"State of War: The Secret History of the
CIA and the Bush Administration"
Yahoo News/AP
January 2, 2006
WASHINGTON - A new book on the government's secret anti-terrorism operations
describes how the CIA recruited an Iraqi-American anesthesiologist in 2002 to
obtain information from her brother, who was a figure in Saddam Hussein's
nuclear program.
Dr. Sawsan Alhaddad of Cleveland made the dangerous trip to Iraq on the
CIA's behalf. The book said her brother was stunned by her questions about the
nuclear program because — he said — it had been dead for a
decade.
New York Times reporter James Risen uses the anecdote to illustrate how the
CIA ignored information that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction.
His book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush
Administration" describes secret operations of the Bush administration's war on
terrorism.
The major revelation in the book has already been the subject of extensive
reporting by Risen's newspaper: the National Security Agency's eavesdropping of
Americans' conversations without obtaining warrants from a special court.
The book said Dr. Alhaddad flew home in mid-September 2002 and had a series
of meetings with CIA analysts. She relayed her brother's information that there
was no nuclear program.
A CIA operative later told Dr. Alhaddad's husband that the agency believed
her brother was lying. In all, the book says, some 30 family members of Iraqis
made trips to their native country to contact Iraqi weapons scientists, and all
of them reported that the programs had been abandoned.
In October 2002, a month after the doctor's trip to Baghdad, the U.S
intelligence community issued a National Intelligence Estimate that concluded
Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program.
In the book, which quotes extensively from anonymous sources, Risen said the
NSA spying program was launched in 2002 after the CIA began to capture
high-ranking al-Qaida operatives overseas, and took their computers, cell
phones and personal phone directories.
The CIA turned the telephone numbers and e-mail addresses from the material
over to the NSA, which then began monitoring the phone numbers — in
addition to anyone in contact with the telephone subscribers, the book said,
saying this led to an expansion of the monitoring, both overseas and in the
United States.
The book said the NSA does not need approval from the White House, the
Justice Department or anyone else in the Bush administration before it begins
eavesdropping on a specific phone line in the United States.
In another chapter on a "rogue operation," the book said a CIA officer
mistakenly sent one of its Iranian agents information that could be used to
identify virtually every spy the agency had in Iran. The book said the Iranian
was a double agent who turned over the data to Iranian security officials.
The book said the information severely damaged the CIA's Iranian network,
and quoted CIA sources as saying several of the U.S. agents were arrested and
jailed.
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