Precisely because of qualms the administration encountered within, it created a rogue intelligence operation -- the Office of Special Plans, located within the bowels of the Pentagon. The OSP was under the control of neoconservatives; it roamed outside the regular interagency intelligence process, stamped its approval on stories retailed by Iraqi exiles that the other agencies dismissed as lacking credibility, and directly piped them into the president through the vice president's office. It was fail-safe in producing disinformation and feeding the impulses of a self-isolated president, but it was not what anyone involved in the craft of intelligence calls intelligence.
There was no general intelligence failure; on the contrary, there was a successful effort by the Bush administration to intimidate, subordinate and punish intelligence to fit its political objectives.
When Bush insisted that Saddam was actively and urgently engaged in a nuclear weapons program and had renewed production of chemical weapons, the Defense Intelligence Agency denied the assertions. Bruce Hardcastle, defense intelligence officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Counterterrorism, "told them that the way they were handling evidence was wrong," Patrick Lang, former head of Human Intelligence at CIA, told me. The Bush administration response was not only to remove Hardcastle from his post. "They did away with his job. They wanted just liaison officers who were junior. They didn't want a senior intelligence person who argued with them. Hardcastle said, 'I couldn't deal with these people.' They are such ideologues that they knew what the outcome should be and they thought when they didn't get it from intelligence people they thought they were stupid. They start with an almost pseudo-religious faith. They wanted the intelligence agencies to produce material to show a threat, particularly an imminent threat. Then they worked back to prove their case. It was the opposite of what the process should have been like, that the evidence should prove the case."
When the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) submitted reports that aluminum tubes Saddam possessed were for conventional rocketry, not nuclear weapons (a report corroborated by Department of Energy analysts), that mobile laboratories were not for WMD, that the story about Saddam seeking uranium in Niger was bogus, and that there was no link between Saddam and al-Qaida (a report backed by the CIA), its analyses were shunted aside. Greg Thielman, chief of INR at the time, told me: "What everyone in the intelligence community knew was that the White House couldn't care less about any kind of information that there were no WMD or that the U.N. inspectors were very effective. Everyone knew the White House was deaf to that input. It was worse than pressure; they didn't care."
