In this special episode of IntelMattersPod, host Michael Morell speaks with five former senior CIA officers about the agency's work before, during and after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
This month marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and in this episode, we are going to look back at the war. Specifically, we are going to look at the many roles played by CIA during the war, and we are going to talk about the long-term consequences of the conflict.
The invasion of Iraq began on March 20, 2003, and it was just the start of what would become a years-long, complex mix of military operations, intelligence activities, and political initiatives to stabilize post-war Iraq and to deal with the consequences. FRANKEL: The president says these satellite photos show two operational nuclear installations inside Iraq and he argues the time to act is now.
On collection, CIA and NSA, the National Security Agency, did not penetrate Saddam's inner circle to the point where the United States would have known what Saddam had really done, what Saddam was really up to: The collection failure is significant because had collectors seen what Saddam had done, the analytic failure on WMD could not, and would not, have happened.
This history colored the analysts' approach to the question of whether he had WMD in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The idea that he would sort of withdraw or pull back from his WMD programs just wasn't in the cards. Of course, he's trying to keep those things because they create regime stability. It's his defense against the West. We won't mess with you if you have WMD.It's hard to think about.
In fact, the text of the NIE included caveats, not a lot of them, but enough to notice. Had the analysts taken those caveats into account and had they rigorously assessed the dated nature of the information underlying their judgments and the poor quality of the sourcing behind that information, I believe their confidence would have been lower. I believe they would have had only"low" confidence -- on a scale of low, medium, and high.
The myth is that, within the Intelligence Community, only CIA got this wrong, that other parts of the Intelligence Community got the WMD story right. The two examples often given are the analysts at the State Department and the analysts at the Energy Department. But the story is much more complex than that, and the rest of the story is one in which CIA largely shined, with a few stumbles.This was critically important because the primary concern of President Bush was that Saddam might someday give his weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, most concerningly to Bin Ladin and Al Qaeda.
And some of those early contacts? We learned after the war that many of the most worrisome had never happened.We had senior military trainer who'd said they'd sent operatives to Iraq, that they'd provided chemical weapons training. They recanted it all. It turned out he lied about it. Likewise, on Zarqawi's trip to Baghdad, the analysts did not believe that the trip was coordinated with the Iraqis.We really thought because he and about ten of his fellow terrorists were in Baghdad for several months that the Iraqis had to know. And that was further boosted by the fact that a foreign service said they told the IIS where they were. But the II S came back and said they couldn't find them.
We are going to take a quick break. When we come back, we will discuss the important presentation to the United Nations by Secretary of State Colin Powell.RATHER: This is a CBS News special report – Dan Rather reporting from CBS News World Headquarters in New York. The secretary of state for the United States Colin Powell is appearing before the United Nations Security Council here in New York City to prevent, to present evidence Saddam Hussein is violating the council resolution.
On the WMD portion of Powell's speech, the Secretary's presentation omitted the analysts' caveats, although, to be fair, the caveats were not numerous. Nonetheless, they were lost. There was pressure from policymakers for those caveats not to be in the speech.MAKRIDIS: PLANTE: Sources tell CBS News that Tenet will point to intelligence successes not previously made public, and try to correct what they call 'inaccuracies' about what the CIA did and did not say about weapons of mass destruction.
It was very difficult to get our message heard. Perhaps we should have said it louder, but it was certainly something that we were trying to get across – that the risks of this effort were substantial, both to the stability of Iraq and to the Middle East, as well as to our own troops.Emile studied the Middle East in great depth as an academic before coming to the Agency, including spending significant time in the region.
MARTIN: As temperatures in Iraq climb higher and tempers grow shorter, senior officials in Washington admit the reconstruction program – which is supposed to put the country back on its feet – is at best sporadic and at worst chaotic. According to one official, J Paul Bremer, the American in charge of rebuilding Iraq, is making it up as he goes along.
While the CIA's assessment of the situation in Iraq was getting worse, some policymakers – and other government agencies, namely the Pentagon – pushed back. The Iraqis, in DOD's eyes, were supposed to be rejoicing that Saddam's regime was gone. And it took them a long time to accept our analyst judgment that the Iraqi people were devolving into civil war.
What about the consequences? What were the consequences for the United States, for Iraq for the region, and for the CIA. Let's turn to that discussion. This is very, very huge. For the first time following the invasion, we saw the rise of what we call or what one academic friend of mine called the Shia Crescent in the region. So for the first time, you have the two largest Shia states in the world, Iran and Iraq, almost in an alliance that they did not have before ever, Significant gains for Iranian influence, as predicted by Emile and his analysts before the invasion.
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