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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/20/international/20war.html?hp&ex=1098331200&en=3f10c2ce8810a771&ei=5094&partner=homepage


New York Times
October 20, 2004
'CATASTROPHIC SUCCESS'
Faulty Intelligence Misled Troops About Risk of Drawn-Out War
By MICHAEL R. GORDON

In early 2003, as the clock ticked down toward the war with Iraq, C.I.A.
officials met with senior military commanders at Camp Doha, Kuwait, to
discuss their latest ideas for upending Saddam Hussein's government.

Intelligence officials were convinced that American soldiers would be
greeted warmly when they pushed into southern Iraq, so a C.I.A. operative
suggested sneaking hundreds of small American flags into the country for
grateful Iraqis to wave at their liberators. The agency would capture the
spectacle on film and beam it throughout the Arab world. It would be the
ultimate information operation.

Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, the commander of allied ground forces, quickly
objected. To avoid being perceived as an occupying army, American forces had
been instructed not to brandish the flag.

The idea was dropped, but the C.I.A.'s optimism remained.

The agency believed that many of the towns were "ours," said one former
staff officer who attended the session. "At first, it was going to be U.S.
flags," he said, "and then it was going to be Iraqi flags. The flags are
probably still sitting in a bag somewhere. One of the towns where they said
we would be welcomed was Nasiriya, where Marines faced some of the toughest
fighting in the war."

Just as the intelligence about Iraq's presumed stockpiles of unconventional
weapons proved wrong, so did much of the information provided to those
prosecuting the war and planning the occupation.

In a major misreading of Iraq's strategy, the C.I.A. failed to predict the
role played by Saddam Hussein's paramilitary forces, which mounted the main
attacks on American troops in southern Iraq and surprised them in bloody
battles.

The agency was aware that Iraq was awash in arms but failed to identify the
huge caches of weapons that were hidden in mosques and schools to supply
enemy fighters.

On postwar Iraq, American intelligence agencies underestimated the decrepit
state of Iraq's infrastructure, which became a major challenge in
reconstructing the nation, and concluded erroneously that Iraq's police had
had extensive professional training.

And while intelligence experts noted an insurgency in its catalog of
possible dangers, it did not highlight that threat.

The National Intelligence Council, senior experts from the intelligence
community, prepared an analysis in January 2003 on postwar Iraq that
discussed the risk of an insurgency in the last paragraph of its 38-page
assessment. "There was never a buildup of intelligence that says: 'It's
coming. It's coming. It's coming. This is the end you should prepare for,' "
said Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the former head of the United States Central
Command and now retired, referring to the insurgency. "It did not happen.
Never saw it. It was never offered."

The Central Intelligence Agency has come under harsh criticism for its
failings on Iraq's weapons and the Sept. 11 terror attacks, and critics have
urged that it be overhauled as part of a broad reform of the nation's
intelligence community.

The agency declined requests for interviews for this article and declined to
respond to written questions submitted to its chief spokesman.

Richard J. Kerr, a former deputy director who was asked by the agency to
review its intelligence analysis on the Iraq war, said in an interview that
much American intelligence on postwar Iraq was on the mark, particularly the
assessment predicting the resentment of Iraqis if the United States did not
transfer power quickly to a new Iraqi government. Still, he acknowledged
some deficiencies.

"Intelligence assessments on the likely Iraqi impatience with an extended
U.S. presence and the role of the army in Iraqi society were particularly
prescient," Mr. Kerr said.

"The intelligence accurately forecast the reactions of the ethnic and tribal
factions in Iraq," he said. "These positive comments, however, cannot gloss
over the fact that Iraq revealed some serious systemic problems in the
intelligence community.

Collection was poor. Too much emphasis was placed on current intelligence
and there was too little research on important social, political and
cultural issues."

Trying to Catch Up
Despite more than a decade of antagonism between Saddam Hussein's government
and the United States, the Bush administration was operating with limited
information when it began to consider the invasion of Iraq. After the 1991
Persian Gulf war, collecting intelligence on Iraq was not always the top
priority for American spy agencies, which were burdened by a multitude of
potential crises and threats.

Iraq was considered a Tier 2 country. North Korea, in contrast, was Tier 1.
As the agencies saw it, North Korea possessed an active nuclear weapons
program and a large conventional army in striking range of South Korea and
the American forces there. Iraq was seen more as a gathering threat.

The months before the war were a scramble for more intelligence. The
American military did its best to fill the gaps, using Predator drones, U-2
spy planes and other surveillance systems. The land forces command printed
100,000 maps of the southern Iraq oilfields, which the Marines were to
secure. Detailed block by block analyses were prepared for downtown Baghdad.

Iraq, in intelligence parlance, was a "glass ball environment," meaning the
weather was often conducive to collecting images from above.

Much of the intelligence was derived from reconnaissance systems, not from
operatives on the ground. With few spies inside Iraq, the agency relied on
defectors, detainees, opposition groups and foreign government services,
according to a Senate report.

"Some critics have claimed during the prewar period, we did not have many
Iraqi sources, " James L. Pavitt, former deputy director for operations for
the agency, said in June in a speech to the Foreign Policy Association.

"We certainly did not have enough," he said. "Until we put people on the
ground in northern Iraq, we had less than a handful. As I mentioned before,
the operating environment was tremendously prohibitive, and developing the
necessary trust with those Iraqis who had access was extraordinarily
difficult in light of the risks they faced. Once on the ground, however, our
officers recruited literally dozens of agents - some of whom paid the
ultimate price for their allegiance to us."

The C.I.A. inserted agents in the southern oil fields shortly before the
war. American intelligence officers obtained the telephone numbers of Iraqi
generals and called to encourage them not to fight. Fearful that the calls
were a loyalty test by Saddam Hussein, some changed their numbers, which
hindered their efforts to talk to each other when the war was under way.

The United States gained a detailed understanding of Iraq's oil
infrastructure and obtained a secret map of Iraq's Baghdad defense plan. The
C.I.A. also helped debunk one threat that the military had worried about:
the possibility that Mr. Hussein's government would flood the country to
thwart an allied advance.

The agency, though, turned out to have a less clear understanding of what
the United States would face once it invaded Iraq, or of Mr. Hussein's
military strategy. In January 2003, the National Intelligence Council issued
its assessment of what might happen after the dictator was ousted. The
report cautioned that building democracy in Iraq would be difficult because
of its authoritarian history. And it warned of the risk that the American
forces would be seen as occupiers.

"Attitudes toward a foreign military force would depend largely on the
progress made in transferring power, as well as on the degree to which that
force were perceived as providing necessary security and fostering
reconstruction and a return to prosperity," it said. The report also noted
that quick restoration of services would be important to maintain the
support of the Iraqi public.

Broader Picture Was Missing
But the analysis was less prescient on other points.

The study underestimated the fragile state of Iraq's infrastructure,
suggesting it could be fixed quickly if it were not extensively damaged in
the fighting. "Iraqis have restored their physical infrastructure quickly in
previous wars," it stated. The United States chose not to attack the
electrical grid, knowing that it would soon need to administer and
reconstruct Iraq. But the electrical system collapsed from long neglect, and
difficulties in restoring the service left much of the capital in darkness
and aggravated residents' fears about crime.

In assessing potential threats, the intelligence report also gave far more
weight to the possibility of score-settling among Iraqi ethnic groups than
to an insurgency. The discussion of that prospect was remarkably brief.

"The ability of Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups to maintain a presence in
northern Iraq (or more clandestinely elsewhere) would depend largely on
whether a new regime were able to exert effective security and control over
the entire country," it noted. "In addition, rogue ex-regime elements could
forge an alliance with existing terrorist organizations or act independently
to wage guerrilla warfare against a new government or coalition forces."

Mr. Kerr, the former C.I.A. official, said the agency's regional experts
were more concerned than the assessment by the National Intelligence Council
about the potential threat of guerrilla attacks by paramilitary forces after
Mr. Hussein's government was toppled, particularly if American troops stayed
in Iraq for a significant period of time. But he acknowledged that the
assessments did not anticipate the sort of virulent insurgency that
Americans forces now face in Iraq.

"They did believe there would be a fairly significant stay-behind group of
Saddam loyalists and fedayeen that would attract outside support," he said.
"But it would be stretching it to reach too far down this line. I could not
justify saying that they predicted the war as it has developed."

Gaps Become Apparent
From the start of the war, it was clear that some of the intelligence was
off.

On March 19, 2003, for example, George J. Tenet, the director of central
intelligence, told the White House that he had firm evidence that Mr.
Hussein and his family were in a suburb near Baghdad known as Dora Farms.
The Iraqi leader and his two sons were thought to be hiding in a concrete
bunker; the C.I.A. provided exact coordinates.

Lt. Gen. Michael (Buzz) Moseley, the air war commander, who was at an air
base in Saudi Arabia, quickly developed a plan for stealth fighters to drop
satellite-guided bombs, followed by cruise missiles. The planes hit their
targets. But when American forces got to Dora Farms after the fall of
Baghdad, they discovered there was no underground bunker at that site,
General Moseley said in an interview last year.

The Iraqis responded to the attack by firing missiles at American forces in
Kuwait. American intelligence learned that a small number of oil wells had
been set on fire, so the land war was accelerated.

Senior military officers and intelligence analysts had expected that the
Iraqi leader would center his defense in Baghdad, and planned for a decisive
battle against his Republican Guard divisions and special military and
paramilitary units in the capital. The American forces discovered in the
first days of the war that the Iraqis had a different strategy. The Marines
learned this the hard way.

Task Force Tarawa, a Marine unit assigned to secure the bridges in eastern
Nasiriya, was told that a C.I.A. source had reported that Iraq's 11th
Infantry Division, which was to guard the bridges, would probably surrender.
Convinced that Nasiriya would be a relatively easy fight, senior Marine
commanders did not make any reconnaissance drones available.

The fight in Nasiriya turned out to be one of the toughest of the war.
Thousands of paramilitary fighters, the Saddam Fedayeen, had taken up
positions there and in the other southern cities, including Samawa and
Najaf, determined to put down any Shiite rebellion and to draw the Americans
into bloody bouts of urban warfare. In Nasiriya, the Marines' mission was
complicated when the Army 507th Maintenance Battalion - made famous when
Pfc. Jessica Lynch was taken prisoner - stumbled into the city. The Marines
suffered 18 dead the first day, some by American fire, after it ran into
hordes of Iraqi fighters.

"All indications were that it would not be much of a fight, that the Iraqis
were probably going to capitulate," recalled Joseph Apodaca, a retired
lieutenant colonel who served as the intelligence officer for the task force
that fought in Nasiriya. "After that contact in Nasiriya, I lost quite a bit
of faith in national-level reporting."

Flawed intelligence led to other units' being caught by surprise, too. In
Samawa, the Army's Third Squadron, Seventh Cavalry Regiment had been told,
based on intelligence reports, to be prepared to conduct a parade to show
solidarity with the inhabitants.

Sgt. First Class Anthony Broadhead, who led a group of Bradley fighting
vehicles and M-1 tanks into the city, was standing in the hatch of his tank
and waving when the Iraqis responded by shooting. A fierce firefight between
the soldiers and the paramilitary forces broke out.

"The fighting that occurred in Samawa was not with conventional Iraqi forces
but with Saddam Fedayeen and Baath Party members," noted Lt. Col. Terry
Ferrell, the unit's commander. "In the intelligence summaries, we had heard
about this type of enemy, but they had not been given any credit for being
as tenacious and capable of fighting as they demonstrated not only in this
battle, but in every other fight the squadron encountered."

The flawed information provided to the units in Nasiriya and Samawa were not
the only lapses. American intelligence knew Iraq had huge quantities of
conventional weapons, but did not realize that arms caches has been
established in schools, hospitals and mosques as part of the strategy to
turn the southern cities into bastions for the Saddam Fedayeen.

"What intelligence did not reveal was the magnitude of the regime's weapons
holdings," the First Marine Division noted in its after-action report. "Huge
caches were hidden in every area of the country, but it was only after the
division closed on those facilities that the full magnitude of the
distribution of tons of weapons and ammunition throughout the country came
to light."

The failure of the American intelligence agencies to detect the paramilitary
forces in the south made it harder to anticipate the potential for an
insurgency, Colonel Apodaca said. "They are good at reaching into the higher
levels of organizations, but those guys don't see clearly what is going on
at the bottom," he said.

An American general who asked not be identified because of the sensitivity
of his position said: "I think it is safe to say we had an accurate picture
of their forces in terms of their general capability and size. But we did
not have a good sense of how they were intended to be used. We started out
with a deficit of human intelligence, of sources inside."

Misreading the Consequences
Even in the last days of Mr. Hussein's government, some preliminary reports
suggested that a guerrilla campaign could emerge once he was toppled.

On April 5, 2003, a Defense Intelligence Agency task force said the
Baathists had made plans to wage a protracted guerrilla war and would form a
tactical alliance with Islamic jihadists. Their goal, the task force said,
was to produce casualties so that the American public would push for United
States forces to quit Iraq.

On April 9, American intelligence agencies issued a "sense of the community"
memo - their collective judgment - which concluded that Baath Party cadres,
Iraqi security forces and paramilitary fighters were operating independently
under longstanding orders. They could be expected to fight on until they
were neutralized, Saddam Hussein was killed or senior Iraqi leaders whom
they respected ordered them to stop fighting. Even then, the memo said, some
would fight on.

Later, after the fall of Baghdad, American intelligence would learn more
about preparations that had been made for a guerrilla campaign. The Iraq
Survey Group, which was sent to Iraq primarily to search for evidence of
unconventional weapons, uncovered some documents. The papers concerning
Falluja, Iraq's most volatile city, identified storage areas for weapons
caches and provided the names of 75 Saddam Fedayeen and 12 suicide
volunteers who were expected to join in the fight.

The battle for the future of Iraq has only intensified as the insurgency has
become entrenched. It has now taken thousands of lives, crippled
reconstruction, threatened election of a new Iraqi government and forced
American troops to engage in a grueling guerrilla conflict. The C.I.A. and
other intelligence services are deeply involved in gathering information to
help subdue the rebels controlling some of Iraq's cities, trying to fill in
the gaps that existed when the Americans invaded Iraq.

"We understood their conventional force, their missiles programs, their air
force," recalled Maj. Gen. James M. (Spider) Marks, now retired, who served
as the chief intelligence officer for the land war command. "The elements of
power which we could assess from a distance we assessed quite well. What we
missed was the fine granularity that you get from a physical presence on the
ground, by interacting with the Iraqi people over the years. Since 1991, we
lost our finger on the pulse of the Iraqi people and built intelligence
assessments from a distance. We did not appreciate the 'fear factor' and the
grip that the regime had on the people."

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