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A Senior Pentagon policy maker created an unofficial "Iraqi
intelligence cell" in the summer of 2002 to circumvent the
CIA and secretly brief the White House on links between Saddam Hussein
and al-Qa'eda, according to the Senate intelligence committee.
The allegations about Douglas Feith, the number three at the Department
of Defence, are made in a supplementary annexe of the committee's
review of the intelligence leading to war in Iraq, released on Friday.
According to dramatic testimony contained in the annexe, Mr. Feith's
cell undermined the credibility of CIA judgments on Iraq's alleged
al-Qa'eda links within the highest levels of the Bush administration.
The cell appears to have been set up by Mr. Feith as an adjunct
to the Office of Special Plans, a Pentagon intelligence-gathering
operation established in the wake of 9/11 with the authority of
Paul Wolfowitz. Its focus quickly became the al-Qa'eda-Saddam link.
On occasion, without informing the then head of the CIA, George
Tenet , the group gave counter-briefings in the White House. Senator
Jay Rockefeller, the most senior Democrat on the committee, said
that Mr. Feith's cell may even have undertaken "unlawful"
intelligence-gathering initiatives.
The claims will lead to calls by Democrats for the resignation of
Mr. Feith, the third-ranking civilian at the Department of Defence
and a leading "neo-con" hawk. "Tenet fell on his
sword," said one Democrat official, "even though it's
clear that he was placed under tremendous pressure to come up with
the 'right' intelligence product for the administration on Iraq.
"The testimony to the committee on Feith and other Pentagon
officials shows just what kind of pressure was being exerted. And
when that didn't work, the Pentagon was just coming up with its
own answers and feeding them to the White House. And on al-Qa'eda
they got it all wrong."
Last night a senior Pentagon adviser confirmed that Mr. Feith was
being targeted by senators unhappy that the administration has so
far escaped censure for its use of intelligence.
"There are senators who are clearly gunning for Douglas Feith
now. This is turning into a classic conspiracy investigation. They
want to get Feith and see if, through Feith, they can go up the
ladder to even bigger fish."
Mr. Feith's role is to be examined further in the second phase of
the Senate committee's investigations, which will deal with the
Bush administration's use of the intelligence it received. The report
by the Republican-dominated committee lambasted the CIA for intelligence
failures while concluding that there was no evidence that the Bush
administration tried to coerce officials to adapt their findings.
Yet the annexe - written by three leading Democratic senators -
contains the strongest evidence yet that Pentagon hardliners sought
to sideline the CIA during a drive to talk up a connection between
Saddam and Osama bin Laden.
After the September 11 attacks, tension had grown between Pentagon
officials and CIA agents, who suspected the Department of Defence
of relying too heavily on dubious testimony from Iraqi defectors
in order to justify a war against Iraq.
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The CIA's investigation of links between Iraq and al-Qa'eda was
almost the only aspect of the agency's intelligence-gathering to
escape severe censure in the 511-page report. Senator Rockefeller,
the senator for West Virginia, said: "Our report found that
the intelligence community's judgments were right on Iraq's ties
to terrorists. There was no evidence of the formal relationship,
however you want to describe it, between Iraq and al-Qa'eda, and
no evidence that existed of Iraq's complicity or assistance in al-Qa'eda's
terrorist attacks."
Pentagon officials who appeared before the Senate committee testified
that Mr. Feith and others believed that the CIA was not sufficiently
aggressive in its investigation of links between Saddam and al-Qa'eda.
During the summer of 2002, administration hardliners believed that
evidence of a connection between Iraq and the terrorist organisation
would provide a clinching argument for war.
After the publication in June 2002 of a cautious report by the CIA
entitled Iraq and al-Qa'eda: A Murky Relationship, Mr. Feith
passed on a written verdict to the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld,
that the report should be read "for content only - and CIA's
interpretation should be ignored".
In August 2002, Mr. Feith's cell gave a briefing to Mr. Rumsfeld
and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, which included a stinging condemnation
of the CIA's intelligence assessment techniques.
In sharp contrast to the Senate intelligence committee's criticisms
of "over-reaching" and "exaggeration" by CIA
agents, the Pentagon briefing criticised the agency for requiring
"juridical evidence" for its findings and for the "consistent
underestimation" of the possibility that Iraq and al-Qa'eda
were attempting to conceal their collaboration.
In another incident, Mr. Feith's Pentagon cell postponed the publication
of a CIA assessment of Iraq's links to terrorism after a visit to
CIA headquarters at which "numerous objections" were made
to a final draft.
In particular, Pentagon officials insisted that more should be made
of an alleged meeting between the September 11 hijacker Mohammed
Atta and an Iraqi official in Prague in April 2001. The CIA judged
reports of the meeting not to be credible, a verdict vindicated
on Friday by the Senate committee report.
Most remarkably, on September 16, 2002, two days before the CIA
was to produce its postponed assessment, Mr. Feith's cell went directly
to the White House and gave an alternative briefing to Vice-President
Dick Cheney's chief of staff, and to the National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice's deputy.
The briefing contained the section alleging "fundamental problems"
with CIA intelligence-gathering. It also gave a detailed breakdown
of the alleged meeting between Atta and an Iraqi agent.
The following week, senior Bush officials made confident statements
on the existence of a link between Saddam and al-Qa'eda. Mr. Tenet
would learn of the secret briefing only in March 2004.
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