AT HIS CONFIRMATION HEARING FOR the new post of director of
national intelligence, John Negroponte pledged to keep open lines of
communication with Congress. He also explained that his experience
as the first U.S. ambassador to Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam
Hussein would help him meet the director's responsibility to--in the
president's words--"make sure that those whose duty it is to defend
America have the information they need to make the right
decisions."
Testifying in April 2005, Negroponte said:
I saw firsthand the savage depredations of
terrorists and insurgents who oppose the birth of a new democracy.
These are violent, determined adversaries who cannot be thwarted,
captured or killed without close coordination between all of our
intelligence assets--military and civilian, technical and
human.
Consider that perspective and that pledge to Congress as you
contemplate the government's inability to make meaningful use of the
vast majority of the documents, computer hard drives, and other
remnants of the Baathist regime acquired by U.S. forces in Iraq.
More than two months ago, for instance, Rep. Pete Hoekstra
requested 40 mostly unclassified documents from postwar Iraq. In a
separate request on November 18, 2005, Hoekstra and Senate
Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts wrote to Negroponte
seeking the public release of "tens of thousands of boxes of
documents captured since the 1991 Desert Storm operation." Two weeks
ago, Negroponte told Hoekstra that he was spending a significant
amount of his time in consideration of this request.
So I asked Negroponte's spokesman for a progress report. He
declined to say when Hoekstra might get his documents. And he told
me, "The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is
presently evaluating Chairman Hoekstra's and Chairman Roberts's
request for public access to Iraqi documents and an overall Iraq
document exploitation effort."
In fairness, Negroponte's office--like the intelligence community
as a whole--has faced an abundance of pressing issues in recent
weeks: the NSA wiretapping policy, Syrian support for terrorism, the
Iranian nuclear program, Russian manipulation of energy markets,
North Korean intransigence. Still, two months is a long time for the
House Intelligence chairman to wait for unclassified documents.
To date, some 50,000 of the 2 million "exploitable items" in the
possession of the U.S. government have been examined by U.S.
intelligence analysts, many of them only for their relevance to the
search for weapons of mass destruction. (The numbers are the best
guesses of several officials who have worked on the document
exploitation project.) There remain, then, approximately 1,950,000
items whose contents are unknown to anyone in the U.S.
government.
Some U.S. officials, including several at the Department of
Defense, have argued in internal deliberations that the exploitation
of these materials is best left to historians. What is the urgency,
they ask, about translating and analyzing documents that come from a
deposed regime?
There are at least two answers: to defeat the insurgency in Iraq;
and to gain a better understanding of the relationship between rogue
regimes and the transregional terrorists they use to extend their
power.
"It's not about looking at the past to understand the past," says
one former U.S. official who has worked on the document exploitation
project. "It is about looking at the past to understand the present
and to understand the future."
Consider: Among the vast intelligence take are boxes and boxes of
files captured from the Baghdad headquarters of the Iraqi
Intelligence Service. According to U.S. officials familiar with
them, the Iraqi Intelligence documents include detailed personnel
files of Iraqi intelligence officers and operatives. While some of
these files have been exploited, many of them have not. It is a safe
bet that today some of these Iraqis are coordinating the insurgency.
Our failure to exploit the materials we have almost suggests we do
not want to know all we can about the "terrorists and insurgents who
oppose the birth of a new democracy."
A hypothetical: What if these files contain fingerprints of Iraqi
intelligence officials or Saddam Fedayeen fighters? The FBI's
Criminal Justice Information Services Division runs something known
as the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System to
track criminals in the United States. According to the FBI website,
the database:
provides automated fingerprint search capabilities,
latent searching capability, electronic image storage, and
electronic exchange of fingerprints and responses, 24 hours a day,
365 days a year. As a result of submitting fingerprints
electronically, agencies receive electronic responses to criminal
ten-print fingerprint submissions within two hours and within 24
hours for civil fingerprint submissions.
When insurgents attacked the al Rashid Hotel in Baghdad on
October 26, 2003, 11 of their 40 rockets never fired. Within two
hours of the attack, military ordnance specialists and FBI
investigators examined those rockets and their makeshift launcher,
lodged in the blue casing of an old generator. I don't know whether
they pulled fingerprints from the unfired rockets. If they did,
imagine how useful such a database would have been in the subsequent
investigation of the incident.
And what about fingerprints found on unexploded roadside bombs?
Or on weapons seized in late-night raids? Or in recently abandoned
insurgent safehouses?
Other captured documents detail training that the Iraqi regime
provided to thousands of Islamic terrorists in the years immediately
preceding the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Rosters of
trainees, I am told, include names, birthdates, countries of origin,
guerrilla warfare skills, and dates of training. In some cases, the
terrorist trainees posed for group photographs with their
classmates, according to officials who have seen them.
Wouldn't this information be useful in interrogating captured
foreign fighters? Or in breaking up terrorist cells? Or in
understanding the structure of the foreign fighter network inside
Iraq or the funding and recruitment mechanisms outside Iraq?
Exploiting this material would also help us better understand the
nature of relationships between rogue regimes like Iraq and the
transregional terrorists the regime supported. The Iraqi training of
jihadists before the war is one example. Although a Pentagon
official says such training was "something we had some knowledge of
prewar," U.S. intelligence analysts were largely skeptical of
reports that Saddam's regime collaborated with Islamic radicals.
Daniel Benjamin, a senior counterterrorism official on the National
Security Council from 1994 to 1999, expressed this view in a New
York Times op-ed on September 30, 2002:
Saddam Hussein has long recognized that al Qaeda
and like-minded Islamists represent a threat to his regime.
Consequently, he has shown no interest in working with them
against their common enemy, the United States. This was the
understanding of American intelligence in the
1990s.
What if that "understanding of American intelligence" was wrong?
Consider just what we could have learned from public sources:
Throughout the 1990s Saddam's rhetoric was increasingly the rhetoric
of jihad; he hosted conferences for radical Islamists from
throughout the world; he expanded relations with Islamic
fundamentalists like Sudan's Hassan-al Turabi; his own son-in-law
told the U.N. in 1995 that the regime was "instigating
fundamentalism" throughout Iraq.
Among the terrorist groups whose members received training in
Iraq was the GSPC (Salafist Group for Call and Combat) from Algeria.
The GSPC was founded in the late 1990s after a split from another
radical Islamist group known as the GIA (Armed Islamic Group). Both
had ties to Saddam Hussein's regime and continue to have ties to
Osama bin Laden. According to Stan Bedlington, a former senior
analyst at the CIA's counterterrorism center, the GIA may have
received Iraqi support in the months and years after the first Gulf
war.
"We were convinced that money from Iraq was going to bin Laden,
who was then sending it to places that Iraq wanted it to go,"
Bedlington told USA Today in December 2001. "There certainly
is no doubt that Saddam Hussein had pretty strong ties to bin Laden
while he was in Sudan, whether it was directly or through (Sudanese)
intermediaries. We traced considerable sums of money going from bin
Laden to the GIA in Algeria. We believed some of the money came from
Iraq."
When I spoke with him later, Bedlington elaborated on the
relationship, saying, "Osama bin Laden had established contact with
the GIA. Saddam was using bin Laden to ship funds to his own
contacts through the GIA."
So, according to Bedlington, the U.S. intelligence community had
evidence that Saddam Hussein was actively supporting Islamic
radicals in the early 1990s. And yet many of the intelligence
analysts who studied the former Iraqi regime believed that such
assistance was unlikely. For instance, a February 2002 Defense
Intelligence Agency assessment--recently declassified and
continually touted by Senator Carl Levin--concludes: "Saddam's
regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary
movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a
group it cannot control." Report after report suggested that Iraq
would be unlikely to work with radical Islamists, and vice versa,
because of their religious and ideological differences. (A notable
exception was George Tenet's October 7, 2002, letter to the Senate
Intelligence Committee, which stated: "Iraq's increasing support to
extremist Palestinians, coupled with growing indications of a
relationship with al Qaeda, suggest that Baghdad's links to
terrorists will increase, even absent U.S. military action." But,
again, Tenet's letter was the exception.)
Understanding what we got right and what we got wrong about
Iraq's involvement in terrorism is more than an academic exercise.
It is important as the U.S. intelligence community continues to
analyze the roles of other rogue states--Syria, Iran, North
Korea--in support of terror. Winning the fight in Iraq, meanwhile,
requires making maximum use of intelligence resources at hand.
Negroponte is surely right that our determined adversaries cannot be
thwarted otherwise.
It may be that the director's consideration of the request to
open the files from Iraq involves weighing whether documents with
value in fighting the insurgency should be withheld. That's a fair
point, though whatever such value these nearly three-year-old files
have is presumably diminishing. All the more reason to get
serious.
As for where to begin in exploiting the remaining documents,
here's a suggestion: Hire a few thousand native-speakers of Arabic
to read and categorize them, with careful cross-checking and U.S.
supervision. How about hiring a few thousand Iraqis?
Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
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