Believe the CIA?
How reliable is the agency’s information on Iraq?

By Max Singer, senior fellow of the Hudson Institute and author of The REAL World Order: Zones of Peace/Zones of Turmoil (with Aaron Wildavsky)
March 7, 2002 8:50 a.m.

s the discussion about what the U.S. should do about Iraq comes to a head, the CIA has stepped up its efforts to discredit the main Iraqi opposition movement, the Iraqi National Congress (INC). For example, the CIA has tried to downplay the significance of each of the defectors the INC has brought out of Iraq since 9/11, including those who described the terrorist training Iraq has been giving foreign Islamic militants. Of course when these stories were given prominence by the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, or NPR, the Agency had to admit the defectors were providing valuable information.

An American reader would normally find it easy to believe that the INC, like most exile groups, is self-serving and unreliable, and that that the CIA is providing realistic information based on objective professional analysis. But for Iraq, history suggests the opposite. The INC has a long record of providing reliable information and being proven correct by later developments. And in the Middle East, especially Iraq, the CIA has a long record of getting the facts wrong. Which may be one of the reasons that James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA, is a leading supporter of the INC — along with other lower-level former CIA officers who had experience working with the INC.

The most famous and dramatic example of the CIA being proven wrong in a disagreement with the INC occurred in connection with the last major CIA effort to organize a coup against Saddam from Jordan. Ahmad Chalabi, the INC's leader, flew to the U.S. to warn CIA Director John Deutsch that he had learned from inside Iraq that Saddam knew about and had penetrated the CIA's plot. Deutsch assigned George Tenet to evaluate the information Chalabi provided, and Tenet, who is now the CIA Director, concluded that Chalabi's information should be rejected and the coup attempt should go forward. Some weeks later Saddam caught and executed the plotters in Iraq and his agents used the radio the CIA had provided to the plotters to taunt the CIA.

It was particularly surprising that the CIA rejected the information from Chalabi because Chalabi had been living in northern Iraq for more than three years as leader of the Iraqi opposition and had survived seven attempts by Saddam to have him killed. His survival in an area where Saddam's agents were able to operate was a very practical demonstration that the INC could penetrate Saddam's intelligence service better than Saddam was able to penetrate the INC. Despite this experience one of the arguments that the State Department has made against the INC is that it is penetrated by Saddam's agents.

Also, in October 1994, when the INC reported to the U.S. in detail about Iraqi troop movements toward Kuwait and warned that Saddam was about to make a new attack against Kuwait, the CIA called the reports exaggerated. Several weeks later the U.S. government realized that the INC was right. Only hours after the State Department publicly announced that there was no problem, the U.S. sent 30,000 troops to the region to deter Saddam.

Eight months later the CIA said that the INC would not be able to mount a substantial offensive out of northern Iraq. When the agency finally saw that the INC could carry out such an offensive it said that the Iraqi military would crush it. But the INC defeated the Iraqi military forces the CIA said would crush them. They destroyed two Iraqi infantry divisions; thousands of officers and soldiers came over to the opposition and much equipment was captured. Three weeks later, although the CIA had prevented the INC from having any anti-tank weapons bigger than RPGs, the INC forces also repelled an Iraqi armored counterattack. The INC forces only withdrew to northern Iraq because of U.S. opposition to their attacks on Saddam's regime.

The next year the INC was forced out of northern Iraq when Saddam took the risk of exposing 400 tanks and 40,000 soldiers from his best forces to U.S. air power by marching them from Baghdad to the north. This was only a few months before the U.S. election and the President only sent planes to take INC people out of the country to avoid capture by Saddam rather than protecting the INC by bombing the Iraqi expeditionary force when it was in the open.

Since then the INC has regularly provided correct timely information from inside Iraq. There is no significant case where the CIA and the INC have disagreed about facts or predictions concerning Iraq and the CIA has turned out to be correct. This should not be surprising because the INC, as an exile organization without authority or resources, knows that it will only be listened to if it builds and keeps a reputation for accuracy and reliability. Of course this does not imply that the U.S. government should just accept everything that the INC says; but it does suggest that when the CIA and the INC disagree about whether Iraq had an important part in the 9/11 attack carried out by members of al Qaeda neither high U.S. officials nor newspaper readers should assume that giant U.S. government agencies necessarily know more than a small group of Iraqi opposition leaders.

Another reason to doubt the CIA when it speaks about Iraq is that the pattern of CIA incompetence in the Middle East goes back many years. Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board, likes to point out that when in 1979 as an Assistant to Senator Scoop Jackson he asked the CIA to confirm some quotations from Ayatollah Khomeini's books, shortly before the Shah of Iran's overthrow, the CIA did not know about the books Khomeini had written and opined that the quotations from these books that were shown to them were phonies.