Free Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror by Michael V. Hayden

what was happening. He was genuinely irate, and said so.
    During the hearing we were inaccessible to the press, of course, but back at our headquarters the phones were ringing off the hook with journalists looking for comment—which, of course, could not be provided, since this was still top secret stuff. It was never officially determined where the leak originated. But one correspondent who called NSA did submit a curious question: “What does Shelby [the senator who had interrogated us on the intercepts in the morning] have against you guys?”
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    E VEN WITH THE JIC DISTRACTION, we were sharpening our game against al-Qaeda and, frankly, were getting pretty good at it. In March 2002 CIA and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) rolled up Abu Zubaida, the first of many al-Qaeda senior leaders we would capture, and later George Tenet was kind enough to call me at home toboth alert me and thank me as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed met a similar fate.
    By this time, though, Iraq was also on the front burner. I must admit the occasional dark moment when I asked myself why we were doing that. Saddam was dangerous, but he wasn’t going anywhere. I wasn’t a policy maker, though. I focused on getting any war there over quickly.

FOUR
GOING TO WAR . . . AGAIN AND AGAIN
FORT MEADE, MD, 2002–2005
    S o, as we were sorting out the aftermath of 9/11 with Congress, we were running up to the war in Iraq.
    For better and for worse, NSA had a powerful role in that as well. Clearly there were those in the administration who believed that 9/11 justified an assault on Saddam’s regime. To buttress their case they often suggested a connection between the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda and would sometimes call for more detailed analysis of specific pieces of signals intelligence that they felt supported their case.
    It happened often enough that I feared some of our stuff might be taken out of context, so I directed our Iraq folks, whenever they were asked to do that, to put an overall caveat in their reporting along the lines of “Taken in its entirety signals intelligence neither proves nor disproves an operational relationship between the government of Iraq and al-Qaeda.”
    Intelligence services, especially those like Saddam Hussein’s, have contacts with a lot of people. Those contacts aren’t a prima facie case of collaboration, cooperation, or subordination. I’m not saying it was unfair or somehow unethical to recommend the hypothesis or to look for evidence to prove it. In the end, though, there just wasn’t a case for it.
    But we all thought that there was a case for weapons of mass destruction. I was in George Tenet’s conference room when we voted on the now-infamous National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). I voted yes—on all counts. I was comfortable with the vote, then. I had earlier told Condi Rice, the national security advisor, in a private conversation, that I had a roomful of evidence that Saddam had a WMD program. “A roomful of evidence,” I confided, “all of it circumstantial.”
    That was often the nature of SIGINT, indeed the nature of a lot of intelligence. Years later Michael Morell, then deputy director of CIA, was briefing President Obama on the likelihood that Osama bin Laden was at that Abbottabad compound. It turns out that some in CIA viewed the odds at no better than fifty-fifty; others handicapped it at nine out of ten. When pressed by the president as to why the large spread, Michael replied that those who had been involved in the Iraq NIE were the most conservative, while those whose only work was counterterrorism and al-Qaeda were most optimistic. Michael added that in both cases the evidence was circumstantial—and that we may have had more of it for the Iraqi WMD question than we did for Abbottabad.
    The intelligence guy is actually most at risk when he is telling the policy maker things he wants to hear. And there is no doubt that Saddam’s linkage to weapons of