Imagine that you have been assigned a highly sensitive mission. It is August 5, 2001. Your employer, the CIA, has been accumulating evidence that suggests the imminence of a major domestic terror attack. The evidence has been pouring in from foreign intelligence services, walk-ins to embassies abroad, NSA electronic surveillance, FBI investigations. But there is a problem. The CIA cannot get the administration to take action. The first obstacle came from Donald Rumsfeld. He refused to take NSA intercepts seriously.
Tenet had been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had questioned all the National Security Agency intercepts and other intelligence. Could all this be a grand deception? Rumsfeld had asked. Perhaps it was a plan to measure U.S. reactions and defenses.
Tenet had the NSA review all the intercepts, and the agency concluded they were of genuine al-Qaeda communications. On June 30, a top-secret senior executive intelligence brief contained an article headlined “Bin Laden Threats Are Real.”
But, there was still no action. So, ten days later Tenet decided to make a bold attempt to wake up the government.
On July 10, 2001, two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet met with his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, at CIA headquarters to review the latest on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Black laid out the case, consisting of communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. It was a mass of fragments and dots that nonetheless made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately.
Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, from the car and said he needed to see her right away. There was no practical way she could refuse such a request from the CIA director.
Tenet and Black laid out the evidence for Rice.
He and Black, a veteran covert operator, had two main points when they met with her. First, al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly in the United States itself. Black emphasized that this amounted to a strategic warning, meaning the problem was so serious that it required an overall plan and strategy. Second, this was a major foreign policy problem that needed to be addressed immediately. They needed to take action that moment — covert, military, whatever — to thwart bin Laden.
But Rice gave them what they considered ‘the brush off’. Cofer Black would later say, “The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.”
Several weeks later the President flew to Crawford, Texas for a month long ‘working vacation’. He arrived August 4th. It was at this point that the CIA decided to bypass Rumsfeld, Rice and the rest of the foreign policy establishment and try to get the attention of the President.
They drew up a memo, entitled Bin Laden determined to strike in US. Then they assigned a CIA officer to deliver the message to the President as part of his August 6th Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB). What happened next must have been highly demoralizing.
The alarming August 6, 2001, memo from the CIA to the President — “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US” — has been widely noted in the past few years.
But, also in August, CIA analysts flew to Crawford to personally brief the President — to intrude on his vacation with face-to-face alerts.
The analytical arm of the CIA was in a kind of panic mode at this point. Other intelligence services, including those from the Arab world, were sounding an alarm. The arrows were all in the red. They didn’t know the place or time of an attack, but something was coming. The President needed to know . . .
George W. Bush seems to have made the wrong choice. He looked hard at the panicked CIA briefer. “All right,” he said. “You’ve covered your ass now.” -Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine
The first sign that there was some kind of rift between the CIA and the Bush administration arose when the existence of this highly sensitive document was disclosed to the press on May 16, 2002.
The obvious question is: why did someone make the decision to disclose the existence of the August 6th PDB in May 2002? If you look at a timeline of the Spring 2002, it isn’t too hard to guess. The CIA had determined that Mohammed Atta had not met an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague but had been in Virginia Beach at the time of the alleged meeting. They had determined that there was no corroboration for a report of Iraq seeking uranium from Niger. The Brits had determined, in March, that the facts were being fixed around the policy of regime change.
In June, the CIA produced a report entitled “Iraq and al-Qaeda: A Murky Relationship,” which was highly skeptical of Iraq’s involvement in international terrorism.
In short, the CIA was debunking the cases for war at the very same time the Bush administration was casting about for any evidence they could find to bolster a decision that had already been made.
How do we know the decision had already been made? The President told us on April 4, 2002.
In a televised interview, US President George Bush tells Sir Trevor McDonald of Britain’s ITV television network, “I made up my mind that Saddam needs to go. That’s about all I’m willing to share with you.”
We later got further confirmation of this:
Time magazine reported that in March 2002 – a full year before the invasion – Bush outlined his real thinking to three U.S. senators, “Fuck Saddam,” Bush said. “We’re taking him out.”
Time actually didn’t report the quote exactly that way. Apparently not to offend readers who admire Bush’s moral clarity, Time printed the quote as “F— Saddam. We’re taking him out.”
Bush offered his pithy judgment after sticking his head in the door of a White House meeting between National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and three senators who had been discussing strategies for dealing with Iraq through the United Nations. The senators laughed uncomfortably at Bush’s remark, Time reported.
When scholars write the history of the Iraq War they should put especial focus on these points. The President made a decision to depose Saddam prior to developing a military or political strategy for accomplishing the task. It was then left to the various agencies of government to carry out the plan in an ad-hoc manner. The Brits were faced with a policy that had no legal analysis or developed basis. They insisted that their cooperation would be contingent on a United Nations’ approach. On March 17, 2002:
British Ambassador to the US Sir Christopher Meyer attends lunch with Paul Wolfowitz and other Bush administration officials in Washington and assures them that the British would support the use of military force against Iraq. Meyer informs Sir David Manning, Tony Blair’s foreign policy adviser, in a memo the following day:
“On Iraq I opened by sticking very closely to the script that you used with Condi Rice last week. We backed regime change, but the plan had to be clever and failure was not an option. It would be a tough sell for us domestically, and probably tougher elsewhere in Europe. The US could go it alone if it wanted to. But if it wanted to act with partners, there had to be a strategy for building support for military action against Saddam. I then went through the need to wrongfoot Saddam on the inspectors and the UN SCRs [Security Council Resolutions] and the critical importance of the MEPP [Middle East Peace Process] as an integral part of the anti-Saddam strategy.”
So, there is a big canvass here to examine when we try to decide why someone (presumably) at the CIA decided to leak the contents of the August 6th, 2001 PDB at the specific moment in time that they did (early May, 2002). I suggest the immediate cause was the following anti-CIA attack by Cheney stenographer William Safire:
The New York Times
9 May 2002 Monday
“Mr. Atta Goes to Prague”, by William Safire
[snip]
A misdirection play is under way in the C.I.A.’s all-out attempt to discredit an account of a suspicious meeting in Prague a year ago. Mohamed Atta, destined to be the leading Sept. 11 suicide hijacker, was reported last fall by Czech intelligence to have met at least once with Saddam Hussein’s espionage chief in the Iraqi Embassy — Ahmed al-Ani, a spymaster whom the Czechs were keeping under tight surveillance.
If the report proves accurate, a connection would exist between Al Qaeda’s murder of 3,000 Americans and Iraq’s Saddam. That would clearly be a casus belli, calling for our immediate military response, separate from the need to stop a demonstrated mass killer from acquiring nuclear and germ weapons. Accordingly, high C.I.A. and Justice officials — worried about exposure of the agency’s inability to conduct covert operations — desperately want Atta’s Saddam connection to be disbelieved.
They are telling favored journalists: Shoot this troublesome story down. In March, a Washington Post columnist obliged with: “hard intelligence to support the Baghdad-bin Laden connection is somewhere between ‘slim’ and ‘none.’ ” In April, Newsweek headlined: “A spy story tying Saddam to 9-11 is looking very flimsy,” and its Michael Isikoff wrote: “the much touted ‘Prague connection’ appears to be an intriguing, but embarrassing, mistake.”
[snip]
Whom do you believe — a responsible official on the scene speaking on the record, with no ax to grind, or U.S. spooks who may be covering up a missed signal from Prague about Sept. 11 and are also fearful of revealing their weakness in Iraq?
Hard-liners can play this background game, too. A “senior Bush administration official” not in the protect-Saddam cabal tells me: “You cannot say the Czech report about a meeting in 2001 between Atta and the Iraqi is discredited or disproven in any way. The Czechs stand by it and we’re still in the process of pursuing it and sorting out the timing and venue. There’s no doubt Atta was in Prague in 2000, and a subsequent meeting is at least plausible.”
To see more of Safire’s work on Cheney’s behalf, look at the comments in this old thread.
Let me try to sum this up succinctly. The CIA did its best to warn the administration about the threat of 9/11. When the administration took no action, the CIA was blamed for failing to connect the dots. They bravely absorbed that unfair characterization, but quickly found themselves under tremendous pressure to link the 9/11 attacks to Iraq, and Iraq to international terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and unverifiable WMD programs. When they could not, or would not, make those determinations, columnists like William Safire launched grossly unfair attacks at them.
Finally, the CIA determined that invading Iraq would weaken our alliances, provide a training ground for future terrorists, be the only reason Saddam would ever consider using WMD (if he even had any), would empower Iran, and could lead to the partition of the country. Despite this, they were asked to support a foreign policy strategy their analysts thought would be a disaster. And they did.
When no WMD’s were found, the CIA was again asked to take the blame, and a new intelligence agency was established that took away the CIA’s responsibility to report directly to the President. Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity was exposed and the investigation, not surprisingly, led directly back into the Vice-President’s office.
Here is what I want to know. What ever happened to that CIA officer that went down to Crawford and briefed the President? Was his ass really covered, or did he get sacked the moment the PDB was leaked? And can we find him and ask him to testify before Congress, so we can finally learn the truth about the President’s foreknowledge of 9/11?
