WASHINGTON, 6 June 2003 — Vice President Dick Cheney and his most senior aide made multiple trips to the CIA over the past year to question analysts studying Iraq’s weapons programs and alleged links to Al-Qaeda, creating an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their assessments fit with the Bush administration’s policy objectives, according to senior intelligence officials.
With Cheney taking the lead in the administration last August in advocating military action against Iraq by claiming it had weapons of mass destruction, the visits by the vice president and his chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, “sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here,” one senior agency official said Wednesday.
Other agency officials said they were not influenced by the visits from the vice president’s office, and some said they welcomed them.
But the disclosure of Cheney’s unusual hands-on role comes on the heels of mounting concern from intelligence officials and members of Congress that administration may have exaggerated intelligence they received about Iraq to build a case for war.
While visits to CIA headquarters by a sitting vice president are not unprecedented, they are unusual, according to intelligence officials. The exact number of trips by Cheney to the CIA could not be learned, but one agency official described them as “multiple.” They were taken in addition to Cheney’s regular attendance at President Bush’s regular morning intelligence briefings and the special briefings the vice president receives when he is at an undisclosed location for security reasons.
A spokeswoman for Cheney would not discuss the matter Wednesday.
“The vice president values the hard work of the intelligence community but his office has a practice of declining to comment on the specifics of his intelligence briefings,” said Cathie Martin, the vice president’s public affairs director.
Concern over the administration’s pre-war claims about Iraq has been growing in Congress and among intelligence officials as a result of the failure to uncover any weapons of mass destruction two months after the collapse of the Iraqi government. Similar ferment is building in Britain, where Prime Minister Tony Blair is under pressure from within the Labor Party to explain whether British intelligence may have overstated the case of Iraq’s covert weapons programs. Blair pledged Wednesday to cooperate with a parliamentary probe into the government’s use of intelligence material.
In a signal of administration concern over the controversy, two senior Pentagon officials Wednesday held a press conference to challenge allegations that they pressured the CIA or other agencies to slant intelligence for political reasons. “I know of no pressure,” said Douglas Feith, undersecretary for policy. “I know of nobody who pressured anybody.”
Feith said a special Defense Department office to analyze intelligence in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks did not necessarily focus on Iraq but came up with “some interesting observations about the linkages between Iraq and Al-Qaeda.”
Officials in the intelligence community and on Capitol Hill, however, have described the office as an alternative source of intelligence analysis that helped the administration make its case that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat.
Government sources said CIA analysts were not the only ones who felt pressure from their superiors to support public statements about the threat posed by Saddam by President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and others.
Former and current intelligence officials said they felt a continual drumbeat, not only from Cheney and Libby, but also from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Feith, and less so from CIA Director George Tenet, to find information or write reports in a way that would help the administration make the case that going into Iraq was urgent.
“They were the browbeaters,” said a former defense intelligence official who attended some of the meetings in which Wolfowitz and others pressed for a different approach to the assessments they were receiving. “In interagency meetings,” he said, “Wolfowitz treated the analysts’ work with contempt.”
Others saw the intervention of senior officials as more responsible. Libby, who helped prepare intelligence analysis for the vice president, made several trips to the CIA with National Security Council officials during preparations of Powell’s Feb. 5 presentation to the United Nations Security Council, officials said. He was described by one senior analyst as “an avid consumer of intelligence and the asker of many questions.”
Such visits permitted Cheney and Libby to have direct exchanges with analysts, rather than asking questions of the daily briefers who task others to prepare responses that result in additional papers, senior administration sources said. Their goal was to have a free flow of information and not to intimidate the analysts -- although some may well have misinterpreted questions as directives, said some sources sympathetic to their approach.
A senior defense official also defended Wolfowitz’s questioning: “Does he ask hard questions? Absolutely. I don’t think he was trying to get people to come up with answers that weren’t true. He’s looking for data and answers and he gets frustrated with a lack of answers and diligence and with things that can’t be defended.”
A major focus for Wolfowitz and others in the Pentagon was finding intelligence to prove a connection between Saddam and Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda terrorist network. On Sept. 11, Wolfowitz told senior officials at the Pentagon that he believed Iraq might be responsible for the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.
