Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (23 page)

The vice president was characteristically cautious and said he wasn’t sure about pulling back on techniques that had worked to produce valuable intelligence. And he correctly predicted that going “full Monty” to the Hill wouldn’t buy much cooperation. But the president had made up his mind. He concluded with words to the effect that “No, Mike is right. If he’s happy operationally, he’s right about the political leverage. This is as good as it’s going to get.”

With the president’s speech scheduled for the Tuesday after Labor Day, we secretly transferred Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaida, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and eleven other terrorists from black sites to the military prison at Guantánamo Bay. We moved a number of others from the black sites to third countries.

In the writing, that seems like a simple task. It wasn’t. It had to be done efficiently and secretly. And the world’s population of “tail spotters,” those dedicated to identifying real and imagined CIA-affiliated flights, was steadily increasing. The office responsible worked very hard—multiple aircraft, limited refueling stops—to keep covert things covert. I later went down to their spaces to thank them.

The remarks the president gave in the East Room of the White House on September 6, 2006, were magnificent. He laid out what we’d done since 9/11, and why. “Captured terrorists have unique knowledge about how terrorist networks operate,” the president said. “They have knowledge of where the operatives are deployed and knowledge about what
plots are under way. This intelligence—this is intelligence that cannot be found any other place, and our security depends on getting this kind of information. To win the war on terror, we must be able to detain, question, and when appropriate, prosecute terrorists captured here in America and on the battlefields around the world.”

He explained that a number of suspected terrorists and terror leaders had been held and questioned in secret sites operated by the Central Intelligence Agency. He said that information they divulged during questioning had prevented attacks on the United States and across the world. And he said CIA used an “alternative set of procedures” during the interrogations that were safe and legal. “I want to be absolutely clear with our people and the world,” he said. “The United States does not torture. It’s against our laws, and it’s against our values. I have not authorized it, and I will not authorize it.”

The CIA prisons were now empty, the president said, though having a CIA program for detaining and questioning terrorists would continue to be crucial.

“We will also consult with congressional leaders,” he said, “on how to ensure that the CIA program goes forward in a way that follows the law, that meets the national security needs of our country, and protects the brave men and women we ask to obtain information that will save innocent lives.”

He spoke, reading from a text, for over an hour, and to sustained applause, and then took a few minutes after he had finished to shake hands with family members who had lost loved ones during the terrorist attacks.

I had spent all summer dealing with the issues that had produced so much agony for CIA and the Bush presidency. Now we had a way forward, as the president had explained with such confidence and conviction. It wasn’t a sure thing. Congress would have its say. But this day, standing way in the back of that room, the emotions of the families were infectious. It was hard for me not to suppress a tear.

A
s we wrestled with what to do about CIA’s black sites and the techniques we employed when interrogating terrorists, the agency remained on a war footing. In a big conference room right across from my office on the seventh floor, we convened an operational meeting three times a week at 5:30 p.m. with more than thirty people crowded around a long, rectangular table. Monday and Wednesday, we dealt with counterterrorism and reviewed, in detail, operations under way across the globe.

Friday was reserved for Iraq and Afghanistan, the nation’s two post-9/11 land wars. In late July 2006, the situation in Iraq was particularly dire, a point two young women analysts had come to make one Friday in rather dramatic fashion. Both women, post-9/11 hires with five or so years’ experience, had concluded in a paper that we call a “serial flier”—a
New Yorker
–length article—that Iraq had descended into civil war.

The Iraq analysts had been pondering this for some time, I later learned, ever since the destruction of the Golden Mosque in Samarra in February 2006. That attack on one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam had
ignited an orgy of killings and attacks on other mosques and suggested a sea change in the character of the violence and the hardening of sectarian lines—both classic indicators of civil war.

These same analysts had fought earlier to label the fighting in Iraq an insurgency and not just the last gasp of dead-enders from the previous regime. That had been a tough and unwelcome message downtown, but Steve Hadley had congratulated them afterward for performing a real service to the president by giving him a better sense of the realities we faced.

The issue of civil war continued to be argued within the shop, and by August 2006 most (but not all) of the analysts felt that it was now the best descriptor of the conflict.

My antennae went up immediately when I heard the term and I thought to myself, There’s a headline.

“You’re the analysts,” I said. “But let me ask you a question, because this has great import: What definition of civil war are you using?” They freely acknowledged that there were all sorts of academic definitions, and we talked about the complexities of the situation in Iraq.

The sectarian killing was so bad that academics and some officials were seriously considering plans for partitioning Iraq into Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish sectors. Militias and death squads proliferated in Baghdad and other urban areas. Sunnis blamed the violence on the Shiite-dominated Ministry of Interior. Shiites said those complaints were a smoke screen to obscure the atrocities of Sunni death squads. It was all so bad that the UN reported that over a hundred civilians had been killed per day on average in June.

We debated how the label of civil war would help the president. “If we think it, isn’t it our responsibility to say it?” they asked. Besides, the new description could lead to alternative courses of action. In fighting an insurgency, it was axiomatic that you would want to strengthen the Iraqi police. But if they were but one predatory element in a complex civil war, strengthening them might actually make things worse.

With a trip to Iraq already scheduled, I invited the analysts to come
with me, talk to the station, and see things for themselves before finishing their paper. There were some hurt feelings. From the analysts’ view, it was worrying that I seemed to be putting a higher premium on proximity to the problem than their expertise.

Still, they piled into a giant C-17 cargo jet alongside my security detail, my immediate staff, and all sorts of other agency people who needed to get to Iraq for one reason or another.

Once in-country, we had a very long meeting with all the analysts there in one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces that we had taken over as our station in the Green Zone. We dug into the situation, and the assessment we heard in graphic detail was deeply troubling—and not too different from what the two headquarters analysts had concluded. They mostly listened to their Baghdad-based colleagues, nodding occasionally.

After the session, I went out and held a town hall meeting for the entire station beneath the palace dome. The stairs behind me were packed, as were the balconies around the second floor. I began with my customary introduction, telling everyone that I was the new director and was there to help. Then I almost blurted out, “What the hell is going on around here?” It was a long meeting. I asked a lot of questions.

Luckily, the station wanted to tell its story. I think some might have been a little skeptical that a new director and especially one in uniform would be willing or able to make an unbiased call when he got back home. But the station chief had told them that he was going to tell it no-holds-barred and had invited them to do the same. Everyone knew what was at stake. They didn’t pass on the opportunity.

I posed the same questions (sort of) to the Iraqi political leadership—Shiite prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, Kurdish leader and Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, and Sunni vice president Tariq al-Hashimi.

The CIA view of Maliki was pretty dark. It proved correct. As a member of the Shia Dawa Party, Maliki had spent much of his adult life in exile in Syria and Iran, constantly in fear of Saddam’s assassins. When I met with him in his Green Zone office, he was guarded by Shia militiamen rather than by government security guards, and not just any Shia—
these guys were Dawa. Maliki seemed to exude a fear that there was a Sunni Baathist behind every bush out to kill him. No doubt for much of his life, that had been arguably true. The station chief told me of a bizarre verbal tic the prime minister had. Every time we said “Salafist” or “terrorist,” he would mutter “Baathist” under his breath. In my session with Maliki, he acknowledged the heightened violence in Iraq but oddly didn’t try to characterize it, calling it “random.”

The station chief’s assessment wasn’t so dark that he believed Maliki to be an Iranian agent (as some thought); he gave the prime minister credit for being tough, honest, and thoroughly Arab. Maliki even later made war on some fellow Shiites in Basra and in Baghdad’s Sadr City slums.

But Maliki was a complicated man, possessing a strange and—at times—even a stunted personality. He rarely showed evidence of charm or humor. Our intelligence reporting suggested that the Iranians had as much trouble slogging through his dour personality as we did.

It was also pretty clear that we weren’t pushing the Sunni neighbors hard enough to be inclusive and supportive of the Shia prime minister. The Jordanians were skeptical but at least made an effort, but others, like the Saudis and the Gulf States, were nowhere to be seen. The king of Saudi Arabia made it clear that he viewed Maliki with contempt. At times it must have seemed to Maliki that he had nowhere to turn in the region other than to Tehran. We should have done better.

Talabani, the Kurdish president, was as charming as Maliki was sour. We convoyed out of the Green Zone to have lunch at his compound along the Tigris and were joined by several members of the cabinet, mostly the power ministries—Defense, Interior, Foreign Affairs, and Finance—along with Talabani’s security advisor Wafiq al-Samarrai and national security advisor Mowaffak al Rubaie. Talabani could deliver the powerful, at least for lunch.

We gathered around a single large table, before us an impressive spread, highlighted by a local fresh fish delicacy that, all the Americans hoped, had not just been pulled from the (obviously polluted) Tigris River.

Talabani, from our point of view, had his own “too close to the Iranians” issue. He once excused himself to me by saying that people got to choose their friends (us), but not their neighbors (Iran).

For the benefit of the two headquarters analysts in the party, I asked the president and the others for their assessment of the current situation. I began with a rather bleak appreciation of my own, highlighting the horrific levels of sectarian violence and terrorist attacks.

National security advisor Rubaie pushed back, rejecting the concept of a civil war and even discounting that this was really terrorism. In fact, he said, a lot of it was our fault. We had not hammered the Sunnis enough, and they were still strong enough to take their vengeance out on the Shia. The so-called Shia death squads were simply a natural and almost legitimate response to this and would stop as soon as we took care of the Sunnis and al-Qaeda. “You are treating the symptoms, not the cause,” he concluded.

Others joined in to relate that Sunnis and Shias in Iraq had coexisted for centuries. Tribes and marriages were routinely mixed. Sustained civil war was just not possible in the Iraqi psyche. My entire lunch group seemed disconnected from, and somewhat cavalier about, the levels of violence.

Talabani’s analysis was long and a little indirect, but far from apocalyptic. “If you think it’s bad
now
, you should have seen it when the other guy [Saddam] was here” was something the Iraqi president never quite said, but was the summary forming in my head as I was buckling on my Kevlar and settling into the armored SUV for the ride back to the Green Zone.

Talabani was avuncular; on our many visits, he gifted me with so many rough-hewn Kurdish chess sets that I could outfit all of my older grandchildren with one.

The other senior Kurd in the Iraqi government, Barham Salih, the deputy prime minister, was equally approachable, but far more professorial. I once characterized him as the smartest man in Southwest Asia. He had fled Iraq as a young man after being persecuted by Saddam Hussein’s
regime and had been educated in the United Kingdom. He was an Iraqi official that I always had time for. On one visit I had a pleasant and informative dinner with Barham and his family on the lawn outside his house in the Green Zone.

I reciprocated at my house when he came to the United States. For such dinners I often had musicians from the air force band, trying to match up the music with the guests. We once had opera for the Italians, for example. The band knew little about Kurdish folk music, however, so—since Barham had gone to university at Cardiff in Wales—we defaulted to Celtic music for the evening.

Near the end, at my request, the group played “Ashokan Farewell,” the haunting fiddle solo that forms the backdrop for Ken Burns’s magnificent TV series about the American Civil War. I described that background to Barham and reminded him that during our Civil War the population in America was roughly equivalent to that of modern Iraq.

He then asked, “And how many died?”

“About six hundred thousand,” I answered.

“Let us hope it doesn’t come to that.”

During that August 2006 visit, it looked as if it might. Working my way through the Iraqi leadership, I called on Tariq al-Hashimi, the vice president, who was less charming than Talabani, but not nearly as sour as Maliki. He wasn’t nearly as wise as Salih, however, so it wasn’t long before he began to catalogue the ills of Sunnis in the new Iraq. He was animated, very physical in his gestures. I remembered thinking that he looked every inch like a union organizer back home, Teamsters or perhaps dockworkers. He was the kind of guy who always seemed to have his fist clenched. There was no love lost between the prime minister and the vice president. Five years later, as the last US soldier was leaving Iraq, Maliki issued an arrest warrant for Hashimi. Maliki’s government later tried and sentenced the vice president to death in absentia.

The noblest Iraqi I met on this first visit did not work or live in the
Green Zone. Mohammed Shahwani was head of INIS, the Iraqi National Intelligence Service, and I visited him at his headquarters in the al-Khark district. He had set up his home there along with a pet gazelle and a lovely dog he sardonically named Chalabi after the Iraqi exile turned politician that CIA loved to hate.

I had every reason to be solicitous. He was a friend, and we had worked with interim prime minister Ayad Allawi to put him in place when the Coalition Provisional Authority created the INIS in 2004. But Shahwani was an impressive man in his own right, an Iraqi war hero who ran special forces missions in the war against Iran. A champion pole-vaulter in his youth, he had carried the Iraqi national flag at the opening of the Rome Olympics in 1960.

Shahwani was clearly talented and courageous, too much so for his former boss, Saddam Hussein, who had cashiered him. Shahwani fled right before the first Gulf War and became part of the Iraqi opposition (and known to the agency) while he was in exile in Jordan. His three sons, all military officers, stayed behind and eventually were executed by Saddam in the mid-1990s for their opposition to the regime. In one of the rare displays of emotion that Prime Minister Maliki ever permitted himself, he told Shahwani at their first meeting, “I know your past. I know your sacrifice.”

Following his sons’ deaths, Shahwani relocated to the United States. His quiet suburban life in northern Virginia came to an end in 2002 when we again pulled him into our ranks to prepare for war in Iraq.

He was a great choice to head the INIS, and during my 2006 meetings with him, he wanted to talk, professional to professional, and I was more than happy to accommodate him. Characteristically, he brought his junior officers in to brief me on the work of his agency.

I visited the STU, INIS’s Special Tactics Unit, at Al-Rashid Air Base across the Tigris. I got an impressive tactics demonstration from Shahwani’s paramilitary strike force, but more impressive was the makeup of the unit (about fifty-fifty Sunni and Shia) and of their targets, distributed
in the same way. The station chief estimated that the STU had to fire in anger in only about 5 percent of their strike missions, they were so well conceived and executed. There were few if any false hits, no grabbing of neighborhood mopes unlucky enough to have an AK-47. And, since INIS had no capture or arrest authority, all of their captures were preapproved to go into the Iraqi judicial system.

INIS paid a price for its excellence. Almost a hundred of its officers had been killed, and the families of seniors had to live in Amman, Jordan, for their own safety. On balance, it was probably the most professional, nonsectarian organization in the Iraqi government.