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The Radical

What Dick Cheney really believes.

By Franklin Foer and Spencer Ackerman

December 1 & 8, 2003: (The New Republic) 

In early 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney spoke to President George W. Bush
from the heart. The war in Afghanistan had been an astonishing display of
U.S. strength. Instead of the bloody quagmire many predicted, CIA
paramilitary agents, Special Forces, and U.S. air power had teamed with
Northern Alliance guerrillas to run the Taliban and Al Qaeda out of their
strongholds. As a new interim government took power in Kabul, Cheney was
telling Bush that the next phase in the war on terrorism was toppling Saddam
Hussein.

Bush was well aware that several of his senior aides wanted to take the battle
to Iraq. When his advisers had convened at Camp David the weekend after the
September 11 attacks, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz argued on three
separate occasions that the United States should immediately target Iraq
instead of the more difficult Afghanistan. Bush had settled the matter by
instructing his chief of staff, Andrew Card, to quiet Wolfowitz -- a moment
humiliatingly enshrined by Bob Woodward in his book *Bush at War*. But, in
early 2002, Cheney dispensed with the policy arguments for taking down Saddam
in favor of a far more personal appeal. He said simply that he had been part
of the team that created what he now saw as a flawed policy -- leaving Saddam
in power at the end of the Gulf war -- and now Bush had a chance to correct
it.

His plea was enormously successful. "The reason that Cheney was able to sell
Bush the policy is that he was able to say, 'I've changed,'" says a senior
administration official. "'I used to have the same position as [James] Baker,
[Brent] Scowcroft, *and your father* -- and here's why it's wrong.'" By
February, observes a since-departed senior National Security Council (NSC)
staffer, "my sense was the decision was taken." The next month, Bush
interrupted a meeting between national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and
three senators to boast, "Fuck Saddam. We're taking him out."

That Cheney had become the decisive foreign policy player in the White House
is hardly surprising. Bush had, after all, added him to the ticket precisely
for his national security heft. What was astonishing -- even to those who
thought they knew Cheney well -- was that Cheney had seemingly swung so
strongly against the policies of the administration he loyally served as
Defense secretary, an administration that valued stability above
democracy-building and crisis management above grand strategy. "Look,"
confesses someone who has worked with Cheney in the past, "I am baffled."

It's easy to understand this bafflement. When Cheney signed on as Bush's
running mate in 2000, many people expected him to bring George H.W. Bush's
realist foreign policy instincts with him. *U.S. News & World Report* quickly
dubbed him "BUSH'S BACK-TO-THE-FUTURE VEEP PICK." After all, Cheney had spent
the latter half of the 1990s as CEO of one of the world's largest oil-services
companies, where he argued against economic sanctions and for engagement with
tyrannies like Iran. And Cheney had *not* spent the '90s -- as his longtime
ally Wolfowitz had -- publicly agonizing over the decision to leave Saddam's
regime intact.

But imparting George H.W. Bush's cautiousness to his former Defense secretary
misreads Cheney entirely. Far from fitting into 41's foreign policy team,
Cheney was its ideological outlier. On the greatest issue of the day -- what
to do about a declining Soviet Union and America's place in a unipolar world
-- Cheney dissented vigorously. His Pentagon argued, again and again, that
the only true guarantee of U.S. security lay in transforming threatening
nations into democratic ones -- a radical notion to the realists in the first
Bush White House. Cheney's policy allies were not national security adviser
Scowcroft and Secretary of State Baker but rather a set of intellectuals on
the Pentagon policy staff who shared and helped him refine his alternative
vision of U.S. power and purpose. In the '90s, this worldview came to be
known as neoconservatism. Cheney was there first.

As he fought an uphill ideological battle in the first Bush administration,
Cheney's foreign policy vision was paired with a tendency that would prove key
to understanding his performance in W.'s White House: a willingness to
circumvent the typical bureaucratic channels to gain advantage over his
rivals. In particular, Cheney came to see the intelligence establishment as
flawed and corrupted by political biases hopelessly at odds with his goals.
By 2001, when Cheney became the most powerful adviser to the president of the
United States, his vision of global democracy and his mistrust of the CIA had
reached full maturity. Both convictions would be brought to bear when the
vice president turned his full attention to Iraq.

SIMILAR WAVELENGTHS

When Dick Cheney arrived at the Pentagon in 1989, he created a brain trust in
his own image, cultivating young staffers with academic backgrounds like his
own. These brainy types congregated in the highest ranks of the policy
directorate run by then-Undersecretary Wolfowitz. In most administrations,
the policy directorate largely deals with mundane tasks, such as the
negotiation of basing rights and arms sales. Those issues held little
interest for Wolfowitz and his team. "They focused on geostrategic issues,"
says one of his Pentagon aides. "They considered themselves conceptual."
Wolfowitz and his protégés prided themselves on their willingness to reexamine
entire precepts of U.S. foreign policy. In Cheney, they found a like-minded
patron. Wolfowitz, in 1991, described his relationship with his boss to *The
New York Times*: "Intellectually, we're very much on similar wavelengths."
Nowhere was this intellectual synergy more evident than on the Soviet Union.

At the time Cheney took office, Mikhail Gorbachev had been in power for four
years. By then, the Soviet premier had charmed the American media and foreign
policy establishment with his ebullient style. Like many hard-liners, Cheney
thought he saw through these atmospherics and publicly intimated his
skepticism of perestroika. Appearing on CNN in April 1989 -- only one month
into his term as Defense secretary -- he glumly announced that Gorbachev would
"ultimately fail" and a leader "far more hostile" to the West would follow.
Such dourness put Cheney well outside the administration mainstream. Baker,
Scowcroft, and President George H.W. Bush -- as well as the NSC's leading
Russia hand, Condoleezza Rice -- had committed themselves to Gorbachev's (and
the USSR's) preservation. But Cheney believed that, with a gust of aggressive
support for alternatives to Gorbachev, the United States could dismember its
principal adversary once and for all.

To craft an alternative strategy, Cheney turned to alternative experts. On
Saturday mornings, Wolfowitz's deputies convened seminars in a small
conference room in the Pentagon's E ring, where they sat Cheney in front of a
parade of Sovietologists. Many were mavericks who believed the Soviet Union
was on the brink of collapse. Out of these Saturday seminars, Cheney's Soviet
position emerged -- with concepts and rhetoric that perfectly echo the current
Bush administration's Iraq policy. They would push regime change in the
Soviet Union, transforming it into a democracy. Support for rebellious
Ukraine would challenge the regime from its periphery; and support for Boris
Yeltsin, the elected president of the Russian Republic, would confront the
regime at its core. "[Yeltsin] represents a set of principles and values that
are synonymous with those that we hold for the Soviet Union --
democratization, demilitarization," Cheney announced in a 1991 appearance on
NBC's "Meet the Press." Bush père and Scowcroft fretted about instability,
but Cheney retorted, if the demolition of the Soviet Union required a little
short-term disruption, such as a nuclear-armed Ukraine, then so be it. After
all, as he observed in a 1992 speech to the Economics Club of Indianapolis,
true security depended on the expansion of "the community of peaceful
democratic nations."

Cheney was unsuccessful in pushing the White House away from Gorbachev. After
he mused aloud about Gorbachev's shortcomings in a 1989 TV interview, Baker
called Scowcroft and told him, "Dump on Dick with all possible alacrity."
When the "Gang of Eight" -- Bush's senior advisers -- met to decide policy in
the final days of the Soviet Union, the meetings featured, as CIA chief Robert
Gates has recalled, "Cheney against the field." The Soviet collapse
ultimately settled the issue. But Cheney's battle against realism had only
begun.

There was, however, a moment of détente in that battle: the Gulf war. Cheney
accepted ending the war with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein still in power, as
did all of Poppy's other senior advisers. (Not even Wolfowitz -- now so
associated with Saddam's toppling -- dissented at the time.) The lasting
effect of the war on Cheney, however, was less strategic and more
bureaucratic: It shattered his faith in the CIA's ability to produce reliable
intelligence.

When Saddam first began amassing troops on the Kuwaiti border in mid-1990,
conventional wisdom in the U.S. intelligence community held that he was
attempting to gain leverage in opec talks and, at the most, might seize a
Kuwaiti oil field. The analysis made little sense -- Saddam was moving his
elite Republican Guard units, the very guarantors of his rule, from their
Baghdad positions -- yet only a few analysts issued starker warnings of an
all-out invasion. Worse still, a National Intelligence Estimate released just
before Christmas that year concluded that Saddam would withdraw from Kuwait to
avert a war with the United States. In a paper for a 1994 conference on
intelligence policy, Wolfowitz reflected, "[W]hen the signs started to turn up
that the projected scenario regarding Iraqi behavior was not unfolding as we
wished, ... somebody within the [intelligence] community should have said,
'Wait a minute, here are facts that we ought to take some account of.'"

Cheney saw little option at the time but to request thorough briefings from
intelligence analysts and subject their judgments to as much scrutiny as he
could muster. Before the Gulf war, one former analyst remembers being
"whisked into a room, there's Dick Cheney, he's right in front of you, he
starts firing questions at you, half an hour later and thirty questions later,
I'm whisked out of the room, and I'm like, 'What the hell just happened?'"
Yet analysts can distinguish between thorough questioning and contempt -- or
pressure. Cheney showed none of it. "He would ask you factual questions
like, 'OK, about this thing you said. Do I understand you correctly that
such-and-such is true? And are you sure about this, and how do you know
that?'" recalls Patrick Lang, the Defense Intelligence Agency's (DIA) Middle
East expert during the Gulf war and one of the few analysts to predict the
invasion of Kuwait. "And I regard that as a legitimate question. ... He
wasn't hostile or nasty about it; he just wanted to know how you knew. And I
didn't mind that in the least."

But, as Cheney and his aides watched, the intelligence failures kept on
mounting. In the fall of 1992, U.N. inspectors uncovered an Iraqi nuclear
weapons program far more advanced than the intelligence community had
suspected. More disturbingly, the CIA admitted to having no clue about the
Soviet Union's massive clandestine biological weapons program, which Yeltsin
had spontaneously acknowledged in 1992 -- and this was an enemy the Agency had
studied carefully for decades. Gradually, Cheney and his staff came to
consider the CIA not only inept but lazy, unimaginative, and arrogant--"a high
priesthood" in their derisive terminology. With uncharacteristic vitriol,
Wolfowitz's 1994 paper argued that the Agency's style "allows [analysts] to
conceal ignorance of facts, policy bias or any number of things that may lie
behind the personal opinions that are presented as sanctified intelligence
judgments."

By the time Cheney arrived at Halliburton in the mid-'90s, he felt he could no
longer rely on his old Langley connections to provide him the information he
needed to do business in the former Soviet Union. So, according to one ex-CIA
operative, Cheney hired a team of retired intelligence agents to collect
information independently. The ex-agent says, "Cheney would just bitch and
moan about the CIA and various parts of the world that they didn't know shit
[about]. ... He was terribly frustrated."

But, while the decision to leave Saddam in power at the end of the Gulf war
would reverberate through neocon circles for the next decade, a policy
initiative devised by Cheney's Pentagon in 1992 would be arguably more
important, laying the foundation for every major theme of George W. Bush's
post-September 11 foreign policy. Under Wolfowitz's direction, the Pentagon
produced a strategy paper called the Defense Planning Guidance (DPG). At a
moment of strategic uncertainty -- the Soviet Union had formally collapsed
just months before -- the document offered a vision of unbridled U.S.
dominance and proposed democratization as the only true guarantor of U.S.
security.

Without a Soviet Union to contain, there was no longer any obvious reason for
the United States to retain its outsized presence on the world stage. To meet
domestic expectations for a "peace dividend," Cheney implemented force
reductions across all the armed services. But the Defense secretary and his
planning staff also saw danger in these cuts. It was impossible to predict
the next global rival to the United States, and, without the forward presence
to encourage and cement democratization in newly freed nations, the gains of a
unipolar world could be short-lived. A new conceptual framework to justify
U.S. leadership was necessary.

DPGs typically explain how the Pentagon plans to implement defense
requirements. They traffic in the minutiae of weapons systems and force
structures, not reconceived notions of global leadership. But, just as
Wolfowitz had used a modest policy office for grander ambitions, in February
1992 his staff drafted a DPG, advocating a value-driven security policy. It
would be a U.S. priority to "encourage the spread of democratic forms of
government." The stakes, they said, were extremely high. Everywhere the DPG
authors looked, they saw the prospects for rivalry: in Russia, where there was
"the possibility that democracy will fail"; in "Indian hegemonic aspiration";
in communist Asia, "with fundamental values, governance and policies decidedly
at variance with our own"; even in allied Europe.

Instead of passively accepting the emergence of such rivals, the DPG proposed
snuffing them out. Washington needed to convince other countries that "they
need not aspire to a greater [global] role," whether through "account[ing]
sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations" or through
traditional deterrence. By preventing the emergence of a rival, U.S. strategy
could recreate itself for a unipolar world, where U.S. power could be used
more freely. "We have the opportunity to meet threats at lower levels and
lower costs," the document read. Chief among those threats was the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). A full decade before
George W. Bush enshrined preemption as state policy in his National Security
Strategy, the DPG raised the prospect of "whether to take military steps to
prevent the development or use of weapons of mass destruction."

It was uncharted territory for the United States, and it alarmed certain
Pentagon officials, who leaked drafts of the DPG to *The New York Times*.
Cheney, Wolfowitz, and their staffs awoke on March 8, 1992, to the headline
"U.S. STRATEGY PLAN CALLS FOR ENSURING NO RIVALS DEVELOP." A horrified
Senator Joseph Biden said the DPG led the way to "literally a Pax Americana."
George H. W. Bush immediately disassociated himself from the document, begging
the press corps, "Please do not put too much emphasis on leaked reports,
particularly ones that I haven't seen." The White House strongly indicated
its displeasure to the Defense secretary.

Cheney was forced to revise the document, sanding down its edges considerably,
but he did not let its ideas perish. In January 1993, as they were about to
leave office, Wolfowitz's planning staff recycled all the controversial ideas
in the DPG and published them in a document called the Regional Defense
Strategy. Again, the strategy was based on the concept of "a democratic 'zone
of peace,'" defined as "a community of democratic nations bound together in a
web of political, economic and security ties." It remained the task of
American leadership "to build an international environment conducive to our
values." The fact that the DPG vision didn't die a quiet, bureaucratic death
wasn't just a tribute to the tenacity of Wolfowitz and his staff; it was a
reflection of how deeply Cheney believed in it.

To this day, his closest aides point to the document as the moment when
Cheney's foreign policy coalesced. The attacks of September 11 may have given
Cheney a new sense of urgency, but the framework was already there. As one
former staffer puts it, "It wasn't an epiphany, it wasn't a sudden eureka
moment; it was an evolution, but it was one that was primed by what he had
done and seen in the period during the end of the cold war."

ALL THE VICE PRESIDENT'S MEN

Cheney's ideology hardly made a dent in the first Bush White House. But, in
the second, George W. Bush tasked him with a robust foreign policy portfolio.
To ensure his ideas won out, the new vice president reassembled the
intellectuals he had relied on in Wolfowitz's policy operation. Stephen
Hadley, who had worked on arms control for the Wolfowitz policy staff, became
deputy national security adviser. Zalmay Khalilzad, another policy aide, took
over the NSC's Middle East portfolio. Others Cheney kept for his own staff.
I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Wolfowitz's deputy, particularly rose in influence.
In addition to becoming the vice president's chief of staff, he became
Cheney's national security adviser and an adviser to the president himself.
For his White House deputy, Libby tapped Eric Edelman, the Pentagon's top
Sovietologist and organizer of the Saturday seminars. They brought in John
Hannah, who had championed the anti-Gorbachev case at the Bush 41 State
Department, to handle Middle East affairs. With a nod from Wolfowitz, they
recruited a Navy officer, William Luti -- who had advised former House Speaker
Newt Gingrich -- to work with Hannah.

Cheney didn't reconvene the group out of nostalgia. During the transition to
the new administration, the NSC had been stocked with wonks from State and the
CIA, and hawks felt ideologically frozen out of the new president's foreign
policy staff. Other neocons -- including Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of
State John Bolton -- were stuck a rung lower on the bureaucracy than their
comrades felt they deserved. "A lot of people didn't end up at State and NSC
and DOD [Department of Defense]," one senior administration hawk says.
"Scooter tried to find a home for them." Cheney's office came to be viewed as
the administration's neocon sanctuary.

The Office of the Vice President (OVP) was more than a consolation prize.
Cheney gave his national security staff far greater responsibilities than had
traditionally been accorded the vice president's team. His regional
specialists wouldn't be involved only in issues relevant to the vice president
-- they would participate fully in the policymaking process and attend almost
every interagency meeting. When Cheney first created this new structure, some
Bushies openly described the operation as a "shadow" NSC. For those in the
NSC itself, it often seemed like the "shadow" had more power than the real
deal. One former Bush official says, "In this case, it's often the vice
president's office that's driving the policy, leading the debate, leading the
arguments, instead of just hanging back and recognizing that the vice
president is not supposed to be driving the policy."

Not only was the OVP staff familiar, so were their ideas. Even before
September 11, 2001, Cheney's staff was convinced Iraq could be a democratic
outpost in the region -- much as they had hoped Ukraine would become -- albeit
through a U.S.-funded insurgency, not an invasion. According to his aides,
Cheney had grown more convinced throughout the '90s of the futility of
containing Saddam. In the early '90s, while Cheney was holed up at the
American Enterprise Institute, his think-tank colleagues say he met Ahmed
Chalabi and increasingly lent the Iraqi National Congress (INC) leader a
sympathetic ear. In July 2000, Chalabi delighted over Cheney's
vice-presidential nomination, boasting, "Cheney is good for us." He was
right. Within two weeks of Bush's inauguration, Cheney helped free U.S. INC
funding that had been bottlenecked during the Clinton administration. At the
senior staff meetings, which considered Iraq policy almost every week during
the first few months of the administration, Cheney's office supported efforts
to topple Saddam through empowering the INC even further. According to former
Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Edward Walker, a regular
attendee at those meetings, Cheney seemed increasingly exasperated with his
options. "Everything that had been tried before didn't work. By a system of
elimination -- sanctions won't stop him, bombing won't stop him, and so on --
you come down to the last resort: Then we'll have to take him out."

The attacks of September 11 violently accelerated Cheney's nascent vision of a
democratic Middle East. As the ruins of the Twin Towers smoldered, Cheney
decided the administration needed to change the strategic framework that had
left the nation vulnerable to mass murder. He unveiled his thinking at the
first NSC meeting after the attack. "To the extent we define our task
broadly, including those who support terrorism, then we get at states," Cheney
said, according to Bob Woodward's account of the meeting. The night before,
Bush had told the nation he would make "no distinction" between Al Qaeda and
its state sponsors. Cheney was pushing the president's reasoning to its next
stage. As a friend recollects, Cheney now understood that "what you had to do
was transform the Middle East."

But, if Cheney realized that the Middle East needed to be recast, he also
believed that one of the nation's most important instruments for doing so --
its intelligence community -- was badly broken. An intelligence failure on
the scale of September 11, in the view of the vice president and his staff,
merely confirmed the OVP's already dim estimation of the CIA. Before the
attacks, Cheney had mused about the centrality of intelligence to national
security, telling *The New Yorker*'s Nicholas Lemann in May 2001, "You need to
have very robust intelligence capability if you're going to uncover threats to
the U.S., and hopefully thwart them before they can be launched." Now there
could be no confidence in the predictive capabilities of the country's
intelligence services. Both lessons -- the need to force a strategic
realignment in the Middle East and the unreliability of normal intelligence
channels -- had deep roots in Cheney's Pentagon experience.

In mid-2002, Cheney made at least two visits to the CIA's Langley headquarters
to talk with the analysts on the intelligence assembly line, who warned that
they had no evidence showing that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear
program. These visits have been chewed over in the press, decried by retired
Agency officials, and condemned as attempts to pressure the CIA into producing
more damning intel. But they only begin to capture the depth of the vice
president's personal involvement in shaping Iraq intelligence. In addition to
trekking to Langley, his former aides say, Cheney paid calls to analysts at
the DIA, the National Security Agency, and even the National Intelligence
Mapping Agency. "He visited every element of the intelligence community,"
says a former Cheney staffer. When he wasn't visiting these agencies, his
staff snowed them with questions. According to one former CIA analyst, "The
Agency [would write] something on WMD, and it would come back from the vice
president with a thousand questions: 'What's this sentence mean?' 'What's
your source for this line?' 'Why are you disregarding sources that are saying
the opposite?'"

Among Cheney's aides, resentment of the CIA went far beyond a healthy
skepticism of fallible intelligence analysts and an Agency with a decidedly
mixed record. Whereas Cheney's questioning of intelligence during the Gulf
war had been probing but respectful, now his staff belittled the intelligence
community's findings, irrespective of their merits. For years, Libby and
Hannah in particular had believed the Agency harbored a politically motivated
animus against the INC and irresponsibly discounted intelligence reports from
defectors the INC had brought forward. "This had been a fight for such a long
period of time, where people were so dug in," reflects a friend of one of
Cheney's senior staffers. The OVP had been studying issues like Iraq for so
many years that it often simply did not accept that contrary information
provided by intelligence analysts -- especially CIA analysts -- could be
correct. As one former colleague of many OVP officials puts it, "They so
believed that the CIA were wrong, they were like, 'We want to *show* these
fuckers that they are wrong.'"

Intelligence analysts saw little difference between Cheney and his staffers.
The vice president's aides may have made more trips to Langley and signed more
memoranda asking for further information, but, as the CIA saw it, the OVP was
a coordinated machine working for its engineer. "When I heard complaints from
people, it was, 'Man, you wouldn't believe this shit that Libby and
[Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J.] Feith and Wolfowitz do to us.' They
were all lumped together," says an ex-analyst close to his former colleagues.
"I would hear them say, 'Goddamn, that fucking John Hannah, you wouldn't
believe.' And the next day it would be, 'That fucking Bill Luti.' For all
these guys, they're interchangeable." Adds another, "They had power.
Authority. They had the vice president behind them. ... What Scooter did,
Cheney made possible. Feith, Wolfowitz -- Cheney made it all possible. He's
the fulcrum. He's the one."

From the OVP's perspective, the CIA -- with its caveat-riddled position on
Iraqi WMD and its refusal to connect Saddam and Al Qaeda -- was an outright
obstacle to the invasion of Iraq. And, as Cheney and his staff remembered so
vividly from their Pentagon days, the CIA was often wrong on the biggest
security questions. So Cheney reverted to the intelligence-gathering method
he had perfected at Halliburton: He outsourced. Even before September 11,
2001, Cheney had given his staff clear instructions to go beyond the typical
information channels in the bureaucracy. "He very, very much did not want to
be trapped inside the government bubble and only see intelligence reports and
State Department cables and Department of Defense memos," an ex-staffer
recounts. Escaping the bubble was often innocuous and intellectually healthy.
The OVP arranged meetings for Cheney with Middle East experts, such as the
University of Haifa's Amatzia Baram, Princeton's Bernard Lewis, and Johns
Hopkins's Fouad Ajami, and it gave him documents, such as the U.N.'s 2002 Arab
Human Development Report, which pointed to tyranny as the source of the
region's problems.

But Cheney's office didn't escape the government bubble so much as create a
new one. Any doubts expressed by the intelligence community about the OVP's
sources, especially Chalabi, were ignored. During his stint as an adviser to
Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Hannah had been one of the Clinton
administration's most fervent INC supporters. Working for Cheney, he stayed
in regular contact with the exile group. "He relied on Ahmed Chalabi for
insights and advice," says a former Bush administration official. Cheney
himself became an increasingly vocal Chalabi advocate. At an NSC meeting in
the fall of 2002, the State Department and Pentagon feuded over releasing even
more funding to the INC. In a rare burst of open influence, Cheney "weighed
in, in a really big way," according to a former NSC staffer. "He said, 'We're
getting ready to go to war, and we're nickel-and-diming the INC at a time when
they're providing us with unique intelligence on Iraqi WMD.'" To the OVP, the
CIA's hostility to such "unique" INC intelligence was evidence of the Agency's
political corruption. Before long, "there was something of a willingness to
give [INC- provided intelligence] greater weight" than that offered by the
intelligence community, says the former administration official.

Chalabi was not the only source Hannah used to get alternative information to
Cheney. In 2001, Luti had moved from the OVP to across the Potomac to become
Feith's deputy for Near East and South Asia (NESA). By late 2002, Luti's Iraq
desk became the Office of Special Plans (OSP), tasked with working on issues
related to the war effort. In addition to actual planning, the OSP provided
memoranda to Pentagon officials recycling the most damaging -- and often the
most spurious -- intelligence about Iraq's Al Qaeda connections and the most
hopeful predictions about liberated Iraq. In the fall of 2002, one of the
memos stated as fact that September 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met in Prague
with an Iraqi intelligence agent months before the attacks -- a claim the FBI
and CIA had debunked months earlier after an exhaustive investigation. And
the OSP didn't just comb through old intelligence for new information. It had
its own sources. For example, one of Luti's aides, a Navy lieutenant
commander named Youssef Aboul-Enein, was tasked with scouring Arabic-language
websites and magazines to come up with what Aboul-Enein would call "something
really useful" -- statements by Saddam praising the September 11 attacks,
Palestinian suicide bombings, or any act of terrorism.

According to those who worked in NESA, Luti's efforts had a specific customer:
Cheney. "Cheney's the one with the burr under his saddle about Iraq," says
retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked for Luti
from May 2002 until the eve of the war. During that time, Luti held only
about six or seven staff meetings, she says, and "I heard Scooter Libby's name
mentioned in half those meetings." Discussing Iraq, Luti would say "things
like, 'Did you give something to Scooter?' 'Scooter called; hey, call him
back,' ... [or] 'Oh, well, did you talk to Scooter about that?'" And Luti
would make trips across the Potomac to see his old colleagues at the OVP.
White House officials would often see Luti disappearing into Hannah's office
before going on to Libby's.

The OVP didn't just generate this information for themselves. They tried to
pump it back into the intelligence pipeline on visits to Langley. "Scooter
and the vice president come out there loaded with crap from OSP, reams of
information from Chalabi's people" on both terrorism and WMD, according to an
ex-CIA analyst. One of the OVP's principal interlocutors was Alan Foley,
director of the CIA's Nonproliferation Center. Cheney's office pelted Foley
with questions about Iraq's nuclear weapons program -- especially about
Saddam's alleged attempts to purchase uranium from Niger. According to a
colleague, Foley "pushed back" by "stressing the implausibility of it."
Months earlier, after all, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson had gone to Niger
at the behest of the CIA -- a visit that had itself been instigated by
questions raised by Cheney in an Agency briefing -- and concluded that the
sale almost certainly did not occur. But Cheney kept pressing, and it took
its toll on Foley. "He was bullied and intimidated," says a friend of Foley.

In the view of many at Langley, the OVP wasn't simply highlighting what it
considered weaknesses in CIA analysis. Rather, it was trying to stifle
information that it considered counterproductive to the case for war. The
tone of the questioning, some analysts felt, was less inquisitive than
hostile. "It was done along the lines of: 'What's wrong with you bunch of
assholes? You don't know what's going on, you're horribly biased, you're a
bunch of pinkos,'" says a retired analyst close to his active-duty colleagues.
Some analysts saw the questioning as a method of diverting overtaxed CIA
analysts from producing undesired intelligence product. On one occasion,
officials asked analysts hard at work on Iraq to produce a paper on the
history of the British occupation of Mesopotamia following World War I. The
request might seem reasonable on the surface -- after all, an occupation ought
to be informed by precedent. But policymakers in the OVP and the DOD could
just as easily have picked up histories of Iraq from the library and let the
CIA go back to work on classified analysis. But, after enduring the
questioning for months, an ex-analyst explains, "It gets to the point where
you just don't want to fight it anymore."

Eventually the OVP's alternative analyses found their way into the
administration's public case for war. The distance between the OVP and the
intelligence community was greatest on terrorism, and the OVP was determined
to win. Libby wrote a draft of Colin Powell's February speech to the U.N.
Security Council that outlined a far different threat than the secretary of
State envisioned. "[The OVP] really wanted to make it a speech mostly about
the link to terrorism," says one former NSC official. Although Powell and his
staff balked at the most controversial -- and poorly substantiated -- details,
Libby still provided the initial outline for the speech.

Cheney's own public statements went far beyond what the CIA and other
intelligence agencies had verified. In an August 2002 speech in Nashville,
Cheney asserted, "The Iraqi regime has in fact been very busy enhancing its
capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents, and they continue
to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago." The intelligence
community was in fact deeply divided over whether the nuclear program was
again active, and a classified DIA report a month later indicated that the
Agency had "no reliable information" about Iraq's chemical weapons program.
But these doubts never seeped into Cheney's public statements. Days before
the invasion, Cheney told NBC's Tim Russert on "Meet the Press," "We know
[Saddam is] out trying once again to produce nuclear weapons, and we know that
he has a longstanding relationship with ... the Al Qaeda organization." By
contrast, the intelligence agencies assessed that, despite some apparently
fruitless contact between Saddam's henchmen and Al Qaeda terrorists in Sudan
in the mid-'90s, Iraq and Osama bin Laden were two unrelated threats.

The OVP never considered that it could be wrong, despite the fact that none of
its senior members had intelligence training. The CIA, on the other hand,
rather than behaving as a rigid and unshakable bastion of unquestionable

Copyright: The New Republic