Rumsfeld's personal spy ring

The defense secretary couldn't count on the CIA or the State Department to provide a pretext for war in Iraq. So he created a new agency that would tell him what he wanted to hear.

By Eric Boehlert

July 16, 2003 | During last fall's feverish ramp-up to war with Iraq, the Pentagon created an unusual in-house shop to monitor Saddam Hussein's links with terrorists and his allegedly sprawling arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. With direct access to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office and the White House, the influential group helped lay out, both to administration officials and to the press, an array of chilling, almost too good to be true examples of why Saddam posed an immediate threat to America.

Six months later, with controversy mounting over the administration's handling of war intelligence, the small, secretive cell inside the Pentagon is drawing closer scrutiny and may soon be the subject of a congressional inquiry to determine whether it manipulated and politicized key intelligence and botched planning for postwar Iraq.

"The concern is they were in the cherry-picking business -- cherry-picking half-truths and rumors and only highlighting pieces of information that bolstered the administration's case for war," says U.S. Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee.

The Pentagon's innocuously named Office of Special Plans served as a unique, handpicked group of hawkish defense officials who worked outside regular intelligence channels. According to the Department of Defense, the group was first created in the aftermath of Sept. 11 to supplement the war on terrorism; it was designed to sift through all the intelligence on terrorist activity, and to focus particularly on various al-Qaida links. By last fall it was focusing almost exclusively on Iraq, and often leaking doomsday findings about Saddam's regime. Those controversial conclusions are now fueling the suspicion that the obscure agency, propelled by ideology, manipulated key findings in order to fit the White House's desire to wage war with Iraq.

"Everything we've seen since the war has confirmed intelligence community suspicions about its [the Office of Special Plans'] sources of information," says Greg Thielmann, who ran military assessments at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research until he retired in October. "The rosy assumption about troops being greeted with flowers and hugs -- that came from that stream of intelligence. The assurance that they knew exactly where the weapons of mass destruction were, or that Iraq was ready to employ chemical and biological weapons in battle within 45 minutes of an order -- all of those stories have proven wrong."

Those alarming allegations, and the subsequent failure to find any weapons of mass destruction, have created a firestorm over intelligence that has forced the Bush administration on the defensive in recent days. The controversy may soon focus attention on the Office of Special Plans, which has been raising hackles among intelligence professionals for the last year. Former CIA counterterrorism chief Vince Cannistraro refers to the office dismissively as "the bat cave."

Thielmann is still unclear why the civilian-run office was formed. "Do they [staffers in the Office of Special Plans] have expertise in Iraqi culture?" he asks. "Are they missile experts? Nuclear engineers? There's no logical explanation for the office's creation except that they wanted people to find evidence to support their answers [about war]."

Currently, the Senate Intelligence Committee is holding closed-door hearings about the intelligence gathering for Iraq. But the House Appropriations Committee, which is weighing the Department of Defense's nearly $400 billion annual budget request, may soon sign off on an inquiry specifically looking into the Office of Special Plans. It would be triggered by a survey and investigation, or S&I, request. The appropriations committee has at its disposal a unique arm of investigators, sort of an in-house General Accounting Office staff.

"What we're asking for is not a determination of wrongdoing," says Scott Lilly, minority staff director for the House Appropriations Committee. "But just routine information about appropriated funds that we ask all the time."

The initial request, made by the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, Wisconsin Rep. David Obey, could lead to more sensitive questions about the office.

"There have been serious allegations made and he [Obey] thinks our committee has responsibility to determine if they're true," says Lilly. "If there's evidence that the office of Secretary of Defense got itself involved in extracurricular intelligence operations that generated misinformation, that's serious and something we'll try to see doesn't happen in the future."

The House inquiry, though modest in its scope, would mark another setback for the Bush administration as it comes under increasing political pressure to explain gathered intelligence on Iraq, why so much of it appears to have been badly off the mark, and whether the White House knowingly misled the country about the need for an unprecedented preemptive war.

For the last week, in what the Washington Post on Tuesday officially labeled a "feeding frenzy," the White House has been trying to explain why bogus information, long ago discredited by intelligence experts, about Saddam Hussein's alleged effort to secure uranium from Niger for his nuclear weapons program, made it into this year's State of the Union address.

On Monday, Bush defended the use of intelligence and insisted: "When all is said and done the people of the United States will realize that Saddam Hussein had a weapons program." But before the war, the White House insisted Saddam had actual weapons, not simply "programs," which was why Iraq was supposed to be a grave, imminent threat to the United States.

According to a recent Newsweek poll, 45 percent of Americans say the Bush administration misinterpreted intelligence reports about Iraq; 38 percent think it deliberately mislead the country.

To date, no weapons or significant evidence of weapons programs have been located, which in and of itself is remarkable. "One year ago, no serious person would've thought we'd have 150,000 troops combing the country and still not be able to find the poison gas," says John Pike, an intelligence expert and director of GlobalSecurity.org.

Pike describes the Office of Special Plans as "Rummy's war room." Other critics are convinced the operation was manipulating information, and worse, disturbing the peer-review method within the intelligence community. "There's a formal, well-established intelligence process in Washington, which Rumsfeld apparently wanted to circumvent" by creating the office, says Thielmann. "Their operation was virtually invisible to us; I don't remember seeing any of their intelligence information." He says the Office of Special Plans "had no status in the intelligence community."

"It was not a neutral, transparent link in the intelligence chain," adds Steve Aftergood, senior research analyst for the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit organization that monitors national security policy. "It was staffed by people with a distinct perspective on events, so it was logical to assume that perspective would be reflected in the work."

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