Shifting Resources Away From WMD Search Led To Saddam Capture

by William M. Arkin

What is more, it is highly unlikely that, even if Hussein chooses to talk freely, he would be able to tell CIA interrogators anything useful, because it now seems likely that the Iraqi leader was himself deceived about the status of Iraq's weapons.

Though there could be no more dramatic event than Hussein's capture, that success ironically came as a result of abandoning high-profile "smoking gun" operations. The lesson of his capture may well be that the end of the insurgency, like the ultimate truth about Iraq's weapons, will come as a result of continued slow and thorough legwork.

Hussein's capture was the result of a significant shift in American strategy that took place in November, one that reassigned intelligence personnel from the search for weapons of mass destruction to a reinvigorated manhunt to find the remaining "high-value Iraqi targets" -- the former regime leaders. Key to that effort was the joint Iraq Survey Group, created at the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom and charged with inspecting suspected WMD sites, collecting and analyzing documents and military materiel and conducting interrogations and debriefings.

Initially, the group's inspectors visited dozens of suspect sites in search of hidden chemical and biological agents, nuclear materials or delivery systems such as missiles. The group found and captured hundreds of Iraqi workers, scientists and officials and collected millions of pages of seized Iraqi documents. In addition to its weapons investigations, the group was charged with establishing Iraqi links to international terrorism, investigating war crimes, finding stolen Kuwaiti assets, recovering antiquities and locating coalition prisoners of war.

Over time, the team's mission shifted. The "bullpen" approach of dispatching teams to suspect sites gave way to the creation of dedicated cells of experts, each working more deeply on a particular portfolio. The group also moved its translators and analysts from Kuwait and Qatar to Baghdad to increase collaboration and efficiency. One of the immediate results, a senior officer says, was that team members discovered that translators were passing over useful but unsensational material in a search for smoking guns. Once translators and analysts were in the same place as the rest of the team, priorities shifted to analyzing documents like salary records and contracts that translators had earlier passed over.

"The goal is to put all the pieces together in what is appearing to be a very complex jigsaw puzzle," says the group's commander, Maj. Gen. Keith W. Dayton, a deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

As more effort was focused on building databases of names and diagraming complicated relationships, some of the group's other missions were completed or phased out. Coalition prisoners of war were all accounted for; antiquities and asset recovery receded in importance. On Sept. 1, the group concluded its "captured materiel exploitation" mission, after intelligence specialists shipped 19 planeloads of Iraqi weapons systems, vehicles and ammunition to the United States.

At some point, insiders say, Dayton and David Kay, the highly regarded former UN weapons inspector brought in to provide strategic direction to the group, realized that there wasn't going to be a smoking gun, and the group shifted its operations. By fall, the group's interrogation facility and intelligence fusion center were the envy of U.S. commanders.

On the ground, U.S. military intelligence on the Iraqi insurgency was also improving. Local commanders were benefiting from their own learning curve, getting to know their regions better, building relationships and deciphering tribal and family relations to better protect their forces and restore civil authority. Then, in November, came a period of what one senior official calls "absolute panic" in Iraq. Attacks by insurgents were increasing, as were U.S. military casualties. "Nothing was going to be successful in Iraq if security couldn't be created," a senior official says.

As military commanders shifted their efforts to more aggressively combating the insurgency, they began to emulate the Iraq Survey Group and abandon their hunts for smoking guns in favor of systematic attempts to understand the relationships that the remaining top officials had with each other and with a web of supporters.

In order to capture Hussein, analysts suggested, military personnel throughout Iraq would have to "leverage the intelligence assets" of the Iraq Survey Group and adopt their pieces-of-the-puzzle approach. Before the war, personality profiles of more than 700 officials and scientists had been assembled. As many of them were captured, even more information became available.

Using this and other new information, intelligence analysts began to refine their elaborate diagrams of family relationships of regime leaders. This led to an increased understanding that midlevel sources and players such as couriers or financiers might well be sources of important information as useful as the more influential decision-makers and power brokers on whom the U.S. had been primarily focusing.

In a series of offensive operations, the 4th Infantry Division narrowed its focus to Tikrit and the surrounding towns. New emphasis was placed on understanding links to "high-value targets," and a new group that included CIA members and covert special operations personnel, Task Force 121, was created to quickly capitalize on information derived from debriefings. In this way, authorities got to a Tikrit family leader who identified the general area in which Hussein was hiding.

Hussein's capture now shifts the media spotlight back on the Iraq Survey Group's initial main task: locating weapons of mass destruction. But it's highly questionable whether the former leader could shed much light on the subject even if he were inclined to. "A lot of what he knows is going to be the product of deception operations his people ran against him," says a senior official involved in the weapons hunt, noting that officials in all likelihood lied to Hussein and his inner circle about progress that they were making in an attempt to avoid his wrath.

Is it possible that U.S. officials were victims of the same deceptions? One of the hopes of American intelligence is not only that Hussein will sing, but that his closest confidants, most of whom have been silent to date, will feel sufficiently freed from their bonds of loyalty and fear to now speak up to save their skins. If that happens, we might finally learn the truth.