Shooting the Messenger

How a Cheney ally helped soften the Pentagon's report on pre-war intel.

Feb. 14, 2007 - A Pentagon office headed by a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney has rejected the findings of a new report that sharply criticized the handling of pre-war intelligence on Iraq.

In a blistering internal memo obtained by NEWSWEEK, Eric Edelman, under secretary of defense for policy, characterized portions of the inspector-general's report as "egregious." Edelman--the Pentagon's No. 3 official--also staunchly defended the actions of his predecessor, Douglas Feith, who has been criticized for his pre-war efforts to promote the idea that Saddam Hussein's regime had a relationship with Al Qaeda.

The protests of Edelman--and his success in getting acting Pentagon Inspector-General Thomas Gimble to drop recommended policy changes from his report--shows how current and former Cheney aides still wield their clout throughout the government.

During the run-up to the Iraq war, Edelman served as Cheney's foreign-policy adviser, directly under the vice president's then chief of staff and national-security aide I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. After a two-year stint as ambassador to Turkey, Edelman was then nominated by President Bush in 2005 to replace Feith, a key ally of the vice president's office in the often-contentious pre-war debates over Iraq intelligence.

The inspector-general's report, released last week, described as "inappropriate" the work of a small intelligence unit within Feith's office. The unit was created during a crucial period in 2002 when the Bush administration first began making the case to invade Iraq.

In particular, the report concluded that analysts working for Feith presented top policymakers with "alternative" intelligence assessments that suggested a direct link between Saddam's regime and Al Qaeda (as well as a possible Iraq connection to the September 11 attacks). The analysts did so, the report concluded, without fully disclosing that their portrayal of the evidence conflicted with the consensus views of the U.S. intelligence community.

In the original draft of his report, Gimble recommended that the Defense Department policy office establish new internal controls to make sure that officials there do not conduct "intelligence activities." He also recommended that any alternative judgments be clearly labeled as such--and that policy officials spell out precisely how they diverged from those of the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies.

But after reviewing a copy of Gimble's draft, Edelman wrote a 52-page response, dated Jan. 16, 2007, that rejected virtually everything the inspector-general had to say (except Gimble's conclusions that Feith's activities were not illegal). Edelman described the report as having "numerous factual inaccuracies, omissions and mischaracterizations."

At the same time, Edelman challenged the competency of Gimble even to weigh in on the "appropriateness" of Feith's work, saying that the inspector-general's "opinion" on this issue "is not entitled to any particular deference" because he "does not have special expertise" on an issue that is "fraught with policy and political dimensions."

As for the inspector-general's recommendation that his office change procedures and make other changes, Edelman wrote that he does not agree with any of them. "Accordingly," Edelman wrote, his office "has taken no actions, and plans none, in response to the proposed recommendations."

While the reply was unusually feisty for a bureaucratic memo, Gimble's response may have been just as unusual. While sticking by his factual findings and conclusions about the inappropriate actions of Feith's analysts, the inspector-general chose to delete his recommended policy changes from the final report. Asked for comment, a spokesman in the inspector-general's office shared with NEWSWEEK a memo Gimble wrote back to Edelman in which he concluded that the "circumstances prevalent in 2002" (when the alleged inappropriate behavior occurred) "are no longer present today." Gimble wrote that the establishment of a new intelligence office in the Pentagon answerable to an under secretary and the "aggressive efforts" of the director of national intelligence--a position created by Congress in 2004--"have all contributed to a more favorable operational environment."

Feith said today he was gratified that the inspector-general changed his report in response to Edelman's criticisms. The IG's proposed policy changes, he said, were "completely impractical." He said they would have stifled criticism of the intelligence community consensus, which, he said, "history shows" is "sometimes very wrong."

All his analysts were trying to do, he said, was challenge a CIA consensus that seemed to be playing down the idea that Saddam's Baathist regime might forge an alliance with Al Qaeda. "The one thing you want to do is encourage policy people to speak up on these matters," he said. "You don't want to impose on them rules that would make it difficult for them to critique the intelligence community."

But the most damning criticism of Feith's operation is not that his analysts were raising questions about the CIA's views on the issue; it is that they were, in the view of critics like Sen. Carl Levin and others, distorting the underlying intelligence in ways that appeared to make it easier for the White House to argue the case for war.

There were in fact three separate briefings presented by Feith's analysts on the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection: one to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on Aug. 8, 2002; another to CIA Director George Tenet on Aug. 15, 2002, and a third to two senior White House officials-- deputy national-security adviser Stephen Hadley, and Edelman's boss at the time, Scooter Libby--which was held in the White House Situation Room on Sept. 16, 2002. At all three, the Feith team presented a slide show that highlighted a Czech intelligence report of a purported meeting between 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001. (The briefings also claimed that an Iraqi "finance officer" had reportedly provided funding to Atta, according to a copy of one of the Feith slides obtained by NEWSWEEK.)

In fact, claims of such a meeting had already been largely debunked by the FBI, which had located cell-phone records and other evidence that placed Atta in Norfolk, Va., and Florida the week of the alleged Prague meeting. Even so, Cheney repeatedly referred to "credible" reports of such a meeting, and Libby later sought unsuccessfully to get Secretary of State Colin Powell to use the allegation in his speech to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003.

In his report, Gimble criticized Feith's team for referring to the alleged Prague meeting as an example of a "known contact" between Saddam's regime and Al Qaeda. He also pointed out that Feith's analysts altered the briefing they gave at the CIA for Tenet and other senior officials, removing one of their slides that asserted there were "fundamental problems" with how the intelligence community assessed information on the issue. One of those "fundamental problems": the CIA insisted on an overly strict "juridical" standard to confirm reports of purported Iraq-Al Qaeda contacts were actually true.

In his rebuttal, Edelman brushed aside these criticisms. He defended the omission of the slide taking a shot at the CIA on the grounds that "its critical tone" at a meeting hosted by Tenet "might have distracted from a discussion of the substance" of the issue. He also said it didn't matter that Feith's team left out the evidence undermining the idea of an Atta-in-Prague meeting because, he argued, Hadley and Libby were already aware of the controversy within the government about the meeting. Edelman also argued that at the time of the briefing for Hadley and Libby, "the Czech intelligence service stood firmly by its report" that the supposed rendezvous had taken place. (Edelman made no reference to the views of the FBI and the CIA, saying only that the U.S. intelligence community had not at that time disseminated any reports stating a "conclusive coordinated judgment that the reported Atta meeting did not occur.")

The Gimble report is hardly the end of the battles over Iraq intelligence. The Senate Intelligence Committee is wrapping up Phase II of its own investigation to pre-Iraq war intel issues. And Gimble has another study underway as well. Its subject: examining the U.S. government's relationship with the Iraqi National Congress--the exile group that was the source for some of the most questionable intelligence about Saddam's regime, and which found its most willing allies in the offices of Feith and Cheney.