On February 5, 2004, I delivered a major speech at Georgetown University, laying out the Agency"s record on Iraqi WMD and affirming our professional commitment to call them as we saw them. Seven weeks later, on March 24, and again on April 14, I testified publicly before the 9/11 Commission. Both commission appearances were grueling experiences. In the end, though, I tried to represent the Agency well. Then, on April 17, three days after my last appearance before the 9/11 Commission, I picked up my Washington Post Washington Post, saw the front-page story touting Bob Woodward"s new book on the run-up to the Iraq war, and read the following in the second paragraph of the story: "The intensive war planning throughout 2002 created its own momentum, according to Plan of Attack Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward, fueled in part by the CIA"s conclusion that Saddam Hussein could not be removed from power except through a war and CIA Director George J. Tenet"s a.s.surance to the President that it was a "slam dunk" case that Iraq possessed weapons of ma.s.s destruction." by Bob Woodward, fueled in part by the CIA"s conclusion that Saddam Hussein could not be removed from power except through a war and CIA Director George J. Tenet"s a.s.surance to the President that it was a "slam dunk" case that Iraq possessed weapons of ma.s.s destruction."
That"s when I pretty much knew the wheels had come off the train.
As I wrote earlier, I"d had some advance notice of this. Woodward called just before Plan of Attack Plan of Attack came out and, in an awkward way, raised the "slam dunk" issue. I guess he was trying to warn me it was going to be controversial, but my first reaction was almost a total blank. I remembered no such seminal moment. Now seeing the words in the came out and, in an awkward way, raised the "slam dunk" issue. I guess he was trying to warn me it was going to be controversial, but my first reaction was almost a total blank. I remembered no such seminal moment. Now seeing the words in the Post Post, I felt as if I were reading about someone else in a parallel universe. Within days, though, Woodward"s book had ignited a media bonfire, and I was the guy being burned at the stake.
This controversy was the last thing I needed. I took off for a few days and went up to the New Jersey sh.o.r.e, by myself. I wanted to get my thoughts together, and the beach, to me, is about the most serene place on earth. This, however, was not a peaceful time. Yes, we at CIA had been wrong in believing that Saddam had weapons of ma.s.s destruction. In the National Intelligence Estimate, in testimony on the Hill, in briefings to almost every member of Congress, I, John McLaughlin, and others had delivered the same message: our a.n.a.lysis showed that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was working on a nuclear capability, though they were years away from achieving it. There was no secret about it. Now, thanks to White House spin, our long, complex record on a difficult subject had been reduced to some ridiculous scene out of a comic opera. It was like I was Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah Winfrey"s couch.
It was obvious to me that this whole Oval Office arm-waving, jumping-off-the-sofa, slam-dunk scene had been fed deliberately to Woodward to shift the blame from the White House to CIA for what had proved to be a failed rationale for the war in Iraq. Woodward"s books, dependent as they are on insider access, have long been used in just this way-to deflect blame and set up fall guys. Now it had happened to me.
I remember sitting there at the beach contemplating all we had accomplished in my seven years on the hot seat-the rebuilding of a broken Agency, the restoration of morale, the successes in Afghanistan and the larger war on terrorism, the takedown of A. Q. Khan and the neutralizing of WMD development in Libya, our role in the Middle East peace process, my own role as personal envoy to the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and Pervez Musharraf, and so much else-and thinking, my G.o.d, none of that really matters to this administration. What I couldn"t stop wondering was, had the president been convinced by some of his advisors that the blame should be shifted onto me? In the end, I will never know the answer to that question.
I like the president, plain and simple. We had been bound together after 9/11 by a national trauma and a common purpose. All of us at the storm"s center believed we were doing the right thing, and every one of us, the president included, had given it his or her absolute best effort. His staff, though, had different priorities. For them, preserving the president"s reputation-particularly with an election coming up and a war plan coming apart-was job one. Perhaps I was just collateral damage.
Maybe my second day at the sh.o.r.e, I phoned Andy Card at the White House and laid it on the line for him. "Andy," I remember saying, "I"m calling to tell you that I"m really angry. Yes, we wrote a National Intelligence Estimate, we expressed our confidence levels, John McLaughlin and I briefed almost every member of Congress; we were fairly strident about the fact that we believed Saddam had weapons of ma.s.s destruction. But what you guys have gone and done is made me look stupid, and I just want to tell you how furious I am about it. For someone in the administration to now hang this around my neck is about the most despicable thing I have ever seen in my life."
Andy is one of the most honorable, decent people I"ve ever worked with. What"s more, he was always very good to me. But he is also extremely disciplined about what he says when he talks to you, and this time he said nothing in response. There was only quiet from the other end. Yet in that silence, I understood that there had been a fundamental breakdown of trust between the White House and me. In short, it finally, absolutely was time to go. I couldn"t quit immediately over something that had appeared in a book, but I didn"t see any way I could or should stay on much longer.
Over the next six weeks, I tried to think through the resignation process with Stephanie, my brother, Bill, John McLaughlin, John Moseman, and Bill Harlow. I also talked to David Boren about it in this period, as well as to my old friend Ken Levit, who went back years with me in the Senate and had served as my special counsel at CIA. That Memorial Day weekend, back at the beach, I had several long conversations with my brother. He was adamantly against resignation, because he felt that if I stepped down, the administration would dump on me whatever else they wanted to. "They"ve already done that," I pointed out to him, "and I"m still in the job!" Stephanie was also opposed to my resignation, because she did not want me to leave while the country was at war and our men and women were at risk on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq. As for me, I already knew the answer. Unfortunately, to the outside world, my credibility had been undermined. My staying on would only hurt CIA. And then, as if by magic, someone appeared to confirm my decision to go.
That Sunday evening we were cooking hamburgers, but we didn"t have any buns. I volunteered to run over to the A&P to get them. I"ve always found food stores and food shopping to be very therapeutic, probably as a function of growing up in my family"s diner. So there I was at the A&P, pushing my cart down aisle seven, and unbeknownst to me, Louis Freeh, a dear friend who three years earlier had stepped down as FBI director and was a fellow devotee of the Jersey sh.o.r.e, was simultaneously pushing his cart down aisle eight. At the end of the aisle, Louis made a left turn, I made a right turn, and-yes, it"s true-our carts smacked right into each other.
I looked up and said, "Well, Louis, how are you?" He said fine, and asked after me, and since we knew each other well and had gone through some of the same battles, I told him how upset I really was. We were both in shorts and T-shirts; my security detail was waiting outside. I explained my thinking, and we discussed my dilemma standing there in the middle of the A&P, our carts blocking the aisle. Louis first tried to talk me out of resigning. I looked at him and said, "I can"t stay. Trust has been broken." Louis finally said to me, "You"re right. It is time to leave. Now, here"s how you do it."
To begin with, Louis said, you pick the date; no one else does.
"Fine," I told him. "Thursday." Four days hence.
"Okay, Thursday. You go in to see the president late Wednesday night. You ask to see him alone. You tell him that it is your intention to resign and to issue a public statement the following morning, and you ask him to keep this between the two of you until that occurs. Then, once he announces you"re leaving, you announce it to your workforce. The key thing is to allow no more than ten to twelve hours to separate your conversation with the president and your announcement to your own people. That"s why you don"t see him earlier in the day or in the middle of the day. You see him as late as you can possibly see him because you want to keep this b.u.t.toned up. The worst thing that could happen is that word reaches your people before you tell them. You don"t want to be in that position."
I shook hands with Louis when he was through and went back to the house feeling terrific. "G.o.d has spoken," I said when I walked into the house. "Louis has told me how to do it, and that"s what I"m going to do." After I explained what that was about, Stephanie felt better about it, too, but she wasn"t yet convinced this was the right course. As for me, I slept great that night, better than I had slept in months, maybe in years.
Before Louis and I parted at the A&P, we had agreed to meet the next morning with our families, under the American flag, for the terrific local Memorial Day parade. Louis, his wife, Marilyn, and Stephanie and I chatted away about the situation. For Stephanie, I know it was an important moment. She got a great deal of comfort from Louis and from the way he reinforced that this was the right thing to do, and by the time we set off that afternoon to drive back to Washington, she had come into camp, too. Louis Freeh swore me into office in 1997, and now he was telling me how to quit. Life had come full circle.
Wednesday morning, I set out to put the Freeh Plan into motion. The president and Andy Card were traveling that day, so I placed a call to Andy"s office and he called me back from the road. "I want to see the president tonight," I told him. Andy didn"t ask why. He told me when they were due back early that evening and said he would try to fit me in around eight o"clock. "That"s fine," I said. "I"ll see him then."
That evening I drove down to the White House and entered the grounds by the southwest gate. I"m not sure what the security people thought was happening, but John Moseman, Bill Harlow, and Dottie Hanson, my executive secretary, were the only CIA people who knew for sure what I was doing. The three of them waited back at Langley to learn how it had gone.
Inside the West Wing, I stopped briefly by Andy Card"s office. "It"s time to go," I told him. "I want to tell the president myself." Andy was considerate as always. As always, too, he didn"t tip his hand as to whether he was surprised by my announcement.
In short order, Andy led me upstairs to the residence, where President Bush greeted me in the library, and the three of us sat down together. "It"s time for me to go," I repeated. "I"ve been doing this a long time. I have a boy who needs me, a family that needs me. I"ve done all I can do. This is a good time for me to go, and I feel very strongly about it."
"When do you want to announce it?" the president asked.
"Tomorrow morning," I told him. I think that caught him off guard a bit, but it also raised a logistical problem. John Howard, the Australian prime minister, was coming early the next day, and he and the president were scheduled to have a joint morning press conference. Howard had been one of our closest allies. Not only had he deployed troops to Iraq, but he"d also had the enormous political courage to say that he"d gone to war in Iraq not because of what the intelligence said but because he"d believed it was the right thing to do. The president didn"t want to do anything to step on Howard"s visit. Nor did I. Instead of launching the daily news cycle with my resignation, the president decided that he would hold off on that news until after the Howard press conference, and then make the announcement as he was heading to the helicopter for yet another overseas trip. In the meantime, we would enforce silence.
"We tell n.o.body," the president told Andy Card. "We don"t tell Rice. We don"t tell anybody about this until tomorrow morning."
I thanked him for making that extra effort, and he told me how much he appreciated what I had done, but unlike our previous conversation, in September 2003, there was no attempt to talk me out of resigning.
Afterward, I walked back out the gate I had entered and found Stephanie, who had come down to the White House with me, waiting at the base of the monument honoring the 1st Infantry Division, a magnificent sixty-foot column topped by a fifteen-foot gilt representation of Winged Victory.
"You look twenty years younger," she told me.
"I feel great," I said.
The two of us then sat together by the monument for what must have been fifteen or twenty minutes. I told her about my meeting, and Stephanie said that while I was inside, a dark cloud had suddenly appeared, accompanied by a hard downpour. One of the security guys, Bob Woods, had come running over with an umbrella, and he and Stephanie raced back to the car. They were just about to get in it when the sky cleared and the setting sun reappeared in a brilliant show of color, and just at that moment, she said, I walked out of the White House grounds.
I learned later that while Stephanie and I were talking, the contingent back at headquarters had migrated from my office down to the "cage," where the security detail operated, and were frantically radioing Bob Woods and others for a heads-up on just what the DCI and "Daphne," Stephanie"s code name, were droning on about. I think they were as relieved as I was when I finally got back to Langley that evening. I filled them in on what the president had said, and a.s.sured one and all that the show really was over.
Thursday morning, still sticking to Louis"s script as well as I could, I a.s.sembled our top people in my conference room, roughly fifteen minutes before I knew the Howard press conference was going to go off. I told them that I had submitted my resignation the night before and that the president would soon be making the announcement. I did not let anyone leave the conference room until the president had finished and was headed to the helicopter to take him to Andrews Air Force Base.
A happy side effect of my departure plan was that by the time the president announced it, most of his staff was already airborne, en route to a summit meeting in Europe, so their ability to spin the reasons behind my departure was mercifully constrained-at least for a few hours.
Maybe an hour later, I went to the Bubble. The rest of the people at Langley, at outlying buildings, and at many locations overseas could watch on closed-circuit TV. Stephanie and John Michael were waiting in the front of the audience when I walked in. By then, I"m sure, the surprise was gone-we are an intelligence agency, after all-but I told everyone that I was leaving all the same, and how proud I was to have worked by their side. Stephanie tells me that I was far from the only person in the auditorium getting choked up. By then, even our always-cool security detail was getting a bit misty-eyed. Near the end, I looked at John Michael and said, "You"ve been a great son, and I now am going to be a great dad." That"s when I lost it, completely.
A footnote to the story: A few days earlier, when Stephanie and I discussed my resignation with John Michael, I told him that he was the main reason I was stepping down. I"d missed too many good times with him. That wasn"t going to happen any longer. As much as John Michael appreciated that, he also expressed the fear that the president would be mad at him for causing my departure. I told the president that story when we met Wednesday evening. Thursday afternoon, after my resignation, the president called John Michael from Air Force One to a.s.sure him that, no, he wasn"t mad at him and to tell him that his father had done an outstanding job.
That wasn"t the first time George Bush had gone the extra mile for my son. He knew, from firsthand experience as the son of a former DCI, what it was like to see your dad get chewed up in the press, and he always asked about John Michael and how he was bearing up. Back in February 2004, three months before I left for good, I had told the president that John Michael was having an especially rough time watching me get pummeled, and the president invited him down to the White House for a chat. John Michael never told us about their conversation, but he came home feeling a lot better about life.
I set my resignation date for July 11, in part so I would have time to hand matters over to my successor in some reasonable shape, but also for sentimental reasons. I had been sworn in on July 11, 1997, exactly seven years earlier. Four days before my last day, Stephanie and I flew out to Sun Valley, Idaho, to attend the annual conference sponsored by Herbert Allen and to see the hundreds of wonderful people who had made us feel so welcome over the years. I even got back to the Smiley Creek Lodge for a milkshake and fries.
We returned home on the eleventh. Late that afternoon I decided to go back to my office one last time. It happened to be a Sunday. The headquarters was all but deserted as I went up to my office on the seventh floor. As I entered, I walked up to the charred American flag at the far wall that had been pulled out of the rubble of the World Trade Center shortly after 9/11. I sat at my desk for a while, thinking about what an amazing nine years it had been since I had come over to CIA as John Deutch"s deputy. I was rolling events through my mind when I remembered that I had stored away a great Cuban cigar that King Abdullah of Jordan had sent me. I found it and lit up, and then I walked alone around the CIA compound-my own way of saying good-bye to a place I loved.
AFTERWORD.
My journey as DCI, which began along the Towpath on the C&O Ca.n.a.l, had more twists and turns than I could ever have imagined. My relinquishing the helm after seven years, in July 2004, did not lead to the calm that usually follows a storm. In fact, the performance of the intelligence community became a debating point in the 2004 presidential campaign. The political arguments generated much heat but little light. Each party tried to bludgeon the other, using American intelligence as a cudgel. The debate also led to a rush to reorganization-an effort destined to provide only a false sense of progress and security.
Somehow the country survived, and shortly after the 2004 election, Brett Kavanaugh, the president"s staff secretary, surprised me with a call saying that the president wanted to present me with the Medal of Freedom, the nation"s highest civilian commendation. Kavanaugh explained that I was to be honored jointly with Tommy Franks and Jerry Bremer. I was not at all sure I wanted to accept. We had not found weapons of ma.s.s destruction and postwar Iraq hadn"t been the cakewalk that some had suggested it would be.
I asked Kavanaugh why the president wanted to honor me, and to read me the proposed citation. It was all about CIA"s work against terrorism, not Iraq. Fair enough, I thought. Perhaps I could accept a medal on that basis, not for me so much as for the Agency. But I was a long way from convinced. "I"ll get back to you," I told him.
I understood the politics clearly, but I weighed that against what I believed the medal would mean to the many heroic men and women of CIA and U.S. intelligence who had performed superbly in responding to the attacks of 9/11. In the end, I said yes for that reason. I also hoped the ceremony might bring a kind of closure to my tenure as DCI and help ease the pain of those last months for my family. Family often gets forgotten in these difficult times; but believe me, they feel the sting of criticism every bit as much as the princ.i.p.als do.
On December 14, 2004, in the East Room, the president showered praise on us. The part I recall best were the words meant not for me but for the Agency I had led: "In these years of challenge for our country," he said, "the men and women of the CIA have been on the front lines of an urgent cause, and the whole nation owes them our grat.i.tude." What meant the most, though, was the look on my son"s face as the ceremony proceeded. I don"t think I"ve ever seen him so happy, so proud, so much at peace.
The ceremony turned out to be only a momentary interlude. Time has pa.s.sed, and controversy has continued to swirl. But in that time, I have given considerable thought not just to the lessons learned in my seven years as DCI, but also to what lies ahead for the country and the intelligence community.
First and foremost, it must be said that intelligence is not the sole answer to any complicated problem. Often, at best, only 60 percent of the facts regarding any national security issue are knowable. Intelligence tries to paint a realistic picture of a given situation based on expert interpretation and a.n.a.lysis of collected information. The results are generally impressionistic-rarely displayed in sharp relief.
Being able to obtain these impressions, however, is critical. To do so, a nation must devote constant attention and resources to its intelligence capabilities-not just in times of crisis but always. Years of neglect cannot be overcome quickly, no matter how intense or well intentioned the recovery effort. The investments made today-in developing intelligence collectors and a.n.a.lysts and in nurturing relations with foreign partners-may not pay dividends for decades to come. But ignore those requirements now, and the cost in terms of lives and treasure will be exponentially higher.
No matter how conclusive intelligence a.s.sessments may be, policy makers must engage and ask tough questions. Intelligence alone should never drive the formulation of policy. Good intelligence is no subst.i.tute for common sense or curiosity on the part of policy makers in thinking through the consequences of their actions.
Terrorism and Iraq were the two most pressing issues of my tenure, but as critical as they are, we should not be blind to other issues in that troubled region. The Middle East is less stable today than at any time in the past quarter century. The security of Israel is at greater peril than at any time I can remember. The United States entered into the war in Iraq and acted as if our actions there had no relationship to the Middle East peace process, events in Lebanon or Syria, or to the broader struggle against Sunni Islamic terrorism. In fact, these issues are intertwined and now require a strategy that sees them as inextricably linked.
Take the ill-fated Palestinian-Israeli peace process. Had we seriously tried to rejuvenate discussions several years ago, we might have mitigated the agitation in the Sunni world and created an environment more conducive to regional peace and security and less hospitable to the forces of Islamic extremism that we see today.
In the mid-to late 1990s, security cooperation between the Palestinians and Israelis was made possible by a political process dedicated to Palestinian and Israeli states existing side by side in peace. So long as a political process was alive, extremists had little base of support on the Palestinian street for terrorism, and Palestinian security forces could work against extremists and not be seen as collaborators.
True, Arafat"s flawed policies and tactics, and his reliance on violence, were major obstacles to peace, but we failed to seize the initiative, upon his death in 2004, to create a political process that offered real hope to the Palestinian people. As a result, they were driven toward extremists who offered them false hope through violence. Security deteriorated, and without a partner, the Israelis properly took measures to protect themselves. In the Middle East, the window of opportunity opens only for brief moments. Sadly, when the window presented itself upon Arafat"s death, we did not rea.s.sert ourselves as honest brokers seeking to bring a solution to the issue.
When the Bush administration pushed for elections in the Palestinian territories, those elections only served to deliver power to Hamas, which is now ascendant. Hamas"s victory was disastrous for the peace process. An Israeli friend asked me, "Why did you Americans insist on elections?" Both the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government, he said, had requested a delay. The implication of the elections" going forward was that that "the United States was on the side of Hamas." My friend"s comments ill.u.s.trate the fundamental contradiction, in this region, between stability and democracy, especially when democracy is equated only with elections. Was insistence on elections worth Hamas"s accession to power? No.
We need to understand that people in the Middle East need a foundation that will allow them to migrate to more representative forms of government in their own way and at their own pace. Simply shouting "democracy" without the existence of a vibrant civil society, and without paving the way for the educational, economic, and inst.i.tutional transformations required as a foundation for that democracy, may well take us backward and empower the very extremists whose strength we are trying to diminish. Once these extremists gain power, they are unlikely to let it go. Their concept of democracy is "One man, one vote...one time." I believe that if we insist on trying to remake the world in our image, we will fail. Still, we must engage relentlessly to foster a solution to these problems, because the region that served as the cradle of civilization also holds the potential to be its grave.
Unfortunately, the task ahead is made more difficult as a result of the United States" current low standing in the Middle East. Commentators have talked about American arrogance and incompetence as the cause for this. Whatever the reason, we should stop acting as if it were irreversible. A bold new framework for security, stability, and the growth of reform in the Middle East is required, with the people of the region leading the effort and the United States serving as their most ardent and forceful supporter.
Overlaying the very general problem of instability in the Middle East is the very specific challenge of the war in Iraq. The wisdom of our entering that war will be debated for years to come. No doubt, the uncertain road to war was paved, in part, by flawed performance from the U.S. intelligence community, which I led. The core of our judgments on Iraq"s WMD programs turned out to be wrong, wrong for a hundred different reasons that go to the heart of what we call our "tradecraft"-the best practices of intelligence collection and a.n.a.lysis. It is no comfort to know that other intelligence services made the same misjudgments. In the case of Iraq, we fell short of our own high standards.
Even if the invading coalition forces had discovered stockpiles of WMD in Iraq after Saddam"s ouster, the current situation on the ground would be the same. The same U.S. post-invasion policies would have produced the same disastrous results. While we got it wrong on much of our WMD a.n.a.lysis, we correctly antic.i.p.ated what might ensue during an extended occupation. What I did not know at the time was how badly our government would mishandle the invasion"s aftermath and the effort to win the peace. Once on the ground, CIA provided clear warning of a growing insurgency. The problem was that our warnings were not heeded. For too long our government was either unable or unwilling to look at new facts and transform its policy. As a consequence, a domestic insurgency in Iraq worsened daily and the political and military situation spiraled out of control. We followed a policy built on hope rather than fact.
Perhaps I should have pounded the table harder. But let me be clear: I am not among those who, with twenty-twenty hindsight, now say, "If only they had listened to me, we never would have gotten into this mess." I did not oppose the president"s decision to invade Iraq. Such decisions properly belong to the policy makers, not to intelligence officials.
The lessons derived from our national nightmare in Iraq are many and have been painfully learned. To start, I would say that even the world"s lone superpower must see that there are some mountains too high for it to climb, and that military might alone cannot solve the endemic political and social problems of other nations. We should enter into wars of choice only with the greatest reluctance, and then only after being completely honest with ourselves and the world about our rationale for undertaking such missions. It is not enough to know how to win wars; equally important is having the knowledge, and the will, to secure the peace. Going into Iraq, the United States let the desire to bring down Saddam"s regime overwhelm the recognition that we were unprepared to create the conditions that would put a workable model in its place.
In Iraq we removed a Sunni-dominated and tribally based cult of personality and backed an increase in Shia power without allowing any Sunni alternative to develop. We did this without a broader political strategy that contemplated an outcome whereby Iran would be deterred and contained, and without a strategy to pull Syria away from the Iranian orbit of influence. In effect, we kept Syria and Iran in the same orbit, shunning them and refusing to talk to them about important issues in the region. Over time both countries became determined to resist us. Rather than seeking to create a broad regional consensus for our goals in Iraq, we have isolated Iraq within the region and, more important, isolated the United States.
The administration did not understand that in the volatile Middle East it is often imperative to fight and talk at the same time. We need to talk to the Arab world about issues they care about, not simply issues of concern to us.
The problems in post-Saddam Iraq grew in large part out of an erroneous belief that we could impose our vision of the future on a diverse set of people with very different motivations and expectations. Some in our government felt that the United States could dictate to the Iraqi people our view of their sovereign will, that we could provide legitimacy for their new political leaders simply through our military strength. They were sadly mistaken.
I don"t know whether putting more American troops on the ground in Iraq in the middle of a sectarian conflict is going to work. At this writing, such a new strategy is being implemented by Gen. David Petraeus. It may have worked more than three years ago-before a country that believed it had a national ident.i.ty reverted to the politics of religious and ethnic identification-but whether it will work now only time will tell. My fear is that sectarian violence in Iraq has taken on a life of its own and that U.S. forces are becoming more and more irrelevant to the management of that violence.
In the end it will not matter how many troops the United States puts on the ground. Only Iraqis can determine what kind of country they want and whether they want to pursue a national reconciliation that allows them to remain unified. They can no longer use the U.S. presence as an excuse for failing to make fundamental decisions about their future as a nation.
Any surge in U.S. forces must continue to be accompanied by the ongoing diplomatic effort to bring to the table all the regional stakeholders. This must include the Iranians and Syrians. This is not a question of sanctioning Iranian behavior that leads to the killing of our troops in Iraq; this behavior is unacceptable and it must be addressed on the ground there. Nor is it a question of fearing that Iran will want to discuss their nuclear program. This subject should properly be dealt with separately.
But Iran is not a monolith. It has serious internal problems, including rising unemployment and a very young population that believes that Khomeini"s revolution has failed the Iranian people. Chaos and civil war in Iraq may be a threat to the Iranian regime, too. Is it possible that there is a convergence of interest between us and the Iranians? We will know only after we talk to them in front of their Sunni counterparts in the region. Should the Iranians resist such a dialogue, what would be lost?
What we don"t want is Sunni countries stoking the flames of the Sunni insurgency, which would increase the likelihood of a broader Sunni-Shia conflagration that could spill over Iraq"s borders and further endanger the region. A Shia political revival is occurring across the Middle East. It needs to be understood and considered in any plans for broad political reform in countries throughout the region. Only in this way can Iranian attempts to gain greater leverage and cause more mischief be restrained.
All of this requires carefully managed and staged discussions, sometimes with the United States, and sometimes without us. But we can never be far away from the process.
As difficult as the problems in Iraq, Iran, and the Middle East might seem, they pale in comparison to the global challenge of terrorism. Our highest priority must be to continue to fight terrorists around the world. The campaign against terrorism will consume the next generation of Americans the way the cold war dominated the lives of their parents and grandparents. It will require an intensity of focus unmatched by any other challenge. Let down our guard for a moment, and the consequences could be devastating. When your enemy wants to kill you, is not afraid to die himself, and actively looks forward to the prospect, then you have a daunting challenge.
Few understand the palpable sense of uncertainty and fear that gripped those in the storm"s center in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Before 9/11, our country was without any systemic program of homeland defense. We allowed ourselves to exist on the home front without the capability to prevent the onslaught of a determined enemy. Moving quickly to compensate for what we did not know-the potential al-Qa"ida cells that I believed were likely already in our country planning another round of attacks-we implemented a surveillance program that critics said was an abuse of our rights as Americans.
This was never so. I sat in on every briefing given to the leadership of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees where then NSA director Gen. Mike Hayden methodically walked through the surveillance program, how it was being implemented, and the care NSA was taking to ensure that its sole focus remained on providing us with the speed and agility we needed to protect the country.
As for the treatment of detainees, the senior leadership at CIA understood clearly that the capture, detention, and interrogation of senior al-Qa"ida members was new ground-morally and legally. We understood the tension between protecting Americans and how we might be perceived years after the trauma of 9/11 had faded from the nation"s memory. History had taught us that decisions made to protect the public from another more devastating al-Qa"ida attack might be viewed later as our sanctioning torture or abuse, thus jeopardizing the CIA and public trust in it. None of this was taken lightly. The risks were understood.
By speaking out about the use of certain interrogation techniques, Senator John McCain engaged the country in an important moral debate about who we are as a people and what we should stand for, even when up against an enemy so full of hate they would murder thousands of our children without a thought. We at CIA engaged in such a debate from the beginning, struggling to determine what was required to protect a just society at so much risk. But from where we sat, in the late summer of 2003, preventing the death of American citizens was paramount. It is easy to second-guess us today, but difficult to understand the intensity of our concerns when we made certain decisions and the urgency we felt to protect the country.
Leaders of our country must find a way to build a broad political consensus on the lengths American citizens will expect intelligence, law enforcement, and military personnel to go to protect the United States. To find such consensus, there must be a sound foundation of consultation and understanding.
After 9/11, gripped by the same emotion and fears, Congress exhorted the intelligence community to take more risks to protect the country. But if the elected representatives of the American people do not want an NSA surveillance program, no matter how rigorous the oversight, then the program should be shut down. If they believe that certain actions taken during an interrogation process put us in a difficult place morally-even if we believe those actions to be disciplined and focused, in compliance with the law, and invaluable for saving American and foreign lives-then we should not employ those actions. Our role as intelligence professionals is to inform policy makers of both the hazards and the value of such programs. We should say what we think but the final decision belongs to the political leadership of the country. It is they who must engage the American people.
In all these programs, we believed we were doing what was right for the country; we calibrated the risks and discussed the tensions. But the debate must be broadened, the guidance made clear, and the consequences of either taking or not taking an action clearly understood.
But I ask that we all remember those decisions when the next terrorist attack occurs. We must understand collectively that if we decide not to empower our intelligence-collection activities, we have to be willing to take the risk and pay the price. If we do not have that debate now, the pendulum will swing much more dramatically after the next major attack.
The president must lead. No president can subordinate day-to-day decision making to others. In the days after 9/11, the president was confronted with an unprecedented danger. He has been criticized for justifying NSA"s surveillance program on the basis of the power the Const.i.tution provides him in a time of war. But the fear present in those early months and years has all but been forgotten.
Today we must all recognize that the campaign against terrorism will be of unlimited duration. It will require a different and enduring bipartisan legal foundation to carry us forward. The senior political leadership of our country should be asking together what we need to do now to increase our odds of deterring future attacks.
Beyond a discussion of what steps to take in the fight against terrorism, there must be honest and realistic expectations for the work of the intelligence community; there is no perfection in our business. Intelligence does not operate in a vacuum, but within a broader mandate of policies and governance. The men and women in the intelligence community are ready and willing to be held accountable for their work. But when policies are inadequate and warnings are not heeded, it is not "failure of imagination" on the part of intelligence professionals that harms American interests and the American people.
Terrorism is the stuff of everyday nightmares. But the added specter of a nuclear-capable terrorist group is something that, more than anything else, causes me sleepless nights. Marry the right few individuals with the necessary material, and you could have a single attack that could kill more people than all the previous terrorist attacks in history. Intelligence has established beyond any reasonable doubt that the intent of al-Qa"ida is to do precisely this. There is an abundance of nuclear material in the world, some of which may already be within reach of terrorist groups. It will require incredible alertness, foresight, and determination to prevent such groups from acquiring that material-a development that would have devastating consequences. Our nation ought to be moving heaven and earth to get a handle on all the deadly fissile material currently unaccounted for and possibly available to the highest bidder. If we do not quickly and completely s.n.a.t.c.h this material from our enemies" grasp, we will rue our lack of foresight and our misperception that "men in caves" lack the ability to acquire and employ such weapons.
Tactically, we can fight these extremists, and we will-for the next twenty-five years, person by person, cell by cell, bank account by bank account. One thing is certain: we have to continue the tactical elements of this campaign. And we cannot do it alone. There is no unilateral American solution to this problem. The relationships we nurtured with intelligence services around the globe and particularly in the Arab and Islamic world have been critical to the many successes we have enjoyed. The adversary we face will not negotiate, accommodate, or settle for peace. At the same time, we must recognize that you cannot kill or jail them all and hope to prevail.
The battle against terrorism must never be just about tactics. We will never get ahead of the problem unless we penetrate the terrorist breeding grounds and do something about promoting honest government, free trade, economic development, educational reform, political freedom, and religious moderation.
The first responsibility lies within Islam itself, to create and foster a religious dialogue that loudly repudiates the violence and radical thought that al-Qa"ida promotes and thrives on. No Westerner can shape this debate. It is the purview of governments and religious leaders and Islamic thinkers, who must no longer turn a blind eye to the extremist message. There must be a way to defeat the perversion of the Islamic faith that sends the message to its followers: "We have been humiliated because of the lack of opportunity and, as a result, our enemies-Christians, Jews, and apostate Muslims-need to die."
The second responsibility lies with the West and these same governments to facilitate educational and economic reforms that allow young men and women to have opportunities to live and flourish in a globalized world on terms in which they are respected and have a stake in their societies. Too often, such compacts have been broken.
Western governments, especially our own, must find ways to engage the mainstream Islamic world, focusing on common interests and objectives. And to do that effectively, we must have a multiyear, long-range commitment in resources, personnel, and deep expertise in Islamic cultures, societies, and languages. We must convince Muslims through their leaders and opinion makers that terrorism is their enemy as well.
Changes in the way we function operationally and diplomatically are urgently needed. But we must not fall prey to typical American impatience and rush into "solutions" that only make matters worse. To some extent, that is what happened with the 9/11 Commission. The commission did some very good work describing the nature of al-Qa"ida"s plot. But it did not fully understand what actions were working against the terrorists prior to the attacks and did not fully a.n.a.lyze the actions taken in the months immediately after 9/11 that led to the successful takedown of two-thirds of Bin Ladin"s top leadership.
The 9/11 Commission"s mandate was not extended beyond the 2004 election as commissioners had requested. As a result, the politics of the moment demanded immediate action. John Kerry"s campaign endorsed the commission"s recommendations within twenty-four hours of the report being published. The Bush administration quickly followed suit, and thereby abdicated its obligation to lead and manage the executive branch in a responsible fashion.
A strong case can be made that the three roles in which I served-as head of the intelligence community, Director of CIA, and the president"s princ.i.p.al intelligence advisor-were too much for any one person. Perhaps so. But to embrace a new structure without careful consideration of the implications was unwise. In the aftermath of 9/11, legislative changes were imposed before we had asked some fundamental questions. What was the world going to look like over the next twenty-five years? What threats and opportunities would we face? What capabilities would the country need to ensure its security? What kind of people would we need to recruit, train, and retain to accomplish the mission? These questions by themselves would have resulted in a vigorous debate and study. Then, and only after understanding the problem before us, should we have asked the question, "What architecture or structure should we put in place to maximize our potential to allow us to succeed?" Little of that was done. The legislation that was pa.s.sed was based on structure, power relationships, and how they should be altered in Washington, rather than on what the country needed from intelligence to protect its future interests. The result was an over-centralized, multilayered structure that, at least where terrorism is concerned, lacked the speed and agility to meet the challenges we face.
From my perspective, the single biggest obstacle we needed to overcome was that there was no single place where foreign intelligence and domestic information could be put together and a.n.a.lyzed quickly to empower those who could do something about it-that is, CIA officers, FBI agents, foreign partners, or state and local police officers inside the United States.
In fact, prior to 9/11, there was precious little domestic data gathered. We had no systematic capability in place to collect, aggregate, and a.n.a.lyze domestic data in any meaningful way. Domestically, there were few if any a.n.a.lysts. There was no common communication architecture that allowed the effective synthesis of terrorist-related data in the homeland, much less the seamless flow of information from overseas to state and local officials inside the United States. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, U.S. intelligence officers in Islamabad could not talk to FBI agents in Phoenix.
While the 9/11 Commission stated that there were "fault lines within our government-between foreign and domestic intelligence, and between and within agencies," it focused almost exclusively on restructuring the American foreign intelligence community. Little if any attention was paid to the systemic deficiencies that existed on the domestic side.
The Department of Homeland Security was in place, and a new intelligence division was being created in the FBI, even before the 9/11 Commission had ended its inquiry. These changes were Washington-centric solutions that did not incorporate state and local officials, the men and women who could actually act on any data gathered-data they still don"t receive.
What do I mean specifically? During the first Gulf war, our commanders complained about the disparate intelligence they received from separate civilian and military channels. In response to this, a major revolution in American intelligence occurred after that war, stimulated by a brilliant paper auth.o.r.ed by President George H. W. Bush"s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and by its chairman, Adm. Bobby Inman.
During the subsequent wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, we did not over-centralize the Washington power structure. Rather, we decentralized access to intelligence by pushing its a.n.a.lysis and exploitation as close as possible to the war fighter-whether in the foxhole or in the c.o.c.kpit. Not only did we convey this data to the field in nanoseconds, but we also allowed our deployed forces to reach back into giant databases to pull the data they believed they needed to do their jobs. Military men and women far away from Washington actually know best what they need most, and today they have the ability to reach in and get it.
Today we are in possession of an enormous amount of data about how al-Qa"ida trains its members, operates, and thinks about the United States as a target. This is all rooted in what we have learned about them around the world through speedy and agile intelligence operations in concert with our foreign partners. Yet how much of this data is available on a daily basis, on one communications backbone, to the people who can do something about it? In reality, very little. It is simply not good enough to warn local police departments of imminent threats. We need to arm them with our knowledge of terrorists and their tactics. This can be done without compromising sensitive sources or methods. Technology today allows us to insert data with varying layers of access for those with a need to know. While some cla.s.sified data will always be essential, the majority of the knowledge we impart should be uncla.s.sified. Without this information, the people most familiar with our cities and local communities have little, if any, basis to plan, allocate resources, and train and retain the right kind of people. The solution to the terrorist threat we face has little to do with structure. It is all about data.
My personal concern is that the head of the intelligence community, now known as the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), may be too distant from the people he is supposed to lead and may be divorced from the reality of risk taking and running operations. Still, the legislation that created the position of DNI is now law. For the good of the country, we must ensure that the DNI and American intelligence succeeds.