04/06/07 "Los Angeles Times" -- - (04-06) 04:00 PDT Washington -- Just four months after the Sept. 11 attacks, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz dashed off a memo to a senior Pentagon colleague, demanding action to identify connections between Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime and al Qaeda.

"We don't seem to be making much progress pulling together intelligence on links between Iraq and al Qaeda," Wolfowitz wrote in the Jan. 22, 2002, memo to Douglas Feith, the department's No. 3 official.

Using Pentagon jargon for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he added: "We owe Sec Def some analysis of this subject. Please give me a recommendation on how best to proceed. Appreciate the short turn-around."

Wolfowitz's memo, released Thursday, is included in a recently declassified report by the Pentagon's inspector general. The memo marked the first days of what would become a controversial, yearlong Pentagon project supervised by Feith to convince the most senior levels of the Bush administration that Hussein and al Qaeda were linked -- a conclusion that was hotly disputed by U.S. intelligence agencies at the time and discredited in the years since.

In excerpts released in February, Thomas Gimble, the acting inspector general of the Pentagon, criticized the effort as an alternative intelligence assessment operation and denounced it as improper. However, Gimble said, the intelligence operation was not illegal or unauthorized because Pentagon directives allowed Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz to assign the work.

Many of the activities of the intelligence unit Feith headed have become known. But the release of the full inspector general's report provided more detail about how a group of Pentagon officials and on-loan intelligence analysts were able to shunt aside contradictory reports and persuade top administration officials that they had powerful evidence of connections between Hussein's regime and al Qaeda. The 121-page report was released by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Feith has defended his conduct, insisting it was an appropriate, rigorous effort to question assumptions made by U.S. intelligence agencies. On a Web site Feith set up to rebut the charges, he states: "This IG report controversy is, in essence, a debate over whether the CIA should be protected against criticism by policy officials."

The current defense secretary, Robert Gates, has disavowed Feith's work, saying both in his confirmation hearings and in other public statements that he believes all intelligence analysis should be left to the CIA and other intelligence agencies, which are subject to congressional oversight.

In making its case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration relied heavily on evidence that Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. However, an important secondary reason was the allegation of connections between Iraq and al Qaeda. While the CIA has been criticized for erroneously gauging Iraq's weapons programs, its assessment of Iraq's ties to al Qaeda turned out to be more accurate.

A PDF of the Pentagon inspector general report can be read at:

http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/supporting/2007/SASC.DODIGFeithreport.040507.pdf