This month marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and in this episode, we're going to look back at the war. Specifically, we're going to look at the many roles played by CIA during the war, and we're going to talk about the long-term consequences of the conflict. In playing those roles, the agency's performance was mixed. As many people know, some of our work reflected the worst the agency had to offer. Few people know, however, that some of our work also reflected the best the agency had to offer. If there is a theme to this episode, that is it. We're going to talk about the agency's work on Iraq with the help of five CIA officers who were either directly involved or who had a front row seat to the war. As a senior agency manager, I had a front row seat as well. What you're going to hear are my personal views as well as the personal views of my five colleagues. We'll be right back with that discussion after a break. I'm Michael Morrell, and this is a special episode of Intelligence Matters. This is the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather reporting from CBS News Headquarters in New York. Good evening. He said he wouldn't. There's no indication he did. No indication Saddam Hussein left Iraq tonight, the deadline for avoiding a U.S. invasion, an invasion that could come as soon as tonight. The invasion of Iraq began on March 20, 2003, and it was just the start of what would become a years-long, complex mix of military operations, intelligence activities, and political initiatives to stabilize post-war Iraq and to deal with the consequences. CIA's work in Iraq included analysis and operations both before and after the invasion. We're going to walk through it all. Let's start pre-invasion, and let's start with the most well-known issue, CIA's deeply flawed assessment that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had an active weapons of mass destruction program. President Bush is calling Saddam Hussein a homicidal dictator who poses a clear threat to the United States. Mr. Bush gave his reasons for confronting Iraq in a speech last night in Cincinnati. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof. the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. CIA's views on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program were outlined in an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE. An NIE is the most authoritative product of the U.S. intelligence community. It is coordinated across the many agencies that make up the intelligence community, and it is approved by the head of each one. In this NIE, which was titled Iraq's Continuing Programs of Weapons of Mass Destruction, CIA made four judgments about Iraq's WMD programs. One, that Saddam had chemical weapons. Two, that he had biological weapons. Three, that he was pursuing a nuclear weapon. And four, that he was expanding his missile force in order to be able to deliver those weapons. Sadly, we were wrong on most of them. I'm Andy Macretus, and I was the president's briefer from 2002 to 2004. And then after that, I ran the nuclear group at the agency. So how wrong were we? We were wrong on the chemical weapons judgment, we were wrong on the biological weapons judgment, and we were wrong on the nuclear weapons judgment. Saddam no longer had these programs. He had stopped them. He had disarmed. For what it's worth, we were mostly right on the missile judgment. There were many reasons CIA was wrong on the WMD judgments, and those included both collection and analytic failures. On collection, CIA and NSA, the National Security Agency, did not penetrate Saddam's inner circle to the point where the United States would have known what Saddam had really done, what Saddam was really up to. That he had given up his WMD programs, but did not want the Iranians to know, so he kept the disarmament a secret. That he had thought the CIA was so good that it would see through the secret and know that the weapons were gone. That once this happened, the U.S. would lift the sanctions against Iraq that were strangling his economy. And that once sanctions were lifted, Saddam would be free to rearm. We know this because Saddam told us this during his captivity. There is, of course, reason to be skeptical of what Saddam says. But we believed him because his mindset at that point was that he was certain to be executed and that he wanted his life story told. He was not dissembling. And what he told us also fit the facts. The collection failure is significant because had collectors seen what Saddam had done, the analytic failure on WMD could not and would not have happened. Without good collection, however, the analysts were left on their own. And the analysts made their own mistakes. The causes of those mistakes were numerous, and I want to touch on just some of them, the ones that I see as most important. One resulted from the fact that Saddam in the 1980s, prior to the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, did have chemical and biological weapons, and he did have a program to build nuclear weapons. We knew that Saddam had WMD programs in the 1980s. After all, he had used chemical weapons against the Iranians and against his own people in the 1980s, and we had monitored his nuclear program for years. After the Gulf War, we even learned that Saddam's nuclear program, at that point dismantled, was further along than we had known before the war. We had missed aspects of it. This history colored the analyst's approach to the question of whether he had weapons of mass destruction in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Andy Macritus shares with us the analyst mentality. The idea that he would sort of withdraw or pull back from his WMD programs wasn't in the cards. Of course he's trying to keep those things because they create regime stability. It's his defense against the West. We won't mess with you if you have WMDs. It's sort of hard to think about that someone would voluntarily stop the WMD programs. And certainly he was under extreme UN sanctions. The first analytic mistake, therefore, was a failure to be open to all possibilities. This led to another analytic mistake, confirmation bias. We were looking for stuff that confirmed our hypotheses as opposed to looking at everything. The analysts took confirmation bias to the extreme, even when considering what they were not seeing. In the second paragraph of the NIE summary, the analysts wrote what is in retrospect an amazing sentence. They said, quote, we lack specific information on many key aspects of Iraq's WMD programs, unquote. Okay, so right away, we're telling the reader, there's a lot that we don't know. However, we make relatively authoritative judgments, definitive judgments in the rest of the body of the key judgment. So you're left with this cognitive dissonance thing where one part your brain and saying, well, we don't know. And then you read the rest saying, yes, we do know. Instead of asking, is it possible that we're not seeing more because we are wrong? The analyst explained the lack of information by saying Saddam was practicing, and I want to quote here, vigorous denial and deception efforts, unquote. In making this observation, the analyst pointed to something they knew, that Saddam had practiced extensive denial and deception of his WMD programs before the first Gulf War. But history turned out to be a bad guide. For the first war, we know that we underestimated across the board how far along Saddam was, and so you can't unknow that. And so when you come in, you say, we know he's denying because clearly he was further along the first time, so there must be more we're not seeing. So it turned out that Saddam was also undertaking denial and deception in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But this time, it was working in reverse. He was pretending to have the weapons when he really did not. He was bluffing. He began to withdraw from his WMD programs in 91, 92, that time frame after Desert Storm. He didn't really make it public. He continued to try to obfuscate all the things that he was doing. So he was almost hiding weakness. He didn't tell all the members of his regime. He created a lot of smoke. Another analytic mistake that was made was what intelligence experts called layering. What you can see in some of these is sort of a layering effect, and that's sort of layering judgments one on top of another without carrying forward the uncertainties of each layer. You're left with a judgment that has a lot of uncertainty surrounding it, but you don't see it. a final error to mention is that the analysts did not put rigor into thinking about the level of confidence they claimed that they had in their judgments on all the weapons judgments the analysts said they had high confidence but these confidence levels were an afterthought They were not the result of rigorous critical thinking. They were based on the history we just discussed. In fact, the text of the NIE included caveats, not a lot of them, but enough to notice. Had the analysts taken those caveats into account, and had they rigorously assessed the dated nature of the information underlying their judgments, and the poor quality of the sourcing behind that information, I believe their confidence would have been lower. I believe they would have had only low confidence on a scale of low, medium, and high. That would have led to a very different message to the president. There's a big difference between saying on the one hand, Mr. President, we think that he has these weapons and we have high confidence in that view. and on the other hand saying, Mr. President, we think he has these weapons, but what you really need to know is that we only have low confidence in that. I think it is important to note here that while I keep saying the analysts did this and the analysts did not do that, I do not mean to put responsibility only on the analysts. We mentioned the collection failure earlier, And by analysts, I mean anyone who did the work and anyone who was in the chain of command of that work. And that includes many senior people, including me. The analysts are not alone here. One final point on the weapons of mass destruction analysis. There's a myth about the weapons judgments that still persist today. the myth is that within the intelligence community only cia got this wrong that other parts of the intelligence community got the wmd story right the two examples that are often given are the analysts at the state department and the analysts at the Energy Department But the State Department analysts came to the same conclusions as our CIA colleagues on chemical and biological weapons. They only differed on nuclear weapons. The State Department analysts said there was not enough evidence to make a judgment that the Iraqis had restarted their nuclear weapons program. But they were with everyone else on chemical and biological weapons. For their part, the analysts at the Energy Department shared all of CIA's judgments, including the nuclear weapons judgment. They too believed Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Their only issue was that they did not believe one of the pieces of data that everyone else saw as supporting the nuclear weapons narrative. So the idea that this was just CIA is wrong. And it's demonstrably wrong, because there was a lot of pieces of the intelligence community that sort of jumped in and sort of agreed. So we were all fooled, I guess. They all fell prey to the same mistakes CIA made, as did every foreign intelligence service with whom we worked, as did the United Nations, and as did academics who seriously looked at the issue. Show us the proof. That's Iraq's message to the U.S. and Britain in a new denial that it has weapons of mass destruction. The government's chief science advisor wasted little time arguing that Iraq has given the U.N. every shred of information it has about its weapons program. But if that's still not enough, he offered to allow the CIA into Iraq to see for itself. What we gave is accurate. We know the full story. If you have another story, tell us. The WMD story is where many commentators end the CIA and Iraq narrative. That CIA got weapons of mass destruction wrong, end of story. But the story is much more complex than that. And the rest of the story is one in which CIA largely shined with a few stumbles. Let's start with CIA's pre-war assessment of Iraq's links to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. This was critically important because the primary concern of President Bush was that Saddam might someday give his weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, most concerningly to bin Laden and al-Qaeda. This was just a possibility, but when you are the President of the United States who just suffered the worst attack on the homeland in the history of the country, you pay attention into possibilities, particularly when they were about the worst weapons ever developed by man. My name is Kristen Wood, and I was the chief of the Iraq Terrorism Branch in the Office of Terrorism Analysis in the Counterterrorism Center prior to the war with Iraq. It's very rare that a judgment has the consequence of potentially being a reason to go to war with another country. For Kristen and her team of analysts working on Iraq's links to terrorism, making judgments was not just important, it was also difficult. The biggest challenge in intelligence analysis is it's not, there are 10 facts to be found, there are 10 data points to be found, we have all 10 of them, and we put them all together and decide what it means. In the case of Iraq, there was a 10,000-piece puzzle to be solved to create the whole big picture. We had 100 pieces, but they weren't all necessarily for the same puzzle. There were two key questions on Iraq and terrorism. One, did Iraq have anything to do with 9-11? And two, did Iraq have a relationship with Abu Musab al-Zaqari, the leader of an ultra-extremist terrorist group called Ansar al-Islam? Here is what the analysts said on each. on Iraq's links to 9-11. There was no evidence that Saddam Hussein or Iraq had foreknowledge or a link to 9-11. No ties to 9-11 in terms of either direction control or even foreknowledge. There appeared to be early contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda, but the analysts judged that those never evolved into an operational relationship. There wasn't a formal arrangement between al-Qaeda and Iraq. After the war, we did learn we were right about the lack of a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda. And some of those early contacts, we learned after the war that many of the most worrisome had never happened. We had a senior military trainer who'd said they'd sent operatives to Iraq, that they'd provided chemical weapons training. They recanted it all. It turned out he lied about it. The question about the Iraqi government's relationship with Zarqawi and Ansar al-Islam was analytically a tougher one. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, he'd been a jihadist since the early 90s. He was involved in al-Qaeda's failed millennium plotting, targeting hotels and landmarks in Amman. We described him as loosely affiliated with al-Qaeda because he went to Afghanistan, tried to meet with bin Laden in 99, but it never happened. What reporting we had from detainees said that Zarqawi himself thought al-Qaeda was too moderate and too much focused on the United States. And bin Laden's team thought that Zarqawi was a thug, maybe even a Jordanian intelligence plant, and way too extreme, because he also believed that the Shia needed to be exterminated. Whether tied directly to al-Qaeda or not, Zarqawi and his men, since the group was formed in 2001, were living in northern Iraq. There they had contact with an Iraqi intelligence officer, and Zarqawi had gone to Baghdad for medical treatment for a few months in 2002. For some in the administration, these two data points were enough to prove a link between Saddam and Zarqawi. But that is not the way the analysts saw it. On the issue of the Iraqi intelligence officer meeting with the group, The analysts noted that they thought that Iraq's interest was in monitoring the group, not collaborating with it. Iraq did not want Zarqawi and his followers to become a threat to Iraq, nor did it want them to commit a terrorist attack against the West and therefore draw American attention to Iraq. The analysts noted correctly that the Iraqis could do no more than watch Zarqawi, as he and his Ansar al-Islam followers were in a location in northern Iraq where Saddam's military or security services could not go because of the no-fly and no-drive zones imposed on Iraq by the United Nations. Likewise, on Zarqawi's trip to Baghdad, the analysts did not believe that the trip was coordinated with the Iraqis. We really thought because he and about 10 of his fellow terrorists were in Baghdad for several months that the Iraqis had to know. And that was further boosted by the fact that a foreign service said they told the IIS where they were, but the IIS came back and said they couldn't find him. So we thought, OK, they know they're there, but there's no reporting that says they're directing them, that they're involved with them. No control, no direction. And that there was not any sense that Iraqi leadership was in any way authorizing their actions. And like the Iraq al-Qaeda link itself, we learned after the war that there was no Iraqi support for Zarqawi and his group. CIA was right on this aspect of the terrorism question too. One consequence, though, is that after the invasion, after the collapse of a functioning Iraqi government, Zarqawi built a powerful terrorist group, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which would go on to kill many U.S. servicemen and which would eventually, after the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, become ISIS, which we continue to have to deal with today. I want to make two other points about CIA's work on the Iraq terrorism link. One, some of the terrorism analysts felt they were being pressured by policymakers to see a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Absolutely. I know you probably got many phone calls. I know I did. I know that at the time, Director, Tenet, Deputy Director, our beloved John McLaughlin, we all had some difficult conversations with members of the administration. I felt like they cherry-picked the information, and by cherry-pick, I mean selectively picked reports that were provided to them by folks who had similar views. and they built a pile of reports that said the same thing. But if you pulled them apart, coming back to our 100 puzzle pieces, right, they didn't all fit to the same puzzle. The administration was definitely trying to get us to describe things in a different way. And two, the analysts felt that senior policymakers were saying things publicly that were inconsistent with the intelligence. President Bush told the press corps in November 2002 that Saddam Hussein is a threat because he's dealing with Al Qaeda. Vice President Cheney in September 2003 said if we're successful in Iraq, then we'll have struck a major blow at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9-11. And there were many more comments from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz. And it was shorthanding what the intelligence said in the service of, I think, their beliefs. At least that's my opinion. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we'll discuss the important presentation to the United Nations by Secretary of State Colin Powell. This is a CBS News special report. Dan Rather reporting from CBS News World Headquarters in New York. The Secretary of State of the United States, Colin Powell, is appearing before the United Nations Security Council here in New York City to present evidence that Saddam Hussein is violating the council resolution. Secretary Powell's speech to the United Nations occurred in early February 2003. He was trying to make the case for why the U.S. needed to go to war in Iraq and why the rest of the world needed to support us. The speech covered both Iraq's WMD programs and its ties to terrorism. Let's look at how intelligence was handled in that speech. I cannot tell you everything that we know, but what I can share with you, when combined with what all of us have learned over the years is deeply troubling. The facts in Iraq's behavior demonstrate that Saddam Hussein and his regime have made no effort, no effort, to disarm as required by the international community. Indeed, the facts in Iraq's behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction. On the weapons of mass destruction portion of Powell's speech, the Secretary's presentation omitted the analyst's caveats. Although, to be fair, the caveats were not numerous. Nonetheless, they were lost. There was pressure from policymakers for those caveats not to be in the speech. Here is Andy MacRetus again talking about the National Intelligence Estimate and the Powell speech I look at the body of the NIE which had some mild caveats about some of the judgments Some of those caveats then got lost or just weren't fully articulated in the key judgments. And now you take it up another level and you have a speech to the UN and more of that gets lost. So what strikes me in listening to the Powell speech when I did and then looking at these other documents is that he's more definitive in his speech than if you read the whole NIE, you'd say, well, wait a second, that's not exactly what was said here. But then again, I said the caveats were mild, they got milder or disappeared in the key judgments, and then by the time of the speech, they were sort of gone. And so it was a much more declarative statement. From his terrorist network in Iraq, Zarkawi can direct his network in the Middle East and beyond. Iraqi officials protest that they are not aware of the whereabouts of Zarqawi or of any of his associates. Again, these protests are not credible. On Iraq and terrorism, the Powell presentation was not about al-Qaeda and 9-11. It was about Zarqawi, and it implied a strong, dangerous link between Iraq and Zarqawi. It painted the contacts with the Iraqi intelligence officer and the medical visit to Baghdad as proof of a relationship. It was not what the analysts had assessed. Kristen Wood again. We were listening to it and we were stunned because we had been intimately involved in the preparation for that and the days leading up to the speech. And we had two analysts full time doing fact checking, turning things back, editing, but it became direct statements of fact. Iraq harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of bin Laden. Baghdad has an agent in the most senior levels of Ansar al-Islam. This agent offered al-Qaeda safe haven in the region, something we didn't have anything about. He traveled to Baghdad, staying in the capital for two months while he recuperated to fight another day. While it was true he was in the capital, we don't know that that was in any cooperation with the Iraqis at all. The terrorism text was finalized in New York City in the last hours before the speech, and it was not sent to the analysts for them to comment on. It should have been. Taking the analysts out of the process almost always ends in a mistake, and it did so in this case. One final point about Iraq and terrorism. The last two paragraphs of the summary of the Iraq WMD National Intelligence Estimate says that if Saddam were sufficiently desperate, that is, if his regime were at risk, that he might provide his weapons of mass destruction to al-Qaeda to attack the U.S. homeland. This was critical because it made the very link the president was concerned about. But in fact, there was quite an analytic debate within CIA about these two paragraphs that many senior officials at the agency did not know about. I just learned about this in putting this episode together. My name is Jane Green. Before the invasion, I was the chief of the group of analysts who focused on Iraq. Most of my analysts were very experienced Iraq hands. They had studied all aspects of Iraq for years. Every one of them assessed that Saddam would never give WMD to terrorists or anyone else. Saddam was ruthless and cautious with a touch of paranoia. He did not believe in long-term alliances. He assumed that anyone who received weapons from him would one day use them against Iraq. Now here's the other side of the argument. Here is Kristen Wood again, the head of the Iraq terrorism team. The WMD community was so certain he had weapons of mass destruction. And being in the terrorism shop, it seemed to me and to my analysts that it would be a poor analytic judgment to say that there's something Saddam wouldn't do. That he had a principle. He used, he gassed his own people. In the end, the analyst compromised, and the NIE said Saddam might share weapons of mass destruction with al-Qaeda if his regime and his own existence were on the line. The analyst chose those two words carefully, might and if. In retrospect, the analyst should have crafted the language to clearly state the existence of analytic differences and the reasons behind those differences, rather than to settle on a weak judgment that Saddam might do something if he found himself an extremist. Words like might and if get lost when policymakers read them. Policy officials likely saw this as the IC confirming the president's worst fears. We could and we should have done better in writing these two paragraphs. CIA Director George Tenet is going on the offensive. This morning he'll answer charges that his agency botched the estimates of Iraq's weapons. Sources tell CBS News that Tenet will point to intelligence successes not previously made public and try to correct what they call inaccuracies about what the CIA did and did not say about weapons of mass destruction. Beyond Iraq and WMD and Iraq and terrorism, there was one other important analysis done prior to the war, this time about what post-war Iraq might look like. Here's Jane Green again. I want to quote Director Tennant from his book. He said our pre-war analysis of post-war Iraq was prescient. Jane highlighted for us one pre-war CIA analytic paper written in August of 2002 titled The Perfect Storm, Planning for Negative Consequences of Invading Iraq. Some of those consequences that we assessed could happen, anarchy in Iraq, regime threatening instability in key Arab states, a surge of global terrorism against U.S. interests. In another CIA assessment in January of 2003, we said Iraq would be unlikely to split apart, but a post-Saddam authority would face a deeply divided society with a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other unless an occupying force prevented them from doing so. It was very difficult to get our message heard. Perhaps we should have said it louder, but it was certainly something that we were trying to get across, that the risks of this effort were substantial, both to the stability of Iraq and to the Middle East, as well as to our own troops. Other CIA analysts shared the concern of Jains analysts. My name is Emil Knackley. Emil studied the Middle East in great depth as an academic before coming to the agency, including spending significant time in the region. At CIA, Emil established and ran the Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program. He also ran the Regional Analysis Program, dealing with the Middle East at large. I had serious concerns and several of my analysts shared those concerns. Many of these concerns had to do with plans by some in the administration to remove from their positions any Iraqis who were members of Saddam's Ba'ath Party, so-called de-Ba'athification. The whole issue of de-Ba'athification, They were talking about ultimately de-Baathification after the war. And they, I must admit, they had no idea of the role of the Baath Party in Iraqi society. That, for example, everybody had to have a party card, membership card, in order to get a job. You could not get a job in Iraq from a taxi driver to a university professor without having a bath party card. And the issue that really concerned me was the interest and influence, generations, centuries old, interest and influence of Iran in Iraq, particularly southern Iraq, where Shia Islam started in the first place in the seventh century. Emil did not think the administration had enough Iraq policy experts, and he was worried about the lack of planning for what would come after combat? For example, what tribes should we deal with? How should we engage the Shia leadership, especially the grand ayatollahs in southern Iraq, in Najaf and Karbala? Whether to bring an indigenous leader or a leader from the outside, how to deal with the Sunnis after they lose power and prestige and stature in the country? how to distribute oil revenues among the ethnic sectarian groups, Arabs, Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds. In one of the last briefings I gave the vice president, I said, Mr. Vice President, you make the decisions. I don't make policy. You were elected to make policy. I'm just giving you what our analysts bring to the table in terms of expertise from the field. And that if those questions are not answered, we will have serious problems on our hands. Jane's and Emil's analysts turned out to be right about what Iraq would look like after the invasion. More of this special episode of Intelligence Matters after a short break. As temperatures in Iraq climb higher and tempers grow shorter, senior officials in Washington admit the reconstruction program, which is supposed to put the country back on its feet, is at best sporadic and at worst chaotic. According to one official, J. Paul Bremer, the American in charge of rebuilding Iraq, is making it up as he goes along. Let me now switch from pre-invasion to post-invasion. There are two stories here. One, the collection of analysis done by CIA on the deteriorating situation in Iraq, and two, CIA support for the eventual stabilization of Iraq. CIA officers on the ground in Iraq and the Iraq analysts in Washington were the first to see what was happening to post-war Iraq. Both saw the emergence of the insurgency and then its growth. And they saw it almost immediately, within weeks of the end of combat operations in April 2003. My name is Luis Rueta. During the time period, I was chief of IOG, which is the Iraq operations group. Luis was responsible for all of CIA operations in country. Our officers were seeing a very rapid deterioration of the situation U forces were not big enough to hold the country Remember that the coalition administration inside Iraq had demobilized the army and they had told the army go home. And they did, but all of a sudden we had 450,000 armed men unemployed, which became very fertile recruiting ground for an insurgency. Services had been at least degraded significantly so electricity, running water, things like that were not functioning, which creates an unhappy population. The coalition authority had de-Bathified the government, which meant getting rid of anybody who belonged to the Bath Party. And as we had articulated, the vast majority of members of the Bath Party had to be Bath Party members to hold a job. It was like the Communist Party in Russia. So you had teachers, policemen, they weren't committed bathies. They just had to have the job. But all of a sudden, they were out of jobs. And law and order started to break down. And we started seeing this get worse and worse. Jane Green again. In June 2003, I went to Iraq to serve as the intelligence advisor to the leader, who was Jerry Bremer. And I was also his briefer. I met with Bremer and with Coalition Ground Forces Chief General Ricardo Sanchez six days a week. During the six months I was there, we saw it right away. and we saw looting of factories and other heavy industry, not just the taking of parts and equipment, but the dismantling of the facilities themselves, which was the equivalent of dismantling the Iraqi economy. It was astounding to see when we would see imagery of, you know, significant factories reduced to, you know, a few pieces of sheet metal and then that sheet metal would be gone the next day. the situation was becoming more and more dangerous. Soon we saw that weapons and ammunition storage depots were being emptied. We saw the rise of Shia militias with support from Iran in some cases. The goal of some of these militias was to take revenge on Sunnis and make sure they never had the ability to subjugate the Shia populace again. We saw the Sunni tribes arming themselves. Soon, Shia shrines were being attacked and groups of Shia civilians were attacked. All the Sunnis then had left were the weapons and ammunitions that they had looted from the depots and a deep resentment of coalition activities. The new Iraqi government faced fierce opposition in Sunni areas, and especially in strongholds like Fallujah and Mahdi. While the CIA's assessment of the situation in Iraq was getting worse, some policymakers and other government agencies, namely the Pentagon, pushed back. The Iraqis in the O.D.'s eyes were supposed to be rejoicing that Saddam's regime was gone. And it took them a long time to accept our analyst judgment that the Iraqi people were devolving into a civil war. Here is Luis Rueda again. At the end of the day, I remember there was a situation where Secretary Rumsfeld confronted agency briefers and said, what makes you use the term insurgency? We don't think there's an insurgency. And the briefer said, well, we're using the Defense Department definition of insurgency and outlined that definition. Once the administration led by President Bush recognized that Iraq was descending into chaos, policy caught up. But several important months were lost. CIA would ultimately support the administration's efforts to stabilize Iraq. And one of the things they did was turn to the agency and say, we need additional assistance in trying to stabilize the country. So the CIA was tasked with working with Bremer's office, with the U.S. military, with Central Command, to sort of bring together Iraqi leadership and work with them and support them in creating some type of stable government. CIA was tasked with finding moderate Iraqi forces who could work together, and then CIA supported them. We were not tasked with picking people. We were not tasked with deciding what the government was going to be like. We wanted that, and it was very clear, we wanted that to be an Iraqi endeavor. The Iraqis had to decide. But we had to bring enough people, give them the wherewithal, whether it was training, advice, or guidance, to come together and form some kind of governing authority where they would choose how they would run the country, who would run the country, and this sort of thing. One of the biggest CIA contributions to the stabilization was forming an Iraqi intelligence service. We also worked to develop a security apparatus that would collect information on the terrorists, on Iranians, on efforts to destabilize any further, destabilize Iraq. And, you know, we realized that the Iraqis are much better at interacting with the Iraqis than the U.S. would be. So we helped to create a security apparatus to help the government stabilize. CIA played a significant role in the stabilization of Iraq, a success that many to this day do not know. What about the consequences? What were the consequences for the United States, for Iraq, for the region, and for the CIA? Let's turn to that discussion. The most important consequences were two. One, the impact the war had on what Americans thought of their own government, and two, the impact it had on America's credibility on the world stage. I spend a great deal of time on college campuses, and I can't tell you how often students question whether America's role in the world has been for good or for not. And for those students who say no, they point first to the Iraq war and second to the 2008 financial crisis. These two events have led many Americans to question the competency and credibility of their own government. Regarding America's credibility in the world, some have argued that the Iraq war was the moment that U.S. seeded its global leadership role. The consequences for the region were even worse. Here's Emil Nakley again. So after the invasion, we see the rise of Iran as a major player because of Iraq. This is very, very huge. For the first time following the invasion, we saw the rise of what we call or what one academic friend of mine called the Shia crescent in the region. So for the first time, you have the two largest Shia states in the world, Iran and Iraq, almost in an alliance that they did not have before ever. So that was the biggest regional implication. Significant gains for Iranian influence, as predicted by Emil and his analysts before the invasion. The war in Iraq may be over, but the politics of leaving have begun. The concern is the regime in Iran. Experts say the more the United States moves out of Iraq, the more Iran moves in. The other significant consequences, which we discussed before, was the rise of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Emil explains how all this affected and still is affecting our strategic position in the region. After we removed Saddam, we got bogged down with the insurgency and the civil war, and the Arab states began to express serious concern about the efficacy of our presence there, that our presence there was contributing to the rise in terrorism, contributing to the rise of Shia terrorism. Finally, what were the consequences for CIA? Damage to its credibility for sure, which took some time to repair. But there was also a positive change for the agency. Jamie Misik, who was the head of analysis, deserves immense credit for this. Immense credit for saying, we made a mistake. Let's figure out why, and let's learn from it. Jamie created a task force to study what happened, and then she ordered a multi-day stand-down to teach every analyst in the organization the lessons learned. In my view, this had the most positive impact on the rigor by which analysts do their work at CIA than any other single moment in the history of the organization. Here's Andy MacRitas again. Some of the things that were put into place afterwards were, in particular, sort of this alternative analysis issue where we really did try on big judgment to come up with a variety of analytic techniques to sort of tease out the uncertainties. And there are a variety of techniques that people can read about. There's premortems, that's sort of one of my favorite ones, but red teaming, double advocacy, brainstorming, alternative futures, competing hypotheses. These are all ways to sort of get at, let's take a look at this and where are the weaknesses in our argument and lay those out for the policymakers. So today when we're making the big analytic judgment, we include a how could we be wrong? That's the narrative I wanted to share. There is obviously much more to the story, but only so much can fit into a 40-minute podcast. Let me end with one final thought. I think the lessons of the Iraq War for both intelligence officers and for policymakers are enormous. For policymakers, it is to understand the inherent limitations of intelligence and to never put pressure on the IC to see things a certain way. Doing so leads to jumbled messages that do not serve the interests of the country. For intelligence officers, it is also important to understand the inherent limitations of intelligence and to apply that understanding to the confidence one has in any judgment. It is to be humble, and it is to know that if you lose your focus for any reason, the next big intelligence failure will be right around the corner. Thanks for listening. I'm Michael Morrell. Please join us again next week for another episode of Intelligence Matters. CBS News. Evening News.
