The yes man and the thug

The CIA's position on Iraq was clear -- it knew almost nothing. "It is hard for people outside the agency to understand how little we were thinking on Iraq," one official tells Risen. But just before the war began, some at the agency tried to fix this problem. Charlie Allen, a CIA veteran who was highly regarded in the agency, launched a provocative program to persuade the expatriate family members of Iraqi weapons scientists to travel to Iraq and investigate the country's plans regarding weapons of mass destruction. Risen tells the story of one such ad hoc spy, Sawsan Alhaddad, an Iraqi-born doctor who had defected from her native country in 1979 and is now an American citizen living in Cleveland. The CIA contacted Alhaddad in May 2002 and asked her to do something straight out of a Tom Clancy novel: The agency wanted her to go to Baghdad and secretly interrogate her brother, Saad Tawfiq, a key Iraqi nuclear scientist, about Iraq's nuclear program.

Alhaddad agreed, and her story makes for the most thrilling reading in Risen's book. She prepares zealously for her assignment, learning ways to avoid detection by Saddam's men, and writing mnemonic aids into a crossword puzzle to help her memorize the questions to ask her brother. Once she's in Iraq, a cloak-and-dagger scene unfolds as she tries to speak candidly with her brother about his work without raising any suspicions. But for all the theatrics -- to talk secretly, the siblings take long walks late at night, they unplug the phones and they turn up the television in Tawfiq's house -- Tawfiq repeatedly tells Alhaddad the same thing: There is no nuclear program in Iraq. Risen paraphrases what Tawfiq said to his sister: "We don't have the resources to make anything anymore, he told her. We don't even have enough spare parts for our conventional military. We can't even shoot down an airplane. We don't have anything left. If the sanctions are ever lifted, then Saddam is certain to restart the programs. But there is nothing now."

Tawfiq, who was understandably wary of war, thought that by taking a risk to tell his sister the truth about Iraq's weapons, he was clearing up an American misunderstanding about Saddam's regime and possibly helping to stave off the invasion. He was not alone; in all, Allen's program recruited family members to get to about 30 Iraqi weapons scientists in the months before the war, and they all said the same thing, "that Iraq's programs to develop nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons had long since been abandoned," Risen writes.

This data would, of course, later prove highly accurate -- but Risen says that officials in the CIA's Directorate of Operations, the agency's clandestine program, became jealous of Allen's findings, and under Tenet's weak management, they successfully suppressed the new information on Iraq. "The reports from the family members of Iraqi scientists were buried in the bowels of the CIA and were never released for distribution to the State Department, Pentagon, or White House," Risen writes. "President Bush never heard about the visits or the interviews."

When it came to Iraq, Tenet, CIA insiders tell Risen, appeared to make his position clear -- he would go along with what hard-liners wanted. When any analyst, no matter how junior or inexperienced, seemed to say anything that comported with the neocon view of Iraq, Tenet perked up. One former official tells Risen of a meeting in which Deputy CIA Director John McLaughlin mentioned that analysts at the Department of Energy doubted that aluminum tubes that Saddam had been buying could be used to build a nuclear bomb. At that point, the official tells Risen, one analyst "who didn't look older than twenty-five says, no, that's bullshit, there is only one use for them," referring to a nuclear program. "And Tenet says, 'Yeah? Great.'"

Another time, Tenet ignored the warnings of Tyler Drumheller, who headed the CIA's European spy operations and had learned from German intelligence that a key CIA source on Iraqi WMD, an Iraqi exile who went by the code name Curveball, was mentally unstable, unreliable and not to be trusted. In the days before former Secretary of State Colin Powell made his famous presentation on Iraqi weapons to the United Nations, Drumheller tried frantically to excise all of Curveball's information from Powell's speech. As late as the night before Powell's presentation, he spoke to Tenet on the phone and warned of problems with Curveball. But Tenet ignored Drumheller, and the Curveball data made it into Powell's speech. The commission investigating the failed WMD intelligence later discredited Curveball's source, and lambasted the CIA for relying on such shaky information.

For all the shoddiness of the CIA's work on Iraq, Risen raises the specter that its work on Iran is even flimsier, and might lead, eventually, to even scarier ends than we've met in Iraq. In a final chapter that is as darkly portentous as it is frustratingly vague, Risen writes of a recent intelligence snafu that compromised all American intelligence operations in Iran. The spy business doesn't get any more comic than this: The snafu was the result of a careless e-mail mistake. In June 2004, a CIA officer accidentally sent information that could be used to identify every American spy in Iran to an agent who, unbeknown to the CIA, was working for the Iranian government. The mistake "left the CIA virtually blind in Iran, unable to provide any significant intelligence on one of the most critical issues facing the United States -- whether Tehran was about to go nuclear."

But wait, it gets better. It turns out, Risen says, that the U.S. has pretty good reason to be worried about Iran's nuclear goals, as we may have been a key source for the development of its weapons program. In an operation code-named Merlin that was launched under the Clinton administration and continued by Bush, the CIA cooked up a high-risk plan "to stunt the development of Tehran's nuclear program by sending Iran's weapons experts down the wrong technical path." To do this, the CIA obtained extremely sensitive Russian blueprints for a component known as a TBA-480 high-voltage block, which Risen writes is needed in a nuclear bomb to "create a perfect implosion that could trigger a nuclear chain reaction inside a small spherical core." The design, Risen adds, "was one of the greatest engineering secrets in the world, providing the solution to one of a handful of problems that separated nuclear powers ... from the rogue countries like Iran that were desperate to join the nuclear club but had so far fallen short."

The CIA's plan was to slightly tweak the blueprints in order to introduce a technical flaw that would be imperceptible to Iranian scientists, and then to have a Russian scientist drop off the documents at an Iranian diplomatic office in Vienna, Austria. Even in theory, the plan sounds pie in the sky; in reality, the whole thing fell apart. The Russian scientist whom the CIA chose, a defector who lived in the United States, immediately spotted the engineering flaw that the Americans had introduced into the designs, and before he dropped off the plans in Vienna, he added a little note that tipped off the Iranians to the problem.

Were it not in a book by a Pulitzer-winning New York Times reporter, the notion that the United States may have so recklessly transferred nuclear secrets to the Iranians sounds almost insane, like the rantings of a conspiracy theorist. As it is, actually, Risen's story is hard to believe -- not because I don't want to believe him or because he's not careful, but because it raises so many questions that he doesn't, and possibly can't, answer. We need to know the scope of the plan, which CIA and White House officials were crazy enough to think it might work, and whether anyone was ever punished for its failure. We need to know whether the CIA has discontinued such techniques and, if it has not, whether it has increased its security checks on such programs.

"State of War" doesn't address these questions. But now that Risen's reporting on the topic is out (and finally: according to Newsweek, the White House asked the New York Times two years ago not to publish his work on the program), perhaps other reporters will get on the case, as happened with the wiretapping program. If Risen's work is just the tip of the iceberg, it's high time we learned what lurks beneath, before we're all sunk.

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