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XIII. INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY COLLECTION ACTIVITIES

AGAINST IRAQ'S LINKS TO TERRORISM

(U) The Committee focused its work in reviewing U.S. intelligence on Iraq's links to terrorism on the quality of intelligence analysis, the objectivity and

reasonableness of the Intelligence Community's (IC) judgments, and whether any influence was brought to bear to shape that analysis to support policy objectives. The Committee also examined, however, the role of intelligence collectors in providing the fundamental information upon which the intelligence analysts based their assessments. To understand the collection posture against Iraq's links to terrorism, Committee staff interviewed the Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Collection (ADCI/C) and various members of the National Intelligence Collection Board (NICB), analysts from the Director of Central Intelligence's (DCI's) Counterterrorist Center (CTC), and analysts from the National Security Agency (NSA).

Notwithstanding four decades of intelligence reporting, IC officials and analysts expressed frustration over the lack of useful intelligence collected on Iraq's involvement in terrorism, particularly on links to al-Qaida. A January 2003 IC assessment of Iraqi support for terrorism explained, "Our knowledge of Iraq's ties to terrorism is evolving and

causes:

1.

2.

3.

." Based on information provided to Committee staff, these gaps had three main

a late start collecting against the target,

the lack of a U.S. presence in Iraq, and

reliance on foreign government services, opposition groups and defectors for current intelligence.

Human

from detainees, defectors, opposition

intelligence (HUMINT) reports were derived groups, as well as foreign government services. Analysts explained that information derived from HUMINT provided insight into historical links, but provided little information on the current environment. Thus, the IC's collection, and subsequent analysis, provided an understanding of the historical context of the Iraqi regime's relationships and contacts, but left many intelligence gaps about the Iraqi regime's intentions. Analysts briefed staff on the IC's collection efforts, the

the information on Iraq's ties to terrorism.

intelligence

that yielded the bulk of

A. Human Intelligence (HUMINT)

IC analysts told Committee staff that there was no robust HUMINT collection capability targeting Iraq's links to terrorism until the Fall of 2002. Prior to 2002, HUMINT collection was heavily dependant on a few foreign government services and there were no

sources inside Iraq reporting on strictly terrorism issues. Officers from the office of the ADCI/C told Committee staff during interviews that HUMINT capabilities against were limited because there was no official U.S. presence in Iraq. This point had been explained in a report from the Collection Concepts Development Center entitled Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction - Recommendations for Improvement in Collection. The report said:

The current clandestine HUMINT capability against the Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) target is marginal, for a number of reasons. First the U.S. has
no official
presence in Iraq,

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in Iraq

Analysts told Committee staff that in late 2002, the IC developed what they described as a comprehensive, robust collection program

When asked to characterize the

collection effort against terrorism and Iraq, an IC analyst said "I don't think that we were really focused on the CT [counterterrorism] side, because we weren't concerned about the IIS going out and pro-actively conducting terrorist attacks. It wasn't until we realized that there was a possibility of going to war that we had to get a handle on that."

A senior collections officer from the CTC described a "multi-faceted CIA

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Committee staff that Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers "went out and tried to pitch all, or as many as we could

The CTC collections officer noted that there was one major gap in collection, he

stated:

We had one gap that we were struggling with. That was the more broader
strategic plans of Saddam Hussein in terms of the use of WMD as a terrorist
weapon. We were very concerned about it, but we did not have much reporting.
What reporting we got

wasn't very reliable

information. We ended up having to do more reasoned logic in terms of working
through the scenarios to make judgments about if he would turn that over to
terrorist groups, when he would turn it over to terrorist groups, and then how they
might use it.

CTC analysts told Committee staff that the CIA also targeted Palestinian surrogates and that the CIA already had considerable collection efforts in place to work with Palestinian groups. CTC noted that they had insights into Baghdad's efforts to reach out to additional Palestinian groups

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In terms of obtaining information on the al-Qaida-Zarqawi network, CTC told Committee staff that there had been an ongoing collection effort since 9/11 that had been "aggressively worked."

Iraqi Support for Terrorism described a network of more than a dozen al-Qaida or al-Qaida-associated operatives in Baghdad, and estimated that 100-200 al-Qaida fighters were present in northeastern Iraq in territory under the control of Ansar al-Islam. As a result, collection continued to focus on understanding the historical context of the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida and trying to understand the nature of contacts between the two. CTC told staff that they relied heavily on foreign government services, and increasingly on detainee debriefs to look into an al-Qaida/Iraq relationship. CTC noted that questions regarding al-Qaida's ties to the Iraqi regime were among the first presented to senior al-Qaida operational planner Khalid Shaikh Muhammad following his capture. When asked if the IC had any unilateral sources that could provide information on the Iraq/al-Qaida relationship, the CTC analysts stated that they were entirely dependent on foreign government services for that information.

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