Spy agencies say Iraq war worsened terror threat

WASHINGTON — A stark assessment of terrorism trends by U.S. intelligence agencies has found that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials who were involved in preparing the assessment or have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by U.S. intelligence agencies since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, and it represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States," it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread around the globe.

An opening section of the report, "Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement," cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report "says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse," one U.S. intelligence official said.

More than a dozen U.S. government officials and outside experts were interviewed for this article. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified intelligence document.

The officials included employees of several government agencies, and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration. All of those interviewed had either seen the final version of the document or participated in the creation of earlier drafts.

Details classified

These officials discussed some of the document's general conclusions but not details, which remain highly classified. Officials with knowledge of the intelligence estimate said it avoided specific judgments about the likelihood that terrorists would strike on U.S. soil again.

The relationship between the Iraq war and terrorism, and the question of whether the United States is safer, have been subjects of persistent debate since the war began in 2003.

NIEs are the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a specific national-security issue, and they are approved by John Negroponte, director of national intelligence. Their conclusions are based on analysis of raw intelligence collected by all of the spy agencies.

Analysts began in 2004 on the estimate, and it was not made final until this year. Part of the reason was that some government officials were unhappy with the structure and focus of earlier versions of the document, according to officials involved in the discussion.

Previous drafts described actions by the U.S. government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement, such as the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal, and some policy makers argued that the intelligence estimate should be more focused on specific steps to mitigate the terror threat.

It is unclear whether the final draft of the intelligence estimate criticizes individual policies of the United States, but intelligence officials involved in preparing the document said its conclusions were not softened or massaged for political purposes.

No White House role

Frederick Jones, a White House spokesman, said the White House "played no role in drafting or reviewing the judgments expressed in the National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism."

The estimate's judgments confirm some predictions of a National Intelligence Council report completed in January 2003, two months before the Iraq invasion. That report stated that the approaching war had the potential to increase support for political Islam worldwide and could increase support for some terrorist objectives.

Documents released by the White House timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks emphasized the successes that the United States had made in dismantling the top tier of al-Qaida.

"Since the Sept. 11 attacks, America and its allies are safer, but we are not yet safe," concludes one, a report titled "9/11 Five Years Later: Success and Challenges." "We have done much to degrade al-Qaida and its affiliates and to undercut the perceived legitimacy of terrorism."

That document makes only passing mention of the impact the Iraq war has had on the global jihad movement. "The ongoing fight for freedom in Iraq has been twisted by terrorist propaganda as a rallying cry," it states.

The report mentions the possibility that Islamic militants who fought in Iraq could return to their home countries, "exacerbating domestic conflicts or fomenting radical ideologies."

On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee released a more ominous report about the terrorist threat. That assessment, based entirely on unclassified documents, details a growing jihad movement and says "al-Qaida leaders wait patiently for the right opportunity to attack."

The new NIE was overseen by David Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats, who commissioned it in 2004 after he took up his post at the National Intelligence Council. Low declined to be interviewed for this article.

The estimate concludes that the radical Islamic movement has expanded from a core of al-Qaida operatives and affiliated groups to include a new class of "self-generating" cells inspired by al-Qaida's leadership but without direct connections to Osama bin Laden or his top lieutenants.

It also examines how the Internet has helped spread jihadist ideology, and how cyberspace has become a haven for terrorist operatives who no longer have geographical refuges in countries such as Afghanistan.

In early 2005, the National Intelligence Council released a study concluding that Iraq had become the primary training ground for the next generation of terrorists, and that veterans of the Iraq war ultimately might overtake al-Qaida's current leadership in the constellation of global jihad.

But the new intelligence estimate is the first report since the war began to present a comprehensive picture about trends in global terrorism.

Earlier hints

In recent months, some senior U.S. intelligence officials have offered glimpses into the estimate's conclusions in public speeches.

"New jihadist networks and cells, sometimes united by little more than their anti-Western agendas, are increasingly likely to emerge," Gen. Michael Hayden said during a speech in San Antonio in April, the month that the new estimate was completed.

"If this trend continues, threats to the U.S. at home and abroad will become more diverse, and that could lead to increasing attacks worldwide," said the general, then Negroponte's top deputy and now director of the CIA.

For more than two years, there has been tension between the Bush administration and U.S. spy agencies over the violence in Iraq and the prospects for a stable democracy in the country. Some intelligence officials have said the White House consistently has presented a more optimistic picture of the situation in Iraq than has been justified by intelligence reports from the field.

The broad judgments of the new intelligence estimate are consistent with assessments of global terrorist threats by U.S. allies and independent terrorism experts.

The panel investigating the London terrorist bombings of July 2005 reported in May that the leaders of Britain's domestic and international intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, "emphasized to the committee the growing scale of the Islamist terrorist threat."

More recently, the Council on Global Terrorism, an independent research group of terrorism experts, assigned a grade of "D-plus" to U.S. efforts over the past five years to combat Islamic extremism. The council concluded that "there is every sign that radicalization in the Muslim world is spreading rather than shrinking."