• Military
• WMD

• Intelligence Menu               

• Systems
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Imagery
• Links

• Homeland Security
• Space

A. Human Intelligence (HUMINT)

(             ) IC analysts told Committee staff that there was no robust HUMINT collection capability targeting Iraq's links to terrorism until the Fall of 2002. Prior to 2002, HUMINT collection was heavily dependant on a few foreign government services and there were no                      sources inside Iraq reporting on strictly terrorism issues. Officers from the office of the ADCI/C told Committee staff during interviews that HUMINT capabilities against were limited because there was no official U.S. presence in Iraq. This point had been explained in a report from the Collection Concepts Development Center entitled Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction - Recommendations for Improvement in Collection. The report said:

The current clandestine HUMINT capability against the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) target is marginal, for a number of reasons. First the U.S. has no official                      presence in Iraq,                      This                      makes recruitment of Iraqis exceptionally difficult. Second, the brutal and pervasively repressive nature of the Iraqi regime makes any contact                      extremely risky. These conditions also make any operations in Iraq                      extremely dangerous.

(             ) Analysts told Committee staff that in late 2002, the IC developed what they described as a comprehensive, robust collection program                                          When asked to characterize the collection effort against terrorism and Iraq, an IC analyst said "I don't think that we were really focused on the CT [counterterrorism] side, because we weren't concerned about the IIS going out and pro-actively conducting terrorist attacks. It wasn't until we realized that there was a possibility of going to war that we had to get a handle on that."                      SENTENCE DELETED                     

A senior collections officer from the CTC described a "multi-faceted CIA program to pursue this initiative."                      SENTENCE DELETED                      The CTC also "built a concerted recruitment program . . . ,"                      SENTENCE DELETED                     ." The same senior collections officer told Committee staff that Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers "went out and tried to pitch all, or as many as we could                                                                                 

(             )                                                             PARAGRAPH DELETED                                                             

(             ) The CTC collections officer noted that there was one major gap in collection, he stated:

We had one gap that we were struggling with. That was the more broader strategic plans of Saddam Hussein in terms of the use of WMD as a terrorist weapon. We were very concerned about it, but we did not have much reporting. What reporting we got                                          wasn't very reliable information. We ended up having to do more reasoned logic in terms of working through the scenarios to make judgments about if he would turn that over to terrorist groups, when he would turn it over to terrorist groups, and then how they might use it.

(             ) CTC analysts told Committee staff that the CIA also targeted Palestinian surrogates and that the CIA already had considerable collection efforts in place to work with Palestinian groups. CTC noted that they had insights into Baghdad's efforts to reach out to additional Palestinian groups                                                                                                                           foreign government services were also key to the CIA's collection.                      SENTENCE DELETED                      The CTC analysts told Committee staff, "Iraq was a hard target... we relied heavily on working with foreign government services and their accesses . . .                                                                                                                         

(             ) In terms of obtaining information on the al-Qaida-Zarqawi network, CTC told Committee staff that there had been an ongoing collection effort since 9/11 that had been "aggressively worked."                      SENTENCE DELETED                      Iraqi Support for Terrorism described a network of more than a dozen al-Qaida or al-Qaida-associated operatives in Baghdad, and estimated that 100-200 al-Qaida fighters were present in northeastern Iraq in territory under the control of Ansar al-Islam. As a result, collection continued to focus on understanding the historical context of the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida and trying to understand the nature of contacts between the two. CTC told staff that they relied heavily on foreign government services, and increasingly on detainee debriefs to look into an al-Qaida/Iraq relationship. CTC noted that questions regarding al-Qaida's ties to the Iraqi regime were among the first presented to senior al-Qaida operational planner Khalid Shaikh Muhammad following his capture. When asked if the IC had any unilateral sources that could provide information on the Iraq/al-Qaida relationship, the CTC analysts stated that they were entirely dependent on foreign government services for that information.