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EXHIBIT D
The Dark Side
PRODUCED
AND DIRECTED BY
Michael Kirk
PRODUCED AND REPORTED BY
Jim Gilmore
WRITTEN BY
Michael Kirk
NARRATOR: After 9/11, the White House went to war.
Vice Pres. DiCK CHENEY: We’ve
got to spend time in the shadows. We have to
work toward the dark side, if you
will.
NARRATOR: And the vice president would lead the charge
OBSERVER: He’s the most powerful vice president in
history of our country.
NARRATOR: and define the war on terror.
OBSERVER: Things are going to happen that the public’s
not going to know about.
OBSERVER: We weren’t going to play by the old set of
rules.
Vice Pres. DiCK CHENEY: It’s
going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal to achieve our
objective.
NARRATOR: Tonight on FRONTLINE, the inside story from
The Dark Side.
911 OPERATOR: Police operator. Where is the emergency?
WOMAN: Help! Help!
FIRE DEPT. DISPATCHER: Fire Department 408. Where’s the fire?
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I I I I I
U
THE E~F~1( SIDE
FRONTLINE~
4~.
ii
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911
OPERATOR: I received another call in regards the World Trade Center.
[“Meet
the Press, “September 16, 2001]
Vice
Pres. RICHARD CHENEY: My secretary had called in just before 9:00 and said an
airplane had hit the World Trade Center.
WOMAN: I’m going to die. aren’t I!
911
OPERATOR: No, no, no, no!
WOMAN: I’m going to die!
911
OPERATOR: Ma’am, say your prayers!
Vice
Pres. RICHARD CIIENEY: So we turned on the television and actually saw the
second plane hit.
POLICE
DEPT. DISPATCHER: Police department 305. Where is the emergency?
MAN: [unintelligiblej’ but it’s getting bad! Oh God! Oh!
Vice
Pres. RICHARD CHENEY: My Secret Service agents caine in and said, “Sir, we have
to leave hmnediately,” and grabbed me and hoisted me up and moved me very
rapidly to an underground facility under the White House. The Secret Service
had received a report that an airplane was headed for the White House.
NEWSCASTER: Oh,
my goodness! There is smoke pouring out of the Pentagon!
Vice
Pres. RICHARD CITENEY: Within short order, we had word the Pentagon’s been hit.
We had a reports that there were six airplanes that might have been hijacked,
and that’s what we started working off of, was that list of six.
NARRATOR:
They scrambled the Air Force. The vice president said he was authorized to
order them to shoot down commercial airliners. Richard Clarke was in the
bunkers.
RICHARD
CLARKE Director NSC Counterterrorism, 1998-01: He had recommended that we use
force to shoot down passenger aircraft, if those passenger aircraft were
hijacked and if it looked like they were about to take out a significant
target, like the White House or the Capitol.
NARRATOR: On
the phone to the Pentagon, Cheney talked about the shootdown order with his
oldest political ally, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld.
/9/71
commission report7
“Has
that directive been transmitted to the aircraft?” The vice president answered,
“Yes, it has.”
By
10:39 in the morning, Cheney mistakenly believed the military had taken down at
least two aircraft. (CIt is my understanding they’ve already taken a couple of
aircraft out,” he said. “We can’t confirm that,” Rumsfeld replied. “We’re told
that one aircraft is
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down,
but we do not have a pilot report that did it.”
The
aircraft. United Airlines flight 93, had just crashed in Pennsylvania. Chenev
believed he had been responsible for shooting it down.
RIChARD
CLARKE: 1-le was very firm, calm, cool. making decisions clearly.
JAMES
MANN, Author, Rise of the Vulcans: He immediately begins to take charge of
what’s going to happen in Washington.
Vice
Pres. RICHARD CHENEY: [‘Meet the
Press,” September 1& 2001] It’s
going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal to achieve our
objective.
RICHARD
CLARKE: I think the vice president felt he kind of looked death in the eye on
9/11. Three thousand Americans died. The building that the vice president used
to work in blew up, and people died there. This was a cold slap in the face.
This is a different world you’re living in now. And the enemy’s still out
there, and the enemy could come after you. That does cause you to think things
differently.
NARRATOR:
The vice president would become the chief architect of the war on terror. There
would be new laws enhancing execufive power, robust action at home and abroad,
and above all, secrecy.
[“Meet
the Press, “September 16, 2001]
Vice
Pres. RICHARD CIIENEY: We have to work toward dark side, if you will. We’ve got
to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to
be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using
sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies.
GARY
SCIIROEN, CIA 1970-2002: There were
about 30 of us standing around, and as soon as the second aircraft smashed into
the second tower, everyone said, “Bin Laden. It was bin Laden. This is the
attack that bin Laden’s been promising.”
NARRATOR:
The CIA had been warning the White House about bin Laden, but they had missed
how and when it would happen.
JOHN
McLAUGhLIN, Dpty. Director, CIA 2000-04:
We were fighting these guys, and they won a huge victory on that day and it was
a huge defeat for us.
NARRATOR:
George Tenet. the director of Central Intelligence, a seasoiied political
operator. wanted official Washington to know the CIA already knew who was responsible.
He sent deputies out for briefings.
Sen.
BOB GRAhAM (D-FL), Select Comm. on
Intel., 01-03: We were given the CIA’s initial assessment of what had
happened, and they listed al Qaeda as the most likely source of this attack.
JAMES
BAMFORD, Author, The Puzzle Palace: On the afternoon of September 11th.
the Pentagon is still smoking, Donald Rurnsfeld dictates to one of his aides,
“We’ve got to see. somehow. how we could bring Saddam Hussein into this.”
[Dept.
of Defense notes. 9/11/01, 2:40 PMJ “Judge
whether hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at the same time, not only UBL [Usama bin
Laden].”
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MICHAEL
SCHEUER, CIA 1982-2004: Mr. Wolfowitz, Mr. Ruinsfeld and Mr Cheney all cut
their teeth in the cold war. in the contest between nation-states. They’re not
comfortable with thinking that the world’s greatest power can be threatened by
a couple of Arabs with long beards, squatting around a desert campfire in
AfgMnistan. It doesn’t register.
NARRATOR:
All that day, Rurnsfeld and Vice President Cheney were in close contact with
the president. They argued there would have to be retaliation, not just against
bin Laden hut also against nations that may have helped al Qaeda, nations like
Iraq.
Pres.
GEORGE W. BUSH: We will make no distinction between the terrorists who
conmîitted these acts and those who harbor them.
NARRATOR:
And later that evening, Don Rurnsfeld took the opportunity to raise Iraq.
BOB WOODWARD, The
Washington Post: The night of 9/li, at a small group meeting of the principals.
Rumsfeld actually puts Iraq on the table and says, “Part of our response maybe
should he attacking Iraq. It’s an opportunity.”
NARRATOR:
The president was now the focus of a longstanding ambition of the vice
president and his allies to deal with Saddain Hussein.
RON
SUSKIND, Author, The One Percent Doctrine: I mean, when you really think about
all these chess pieces moving, with significant players, seasoned infighters,
almost in every chair. Now, take these two characters, Cheney and Rumsfeld. and
move them into the two key slots around a young and generally inexperienced
president. certainly in foreign affairs. It’s something of a mismatch.
NARRATOR:
But Cheney had a competitor. Back when they were assembling the Bush
administration, Cheney had tried hard to keep George Tenet out.
CHARLES
BATTAGLIA, Bush-Cheney 2000 Transition: The word I was getting here from Vice
President-Designate Cheney’s staff is that there was no way that George Tenet
was going to stay around.
NARRATOR:
Not much about Tenet appealed to Cheney. He was a holdover from the
Clinton
administration, a Democrat. But he’d worked in the Senate, at the National
Security
Council, and knew something about the personal side of politics.
Tenet,
after all, renamed the CIA headquarters after George W. Bush’s father, after
George
Herbert Walker Bush. And it was a signal of his deft touch as a political
manager
that he did this.
NARRATOR:
Bush 41 recommended Tenet to his son, and they immediately hit it off.
DAVID
KAY, Iraq Weapons Inspector: He’s a very gregarious, enjoyable friend to have.
He wraps his hand around you, chewing on an unlit cigar. He loves to talk
sports. He’s a man’s man.
NARRATOR:
They met nearly every morning, Tenet personally delivering the Presidential
Daily Brief, the PDB.
STEVE
COLL: It’s very easy to see how Tenet and George W. Bush would have gotten
along well. They’re both men who aren’t going to spend a lot of time pulling
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apart
nuances of international relations. They’re interested in short, sharp facts, a
clear sense of direction. And Tenet, like the president, is casual in his
demeanor. It’s easy to imagine at these briefings that two men who didn’t know
each other at all discovered that they were similar personalities.
NARRATOR:
Some at the CIA worried that Tenet might become just a little too close the
president.
RICHARD
KERR, Fmr. Dpty. Director CIA: I do believe that you can get to close and
become, if you will, partisan to the policy. You can be captured by being close
to the seat of power. And I think you have to be very careful.
NARRATOR:
But on the night of 9/11, out at CIA headquarters, George Tenet was all
business, pushing hard to prepare a counterattack.
J.
COFER BLACK, CIA 1974-2002: We had been working on this for years. When
everybody else is looking for their maps on Afghanistan. we’re ready to rock,
we’re ready to roll. And it really took momentum. And George Tenet said, “OK.
take the plan and have it ready by tomorrow.”
RON
SUSKhND: They come blazing forward with a fully architected plan. “We are going
to spread this over 80 countries. We are going to go at it with this
eight-pronged attack.”
NARRATOR:
Tenet and Cofer Black vividly delivered the message.
MIKE
SCHEUER: Cofer Black, who was the Chief of CTC. said. you know, “We’re going to
put their heads on pikes, and we want flies crossing you know, crawling across
their dead eyes,” and that kind of headquarters hero talk.
RON
SUSKIND: The president loves operational guys. Black does a great presentation.
You know. Black has been waiting his whole life for this, basically. He’s very
theatrical.
COFER
BLACK: This is serious business. We’ve been attacked. This is war. People are
going to die. And my guys are going to die.
RON
SUSKIND: He can talk the talk of blood lust. You know, he’s very vivid. The
president loves this.
NARRATOR:
Tenet wanted the CIA to take the lead, but Dick Cheney favored the Pentagon and
Rumsfeld. and deeply distrusted the CIA. They all knew that after Tenet left
the morning briefing, Dick Cheney would still be there.
RICHARD
CLARKE, Dir., NSC Counterterrorisni 1998-01: I think the personal relationship
with the president that George Tenet had is still that of an employee. It
doesn’t begin to touch the decades of working together that Cheney and Rumsfeld
had.
MELVIN
GOODMAN, Fmr. CIA Officer: You haven’t had that kind of strong relationship
between a vice president and a secretary of defense. We’ve never had a vice
president as powerful as Dick Cheney, and we’ve never had a secretary of
defense who probably is feared as much as Donald Rumsfeld.
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NARRATOR:
Once, 35 years ago. Cheney had worked for Rumsfeld. It began in the
Nixon administration, when Rumsfeld was looking for a staff aide.
FRANK
CARLUCCI, Fmr. Secretary of Defense: One day, Don called n* in and said,
“There’s a young intern on the Hill named Dick Cheney. Frank. l’m thinking of
hiring him. I’d like you to interview him and see what you think.” So I
interviewed Dick and called Don and said, “I think this guy’s pretty good. You
ought to hire him.”
NARRATOR:
They would be closely linked for more than three decades.
JAMES
MANN, Author, Rise of the Vulcans: The difference between these two people,
Runisfeld and Cheney Rumsfeld, he’ll come right at you. There’s nothing
indirect about him. Cheney tends to be very low-keyed. It’s just a difference
in style between the two guys. Politically, they’re really the guys their views
of the world and their views of government are very similar.
NARRATOR:
Then, as Gerald Ford took office, they took over running the White House.
BOB
WOODWARD: I happened to be talking to former president Ford, and I asked, “How
did this happen?” And he said, “Don Rumsfeld, when I picked him as White House
chief of staff, he said, ~IEI’ll accept, but there’s one thing I have to have,
and that is I want to bring in a guy named Dick Cheney.’ “And Ford said, “I
haven’t even met him,” but he agreed. And so Rumsfeld gave political life to
Dick Cheney, to say the least.
NARRATOR:
They were formidable bureaucratic infighters, and one day they proved it.
literally remaking the Ford administration in a legendary maneuver performed
entirely behind the scenes.
RON
SUSKIND, Author, The One Percent Doctrine: In really a couple of days, the
so-called “Halloween massacre,” they manage to cut Henry Kissinger’s job in
half; and the vice president, Rockefeller, is swiftly marginalized. William
Colby, then running the CIA, is replaced with George H. W. Bush. Rumsfeld moves
to be secretary of defense. Cheney moves up to Rumsfeld’s job as chief of
staff. It’s an extraordinary tactical flourish.
NARRATOR:
After the Ford administration. Runisfeld made his fortune in private industry.
Cheney spent 10 years in Congress. where he was immersed in intelligence
matters, and then he became secretary of defense for the first President Bush.
In the shadow of Cohn Powell, he had quietly managed the military in the Gulf
war. Now he and Rumsfeld wanted the military to come up with a plan for
attacking al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but the Pentagon was caught flat-footed.
MELVIN
GOODMAN: The military was totally unprepared in the wake of 9/11 for anything
that needed to be done in Afghanistan. They had no plans on the shelf. They had
no idea what was required.
NARRATOR:
The secretary of defense called his generals at Central Command. Tommy Franks
was the four star. Mike DeLong was his number two.
Lt.
Gen. MICHAEL DeLONG, Dpty. Cmdr. CENTCOM 2000-03: We had no plan. I mean, to be
honest, you have operational plans for different parts of the world. There
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was
none for Afghanistan.
NARRATOR: Rumsfeld
was angry. He wanted quick action with a small force, and he didn’t mince words
with Tommy Franks about it.
Lt.
Gen. MICHAEL DeLONG: The tensions were really high, and Franks was not getting
any more sleep than I was. And by the way, he drinks maybe 15 cups of coffee a
day, smokes two packs of cigarettes, cigars, and chews. So he’s running on
adrenalin and caffeine and nicotine. And so it doesn’t take much to scratch
that line, and he and Rumsfeld went at it.
NARRATOR:
Rumsfeld would scramble, but Tenet and his countertenor teams were way ahead of
him.
RON
SUSKIND: And I think it’s a bitter pill for the Pentagon this great historical
moment. They’re public servants, after all. In some ways, they wait their whole
life to be called to duty at a moment like this. And the Pentagon is largely on
the sidelines, watching, and watching, of all people, the CIA. Oh!
NARRATOR:
At Camp David, four days after 9/li, George Bush would hear the formal
arguments for and against including Iraq in the ‘var plan.
JOHN
McLAUGHLIN, Dpty. Director, CIA 2000-04: Hard to describe the feeling, in the
room. I mean, they were focused.
NARRATOR:
They began with Afghanistan, but Cheney’s former Pentagon deputy, Paul
Woifowitz, brought up Iraq.
JOHN
McLAUGHLIN: There was discussion of Iraq and whether Iraq was behind this and
whether Iraq should be included in any targeting.
KENNETH
POLLACK, National Security Council 1999-01: They made Saddam Hussein out to be
the greatest threat to the United States and the source of all evil, if not in
the world, then certainly in the Middle East.
JOHN
McLAUGHLIN: That discussion went back and forth, back and forth, back and
forth. The Agency argued that that was not appropriate, not the right
conclusion to draw at this point.
NARRATOR:
secretary of State Powell weighed in on Tenet’s side, hut Cheney had no faith
in the CIA.
DAVID
KAY, Iraq Weapons Inspector: I think there’s one thing that influences him, at
least in my conversations. He remembered as clearly as I remembered how wrong
intelligence had been in 1991.
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NARRATOR:
They had been wrong about the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
Iranian
revolution, Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, and more.
RICHARD
CLARKE: There was a massive nuclear program in Iraq. nuclear weapons
development
program, that was probably 9 to 18 months away from having its first
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nuclear
weapon detonation, and that CIA had totally missed it. We had bombed everything
we could bomb in Iraq but missed an enormous nuclear weapons development
facility didn’t know it was there, never dropped one bomb on it
DAVID
KAY: That’s at the forefront, at least in my conversations with him about Iraq.
You know, they were wrong before. They didn’t get the evidence. How do we know
what they know now?
RICHARD
CLARKE: There’s no doubt that Dick Cheney comes back into office eight years
later, nine years later, has that as one of the things burnt into his memory.
that Iraq wants a nuclear weapon, fraq was that close to getting a nuclear
weapon, and CIA hadn’t a clue.
JOHN
McLAUGIILI1N: At the end of all this deliberation, the president says, “Thank
you all very much. This has been a very good discussion. I’m going to think
about all of this on Sunday, and I’ll call you together Monday and tell you
what I’ve concluded.”
NARRATOR:
The stakes for Cheney and Rumsfeld were high. If the CIA prevailed, they could
lose control of how and where the war on terror would be fought.
JOHN
McLAUGHLIN: And Monday, we all
assembled in the Cabinet Room, and the president lays down about 12 decisions, just
like that, machine-gun fashion.
INTERVIEWER: What
did he say?
JOHN
McLAUGHLIN: Well, of course, the thing that stands out in my memory, because it
hit me vividly, was he said, “I want CIA in there first.”
NARRATOR:
It was a body blow to Cheney and Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld’s military machine would be
taking a back seat to the CIA and George Tenet.
GARY
SCHROEN, CIA 1970-2002: My team, seven officers, including myself and
three air crew, flew in on the 26th of September. When I began to distribute
money $200,000 dollars here, $250,000 for this I think that the Afghans were
convinced that we were sincere.
NARRATOR:
It was a new kind of war against an invisible enemy.
CARL
W. FORD, Jr., Dir. State Dept. Intel. 2001-03:
You read the stories about what these people did on the ground in Afghanistan,
and it’s like you could make movies out of it, it’s so fantastic.
NARRATOR:
The plan was all about size and speed and using just the right CIA officers.
GARY
BERNTSEN, CIA 1982-2005: And they had
to be guys that we knew that we could trust. Cofer Black told me, “One third of
your men will die. Be prepared for that. I accept it. You need to accept it and
proceed aggressively. I want you killing the enemy in 48 hours. Find them and
destroy them.”
NARRATOR:
They would spend millions to buy the Northern Alliance, ragtag fighters led by
brutal warlords.
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J.
COFER BLACK, CIA 1974-2002: It’s
going to be a multi-prong threat attack. where we work with locals. We
compromised enemies. We used cash. We provided humanitarian aid.
NARRATOR:
But once the covert side of the CIA plan was fmished, they needed the
U.S.
military. Don Rmnsfeld’s military. They would wait and wait, for almost a
month.
GARY
SCIIROEN: We were there for just about a month by ourselves in the valley.
We were
the only Americans in country for almost a month.
NARRATOR:
By late October at CIA headquarters, they were worried.
TYLER
DRUMHELLER, Chief, CIA European Div. 2001-05: We were already making plans for
a winter siege. And we had meetings on the budget, like, how we would budget
for this. and you know, the military and our people and the Northern Alliance
people would be there through the winter.
NARRATOR:
Then there was a fiery NSC meeting. The CIA had been complaining Rumsfeld was
dragging his feet in Afghanistan. It was said Rumsfeld didn’t like taking
orders from the CIA.
JAMES
BAMFORID, Author, The Puzzle Palace: There was a lot ofjealousy that Tenet had
a leg up, and Rumsfeld was about three yards back.
Lt.
Gen. MICHAEL DeLONG: Rumsfeld went to the president and said, “The CIA has to
work for me. or this isn’t going to work.”
DAVID
KAY: I’ve got a lot of respect for Rumsfeld as a bureaucratic infighter. He
never loses a battle because if he loses a battle, he’ll re-fight it the next
morning.
NARRATOR: The
president finally agreed. Rurnsfeld would now be in charge. Lt. Gen. MICHAEL
DeLONG: That’s what happened. CIA works for Rumsfeld.
NARRATOR:
Army special ops teams were airlifted to Afghanistan, and the military side of
Operation Jawbreaker could begin in earnest.
GARY
SCIIROEN: it wasn’t until the night of the 19th of October or the morning of
the 20th that the first special forces A-team caine in.
NARRATOR:
The Northern Alliance on horseback, the special ops teams with global position
devices calling in air strikes, made short work of the Taliban forces. Finally,
in mid-November, the capital. Kabul, fell.
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GARY
SCHROEN: And I was absolutely convinced that that would happen and that the
Taliban would break quickly. That could have happened in October, early
October.
NARRATOR:
It was mission accomplished.
COFER
BLACK: We’d like the survivors of 9/11 to know that those of us in the
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business
consider it the CIA’s finest hour. We \vent in to kick ass, and we did that.
MELVIN
GOODMAN, Fmr. CIA Officer: It was a CIA success story.
NARRATOR:
George Tenet and the CIA were riding high. Now they wanted to take on al Qaeda
all over the globe.
STEVE
COLL, Author, Ghost Wars: Now he had the place at the table, the role in
American
national security that hearkened back to the glory days of the CIA in the ~E50s
and the ~E60s and even druing the Second World War.
NARRATOR:
But Tenet’s man-of-the-hour status was already being undercut behind closed
doors. Dick Cheney had quietly placed loyalists throughout the administration,
and they were abeady in motion.
JAMES
MANN: Many of the people who worked for Cheney when he was defense secretary
end up in senior jobs in the administration.
LAWRENCE
WILKERSON, Chief of Staff, State Dept. 2002-05: And his network is positioned
almost everywhere in the government that’s important.
JAMES
BAMIFORD: That’s how they were able to galvanize so much power.
NARRATOR:
He aggregated the power at key national security centers. At the Pentagon,
Rumnsfeld was joined by Wolfowitz and Feith, Camnbone, Richard Perle.
DANIEL
BENJAMIN, National Security Council 1994-99: The important thing that unites
them is their belief in the primacy of the military tool, that it’s been an
underused tool.
NARRATOR: Over
at Cohn Powell’s State Department, Cheney brought in John Bolton.
LARRY
WILKERSON: Bolton’s not President Bush’s man, he’s Dick Cheney’s man.
NARRATOR: At
the White house, Cheney’s national security staff was larger than that of any
vice president in history.
JAMES
MANN: He went out and had his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, appoint what
amounts to a whole second National Security Council. It became a new source of
power within the whole foreign policy community. It’s an agency all its own.
NARRATOR:
And he relied on Rumsfeld and the insiders at the Pentagon to create their own
intelligence capability.
DANA
PRIEST, The Washington Post: He starts to put in place a new capability that’s
not yet filly developed. But the outlines are, “We need to figure out how to
gather more intelligence ourself, the military, not rely so much on the CIA.”
JOHN
BRENNAN, Dpty. Exec. Director, CIA 200 1-03: There were a lot of seniors in the
Department of Defense that were dismayed that they weren’t able to respond as
quickly as CIA. And I think it has been shown over the past several years that
the Defense Department has tried to increase its role in the intelligence
community and to
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chew
away at CIA’s traditional authorities and responsibilities.
NARRATOR:
The internal struggle was revealed in those morning briefings between Tenet,
the president and Cheney.
JAMES
BAMFORD: Every morning, the Presidential Daily Brief, the PDB, will be given.
It’ll be given both to the president and the vice president. And Cheney
complalned numerous times that the information coming from the CIA was not very
good.
NARRATOR:
Cheney wanted information that linked Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein
JAMES
BAMFORD: But they weren’t getting that information from the CIA. And so he put
pressure. I think, on Rumsfeld and on the Pentagon to come up with their own
estimates.
NARRATOR:
Inside the Pentagonbureaucracy, Rumsfeld could easily and quietly grow a nearly
invisible operation.
MELVIN
GOODMAN: They needed an office that would produce the intelligence that the CIA
wouldn’t produce. Rumsfeld said, “I can solve your problem.” and he put Douglas
Feith on that issue.
DANIEL
BENJAMIN: So they’re going to do their own analysis. They’re going to show what
the CIA’s been missing all along about the true relationship between Saddam and
al Qaeda.
NARRATOR:
They needed people with experience in the world of intelligence, but they hired
politically connected policy analysts.
F.
MICHAEL MALOOF, DoD 1982-2004: I got a phone call. The next thing I know.
I’m
being detailed on over to Doug Feith’s office, and that I would be joined by
Dave
Wurmser,
who today works in the office of the vice president.
NARRATOR:
They worked in a vault deep inside the Pentagon. They had what is known as “all
source clearances” total access to intelligence information.
MICHAEL
F. MALOOF: I went into the system, our classified system, to see whether we
know about terrorist groups and the relationships, as well as their connection,
associations with not only al Qaeda, but also with state sponsors.
NARRATOR:
The information was rarely vetted. Instead, it moved up the chain of command to
the office of the vice president.
MELVIN GOODMAN:
And this became material that was then used, sort of in white paper-like
fashion~ to be leaked to journalists or to create links between Saddam Hussein
and al Qaeda.
NARRATOR:
One story involved the leader of the 9/Il attacks, Mohammed Atta, who allegedly
had met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague.
MICHAEL
F. MALOOF: We were looking for connections, and that was one of
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them.
And then subsequently-and then I did some additional research in talking to
people who were in touch with the Czechs.
NARRATOR: They
sent it up to the vice president’s office.
Vice Pres.
DICK CHENEY: [‘Meet the Press, “December 9, 2001] It’s been pretty well
confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of
the Iraqi intelligence service.
JOHN
McLAUGHLIN: We came to a different conclusion. We went over that every which
way from Sunday. I mean, we looked at it from every conceivable angle. We
peeled open the source and examined the chain of acquisition. We looked at
photographs. We looked at timetables. We looked at who was where, when.
MICHAEL
F. MALOOF: I believe something did occur, for two reasons. Number one, I think
it’s the prime minister has always refuted the allegation that it was made up.
VINCENT
CANNISTRARO, Fmr. CIA Officer: Very early on, both CIA and FBI knew it wasn’t
true because the FBI had Atta in Florida at the time.
MICHAEL
F. MALOOF: And number two, I’m told there was a photograph of the meeting.
NARRATOR:
The 9/Il commission report would hater find that there was no photograph and
Atta was not in Prague at that time.
MICHAEL
F. MALOOF: And I sought to get for our people to get that photograph. They
never did, to my knowledge. Or at least, they never got it so that I could see
it.
[‘Meet
the Press, “September 8, 2002]
Vice
Pres. DICK CHENEY: I want to be very careful about how I say this
NARRATOR: And
despite the CIA’s conclusion that the story wasn’t true Vice Pres. DICK
CHENEY: Mohammed Atta, who was the lead hijacker NARRATOR: the vice
president continued to tell it.
Vice
Pres. DICK CHENEY: did apparently travel to Prague and NARRATOR: He would repeat it regularly for the
next two years. [‘~Meet the Press, “September 14, 2003]
Vice
Pres. DICK CIIENEY: The Czechs alleged that Mohammed Atta, the lead attacker,
met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the
attack, but we’ve never been able to develop any more of that yet.
RICHARD
CLARKE, Dir. NSC Counterterrorism 1998-01: I remember vividly, in the driveway
outside of the West Wing, Scooter Libby grabbing me from the vice president’s
office and saying, “I hear you don’t believe this report that Mohammed Atta
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was
talking to Iraqi people in Prague.” And I said, “I don’t believe it because
it’s not true.” And he said, “You’re wrong. You know you’re wrong. Go back and
find out. Look at the rest of the reports and find out that you’re wrong.” And
I understood what he was saying, which was, “This is a report that we want to
believe, and stop€aying it’s not true. It’s a real problem for the vice
president’s offlce that you, the counterterrorism coordinator, are wailcing
around saying that this isn’t a true report. Shut up.” That’s what I was
being told.
NARRATOR:
That winter, the CIA was still at war. The Taliban had fallen. Now it was Osama
bin Laden’s turn.
GARY
BERNTSEN, CIA 1982-2005: I’m looking for bin Laden right away. I want to start
killing him and his people immediately.
GARY
SCHROEN: We had intelligence that continued to develop that bin Laden and
Zawahiri were in Afghanistan, probably in the eastern areas, hiding out there.
NARRATOR:
The CIA tried to put together a team to chase bin Laden. It wasn’t easy.
GARY
BERNTSEN: I asked Anny special forces if they’ll send people in. They say, “No,
we’re not going down there. It’s unstable. You don’t have a reliable ally.”
STEVE
COLL, Author, Ghost Wars: The conditions for al Qaed&s retreat were quite
favorable, and the United States did not do the one thing that the Pentagon had
within its power to do. which was to move regular U.S. troops into a blocking
position behind these mountains.
GARY
SCIIROEN: We could come from the north, west and south, but we couldn’t block
the east. It’s rugged, rugged terrain. And we didn’t have enough U.S. troops.
Lt.
Gen. MICHAEL DeLONG, Dpty. Cindr, CENTCOM, 2000-03: How do you block this entire
mountain line? It’s like blocking the border of New Mexico from Mexico and
hoping you can keep people from going both ways, with tunnels underneath,
hundreds of them.
RICHARD
CLARKE: We could all feel it slipping away, as week after week after week went
by, and the U.S. had no military units on the ground, except a few special
forces.
[www.pbs.org:
Read Clarke’s extended interviewS]
NARRATOR:
So on his own and without the pennission of the Defense Department, CIA officer
Berntsen sent a small group to Nangahar province.
GARY
BERNTSEN: Based on intelligence that we have that bin Laden has fallen back
with about a thousand people. And then we come upon his camp at Melowah.
NARRATOR:
The CIA urgently called the Pentagon. They were given air support, but not the
Army Rangers.
GARY
BERNTSEN: And then four guys, two CIA officers and two JSOC, with about
10
Afghan guards, call in the first 56 hours of air strikes against the motherlode
of al
Qaeda
down below them. It was a nice beginning to what would be about a 16-day
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battle.
GARY
SCHROEN: We actually, I’m convinced, wounded him. He was there at Tora
Bora. I
don’t think there’s any question now that bin Laden was at Tora Bora~nd was
wounded in some way.
NARRATOR:
The CIA officers in the field told headquarters the border had not been closed
and bin Laden had escaped. That winter, a story circulated that military
resources were already being aimed at Iraq. One United States senator, the
chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, remembers a private conversation
with General Franks.
Sen.
BOB GRAhAM (D-FL), Select Comte. on Intel.
2001-03: The general said, “Senator, I would like to speak with you
privately.” We went into his room, and he proceeded to tell me that they
weren’t fighting a war in Afghanistan, that they were, in fact, beginning to
redeploy assets. And he particularly mentioned Special Operations personnel and
the Predator unmanned aircraft as examples of assets that were being redeployed
from Afghanistan to get ready for Iraq.
NARRATOR:
General Franks has denied Senator Graham’s version of the story. But on the
ground in Afghanistan, CIA officers say they noticed a shift toward Iraq.
GARY
SCHROEN: Well, you could see changes being made in the U.S. military staffing
in Afghanistan, that the Green Beret units, the 5th Special Forces group, for
the most of it, were being pulled out to refit and get ready for Iraq. And it
was clear that the kind of guys that I think a lot of us believed were
essential U.S. military personnel with special operations capabilities were being
pulled away.
NARRATOR:
Three months after 9/11, the Vice President went on Fox News.
Vice
Pres. DICK CHENEY: [December 11, 200]] I never say anything is
inevitable, but if I were Saddam Flussein, I’d be thinking very carefully about
the future and I’d be looking very closely to see what happened to the Taliban
in Afghanistan.
NARRATOR:
The vice president continued to assert a connection between al Qaeda and Iraq,
but the CIA kept saying it wasn’t true.
JOHN
McLAUGHLIN, Dpty. Director, CIA 2000-04: We said in that timeframe that we had
no evidence linking Iraq to al Qaeda and to those attacks.
NARRATOR:
Tenet had even ordered a massive agency search for any connection.
MICHAEL
SCIIEUER, CIA 1982-2004: Tenet, to his credit, had us go back 10 years in the
Agency’s records and look and see what we knew about Iraq and~ al Qaeda. And I
was available at the time and I led the effort. And we went back 10 years. We
examined about 20,000 documents, probably something along the line of 75,000
pages of infonnation. And there was no connection between Iraq and Saddam.
Lt.
Gen. MICHAEL DeLONG: He saw it as his job, and he told the president, “Here’s
what I think.” And the president didn’t like it, fine. But I never saw him hold
back on what I knew. He told him everything that I knew, he told the president.
INTERVIEWER: Like
what?
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Lt.
Gen. MICHAEL DeLONG:You know, things that were going on. Flere’s it’s the al
Qaeda in Afghanistan. It’s not the Iraqis. It’s not the Iranians. If they do
have something to do with it, it’ll be a side issue, but that’s not the main
issue now. Boom, just like that.
INTERVIEWER: So
from the very beginning, he was saying it’s aI Qaeda.
Lt.
Gen. MICHAEL BeLONG: It’s al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
INTERVIEWER: And
Bush is hearing that.
Lt.
Gen. MICHAEL BeLONG: Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: He
was hearing that?
Lt.
Gen. MICHAEL BeLONG: Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick. I
mean, that here it is. Yeah.
NARRATOR:
The CIA meanwhile began usii1g what would later become a controversial tactic
in the war on terror. Of the thousands of prisoners being taken off the
battlefield, the Agency was in charge of a handful. “high-value terrorists,”
HVTs. And they had a special way of dealing with them known as “rendition.”
Lt.
Gen. MICHAEL DeLONG:One rendition story involves the I-IVT Ibn Sheikh aL Libi
VINCENT
CANNISTRARO, Fmr. CIA Officer: Bin Laden made his escape, left Sheikh al Libi
in command of the al Qaeda forces there, and he’s captured. So we capture
Sheikh al Libi.
MICHAEL
SCHEUER: What you want from that individual is to try to get information that
will lead you to another success either on the battlefield or in some other
way.
VINCENT
CANNISTRARO: He’s carried off to Egypt, who torture him. And we know that he’s
going to be tortured. Anyone who’s worked on Egypt, has worked on other
countries in the Middle East, knows that. Egyptians torture him, and he
provides a lot of information.
NARRATOR:
The infbnnation from al Libi found its way into the intelligence system.
VINCENT
CANNISTRARO: And it says that Saddam Hussein provided training in chemical
weapons to a! Qaeda.
NARRATOR:
And that secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon turned the information about
Saddam and al Qaeda and chemical weapons into an official report.
MICHAEL
SCIIEUER: The test of an Intelligence officer is not so much the ability to
accumulate information, it’s to judge between different pieces of information.
There is what you could call intelligence infonnation available to prove almost
any case that you wanted to prove, if you were a non-discerning intelligence
amateur.
MICHAEL
F. MALOOF: Well, that information turned out to be correct. I heard it
not
only from al Libi, but we heard it from some people from the INC, the Iraqi
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National
Congress. And then we take their information and put it back into the
intelligence
system.
NARRATOR:
The intelligence provided by the torture of al Libi moved thr~ugh the system.
VINCENT
CANNISTRARO, Fmr. CIA Officer: A lot of that information is funneled in the
form of intelligence reports to the vice president, to the secretary of
defense, in fact. to the entire administration.
NARRATOR:
It is the kind of information the office of the vice president, the OVP. began
to stockpile. In fact, all roads in the war on tenor run through the OVP. It
has a political arm and a policy side. And then there’s legal. They believed in
expanding the president’s executive powers.
RON
SUSKIND: In tenms of the executive power issue, you know, clearly, I think 9/il
is a moment of preparation meeting opportunity.
NARRATOR:
Cheney was convinced the power of the president had been whittled away by
Congress and the courts.
WATERGATE
COMMITTEE STAFFER: /July 1973~J Could you tell us how and when did you
first meet President Nixon?
RON
SUSKIND: He viewed the searing moments of the Nixon administration, which
he was
there in the front seats for, as a diminution of what the president ought to
be. [www.pbs.org: Chene/c views on power]
NEWSCASTER: [August
9, ]974J They are now boarding the helicopter. walkmg through the honor
guard. The president now at the door
RON
SUSKIND: And he saw the years since as a time where, essentially, that danrnge
was not repaired.
NARRATOR: Within
days of 9/Il, Cheney’s legal insiders saw a chance to rebuild the president’s
power.
JOHN
YOO, Legal Counsel, DoJ 2001-03: The laws as they were written and the
Constitution that we have gives the president a lot of power in wartime. The
president is the commander-in-chief.
NARRATOR:
The vice president’s legal counsel, David Addington, headed a group of lawyers
who argued the president could authorize whatever means were necessary to fight
the war on tenor.
DANA
PRIEST, The Washington Post: And it is amazing, what it says. It basically says
that the commander-in-chief can disregard any other law during time of war.
RON
SUSKIND: They’re looking to expand executive power, and 9/li comes and it is a
state of emergency. And a state of emergency gives a host of people in the
administration, at the top, a chance to try some things that they’ve been
thinking about trying for a long time.
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NARRATOR:
By the spring of 2002 the U.S. government was chasing down suspected terrorists
all over the world. But the signals were clear. The push for what Cheney
considered the real war on tenor was about to begin.
Vice
Pres. DICK CHENEY: [CNN “Late Edition, “3/24/2002] This is a man of
great evil. He knows we’re deadly serious. Our friends and allies in the region
know we’re deadly serious and that we do need to fmd a way to address this
problem.
MIKE
SCHEUER: Clearly, by 2002 in the springtime, it was almost taken for granted
that we were going to go to war with Iraq, in addition to having missed Osama
bin Laden. It was a nightmare, and I know Tenet was briefed repeatedly by the
head of the bin Laden department that any invasion of Iraq would break the back
of our countertenorism program..
RON
SUSKIND: Cheney’s view, supported by the president, I think everybody knows
from meetings with the door shut that this is kind of the way we have to do
this thing. I don’t think there’s any doubt, at this point, as to what will be
done.
NARRATOR:
At Central Intelligence headquarters, they were wondering where that left
George Tenet. He could fight them, he could join themn or he could retire.
JOHN
BRENNAN, Dpty. Exec. Director, CIA 2001-03: I think it was a very personal and
pensive time for George. I think he asked himself whether or not he wanted to
continue on that road and to be part of it. So I think he had some sort of long
nights.
STEVE
COLL, Anthor, Ghost Wars: Tenet had an opportunity after the Afghan war to
declare victomy and go home. He didn’t take that opportunity. I would imagine
that he regrets it.
NARRATOR:
Since the time of I-larry Truman, the director of Central Intelligence has come
to the White House to tell the unvarnished truth to the president.
But George Tenet also carried the burden of his new friendship.
JAMES
BAMFORD, Author, The Puzzle Palace: You get this friendship factor that enters
into it, so it eliminates the objectivity of a lot of it.
DAVID
KAY, Iraq Weapons Inspector; It’s a Faustian bargain because, ultimately,
anyone who heads an intelligence agency has got to speak, if he’s serving the
interest, truth to power.
LARRY
WILKERSON: You’re committed. You’re committed. And every day that you go,
you’re committed more.
RICHARD
KERR, Fmr. Dpty. Director, CIA: I think you have to be independent enough and
distant enough that you can say, “Mr. President, that’s not the way we see it,”
or. “Mr. Vice President or Mr. Secretary, that’s not our view of it,” and then
follow up with why that’s not our view.
NARRATOR:
Tenet believed he’d proved al Qaeda and Iraq were not connected. He hoped the
war fever would pass. But then to strengthen their case, the imminent danger of
weapons of mass destruction.
Vice
Pres. DICK CRENEY: [‘Meet the Press; “March 24. 2002] The evidence is
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overwhelming.
And one of the things that we need to do is to make the case, lay it out there.
This is the evidence. This is what he’s done. This is what he’s doing. This is
the threat to the United States and to our friends around the world.
NARRATOR:
Even inside the CIA. it was conventional wisdom that Saddarn probably had the
weapons. But a lot of the information going to the vice president’s office was
coining from that secret intelligence office at the Pentagon and their ready
source of intelligence, Ahmed Chalahi of the Iraqi National Congress.
MARK
GARLASCO, Def. Intel. Agency, 1997-03: At that time, we had INC constantly
shoving crap at us. You know, they were providing information that they thought
that we wanted to hear. They were feeding the beast.
VINCENT
CANNISTRARO: This was part of a broad
campaign to pollute the U.S. policy process by feeding it false information,
but information that would basically confirm fears already held, conceptions
already held by the administration that Saddani Hussein was an imminent danger
and had to be dealt with.
NARRATOR:
A secret decision to go to war with Iraq was imminent, but the inner circle was
fighting its own war about the war.
BOB WOODWARD, The Washington Post: I think the
discord within the foreign policy inner circle around Bush is very, very high.
NARRATOR:
By now, Tenet’s only ally in the administration, the secretary of stat, was
openly facing off against Cheimey and Rumsfeld.
BOB WOODWARD: It became personal between Powell and
Cheney. It also became personal between Powell and Rurnsfeld. So you have this
collision of world views. You have personal animosity.
NARRATOR:
The vice president took the WMD arguments out into the country.
Vice
Pres. DICK CHENEY: [August 26, 2002. VFW address] Simply stated,
there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.
There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against
our allies and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional
ambitions
NARRATOR:
Congress would soon have to vote on the war.
Vice
Pres. DICK CHENEY: that Saddam has
resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons
NARRATOR:
But much of what they knew came fl~omn Cheney on television. They brought in
George Tenet.
Sen.
BOB GRAHAM (D-FL), Select Ciute. on Intel. 2000-03: We had a meeting of
the
Senate Intelligence Committee, a closed meeting, with Director Tenet. And
several of us ask him, “What did the National Intelligence Estimate say about
this issue?”
NARRATOR:
The National Intelligence Estimate, the NIE, is the highest-level document
generated by the intelligence agencies.
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W.
PATRICK LANG, Fmr. Def. Intel. Agency Officer: A National Intelligence Estimate
becomes the truth accepted by the United States government. They hold this
thing up. the NIB. and they say, “On page 6, it says so and so.” and that is an
irrefutable truth.
Sen.
BOB GRAhAM: The answer that we got from Director Tenet is, “We’ve never done a
National Intelligence estimate on Iraq, including its weapons of mass
destruction.” Stunning. We do these on almost every significant activity, much
less significant than getting ready to go to war. We were flying blind.
MELVIN
GOODMAN, Fmr. CIA Officer: The fact of the matter is, the CIA didn’t want to
produce one. The White House didn’t want one because they didn’t want to allow
any venting of whatever opposition there was to what they wanted to be the
conventional wisdom on weapons of mass destruction.
NARRATOR:
And Tenet said the CIA was primarily focused on al Qaeda, not really paying
attention to WMD and Iraq.
JOHN
BRENNAN, Dpty. Exec. Director, CIA 2001-03: It was an intense period. We still
were heavily engaged on trying to counter al Qaeda. the war on terrorism, and
so there were a lot of things on George’s plate. And he was working, you know,
from sunup to sun-down, and past that, seven days a week.
Sen.
BOB GRAHAM: We said, “We don’t care.
This is the most important decision that we, as members of Congress, and that
the people of America are likely to make in the foreseeable future. We
want to have the best understanding of what it is we’re about to get involved
with.”
NARRATOR:
Congress demanded that the White House prepare an NIE. Tenet was supposed to
provide a tough-minded analysis of the WMD allegations in a huny. A process
that ordinarily takes months or years would be reduced to just over two weeks.
DANIEL
BENJAMIN, National Security Council 1994-99: I know some of the people who did
that, and it’s, you know, a mind-boggling task to have to put together an NIE
in that amount of time, and particularly in those kinds of very charged
circumstances.
NARRATOR:
Many members of the CIA believed the vice president himself was determined to
control the content of the NIE. The vice president and his chief of staff,
Scooter Libby, had made about 10 trips to CIA headquarters, where they
personally questioned analysts.
MELVIN
GOODMAN: I was at the CIA for 24 years. The only time a vice president came to
the CIA building was for a ceremony, to cut a ribbon, to stand on the stage,
but not to harangue analysts about finished intelligence.
PATRICK
W. LANG: Many, many of them have told me they were pressured. And there are a
lot of ways pressure takes a lot of fonns.
PAUL
PILLAR, National Intel. Officer 2000-05: The questions every morning, the
tasks, the requests to look into this angle one more time, turn over that rock
again. If you didn’t fmd anything last week, look again to see if there’s
something there for that about that connection.
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VINCENT
CANNISTRARO: So you start looking very hard for anything at all that will support the answer that the
vice president wants, that the Defense Department wants.
NEWSCASTER: From
NBC News in Washington. this is Meet the Press.
NEWSCASTER: Today
on Face the Nation, Condoleezza Rice on Iraq and Iran and
NEWSCASTER: From
Washington. This Week. with ABC News chief
PAUL
PILLAR: Intelligence analysts listen
to speeches and read newspapers, too, and they can see what senior policy
makers are saying publicly. And they can make their own judgments about, “Well,
does this really conform or does it not conform with what our analytic
judgments are.” And there was there was a clear tension.
[www.pbs.org:
Read Pi1lar~s extended interview]
NARRATOR:
One particular Sunday morning,
September 8, 2002, serves as an example. It began with a New York Times story.
“Iraq
has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which
American
officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich
uranium.”
JAMES
BAMFORD: There were a number of other headlines based on faulty information
that Judy Miller would write. She would go and interview a senior Bush
administration official on, say, a Saturday, and it would be off the record.
And then Condi Rice is on a show on Sunday morning, and she points to the paper
and says
CONDOLEEZA
RICE, National Security Adviser:
We do know that there have been shipments going into Iraq, for instance, of
aluminum tubes that really are only suited to high-quality aluminum tools that
are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs.
NARRATOR:
It is just before the delivery of the NIE to Congress.
Vice
Pres. DICK CHENEY: [“Meet the Press;” September 8,
2002] is that he now is trying
through his illicit procurement network to acquire the equipment he needs to be
able to enrich uranium specifically, aluminum tubes. There’s a story in The New
York Times this morning
CONDOLEEZZA
RICE: ISeptember 8, 20021 acquire
nuclear weapons, but we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
DONALD
RUMSFELD: [September 8, 2002J “Smoking gun” is an interesting phrase. It implies
NARRATOR:
The media blitz, the visits by the vice president and his chief of staff some
in the CIA say it was all a kind of subtle arm-twisting, but later, in a
controversial report, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found no
pressure.
“The
committee did not find any evidence that administration officials attenmpted to
coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments.”
PAUL
PILLAR: Politicization, real
politicization, rarely works that way. That is to
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say,
you know, blatant, crude. arm-twisting. It’s always far more subtle.
NARRATOR:
In early October, Tenet delivered the hastily produced NIE. This was the top
secret ME. Much of the evidence was outdated,
from the 1 990s. Thei~ were four or five
new allegations. The aluminum tubes, mobile biological, chemical and nuclear
programs were alleged. And there were some footnotes where technical
disagreements were aired.
VINCENT
CANNISTRARO: The CIA’s assessment was sheep-herded by a national intelligence
officer who works very closely with the vice president’s office. It’s a flawed
fatally flawed document, and it should never had seen the light of day.
DAVID
KAY: When I read the NIE, I thought they were protecting sources and methods
and trying to paint just an adequate job to get past the vote, that there must
be more there. When I read it in 2003. after I took this responsibility there’s
an old Peggy Lee song that I like that came to mind. “If That’s Ml There Is.”
NARRATOR:
The NIE was kept in a locked room where Congress could read it, but few did. In
mid-October. they voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Iraqi war resolution. A
declassified version of the NIE, known as the “white paper,” was prepared by
the CIA and released three days later.
Sen.
BOB GRAHAM: And one of the surprising things about it was it was of a very high
production level graphs, photographs in color. It was an advocacy piece.
INTERVIEWER: What
does it say to you?
Sen.
BOB GRAHAM: Oh, it says to me that the decision had been made that we’re going
to go to war with Iraq, all of this other was just window dressing, and that
the intelligence community was being used as almost a public relations
operation to validate the war against Saddam Hussein.
NARRATOR:
Paul Pillar, a veteran high-ranking CIA analyst, was one of the primary authors
of the white paper.
PAUL
PILLAR: It was clearly requested and published for policy advocacy purposes.
This was not infonning a decision. What was the purpose of it? The purpose was
to strengthen the case for going to war with the American public. Is it proper
for the intelligence community to publish papers with that purpose? I don’t
think so. And I regret having had a role in that.
MICHAEL
SCHEIJER, CIA 1982-04: Paul Pillar is a man that I have tremendous respect fo.r
and who I think is an ideal intelligence officer. If there was pressures that
resulted in Mr. Pillar not being happy with what he finally authored, I can
only imagine those pressures must have been extraordinary because he is a man
that I would want my son to model himself after. So that to me, that says the
pressure from the White House through Mr. Tenet on professional CIA officers
was nearly overwhelming.
NARRATOR:
George Tenet had relied on his connections in Congress as a source of
protection and power. To some of them, now he was as flawed as the NW he had
delivered.
Sen.
BOB GRAHAM: Well, I thought that this %vasn’t a man who was strong enough
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to
stand up to the president of the United States and say, “Mr. President, you are
about to make a very serious mistake, and here are the reasons. Here’s what we
know. Here’s what we don’t know about the situation in Iraq. And it does not
warrant us leaving a victory which is imminent in Afghanistan and attainable in
Afghanistan to start a war in an environment in which we are largely ignorant.”
GARY
SCHROEN: The problem rested not with his relationship with George Bush but
probably with Rumsfeld and Cheney, who, you know, for apparently, simply were
so overwhelming at the bureaucratic infighting that they were able to isolate
him, and in a sense, perhaps, allowed him to kind of forced him into becoming
more of a cheerleader for what was going what the direction the administration
was taking than he should have been.
NARRATOR:
George Tenet’s conversion mnoment occurred in the Oval Office when the
president was given a presentation of the WMD case against Saddam Hussein.
CARL W.
FORD, Jr., Dir. State Dept. InteL 2001-2003: The president had said, “Is this
all we got?” And the answer should have been, “Yes, sir. Unfortunately, that’s
all we got.” His instincts were right. He saw that there wasn’t a lot there.
But I guarantee you, that’s everything we had. We gave him our best shot, and
the president said, “I don’t is that all you got?”
INTERVIEWER: And
what did Tenet say?
CARL W.
FORD, Jr.: “Slam dunk.” That was the slam dunk conversation.
DAVID
KAY: He certainly knew it wasn’t a slam dunk. He knew and would have had to
know that the data was not of a character that one could describe, even in a
loose manner, and certainly not in the Oval Office of the president, who has
expressed doubt about the presentation he’s just heard, “Don’t worry, Mr.
President, that’s a slain dunk.” The data was not that solid.
CARL W.
FORD, Jr.: Then they said. “Well, if that’s true. George, if this is right, and
this is we’re going to have to say it differently. You’re going to have to come
up with different ways of saying this because a nonrial person is going to look
at this and say, (EIs that all you got?’”
DAVID
KAY: Quite frankly, the thing that I find hardest to understand in this entire
story where was the national security adviser, Condi Rice? She should
iimnediately have said to the any DCI, not just George Tenet, anyone who did that
in the Oval Office. “No, you go back and you come back with a better case. Here
are the doubts the president’s expressed. Let’s see what’s there.” But it was
allowed to slide. Here again, I think it was allowed to slide because “We all
knew he’s got weapons.”
NARRATOR:
The State of the Union speech, a public recitation of the NIE.
Pres.
GEORGE W. BUSH: [January 28, 20031 Saddam Hussein has gone to elaborate
lengths, spent enormous sums, taken great risks to build and keep weapons of
mass destruction.
NARRATOR:
It was all there: the aluminum tubes
Pres.
GEORGE W. BUSH: Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to
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purchase
high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.
NARRATOR:
A controversial assertion that Saddam was buying nuclear material would become
known as “the 16 words.”
Pres.
GEORGE W. BUSH: The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently
sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
NARRATOR:
The controversy would be called “yellowcake.” The CIA had examined the story.
VINCENT
CANNISTRARO: No one is endorsing it. Evemyone is saying it really does sound implausible.
TYLER
DRUMBELLER, Chief, CIA European Div. 2001-05: We never took it
seriously. I mean, we looked at it, but there was never any real substance to
it.
NARRATOR:
The vice president had heard of a defense intelligence report that the African
nation of Niger had sold 500 tons of uranium, known as “yellowcake,” to Iraq.
CARL W.
FORD, Jr.: He said, “This is important. This is interesting to
me. Tell me about it.”
Amb.
JOSEPH WILSON, State Department 1976-98: 1 was briefed that an allegation had
reached the office of the vice president, and the Office of the vice president
had asked the CIA to look into it. I knew a lot about uranium mining. I knew a
lot about Niger.
NARRATOR:
The CIA sent Wilson to Niger. He found no evidence of a yellowcake sale. Yet it
was put in the NIE.
“A
foreign government service reported that as of early 2001, Niger planned to
send several tons of pure uranium, probably yellowcake. to Iraq.”
PAUL
PILLAR: There were serious questions
raised about yellowcake, and that’s why the people in the intelligence
community advised the White House not to use it publicly. And that’s why it was
not used in the intelligence community’s own unclassified product, because
there were doubts about the credibility of the report, that’s turned out to be
fabricated.
NARRATOR:
Tenet in the past had worked hard to get yellowcake off the agenda, and he
thought he had, but it had found its way into the NIE and been put in the State
of the Union.
RON
SUSKIND, Author, The One Percent Doctrine: I know, personally, when I
listened
to that State of the Union speech and I heard about uranium and yellowcake, I
turned
to the people I was with, my family, and said, “We are going to war in Iraq.”
Pres.
GEORGE W. BUSH: May God continue to
bless the United States of America.
NARRATOR:
The vice president had been the driving force to this moment. Now, on the brink
of war, one last stop, the secretary of state. He was about to deliver the case
against Saddam Hussein at the United Nations.
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RICHARD
CLARKE: Powell gets a speech, written by Scooter Libby. sent to him. And
he’s told, “This is the kind of speech we would like you to give at the U.N.”
It’s very strange for the vice president’s senior adviser to be writing the
speech and saying to the secretary Of State, “This is what you should be saying.”
NARRATOR:
Powell was skeptical of Libby’s speech. 1-le turned to tenet for help.
CARL
W. FORD, Jr.: He took the initiative
to tell his staff. 1NR and CIA. “We’re going to have to got through this. I
don’t like this.” So his mind was already attuned to the fact that he wanted to
make it better than he saw it.
LAWRENCE
WILKERSON, Chief of Staff, State Dept. 2002-05: Secretary Powell was not
reluctant at all to throw things out completely. We threw the meeting between
Mohammad Atta and Iraqi intelligence operatives in Prague out.
NARRATOR:
Powell and his senior staff spent the weekend at CIA headquarters.
LARRY
WILKERSON: I sat in the room, looking into George Tenet’s eyes, as did the
secretary of state, and heard with the firmness that only George could give it
and I don’t mean terminology like “slam dunk,” although he was a basketball
aficionado and used that kind of terminology a lot but I mean
eyeball-to-eyeball contact between two of the most powerfiti men in the
administration, Cohn Powell and George Tenet, and George Tenet assuring Cohn
Powell that the information he was presenting to the U.N. was ironclad.
NARRATOR:
But even at that time, inside the CIA, there were serious doubts about the
accuracy of a central part of Powell’s speech. It, too, had come from the NILE.
“Baghdad has mobile facilities for producing bacterial and toxin BW agents.
These facilities can evade detection and are highly survivable.”
The source
for this information was code-named “Curveball.”
VINCENT
CANNISTRARO: Curveball was a relative of a senior official of the INC, the
Iraqi National Congress, headed by Ahined Chalabi.
DAVID
KAY: Curveball claimed that he was an engineer, young engineer out of the
University of Baghdad. And among the things he had designed, helped design,
were this trailer, which was to be a mobile biological production facility.
NARRATOR:
His story had been given to the American intelligence network by the Gennans,
but they could not verify the accuracy of his claims.
TYLER
DRUMHELLER, Chief, CIA European Div. 2001-05: For a service to say, “We have
this source, and here’s what he reports but we can’t vouch for it one way or
another” that’s a little you know, that should be a flag right there.
NARRATOR:
But as Curveball’s allegations became
a crucial part of the NIB, what few knew, including Secretary Powell, was that
Curveball was the sole source for most of the information.
DAVID
KAY: He was not told the truth when he was at the Agency. When he was going
over the data, he was told this was based on not one source but multiple
sources. One of the sources he was told it was based on was already known to be
a fabricator. He was not told that the Germans had denied the U.S. access to
it. He was not told that
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there
had been warnings from the Germans that this guy was, to say the least,
undependable, alcoholic. So all the all the fine-grained stuff that might have
caused him even then not to use it. he wasn’t given an oppothmity to hear
firsthand.
NARRATOR:
In February of 2003, Secretary Powell arrived at the united nations to put his
personal prestige on the line.
ROBIN
WRiGHT, The Washington Post: Cohn Powell was the most powerfiñ voice within the
administration cautioning against the dangers of going to war and the costs
human, political, diplomatic. At the end of the day, however, Cohn Powell is a
team player. He wasn’t going to walk away from the administration on the eve of
going to war, which was not only abandoning his commander-in-chief, but also
the troops, many of which he still knew.
COLIN
POWELL, Secretary of State: [U.N.,
February 5, 2003J Let me turn now to
nuclear weapons
NARRATOR:
Powell insisted George Tenet sit in camera range right behind him. The usual allegations were made.
COLIN
POWELL: Saddam Hussein is so determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb
NARRATOR:
Aluminum tubes.
COLIN
POWELL: that he has made repeated
covert attempts to acquire high-specification aluminum tubes.
DAVID
KAY: I think the on the aluminum tubes, that test data was cooked, and it was
portrayed upward in a very dishonest fashion.
NARRATOR:
Curveball.
COLIN
POWELL: We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on
wheels and on rails. The source was an eyewitness, an Iraqi chemical engineer
who supervised one of these facilities. He actually was present during
DAVID
KAY: George Tenet knew we had no agents inside Iraq. George Tenet knew that on
the case of Curveball, no American had ever talked to Curveball directly. No
American had been given his name by the Gennans. And you go down the line, he
knew the holes in the data.
NARRATOR:
And Powell used that information from Sheik al Libi, who was rendered and
tortured in Egypt.
COLIN
POWELL: I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq
provided training in these weapons to al Qaeda. Fortunately, this operative is
now detained, and he has told his story.
NARRATOR: But
this information had been coerced out of al Libi. Eventually, he would recant
and admit he made it up.
COLIN
POWELL: Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass
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destruction
for a few more months or years is not an option. not in a post-September 11th
world.
NEWSCASTER: A nighttime artillery barrage
NEWSCASTER: Marines shoot it out with Iraqi soldiers
NEWSCASTER: The push has been relentless.
NARRATOR:
In three weeks, it was over.
DONALD
RUMSFELD: The scenes of free Iraqis
celebrating in the streets, riding American tanks, tearing down the statues of
Saddam Hussein iii the center of Baghdad are breathtaking.
BOB
WOOD WARD: Cheney has a dinner at the
residence and has his chief aide, Scooter Libby, Wolfowitz, Ken Edelman and
Cheney’s wife. And it’s a kind of celebration that they’d done it. “We got it
right.” And they talked at that dinner about, “We’re going to find weapons of
mass destruction. Don’t worry,” you know? And it was a celebration.
RICHARD
KERR, Fmr. Deputy Director, CIA: Early on in the war. it seemed quite
clear that they were not going to find major stockpiles of weapons. that we
were looking at a kind of empty shelf.
NARRATOR:
Finding the weapons was left to the CIA. They hired former U.N. weapons
inspector David Kay. Before long, he called Tenet.
DAVID
KAY: From very early on I said, “Things are not panning out the way you thought
they existed here.” And it was specific cases, whether we were talking about
the aluminum tubes or we’re talking about the nuclear program, in general, or
the biological program or the chemical program.
NARRATOR:
Powell received the bad news directly from Tenet.
LAWRENCE
WILKIERSON: I remember these scenes
where he would come through my door and say, “Well, George just called and he
took another pillar out. Another substantial aspect of my presentation is
gone.” He took it like a soldier, but it was a blow. It was a blow to me. I
mean, I wrote out my resignation. I put it in my center drawer, typed it
myself. I wouldn’t even make my staff assistant type it. “Dear President Bush,
I’ve come to the point in my service where I no longer can serve, given the
nature of your foreign policy,” and so forth. “And therefore, I respectfully submit
my resignation.” And once a week or so. I would take it out and look at it and
fold it back up carefully and put it back in my center drawer, never having the
intestinal fortitude to submit it. You know, I won’t speak for Cohn Powell, but
I’ll tell you it really affected me.
NARRATOR:
Then one day, the vice president received
a news clipping from The New York Times.
“1 have
little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s
nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”
Anib. JOSEPH
WILSON: I sat down and wrote this article, 1,500 words, for The New
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York
Times entitled, “What I did not find in Africa,” and basically laid out the
trip, laid out my conclusions.
NARRATOR:
The vice president wrote a note to his staff.
“Have
they done this sort of thing before, sent an ambassador to answer a question?
Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us, or did his wife send
him on a junket?
Wilson’s
wife. Valerie Plame, was a CIA officer. Cheney and his staff already had reason
to he suspicious of the CIA.
JAMES
BAMFORD, Author, The Puzzle Palace: I interviewed a number of people that were
active-duty CIA people still working there at the time, who were telling me a
lot of things about what was happening and how intelligence was being abused and
how they were being pressured. And these aren’t the kinds of things that you
can normally get CIA people to tallc to, especially people you haven’t
developed a long relationship with. These were people who were sort of almost
pounding at the doors to get this information out.
NEWSCASTER: The
president’s team is facing another stinging critique over
NARRATOR: Reporters
were being told about Curveball, the alumintun tubes, the vice president’s
visits.
NEWSCASTER: because
many in the intelligence community feel they’re taking the heat for the
fiiilure to find
RICHARD
KERR, Fmr. Deputy Director, CIA: There have been more leaks and
discussions kind of outside what 1 would consider to he the appropriate level
than I’ve ever seen before. One of the effects is it really ilTitates the
White House, and that is not a useful situation to be in.
STEVE
COLL, The New Yorker: There was a substantial group of people in the
White I-louse who believed that elements of the Central intelligence Agency
were opposed to the president’s reelection and might even be running a
quasi-covert action to prevent the president’s reelection.
NARRATOR:
It would be two-and-a-half years later. Aimed with subpoena powers, after
hundreds of hours of grand jury testimony, a special prosecutor began to shine
a light into the dark side.
PATRICK
FITZGERALD, Special Counsel: fOctober 28, 2005J I’m Pat Fitzgerald.
I’m the
United States Attorney and appearing before you today as special counsel in the
CIA leak
investigation. A few hours ago, a federal grand july sifting in the District of
Columbia
returned a five-count indictment against I. Lewis Libby, also known as
Scooter
Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff.
NARRATOR:
The investigation has uncovered what appears to be a covert campaign waged
against the Central Intelligence Agency.
PATRICK
FITZGERALD: The grand jury’s indictment charges that Mr. Libby committed five
crimes. The indictment charges one count of obstruction of justice of the
federal grand jury, two counts of perjury
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NARRATOR:
Libby has pled not guilty to these charges, but the indictment suggests the OVP
tried to discredit Joseph Wilson, that Libby told at least two reporters
Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA, and that others in the administration did the
same. Her name did appear in this column.
Auth.
JOSEPH WILSON: I’ve always speculated that the reason Mr. Libby and Mr. Rove and maybe others were speaking
about my wife and impugning my integrity was not so much to get revenge against
me, although I think that was part of it. But the rational reason for doing so
was to send a shot across the bow to others who might be willing to come
forward and challenge the administration on its use of information to justify
the invasion of Iraq.
NARRATOR:
Then as the 16 word controversy continued, according to Libby’s grand jury
testimony, the vice president told him he was now authorized to reveal top
secret information from the NIE to a reporter.
“Defendant’s
participation in a critical conversation with Judith Miller occurred only after
the vice president advised defendant that the president specifically had
authorized defendant to disclose certain information in the NIE.”
Libby
testified that he met with New York Timnes reporter Judith Miller in this
Washington restaurant. And he says in their off-the-record conversation about
the yellowcake story that he told her that the CIA was responsible for it.
“Defendant understood that he was to tell Miller, among other things, some of
the key judgments of the NIE and that the NIE stated that Iraq was ~Evigorou
sly trying to procure’ uranium.
Three
days later, the president was in Uganda. As the reporters were invited in, he
would take a question that allowed the administration to publicly blame the CIA
and George Tenet for the yellowcake story.
REPORTER:
Take a question, sir? Pres. GEORGE W. BUSH: Sure.
REPORTER:
Why can you explain how an erroneous piece of intelligence on the Iraq-Niger
connection got into your State of the Union speech’? Are you upset about it?
And should somebody he held accountable, sir?
Pres.
GEORGE W. BUSH: I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services, and it was a speech that
detailed to the American people the dangers imposed by the Saddam Hussein
regime and
NARRATOR:
George Tenet has admitted he never read the advance copy of State of the Union
speech. Now the president had weighed in.
STEVE
COLL, The New Yorker: I don’t know what George Tenet felt as he saw that
unfold, but I can imnagine that he was dismayed and increasingly resentful that
he was being singled out for blame. At the same time. he’s such an operator and
such a student of Washington that surely, he understood what was happening,
that he was being asked, in effect, to fall on his shield so that the president
could be reelected.
DAVID
KAY, Iraq Weapons Inspector 1991-92: I think it is true that George Tenet
wanted to be a player and he understood that if you didn’t give the policy
makers what they wanted, he believed I think wrongly that you weren’t a player,
and therefore, your views wouldn’t be taken and you wouldn’t be invited into
the closed nieetings, et cetera.
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He
traded integrity for access, and that’s a bad bargain any time in life. It’s
particularly a bad bargain if you’re running an intelligence agency.
Pres.
GEORGE W. BUSH: [June 3, 2004J Today George Tenet, the direct~ of the
CIA,
submitted a letter of resignation. I met with George last night in the White
House.
I had a
good visit with him. He told me he was resigning for personal reasons.
NARRATOR:
The CIA would have a new director, and there would be a bloodbath. Dozens of
high-ranking officials would leave.
RICHARD
KERR, Fmr. Deputy Director, CIA: I didn’t mind thinking that CIA was a
dangerous, difficult organization. I didn’t mind them thinking that we were
even evil sometimes. But I didn’t like them thinking that we were incompetent.
If that is the view of your intelligence organization, you have a real problem.
NARRATOR:
In the farthest reaches at headquarters, one could find the weapons inspector
David Kay.
DAVID
KAY: It’s almost comical to me. And in fact, I’d laughed at the time because it
was so much like a poor spy novel. I was given an office that didn’t have a
working telephone, that was surrounded by packing cases, you know, at the at
the depths of Langley, with a secretamy that usually wasn’t there. And I mean,
you know, you’d have to have been pretty dumb not to have caught the signals.
What it said to me is these guys really don’t want the message. The message
wasn’t, “There are no weapons there,” the message was our system completely
broke down and failed. It gave not only the wrong answer, it mnishandled every
piece of evidence that we have.
NARRATOR:
At Christmastime in 2004, they gave out the highest honor the president
can
bestow, the Medal of Freedom. The insiders from the ~var on tenor were there.
Don
Rumsfeld,
whose Pentagon had by now inherited most of the intelligence function.
Scooter
Libby was there. Cohn Powell he would resign soon.
NARRATOR:
[December 14, 2004] Ladies and Gentlemen the recipients of the
Presidential
Medal of Freedom: L. Paul Bremer III, General Tonmmy R. Franks, George
S. Tenet.
STEVE
COLL: I presume that for President Bush, it was a signal that he wasn’t mnaking
Tenet a scapegoat. It would be the natural thing to do, right? You’ve seen this
episode of “I, Claudius.” You know, you put the knife in one side and the medal
on the other side, and that’s politics.
NARRATOR:
Watching it all was the man who had been at war since that first day, on
September 11th.
JAMES
BAMFORD, Author, The Puzzle Palace: Cheney pretty much got everything he wanted
for in terms of the CIA. Tenet left, and kept his mouth shut about all the
things that went on, about what kind of influence Cheney might have had. They
still have a CIA, but all the power is now with his team over at the Pentagon.
They’re gathering more power every day in terms of intelligence. So largely,
Cheney won.
NARRATOR:
The vice president and George Tenet declined FRONTLINE’s requests for on-camera
interviews.
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The
Dark Side
WRITTEN,
PRODUCED AND DIRECTED BY
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Kirk
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AND REPORTED BY
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OF PHOTOGRAPHY
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FOX
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A
FRONTLINE coproduction with Kirk Documentary Group. Ltd.
(c.) 2006
WGBH
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NARRATOR:
This report continues on our Web site, with FRONTL[NEts extended
interviews with former members of U .S. intelligence agencies, the military and
government officials, more on Vice President Cheney’s views on executive
powers, 9/Il and a forceful preemptive foreign policy, and more on the CIA’s
intelligence battles over the years, plus a chronology and the option to watch
the full program again on line. Then join the discussion at pbs.org.
Next
time on FRONTLINE! World: In Zimbabwe, he was once a national hero, but now his
country is falling apart. Going undercover, Alexis Bloom tells the tragic stoly
of people risking their lives to escape, only to be herded back to Mugabe’s
broken country. In despair, some people have just given up.
NARRATOR:
This story and more on the next FRONTLINE/World.
To
order FRONTLINE’s The Dark Side on videocassette or DVD, call PBS Home Video at
1-800-PLAY PBS. f$29.99 plus s&hJ
Funding
for FRONTLINE is provided by the Park Foundation, committed to raising public
awareness.
FRONTLINE
is made possible by the annual fmancial support of PBS viewers like you. Thank
you.
home +
introduction + watch
online + intervi~~ + analysis + discussion + readings & links cheney’s network + cia’s
realignment + paths to p~w~r +
producer’s chat + site
maj~ ± dvd/vhs
& transcript
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press_reactip~ + crethts
+ ~jv~çypojjçy + ERONTLINE
series home + wg~h 4-
p~s
posted june 20, 2006
FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of wgbh educational
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cheney background photo copyright © corbis web site
copyjlglit. 1995-2007 WGBH educational foundation
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EXHIBIT
E
Case 1 :05-cr-00394-RBW Document 246-4
ABC News: Libby: White House
‘Superiors’ OK’d Leaks
Filed 01/16/2007
Page 37 of 38
Page 1
of2
______ January15, 2007jLucai News and Weather f~amh ABC News
I
~.J ! Ii [41
_____________________ ABC News Home> Politics
Vice President
Dick cheney is welcomed as he arrives to speak to
the conservative Political Action conference dinner at the Omni Shoreham Hotel
in washington, Thursday, Feb. 9, 2006. Applauding at far left is Maryland’s Lt.
Gov. Michael Steele of Maryland, a Republican, and sen. George Allen, RVa., at
center. A former top aide to Vice President cheney, I. Lewis “Scotter” Libby,
has told a federal grand jury that his ‘superiors” authorized him to give
secret information to reporters to bolster the Bush administration’s defense of
intelligence it used in 2003 to justify invading Iraq, according to court
papers. CAP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Libby: White House 1Superior&
OK’d Lea ks
Libby: White House ‘Superior? Authorized Leaks of Classified
Information
AOVERTISENENr
Click here for
small k - 355 news and information
fl~J~9Si4t~
ByTONI LOCY
WASHINGTON Feb
9, 2006 (AP)— A former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney told a federal
grand jury that his superiors authorized him to give secret information to
reporters as part of the Bush administration’s defense of intelligence used to
justify invading Iraq, according to court papers.
Special
prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said in documents filed last month that he plans
to introduce evidence that I. Lewis “Scooter” Ubby,
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Cheney’s
former chief of staff, disclosed to reporters the contents of a classified
National Intelligence Estimate in the summer of 2003.
The NIE is a report
prepared by the head of the nation’s intelligence operations for high-level
government offidals, up to and including the president. Portions of NIEs are
sometimes declassified and made public. It is unclear whether that happened in
this instance.
In a Jan. 23
letter to Libby’s lawyers, Fitzgerald said Libby also testified before the
grand jury that he caused at least one other government official to discuss an
intelligence estimate with reporters in July 2003.
“We also note
that it is our understanding that Mr. Libby testified that he was authorized to
disclose information
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ABC News: Libby: White
House ~Superiors’ OK’d Leaks Page
2 of 2
about the NIE to the press by his
superiors,’ Fitzgerald
wrote.
White House spokesman Scott
McClellan refused to comment. “Our policy is that we are not going to discuss
this when it’s an ongoing legal proceeding,” he said.
William Jeffress, Libby’s lawyer,
said, “There is no truth at all” to suggestions that Libby would try to shift blame to his superiors as a defense against
the charges.
Libby, 55, was indicted late last
year on charges that he lied to FBI agents and the grand jury about how he
learned CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity and when he subsequently told
reporters. He is not charged with leaking classified information from an
intelligence estimate report.
Plame’s identity was published in
July 2003 by columnist Robert Novak after her husband, former U.S. Ambassador
Joseph Wilson, accused the administration of twisting intelligence about Iraq’s
efforts to buy uranium in Niger. The year before, the CIA had sent Wilson to
Niger to determine the accuracy of the uranium reports.
Continued
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