The Lie Factory
News: This special Mother Jones investigation late last year detailed
how, only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret
Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside
story of how they pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led
the nation to war.
By Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest
January/February 2004 Issue
It's a crisp fall day in western Virginia, a hundred miles from
Washington, D.C., and a breeze is rustling the red and gold leaves of
the Shenandoah hills. On the weather-beaten wood porch of a ramshackle
90-year-old farmhouse, at the end of a winding dirt-and-gravel road,
Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski is perched on a plastic chair, wearing
shorts, a purple sweatshirt, and muddy sneakers. Two scrawny dogs and
a lone cat are on the prowl, and the air is filled with swarms of
ladybugs.
So far, she says, no investigators have come knocking. Not from the
Central Intelligence Agency, which conducted an internal inquiry into
intelligence on Iraq, not from the congressional intelligence
committees, not from the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory
Board. All of those bodies are ostensibly looking into the Bush
administration's prewar Iraq intelligence, amid charges that the White
House and the Pentagon exaggerated, distorted, or just plain lied
about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda terrorists and its possession of
nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. In her hands, Kwiatkowski
holds several pieces of the puzzle. Yet she, along with a score of
other career officers recently retired or shuffled off to other jobs,
has not been approached by anyone.
Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the
Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the
invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit
manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to
terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence‚ -- it was propaganda," she says.
"They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it
sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often
by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong
together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking
points for U.S. officials‚ -- including ominous lines in speeches by
President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of
State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last
February‚ -- that the administration pushed American public opinion
into supporting an unnecessary war.
Until now, the story of how the Bush administration produced its
wildly exaggerated estimates of the threat posed by Iraq has never
been revealed in full. But, for the first time, a detailed
investigation by Mother Jones, based on dozens of interviews‚ -- some
on the record, some with officials who insisted on anonymity‚ --
exposes the workings of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and of the
Defense Department's war-planning task force, the Office of Special
Plans. It's the story of a close-knit team of ideologues who spent a
decade or more hammering out plans for an attack on Iraq and who used
the events of September 11, 2001, to set it into motion.
Six months after the end of major combat in Iraq, the United States
had spent $300 million trying to find banned weapons in Iraq, and
President Bush was seeking $600 million more to extend the search. Not
found were Iraq's Scuds and other long-range missiles, thousands of
barrels and tons of anthrax and botulism stock, sarin and VX nerve
agents, mustard gas, biological and chemical munitions, mobile labs
for producing biological weapons, and any and all evidence of a
reconstituted nuclear-arms program, all of which had been repeatedly
cited as justification for the war. Also missing was evidence of Iraqi
collaboration with Al Qaeda.
The reports, virtually all false, of Iraqi weapons and terrorism ties
emanated from an apparatus that began to gestate almost as soon as the
Bush administration took power. In the very first meeting of the Bush
national-security team, one day after President Bush took the oath of
office in January 2001, the issue of invading Iraq was raised,
according to one of the participants in the meeting‚ -- and officials
all the way down the line started to get the message, long before
9/11. Indeed, the Bush team at the Pentagon hadn't even been formally
installed before Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of Defense, and
Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of Defense for policy, began putting
together what would become the vanguard for regime change in Iraq.
Both Wolfowitz and Feith have deep roots in the neoconservative
movement. One of the most influential Washington neo- conservatives in
the foreign-policy establishment during the Republicans' wilderness
years of the 1990s, Wolfowitz has long held that not taking Baghdad in
1991 was a grievous mistake. He and others now prominent in the
administration said so repeatedly over the past decade in a slew of
letters and policy papers from neoconservative groups like the Project
for the New American Century and the Committee for the Liberation of
Iraq. Feith, a former aide to Richard Perle at the Pentagon in the
1980s and an activist in far-right Zionist circles, held the view that
there was no difference between U.S. and Israeli security policy and
that the best way to secure both countries' future was to solve the
Israeli-Palestinian problem not by serving as a broker, but with the
United States as a force for "regime change" in the region.
Called in to help organize the Iraq war-planning team was a longtime
Pentagon official, Harold Rhode, a specialist on Islam who speaks
Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, and Farsi. Though Feith would not be
officially confirmed until July 2001, career military and civilian
officials in NESA began to watch his office with concern after Rhode
set up shop in Feith's office in early January. Rhode, seen by many
veteran staffers as an ideological gadfly, was officially assigned to
the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, an in-house Pentagon think
tank headed by fellow neocon Andrew Marshall. Rhode helped Feith lay
down the law about the department's new anti-Iraq, and broadly
anti-Arab, orientation. In one telling incident, Rhode accosted and
harangued a visiting senior Arab diplomat, telling him that there
would be no "bartering in the bazaar anymore. You're going to have to
sit up and pay attention when we say so."
Rhode refused to be interviewed for this story, saying cryptically,
"Those who speak, pay."
According to insiders, Rhode worked with Feith to purge career Defense
officials who weren't sufficiently enthusiastic about the muscular
anti-Iraq crusade that Wolfowitz and Feith wanted. Rhode appeared to
be "pulling people out of nooks and crannies of the Defense
Intelligence Agency and other places to replace us with," says a
former analyst. "They wanted nothing to do with the professional
staff. And they wanted us the ***** out of there."
The unofficial, off-site recruitment office for Feith and Rhode was
the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank whose
12th-floor conference room in Washington is named for the dean of
neoconservative defense strategists, the late Albert Wohlstetter, an
influential RAND analyst and University of Chicago mathematician.
Headquartered at AEI is Richard Perle, Wohlstetter's prize protege,
the godfather of the AEI-Defense Department nexus of neoconservatives
who was chairman of the Pentagon's influential Defense Policy Board.
Rhode, along with Michael Rubin, a former AEI staffer who is also now
at the Pentagon, was a ubiquitous presence at AEI conferences on Iraq
over the past two years, and the two Pentagon officials seemed almost
to be serving as stage managers for the AEI events, often sitting in
the front row and speaking in stage whispers to panelists and AEI
officials. Just after September 11, 2001, Feith and Rhode recruited
David Wurmser, the director of Middle East studies for AEI, to serve
as a Pentagon consultant.
Wurmser would be the founding participant of the unnamed, secret
intelligence unit at the Pentagon, set up in Feith's office, which
would be the nucleus of the Defense Department's Iraq disinformation
campaign that was established within weeks of the attacks in New York
and Washington. While the CIA and other intelligence agencies
concentrated on Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda as the culprit in the 9/11
attacks, Wolfowitz and Feith obsessively focused on Iraq. It was a
theory that was discredited, even ridiculed, among intelligence
professionals. Daniel Benjamin, co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror,
was director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council in
the late 1990s. "In 1998, we went through every piece of intelligence
we could find to see if there was a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq,"
he says. "We came to the conclusion that our intelligence agencies had
it right: There was no noteworthy relationship between Al Qaeda and
Iraq. I know that for a fact." Indeed, that was the consensus among
virtually all anti-terrorism specialists.
In short, Wurmser, backed by Feith and Rhode, set out to prove what
didn't exist.
In an Administration devoted to the notion of "Feith-based
intelligence," Wurmser was ideal. For years, he'd been a shrill
ideologue, part of the minority crusade during the 1990s that was
beating the drums for war against Iraq. Along with Perle and Feith, in
1996 Wurmser and his wife, Meyrav, wrote a provocative strategy paper
for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called "A Clean Break: A
New Strategy for Securing the Realm." It called on Israel to work with
Jordan and Turkey to "contain, destabilize and roll back" various
states in the region, overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq, press Jordan
to restore a scion of the Hashemite dynasty to the Iraqi throne, and,
above all, launch military assaults against Lebanon and Syria as a
"prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would
threaten Syria's territorial integrity."
In 1997, Wurmser wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal called
"Iraq Needs a Revolution" and the next year co-signed a letter with
Perle calling for all-out U.S. support of the Iraqi National Congress
(INC), an exile group led by Ahmad Chalabi, in promoting an insurgency
in Iraq. At AEI, Wurmser wrote Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to
Defeat Saddam Hussein, essentially a book-length version of "A Clean
Break" that proposed an alliance between Jordan and the INC to redraw
the map of the Middle East. Among the mentors cited by Wurmser in the
book: Chalabi, Perle, and Feith.
The purpose of the unnamed intelligence unit, often described as a
Pentagon "cell," was to scour reports from the CIA, the Defense
Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and other agencies
to find nuggets of information linking Iraq, Al Qaeda, terrorism, and
the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In a
controversial press briefing in October 2002, a year after Wurmser's
unit was established, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
acknowledged that a primary purpose of the unit was to cull factoids,
which were then used to disparage, undermine, and contradict the CIA's
reporting, which was far more cautious and nuanced than Rumsfeld,
Wolfowitz, and Feith wanted. Rumsfeld particularly enjoyed harassing
the CIA staffer who briefed him every morning, using the type of data
produced by the intelligence unit. "What I could do is say, 'Gee, what
about this?'" Rumsfeld noted. "'Or what about that? Has somebody
thought of this?'" Last June, when Feith was questioned on the same
topic at a briefing, he acknowledged that the secret unit in fact
looked at the connection between Iraq and terrorism, saying, "You
can't rely on deterrence to deal with the problem of weapons of mass
destruction in the hands of state sponsors of terrorism because [of]
the possibility that those state sponsors might employ chemical
weapons or biological weapons by means of a terrorist organization
proxy.
Though Feith, in that briefing, described Wurmser's unit as an
innocent project, "a global exercise" that was not meant to put
pressure on other intelligence agencies or create skewed intelligence
to fit preconceived policy notions, many other sources assert that it
did exactly that. That the White House and the Pentagon put enormous
pressure on the CIA to go along with its version of events has been
widely reported, highlighted by visits to CIA headquarters by Vice
President Cheney and Lewis Libby, his chief of staff. Led by Perle,
the neocons seethed with contempt for the CIA. The CIA's analysis,
said Perle, "isn't worth the paper it's printed on." Standing in a
crowded hallway during an AEI event, Perle added, "The CIA is status
quo oriented. They don't want to take risks."
That became the mantra of the shadow agency within an agency.
Putting Wurmser in charge of the unit meant that it was being run by a
pro-Iraq-war ideologue who'd spent years calling for a pre-emptive
invasion of Baghdad and who was clearly predisposed to find what he
wanted to see. Adding another layer of dubious quality to the endeavor
was the man partnered with Wurmser, F. Michael Maloof. Maloof, a
former aide to Perle in the 1980s Pentagon, was twice stripped of his
high-level security clearances‚ -- once in late 2001 and, again, last
spring, for various infractions. Maloof was also reportedly involved
in a bizarre scheme to broker contacts between Iraqi officials and the
Pentagon, channeled through Perle, in what one report called a "rogue
[intelligence] operation" outside official CIA and Defense
Intelligence Agency channels.
As the momentum for war began to build in early 2002, Wolfowitz and
Feith beefed up the intelligence unit and created an Iraq war-planning
unit in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia Affairs section, run
by Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Luti, under the rubric
"Office of Special Plans," or OSP; the new unit's director was Abram
N. Shulsky. By then, Wurmser had moved on to a post as senior adviser
to Undersecretary of State John Bolton, yet another neocon, who was in
charge of the State Department's disarmament, proliferation, and WMD
office and was promoting the Iraq war strategy there. Shulsky's OSP,
which incorporated the secret intelligence unit, took control,
banishing veteran experts‚ -- including Joseph McMillan, James
Russell, Larry Hanauer, and Marybeth McDevitt‚ -- who, despite years
of service to NESA, either were shuffled off to other positions or
retired. For the next year, Luti and Shulsky not only would oversee
war plans but would act aggressively to shape the intelligence product
received by the White House.
Both Luti and Shulsky were neoconservatives who were ideological soul
mates of Wolfowitz and Feith. But Luti was more than that. He'd come
to the Pentagon directly from the office of Vice President Cheney.
That gave Luti, a recently retired, decorated Navy captain whose
career ran from combat aviation to command of a helicopter assault
ship, extra clout. Along with his colleague Colonel William Bruner,
Luti had done a stint as an aide to Newt Gingrich in 1996 and, like
Perle and Wolfowitz, was an acolyte of Wohlstetter's. "He makes Ollie
North look like a moderate," says a NESA veteran.
Shulsky had been on the Washington scene since the mid-1970s. As a
Senate intelligence committee staffer for Senator Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, he began to work with early neoconservatives like Perle, who
was then an aide to Senator Henry Jackson. Later, in the Reagan years,
Shulsky followed Perle to the Pentagon as Perle's arms-control
adviser. In the '90s, Shulsky co-authored a book on intelligence
called Silent Warfare, with Gary Schmitt. Shulsky had served with
Schmitt on Moynihan's staff and they had remained friends. Asked about
the Pentagon's Iraq intelligence "cell," Schmitt‚ -- who is currently
the executive director of the Project for the New American Century‚ --
says that he can't say much about it "because one of my best friends
is running it."
According to Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski, Luti and Shulsky ran NESA and
the Office of Special Plans with brutal efficiency, purging people
they disagreed with and enforcing the party line. "It was organized
like a machine," she says. "The people working on the neocon agenda
had a narrow, well-defined political agenda. They had a sense of
mission." At NESA, Shulsky, she says, began "hot-desking," or taking
an office wherever he could find one, working with Feith and Luti,
before formally taking the reins of the newly created OSP. Together,
she says, Luti and Shulsky turned cherry-picked pieces of
uncorroborated, anti-Iraq intelligence into talking points, on issues
like Iraq's WMD and its links to Al Qaeda. Shulsky constantly updated
these papers, drawing on the intelligence unit, and circulated them to
Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld, and to Vice President Cheney.
"Of course, we never thought they'd go directly to the White House,"
she adds.
Kwiatkowski recalls one meeting in which Luti, pressed to finish a
report, told the staff, "I've got to get this over to 'Scooter' right
away." She later found out that "Scooter" was none other than Lewis
"Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff. According to
Kwiatkowski, Cheney had direct ties through Luti into NESA/OSP, a
connection that was highly unorthodox.
"Never, ever, ever would a deputy undersecretary of Defense work
directly on a project for the vice president," she says. "It was a
little clue that we had an informal network into Vice President
Cheney's office."
Although Feith insists that the OSP did not seek to gather its own
intelligence, Kwiatkowski and others sharply disagree. Staff working
for Luti and Shulsky in NESA/OSP churned out propaganda-style
intelligence, she says. As an example, she cited the work of a U.S.
intelligence officer and Arabic specialist, Navy Lt. Commander Youssef
Aboul-Enein, who was a special assistant to Luti. "His job was to
peruse the Arabic-language media to find articles that would
incriminate Saddam Hussein about terrorism, and he translated these."
Such raw intelligence is usually subject to a thorough vetting
process, tracked, verified, and checked by intelligence professionals.
But not at OSP‚ -- the material that it produced found its way
directly into speeches by Bush, Cheney, and other officials.
According to Melvin Goodman, a former CIA official and an intelligence
specialist at the National War College, the OSP officials routinely
pushed lower-ranking staff around on intelligence matters. "People
were being pulled aside [and being told], 'We saw your last piece and
it's not what we're looking for,'" he says. "It was pretty blatant."
Two State Department intelligence officials, Greg Thielmann and
Christian Westermann, have both charged that pressure was being put on
them to shape intelligence to fit policy, in particular from Bolton's
office. "The Al Qaeda connection and nuclear weapons issue were the
only two ways that you could link Iraq to an imminent security threat
to the U.S.," Thielmann told the New York Times. "And the
administration was grossly distorting the intelligence on both
things."
Besides Cheney, key members of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board,
including Perle and ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, all Iraq hawks,
had direct input into NESA/OSP. The offices of NESA were located on
the Pentagon's fourth floor, seventh corridor of D Ring, and the
Policy Board's offices were directly below, on the third floor. During
the run-up to the Iraq war, Gingrich often came up for closed-door
meetings with Luti, who in 1996 had served as a congressional fellow
in Speaker of the House Gingrich's office.
As OSP got rolling, Luti brought in Colonel Bruner, a former military
aide to Gingrich, and, together, Luti and Bruner opened the door to a
vast flow of bogus intelligence fed to the Pentagon by Iraqi defectors
associated with Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress group of exiles.
Chalabi founded the Iraqi National Congress in 1992, with the help of
a shadowy CIA-connected public-relations firm called the Rendon Group,
one of whose former employees, Francis Brooke, has been a top aide to
Chalabi ever since. A scion of an aristocratic Iraqi family, Chalabi
fled Baghdad at the age of 13, in 1958, when the corrupt Iraqi
Hashemite monarchy was overthrown by a coalition of communists and the
Iraqi military. In the late 1960s, Chalabi studied mathematics at the
University of Chicago with Wohlstetter, who introduced him to Richard
Perle more than a decade later. Long associated with the heart of the
neoconservative movement, Chalabi founded Petra Bank in Jordan, which
grew to be Jordan's third-largest bank by the 1980s. But Chalabi was
accused of bank fraud, embezzlement, and currency manipulation, and he
barely escaped before Jordanian authorities could arrest him; in 1992,
he was convicted and sentenced in absentia to more than 20 years of
hard labor. After founding the INC, Chalabi's bungling, unreliability,
and penchant for mismanaging funds caused the CIA to sour on him, but
he never lost the support of Perle, Feith, Gingrich, and their allies;
once, soon after 9/11, Perle invited Chalabi to address the Defense
Policy Board.
According to multiple sources, Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress sent
a steady stream of misleading and often faked intelligence reports
into U.S. intelligence channels. That information would flow sometimes
into NESA/OSP directly, sometimes through Defense Intelligence Agency
debriefings of Iraqi defectors via the Defense Human Intelligence
Service, and sometimes through the INC's own U.S.-funded Intelligence
Collection Program, which was overseen by the Pentagon. The INC's
intelligence "isn't reliable at all," according to Vincent
Cannistraro, a former CIA chief of counterterrorism. "Much of it is
propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they
want to hear, using alleged informants and defectors who say what
Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes
right into presidential and vice presidential speeches."
Bruner, the aide to Luti and Gingrich's former staffer, "was Chalabi's
handler," says Kwiatkowski. "He would arrange meetings with Chalabi
and Chalabi's folks," she says, adding that the INC leader often
brought people into the NESA/OSP offices for debriefings. Chalabi
claims to have introduced only three actual defectors to the Pentagon,
a figure Thielmann considers "awfully low." However, according to an
investigation by the Los Angeles Times, the three defectors provided
by Chalabi turned up exactly zero useful intelligence. The first, an
Iraqi engineer, claimed to have specific information about biological
weapons, but his information didn't pan out; the second claimed to
know about mobile labs, but that information, too, was worthless; and
the third, who claimed to have data about Iraq's nuclear program,
proved to be a fraud. Chalabi also claimed to have given the Pentagon
information about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda. "We gave the names of
people who were doing the links," he told an interviewer from PBS's
Frontline. Those links, of course, have not been discovered. Thielmann
told the same Frontline interviewer that the Office of Special Plans
didn't apply strict intelligence-verification standards to "some of
the information coming out of Chalabi and the INC that OSP and the
Pentagon ran with."
In the war's aftermath, the Defense Intelligence Agency‚ -- which is
not beholden to the neoconservative civilians at the Pentagon‚ --
leaked a report it prepared, concluding that few, if any, of the INC's
informants provided worthwhile intelligence.
So far, despite all of the investigations under way, there is little
sign that any of them are going to delve into the operations of the
Luti-Shulsky Office of Special Plans and its secret intelligence unit.
Because it operates in the Pentagon's policy shop, it is not
officially part of the intelligence community, and so it is seemingly
immune to congressional oversight.
With each passing day, it is becoming excruciatingly clearer just how
wrong U.S. intelligence was in regard to Iraqi weapons and support for
terrorism. The American teams of inspectors in the Iraq Survey Group,
which has employed up to 1,400 people to scour the country and analyze
the findings, have not been able to find a shred of evidence of
anything other than dusty old plans and records of weapons apparently
destroyed more than a decade ago. Countless examples of fruitless
searches have been reported in the media. To cite one example: U.S.
soldiers followed an intelligence report claiming that a complex built
for Uday Hussein, Saddam's son, hid a weapons warehouse with
poison-gas storage tanks. "Well," U.S. Army Major Ronald Hann Jr. told
the Los Angeles Times, "the warehouse was a carport. It still had two
cars inside. And the tanks had propane for the kitchen."
Countless other errors and exaggerations have become evident. The
thousands of aluminum tubes supposedly imported by Iraq for uranium
enrichment were fairly conclusively found to be designed to build
noncontroversial rockets. The long-range unmanned aerial vehicles,
allegedly built to deliver bioweapons, were small, rickety,
experimental planes with wood frames. The mobile bioweapon labs turned
out to have had other, civilian purposes. And the granddaddy of all
falsehoods, the charge that Iraq sought uranium in the West African
country of Niger, was based on forged documents‚ -- documents that the
CIA, the State Department, and other agencies knew were fake nearly a
year before President Bush highlighted the issue in his State of the
Union address in January 2003.
"Either the system broke down," former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who
was sent by the CIA to visit Niger and whose findings helped show that
the documents were forged, told Mother Jones, "or there was selective
use of bits of information to justify a decision to go to war that had
already been taken."
Edward Luttwak, a neoconservative scholar and author, says flatly that
the Bush administration lied about the intelligence it had because it
was afraid to go to the American people and say that the war was
simply about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Instead, says Luttwak, the
White House was groping for a rationale to satisfy the United Nations'
criteria for war. "Cheney was forced into this fake posture of
worrying about weapons of mass destruction," he says. "The ties to Al
Qaeda? That's complete nonsense."
In the Senate, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) is pressing for the
Intelligence Committee to extend its investigation to look into the
specific role of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, but there is
strong Republican resistance to the idea.
In the House, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) has introduced legislation
calling for a commission to investigate the intelligence mess and has
collected more than a hundred Democrats‚ -- but no Republicans‚ -- in
support of it. "I think they need to be looked at pretty carefully,"
Waxman told Mother Jones when asked about the Office of Special Plans.
"I'd like to know whether the political people pushed the intelligence
people to slant their conclusions."
.
|
