Cheney's Mission Accomplished

By Prof. Juan Cole
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Courtesy Of Informed Comment

Dick Cheney: "I guess my general sense of where we are with respect to Iraq and at the end of now, what, nearly six years, is that we've accomplished nearly everything we set out to do...."

What has Dick Cheney really accomplished in Iraq?

An estimated 4 million Iraqis, out of 27 million, have been displaced from their homes, that is, made homeless. Some 2.7 million are internally displaced inside Iraq. A couple hundred thousand are cooling their heels in Jordan. And perhaps a million are quickly running out of money and often living in squalid conditions in Syria. Cheney's war has left about 15% of Iraqis homeless inside the country or abroad. That would be like 45 million American thrown out of their homes.

It is controversial how many Iraqis died as a result of the 2003 invasion and its aftermath. But it seems to me that a million extra dead, beyond what you would have expected from a year 2000 baseline, is entirely plausible. The toll is certainly in the hundreds of thousands. Cheney did not kill them all. The Lancet study suggested that the US was directly responsible for a third of all violent deaths since 2003. That would be as much as 300,000 that we killed. The rest, we only set in train their deaths by our invasion.

Baghdad has been turned from a mixed city, about half of its population Shiite and the other half Sunni in 2003, into a Shiite city where the Sunni population may be as little as ten to fifteen percent. From a Sunni point of view, Cheney's war has resulted in a Shiite (and Iranian) take-over of the Iraqi capital, long a symbol of pan-Arabism and anti-imperialism.

In the Iraqi elections, Shiite fundamentalist parties closely allied with Iran came to power. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the leading party in parliament, was formed by Iraqi expatriates at the behest of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1982 in Tehran. The Islamic Mission (Da'wa) Party is the oldest ideological Shiite party working for an Islamic state. It helped form Hizbullah in Beirut in the early 1980s. It has supplied both prime ministers elected since 2005. Fundamentalist Shiites shaped the constitution, which forbids the civil legislature to pass legislation that contravenes Islamic law. Dissidents have accused the new Iraqi government of being an Iranian puppet.

Arab-Kurdish violence is spiking in the north, endangering the Obama withdrawal plan and, indeed, the whole of Iraq, not to mention Syria, Turkey and Iran.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi women have been widowed by the war and its effects, leaving most without a means of support. Iraqi widows often lack access to clean water and electricity. Aljazeera English has video.

$32 billion were wasted on Iraq reconstruction, and most of it cannot even be traced. I repeat, Cheney gave away $32 bn. to anonymous cronies in such a way that we can't even be sure who stole it, exactly. And you are angry at AIG about $400 mn. in bonuses! We are talking about $32 billion given out in brown paper bags.

Political power is being fragmented in Iraq with big spikes in the murder rate in some provinces that may reflect faction-fighting and vendettas in which the Iraqi military is loathe to get involved.

The Iraqi economy is devastated, and the new government's bureaucracy and infighting have made it difficult to attract investors.

The Bush-Cheney invasion helped further destabilize the Eastern Mediterranean, setting in play Kurdish nationalism and terrifying Turkey.

Cheney avoids mentioning all the human suffering he has caused, on a cosmic scale, and focuses on procedural matters like elections (which he confuses with democracy-- given 2000 in this country, you can understand why). Or he lies, as when he says that Iran's influence in Iraq has been blocked. Another lie is that there was that the US was fighting "al-Qaeda" in Iraq as opposed to just Iraqis. He and Bush even claim that they made Iraqi womens' lives better.

The real question is whether anyone will have the gumption to put Cheney on trial for treason and crimes against humanity.

End/ (Not Continued)

Counter Intelligence

Today’s CIA Serves Contractors and Bureaucrats—Not The Nation.

By Philip Giraldi
February 23, 2009 Issue
Courtesy Of The American Conservative Magazine

Suppose you were given the dark mission of spending $50 billion a year to create a global intelligence organization that would be minimally effective. You would want to keep 90 percent of the employees in their home country and incentivize senior staff to stay “close to the flagpole” to enhance their promotion prospects. Training costs should be high—$500,000 per recruit—and bureaucracy so stifling that a third of incoming officers will swiftly wash out. To keep morale low, surround those who remain with contractors—about half of the workforce—and pay the hired guns twice as much as the staff. Add a high level of corruption, routine cover-ups of malfeasance and incompetence, and you would have today’s CIA. It is, as one critic noted, “a sorry blend of Monty Python and Big Brother.”

The Sept. 11 attacks caught the Agency off guard. After the devastating budget cuts of the Clinton years, the CIA was desperately trying to rebuild its capabilities, yet it was still gripped by a Cold War mindset. The over-the-horizon threat from China figured far more prominently than terrorism or nuclear proliferation. But overnight that orientation shifted, and this sclerotic bureaucracy was tasked with becoming the leading edge in the Bush administration’s war on terror. Its budget exploded.

Many of the highly motivated but poorly prepared new hires came in without foreign-language fluency. Few had lived or worked outside the United States. Rather than being sent to overseas posts, most were shunted into CIA offices popping up like mushrooms across the United States. Even non-official cover operatives, very expensive and specially trained officers under business cover, were frequently given domestic assignments because there was no place to put them. When the National Clandestine Service needed to increase “operators” overseas—usually because some congressman was nosing around—it prescribed sightseeing and “area familiarization” trips, which the dispatched officers referred to as “Axis of Evil Tourism.” The new CIA thus became its own false front—long on numbers, short on depth.

In a stopgap move designed to buy time to train the newcomers, numerous Agency retirees were called back to the colors as contractors, their clearances renewed. But contracting quickly became a way for senior managers to featherbed their own staffs. By 2002, contractors made up one third of the burgeoning workforce. By 2006, they were more than half, and, according to some estimates, up to 70 percent in certain areas, including the Clandestine Service. Some even found positions as chiefs of station, unimaginable when the contractor program was initiated. Experienced officers, spying an opportunity, retired early to set up their own companies and return as contractors. They could collect their pensions and also get back on the payroll at much higher salaries.

Contractors are not cheap and, once introduced into a bureaucracy, they tend to grow like Topsy. The average federal government civil servant costs $128,000 per year, including benefits and legacy issues like pensions. Intelligence contractors make that much in salary alone—and sometimes significantly more because of the market value of their security clearances. The companies that employ them use a formula that multiplies the base salary by two and a half to four to come up with the figure that they charge the government. A contractor working for the CIA can easily cost taxpayers half a million dollars per year.

Ready availability of contractors to staff the myriad layers of bureaucracy in Langley encouraged the proliferation of what would be non-jobs anywhere else, what former CIA Chief of Station Milt Bearden described as headquarters’ “buggy-whip makers.” Moreover, intelligence officers who serve overseas are able to retire early by American standards because the job is high stress and, after a point, the officer burns out. Contracting takes many of these officers considered to be less effective and puts them back into the system.

Eventually the growth of contracting alarmed even Congress, and in June 2007 CIA Director Michael Hayden agreed to cut the contractor numbers by 10 percent. It now appears, however, that commitment will be achieved by a hiring freeze rather than any actual cut in positions.

But concentrating on what the CIA has become since 9/11 ignores the roots of the problem. Anyone who has ever worked for the Agency would probably concede that the CIA’s reality has never equaled its mystique. In Rome Station in the 1980s, officers, bemused by the oppressive bureaucracy and strutting incompetence of chiefs who could not speak Italian, would joke about the “real CIA,” speculating that it must exist somewhere, possibly concealed in the Department of Agriculture offices at the embassy or hidden down in the commissary behind the rack of prosciutto.

The Agency has undeniably had successes, but weighed against the cost and measured against the national interest they have been few and far between. From its founding, the CIA has been burdened by unrealistic expectations, often poorly led, politically manipulated, and sometimes corrupt. It failed to realize that even its supposed victories would bear bitter fruit—Afghanistan is a case in point. And the Agency’s ability to predict and counter threats against the United States, the purpose for which it was created by the National Security Act of 1947, has been almost nonexistent. Double agents from Russia, Cuba, China, and MI-6 all penetrated the Agency, and its old-boy culture led to the failure to identify Aldrich Ames, a traitor within its own ranks who betrayed our few agents in Moscow. Despite years of effort and billions of dollars, the CIA has never obtained policy-level information on key international adversaries. The development of nuclear weapons by the USSR and China, the Korean War, and India’s test of an atomic bomb all took the Agency by surprise. From 1969 onward, it bowed to political pressure to overestimate the size of the Russian economy.

More recently, the Agency failed to predict and stop the 9/11 attacks, and its preparation of the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002 was wrong in every particular, leading to the disastrous war with Iraq. Currently, the Agency is unable to penetrate terrorist groups. Nearly every top-level agent employed over the course of 60 years has been a volunteer, a “walk-in,” not the product of intensive efforts to find and recruit spies.

Since the CIA works for the president, political pressure regularly trumps honest analysis. Hundreds of incomprehensible covert actions have been launched because the White House said “do something.” The overthrow of Mohammed Mossadeq in Iran in 1953 and the manipulation of elections in countries like Italy through the 1980s to keep the Communists out only encouraged corruption and inhibited positive political development. Many other operations, particularly in Latin America, did little more than install military dictators, empower leftist revolutionaries, and blacken the name of the United States.

In the wake of 9/11, the Agency failed to redeem itself. Director George Tenet grandiloquently declared war on Osama bin Laden then inexplicably failed to allocate resources to deal with the emerging terrorist threat or create career incentives to attract top officers to work in counterterrorism. He was unable to recruit Arab or Asian Americans who speak the languages and understand the cultures where terrorists germinate because the Agency’s draconian standards prevented them from getting security clearances. A consummate team player and bureaucrat who always sought to please, Tenet capped his career by slanting intelligence to support the White House’s plan for war against Iraq, famously declaring the case for WMD a “slam dunk.”

Yet the CIA always circles the wagons to protect its own. An Agency Inspector General’s report released in August 2007 recommended disciplinary action against Tenet and three of his top aides over failure to perform adequately in the lead-up to 9/11. But the recommendation was ignored by Porter Goss and Michael Hayden, the two directors who succeeded Tenet.

Examples of other mistakes abound: An officer operating in the Middle East once betrayed an entire network of agents when he tried to pass through an airport metal detector with their passports carelessly stuffed into a pocket with a steel pen. Officers in Europe in the early 1990s sent identical letters from the same mailbox on the same day to every agent in Iran, leading to the roll-up of every Agency source in that country. The agents paid with their lives; the officers involved were not punished. One became the chief of the Near East Division.

The Agency’s culture is increasingly defined by a kind of insularity, along with an unwillingness to accept criticism and a belief in its own exceptionalism. CIA analysts have been rightly rebuked for their inability to find and use open-source information. They give greater weight to reports from spies even when the information being provided is wrong. And the Agency’s obsessive secretiveness also goes beyond any rational need to protect sensitive material. It refuses even to acknowledge information already in the public record, including the location of its principal training center near Williamsburg, Virginia.

The most cult-like of the CIA’s divisions is its spy network—designated the National Clandestine Service since 2006 but generally referred to by Agency officers as the DO, an acronym of its former name, the deputy directorate for operations. The DO has its own rites of passage, its own language and expressions. Many clandestine officers believe they belong to an elite that is undertaking extraordinarily difficult and dangerous tasks—“God’s work.” But the James Bond conceit is largely a fiction as few CIA officers are ever in real danger. High internal cohesion derives less from shared peril than the moral ambiguities related to spying.

This strong group identity has led to an acceptance of extraordinary levels of mediocrity or even incompetence within the ranks. As the alcoholic and utterly inept Aldrich Ames learned, it is very hard to get hired but even harder to get fired. One officer who was recorded by a Cuban film crew nonchalantly unloading a dead drop in a Havana park not only went unpunished for his failure to operate securely, he was made chief of a large station in Europe. The dead dropped message from the agent, who was a double working for Cuban intelligence, was concealed, appropriately, in a plastic dog turd fabricated by the Office of Technical Services.

Senior officers, in denial over their own lack of language and cultural skills, frequently maintain that “an op is an op,” implying that recruiting and running spies is the same everywhere—an obvious absurdity. The Agency’s shambolic overseas assignment process means that officers often receive only minimal language training and are expected to learn the local idiom after arriving at a post, presumably through osmosis. Most fail to do so. Frequently chiefs of station cannot converse with the heads of the local intelligence services unless their counterparts happen to speak English. Officers targeting indigenous political parties or government officials often cannot read a newspaper or speak the local language. Attempts in the 1980s to require language qualification as a sine qua non for overseas assignment foundered due the sheer immensity of the problem. In 1995, only three Agency officers could speak Arabic well enough to understand an Arab speaking colloquially. Seven years after 9/11, there are only five such officers.

As the Agency evolved into what one critic called “a global military policy,” an officer corps that largely eschewed any thought of torture or secret prisons in the ’80s and ’90s now embraces these practices—and their tradecraft is so poor that they can’t even keep their war crimes secret. The 26 CIA employees who abducted radical preacher Abu Omar from a Milan street in 2003 used passports and cell phones in false names but called their families in Virginia and claimed frequent flyer miles at their hotels in their true names, enabling Italian investigators to identify nearly all of them. The major counterterrorist operation, costing millions of dollars and with a huge supporting cast of Italians and Americans, successfully “rendered” the hapless Egyptian cleric to Cairo. He was subsequently tortured into telling everything he knew, which was more or less nothing, leading to his release by the Egyptians.

A fish rots from its head. One recent director for operations was referred to derisively by a number of European intelligence services as the “Ex-Chief of Station Luxembourg” because he lacked operational experience and Luxembourg was the most senior overseas position that he had held. He was, however, a skilled operator in the headquarters bureaucracy—which in some ways made him a welcome exception. Most Agency senior officers in the clandestine service are promoted because they are believed to be effective case officers, good at recruiting and running agents, not because they are able managers. The aggressive arrogance common in agent handlers makes them ill-suited superiors. As a result, most CIA chiefs of station are regarded by their subordinates as terrible bosses whose first priority is polishing their own reputations. By 2001, even though the terrorist threat had been growing for years, many overseas stations had become paranoid and operationally paralyzed. A well-known chief of station in Rome was so insecure about his staff that he tasked a loyal officer to crawl through the halls to eavesdrop outside offices and monitor what was being said.

Another reason the wrong officers advance is that personnel policies tend to measure performance in statistical terms. It is, perhaps, a failure of the American imagination, or an adoption of a production-line mentality, that leads to the confusion of more with better. Nowhere is this truer than at the CIA. Field officers are evaluated by the number of recruitments, called “scalps,” and raw intelligence reports produced during a standard two- or three-year tour. Quality is relatively unimportant since most officers move on before the hollowness of their achievements can be fully realized by their successors. As it is extremely difficult, even impossible, to locate and recruit a terrorist, few are willing to make the effort when easier pickings can inflate the numbers. Some officers deliberately seek assignments—referred to as “recruiting tours”—in poor Third World countries where it is easy to run up the score.

Struggling to achieve within the sluggish and multilayered Agency bureaucracy, described by one critic as similar to that of the former Soviet Union, officers become more adept at working the system than collecting intelligence. In a candid moment, most retirees would admit that they never recruited an agent who actually had information vital to the United States and never produced an intelligence report that contained anything policymakers actually needed. It has been estimated that only 4 percent of finished intelligence reports originate from recruited spies, referred to as “humint.”

In the wake of 9/11, analysts realized that they must write more rather than better reports—and align themselves with the prevailing view of the White House—if they wanted to get promoted. Strategic analysis, which takes more time, requires more expertise, and does not tell the White House what is going to happen tomorrow, became a lost art. As Carl Ford, a retired senior analyst, put it, “As long as we rate intelligence more for its volume than its quality, we will continue to turn out the $40 billion pile of crap that we have become famous for.” The policymakers often agree. President Richard Nixon frequently asked what the hell “those clowns” were doing over at Langley. President George H.W. Bush, a friend of the Agency and onetime director, referred to the CIA as “both ineffective and scared.”

Unsurprisingly, rampant operational corruption has led to personal corruption. The September 2008 conviction of the Agency’s third-ranking officer, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo—who pled guilty to wire fraud after being charged with 30 separate crimes—was only the tip of the iceberg. Retired officers become contractors to take advantage of the system, while former senior personnel do even better, exploiting their international contacts to make money on a much larger scale. Several recent Clandestine Service retirees who were involved in Iraq have become partners in ventures marketing oil diverted from wells in Kirkuk and Mosul with the collusion of the Kurdish authorities. The oil is sold primarily on the black market in Eastern Europe.

Into this dysfunctional environment, President Obama has dispatched Leon Panetta—soft-spoken, judicious, wise to the ways of Washington. His lack of intelligence experience initially riled Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein, who was pushing her fellow Californian, Rep. Jane Harmon. But he fielded the committee’s questions with aplomb, and the consensus among former officers is that Panetta is a good pick.

He was, in fact, the second choice. Obama had been leaning toward John Brennan, a company man and close adviser to George Tenet who was forced to withdraw from consideration amid accusations that he approved Bush-era interrogation and rendition practices.

Panetta comes with fresh eyes and a pragmatic streak. As Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, he imposed order on a slovenly West Wing. As a member of the Iraq Study Group, he saw firsthand the disastrous consequences of politicizing intelligence. A consummate insider, he carries enough weight to clear space for renovation.

High on Panetta’s to-do list should be the introduction of a requirement that entry-level hires have foreign language skills. If officers do not achieve proficiency in the language of their target country, their assignments should be canceled. More officers should be sent overseas—under business rather than embassy cover—and they should be required to complete cultural and historical studies before going. These postings should be three years minimum to enable officers to understand the working environment and local players.

Those who undertake arduous assignments shouldn’t be penalized. Indeed, promotion should be recalibrated to gauge success relative to the difficulty of the job. An officer who works hard on terrorists but never recruits—or even meets—one should not be judged on the same scale as someone who goes to Africa and recruits a local chief of police. (In fact, there should be no reward for recruiting an African chief of police.) Moreover, senior-level assignments should no longer be plums for officers who have done their time and are just waiting to retire. And at the highest levels, officers with proven management ability should fill top posts—not necessarily people who have street skills.

These are not changes that Panetta can accomplish by himself. Bureaucracy is a sluggish beast. But he is positioned to alter CIA culture in two critical ways. He can serve as a buffer between the White House and the Agency, not a conduit for policymakers’ demands, and he can encourage risk-taking against terrorist and proliferation targets by protecting and rewarding his officers who are willing to accept the challenge. In his Feb. 5 confirmation hearing, Panetta promised to “turn the page to a new chapter in the Agency’s history.” We’ll soon see whether he has the vision, independence, and will to make good on that pledge and fix a CIA that is undeniably broken.
__________________________________________

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA Officer, is a fellow with the American Conservative Defense Alliance.

Copyright © 2009 The American Conservative

German Agents Helped Pave The Way Into Iraq

"Those Guys Are Heroes"

By John Goetz, Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark
December 16, 2008
Courtesy Of Der Spiegel

The German government has long denied that its intelligence agents in Baghdad provided meaningful help prior to and during the US invasion of Iraq. US military personnel, though, have told SPIEGEL a vastly different story.

He would make the perfect witness. The tall, slim retired US general has nothing but good things to say about the Germans. He says they are "reliable" and extremely trustworthy. Most of all, though, he knows things that German parliamentarians would like to know.

But General James Marks is not a witness, nor is he ever likely to be one. The German parliamentary committee charged with investigating the German foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), prefers to question Germans in its effort to find out what role the agency played during the Iraq war. Those asked to testify tend to be government employees and, therefore, dependent on the government. Americans have not thus far been summoned. Indeed, no effort to do so has been made.

Still, a man like Marks would have a lot to say. He could talk about the spring of 2003, when he was sitting in a windowless, air-conditioned briefing room at the US military's Camp Doha in the Kuwaiti desert, reading the reports of two BND agents who held out in Baghdad during the war. And he could talk about how the information provided by the Germans was incorporated into the situation reports he presented in daily videoconferences to General Tommy Franks, head of the US invading forces, and sometimes to then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

In the spring of 2003, Marks headed up the military intelligence efforts both before and during the American campaign. It was his job to ensure that the 115,000 US troops didn't run into any surprises as they advanced toward Baghdad. All information relevant to the war ended up on his desk. By virtue of this position, Marks, more than almost anyone else, knows how important the reports provided by the two Germans were for the American war effort.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier will testify before the parliamentary investigative committee on Thursday. When the Iraq war began in early 2003, Steinmeier was head of Germany's secret services as well as being then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's chief of staff. Schröder, for his part, owed his re-election in September 2002 primarily to his tough opposition to US plans to invade Iraq.

Rewriting History?

In February 2003, Schröder promised Germany's lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, that there would be "no direct or indirect participation in a war." And yet, by that point, his right-hand-man Steinmeier had already secretly approved the deployment of the two BND agents to Baghdad. The details of this mission began to be revealed in January 2006. And since then, the same questions have been asked repeatedly, and not just in the parliamentary investigative committee.

What was the assignment given to the two men? Did the information they provided support the American war effort? Was German government criticism of the United States just one side of the coin? Did Schröder's and Steinmeier's BND secretly help the Americans militarily?

For Steinmeier, nothing less than his political credibility is at stake. He is the most prominent of Schröder's close associates still in power today, and he will challenge Chancellor Angela Merkel as the Social Democrats' candidate for chancellor in general elections next fall. Is Steinmeier now trying to rewrite part of history?

Since January 2006, Steinmeier, now Germany's vice chancellor and foreign minister, has stated that the government's political standard for the BND's mission in Baghdad was clear: No "active support" of combat operations in Iraq. He has also said: "If an embassy or a hospital was prevented from being hit, then it can't be called a double standard. In that case, it was about saving innocent human lives."

The current governing coalition, which pairs Steinmeier's Social Democrats (SPD) with Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU), also stuck to the same official line in its report on the Baghdad mission: "No support for the US's offensive, strategic aerial war. No transfer of information with direct relevance to the US's tactical air and ground war effort." Berlin has also insisted: "The responses the BND provided to US requests for information satisfied these criteria." According to the classified, censored part of the report, the information coming from the BND agents was not suitable for US purposes.

But according to US military officials involved in the Iraq war, these statements have little to do with reality. SPIEGEL spoke with more than 20 active and retired American soldiers both from Central Command (Centcom) -- which coordinates US military activity in the Middle East, Egypt and Central Asia -- and from the Coalition Forces Land Component Command (CFLCC) in charge of the ground forces in the invasion of Iraq. Among those spoken to were critics of the Bush administration, who cannot be accused of wanting to shift political responsibility to Germany. All of them dealt with the reports filed by the German agents. They analyzed the information and put it to use.

'Living On Another Planet'

A number of senior US military officials were confronted a second time with the content of selected reports. The pictures that the respondents drew of the relevance of the German contributions were largely similar. Colonel Carol Stewart, who was a member of the intelligence team at Centcom, then run by General Tommy Franks, says: "Anyone who claims that these reports did not play a role for combat operations is living on another planet."

The history of the BND mission goes back to the fall of 2002. At the agency's headquarters just outside of Munich, the idea developed to remain in Baghdad during the war in order to obtain a perspective independent of that provided by the Americans. According to one memo, the German Foreign Ministry, which was intimately involved early in the process, was "initially skeptical" about the project. But in mid-December 2002, then Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer gave his consent.

On Feb. 11, 2003, two agents using the cover names Reiner Mahner and Volker Heinster traveled across the desert from the Jordanian capital Amman to Baghdad. First though the agency negotiated a secret deal with the Americans. Under the arrangement, selected reports from the Iraqi capital would also be sent to the Americans. In return, the Germans were permitted to send one of their intelligence agents to Centcom in Qatar, the US war operations headquarters. The BND sent Bernd P., code name "Gardist."

The operation quickly gained in importance, according to former BND division head Ludwig Mundt, from whose unit the agents were sent. Mundt is a veteran of the intelligence community and has seen many governments come and go. But he cannot recall a time when an administration in Berlin was this interested in a secret services operation.

Photographs, GPS Data and 130 Reports

On Feb. 27, an incident occurred that demonstrates that the BND's role in Baghdad could not have been as marginal as it claims today. On that day, Johannes H., the BND agent (or "resident") in Baghdad at the time, sent an extremely important message to his counterparts with the Iraqi intelligence service. The core of the message consisted of only one sentence, but it was practically an ultimatum: "The United States and Great Britain consider Iraq's refusal to destroy the Samud II missiles to be a casus belli."

When the Iraqis hesitated, the BND agent told them that the Latin term means "cause for war." Suddenly they understood the message. "Both men seemed very concerned," the station chief noted in a memo for BND headquarters. The Iraqis had suggested that their boss was likely to "take the message directly to IRQ President Saddam Hussein."

The delivery of this explosive news was one of the resident's last official actions. After that, the new special team took over the BND's Baghdad operations. The two new agents were trained soldiers. Mahner was a lieutenant colonel and had served in the German Air Force, and Heinster was a paratrooper. The BND duo began making reconnaissance trips. Using a secure satellite line, they transmitted about 130 reports, including photographs and GPS data, to BND headquarters. They reported sandbag positions and machine gun nests and, after reporting the positions of Iraqi troops near their own location, they requested that "Special Forces be used to fight these troops; no rockets, and definitely no artillery."

Part 2: Germany's Role in US Combat Decisions

To this day, the two men deny knowing that their reports were forwarded to the Americans. But such a request seems to counter those denials. After all, decisions on the deployment of Special Forces and artillery were entirely up to Centcom, the American headquarters.

On the ninth day of the war, the two BND agents reported: "Air force officers' club severely hit, although soldiers are preparing for defense in the ruins." The report was sent to Qatar on the same day. A short time later, the Americans attacked the same target a second time. On April 1, the pair, known as a Special Deployment Team or SET, reported that the air force officers' club was "hit again and completely destroyed." This report was also forwarded to Centcom on the same day, at 11:28 a.m.

DPA

Baghdad on the evening of March 21, 2003. Germany has long denied having played any kind of a military role.

Were these reports relevant to the Americans' conduct of the war? Horst Henning Sch., an agent stationed at BND headquarters at the time, was responsible for deciding what information could be passed on to "Gardist" and to the Americans. He told the Bundestag investigative committee that almost no information was supplied to the Americans, and that the information that was provided was worthless. Sch. chose a bold simile in his testimony before the committee: "Gardist," in a manner of speaking, "played a strong game of poker with few aces in his hand."

The Americans interviewed by SPIEGEL could tell the Bundestag committee a different story about the relevance of the BND reports. In their view, these reports even played a role in critical combat decisions, such as that relating to commencement of the ground offensive.

'Reliable Agents On The Ground'

Marks, the general in military intelligence, recalls receiving hundreds of reports from other agencies every day in his top-secret e-mail box. He classified the information coming from the Germans as coming from "eyes on the ground." It was exactly the kind of information that Marks felt he didn't have enough of. In addition to the search for the alleged weapons of mass destruction, the general was interested in the situation surrounding Iraq's oilfields and the defense of Baghdad.

The oil was of particular concern to the US military in Kuwait and Qatar. They were determined to prevent Saddam Hussein from destroying his oil facilities, as he had done 12 years earlier in the first Gulf War. Any information about possible sabotage was given priority within Marks' 400-man operation.

The American intelligence group was all the more agitated when, on Feb. 25, it received information indicating that Iraqi forces had begun burning "massive amounts of crude oil" at the al-Dora refinery in Baghdad. "The IRQ side apparently hopes that this will obstruct US satellite reconnaissance," the German agents wrote. On March 5, they reported: "There is credible information to suggest that the oil pumping station near Kirkuk was prepared for blasting." The explosive reports came from Mahner and Heinster, the two BND agents.

Eleven days after their arrival, they got into their Jeep, together with the BND resident, and drove on Iraq's Highway No. 8 to Hilla, about 70 kilometers (44 miles) south of Baghdad. As they drove south, the Germans saw Soviet-made T-72 combat tanks dug into position along the highway, various sandbag positions and machine-gun nests on the roofs of government buildings. The agents took a number of photographs.

Invasion, Fast-Forward

In the report they prepared after the trip, they also described plumes of smoke coming from the airport and the al-Dora refinery. A short time later the information, photographs included, became available to the Americans in Kuwait.

Several members of General Marks' staff remember the reactions triggered by the German reports.

"The March 5 report was especially important to us," says a senior member of the oil reconnaissance team, who works for a security agency today and therefore wishes to remain anonymous. The reports and the increased monitoring of the facilities that ensued, he says, resulted in substantial changes to and acceleration of the war plans.

Air reconnaissance of the facilities was immediately stepped up, says the former oil reconnaissance team member. On March 19, when a drone provided the first images of flames coming from burning oilfields, thus reinforcing the Germans' warnings, Marks hurried to the commander of the ground troops, David McKiernan. "What counts now," he said, with some urgency, "is the element of surprise. Let's advance on the ground first and secure the oil."

Centcom Commander Franks agreed. A few hours later, he gave 140,000 coalition troops their marching orders. As a result, the ground war began earlier than planned, and Franks' decision went down in US military history as "G before A," or "ground before air." By March 21, the US Marines reported that their mission had already been accomplished. They had crossed the border without encountering significant resistance, and had taken control of Iraq's central oil fields. "The Germans and their reliable information played a significant part in the war beginning earlier than planned," says Marks.

According to several American military officials, the Baghdad BND agents' reports also played a role in a second strategic war issue, centering on the Baghdad international airport, known as Saddam Airport at the time. In this case, the German information again apparently contributed to the US Army's decision to jettison its original plan.

'Saved American Lives'

Because of its strategic importance, US military leaders in Kuwait had had a 10-meter (33-foot) model of the airport made. Plastic soldiers represented the Iraqi troops, and a color-coding system was used to identify high-risk areas. Centcom had planned a surprise attack. Using the model, the commanders had developed a plan in which Special Forces and parts of the 82nd Airborne Division would take the airport with paratroopers from the air.

Mahner and Heinster were also interested in the airport. On Feb. 16, they and the BND resident completed one of their first reconnaissance trips to the area. As they wrote in their report, they discovered Roland anti-aircraft systems on a "manmade hill," which they photographed from their car.

A few days later, during a second reconnaissance rip, they noticed freshly dug oil ditches. The Iraqi forces had begun to "lay smoke screens near Saddam Airport," they reported on Feb. 24. That report went to "Gardist" at US operational headquarters in Qatar the next day. Marks remembers both the photo taken by the Germans and the fact that the information about the air defense systems was incorporated into the model at Camp Doha.

In the decisive pre-war phase, the commander of ground troops brought together the air-landing specialists and reconnaissance experts in front of the model to work through all options. After two hours of simulation, the general decided to call off the operation, because of the high risk involved. To this day, Marks is convinced that the information about the air defense positions and quickly ignitable oil ditches made it clear to the commander that going ahead with the original plan could have led to the deaths of thousands of paratroopers.

The German team, Marks says today, "saved American lives" through their efforts -- the lives of soldiers, he means, not the civilians that Steinmeier and the BND still talk about today.

The BND's dangerous Baghdad operation was kept secret for a long time. It was only during a visit by US members of Congress, including Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, to American headquarters in Baghdad in early 2004 that the matter was briefly discussed. A Republican had complained that Berlin had let the coalition down during the war.

Colonel Carol Stewart recalls that she pointed out that the Germans had contributed to "Operation Iraqi Freedom" with their reports. "Liebermann was surprised," says Stewart, who says she had a similar reaction during the war. "I knew that the Germans were against the war, and that's why I was surprised that they played such a positive and helpful role for us during the war." Stewart has nothing but praise for the BND agents, noting that they were courageous and "did excellent work." Retired General Marks says, referring to the BND agents, "those guys are heroes."

Part 3: An Incorrect Denial

The same view was held in BND headquarters and in Berlin, at least as long as the mission was kept under wraps. Then Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and Chancellery Chief of Staff Steinmeier, who met Mahner and Heinster on various occasions, congratulated and thanked them for their work. But when the first reports about the BND cell became public in January 2006, a quarrel quickly erupted in Berlin.

August Hanning, president of the BND during the Iraq war and now a deputy in the Interior Ministry, argued for an assertive position: "The Iraq war, after all, did not lead to the suspension of our alliance with the Americans. We continue to work closely together."

PHOTO GALLERY: GERMAN AGENTS IN IRAQ

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In January 2006, Hanning argued internally for a self-assured approach, refusing to apologize for or even downplay the case. "We were interested in information about the progress of the war," he told close associates, "and we wanted to have our own information in the field. That's why we needed the two agents, and of course we exchanged information with the Americans." Hanning was aware that the cooperation with US intelligence was much closer than the anti-war rhetoric of the Schröder government indicated. "The reality and the public's impression," he said, "are not the same."

Steinmeier and Ernst Uhrlau have taken a significantly different approach to the subject. Steinmeier has become foreign minister and thus entered the top echelon of German politics. Uhrlau has since replaced Hanning as head of the BND.

Incorrect Denial

In mid-January 2006, when the first media inquiries about the BND's Baghdad operation started coming in, Uhrlau consulted with his staff and then with the Chancellery. For the first time, the charge was raised that the BND may have supplied military information to the Americans. The agents, it was claimed, had provided the US military with a supposed location for Saddam Hussein, which allegedly led to the bombing of a restaurant, killing 12 civilians. Based on everything we know today, this charge is false.

Uhrlau was in favor of a forceful denial and had his staff prepare a press release that went beyond the specific restaurant-related claims. The statement said that the parties to the conflict "were not provided with any target documentation or coordinates for bombing targets."

The approach taken by the BND president was controversial within his own agency, where some senior staff members advised restraint. "We will never be able to withdraw from a statement like this," they argued. The new agency president, they said, had no idea what surprises the BND files had in store for him. But Uhrlau ignored their warnings and insisted that the BND issue a denial, in writing.

Still, before he issued the denial, Uhrlau asked Merkel's Chief of Staff Thomas de Maizière and the Chancellery intelligence coordinator Klaus Dieter Fritsche. But they were unfamiliar with the files, and de Maizière and Fritsche had to take Uhrlau at his word. They voiced there concerns during a number of meetings. But eventually the Chancellery officials told Uhrlau that, if it was correct, he could go ahead and issue the official denial.

The denial was issued, but it was not correct.

Uhrlau's public relations staff provided the German news agency DPA with the following quote: "The goal was to save human lives." The BND agents, Uhrlau's staff said, provided information about buildings that were not to be bombed under any circumstances. "Civilian facilities, daycare centers, embassies and the like," the BND spokesmen said, "the goal being to protect human life. Military information was not provided. This did not happen. We deny it."

So there was no information of a military nature.

Medals For The Germans

Steinmeier added his own twist to the message. When SPIEGEL reported, on Jan. 14, 2006, that military information about oil ditches had been sent to the US military, the news agencies reported: "Steinmeier denies SPIEGEL report about BND legwork." He said he would "resist attempts to rewrite history." Internally, Steinmeier complained about "a campaign," and confidants say they recall that the minister feared serious political consequences, up to and including the possibility of his resignation.

Later, Steinmeier issued the following prescribed terminology, which remains valid today. He said that the government's political instructions to the BND "precluded active support of combat operations" in Iraq. But Steinmeier's problem was that the supposed instructions were not issued in writing, an unusual approach for a bureaucracy known for its otherwise thorough documentation of even the most minor details.

When Hanning testified before the investigation commission, he referred to the situation as a "balancing act" and conceded that he had relied on the relevant department manager, but argued that he had had no reason to question what he had been told. Does this mean that, in the end, it was a minor department manager at the BND who ultimately thwarted the Schröder government's anti-war course? Were Hanning, Uhrlau and Steinmeier guilty of nothing more than a failure to properly supervise lower-ranking staff?

Or is the official account by those in power at the time just as questionable as the attempts to downplay the US Army's awarding of its Meritorious Service Medal to the Baghdad agents and "Gardist" by arguing that this medal is awarded to "non-combatants?"

"Total nonsense," says James Marks, who manages a large Pentagon contracting firm today. "This medal is one of the highest honors we award to foreign nationals."

He knows what he is talking about. Marks himself has been awarded the Meritorious Service Medal -- four times.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

RELATED SPIEGEL ONLINE LINKS

• US General on Berlin Agents in Baghdad: 'The Germans Were Invaluable to Us' (12/16/2008)

• Covert Cock-Up: Germany's Failed Spy Mission in Kosovo (12/01/2008)

• The Real Story of 'Curveball': How German Intelligence Helped Justify the US Invasion of Iraq (03/22/2008)