Iraq Flap Shakes Rice's
Image
By Dana Milbank and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, July 27, 2003; Page A01
Just weeks ago, Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national
security adviser, made a trip to the Middle East that was widely
seen as advancing the peace process. There was speculation that
she would be a likely choice for secretary of state, and hopes
among Republicans that she could become governor of California
and even, someday, president.
But she has since become enmeshed in the controversy over the
administration's use of intelligence about Iraq's weapons in the
run-up to war. She has been made to appear out of the loop by
colleagues' claims that she did not read or recall vital pieces
of intelligence. And she has made statements about U.S.
intelligence on Iraq that have been contradicted by facts that
later emerged.
The remarks by Rice and her associates raise two uncomfortable
possibilities for the national security adviser. Either she
missed or overlooked numerous warnings from intelligence agencies
seeking to put caveats on claims about Iraq's nuclear weapons
program, or she made public claims that she knew to be false.
Most prominent is her claim that the White House had not heard
about CIA doubts about an allegation that Iraq sought uranium in
Africa before the charge landed in Bush's State of the Union
address on Jan. 28; in fact, her National Security Council staff
received two memos doubting the claim and a phone call from CIA
Director George J. Tenet months before the speech. Various other
of Rice's public characterizations of intelligence documents and
agencies' positions have been similarly cast into doubt.
"If Condi didn't know the exact state of intel on Saddam's
nuclear programs . . . she wasn't doing her job," said Brookings
Institution foreign policy specialist Michael E. O'Hanlon. "This
was foreign policy priority number one for the administration
last summer, so the claim that someone else should have done her
homework for her is unconvincing."
Rice declined to be interviewed for this article. NSC
officials said each of Rice's public statements is accurate. "It
was and is the judgment of the intelligence community that Saddam
Hussein was attempting to reconstitute his nuclear weapons
program," said Michael Anton, an NSC spokesman.
Still, a person close to Rice said that she has been dismayed
by the effect on Bush. "She knows she did badly by him, and he
knows that she knows it," this person said.
In the White House briefing room on July 18, a senior
administration official, speaking to reporters on the condition
of anonymity, said Rice did not read October's National
Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, the definitive prewar
assessment of Iraq's weapons programs by U.S. intelligence
agencies. "We have experts who work for the national security
adviser who would know this information," the official said when
asked if Rice had read the NIE. Referring to an annex raising
doubts about Iraq's nuclear program, the official said Bush and
Rice "did not read footnotes in a 90-page document. . . . The
national security adviser has people that do that." The annex was
boxed and in regular type.
Four days later, Rice's deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, said in a
second White House briefing that he did not mention doubts raised
by the CIA about an African uranium claim Bush planned to make in
an October speech (the accusation, cut from that speech,
reemerged in Bush's State of the Union address). Hadley said he
did not mention the objections to Rice because "there was no
need." Hadley said he does not recall ever discussing the matter
with Rice, suggesting she was not aware that the sentence had
been removed.
Hadley said he could not recall discussing the CIA's concerns
about the uranium claim, which was based largely on British
intelligence. He said a second memo from the CIA protesting the
claim was sent to Rice, but "I can't tell you she read it. I
can't tell you she received it." Rice herself used the allegation
in a January op-ed article.
One person who has worked with Rice describes as
"inconceivable" the claims that she was not more actively
involved. Indeed, subsequent to the July 18 briefing, another
senior administration official said Rice had been briefed
immediately on the NIE -- including the doubts about Iraq's
nuclear program -- and had "skimmed" the document. The official
said that within a couple of weeks, Rice "read it all."
Bush aides have made clear that Rice's stature is undiminished
in the president's eyes. The fault is one of a process in which
speech vetting was not systematic enough, they said. "You cannot
have a clearance process that depends on the memory of people who
are bombarded with as much information, as much paperwork, as
many meetings, as many phone calls," one official said. "You have
to make sure everybody, each time, actually reads the documents.
And if it's a presidential speech, it has to be done at the
highest levels."
Democrats, however, see a larger problem with Rice and her
operation. "If the national security adviser didn't understand
the repeated State Department and CIA warnings about the uranium
allegation, that's a frightening level of incompetence," said
Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.), who as the ranking Democrat on the
Government Reform Committee has led the charge on the
intelligence issue. "It's even more serious if she knew and
ignored the intelligence warnings and has deliberately misled our
nation. . . . In any case it's hard to see why the president or
the public will have confidence in her office."
Rice, a former Stanford University provost who developed a
close bond with Bush during the campaign, was one of the most
outspoken administration voices arguing that Saddam Hussein posed
a nuclear danger to the world. As administration hard-liners
worked to build support for war throughout the fall and winter,
Rice often mentioned the fear that Hussein would develop a
nuclear weapon, saying on CNN on Sept. 8: "We don't want the
smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Now that U.S. forces have not turned up evidence of an active
nuclear program in Iraq, the White House is being barraged with
allegations from abroad, and from Democrats on Capitol Hill and
on the presidential trail, that Bush and his aides exaggerated
their evidence. Rice, who is responsible for the White House's
foreign policy apparatus, is the official responsible for how the
president and his aides present intelligence to the public.
When the controversy intensified earlier this month with a
White House admission of error, Rice was the first administration
official to place responsibility on CIA Director Tenet for the
inclusion in Bush's State of the Union address of the Africa
uranium charge. The White House now concedes that pinning
responsibility on Tenet was a costly mistake. CIA officials have
since made clear to the White House and to Congress that
intelligence agencies had repeatedly tried to wave the White
House off the allegation.
The main issue is whether Rice knew that U.S. intelligence
agencies had significant doubts about a claim made by British
intelligence that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa. "The
intelligence community did not know at that time or at levels
that got to us that this, that there was serious questions about
this report," she said on ABC's "This Week" on June 8. A month
later, on CBS's "Face the Nation," she stood by the claim. "What
I knew at the time is that no one had told us that there were
concerns about the British reporting. Apparently, there were.
They were apparently communicated to the British."
As it turns out, the CIA did warn the British, but it also
raised objections in the two memos sent to the White House and a
phone call to Hadley. Hadley last Monday blamed himself for
failing to remember these warnings and allowing the claim to be
revived in the State of the Union address in January. Hadley said
Rice, who was traveling, "wants it clearly understood that she
feels a personal responsibility for not recognizing the potential
problem presented by those 16 words."
In a broader matter, Rice claimed publicly that the State
Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or INR, did not
take issue with other intelligence agencies' view that Iraq was
rebuilding its nuclear program. "[W]hat INR did not take a
footnote to is the consensus view that the Iraqis were actively
trying to pursue a nuclear weapons program, reconstituting and so
forth," she said on July 11, referring to the National
Intelligence Estimate. Speaking broadly about the nuclear
allegations in the NIE, she said: "Now, if there were doubts
about the underlying intelligence to that NIE, those doubts were
not communicated to the president, to the vice president, or to
me."
In fact, the INR objected strongly. In a section
referred to in the first paragraph of the NIE's key judgments,
the INR said there was not "a compelling case" and said the
government was "lacking persuasive evidence that Baghdad has
launched a coherent effort to reconstitute its nuclear weapons
program."
Some who have worked in top national security jobs in
Republican and Democratic administrations support Rice aides'
contention that the workload is overwhelming. "The amount of
information that's trying to force itself in front of your
attention is almost inhuman," one former official said. Another
former NSC official said national security advisers often do not
read all of the dozens of NIEs they get each year.
Still, these former officials said they would expect a
national security adviser to give top priority to major
presidential foreign policy speeches and an NIE about an enemy on
the eve of a war. "It's implausible that the national security
adviser would be too busy to pay attention to something that's
going to come out of the president's mouth," said one. Another
official called it highly unlikely that Rice did not read a memo
addressed to her from the CIA. "I don't buy the bit that she
didn't see it," said this person, who is generally sympathetic to
Rice.
In Rice's July 11 briefing, on Air Force One between South
Africa and Uganda, she said the CIA and the White House had "some
discussion" on the Africa uranium sentence in Bush's State of the
Union address. "Some specifics about amount and place were taken
out," she said. Asked about how the language was changed, she
replied: "I'm going to be very clear, all right? The president's
speech -- that sentence was changed, right? And with the change
in that sentence, the speech was cleared. Now, again, if the
agency had wanted that sentence out, it would have gone. And the
agency did not say that they wanted that speech out -- that
sentence out of the speech. They cleared the speech. Now, the
State of the Union is a big speech, a lot of things happen. I'm
really not blaming anybody for what happened."
Three days later, then-White House press secretary Ari
Fleischer said Rice told him she was not referring to the State
of the Union address, as she had indicated, but to Bush's October
speech. That explanation, however, had a flaw: The sentence was
removed from the October speech, not cleared.
In addition, testimony by a CIA official before the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence two days after Fleischer's
clarification was consistent with the first account Rice had
given. The CIA official, Alan Foley, said he told a member of
Rice's staff, Robert Joseph, that the CIA objected to mentioning
a specific African country -- Niger -- and a specific amount of
uranium in Bush's State of the Union address. Foley testified
that he told Joseph of the CIA's problems with the British report
and that Joseph proposed changing the claim to refer generally to
uranium in Africa.
White House communications director Dan Bartlett last Monday
called that a "conspiracy theory" and said Joseph did not recall
being told of any concerns.
Staff writer Walter Pincus contributed to this report.
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