Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [233]
It wasn’t only our enemies that compounded the intelligence community’s challenges. Budget cuts during the 1990s amounting to 10 percent of the intelligence community’s budget were a costly self-inflicted wound that weakened our capabilities for years, particularly in the area of human intelligence. I had worked with our intelligence agencies off and on over some three decades, and intensely when I chaired the Ballistic Missile Threat Commission in 1998. That experience was sobering. Compartmentalization hampered intelligence analysis. Policy makers did not engage sufficiently with intelligence professionals in setting intelligence priorities and asking informed questions about their analyses and conclusions.* In a unanimous letter to CIA Director Tenet, our bipartisan commission members shared our concerns about the quality of the intelligence community’s products. In the letter we wrote:
Unless and until senior users take time to engage analysts, question their assumptions and methods, seek from them what they know, what they don’t know and ask them their opinions—and do so without penalizing the analysts when their opinions differ from those of the user—senior users cannot have a substantial impact in improving the intelligence product they receive.5
What was unique about Iraq was that the intelligence community reported near total confidence in their conclusions. Their assessments appeared to be unusually consistent. In August 2002, Deputy CIA Director John McLaughlin presented to the principals committee the intelligence community’s judgments about Iraq’s WMD activities. McLaughlin, a serious and measured career intelligence professional, described the situation in stark terms. According to my notes, his briefing concluded that:
Iraq had reconstituted its facilities for biological and chemical weapons.
There were 3,200 tons of chemical weapons the regime previously had that remained unaccounted for.
Saddam had a mobile biological warfare capability, and a variety of means to deliver them, likely including UAVs.
Saddam had retained many of the same experts who had developed nuclear weapons prior to the Gulf War.
There was construction at old nuclear facilities, and Iraq was “clearly working” on fissile material, which meant that Saddam could have a nuclear weapon within one year.6
McLaughlin’s briefing covered many of the same points that were emphasized in the intelligence community’s analyses of Iraq’s WMD programs, and later in Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN. As McLaughlin gave the Agency’s official and authoritative briefing, I wrote a note to myself. It said “caution—strong case,” but I added, “could be wrong.”7 There were few qualifiers in the briefing. In the run-up to the war in Iraq, we heard a great deal about what our intelligence community knew or thought they knew, but not enough about what they knew they didn’t know.
Two months after McLaughlin’s briefing, in October 2002, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the coordinating body for the U.S. intelligence community’s analytical products, issued the authoritative National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq. The NIE, which is now declassified, was an alarming report on Iraq’s weapons systems. The report included the following:
We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.
Iraq has largely rebuilt missile and biological weapons facilities damaged during Operation