Iraq War Intelligence

Nature

Flawed and allegedly politicized

Primary Focus

Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) programs (nuclear, biological, chemical) in Iraq

Reforms Instituted

Allowed analysts to better evaluate sources and challenge conclusions for possible bias

Consequence of Failure

Major reorganization of the U.S. intelligence community, CIA lost oversight role

Alleged Pressure Source

Vice President Dick Cheney

Key Assessment Document

National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October 2002

NIE Conclusion (Incorrect)

Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, actively pursuing a nuclear device, had chemical weapons stockpiles of up to 500 tons, and considered buying uranium from Niger and aluminum tubes for centrifuges

2002-10-01

2003-03-20

2006-01-01

The failures of the Iraq War deeply shaped American spy agencies and a generation of intelligence officers and lawmakers. They helped drive a major reorganization of the U.S. intelligence community, with the CIA losing its oversight role over other spy agencies, and reforms intended to allow analysts to better evaluate sources and challenge conclusions for possible bias. [...] A White House spokesperson told The Washington Post in 2006 — as Iraq had fallen into a violent insurgency — that Bush “made his decision to go to war in Iraq based on the intelligence given to him by the intelligence community.” Some former intelligence officials argue the Bush administration stretched available information to make the case for war, particularly on allegations of ties between Iraq and al-Qaida. [...] A U.S. intelligence estimate published in October 2002 alleges that Iraq had considered buying uranium from Niger and aluminum tubes for centrifuges, that it was building mobile weapons labs, that it was considering using drones to spread deadly toxins, and that it had chemical weapons stockpiles of up to 500 tons. Some U.S. officials also suggested Iraqi officials had ties to al-Qaida leaders despite evidence of deep antipathy between the two sides.

Scholars working with Iraqi archives have posited other theories resting on firmer ground. An important academic article by Gregory Koblentz pointed to the role of secret Iraqi intelligence agencies in Saddam’s failure to cooperate with U.N. inspectors, and thus the misperceptions about his weapons programs. The most important agency was aptly named the Special Security Organization. Its primary role was to spy on other spies and on members of the Baath Party to coup-proof the regime. The Iraqi [...] Once Baghdad was caught concealing weapons and documentation, U.N. inspectors and U.S. intelligence analysts developed a healthy distrust of everything the Iraqis said. When Baghdad later owned up to some aspects of its illicit programs, Americans took Iraq’s revelations of its previous misdeeds as proof of the regime’s duplicitous nature. Thus, instead of encouraging the Iraqis to cooperate with weapons inspectors, American and U.N. officials turned the screws even tighter on Baghdad, hoping [...] Yet, the question remains: How did intelligence agencies in the United States, with all their resources, fail to understand what had happened? Access to internal Iraqi records immediately showed the origins of some tactical misperceptions in Washington. For example, the United States government had intercepted snippets of Iraqi communications in which senior Iraqis ordered a site to be cleansed prior to the arrival of U.N. inspectors. In a high-profile presentation to the United Nations in

another. But, after ten years of effort, the Intelligence Commu­nity still had no good intelligence on the status of Iraq’s weapons programs. Our full report examines these issues in detail. Here we limit our discussion to the central lessons to be learned from this episode. The first lesson is that the Intelligence Community cannot analyze and disseminate information that it does not have. The Community’s Iraq assessment was crippled by its inability to collect meaningful intelligence on [...] result of a few harried months in 2002. Most of the fundamental errors were made and communicated to policymakers well before the now-infamous NIE of October 2002, and were not corrected in the months between the NIE and the start of the war. They were not isolated or random failings. Iraq had been an intelligence challenge at the forefront of U.S. attention for over a decade. It was a known adversary that had already fought one war with the United States and seemed increasingly likely to fight [...] be changed. Iraq: An Overview In October 2002, at the request of members of Congress, the National Intel­ligence Council produced a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)—the most authoritative intelligence assessment produced by the Intelligence Community—which concluded that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons pro­gram and was actively pursuing a nuclear device. According to the exhaustive study of the Iraq Survey Group, this assessment was almost com­pletely wrong. The NIE said that

about the intelligence community’s failure to assess correctly the status of Iraq’s alleged WMD programs without at least some discussion regarding the churning controversy that politicization may have played in corrupting the WMD intelligence. Paul R. Pillar, the former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, recently stirred the ongoing controversy with a Foreign Affairs essay “Intelligence, Policy and the War in Iraq” in which he described a dysfunctional and [...] for every intelligence question. Nevertheless, given that Iraq was one of the two possible major theaters of war that the Department of Defense planned for, that we had been conducting low-level combat operations there since 1991, and that Iraq’s WMD capability was an enduring matter of high concern, it is hard to argue that this intelligence problem did not merit resource intensive competitive analytical techniques.25 All the techniques listed above offer distinct analytical advantages and [...] “…is this best we’ve got?” Tenet replied unequivocally “Don’t worry; it’s a slam dunk case!”1 Yet as the world now knows, instead of a “slam dunk case” America’s intelligence on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) was flat-out wrong. The president’s Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction called this profound intelligence failure “one of the most public—the most damaging—intelligence failures in recent American history.”2 In a