Report details how Pentagon linked Saddam and al-Qaida

WASHINGTON — Just four months after the Sept. 11 attacks, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz dashed off a memo to a senior Pentagon colleague, demanding action to identify connections between Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime and al-Qaida.

"We don't seem to be making much progress pulling together intelligence on links between Iraq and al-Qaida," Wolfowitz wrote in the Jan. 22, 2002, memo to Douglas J. Feith, the department's No. 3 official.

Using Pentagon jargon for then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he added: "We owe SecDef some analysis of this subject. Please give me a recommendation on how best to proceed. Appreciate the short turn-around."

Wolfowitz's memo, released Thursday, is included in a recently declassified report by the Pentagon's inspector general. The memo marked the first days of what would become a controversial yearlong Pentagon project supervised by Feith to convince the most senior levels of the Bush administration that Saddam and al-Qaida were linked — a conclusion that was hotly disputed by U.S. intelligence agencies at the time and discredited in the years since.

In excerpts released in February, Thomas F. Gimble, the acting inspector general of the Pentagon, criticized the effort as an alternative intelligence-assessment operation and denounced it as improper. However, Gimble said, the intelligence operation was not illegal or unauthorized because Pentagon directives allowed Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz to assign the work.

Many of the activities of the intelligence unit Feith headed have become well-known. But the release of the full inspector general's report provided more detail about how a group of Pentagon officials and on-loan intelligence analysts were able to shunt aside contradictory reports and persuade top administration officials that they had powerful evidence of connections between Saddam's regime and al-Qaida. The 121-page report was released by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and is posted on the committee's Web site.

Feith has defended his conduct, insisting it was an appropriate, rigorous effort to question assumptions made by U.S. intelligence agencies. On a Web site Feith set up to refute the charges, he states: "This IG report controversy is, in essence, a debate over whether the CIA should be protected against criticism by policy officials."

The current Defense secretary, Robert Gates, has disavowed Feith's work, saying both in his confirmation hearings and in other public statements that he believes all intelligence analysis should be left to the CIA and other intelligence agencies, which are subject to congressional oversight.

Still, Feith's successor, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman, sent the inspector general a 52-page defense of Feith's project, which also was released Thursday. In the critique, Edelman insisted all the activities labeled as "inappropriate" were either authorized by Wolfowitz or Rumsfeld, and that by discouraging such outside analysis, the inspector general will have a "dampening effect" on future efforts to challenge intelligence assessments.

"Bipartisan reports and studies by various commissions and congressional committees since the 9/11 attacks have stressed the need for vigorous debate, hard questions and alternative thinking of the sort that motivated the work reviewed in this project," Edelman said.

In making its case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration relied heavily on evidence that Saddam was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. However, another important reason was the allegation of connections between Iraq and al-Qaida. While the CIA has been criticized for erroneously gauging Iraq's weapons programs, its assessment of Iraq's ties to al-Qaida proved to be more accurate.

The report highlights how much credence the Feith group put into a purported meeting in April 2001 in Prague, Czech Republic, between Mohammed Atta, the lead Sept. 11 hijacker, and Ahmad Ani, an Iraqi intelligence officer. Briefings Feith's office gave to senior officials, including Rumsfeld and George Tenet, then the CIA director, listed the meeting among "known contacts" between Iraqis and the terrorist organization, according to the report.

The reported meeting, which initiated with a single source that was in contact with Czech intelligence, was widely questioned by U.S. intelligence agencies at the time and was never substantiated.

"Both the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] and CIA published reports that disavowed any 'mature, symbiotic' cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaida," the inspector general's report found. "The intelligence community was united in its assessment that the intelligence on the alleged meeting between Mohammed Atta and al-Ani was at least contradictory, but by no means a 'known contact.' "

The report's release came on the same day that Vice President Dick Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, repeated his allegation that al-Qaida was operating inside Iraq "before we ever launched" the war, under the direction of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist killed last June.

"This is al-Qaida operating in Iraq," Cheney told Limbaugh's listeners about al-Zarqawi, who he said had "led the charge for Iraq."

Information from The Washington Post is included in this report.