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James Woolsey
Former Director, CIA
Answers to Questions from the Audience
Q: How will the director of intelligence, as proposed by the 9/11 Commission, operate to gain better intelligence from the intelligence agencies?
A: First, if we split the director of central intelligence job and have one individual to manage the CIA as an agency and the other to manage the community as a whole, of which the CIA is part, we can do this in a way that does not create a czar. The person who is, let's say, a Cabinet official with oversight for the entire intelligence community, including possibly some portion of the FBI, needs to operate collegially. The secretary of defense has huge interests here, because much of the intelligence, particularly technical intelligence from signals intercepts and reconnaissance satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles is directly and immediately fed to our forces in combat, sometimes within seconds. That coordinating mechanism is not the kind of thing you want to disrupt. I think 60/40 it's a good idea to split these jobs; the director of central intelligence, which is the current title, was created that way in 1947 because the CIA was the whole intelligence community. But there weren't even any U2s in 1947, much less any satellites.
The community has grown substantially. Management of it is a major matter. Although it is possible to do two jobs by one person, the requirement has to be that one has close and cordial working relationships with at least ten people: the secretary of defense, the president and the four committee chairmen in the Congress (the intelligence and appropriations committees and their ranking members). I had eight. I had a good relationship with Les Aspin and Bill Perry, both old friends and secretaries of defense. I didn't have a bad relationship with President Clinton, I just had none at all. Of the eight congressional leaders, I had seven good relationships and one awful, with the Senate intelligence committee Chairman Dennis DeConcini. He and I did not see a single issue the same way for the two years I was in the job. As a result of that, Congress was in session, for example, 195 days in 1993; and in that year I had 205 appointments on Capitol Hill. I was up there on average more than once a day trying to undo budget cuts of Arabic language speakers, of satellites. I didn't have enough time to do both jobs. If someone were lucky and he had all ten of those relationships very sound and solid, he might be able to do both jobs, but I think the chances of that, given human nature, are relatively slim.
Q: Does the CIA need to change its strategic focus or operational infrastructure to address the future intelligence challenges we face?
A: Yes, some of these changes will be possible but difficult. Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA case officer who writes on these subjects, says that in order to operate in the Middle East case officers need to be what are called NOCs, non-official cover officers. They can't be people, on the whole, who are attached to the U.S. Embassy undercover as State Department officials or something like that. That worked reasonably well in the Cold War, because you met a lot of Soviets in various capacities that, as a U.S. government official, you needed to talk to. Besides, we got an awful lot of volunteers from the Soviets for people to spy for the United States. The way I used to put it was that Thomas Jefferson did a lot of recruiting for us in the Cold War. We're not going to see that in Al Qaeda cells. We're going to have to get into those clans and families. That's going to take CIA officers who don't look like a younger version of me, coming from Oklahoma and trying to speak a halting Arabic. They are going to have to look like, behave like and be essentially people who are at home in the region and are very brave.
A lot of what we use to collect intelligence now and in the Cold War is not going to be a great deal of use in foreign intelligence collection against terrorist groups. You don't learn much about terrorists by looking at their caves or tents with satellites. When we've been able, through great cleverness, to intercept some of their communications, some damn fool talks to the press about it and it shows up on the front page of the paper: Hey, we're reading bin Laden's satellite telephone. Isn't that neat. So he shuts down his use of his satellite telephone. The relationship that really matters in detecting attacks by people like Al Qaeda in the United States is a relationship between a corner grocer in Dearborn, Michigan – let's say Mr. Hasaan – and Officer O'Reilly, who walks the beat outside his store. If Mr. Hasaan is comfortable telling Officer O'Reilly, There's three or four new guys here in this apartment building where I am and they stick to themselves, they sound like they are either Yemeni or south Saudi, one of them said something really strange about terrorism the other day, that relationship is most likely to be able to let us be consistent with the civil liberties of Americans. That's where we will learn about the terrorist cells and the equivalents of Lackawanna, of the terrorist financing operations in the places like Herndon, Virginia, and it will be a very important piece of the long war of the 21st century – in some ways more important than many aspects of foreign intelligence collection.
Q: If there were one recommendation that ought to be implemented immediately, what would that be?
A: Make sure that either the next director of central intelligence – or if the job is split, the next two people in those jobs – are people who do not want too much to be liked. These are skunk-at-the-garden-party jobs; if you want positive feedback, go run a motivation group or something.
Q: How would you outline a U.S.-Iran policy?
A: The best thing we can do for the people of Iran, in addition to imposing whatever sanctions we can get our somewhat flaccid European allies to go along with to limit their nuclear program, is to provide assistance overtly, not covertly, to student groups, unions, etc. We want to help as much as we can with broadcasting to the people of Iran that they and we are on the same side. I don't think it makes sense to use military force – even though it has some of the same characteristics that Iraq did: some more, some less, ties to terrorist groups like Hezbollah; work on weapons of mass destruction programs, certainly; and being a terrible dictatorship.
Bernard Lewis, a great Arab Mideast historian, says that Iran today is the only country in the Middle East where the United States is genuinely and thoroughly popular. We are seen as the enemy of these crazy mullahs running things in Tehran. We don't want to drive all of these wonderful women and students and clerics into the arms of Khamenei and Rafsanjani. The best thing we could possibly do for freedom in Iran is to make this situation in Iraq turn out well for democracy and the rule of law. This will not be easy.
If we begin to see a Shiite-majority democracy coming into existence in Iraq, it will be an earthquake for the mullahs in Tehran, for Bashar al-Assad in Syria. It will also, because they also have substantial Shiite minorities in the Gulf states and in Saudi Arabia, they will themselves begin to get very worried and start to think that maybe the fact that these Iraqi students are going to universities and studying useful things and they have a movie industry getting started and Internet cafes and it's all showing up on television, maybe we better start thinking that we better start doing things differently.
Q: What happened to the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
A: Okay. A) I don't know, but B) here are some thoughts about four categories: ballistic missiles, nuclear, bacteriological and chemical. Ballistic missiles: We know from the recent Butler report from Britain, as well as from the Senate intelligence committee report, that the CIA did a pretty good job. They may have slightly understated what Saddam was doing in violating the various covenants with respect to ballistic missiles. He was working on longer-range ballistic missiles. He was in violation, and the CIA had him pretty well. If anything, they were a little cautious in making charges.
Nuclear is very interesting now, because the CIA said in that very famous estimate in the fall of '02 that they believed – assuming Saddam needed to develop his own fissionable material – that they were five to seven years away from a bomb. The whole thing in nuclear weapons is getting the fissionable material, the highly enriched uranium or the plutonium. The bomb itself is pretty easy to make; the design is out there on the Internet. Once you've the fissionable material, even if you're a very poor country like North Korea, you're very close to having a weapon that would work.
Keep in mind that Saddam had not one, not two, but three fissionable materials programs in the 1980s and that he was only months away from having what he needed for a weapon at the time we went to war with him in 1991; that was clear after the '91 war and the inspectors went in. Hans Blix at the time was the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. In the late '80s, Blix and I were stationed together as diplomats in Vienna. In those years, Blix's agency missed not one, not two, but all three of those enrichment programs. So there was a mindset of saying that maybe the Iraqis have hidden something.
The big controversy about nuclear weapons of mass destruction has had to do with whether Iraq was attempting to buy or had bought yellowcake (uranium oxide) from Niger. The CIA said, based on a report from Britain – and they also didn't object ultimately when the president put it in the State of the Union – that, as of late 2002, the British had informed us that Iraq was attempting to obtain yellowcake from Niger. Iraq had already obtained a lot of yellowcake from Niger, as Prime Minister Blair continually points out: They bought a lot of it in the 1980s; it's Niger's main export. It was an understandable assumption, and the administration was reasonably cautious in what they said: was attempting in late 2002.
Now Ambassador Joseph Wilson enters the story. He was asked in early 2002 to go out to Niger, talk to people and make an assessment. He came back and said there was no successful effort by Iraq, as of early 2002, that had succeeded in buying yellowcake from Niger. (Footnote: since the 1980s.) I never thought there was a conflict between what Wilson said and what the president said. Wilson said in early 2002 they hadn't succeeded; the president said that the British told us in late 2002 that they were trying. I never understood why we got off on this business of apologies and should it have been in the speech or not. We now know, from the British report and from the Senate report, that the Nigerian prime minister told Ambassador Wilson that there had been an Iraqi trade delegation in Niger in 1999 and that he believed they were after yellowcake. Lord Butler's report says Blair's statement about the attempt to obtain the yellowcake and the president's statement were "well-founded" and that the British report did not come from forged documents.
Bacteriological: Nobody uses bacteriological weapons on the battlefield. Some bacteriological agents are contagious, like smallpox; others you can't control where the wind is going to blow them, like anthrax. Saddam has used weapons of mass destruction twice, both times chemicals. I don't think there was ever any assumption that the Iraqis had loaded up anthrax into bombs or shells to be used on the battlefield. People were worried that they might have launched a Scud with anthrax aimed at Israel. The administration made a big mistake, as did the CIA, in continuing to talk about biological weapons. A weapon to most of us, whether we work in these areas or not, is a loaded-up shell or bomb, and if you have a stockpile of weapons people expect to find warehouses full of big stuff. But, if you look at the biological agent that is the anthrax itself, the picture is a little different. Saddam made, in the late 1980s, 8,500 liters of anthrax. That's the amount that was determined after denying that he had any kind of biological program. His son-in-law Kemal Hussein defected, he was a head of the program. The Iraqis said, Okay, we admit it. Hans Blix, as well as almost everybody else, said nobody knows what they did with this; there is no record of it being destroyed, we don't know if it's destroyed or not: 8,500 liters sounds big, but that's only 8.5 tons – less than half of a tractor-trailer. If you reduce it to powder, it goes down in volume from between a factor of 500 and 1,000. That means four to eight suitcases for the entire Iraqi biological agent stockpile. The country is the size of California.
The fourth area is the one where it was the biggest mistake: chemical weapons. Again they said chemical weapons, rather than chemical agent. If you just look at the sarin or nerve gas, there were 100 to 500 tons – five to 25 tractor-trailer loads. It was credible that there were loaded up, or about to be loaded up, weapons to be used on the battlefield. That has not been found. That they may have made a big mistake on. But it's interesting who else made mistakes. David Kay, when he stepped down as the chief inspector on this late last year, pointed that all, not most, all of the Iraqi generals who had battlefield commands when they had been taken into custody by the Coalition forces were kept separate from one another, and every one said, My unit didn't have chemical weapons, but the unit to my right and the unit to my left did. Kay believes these generals were all told their colleagues had chemical weapons. It's understandable, given that wilderness of mirrors that was Baathist Iraq, how they could have gotten that one wrong. If George Tenet had been the best spymaster in the history of the world and succeeded in recruiting say a dozen, two dozen Iraqi combatant generals as CIA agents and informants, it's entirely plausible that the unanimous report coming back from all of these spies could have been, Yep, that's right, we've got all these chemical weapons.
We've got to look for these things in different ways, have different approaches, but on balance I think I would have to say that the mistakes are complex and that it is not a simple matter of the CIA or the Bush administration having said a single thing is there and now the single thing is not there.
