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|  | FEBRUARY 6, 2004
By Stan Crock George Tenet Goes on Offense The embattled CIA director explains his agency's Iraq intelligence effort -- and points to successes elsewhere. The last word? Hardly It has been a rough winter for U.S. intelligence agents, with the explosive charges that the Central Intelligence Agency vastly overstated the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, while it understated the development of nuclear-weapons programs in Libya and Iran. On Feb. 5, in a speech at his alma mater, Georgetown University, CIA Director George Tenet tried to explain what happened and what steps are being taken to remedy the missteps. It was a spirited and at times persuasive performance, but the biggest test of lessons learned is yet to come. Tenet laid out in detail how the intelligence community arrived at its October, 2002, estimate of Iraq's capability. What those estimates didn't say, however, was the most interesting part of Tenet's speech -- and the most damning for President Bush. The CIA never concluded that the threat was imminent, as the Administration had suggested. Saddam Hussein likely wouldn't be able to make a nuclear weapon until 2007 to 2009, the CIA concluded, according to Tenet. There was a wild card: If Saddam managed to get his hands on fissile material, he could have a bomb within a year, agency spooks concluded, but they had no evidence of such an acquisition. Yet, Team Bush officials, especially Vice-President Cheney, used only the worst-case scenario -- declaring that Baghdad could have a nuclear capability in a year -- and ignored the equivocations. Cheney was accurate to a point, but by not revealing the rest of the analysis, the assertion was misleading. SIFTING SAND. The CIA chief insisted that the intel community was right in its assessment of Iraq's missile development programs, including those prohibited under U.N. sanctions. The estimates may have overstated the progress Saddam was making on nukes, Tenet said, and indeed no evidence has yet been found of the chemical and biological weapons the U.S. thought Iraq had -- though indications are clear that Saddam was still keenly interested in developing such weapons. In a shot at weapons inspector David Kay, who concluded that it's very unlikely now that WMD stockpiles existed in the run-up to the U.S. invasions, Tenet said the investigation of whether the stockpiles exist isn't close to 85% complete. Iraq is a big country, and it will take a long time to settle this issue once and for all. Later in the day, Kay held his ground, responding that a strategy of searching every nook and cranny in the Iraqi sands is daft. Once you search the obvious suspected sites, he said, you look for the people, areas, and documents that could lead you to the stockpiles. Nothing has emerged after a vigorous search, he said, and that's why he concluded the stockpiles don't exist. DIPLOMATIC BREAKTHROUGHS. Tenet was speaking out, however, in an effort to regain traction against critics. He suggested that British and American intelligence officials haven't gotten the credit they deserve for Libya's decision to dismantle its nuclear weapons development programs. Spy satellites, analytical work, and human intelligence combined to alert Washington and London when the bomb program started, when it went on hiatus for years, and when it started again. So when Libya approached the Brits and Americans about dismantling its programs, it quickly became clear that the two allies had so much information that evasiveness was out of the question. That resulted in serious, quiet diplomacy that holds the prospect of disarming what had been a renegade regime. Tenet also claimed that the CIA knew about Tehran's secret nuclear sites before Iranian dissidents went public with the information last year. That prompted intervention by the International Atomic Energy Agency and an agreement with Tehran for intrusive inspections. And it was an intelligence effort that led the Bush Administration to confront North Korea about its highly enriched uranium effort, which recent disclosures about the nuclear black market run by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan confirm. PRISM OF SUSPICION. Let's take Tenet at his word. The beleaguered CIA director was indeed quite candid about some flaws in the intelligence process. The fact that Saddam had lied to weapons inspectors and the international community for years, had developed prohibited weapons, and had used such weapons clearly darkened analysts' views of his behavior. In the face of such lies, the spies took off the table alternative explanations -- for example, that sanctions had crippled Saddam's weapons programs and he was bluffing to keep a grip on power. Tenet & Co. subsequently discounted evidence indicating that weapons had been destroyed in the mid-1990s. Skepticism about this regime was understandable, but the prism of suspicion tainted the analysis in the end. There's a chilling irony here. The doctrine of preventive attack used in Iraq requires superb intelligence to justify an unprovoked attack, but the intel in Iraq was far from that. On the other hand, where the U.S. did have good intelligence -- in Libya, Iran, and North Korea -- Washington pursued a diplomatic route, what arms-control expert Janne Nolan calls a "more sophisticated" approach. It's great that good data lead to diplomacy, but it's quite disheartening that bad intel is the basis for conflict (see BW Online, 1/15/04, "A Safer World Takes More than Might"). OSAMA IN THE CROSSHAIRS? With his address, Tenet also tried to debunk the conventional wisdom that the CIA has all but abandoned human intelligence in favor of spy satellites and high-tech eavesdropping and gadgetry. I Spy-type intelligence, with operatives and agents in the field, isn't the dead-letter trade so often portrayed in the press, the CIA director said, recounting successes not only against rogue regimes but against terrorist groups using intelligence gathered on the ground the old-fashioned way. He claimed to have been rebuilding the Operations Directorate, which operates undercover programs, for the past seven years. To the extent it operates in the shadows, it's hard to gauge all its successes. One indication of how effective that rebuilding has been could come soon, however. On Jan. 29, U.S. military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Bryan Hilferty boldly predicted that coalition forces would capture Osama bin Laden within a year. If he's right -- and intel will play a major role in determining the outcome -- Tenet should not only keep his job but get a raise. If instead, bin Laden stays at large and terrorist attacks continue to plague Americans at home and abroad, the intelligence probe President Bush is ordering will take on even more urgency.  Crock covers national security and foreign affairs for BusinessWeek from Washington. Follow his views in Affairs of State twice a month, only on BusinessWeek Online Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
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