The leaders of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence have criticized U.S. intelligence agencies for using outdated information to determine that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and that it had links to al-Qaeda, the Washington Post reported yesterday (see GSN, Sept. 26).
In a letter sent last week to CIA Director George Tenet, committee Chairman Porter Goss (R-Fla.) and top Democrat Jane Harman (D-Calif.) said a committee inquiry into numerous volumes of classified information found “significant deficiencies” in the ability of U.S. intelligence agencies to gather fresh information on Iraq. The letter also charged that intelligence agencies used “past assessments” dating back to 1998 and “some new ‘piecemeal’ intelligence,” neither of which had been challenged, to make assessments.
“The absence of proof that chemical and biological weapons and their related development programs had been destroyed was considered proof that they continued to exist,” Goss and Harman said in their letter.
The committee also found “substantial gaps” in information from human sources that would have allowed intelligence agencies to provide lawmakers with “a clear understanding of the nature of the relationship” between Iraq and al-Qaeda, the letter said. Intelligence agencies instead used a “low threshold” or “no threshold” on using information purporting to demonstrate ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda, it said.
The full House intelligence committee has not voted on the letter’s findings, the Post reported.
CIA chief spokesman Bill Harlow said he disagreed with the conclusions made in the letter and said the intelligence committee had not conducted “a detailed inquiry on this study.”
“To attempt to make such a determination so quickly and without all the facts is premature and wrong,” Harlow said. “Iraq was an intractable and difficult subject. The tradecraft of intelligence rarely has the luxury of having black-and-white facts. The judgments reached, and the tradecraft used, were honest and professional — based on many years of effort and experience,” he said (Dana Priest, Washington Post, Sept. 28).
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice yesterday challenged Goss and Harman’s assessment that outdated intelligence on Iraq was used to evaluate Iraqi WMD efforts. During an appearance on FOX News Sunday, Rice said that U.S. intelligence on Iraq had also included new information on procurement efforts and attempts to reconstitute groups of scientists.
“Yes, I think I would call it new information, and it was certainly enriching the case in the same direction that this is somebody who had had weapons of mass destruction, had used them, and was continuing to pursue them,” Rice said. “There were many, many dots about what was going on in the Iraqi programs after 1998,” she said (Kessler/Priest, Washington Post, Sept. 29).
Rice yesterday also defended the quality of U.S. prewar intelligence on Iraq.
“The president believes that he had very good intelligence going into the war, and stands behind what the director of central intelligence told him going into the war,” Rice said. “Obviously, this was the accumulation of evidence about [former Iraqi President] Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction over a 12-year period, information that was relied on by three administrations, several different intelligence services, and indeed the United Nations itself,” she said.
The absence of U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq after 1998 also made it difficult for U.S. intelligence agencies to obtain information, Secretary of State Colin Powell said yesterday.
“From 1998 until we went in earlier this year, there was a period where we didn’t have benefit of U.N. inspectors actually on the ground, and our intelligence community had to do the best they could,” Powell ABC’s This Week. “And I think they did a pretty good job,” he said (Hulse/Sanger, New York Times, Sept. 28).
DIA Criticizes Information From Defectors
In addition to the House intelligence committee’s criticism, a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment has found that information provided by Iraqi defectors made available by the Iraqi National Congress opposition group was of little value, according to the New York Times (see GSN, June 12).
The DIA assessment found that only one-third of the information provided by defectors had any use and that efforts to follow up on such information had little result, said U.S. officials. The information provided by defectors that could not be substantiated included information on Iraqi WMD programs, they said. Several of the defectors made available by the INC had either invented or exaggerated their ties to the Hussein regime and Iraqi WMD programs, the officials said.
Two U.S. Defense Department officials, however, defended the efforts to debrief Iraqi defectors provided by the INC, saying that while the credibility of the defectors was low, it was about the same as most human intelligence on Iraq.
One Pentagon official said that even the best information provided by defectors included “a lot of stuff that we already knew or thought we knew.” That information, however, had “improved our situational awareness” by “making us more confident about our assessments,” the official said (Douglas Jehl, New York Times, Sept. 29).
Senior British Official Acknowledges Problems with WMD Dossier
Meanwhile, British Home Secretary David Blunkett has said that a September 2002 dossier on Iraqi WMD programs should have better clarified that an included claim that Iraq could launch biological and chemical weapons attacks within 45 minutes applied to battlefield weapons, and not long-range systems (see GSN, Sept. 23).
The British Parliament intelligence and security committee this month criticized the failure to better explain the 45-minute claim, which it said “allowed speculation (which) was unhelpful,” according to the Financial Times.
“We accept the reprimand from the ISC,” Blunkett said (Jean Eaglesham, Financial Times, Sept. 29).
Iraqi Scientists May Have Conned Hussein Over Weapons
In Iraq, former officials and scientists have said that Iraq’s WMD programs were dismantled during the 1990s and that Hussein may have been fooled into believing he possessed weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, according to Time.
In an interview with Time, Iraqi engineering professor Nabil al-Rawi said Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was not relaunched after its facilities were destroyed during the 1991 Gulf War. Al-Rawi said Iraqi biological and chemical weapons programs were also shut down during the 1990s, with the scientists transferred to conventional military or civilian projects. He said he was asked last year by Abd al-Tawab Mullah Huweish, head of the Iraqi Industry and Military Industrialization Ministry, to give a seminar to scientists at the Military Industrialization Commission “on ways to attract funding for and shape new research projects because there was no weapons work for them.”
Some former scientists and officials also said Hussein destroyed on his own much of Iraq’s WMD stockpiles without keeping proper records, according to Time. For example, a captain in the Mukhabarat intelligence service said that in July 1991, he watched the destruction of 25 missiles armed with biological agents. No documentation of the destruction was kept, the captain said.
The men used to conduct such destruction missions were junior level military officers, al-Rawi said.
“They are not educated men,” he said. “You order them to do something, they do it. When we had to try to account for this, we tried to recall them in 1997, but many had of course left the army and were hard to find. And the ones we did find certainly couldn’t remember exactly how many missiles were buried, nor what was in each of them,” al-Rawi said.
In addition, Iraqi officials appeared to have also invented WMD projects and experiments to continue to receive funding, according to Time. The Mukhabarat captain said that even Huweish would create false progress reports for Hussein while embezzling research funding.
“He would tell the president he had invented a new missile for stealth bombers but hadn’t. So Saddam would say, ‘Make 20 missiles.’ He would make one and put the rest in his pocket,” the captain said (Gibbs/Ware, Time, Sept. 28).
By Mike Nartker
Global Security Newswire
WASHINGTON — CIA Director George Tenet has request a U.S. Justice Department investigation into charges that the White House leaked the name of the wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who traveled to Niger last year to investigate claims that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium there, according to reports (see GSN, July 25).
In a July 14 column for the Chicago Sun-Times, Robert Novak identified Wilson’s wife by name and said she was a CIA “operative on weapons of mass destruction,” citing “two senior administration officials” as his sources. In a column published about a week earlier in the New York Times, Wilson described his visit to Niger as a CIA envoy, during which he determined that it was unlikely that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium there. Wilson’s trip helped to discredit one of the key pieces of evidence offered by the Bush administration that Iraq was attempting to develop nuclear weapons.
The Washington Post reported yesterday that, shortly before Novak’s column was published, two senior White House officials called at least six reporters based in Washington and told them the name and occupation of Wilson’s wife. The Post quoted a senior Bush administration official as saying that the leak “was meant purely and simply for revenge.”
According to the Post, Tenet has sent a memo to Justice with a set of questions as to whether the leak of Wilson’s wife’s identity violated U.S law. Experts have said the leak could be a violation of the Intelligence Identity Protection Act of 1982, which carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison for the disclosure of names and identities of intelligence agents by those who have access to classified information that identifies covert agents; and up to five years in prison for the disclosure of information by those who learn the identities of covert agents through access to classified information.
Neither the CIA nor Justice would confirm to Global Security Newswire that an investigation into the leak of Wilson’s wife’s identity is being considered. A statement released yesterday by Senator Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who requested in July that the FBI investigate the leak, said Justice is now considering whether to begin a formal investigation.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan said today that “nothing has been brought to our attention” that any White House official was involved in the leak.
“We have nothing beyond … media reports to suggest White House involvement,” McClellan said.
Wilson himself has previously named White House top political adviser Karl Rove as being behind the leak. During an appearance today on ABC’s Good Morning America, however, Wilson backed away from such an assertion, saying instead that he believed Rove had “condoned” the leak.
“In one speech I gave out in Seattle not too long ago, I mentioned the name Karl Rove. I think I was probably carried away by the spirit of the moment. I don’t have any knowledge that Karl Rove himself was either the leaker or the authorizer of the leak. But I have great confidence that, at a minimum, he condoned it and certainly did nothing to shut it down,” CNN.com quoted Wilson as saying.
McClellan today said that it is “simply not true” that Rove had any involvement in the leak.
Yesterday, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice also refuted the leak allegations.
“I know nothing about any such calls, and I do know that the president of the United States would not expect his White House to behave in that way,” Rice said during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press. “It’s my understanding that when a question like this is raised before the agency, that they refer it as a matter of course, a matter of routine, to the Justice Department. The Justice Department will now take appropriate action, whatever that is, and that will be up to the Justice Department to determine what that action is,” she said.
While denying any knowledge of the possible leak, Secretary of State Colin Powell said yesterday that the CIA had “an obligation” to investigate the claim.
“I think that the CIA has an obligation, when they believe somebody who was undercover was outed, so to speak, has an obligation to ask the Justice Department to look into it. But other than that, I don’t know anything about the matter,” Powell said during an appearance on ABC’s This Week.
In his statement yesterday, Schumer called on Justice to appoint a special counsel to investigate the link, saying Attorney General John Ashcroft faced a “conflict of interest” in investigating senior White House officials.
“I don’t see how it would be possible for the Justice Department to investigate whether a top administration official broke the law and endangered the life of this agent,” Schumer said. “Even if the department were to do a thorough and comprehensive investigation, the appearance of a conflict could well mar its conclusions. I hope the Attorney General will do the right thing and appoint a special counsel,” he said.
The White House believes, however, that Justice is the proper agency to investigate the leak allegation, McClellan said today during a White House press conference, defending the department’s ability to independently investigate the issue. He said the Bush administration would cooperate with a Justice investigation, adding that the department has not yet made such a request.
Anyone in the White House with information relating to the leak should come forward, McClellan said. He also said that if anyone in the media has any information about the leak, they too should provide it to Justice.
While official investigations of information leaks are notoriously hard to prove, the recent media coverage of the leak of Wilson’s wife’s name is likely to pressure Justice to act, according to Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy.
If Justice were to do nothing, “it would lead to endless questioning,” Aftergood told GSN today. “The only way out at this point is to go through it,” he said.
Yesterday’s Post story suggested that Tenet’s request for an investigation into the leak was part of a split that has developed between the CIA and the White House after Tenet was made first in line for blame over the inclusion of the disputed claim that Iraq sought uranium from Africa into President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address.
Aftergood, however, said he did not think Tenet was “looking for a fight with the White House. Instead, Tenet would risk looking inconsistent in challenging these kinds of leaks if he had not requested the investigation, Aftergood said, adding that Tenet “probably wishes that none of this had happen.”
A likely byproduct of the CIA’s request, however, is “significant embarrassment” for the White House, Aftergood said, adding that the request is “not going to win Tenet any friends over there.”
U.S. intelligence reports and Bush administration officials have indicated that security preparations for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens are still ineffective and serious problems remain, the Washington Post reported Saturday (see GSN, Sept. 25).
Intelligence reports describe a number of Greek security lapses, such as a test agent disguised as a pregnant woman being allowed to smuggle mock explosives through a security checkpoint and another test agent being allowed to place a mock explosive device on a ferry, the Post reported. The reports also describe disorganized Greek law enforcement, poor maritime patrolling and concerns over delays in counterterrorism planning.
“If the Olympics were held today, the security would be worse than Munich,” a U.S. security planning official said, referring to the 1972 games where 11 Israeli athletes and trainers were killed by pro-Palestinian terrorists.
A security test conducted last month in Athens found serious concerns that were correctable, according to international security personnel.
“All the big stuff got through,” the U.S. security planning official said, referring to guns and mock explosives used in the test. “If you can get the big stuff through, getting chemical and biological stuff through is no problem,” the official said.
Greece is likely to spend almost $1 billion for the Athens games — about twice as much as was spent on security for the Olympics held in Sydney and in Salt Lake City, said Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou.
“Security is on track,” Papandreou said.
The recent intelligence reports about security for the Olympics, coming about a year before the games are to be held, are intended to highlight security flaws that officials are used to resolving, some officials said.
“They have come a long way. Is there room for improvement? Absolutely,” a Bush administration official said. The White House is “actively engaged with the Greeks because we’ve known it was going to be a problem,” the official said (Gregory Vistica, Washington Post, Sept. 27).
The U.S. Homeland Security Department last week announced the first research project solicitation issued by the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (see GSN, Aug. 4).
The solicitation outlines the agency’s requirements for research into new biological and chemical weapons detectors, according to a department press release. A bidders conference on the solicitation is scheduled to be held today in Washington.
“Our goal for this first solicitation is to develop and transition to the field the next generation of biological and chemical detectors,” said Homeland Security Undersecretary for Science and Technology Charles McQueary. “These detectors will significantly advance the capabilities of our first responders and federal programs to counter terrorism,” he said (U.S. Homeland Security Department release, Sept. 25).
The purpose of HSARPA is to award procurement contracts and funding to public and private entities to aid research into new homeland security technologies, according to a department fact sheet. David Bolka was appointed last month as the first director of the agency (U.S. Homeland Security Department release, Sept. 26).
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