Politics and the CIA

By DOUGLAS WALLER AND MASSIMO CALABRESI/WASHINGTON Monday, Oct. 14, 2002
    • ISAAC MENASHE/ZUMA

    The CIA said Iraq might not actually pose an immediate threat to U.S. interests

    For more than a year, George Bush stood by CIA Director George Tenet, dismissing critics who said the agency failed at its core mission — preventing attacks against the homeland. But loyalty is a two-way street for this White House, and since Bush began making his case for war with Iraq, his aides — particularly the hard-line ones — have pressed Tenet to join the march. For the President's war speech in Cincinnati last week, Bush aides badgered the CIA to declassify more intelligence on Saddam Hussein's ties to Osama bin Laden. As a result, Bush was able to disclose that "a very senior al-Qaeda leader received medical treatment in Baghdad this year" (intelligence sources tell TIME that it is a Jordanian operational commander named Abu Musab Zarqawi) and that "Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bombmaking and poisons and deadly gases."

    But when a recently released CIA report seemed to paint too dire a picture of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee pressured Tenet to declassify testimony by a top aide who rated the likelihood of Saddam's initiating a chemical or biological weapons attack against the U.S. as "low." That testimony appeared to contradict Bush's claim in Cincinnati that Saddam could lob those weapons at the U.S. or its allies "on any given day." Bush sympathizers saw a sellout by the CIA. "That wasn't intelligence, that was pure speculation," groused a former senior Pentagon official.


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    So which is it? Is the CIA politicizing the intelligence on Iraq to help the hard-liners persuade people that war is in the national interest? Or is Tenet, a former Senate staff member with keen survival instincts, working to keep the moderates happy too? Tenet denies both charges. "It's ludicrous," he told TIME. "I work for a guy who expects our honest judgment, period. There's no cooking of the books."

    Every faction in the Administration reads the evidence gathered by the CIA about Iraq's actions and capabilities in different ways — usually to justify its preferred outcome. And then the factions press for more. The agency has tried not to take sides, but the rift between it and the Administration hawks is widening as the White House "pushes the envelope" on evidence against Saddam, says a senior intelligence official. The pressure from the hard-liners to paint Saddam in the most dangerous hues "is intense," the official explains. "There is one overriding emphasis, and that is to sell the policy of regime change."

    The friction is greatest on the question of whether Iraq and al-Qaeda are working together against the U.S. Some intelligence analysts accuse Bush of grasping at examples that imply an alliance while ignoring others that don't — like the fact that in the past the secular Saddam and the fundamentalist bin Laden have not been ideological soul mates. (Bin Laden offered to fight against Saddam when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991.) Complicating the fight is the fact that the spooks don't want to overlook evidence on Iraq — as they did with al-Qaeda — so they are trying to turn over every stone. For example, a top Iraqi intelligence official visited bin Laden in Sudan in the mid-1990s, an intelligence source tells Time. There is also more evidence that al-Qaeda operatives who turned up recently in Baghdad may have been plotting chemical-weapons attacks on U.S. soil. "As we peel the onion," says another senior U.S. intelligence official, "we continue to find things that indicate people should at least be troubled and pay attention to the relationship [between Saddam and bin Laden]."

    The peeling, however, hasn't quelled complaints from both hawks and doves that the agency tilts its product. Agency analysts are more pessimistic than are White House hard-liners about possible chaos in Iraq after a U.S. invasion. (The Administration is considering a broad military occupation of Iraq much like the U.S. Army's presence in Japan after World War II.) But State Department intelligence officials remain unconvinced that high-strength aluminum tubes Baghdad has been trying to import are meant to be used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons, as the CIA claims. The tubes, they argue, could just as easily be used to manufacture conventional arms.

    "It's all politics," says a senior CIA hand. "We're the meat in the sandwich. People hear what they want to hear from our reports." Agency insiders say that if Tenet tried anything heavy-handed to please one side or the other, he would have a rebellion on his hands from CIA analysts. Insists Tenet: "We draw lines in the sand about anybody ever telling us what to do. I wouldn't stand for it, and the President wouldn't stand for it."

    Tenet fact-checked a footnoted version of Bush's Cincinnati speech before the President delivered it, correcting a few items and satisfying himself that it represented the agency's view. So perhaps it is not surprising that, according to a White House aide, Bush was miffed that testimony Tenet later declassified seemed to contradict part of his speech. Tenet wasted no time rectifying the situation. The next day he issued an unusual clarification that there was "no inconsistency" between the CIA's view and that of the President.