelligence acquired in 2000 provides compelling information about Iraq's ongoing BW activities...and causes us to adjust our a.s.sessment upward of the BW threat posed by Iraq...the new information suggests Baghdad has continued and expanded its offensive BW program by establishing a large scale, redundant and concealed BW capability." At the time, Curve Ball's reporting was given added credence by the UN discovery in 1995 of Iraqi military doc.u.ments pertaining to a secret mobile fermentation project.

We also had trouble with information from sources we used to validate what we heard from Curve Ball. For example, the Estimate contains information obtained in March 2002 from an Iraqi defector, a former Iraqi major by the name of al-Asaaf, who had been referred to the Defense Intelligence Agency by the Iraqi National Congress. DIA had concerns about al-Asaaf's story regarding Iraq's mobile BW program, its interest in "dirty bombs," and its work on proscribed long-range missiles. The Iraqi major pa.s.sed a DIA polygraph, but those who administered it felt that he had been "coached" in his story. Soon, much of what he had to say to DIA also appeared in a May 2002 article in Vanity Fair Vanity Fair. The Iraqi National Congress arranged al-Asaaf's interview with the publication. The fact that his information was being peddled as if it were a PR campaign should have set off alarm bells.

DIA officials eventually concluded that the man was unreliable and was quite possibly feeding the United States fabricated information. But senior DIA officials sat through the hour-and-a-half NFIB meeting without ever mentioning that possibly bogus information was being cited in the Estimate we were all evaluating. Perhaps they didn't recognize their own information when they saw it, but that strains credulity.

DIA is not alone in bearing responsibility for the error. In July 2002, the National Intelligence Council staff did a study of the value, or lack thereof, of intelligence provided by the INC and cited this same source, al-Asaaf, as a possible fabricator. Three months later, they, too, failed to mention the matter as the NFIB reviewed the draft Estimate. I subsequently learned that some CIA a.n.a.lysts were also aware of al-a.s.saf's fabrication and failed to notice its inclusion in the NIE.

Although not mentioned in the Estimate, my views about Iraq's pursuit of WMD were greatly influenced by a very sensitive, highly placed source in Iraq. Little has been publicly said about this source. Indeed, at the time the NIE was being produced, because of the sensitivity of the source, most of the a.n.a.lysts involved were not even aware of the source's existence. The reporting, as it continued to stream in after the production of the Estimate, however, gave those of us at the most senior level further confidence that our information about Saddam's WMD programs was correct.

This source reported that production of chemical and biological weapons was taking place, biological agents were easy to produce and to hide, and prohibited chemicals were also being produced at dual-use facilities. This source stated that a senior Iraqi official in Saddam's inner circle believed, as a result of the UN inspections, that Iraq knew the inspectors' weak points and how to take advantage of them. The source said there was an elaborate plan to deceive inspectors and ensure that prohibited items would never be found.

Every once in a while, doubts would creep in about why so much of our evidence was indirect or why it had been so long since inspectors had found something. Right about then, this source would pop up with something incredibly specific that would not only affirm our intelligence but eliminate the doubts we might be having.

Sometimes a single source can make all the difference. Oleg Penkovsky was a single source whose reporting proved indispensable in helping the United States get through the Cuban Missile Crisis forty years earlier.

In many ways, we were prisoners of our own history. The judgments we delivered in the NIE on Iraq's chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs were consistent with the ones we had given to the Clinton administration. Yet by 2002, we made some leaps based on technical a.n.a.lysis that led us to a.s.sume that Saddam had more capability, particularly with regard to chemical weapons, than we later learned was warranted.

Inevitably, the judgments were influenced by our underestimation of Iraq's progress on nuclear weapons in the late 1980s and early 1990s-a mistake no one wanted to repeat.