The 9/11 Secret In The CIA’s Back Pocket
By Robert Scheer
October 19th, 2004

The Los Angeles Times

The agency is withholding a damning report that points at senior officials.

It is shocking: The Bush administration is suppressing a CIA report on 9/11 until after the election, and this one names names. Although the report by the inspector general’s office of the CIA was completed in June, it has not been made available to the congressional intelligence committees that mandated the study almost two years ago.
“It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed,” an intelligence official who has read the report told me, adding that “the report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they weren’t interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in the government responsible afterward.”

When I asked about the report, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, said she and committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) sent a letter 14 days ago asking for it to be delivered. “We believe that the CIA has been told not to distribute the report,” she said. “We are very concerned.”

According to the intelligence official, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, release of the report, which represents an exhaustive 17-month investigation by an 11-member team within the agency, has been “stalled.” First by acting CIA Director John McLaughlin and now by Porter J. Goss, the former Republican House member (and chairman of the Intelligence Committee) who recently was appointed CIA chief by President Bush.

The official stressed that the report was more blunt and more specific than the earlier bipartisan reports produced by the Bush-appointed Sept. 11 commission and Congress.

“What all the other reports on 9/11 did not do is point the finger at individuals, and give the how and what of their responsibility. This report does that,” said the intelligence official. “The report found very senior-level officials responsible.”

By law, the only legitimate reason the CIA director has for holding back such a report is national security. Yet neither Goss nor McLaughlin has invoked national security as an explanation for not delivering the report to Congress.

“It surely does not involve issues of national security,” said the intelligence official.

“The agency directorate is basically sitting on the report until after the election,” the official continued. “No previous director of CIA has ever tried to stop the inspector general from releasing a report to the Congress, in this case a report requested by Congress.”

None of this should surprise us given the Bush administration’s great determination since 9/11 to resist any serious investigation into how the security of this nation was so easily breached. In Bush’s much ballyhooed war on terror, ignorance has been bliss.

The president fought against the creation of the Sept. 11 commission, for example, agreeing only after enormous political pressure was applied by a grass-roots movement led by the families of those slain.

And then Bush refused to testify to the commission under oath, or on the record. Instead he deigned only to chat with the commission members, with Vice President Dick Cheney present, in a White House meeting in which commission members were not allowed to take notes. All in all, strange behavior for a man who seeks reelection to the top office in the land based on his handling of the so-called war on terror.

In September, the New York Times reported that several family members met with Goss privately to demand the release of the CIA inspector general’s report. “Three thousand people were killed on 9/11, and no one has been held accountable,” 9/11 widow Kristen Breitweiser told the paper.

The failure to furnish the report to Congress, said Harman, “fuels the perception that no one is being held accountable. It is unacceptable that we don’t have [the report]; it not only disrespects Congress but it disrespects the American people.”

The stonewalling by the Bush administration and the failure of Congress to gain release of the report have, said the intelligence source, “led the management of the CIA to believe it can engage in a cover-up with impunity. Unless the public demands an accounting, the administration and CIA’s leadership will have won and the nation will have lost.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Report: No WMD Stockpiles In Iraq
CIA: Saddam intended to make arms if sanctions ended
CNN
October 7th, 2004

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Saddam Hussein did not possess stockpiles of illicit weapons at the time of the U.S. invasion in March 2003 and had not begun any program to produce them, a CIA report concludes.

In fact, the long-awaited report, authored by Charles Duelfer, who advises the director of central intelligence on Iraqi weapons, says Iraq’s WMD program was essentially destroyed in 1991 and Saddam ended Iraq’s nuclear program after the 1991 Gulf War.
The Iraq Survey Group report, released Wednesday, is 1,200 to 1,500 pages long.

The massive report does say, however, that Iraq worked hard to cheat on United Nations-imposed sanctions and retain the capability to resume production of weapons of mass destruction at some time in the future.

“[Saddam] wanted to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction when sanctions were lifted,” a summary of the report says.

Duelfer, testifying at a Senate hearing on the report, said his account attempts to describe Iraq’s weapons programs “not in isolation but in the context of the aims and objectives of the regime that created and used them.”

“I also have insisted that the report include as much basic data as reasonable and that it be unclassified, since the tragedy that has been Iraq has exacted such a huge cost for so many for so long,” Duelfer said.

The report was released nearly two years ago to the day that President Bush strode onto a stage in Cincinnati and told the audience that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq “possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons” and “is seeking nuclear weapons.”

“The danger is already significant and it only grows worse with time,” Bush said in the speech delivered October 7, 2002. “If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today — and we do — does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?”

Speaking on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania, Bush maintained Wednesday that the war was the right thing to do and that Iraq stood out as a place where terrorists might get weapons of mass destruction.

“There was a risk, a real risk, that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks, and in the world after September the 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take,” Bush said.

But Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, seized on the report as political ammunition against the Bush administration.

“Despite the efforts to focus on Saddam’s desires and intentions, the bottom line is Iraq did not have either weapon stockpiles or active production capabilities at the time of the war,” Rockefeller said in a press release.

“The report does further document Saddam’s attempts to deceive the world and get out from under the sanctions, but the fact remains, the sanctions combined with inspections were working and Saddam was restrained.”

But British Prime Minister Tony Blair had just the opposite take on the information in the report, saying it demonstrated the U.N. sanctions were not working and Saddam was “doing his best” to get around them.

He said the report made clear that there was “every intention” on Saddam’s part to develop WMD and he “never had any intention of complying with U.N. resolutions.”

At a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee Wednesday, panel Chairman John Warner, R-Virginia, called the findings “significant.”

“While the ISG has not found stockpiles of WMD, the ISG and other coalition elements have developed a body of fact that shows that Saddam Hussein had, first, the strategic intention to continue to pursue WMD capabilities; two, created ambiguity about his WMD capabilities that he used to extract concessions in the international world of disclosure and discussion and negotiation.

“He used it as a bargaining tactic and as a strategic deterrent against his neighbors and others.”

“As we speak, over 1,700 individuals — military and civilian — are in Iraq and Qatar, continuing to search for facts about Iraq’s WMD programs,” Warner said.

But Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, ranking Democrat on the committee, said 1,750 experts have visited 1,200 potential WMD sites and have come up empty-handed.

“It is important to emphasize that central fact because the administration’s case for going to war against Iraq rested on the twin arguments that Saddam Hussein had existing stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and that he might give weapons of mass destruction to al Qaeda to attack us — as al Qaeda had attacked us on 9/11,” Levin said.

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, asked Duelfer about the future likelihood of finding weapons of mass destruction, to which Duelfer replied, “The chance of finding a significant stockpile is less than 5 percent.”

Based in part on interviews with Saddam, the report concludes that the deposed Iraqi president wanted to acquire weapons of mass destruction because he believed they kept the United States from going all the way to Baghdad during the first Gulf War and stopped an Iranian ground offensive during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, senior administration officials said.

U.S. officials said the Duelfer report is “comprehensive,” but they are not calling it a “final report” because there are still some loose ends to tie up.

One outstanding issue, an official said, is whether Iraq shipped any stockpiles of weapons outside of the country. Another issue, he said, is mobile biological weapons labs, a matter on which he said “there is still useful work to do.”

Duelfer said Wednesday his teams found no evidence of a mobile biological weapons capability.

The U.S. official said he believes Saddam decided to give up his weapons in 1991, but tried to conceal his nuclear and biological programs for as long as possible. Then in 1995, when his son-in-law Hussain Kamal defected with information about the programs, he gave those up, too.

Iraq’s nuclear program, which in 1991 was well-advanced, “was decaying” by 2001, the official said, to the point where Iraq was — if it even could restart the program — “many years from a bomb.”

CNN’s Wayne Drash contributed to this report.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

U.S. ‘Almost All Wrong’ on Weapons
By Dana Priest and Walter Pincus
The Washington Post

October 7th, 2004

The 1991 Persian Gulf War and subsequent U.N. inspections destroyed Iraq’s illicit weapons capability and, for the most part, Saddam Hussein did not try to rebuild it, according to an extensive report by the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq that contradicts nearly every prewar assertion made by top administration officials about Iraq.

Charles A. Duelfer, whom the Bush administration chose to complete the U.S. investigation of Iraq’s weapons programs, said Hussein’s ability to produce nuclear weapons had “progressively decayed” since 1991. Inspectors, he said, found no evidence of “concerted efforts to restart the program.”
The findings were similar on biological and chemical weapons. While Hussein had long dreamed of developing an arsenal of biological agents, his stockpiles had been destroyed and research stopped years before the United States led the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Duelfer said Hussein hoped someday to resume a chemical weapons effort after U.N. sanctions ended, but had no stocks and had not researched making the weapons for a dozen years.

Duelfer’s report, delivered yesterday to two congressional committees, represents the government’s most definitive accounting of Hussein’s weapons programs, the assumed strength of which the Bush administration presented as a central reason for the war. While previous reports have drawn similar conclusions, Duelfer’s assessment went beyond them in depth, detail and level of certainty.

“We were almost all wrong” on Iraq, Duelfer told a Senate panel yesterday.

President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials asserted before the U.S. invasion that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, had chemical and biological weapons and maintained links to al Qaeda affiliates to whom it might give such weapons to use against the United States.

But after extensive interviews with Hussein and his key lieutenants, Duelfer concluded that Hussein was not motivated by a desire to strike the United States with banned weapons, but wanted them to enhance his image in the Middle East and to deter Iran, against which Iraq had fought a devastating eight-year war. Hussein believed that “WMD helped save the regime multiple times,” the report said.

The report also provides a one-of-a-kind look at Hussein’s personality. The former Iraqi leader participated in numerous interviews with one Arabic-speaking FBI interrogator. Hussein told his questioner he felt threatened by U.S. military power, but even then, he maintained a fondness for American movies and literature. One of his favorite books was Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” He hoped for improved relations with the United States and, over several years, sent proposals through intermediaries to open a dialogue with Washington.

Hussein, the report concluded, “aspired to develop a nuclear capability” and intended to work on rebuilding chemical and biological weapons after persuading the United Nations to lift sanctions. But the report also notes: “The former regime had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions. Neither was there an identifiable group of WMD policy makers or planners separate from Saddam” tasked to take this up once sanctions ended.

Among the most diplomatically explosive revelations was that Hussein had established a worldwide network of companies and countries, most of them U.S. allies, that secretly helped Iraq generate $11 billion in illegal income and locate, finance and import banned services and technologies. Among those named are officials or companies from Belarus, China, Lebanon, France, Indonesia, Jordan, Poland, Russia, Turkey, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

Duelfer said one of Hussein’s main strategic goals was to persuade the United Nations to lift economic sanctions, which had devastated the country’s economy and, along with U.N. inspections, had forced him to stop weapons programs. Even as Hussein became more adept at bypassing the sanctions, he worked to erode international support for them.

Democrats seized on the exhaustive report, which comes amid a presidential race dominated so far by the Iraq war, to argue that the administration misled the American public about the risk Hussein posed and then miscalculated the difficulties of securing postwar peace.

“Now we have a report today that there clearly were no weapons of mass destruction,” Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), the Democratic vice presidential candidate, said in West Palm Beach, Fla. “All of that known, and Dick Cheney said again last night that he would have done everything the same. George Bush has said he would have done everything the same. . . . They are in a complete state of denial about what is happening in Iraq.”

Neither Bush nor challenger John F. Kerry spoke directly about the report yesterday, though at a campaign appearance in Pennsylvania the president emphasized that Hussein was a threat to the United States.

“There was a risk — a real risk — that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks,” Bush said. “In the world after September 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take.”

Supporters rallied around the administration, which has suffered a string of setbacks recently with revelations that the CIA had warned the White House about the strength of Iraqi insurgents, and from former Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer, who said this week that the United States should have put more troops in Iraq during the invasion.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) said: “We didn’t have to find plans or weapons to see what happened when Saddam Hussein used chemical and biological weapons on his own people. So just because we can’t find them and Saddam Hussein had 12 years to hide them doesn’t mean he didn’t have them and didn’t use them.”

But Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) said the report showed U.N. inspections and sanctions had worked in preventing Hussein from pursuing his weapons ambitions. “Despite the effort to focus on Saddam’s desires and intentions, the bottom line is Iraq did not have either weapons stockpiles or active production capabilities at the time of the war.”

Duelfer’s report contradicted a number of specific claims administration officials made before the war.

It found, for example, that Iraq’s “crash” program in 1991 to build a nuclear weapon before the Persian Gulf War was far from successful, and was nowhere near being months away from producing a weapon, as the administration asserted. Only micrograms of enriched uranium were produced and no weapon design was completed. The CIA and administration officials have said they were surprised by the advanced state of Iraq’s pre-1991 nuclear program, which was discovered after the war, and therefore were more prone to overestimate Iraq’s capability when solid proof was unavailable.

There also was no evidence that Iraq possessed or was developing a mobile biological weapons production system, an assertion Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others made before the invasion. The two trailers that were found in early 2003 were “almost certainly designed and built . . . exclusively for the generation of hydrogen” gas.

Duelfer also found no information to support allegations that Iraq sought uranium from Africa or any other country after 1991, as Bush once asserted in a major speech before the invasion. The only two contacts with Niger that were discovered were an invitation to the president of Niger to visit Baghdad, and a visit to Baghdad by a Niger minister in 2001 seeking petroleum products for cash. There was one offer to Iraq of “yellowcake” uranium, and that was from a Ugandan businessman offering uranium from Congo. The deal was turned down, and the Ugandan was told that Baghdad was not interested because of the sanctions.

Nuclear Weapons

Despite the U.S. intelligence judgment that Iraq in 2002 had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program, Duelfer reported that after 1991, Baghdad’s nuclear program had “progressively decayed.” He added that the Iraq Survey Group investigators had found no evidence “to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program.”

There was an attempt to keep nuclear scientists together and two scientists were discovered to have saved documents and technology related to the uranium enrichment program, but they appeared to be the exception.

Although some steps were taken that could have helped restart the nuclear program, using oil-for-food money, Duelfer concluded that his team “uncovered no indication that Iraq had resumed fissile material or nuclear weapons research and development activities since 1991.”

Biological Weapons

Duelfer’s report is the first U.S. intelligence assessment to state flatly that Iraq had secretly destroyed its biological weapons stocks in the early 1990s. By 1995, though, and under U.N. pressure, it abandoned its efforts.

The document rules out the possibility that biological weapons might have been hidden, or perhaps smuggled into another country, and it finds no evidence of secret biological laboratories or ongoing research that could be firmly linked to a weapons program.

Some biological “seed stocks” — frozen samples of relatively common microbes such as bolutinum — were found in the home of one Iraqi official last year. But the survey team said Iraq had “probably” destroyed any bulk quantities of germs it had at the height of the program in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The team also found no evidence of stocks of the smallpox virus, which the administration had claimed it had.

Chemical Weapons

Duelfer’s report said that no chemical weapons existed and that there is no evidence of attempts to make such weapons over the past 12 years. Iraq retained dual-use equipment that could be used for such an effort.

“The issue is that he has chemical weapons, and he’s used them,” Cheney told CNN in March 2002. The National Intelligence Estimate said that “although we have little specific information on Iraq’s CW stockpile, Saddam probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons and possibly as much as 500 MT of CW agents — much of it added in the last year.”

One of the reasons the intelligence community feared a chemical weapons arsenal was that U.N. inspectors said Iraq had not fully explained missing chemical agents during the 1990s. The report determined that unanswered questions were almost certainly the result of poor accounting.

Iraq’s responses to U.N. inspectors regarding chemical weapons appear to have been truthful, and where incomplete, with differing recollections among former top officials, mostly the result of fading memories of when or how stockpiles were destroyed. Those were the identical reasons Iraq offered to U.N. inspectors before the war.

One of the key findings of the report is that “Saddam never abandoned his intentions to resume a chemical weapons effort when sanctions were lifted.”

The evidence included in the report to back up claims of Hussein’s intent is described as “extensive, yet fragmentary and circumstantial.” The report quotes a single scientist who reached that conclusion in hindsight and based on information he learned from the U.S. inspection team long after U.S. troops had captured Iraq.

After 17 months of investigation, the U.S. team was able to find only 30 of 130 scientists identified with Iraq’s pre-1991 chemical weapons programs. “None of those interviewed had any knowledge of chemical weapons programs” or knew of anyone involved in such work, according to the report. There was one exception, the reported noted, from a scientist who maintained he was asked to make a chemical agent, but that story was uncorroborated and there was no follow-up.

Delivery Systems

Iraq’s secret quest to develop a more powerful missile was discovered and disrupted by U.N. weapons inspectors in the weeks before the U.S.-led invasion. In the 19 months since then, the survey team has uncovered more evidence suggesting that Hussein intended to use the Al Samoud 2 and other proposed missiles to extend the reach of his military beyond the country’s borders.

Iraq was allowed to continue developing short-range missiles for self-defense under the terms of the U.N. agreement that ended the 1991 Gulf War. But the Al Samoud 2, which Iraq began building in 2001, was clearly designed for flights exceeding the U.N.-imposed 93-mile limit, the new report says. And Duelfer’s team found blueprints for missiles with potential ranges up to 10 times as far.

The team “uncovered Iraqi plans or designs for three long-range ballistic missiles with ranges from 400 to 1,000 kilometers (250 to 621 miles), and for a 1,000-km-range (932-mile) cruise missile,” the report says. It adds that none of the planned missiles was in production, and only one of them had progressed beyond the design phase.

The report concludes that Iraq “clearly intended to reconstitute long-range delivery systems,” and maintains that the missiles, if built, could potentially have been combined with biological, chemical or nuclear warheads, if Hussein acquired them.

At the same time, the missile that U.S. military planners had most feared in the run-up to the invasion appears to have vanished. While Bush administration officials had asserted that Hussein had hidden a small arsenal of Scud missiles, Duelfer said interviews and documents suggest Iraq “did not retain such missiles after 1991.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Prewar Assessment on Iraq Saw Chance of Strong Divisions
By Douglas Jehl and David E. Sanger
The New York Times

September 28th, 2004

WASHINGTON - The same intelligence unit that produced a gloomy report in July about the prospect of growing instability in Iraq warned the Bush administration about the potential costly consequences of an American-led invasion two months before the war began, government officials said Monday.

The estimate came in two classified reports prepared for President Bush in January 2003 by the National Intelligence Council, an independent group that advises the director of central intelligence. The assessments predicted that an American-led invasion of Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict.
One of the reports also warned of a possible insurgency against the new Iraqi government or American-led forces, saying that rogue elements from Saddam Hussein’s government could work with existing terrorist groups or act independently to wage guerrilla warfare, the officials said. The assessments also said a war would increase sympathy across the Islamic world for some terrorist objectives, at least in the short run, the officials said.

The contents of the two assessments had not been previously disclosed. They were described by the officials after two weeks in which the White House had tried to minimize the council’s latest report, which was prepared this summer and read by senior officials early this month.

Last week, Mr. Bush dismissed the latest intelligence reports, saying its authors were “just guessing'’ about the future, though he corrected himself later, calling it an “estimate.'’

The assessments, meant to address the regional implications and internal challenges that Iraq would face after Mr. Hussein’s ouster, said it was unlikely that Iraq would split apart after an American invasion, the officials said. But they said there was a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent internal conflict with one another unless an occupying force prevented them from doing so.

Senior White House officials, including Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, have contended that some of the early predictions provided to the White House by outside experts of what could go wrong in Iraq, including secular strife, have not come to pass. But President Bush has acknowledged a “miscalculation'’ about the virulency of the insurgency that would rise against the American occupation, though he insisted that it was simply an outgrowth of the speed of the initial military victory in 2003.

The officials outlined the reports after the columnist Robert Novak, in a column published Monday in The Washington Post, wrote that a senior intelligence official had said at a West Coast gathering last week that the White House had disregarded warnings from intelligence agencies that a war in Iraq would intensify anti-American hostility in the Muslim world. Mr. Novak identified the official as Paul R. Pillar, the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, and criticized him for making remarks that Mr. Novak said were critical of the administration.

The National Intelligence Council is an independent group, made up of outside academics and long-time intelligence professionals. The C.I.A. describes it as the intelligence community’s “center for midterm and long-term strategic thinking.'’ Its main task is to produce National Intelligence Estimates, the most formal reports outlining the consensus of intelligence agencies. But it also produces less formal assessments, like the ones about Iraq it presented in January 2003.

One of the intelligence documents described the building of democracy in Iraq as a long, difficult and potentially turbulent process with potential for backsliding into authoritarianism, Iraq’s traditional political model, the officials said.

The assessments were described by three government officials who have seen or been briefed on the documents. The officials spoke on condition that neither they nor their agencies be identified. None of the officials are affiliated in any way with the campaigns of Mr. Bush or Senator John Kerry. The officials, who were interviewed separately, declined to quote directly from the documents, but said they were speaking out to present an accurate picture of the prewar warnings.

The officials’ descriptions portray assessments that are gloomier than the predictions by some administration officials, most notably those of Vice President Dick Cheney. But in general, the warnings about anti-American sentiment and instability appear to have been upheld by events, and their disclosure could prove politically damaging to the White House, which has already had to contend with the disclosure that the National Intelligence Estimate prepared by the council in July presented a far darker prognosis for Iraq through the end of 2005 than Mr. Bush has done in his statements.

The reports issued by the intelligence council are of two basic types: those that try to assess intelligence data, like the October 2002 document that assessed the state of Iraq’s unconventional weapons programs, and broader predictions about foreign political developments.

The group’s National Intelligence Estimate about Iraqi weapons has now been widely discredited for wildly overestimating the country’s capabilities. Members of the intelligence council have complained that they were pressured to write the document too quickly and that important qualifiers were buried.

The group’s recent National Intelligence Estimate, prepared in July this year, with its gloomy picture of Iraq’s future, was described by White House officials in the past two weeks as an academic document that contained little evidence and little that was new.

“It was finished in July, and not circulated by the intelligence community until the end of August,'’ said one senior administration official. “That’s not exactly what you do with an urgent document.'’

Mr. Pillar, who has held his post since October 2000, is highly regarded within the C.I.A. But he has been a polarizing figure within the administration, particularly within the Defense Department, where senior civilians who were among the most vigorous champions of a war in Iraq derided him as being too dismissive of the threat posed by Mr. Hussein.

A C.I.A. spokesman said Monday that Mr. Pillar was not available for comment and that his comments at the West Coast session had been made on the condition that he not be identified. An intelligence official said Mr. Pillar had supervised the drafting of the document, but the official emphasized that it reflected the views of 15 intelligence agencies, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the State Department’s bureau of Intelligence and Research.

A spokesman for the National Security Council, Sean McCormack, said Monday that “we don’t comment on intelligence and classified reports,” and he would not say whether Mr. Bush had read the January 2003 reports. But he said “the president was fully aware of all the challenges prior to making the decision to go to war, and we addressed these challenges in our policies.”

“And we also addressed these challenges in public,” he added.

A senior administration official likened Mr. Bush’s decision to a patient’s decision to have risky surgery, even if doctors warn that there could be serious side effects. “We couldn’t live with the status quo,” the official said, “because as a result of the status quo in the Middle East, we were dying, and we saw the evidence of that on Sept. 11.”

Officials who have read the July 2004 National Intelligence Estimate have said that even as a best-case situation, it predicted a period of tenuous stability for Iraq between now and the end of 2005. The worst of three cases cited in the document was that developments could lead to civil war, the officials have said. Some Democratic senators have asked that the document be declassified, but administration officials have called that prospect unlikely.

The White House has also sought to minimize the significance of the estimate, with Mr. Bush saying that intelligence agencies had laid out “several scenarios that said, life could be lousy, life could be O.K. or life could be better, and they were just guessing as to what the conditions might be like.'’ Mr. Bush later corrected himself, saying that he should have used the word estimate.

Democrats have contrasted the dark tone of the intelligence report with the more upbeat descriptions of Iraq’s prospects offered by the administration. The White House has defended its approach, saying that it is the job of intelligence analysts to identify challenges, and the job of policy makers to overcome them. But administration officials have also emphasized that the White House was not given a copy of the document until Aug. 31, only about two weeks before it was made public by The New York Times.

In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell acknowledged that “we have seen an increase in anti-Americanism in the Muslim world'’ since the war began. Mr. Powell also said the insurgency in Iraq was “getting worse'’ as forces opposed to the United States and the new Iraqi leadership remained “determined to disrupt the election'’ set for January.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

National Intelligence Estimate Provides Bleak Assessment of Iraq Security
By Katherine Pfleger Shrader
September 15th, 2004

Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) A highly classified National Intelligence Estimate assembled by some of the government’s most senior analysts this summer provided a pessimistic assessment about the future security and stability of Iraq.

The National Intelligence Council looked at the political, economic and security situation in the war-torn country and determined at best the situation would be tenuous in terms of stability, a U.S. official said late Wednesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
At worst, the official said, were ‘’trend lines that would point to a civil war.'’

The intelligence estimate, which was prepared for President Bush, considered the window of time between July and the end of 2005. But the official noted that the document, which runs about 50 pages, draws on less formal intelligence community assessments from January 2003, before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the subsequent deteriorating security situation there.

The assessment was initiated by the National Intelligence Council, a group of senior intelligence officials who provide long-term strategic thinking for the entire U.S. intelligence community but report to the director of central intelligence. It was completed under acting CIA Director John McLaughlin. He and the leaders of the other intelligence agencies approved it.

A CIA spokesman declined to comment Wednesday night.

The document was first reported by the New York Times on its Web site Wednesday night.

It is the first formal assessment of Iraq since the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on the threat posed by fallen Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

A review of that estimate released this summer by the Senate Intelligence Committee found widespread intelligence failures that led to faulty assumptions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Senate Republicans and Democrats on Wednesday denounced the Bush administration’s slow progress in rebuilding Iraq, saying the risks of failure are great if it doesn’t act with greater urgency.

‘’It’s beyond pitiful, it’s beyond embarrassing, it’s now in the zone of dangerous,'’ said Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., referring to figures showing only about 6 percent of the reconstruction money approved by Congress last year has been spent.

Foreign Relations Committee members vented their frustrations at a hearing where the State Department explained its request to divert $3.46 billion in reconstruction funds to security and economic development. The money was part of the $18.4 billion approved by Congress last year mostly for public works projects.

The request comes as heavy fighting continues between U.S.-led forces and a variety of Iraqi insurgents, endangering prospects for elections slated for January.

‘’We know that the provision of adequate security up front is requisite to rapid progress on all other fronts,'’ said Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Ron Schlicher.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said circumstances in Iraq have changed since last year. ‘’It’s important that you have some flexibility.'’

But Hagel said the shift in funds ‘’does not add up in my opinion to a pretty picture, to a picture that shows that we’re winning. But it does add up to this: an acknowledgment that we are in deep trouble.'’

Hagel, Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and other committee members have long argued even before the war that administration plans for rebuilding Iraq were inadequate and based on overly optimistic assumptions that Americans would be greeted as liberators.

But the criticism from the panel’s top Republicans had an extra sting coming less than seven weeks before the presidential election in which President Bush’s handling of the war is a top issue.

‘’Our committee heard blindly optimistic people from the administration prior to the war and people outside the administration what I call the ‘dancing in the street crowd,’ that we just simply will be greeted with open arms,'’ Lugar said. ‘’The nonsense of all of that is apparent. The lack of planning is apparent.'’

He said the need to shift the reconstruction funds was clear in July, but the administration was slow to make the request.

‘’This is an extraordinary, ineffective administrative procedure. It is exasperating from anybody looking at this from any vantage point,'’ he said.

State Department officials stressed areas of progress in Iraq since the United States turned over political control of Iraq to an interim government on June 28. They cited advances in generating electricity, producing oil and creating jobs.

Schlicher said the department hopes to create more than 800,000 short- and long-term jobs over two years, saying, ‘’When Iraqis have hope for the future and real opportunity, they will reject those who advocate violence.'’

Congress approved the $18.4 billion in November as part of an $87 billion package mostly for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the time, administration officials said the reconstruction money was just as important as the military funds. But only $1.14 billion had been spent as of Sept. 8.

‘’It’s incompetence, from my perspective, looking at this,'’ said the panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Joseph Biden Jr. of Delaware.

In separate action Wednesday, the Senate Appropriations Committee agreed to shift $150 million from the $18.4 billion to buttress U.S. efforts to help victims of violence and famine in the Darfur region of Sudan and nearby areas. The transfer was approved by voice vote with bipartisan support.

Associated Press writer Ken Guggenheim contributed to this report.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Bush Failed To Plan For After War, Report Says
By Rupert Cornwell
September 17th, 2004

Independent U.K.

A deeply pessimistic US intelligence assessment of the situation in Iraq, warning of possible civil war, has cast further doubts over the Bush administration’s attempt to rebuild the country, and gave the Democratic challenger John Kerry a new opportunity to move the Iraq crisis to the centre of the Presidential election battle.

In a speech to the National Guard Association in Las Vegas yesterday, the Massachusetts senator avoided the controversy over charges that the President shirked his duties during his service in the Texas Air National Guard from 1968 to 1973.
Instead, Mr. Kerry accused George Bush of “playing politics with national security” over Iraq, of glossing over the problems there and “living in a fantasy world of spin”. He lambasted the White House for the lack of prewar planning which was now forcing National Guardsmen and reservists to serve excessively long tours of duty there, in what amounted to a backdoor draft.

The acute difficulties in Iraq are highlighted in the National Intelligence Estimate, drawn up in July and representing the distilled wisdom of the entire US intelligence community.

It sketches out three scenarios for Iraq. The grimmest is a descent into civil war; the second is understood to be a continuation of the current disorder. Even the most favourable of the three holds out no better prospect than a precarious stability, under constant threat.

The conclusions of the NIE, first reported by The New York Times yesterday, contrast sharply with the doggedly upbeat tone of Mr. Bush on the campaign trail. At every turn, the President insists Iraq is firmly on the road to peace and democracy, deriding Mr. Kerry for vacillation and “flip-flopping” on the issue.

Such intelligence studies have a chequered history - not least the previous NIE on Iraq in October 2002, when it grossly exaggerated the weapons threat posed by Saddam Hussein. But this new assessment reflects the view of most nonpartisan Iraq specialists here, that the insurgency is becoming ever more sophisticated and more dangerous. The view is widespread that the war in Iraq is politically, if not militarily, close to unwinnable for the US.

“Is there a threat of civil war? - Yes,” Sean McCormick, the National Security Council spokesman admitted to reporters yesterday. But, he argued, many of the worst scenarios previously predicted for Iraq, including famine and civil war, had not come to pass.

The bleak prognosis by US intelligence comes days after the administration asked Congress to approve a shift of $3.6bn (£2bn) of the $18bn earmarked for reconstruction in Iraq into short-term spending, to speed the training Iraqi defence forces, boost security and protect the country’s oil industry.

Even Republicans on Capitol Hill are enraged at how less than $1bn of the promised $18bn has been spent. Richard Lugar, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, described the delays as “exasperating”. Nebraska’s Republican senator, Chuck Hagel, was even blunter. “It’s beyond pitiful, it’s beyond embarrassing, it is now in the zone of dangerous,” he said.

More fundamentally, the re-allocation of funds is being seen as a tacit admission by the administration that many of its long-term ambitions for Iraq, so dear to the neo-conservatives who argued most strongly for the 2003 invasion, are now a dead letter.

Thus far - despite Mr. Kerry’s fierce criticism, not to mention the growing chaos and bloodshed on the ground - Iraq has been a peripheral issue in the campaign. To the frustration of Democrats, Mr. Bush has succeeded in depicting Iraq as just a segment of the “war on terror”, an area where he scores far better in opinion polls than his Democratic opponent.

At the Republican convention in New York, the turmoil was barely mentioned. Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, continues to make speeches implying Saddam had links with al-Qa’ida, and by extension with the 11 September terror attacks.

But Democrats are determined to turn the tactic against Mr. Bush. “The President has frequently described Iraq as the central front in the war on terror,” said Senator Joe Biden, senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee and widely tipped as a possible Secretary of State should Mr. Kerry win on 2 November. “By that measure the war on terror is in trouble.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Secret Papers Show Blair Was Warned of Iraq Chaos
By Michael Smith, Defence Correspondent
Telegraph U.K.

September 18th, 2004

Tony Blair was warned a year before invading Iraq that a stable post-war government would be impossible without keeping large numbers of troops there for “many years”, secret government papers reveal.

The documents, seen by The Telegraph, show more clearly than ever the grave reservations expressed by Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, over the consequences of a second Gulf war and how prescient his Foreign Office officials were in predicting the ensuing chaos.
They told the Prime Minister that there was a risk of the Iraqi system “reverting to type” after a war, with a future government acquiring the very weapons of mass destruction that an attack would be designed to remove.

The documents further show that the Prime Minister was advised that he would have to “wrong foot” Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war, and that British officials believed that President George W Bush merely wanted to complete his father’s “unfinished business” in a “grudge match” against Saddam.

But it is the warning of the likely aftermath - more than a year in advance, as Mr Blair was deciding to commit Britain to joining a US-led invasion - that is likely to cause most controversy and embarrassment in both London and Washington.

More than 900 allied troops have been killed in Iraq since the end of the war, 33 of them British. More than 10,000 civilians are believed to have been killed.

At least 13 civilians died yesterday in a suicide bomb attack on a police checkpoint in Baghdad. The Iraqi health ministry said a further 45 civilians had died in US air attacks on Fallujah overnight.

Mr Straw predicted in March 2002 that post-war Iraq would cause major problems, telling Mr Blair in a letter marked “Secret and personal” that no one had a clear idea of what would happen afterwards. “There seems to be a larger hole in this than anything.”

Most of the US assessments argued for regime change as a means of eliminating Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Mr Straw said.

“But no one has satisfactorily answered how there can be any certainty that the replacement regime will be any better. Iraq has no history of democracy so no one has this habit or experience.”

Senior ministerial advisers warned bluntly in a “Secret UK Eyes Only” options paper that “the greater investment of Western forces, the greater our control over Iraq’s future, but the greater the cost and the longer we would need to stay”.

The paper, compiled by the Cabinet Office Overseas and Defence Secretariat, added: “The only certain means to remove Saddam and his elite is to invade and impose a new government, but this would involve nation-building over many years.”

Replacing Saddam with another “Sunni strongman” would allow the allies to withdraw their troops quickly. This leader could be persuaded not to seek WMD in exchange for large-scale assistance with reconstruction.

“However, there would then be a strong risk of the Iraqi system reverting to type. Military coup could succeed coup until an autocratic Sunni dictator emerged who protected Sunni interests. With time he could acquire WMD,” the paper said.

Even a representative government would be likely to create its own WMD so long as Israel and Iran retained their own arsenals and Palestinian grievances remained unresolved.

But there would be other major problems with a democratic government.

If it were to survive, “it would require the US and others to commit to nation-building for many years. This would entail a substantial international security force.”

The documents also show the degree of concern within Whitehall that America was ready to invade Iraq with or without backing from any of its allies.

Sir David Manning, Mr Blair’s foreign policy adviser, returned from talks in Washington in mid-March 2002 warning that Mr Bush “still has to find answers to the big questions”, which included “what happens on the morning after?”.

In a letter to the Prime Minister marked “Secret - strictly personal”, he said: “I think there is a real risk that the administration underestimates the difficulties.

“They may agree that failure isn’t an option, but this does not mean they will necessarily avoid it.”

The Cabinet Office said that the US believed that the legal basis for war already existed and had lost patience with the policy of containment.

It did not see the war on terrorism as being a major element in American decision-making.

“The swift success of the war in Afghanistan, distrust of UN sanctions and inspections regimes and unfinished business from 1991 are all factors,” it added. That view appeared to be shared by Peter Ricketts, the Foreign Office policy director.

There were “real problems” over the alleged threat and what the US was looking to achieve by toppling Saddam, he said. Nothing had changed to make Iraqi WMD more of a threat.

“Even the best survey of Iraq’s WMD programmes will not show much advance in recent years. Military operations need clear and compelling military objectives. For Iraq, ‘regime change’ does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge match between Bush and Saddam.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

C.I.A. Officer Denounces Agency and Sept. 11 Report
By Eric Lichtblau
New York Times

August 17th, 2004

WASHINGTON - A senior officer for the Central Intelligence Agency who led the unit that tracked Osama bin Laden has written a blistering letter to the Sept. 11 commission, attacking both the C.I.A. and the commission itself over what he sees as a failure to punish “bureaucratic cowards” in the intelligence agencies.

The officer, Michael F. Scheuer, has written a best-selling book under the pseudonym “Anonymous” that is sharply critical of the way the United States has pursued its global campaign against terrorism.
In a signed e-mail letter sent to the commission, he lashed out in angry and highly personal tones at the failure by the commission and the C.I.A. to hold anyone directly accountable for Sept. 11 failures and aimed sharp criticism at George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, without mentioning his name.

In the Sept. 11 commission’s final report, “you never mention that the D.C.I. starved and is starving the bin Laden unit of officers while finding plenty of officers to staff his personal public relations office, as well as the staffs that handled diversity, multiculturalism, and employee newsletters,” he wrote in a letter that was sent July 31.

He also said that the United States gave short shrift to protecting American lives before the Sept. 11 attacks so that it could pursue the sale of fighter jets to an unnamed Arab government, which other officials identified as the United Arab Emirates.

Mr. Scheuer’s e-mail, a copy of which was made available to The New York Times, was a dissenting note in what has otherwise been largely glowing reaction to the Sept. 11 commission’s final report last month, which has set off broad debate about how best to restructure the intelligence community. His letter, which says restructuring is not the answer, is also extraordinary in that it comes from a current senior case officer at the C.I.A., where internal whistle-blowers are rare. From 1996 to 1999, he led the C.I.A. unit that tracked Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and he continues to serve in a senior counterterrorism post.

While some intelligence officials took issue with Mr. Scheuer’s version of events, the C.I.A. and the Sept. 11 commission declined to respond to his specific accusations.

“A lot of people call and e-mail us with their thoughts,” said Al Felzenberg, spokesman for the Sept. 11 commission. “Some people criticize us, some people praise us and we don’t respond. The report is out there for the American people to judge. ”

In recent weeks, Mr. Scheuer has given numerous anonymous interviews promoting his book, “Imperial Hubris,” including some television appearances in which his face was not shown. But the C.I.A. has now ordered him to curtail his public commentary sharply, and to get advance approval for future statements. A publicist for Mr. Scheuer’s book said Monday that he could not comment on the letter to the commission because of the C.I.A.’s new restrictions.

While some Web sites and media outlets have disclosed Mr. Scheuer’s identity before, The Times has previously referred to him only as “Mike” at the request of an intelligence official because of concerns about his safety. Now that he has signed his name in his letter to the Sept. 11 commission and the C.I.A. has sought to curb his public comments, the newspaper is using his name.

Some government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Monday that they regarded Mr. Scheuer’s latest accusations as exaggerated or unfounded.

On the question of whether Mr. Tenet put public relations staffing ahead of combating terrorism, for instance, an intelligence official said that the C.I.A. quadrupled the number of counterterrorism analysts and doubled the number of counterterrorism officers in the year after the Sept. 11 attacks and that these numbers have risen further since then.

A second intelligence official noted that Mr. Scheuer had testified privately at length before the Sept. 11 commission. “If they didn’t buy what he had to say, that ought to tell you something,” the official said.

Mr. Scheuer said in his letter that he found the commission’s final report “disappointing in the extreme” and that it “seems to deliberately ignore those who were clearly culpable of negligence or dereliction” for failing to deal adequately with the bin Laden threat. “By finding no one culpable, you will allow the mindset that got America to 9/11 to endure and thrive in whatever new community structure is established.”

He said human failings, not the organizational problems that have been so widely discussed in recent weeks, allowed the Sept. 11 attacks. “Perhaps most damaging, your report will accelerate the growth of cynicism among the men and women of America’s clandestine service who risk their lives every day to collect the information which would allow America to be defended - if their leaders were not such bureaucratic cowards.”

Mr. Scheuer had pushed for more aggressive covert and military action, but he says he was rebuffed. In his letter, he pointed with frustration to’ failed American plans to assassinate Mr. bin Laden, saying that “there is much more to the failure to fire cruise missiles at bin Laden” in the late 1990’s than the report suggested. And he said that “you know that on at least one occasion the sale of F-16’s to an Arab government was considered more important than acting to protect American lives.”

He did not elaborate on that accusation, but officials said his comments appeared to refer to the United States’ approval of Lockheed Martin’s pending sale of 80 fighter jets to the United Arab Emirates.

The Sept. 11 commission found that an American plan in early 1999 to launch a missile attack against a hunting camp in Afghanistan, which Mr. bin Laden appeared to be using, was postponed because three Emirates officials were also at the camp at the time. Policymakers “were concerned about the danger that a strike would kill an Emirati prince or other senior officials who might be with bin Laden or close by,” and Mr. bin Laden moved on after the strike was put off, the report said.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Bereuter: War In Iraq Not Justified
By Don Walton
Lincoln Journal Star

August 18th, 2004

In a dramatic departure from the Bush administration, Republican Rep. Doug Bereuter says he now believes the U.S. military assault on Iraq was unjustified.

“I’ve reached the conclusion, retrospectively, now that the inadequate intelligence and faulty conclusions are being revealed, that all things being considered, it was a mistake to launch that military action,” Bereuter wrote in a letter to constituents in the final days of his congressional career.
That’s especially true in view of the fact that the attack was initiated “without a broad and engaged international coalition,” the 1st District congressman said.

“Knowing now what I know about the reliance on the tenuous or insufficiently corroborated intelligence used to conclude that Saddam maintained a substantial WMD (weapons of mass destruction) arsenal, I believe that launching the pre-emptive military action was not justified.”

As a result of the war, he said, “our country’s reputation around the world has never been lower and our alliances are weakened.”

Bereuter is a senior member of the House International Relations Committee and vice chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

His four-page letter represented a departure from his support for a 2002 House resolution authorizing the president to go to war.

His vote to authorize the use of military force - even pre-emptive force - was based on faulty, or misrepresented, intelligence that led to the fear Saddam Hussein would share weapons of mass destruction with terrorists, Bereuter said.

“Left unresolved for now is whether intelligence was intentionally misconstrued to justify military action,” he said.

In a floor statement accompanying his 2002 vote, Bereuter urged that the international coalition be broadened and the administration adequately plan for the consequences of war and not divert resources from the battle against al-Qaida and the stabilization of Afghanistan.

Despite acknowledged intelligence failures and failure to locate weapons of mass destruction, President Bush continues to forcefully argue the war was justified because Saddam represented a threat to the United States, his neighbors and the people of Iraq.

While criticizing the manner in which the administration went to war, Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry has said he still would have voted for the authorizing resolution knowing what he knows today.

Bereuter pointed to a list of negative consequences arising from the war.

“The cost in casualties is already large and growing,” he said, “and the immediate and long-term financial costs are incredible.

“From the beginning of the conflict, it was doubtful that we for long would be seen as liberators, but instead increasingly as an occupying force.

“Now we are immersed in a dangerous, costly mess, and there is no easy and quick way to end our responsibilities in Iraq without creating bigger future problems in the region and, in general, in the Muslim world.”

Bereuter sent the letter to constituents who have contacted him about the war.

“I felt I should send you a forthright update of my views and conclusions on that subject before I leave office,” he said.

Bereuter will depart the House after 26 years to become president of the Asia Foundation on Sept. 1.

Congress and the administration “must learn from the errors and failures” related to the attack and its aftermath, he said.

“The toll in American military casualties and those of civilians, physical damages caused, financial resources spent, and the damage to the support and image of America abroad all demand such an assessment and accounting.”

In addition to “a massive failure or misinterpretation of intelligence” concerning weapons of mass destruction, Bereuter said, the Bush administration made a number of errors in prosecuting the war despite warnings about the consequences.

“American and coalition forces were inadequate in number to take effective control of Iraq when the initial military action was completed,” he said.

Other mistakes included disbanding the Iraqi army and placing responsibility for reconstruction with the Department of Defense instead of the Department of State, he said.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

The Deal
By Seymour M. Hersh
The New Yorker

March 1st, 2004

Why is Washington going easy on Pakistan’s nuclear black marketers?

On February 4th, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, who is revered in Pakistan as the father of the country’s nuclear bomb, appeared on a state-run television network in Islamabad and confessed that he had been solely responsible for operating an international black market in nuclear-weapons materials. His confession was accepted by a stony-faced Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s President, who is a former Army general, and who dressed for the occasion in commando fatigues. The next day, on television again, Musharraf, who claimed to be shocked by Khan’s misdeeds, nonetheless pardoned him, citing his service to Pakistan (he called Khan “my hero”). Musharraf told the Times that he had received a specific accounting of Khan’s activities in Iran, North Korea, and Malaysia from the United States only last October. “If they knew earlier, they should have told us,” he said. “Maybe a lot of things would not have happened.”
It was a make-believe performance in a make-believe capital. In interviews last month in Islamabad, a planned city built four decades ago, politicians, diplomats, and nuclear experts dismissed the Khan confession and the Musharraf pardon with expressions of scorn and disbelief. For two decades, journalists and American and European intelligence agencies have linked Khan and the Pakistani intelligence service, the I.S.I. (Inter-Service Intelligence), to nuclear-technology transfers, and it was hard to credit the idea that the government Khan served had been oblivious. “It is state propaganda,” Samina Ahmed, the director of the Islamabad office of the International Crisis Group, a nongovernmental organization that studies conflict resolution, told me. “The deal is that Khan doesn’t tell what he knows. Everybody is lying. The tragedy of this whole affair is that it doesn’t serve anybody’s needs.” Mushahid Hussain Sayed, who is a member of the Pakistani senate, said with a laugh, “America needed an offering to the gods,blood on the floor. Musharraf told A.Q., ‘Bend over for a spanking.’”

A Bush Administration intelligence officer with years of experience in nonproliferation issues told me last month, “One thing we do know is that this was not a rogue operation. Suppose Edward Teller had suddenly decided to spread nuclear technology and equipment around the world. Do you really think he could do that without the government knowing? How do you get missiles from North Korea to Pakistan? Do you think A.Q. shipped all the centrifuges by Federal Express? The military has to be involved, at high levels.” The intelligence officer went on, “We had every opportunity to put a stop to the A. Q. Khan network fifteen years ago. Some of those involved today in the smuggling are the children of those we knew about in the eighties. It’s the second generation now.”

In public, the Bush Administration accepted the pardon at face value. Within hours of Musharraf’s television appearance, Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State, praised him as “the right man at the right time.” Armitage added that Pakistan had been “very forthright in the last several years with us about proliferation.” A White House spokesman said that the Administration valued Musharraf’s assurances that “Pakistan was not involved in any of the proliferation activity.” A State Department spokesman said that how to deal with Khan was “a matter for Pakistan to decide.”

Musharraf, who seized power in a coup d’état in 1999, has been a major ally of the Bush Administration in the war on terrorism. According to past and present military and intelligence officials, however, Washington’s support for the pardon of Khan was predicated on what Musharraf has agreed to do next: look the other way as the U.S. hunts for Osama bin Laden in a tribal area of northwest Pakistan dominated by the forbidding Hindu Kush mountain range, where he is believed to be operating. American commanders have been eager for permission to conduct major sweeps in the Hindu Kush for some time, and Musharraf has repeatedly refused them. Now, with Musharraf’s agreement, the Administration has authorized a major spring offensive that will involve the movement of thousands of American troops.

Musharraf has proffered other help as well. A former senior intelligence official said to me, “Musharraf told us, ‘We’ve got guys inside. The people who provide fresh fruits and vegetables and herd the goats’” for bin Laden and his Al Qaeda followers. “It’s a quid pro quo: we’re going to get our troops inside Pakistan in return for not forcing Musharraf to deal with Khan.”

The spring offensive could diminish the tempo of American operations in Iraq. “It’s going to be a full-court press,” one Pentagon planner said. Some of the most highly skilled Special Forces units, such as Task Force 121, will be shifted from Iraq to Pakistan. Special Forces personnel around the world have been briefed on their new assignments, one military adviser told me, and in some cases have been given “warning orders”,the stage before being sent into combat.

A large-scale American military presence in Pakistan could also create an uproar in the country and weaken Musharraf’s already tenuous hold on power. The operation represents a tremendous gamble for him personally (he narrowly survived two assassination attempts in December) and, by extension, for the Bush Administration,if he fell, his successor might be far less friendly to the United States. One of Musharraf’s most vocal critics inside Pakistan is retired Army Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, a fundamentalist Muslim who directed the I.S.I. from 1987 to 1989, at the height of the Afghan war with the Soviets. If American troops start operating from Pakistan, there will be “a rupture in the relationship,” Gul told me. “Americans think others are slaves to them.” Referring to the furor over A. Q. Khan, he added, “We may be in a jam, but we are a very honorable nation. We will not allow the American troops to come here. This will be the breaking point.” If Musharraf has made an agreement about letting American troops operate in Pakistan, Gul said, “he’s lying to you.”

The greatest risk may be not to Musharraf, or to the stability of South Asia, but to the ability of the international nuclear monitoring institutions to do their work. Many experts fear that, with Khan’s help, the world has moved closer to a nuclear tipping point. Husain Haqqani, who was a special assistant to three prime ministers before Musharraf came to power and is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noted, with some pride, that his nation had managed to make the bomb despite American sanctions. But now, he told me, Khan and his colleagues have gone wholesale: “Once they had the bomb, they had a shopping list of what to buy and where. A. Q. Khan can bring a plain piece of paper and show me how to get it done,the countries, people, and telephone numbers. ‘This is the guy in Russia who can get you small quantities of enriched uranium. You in Malaysia will manufacture the stuff. Here’s who will miniaturize the warhead. And then go to North Korea and get the damn missile.’” He added, “This is not a few scientists pocketing money and getting rich. It’s a state policy.”

Haqqani depicted Musharraf as truly “on the American side,” in terms of resisting Islamic extremism, but, he said, “he doesn’t know how to be on the American side. The same guys in the I.S.I. who have done this in the last twenty years he expects to be his partners. These are people who’ve done nothing but covert operations: One, screw India. Two, deceive America. Three, expand Pakistan’s influence in the Islamic community. And, four, continue to spread nuclear technology.” He paused. “Musharraf is trying to put out the fire with the help of the people who started the fire,” he said.

“Much of this has been known for decades to the American intelligence community,” Haqqani added. “Sometimes you know things and don’t want to do anything about it. Americans need to know that your government is not only downplaying this but covering it up. You go to bed with our I.S.I. They know how to suck up to you. You let us get away with everything. Why can’t you be more honest? There’s no harm in telling us the truth,’Look, you’re an ally but a very disturbing ally.’ You have to nip some of these things in the bud.”

The former senior American intelligence official was equally blunt. He told me, “Khan was willing to sell blueprints, centrifuges, and the latest in weaponry. He was the worst nuclear-arms proliferator in the world and he’s pardoned,with not a squeak from the White House.”

The most recent revelations about the nuclear black market were triggered by the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a now defunct opposition group that has served as the political wing of the People’s Mujahideen Khalq, a group that has been on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations since 1997. The National Council lobbied in Washington for decades, and offered information,not always accurate,about Iran. There had been suspicions about Iran’s nuclear intentions since the eighties, but the country’s religious rulers claimed that its nuclear facilities were intended for peaceful purposes only. In August of 2002, the National Council came up with something new: it announced at a news conference in Washington that it had evidence showing that Iran had secretly constructed two extensive nuclear-weapons facilities in the desert south of Tehran. The two plants were described with impressive specificity. One, near Natanz, had been depicted by Iranian officials as part of a desert-eradication program. The site, surrounded by barbed wire, was said to include two work areas buried twenty-five feet underground and ringed by concrete walls more than eight feet thick. The second plant, which was said to be producing heavy water for use in making weapons-grade plutonium, was situated in Arak and ostensibly operated as an energy company.

Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the organization that monitors nuclear proliferation, eventually followed up on the National Council’s information. And it checked out.

A building that I.A.E.A. inspectors were not able to gain full access to on a visit in March, 2003, was found on a subsequent trip to contain a centrifuge facility behind a wall made of boxes. Inspectors later determined that some of the centrifuges had been supplied by Pakistan. They also found traces of highly enriched uranium on centrifuge components manufactured in Iran and Pakistan. The I.A.E.A. has yet to determine whether the uranium originated in Pakistan: the enriched materials could have come from the black market, or from a nuclear proliferator yet to be discovered, or from the Iranians’ own production facilities.

Last October, the Iranian government, after nine months of denials and obfuscation,and increasingly productive inspections,formally acknowledged to the I.A.E.A. that it had secretly been producing small quantities of enriched uranium and plutonium, and had been operating a pilot heavy-water reactor program, all potentially in violation of its obligations under the nuclear-nonproliferation treaty. Some of the secret programs, Iran admitted, dated back eighteen years. At first, the country’s religious leadership claimed that its scientists had worked on their own, and not with the help of outside suppliers. The ayatollahs later admitted that this was not the case, but refused to say where the help had come from.

Iran’s leaders continued to insist that their goal was to produce nuclear energy, not nuclear weapons, and, in a public report last November, the I.A.E.A. stopped short of accusing them of building a bomb. Cautiously, it stated, “It is clear that Iran has failed in a number of instances over an extended period of time to meet its obligations . . . with respect to the reporting of nuclear material and its processing and use. . . . To date, there is no evidence that the previously undeclared nuclear material and activities referred to above were related to a nuclear weapons programme.”

Privately, however, senior proliferation experts were far less reserved. “I know what they did,” one official in Vienna told me, speaking of the Iranians. “They’ve been lying all the time and they’ve been cheating all the time.” Asked if he thought that Iran now has the bomb, the official said no. Asked if he thought that Iran had enough enriched uranium to make a bomb, he said, “I’m not sure.”

Musharraf has insisted that any dealings between A. Q. Khan and Iran were independent of, and unknown to, the Pakistani government. But there is evidence to contradict him. On a trip to the Middle East last month, I was told that a number of years ago the Israeli signals-intelligence agency, known as Unit 8200, broke a sophisticated Iranian code and began monitoring communications that included talk between Iran and Pakistan about Iran’s burgeoning nuclear-weapons program. The Israeli intelligence community has many covert contacts inside Iran, stemming from the strong ties it had there before the overthrow of the Shah, in 1979; some of these ties still exist. Israeli intelligence also maintained close contact with many Iranian opposition groups, such as the National Council. A connection was made,directly or indirectly,and the Israeli intelligence about Iran’s nuclear program reached the National Council. A senior I.A.E.A. official subsequently told me that he knew that the Council’s information had originated with Israeli intelligence, but he refused to say where he had learned that fact. (An Israeli diplomat in Washington, asked to comment, said, “Why would we work with a Mickey Mouse outlet like the Council?”)

The Israeli intercepts have been shared, in some form, with the United States intelligence community, according to the former senior intelligence official, and they show that high-level officials in Islamabad and Tehran had frequent conversations about the I.A.E.A. investigation and its implications. “The interpretation is the issue here,” the former official said. “If you set the buzzwords aside, the substance is that the Iranians were saying, ‘We’ve got to play with the I.A.E.A. We don’t want to blow our cover, but we have to show some movement. There’s no way we’re going against world public opinion,no way. We’ve got to show that we’re coöperating and get the Europeans on our side.’” (At the time, Iran was engaged in negotiations with the European Union on trade and other issues.) It’s clear from the intercepts, however, the former intelligence official said, that Iran did not want to give up its nuclear potential. The Pakistani response, he added, was “Don’t give away the whole ballgame and we’ll look out for you.” There was a further message from Pakistan, the former official said: “Look out for your own interests.”

Continued in Part Two…