CIA May Have Been Out of Iraq Loop
Top Democrat on the Senate intelligence panel says some officials in the administration appear to have bypassed agency in gathering Iraq data.
By Greg Miller for The Los Angeles Times.

Officials in the Bush administration appear to have bypassed the CIA and other agencies to collect their own intelligence overseas on Iraq, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee said Friday...

Making the case for an expanded inquiry, Rockefeller, of West Virginia, the committee's vice chairman, said some in the administration appeared to have been collecting intelligence "without the knowledge of the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department or anybody else" in the intelligence community.

Such operations, if verified, would be highly unusual and would bolster critics' claims that the administration has short-circuited the normal flow of intelligence to search for facts that support its assumptions.

Rockefeller's comments appeared designed to pressure Republicans to expand the probe's scope at a time when both parties are struggling to control the course of the investigation as next year's presidential election looms.

His remarks culminated a week of uncharacteristic outbursts from a committee that has traditionally sought to steer clear of the partisan rancor that often characterizes other legislative panels...

Its activities have been harshly criticized by some in the intelligence community. The office has come under closer scrutiny on Capitol Hill since defense officials acknowledged this year that representatives from Special Plans met with Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian exile and discredited figure involved in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s, shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

At the time, officials said Ghorbanifar was part of a group claiming to have information that might be helpful to the U.S. in the war on terrorism, and that Pentagon officials agreed to the meeting merely to assess that information. Asked to explain the matter during an August news conference, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that "people come in offering suggestions or information or possible contacts, and sometimes they're pursued."

But the contacts aroused suspicion on Capitol Hill. According to congressional testimony from the 1980s, Ghorbanifar was among those proposing that money from the Reagan administration's arms-for-hostages deal with Iran be diverted to aid the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

Even before that scandal, Ghorbanifar was a notorious figure in the intelligence community. The CIA had issued a "burn notice" to other agencies advising them to have nothing to do with him.

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CIA May Have Been Out of Iraq Loop
By Greg Miller The Los Angeles Times

Saturday 25 October 2003

Top Democrat on the Senate intelligence panel says some officials in the administration appear to have bypassed agency in gathering Iraq data.

WASHINGTON -- Officials in the Bush administration appear to have bypassed the CIA and other agencies to collect their own intelligence overseas on Iraq, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee said Friday.

Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV's comments came as bipartisan cooperation on the committee's inquiry into prewar intelligence appeared to be unraveling. Democrats complained that Republicans are out to pin blame on the CIA and shield the White House from criticism that intelligence used to make the case to invade Iraq was exaggerated.

After reviewing tens of thousands of pages of intelligence documents, the committee staff has begun drafting a report that sources said would harshly criticize the CIA for prewar judgments that congressional investigators believe were unfounded, thinly sourced or lacked adequate caveats.

Democrats, who have been rebuffed by Republicans in their efforts to widen the probe's scope, threatened Friday to launch a separate investigation. Several committee Democrats said it is now all but inevitable that they will produce a separate report.

Making the case for an expanded inquiry, Rockefeller, of West Virginia, the committee's vice chairman, said some in the administration appeared to have been collecting intelligence "without the knowledge of the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department or anybody else" in the intelligence community.

Such operations, if verified, would be highly unusual and would bolster critics' claims that the administration has short-circuited the normal flow of intelligence to search for facts that support its assumptions.

Rockefeller's comments appeared designed to pressure Republicans to expand the probe's scope at a time when both parties are struggling to control the course of the investigation as next year's presidential election looms.

His remarks culminated a week of uncharacteristic outbursts from a committee that has traditionally sought to steer clear of the partisan rancor that often characterizes other legislative panels.

Rockefeller declined to elaborate on his comments to reporters on Capitol Hill. But congressional sources said the senator was referring to questions about the activities of a controversial Pentagon unit known as the Office of Special Plans. That office was in charge of drafting Pentagon policies and plans in connection with the war in Iraq.

Its activities have been harshly criticized by some in the intelligence community. The office has come under closer scrutiny on Capitol Hill since defense officials acknowledged this year that representatives from Special Plans met with Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian exile and discredited figure involved in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s, shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

At the time, officials said Ghorbanifar was part of a group claiming to have information that might be helpful to the U.S. in the war on terrorism, and that Pentagon officials agreed to the meeting merely to assess that information. Asked to explain the matter during an August news conference, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that "people come in offering suggestions or information or possible contacts, and sometimes they're pursued."

But the contacts aroused suspicion on Capitol Hill. According to congressional testimony from the 1980s, Ghorbanifar was among those proposing that money from the Reagan administration's arms-for-hostages deal with Iran be diverted to aid the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

Even before that scandal, Ghorbanifar was a notorious figure in the intelligence community. The CIA had issued a "burn notice" to other agencies advising them to have nothing to do with him.

An intelligence committee source said the Pentagon's contacts with Ghorbanifar point to the possibility of rogue intelligence operations.

"That's already one validated case in point that [the administration] doesn't deny," said a committee source. "How much more of that stuff is there? How do you know until you turn over the rock?"

Sources said some members of the committee also are increasingly questioning the activities of senior State Department official John R. Bolton, who recently acknowledged that his office routinely went outside normal department channels to request raw intelligence from the CIA and other agencies.

Bolton, undersecretary for arms control and international security, has denied any wrongdoing, as has Douglas J. Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy and head of the Office of Special Plans. The administration has strongly defended prewar intelligence and insists that its claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction will eventually be vindicated.

The Intelligence Committee's Democrats were angered by comments made this week by Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the committee, to USA Today and the Washington Post. Roberts said that the inquiry was 90% to 95% complete and suggested that the panel had already reached certain conclusions.

USA Today quoted Roberts as saying that the committee had found no evidence that analysts in the intelligence community were pressured to tailor their work to conform to administration views on Iraq. The issue has been fueled by a series of news stories citing unnamed intelligence officials complaining that the administration pressured them to alter views about the threat posed by Iraq. It goes to the heart of whether the administration abused the intelligence process.

Democrats acknowledge that no one from the intelligence community has come to the committee complaining of being pressured. But many argue that given Roberts' perceived ties to the Bush administration, and the fact that most of the interviews with intelligence community officials have been conducted in the presence of minders from the various agencies, such complaints would be unlikely.

"There is no justification for that conclusion at this time," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, a Democrat on the committee. "We still don't know" whether there was pressure, she said.

Seeking to defuse the matter, Roberts issued a statement Friday saying the committee "has not finished its review of the intelligence and has not reached any final conclusions or finished a report." Roberts has given some ground to Democrats in recent days, allowing the committee to submit questions to Feith and possibly seek testimony from him at a future hearing.

But Roberts has also clung to his position that it would be improper to expand the inquiry to examine the role of the White House and other executive entities. An aide to Roberts said moving the probe in that direction would be "laced with partisanship."

"We'd never reach consensus" on questions of whether the White House abused the intelligence process, he said. "The best you could get is a partisan divide. The chairman doesn't think that's useful."

As chairman, Roberts controls most of the committee's resources and directs all but a handful of the members of its staff. But Democrats have limited means of working around Roberts' objections. Rockefeller said Friday that he has enough votes from Democratic members to take the unusual step of launching a separate investigation. He could enlist Democratic staffers on the committee and, as vice chairman, he could request documents and testimony from agencies without Roberts' signature.

"What the chairman is really doing is saying the blame is with the intelligence community and there will be no questions about the White House," Rockefeller said. The senator vowed that Democrats will examine the administration's handling of intelligence "one way or another, I guarantee you."

So far, the committee has pored over 19 volumes of intelligence documents on Iraq turned over by the CIA. It has also interviewed more than 100 witnesses. Committee sources from both parties say investigators have been dismayed at the shoddiness of much of the intelligence community's work on Iraq.

"We're having difficulties in substantiating things that showed up in their assessments," one committee source said, adding that the CIA often seemed quick to draw damaging conclusions that other intelligence agencies resisted. "It's just bad work," the source said.

Another source said "there were clearly failures in our ability to penetrate the regime and get ground truth [accurate data] on what was happening." That problem, the source added, "was amplified by an inability to correctly interpret the information that we did have, as scattered and indirect as it often was."

The committee is particularly focused on claims that highlighted last fall's National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. Such a report is supposed to represent the comprehensive view of the intelligence community.

But committee sources said many of the claims in the report simply don't add up, including an assertion at the top of the document that "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of U.N. restrictions." Though the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq recently reported finding no chemical weapons, and scant evidence of existing biological stocks, the CIA says it stands behind its judgments.

"There may be places where if we had more time to vet the language we would have put another caveat or two in there," a U.S. official said. "But the overarching theme of it is something we continue to stand behind."