CIA intelligence shaped to justify agenda

I feel sorry for the CIA.

The Senate Intelligence Committee found that the CIA’s prewar reporting on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was mostly wrong. So now when critics cavil about missing Iraqi weapons, the president can say he got bad information.

But the real issue — which the Senate committee timidly deferred until after U.S. elections — is how the president used the information he got.

Here’s the answer: The administration massaged and hyped that information way beyond what the hapless CIA delivered. Rather than use CIA evidence to connect the dots, it shaped the case for a precooked policy decision.

Yes, the CIA said (wrongly) that Iraq still possessed stocks of biological and chemical agents. Foreign intelligence agencies and United Nations inspectors also believed this (so did I) because Saddam Hussein refused to present evidence to the contrary. He apparently feared this would make him look weak.

But the CIA reports were embroidered by the administration. President Bush cited prewar intelligence claims that Iraq had a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that could disperse biochemical agents in the United States. He never mentioned that the U.S. Air Force — which has the most experience with UAVs — had strongly debunked these claims.

Secretary of State Colin Powell and Vice President Cheney insisted Iraq had mobile vans producing biological weapons. This tall tale came from a defector code-named Curveball, who lived up to his moniker. He allegedly was referred to German intelligence by associates of the Pentagon’s favorite Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi.

Most, if not all, of the info on WMD provided by Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress has proved specious. But it was welcomed by the Pentagon’s top civilian officials because it justified intervention in Iraq.

One Defense Intelligence Agency analyst complained about Curveball’s reliability shortly before Powell cited the mobile vans in his Feb. 5, 2003, speech to the United Nations. The nervous DIA agent was given a dose of political realism by his CIA superior, according to the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“Let’s keep in mind that this war’s going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn’t say,” advised the CIA man “and that the powers that be probably aren’t terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he’s talking about.”

So much for claims that the pro-war bent at the White House and Pentagon didn’t affect the climate in which the CIA wrote its reports.

But the hype was even more pronounced on the two most important issues related to WMD: whether Saddam had revived his nuclear weapons program, and whether he might hand off WMD to terrorists.

U.N. inspectors dismantled Iraq’s nuclear program in the mid-1990s and found no evidence it had been reconstituted. The U.S. Department of Energy and the State Department’s intelligence arm doubted CIA claims it had resumed.

And even CIA officials, along with State Department analysts, debunked the notorious claim of a uranium sale by Niger to Iraq. Yet administration officials talked of the nuclear program’s renewal as a certainty. “Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon,” said Cheney famously in August 2002.

And the vice president continued to imply that Saddam was linked operationally to al-Qaida, even though this was the one area where the CIA got it right. The agency largely discounted any theories about a close working relationship between Saddam and al-Qaida. Bush and Cheney continue to imply that a deeper relationship existed.

Why does this all matter now?

Because creating a fictional threat discredits the real threats and leaves our country less prepared to face them. Saddam was a long-term danger; had sanctions against him been lifted, he would have restarted his weapons programs. At that point, the Iraqi leader would have threatened the Mideast region and our interests there, but not our shores.

This threat was real. Had the administration laid out an honest case, it could have argued for long-term sanctions, or made a far better case for war if the world community failed to keep Saddam contained.

But starting a war on false premises sacrificed U.S. credibility. It gutted the president’s argument for the right to attack preemptively if American interests are threatened. Who would believe our evidence?

And the same willful blindness that led the White House to cherry-pick intelligence on WMD led it to underestimate the difficulties in postwar Iraq. That should be a warning. But has the White House gotten the message?

Shaping intelligence to fit foregone conclusions is a sure way to fail.


Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer.