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C. Iraq's Ties to Terrorism

(U) The terrorism related sections of the report recount the Committee's efforts to evaluate the quantity and quality of the intelligence underlying prewar assessments. Each section contains it own set of conclusions. There is also a separate section on the issue of objectivity and whether analysts were pressured to reach specific conclusions to support a particular policy objective. Unlike the WMD sections of the report, in some instances, the issue of accuracy has been addressed as post-war reporting has become available.

(U) Because there was no National Intelligence Estimate specifically focused on Iraq's ties to terrorism, the Committee focused its work primarily the January 2003 Intelligence Report entitled Iraqi Support for Terrorism. This intelligence assessment was drafted by the Director of Central Intelligence's (DCI) Counterterrorist Center (CTC). (The CTC includes analysts from across the Intelligence Community.) Iraqi Support for Terrorism was first published for a limited executive audience in September 2002 under the same title. There were a few changes made to the January 2003 version of the document including the addition of new information that had been collected following the September publication. The Committee chose to evaluate it as the IC's most comprehensive product on the subject because the January 2003 paper was the most current version and was disseminated to a much wider audience.

(U) To complete this section of the report, the Committee's staff interviewed a total of sixty-two individuals and reviewed more than 1,000 documents provided by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). To gain an in-depth understanding of the Intelligence Community (IC) and CTC collection posture, Committee staff received a briefing from the Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Collection (ADCI/C) and met with two former heads of the DCI's Counterterrorist Center (CTC). Committee staff interviewed analysts from the CTC, DIA, and FBI who were responsible for assessing Iraq's links to al-Qaida. Committee staff also met with National Security Agency (NSA) employees who collected and analyzed signals intelligence (SIGINT) related to Iraq's links to terrorism. To address analytical objectivity and allegations concerning the politicization of the intelligence process, Committee staff received a briefing from the CIA Ombudsman for Politicization and interviewed IC analysts who interacted with, inter alia, personnel from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (OUSDP).

(U) In addition to reviewing activities specifically relating to Iraq's links to terrorism, the Committee staff participated in a briefing to the Committee by the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and in a Committee hearing with the former Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction. On each occasion, the Committee raised the issue of Iraq's links to terrorism.

(U) Intelligence from the 1960s and 1970s first established the link between Iraq and terrorism, resulting in Iraq's inclusion in the State Department's 1979 list of State Sponsors of Terrorism. The State Department removed Iraq from the list in 1982.⁴ Iraq returned to the list in 1990 based upon intelligence information linking the regime to acts of terrorism conducted by the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) and its support for Palestinian terrorists. The first intelligence reports suggesting links between Iraq and al Qaida emerged in the mid-1990s. The IC continues to receive reporting on these links from detainees and document exploitation.

(U) While the nature of the intelligence reporting produced or obtained by the IC has not changed dramatically in the past decade, there has been a significant shift in the way IC analysts evaluate reporting regarding terrorism, particularly in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. CIA officials interviewed by Committee staff indicated that, following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the trade craft of terrorism analysis shifted and analysts now feel obligated to make more conclusive assessments regardless of the quality of the available intelligence. In this new analytic environment analysts cannot set aside intelligence reports because the information does not fit within the context of their prior knowledge or because the report has not been corroborated. The CIA Deputy Director for Intelligence (DDI), describing the unique nature of terrorism analysis, said, ". . . terrorism analysis is just fundamentally different on some issues." She commented further that:

Sometimes it is the walk-in who has the best information about the impending attack. What we teach people in trade craft is that you want to get a report. It's preferable that that report come from a fully-vetted source whose information is from a long-established reporting record, has direct access and you've been able to corroborate it somehow. That's what you would ideally like and that's what you ideally teach analysts to look for. But with terrorism you can't dismiss the walkin.

The Deputy Director of the CTC's Office of Terrorism Analysis noted that this is the most difficult issue he has encountered in his eighteen years of intelligence analysis. He also stated that:

On the other hand, I would also say that we've encouraged and developed a sense of trade craft specifically on terrorism that says push the envelope because the implications are so high and because we have to acknowledge up front that, unlike in some other cases, some other lines of analysis, that we have to accept that often our information is going to be fragmentary and, if we wait too long to reach conclusions, we might make a mistake.

(U) The focus of the Committee's terrorism review, Iraqi Support for Terrorism, addressed four main issues:

• terrorist activities conducted by the IIS;
• Iraqi support for terrorist activities conducted by regional terrorist groups;
• Iraqi contacts with al-Qaida; and,
• potential Iraqi use of terrorism in the event of a war with the United States.

(U)Committee staff evaluated each of these and other issues including the intelligence source reporting underlying the assessments. The terrorism related sections of this report discuss the assessments and the intelligence reporting in detail.

1. Overall Conclusions - Terrorism

(U) Conclusion 8. Intelligence Community analysts lack a consistent post-September 11 approach to analyzing and reporting on terrorist threats.

(U) Though analysts have been wrong on major issues in the past, no previous intelligence failure has been so costly as the September 11 attacks. As the Deputy Director of Intelligence (DDI) explained during an interview with Committee staff, terrorist threat analysts now use a different type of trade craft than generally employed by political, leadership or regional analysts. Threat analysts are encouraged to "push the envelope" and look at various possible threat scenarios that can be drawn from limited and often fragmentary information. As a result, analysts can no longer dismiss a threat as incredible because they cannot corroborate it. They cannot dismiss what may appear to be the rantings of a walk-in until additional vetting shows those stories to be fabricated.

(U) To compensate for the fragmentary nature of the reporting on Iraq's potential links to al-Qaida, Intelligence Community (IC) analysts included as much detail as they could about the nature of the sources and went to great lengths to describe their analytic approach to the problem. For example, where information was limited to a single or untested source or to a foreign government service, a source description was provided. As discussed in more detail in the body of this report, a "Scope Note" was incorporated in each product to describe the analytic approach the drafters had taken to address the issue. In Iraq and al-Qaida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship, the Scope Note explained that the authors had purposefully taken an aggressive approach to interpreting the available data. In both the September 2002 and January 2003 versions of Iraqi Support for Terrorism, the Scope Note did not describe an analytic approach, but rather it highlighted the gaps in information and described the analysts' understanding of the Iraq-al-Qaida relationship as "evolving."

(U) Though the Committee understands the need for different analytical approaches and expressions of competing viewpoints, the IC should have considered that their readership would not necessarily understand the nuance between the first "purposely aggressive" approach and a return, in Iraqi Support for Terrorism, to a more traditional analysis of the reporting concerning Iraq's links to al-Qaida. A consistent approach in both assessments which carefully explained the intelligence reports and then provided a spectrum of possible conclusions would have been more useful and would have assisted policymakers in their public characterizations of the intelligence.

(U) Conclusion 9. Source protection policies within the Intelligence Community direct or encourage reports officers to exclude relevant detail about the nature of their sources. As a result, analysts community-wide are unable to make fully informed judgments about the information they receive, relying instead on nonspecific source lines to reach their assessments. Moreover, relevant operational data is nearly always withheld from analysts, putting them at a further analytical disadvantage.

(U) A significant portion of the intelligence reporting that was used to evaluate whether Iraq's interactions with al-Qaida operatives constituted a relationship was stripped of details prior to being made available to analysts community-wide. Source information and operational detail was provided only to Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analysts. This lack of information sharing limited the level of discussion and debate that should have taken place across the Community on this critical issue. While in the case of Iraq's links to terrorism, the final analysis has proven, thus far, to have been accurate and not affected by a lack of relevant source or operational detail, we cannot rely on this system in the future. Until changes are made concerning how and when source information is made available to analysts, we run the risk of missing critical data that might provide early warning.

(U) The absence of source and operational detail affects not only analysts, but policymakers as well. The Committee found that policymakers took an active role by personally examining individual intelligence reports for themselves. If this trend continues, it is even more important that such relevant detail be provided.

(  ) Conclusion 10. The Intelligence Community relies too heavily on foreign government services and third party reporting, thereby increasing the potential for manipulation of U.S. policy by foreign interests.

(  ) Due to the lack of unilateral sources on Iraq's links to terrorist groups like al-Qaida DELETED, the Intelligence Community (IC) relied too heavily on foreign government service reporting and sources to whom it did not have direct access to determine the relationship between Iraq and DELETED terrorist groups. While much of this reporting was credible, the IC left itself open to possible manipulation by foreign governments and other parties interested in influencing U.S. policy. The Intelligence Community's collectors must develop and recruit unilateral sources with direct access to terrorist groups to confirm, complement or confront foreign government service reporting on these critical targets.

(U) Conclusion 11. Several of the allegations of pressure on Intelligence Community (IC) analysts involved repeated questioning. The Committee believes that IC analysts should expect difficult and repeated questions regarding threat information. Just as the post 9/11 environment lowered the Intelligence Community's reporting threshold, it has also affected the intensity with which policymakers will review and question threat information.

(U) A number of the individuals interviewed by the Committee in conducting its review stated that Administration officials questioned analysts repeatedly on the potential for cooperation between Saddam Hussein's regime and al-Qaida. Though these allegations appeared repeatedly in the press and in other public reporting on the lead up to the war, no analyst questioned by the Committee stated that the questions were unreasonable, or that they were encouraged by the questioning to alter their conclusions regarding Iraq's links to al-Qaida.

(U) In some cases, those interviewed stated that the questions had forced them to go back and review the intelligence reporting, and that during this exercise they came across information they had overlooked in initial readings. The Committee found that this process - the policymakers probing questions - actually improved the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) products. The review revealed that the CIA analysts who prepared Iraqi Support for Terrorism made careful, measured assessments which did not overstate or mischaracterize the intelligence reporting upon which it was based.

(U) The Committee also found that CIA analysts are trained to expect questions from policymakers, and to tailor their analysis into a product that is useful to them. In an Occasional Paper on improving CIA analytic performance, written by a Research Fellow at the Sherman Kent Center, the fellow states:

If the mission of intelligence analysis is to inform policymaking - to help the U.S. government anticipate threats and seize opportunities - then customization of analysis is the essence of the professional practice, not a defilement of it (i.e., politicization). In effect there is no such thing as an unprofessional policymaker question for intelligence to address so long as the answer reflects professional analytic trade craft (e.g., tough-minded weighing of evidence and open-minded consideration of alternatives). (Emphasis added)

(U) The same Research Fellow commented on strategic warning stating, "Key to the warning challenge is that the substantive uncertainty surrounding threats to U.S. interests requires analysts, and policymakers, to make judgments that are inherently vulnerable to error." This vulnerability has never been so apparent as in the failure to detect and deter the attacks on September 11, 2001. While analysts cannot dismiss a threat because at first glance it seems unreasonable or it cannot be corroborated by other credible reporting, policymakers have the ultimate responsibility for making decisions based on this same fragmentary, inconclusive reporting. If policymakers did not respond to analysts' caveated judgments with pointed, probing questions, and did not require them to produce the most complete assessments possible, they would not be doing their jobs.

footnotes

⁴ The 1982 State Department publication Patterns of Global Terrorism explained Iraq's removal from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism in the following manner: "The Iraqi Government has reduced support to nonPalestinian groups, thereby moving closer to the policies of its moderate Arab neighbors."