Intelligence Community to Get Post-war Critique

The review is being officially touted as an intellectual exercise of comparing pre-war intelligence reports with the reality being found on the ground in post-war Iraq. Furthermore, according to the report, the review is a project that had its genesis before the war in Iraq and before the frustrating failure to date to secure a WMD smoking gun.

According to the report, the CIA review’s impetus comes from a request last October from Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld to Tenet and is a relatively benign thing -- not a witch hunt, or a report card, or a formal investigation. But the disclosure of the fact of the review comes at a time of mounting concern over the lack of WMD being uncovered in Iraq and against a backdrop of still simmering complaints by CIA analysts that they had been pressed to produce reports that supported the administration’s positions on Iraq.

The central figure in the review, which will be undertaken by a panel of retired CIA agents, may well be the Special Plans office.

According to a recent report in the New Yorker magazine, the unique operations of this office were conceived in the wake of 9/11 by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense. Special Plans interpreted data gathered by other intelligence agencies but also concentrated on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi.

According to the New Yorker article, Special Plans was expressly formed in order to find evidence that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that could potentially threaten the U.S. Critics say that this “politicizing” of the intelligence function was not a good thing.

Adding to the mix, the Iraqi defectors favored by Special Plans were providing plenty of compelling stories to reporters in the United States and Europe -- accounts of advances in weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi links to terrorist groups.

However, in the resulting credibility tug-of-war, the CIA disputed these accounts, pointing out misstatements and inconsistencies in I.N.C. defector versions.

But Rumsfeld and his colleagues fought back, judging, according to the New Yorker, that the CIA was unable to perceive the reality of the situation in Iraq.

“The agency was out to disprove linkage between Iraq and terrorism,” a Pentagon adviser told the New Yorker. “That’s what drove them. If you’ve ever worked with intelligence data, you can see the ingrained views at C.I.A. that color the way it sees data.” The goal of Special Plans, he said, was “to put the data under the microscope to reveal what the intelligence community can’t see.”