Mainly, the work of the evaluation group, Luti said, "went into the corporate memory."
'Very Helpful'
In the summer of 2002, Shelton, who had been working virtually on her own, was joined by Christopher Carney, a naval reservist and associate professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. Together they completed their study on the links between al Qaeda and Iraq.
Douglas J. Feith wanted a more hard-line alternative.
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"It was interesting enough that I brought it to Secretary Rumsfeld because Secretary Rumsfeld is well known for being a particularly intelligent reader of intelligence," Feith said.
Rumsfeld told Feith, " 'Call George and tell him we have something for him to see,' " Feith said. On Aug. 15, 2002, a delegation from Pentagon was buzzed through the guard station at CIA headquarters for the Tenet meeting. Shelton and Carney were the briefers; Feith and DIA Director Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby accompanied them.
"The feedback that I got from George right after the briefing was, 'That was very helpful, thank you,' " Feith said.
CIA officials who sat in the briefing were nonplussed. The briefing was all "inductive analysis," according to one participant's notes from the meeting. The data pointed to "complicity and support," nothing more. "Much of it, we had discounted already," said another participant.
Tenet, according to agency officials, never incorporated any of the particulars from the briefing into his subsequent briefings to Congress. He asked some CIA analysts to get together with Shelton for further discussions.
Feith also arranged for Shelton to brief deputy national security adviser Hadley and Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.
"Her work did not change [Hadley's] thinking because his source for intelligence information are the products produced by the CIA," White House spokesman Sean McCormack said.
Nor did the briefing's content reach national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Cheney or Bush, according to McCormack and Cheney spokesman Kevin Kellems. (In November 2003, a written version of her PowerPoint briefing, a version submitted to the intelligence committees investigating prewar intelligence, was published in the conservative Weekly Standard magazine.) The briefing openly challenged the prevailing CIA view that a religion-based terrorist, Osama bin Laden, would not seek to work with a secular state such as Iraq. "They were the ones who were intellectually unwilling to rethink this issue," one defense official said. "But they were not willing to shoot it down, either."
Whatever the agency really thought of Shelton's analysis, on Oct. 7, 2002, CIA Deputy Director John E. McLaughlin sent a letter to the Senate intelligence committee which, in a general sense, supported her conclusion: "We have solid evidence of senior level contacts between Iraq and al-Qa'ida going back a decade," it said. ". . . Growing indications of a relationship with al-Qa'ida, suggest that Baghdad's link to terrorists will increase, even absent U.S. military action."
A Nondescript Name
In August 2002, as the possibility of war with Iraq grew more likely, Luti's Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs (NESA) was reorganized into the Office of Special Plans and NESA. Its job, according to Feith and Luti, was to propose strategies for the war on terrorism and Iraq.
It was given a nondescript name to purposefully hide the fact that, although the administration was publicly emphasizing diplomacy at the United Nations, the Pentagon was actively engaged in war planning and postwar planning.
The office staff never numbered more than 18, including reservists and people temporarily assigned. "There are stories that we had hundreds of people beavering away at this stuff," Feith said. ". . . They're just not true."
The office's job was to devise Pentagon policy recommendations for the larger interagency decision-making on every conceivable issue: troop deployment planning, coalition building, oil sector maintenance, war crimes prosecution, ministry organization, training an Iraqi police force, media strategy and "rewards, incentives and immunity" for former Baath Party supporters, according to a chart hanging in the special plans office, Room 1A939, several months ago.
The insular nature of Luti's office, and his outspoken personal conviction that the United States should remove Hussein, sparked rumors at the Pentagon that the office was collecting intelligence on its own, that it had hired its own intelligence agents. Even diehard Bush supporters, some of whom were critical of Feith's and Luti's management style, were repeating the rumors.
Yesterday, Rumsfeld addressed the controversy, saying critics of the Office of Special Plans had a "conspiratorial view of the world." Shelton's analysis, he emphasized, was shared with the CIA, and White House briefings were not unusual.
"We brief the president. We brief the vice president. We brief the [CIA director]. We brief the secretary of state. . . . That is not only not a bad thing, it's a good thing."
