Cheney linked to secrecy of CIA program
At the direction of the then-vice president, Congress was not notified of a highly classified counter-terrorism program for eight years, sources say.
By Greg Miller, LA TIMES, July 12, 2009
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Reporting from Washington — The CIA kept a highly classified counter-terrorism program secret from Congress for eight years at the direction of then-Vice President Dick Cheney, according to sources familiar with an account that agency Director Leon E. Panetta provided recently to House and Senate committees.

The sources declined to provide any details on the nature of the program, but said that the agency had opened an internal inquiry in recent days into the history of the program and the decisions made by a series of senior officials to withhold information about it from Congress.

Cheney's involvement suggests that the program was considered important enough by the Bush administration that it should be monitored at the highest levels of government, and that the White House was reluctant to risk disclosure of its details to lawmakers.

Panetta killed the program on June 23 after learning of it, four months after he became director of the CIA. He then called special sessions with the House and Senate intelligence committees.

The CIA's relationship with Congress has become a source of controversy in Washington in recent months, after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) accused the agency of lying to members about its use of waterboarding and other interrogation measures in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The secret counter-terrorism program was put in place shortly after those attacks, but it was never fully operational, sources said. Current and former intelligence and congressional officials have offered different viewpoints on the program's significance.

A senior congressional aide said the magnitude of the program and the decision to keep it secret should not be downplayed. "Panetta found out about this for the first time, and within 24 hours was in the office telling us," the aide said. "If this wasn't a big deal, why would the director of the CIA come sprinting up to the Hill like that?"

An aide to Cheney did not respond to a request for comment. CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano declined to comment Saturday on the program or Cheney's role, which was initially reported by the New York Times on its website.

By law, the CIA is required to make sure that congressional committees are "kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States, including any significant anticipated intelligence activity."

But there is latitude in the language for programs and operations deemed extremely sensitive, or those that might be considered routine.

Indeed, former U.S. intelligence officials said that Panetta's predecessors, including retired Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, did not think they were constrained from informing Congress about the program, but regarded the activity as falling well short of the threshold for congressional notification.

"We do a lot of foreign intelligence collection we don't run down to the Hill and say, 'How about this?' " said a former U.S. intelligence official familiar with the program, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

More than a year ago, however, Hayden informed subordinates that the intelligence committees would need to be briefed on the program if it crossed certain thresholds, according to former officials.

The key issue, the officials said, was whether the agency was taking steps in its implementation of the program that could potentially be discovered by foreign intelligence services, and therefore possibly surface publicly -- to the embarrassment of the United States.

The program was coming "closer to (being) something in the real world" when Hayden issued the guidance, one former official said. But the activity never reached that point.

Hayden was among the high-level CIA officials -- including Deputy Director Stephen Kappes and the head of the clandestine service, Michael J. Sulick -- who were kept apprised of the program's progress.

One former official said that Hayden, Kappes and Sulick were "very cautious" in their handling of the program and that they made decisions to narrow its focus.

The official said that the program fell on a continuum between foreign intelligence collection and covert action; the latter involves taking steps to influence events overseas, and generally falls within more stringent congressional notification rules.

Some former high-level CIA officials said they remained puzzled about which program could be at the center of the budding controversy.

"A lot of people thought they were Jason Bourne and came up with ideas," said a former senior CIA officer, referring to the fictional super-spy. "There were programs that were kind of wild that were considered in 2001, but to my knowledge, within six months we didn't get one follow-on attack and people kind of gave up on those ideas."

The House Intelligence Committee has approved new legislation that would seek to make it significantly more difficult for the executive branch to withhold information on intelligence activities from Congress. But President Obama has threatened to veto the legislation.

greg.miller@latimes.com

CIA Unclassified Report on Warrantless Wiretapping

Democrats May Investigate Secret Program
By Paul Kane and Joby Warrick, Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, July 12, 2009

House Democrats said yesterday that they expect to launch a formal investigation into a secret CIA program that was not disclosed to Congress for almost eight years, a probe that could entangle senior Bush administration officials who oversaw intelligence issues.

Democrats on the House intelligence committee said the inquiry would examine both the nature of the still-secret program and the decisions to keep congressional oversight committees in the dark about its existence.

"This wasn't an oversight. There was an order given to not inform Congress," said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), chairman of the panel's oversight and investigations subcommittee.

Lawmakers learned of the program from CIA Director Leon Panetta at closed-door briefings June 24 for the House and Senate intelligence committees. The day before, CIA officials informed Panetta of the program and told him Congress had not been briefed. He then canceled it.

The New York Times, on its Web site, reported yesterday that Panetta has told the committees that Vice President Richard B. Cheney gave the order to keep the information from Congress. The newspaper cited unnamed sources.

In an interview last night with The Washington Post, an intelligence official said it was "generally known" from the beginning that Cheney had requested that the program be kept from Congress. The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said it was unclear whether the agency was obligated to brief Congress.

During the second half of the Bush administration, CIA officials did not consult with the administration about the program or take orders from Cheney to keep it secret, according to former agency officials who held senior posts at the time.

"We never briefed the vice president, the president or the Cabinet," said a former senior intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the program remains highly secret. He said the program remained in the planning stages and never crossed the agency's threshold for reporting to the administration and congressional overseers.

Congress and the CIA have jousted for decades over the interpretation of the 1947 law creating the agency, which included a provision mandating that the committees be kept "fully and currently informed" of intelligence issues. Even for covert actions, lawmakers on the committees generally must be notified.

But the law also says such briefings should be done "to the extent consistent with due regard for the protection from unauthorized disclosure of classified information relating to sensitive intelligence sources and methods or other exceptionally sensitive matters."

Cheney's current spokeswoman did not respond to an e-mail last night seeking comment.

Congressional Republicans have rejected the call for an investigation and said the program did not rise to the level of requiring a briefing for the congressional committees. They also have suggested that Democrats were using the issue as a way to back up House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's assertion that the CIA had intentionally misled her in 2002 regarding an unrelated program for harsh interrogations of alleged terrorists.

After listening to Panetta's June 24 presentation, some Republican committee members said they wanted to know more about the program but were not overly alarmed. "I didn't walk out of there saying this is some horrible thing," Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) said.

Schakowsky, who declined to comment on Cheney's role, said lawmakers have learned that the program was started shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and that the orders about who was to be informed about its existence were given at that time. "That's when the parameters were all laid out," she said.

Two former agency officials who were familiar with the program said it involved a series of proposals over several years for providing the intelligence agencies with a "needed capability," one of the officials said. The latest proposal was aired in the spring of 2008 but was not carried out, the officials said. The program did not involve interrogations of detainees or surveillance of U.S.-based communications, they said.

Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman, said it was "not agency practice to discuss what may or may not have been said in a classified briefing." Gimigliano said in a statement that agency officials brought the program to Panetta with the recommendation that he go to Capitol Hill with the information.

"That was also his view, and he took swift, decisive action to put it into effect," he said.

Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.), chairman of the intelligence committee, has said the panel was "affirmatively lied to" regarding this program's existence. Reyes had not had a formal discussion with Rep. Peter Hoekstra (Mich.), the ranking Republican on the committee, about opening a formal investigation. But lawmakers and aides said such a step was a formality and that a formal investigation probably would take place.

Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Calif.), a senior member of the intelligence panel, said she was calling for the committee to hire an outside counsel to investigate the issue. "We have to know who gave the order for this, who gave the order to conceal this, where did they draw the money for this," she said.

Eshoo said the committee may have to use its subpoena power to interview some of the top officials who oversaw intelligence issues during the Bush administration.

Dems to Probe Cheney's Secret CIA Program
Newser
LINK

Democrats plan to investigate the CIA program Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly ordered be kept secret from Congress, reports the Washington Post. The 8-year-old covert operation only came to light June 24 after CIA officials briefed spy-chief Leon Panetta, who then canceled the program. A day later, Panetta notified Congress, as mandated by law.

Former senior CIA officials denied the White House was ever briefed on the program, which was only in the planning stages and not at the level where Congress or the president needed to be informed. Other intelligence officials, however, agreed with New York Times reports that the order for secrecy came directly from Cheney.
—Mat Probasco

House Intelligence Chairman Reyes Says CIA Lied to Committee
By Paul Kane, Washington Post Staff Writer, Thursday, July 9, 2009
LINK

The chairman of the House intelligence committee has accused the CIA of lying to the panel in a classified matter, the second time in less than two months that a top House Democrat has charged the spy agency of intentionally misleading Congress.

Rep. Silvestre Reyes (Tex.), in a letter sent Tuesday to House leadership, said that CIA officials "affirmatively lied" to the intelligence committee when recently notifying the panel about a classified matter. Reyes wrote that it was one of several recent instances in which the CIA has not fully informed the committee on other classified notifications.

His complaint echoed charges by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), who on May 14 said the agency intentionally misled her in a 2002 briefing on interrogation techniques used against alleged terrorist detainees.

"This committee has been misled, has not been provided full and complete notifications, and [in at least one case] was affirmatively lied to," Reyes wrote. The letter, which was first reported yesterday by Congressional Quarterly, was sent to Pelosi, House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and Rep. Peter Hoekstra (Mich.), the ranking Republican on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

In an interview yesterday, Reyes declined to expand upon the allegations in his letter, saying "it's all classified information." Late last night, he issued a statement crediting CIA Director Leon E. Panetta with bringing the issues to the committee's attention at a June 24 briefing.

The CIA rejected the allegation that it lied to Congress. "This agency and this director are committed to a candid dialogue with Congress. When Director Panetta believes something should be raised with the Hill, it gets done quickly and clearly. Our oversight committees recognize that," George Little, an agency spokesman, said in a statement.

Further increasing the tension on intelligence issues, the White House issued a veto threat yesterday to a provision that House Democrats included in an intelligence authorization bill set for debate today. The provision makes it the prerogative of the two committee chairmen to determine whether classified briefing information could be opened up to the entire membership of the House and Senate intelligence panels.

The White House said it "strongly objects" to that language, suggesting it would create an unconstitutional usurpation of executive power.

The provision was included at the behest of Pelosi after her showdown with the agency in mid-May.

Pelosi initiated the CIA feud when she accused the agency of intentionally misleading her, and not telling her about the use of waterboarding, in a September 2002 briefing on interrogations.

CIA documents released two months ago included notations indicating that Pelosi was informed at the 2002 briefing about waterboarding. Republicans have suggested Pelosi has not told the truth about her knowledge and support of the enhanced interrogation technique, an allegation they plan to repeat in today's debate.

Doubt, Distrust, Delay
The Inside Story of How Bush's Team Dealt With Its Failing Iraq Strategy
By Bob Woodward, Washington Post Staff Writer, Sunday, September 7, 2008; A01
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During the summer of 2006, from her office adjacent to the White House, deputy national security adviser Meghan O'Sullivan sent President Bush a daily top secret report cataloging the escalating bloodshed and chaos in Iraq. "Violence has acquired a momentum of its own and is now self-sustaining," she wrote July 20, quoting from an intelligence assessment.

Her dire evaluation contradicted the upbeat assurances that President Bush was hearing from Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the U.S. commander in Iraq. Casey and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were pushing to draw down American forces and speed the transfer of responsibility to the Iraqis. Despite months of skyrocketing violence, Casey insisted that within a year, Iraq would be mostly stable, with the bulk of American combat troops headed home.

Publicly, the president claimed the United States was winning the war, and he expressed unwavering faith in Casey, saying, "It's his judgment that I rely upon." Privately, he was losing confidence in the drawdown strategy. He questioned O'Sullivan that summer with increasing urgency: "What are you hearing from people in Baghdad? What are people's daily lives like?"

"It's hell, Mr. President," she answered, determined not to mislead or lie to him.

O'Sullivan was 36, with a PhD from Oxford and a year's experience in Iraq. As the violence had escalated, she began to feel that the strategy of drawing down had become indefensible. For months, she had urged her boss, national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, to begin a full strategy review.

That summer, with U.S. casualties eclipsing 2,500 deaths and nearly 20,000 wounded, Bush acknowledged to himself what he was not saying publicly: The war had taken a perilous turn for the worse, with 1,000 attacks a week, the equivalent of six an hour. "Underneath my hope was a sense of anxiety," Bush recalled in a May 2008 interview. The strategy was one "that everybody hoped would work. And it did not. And therefore the question is, when you're in my position: If it's not working, what do you do?"

This is the untold history of how the Bush administration wrestled with that question. Compiled from classified documents and interviews with more than 150 participants, it reveals that the administration's efforts to develop a new Iraq strategy were crippled by dissension among the president's advisers, delayed by political calculations and undermined by a widening and sometimes bitter rift in civilian-military relations.

No administration willingly puts its disagreements on display, but what happened in Washington during 2006 went beyond the usual give-and-take of government. The level of distrust became so severe that Bush eventually activated a back channel to Casey's replacement in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, circumventing the established chain of command. While the violence in Iraq skyrocketed to unnerving levels, a second front in the war raged at home, fought at the highest levels of the White House, the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Depart ment.

By mid-2006, Casey, a stout four-star general with wire-rim glasses, had been the commander in Iraq for two years. As American military units rotated in and out, Casey remained the one constant.

He had concluded that one big problem with the war was the president himself. Since the beginning, Casey felt, the president had viewed the war in conventional terms, repeatedly asking how many of the various enemies had been captured or killed. Casey later confided to a colleague that he had the impression that Bush reflected the "radical wing of the Republican Party that kept saying, 'Kill the bastards! Kill the bastards! And you'll succeed.' "

Casey was troubled by the thought that the president didn't understand the nature of the fight they were in. The large, heavily armed Western force was on borrowed time, he believed. The president often paid lip service to winning over the Iraqi people, but then he would lean in with greater interest and ask about raids and military operations, grilling Casey about killings and captures.

Months earlier, during a secure video conference with top military and civilian leaders looking on, he told Casey that it seemed the general wasn't doing enough. "George, we're not playing for a tie," Bush had said. "I want to make sure we all understand this, don't we?" Later in the video conference, Bush emphasized it again: "I want everybody to know we're not playing for a tie. Is that right?"

In Baghdad, Casey's knuckles whitened on the table. The very suggestion was an affront to his dignity that he would long remember, a statement just short of an outright provocation.

"Mr. President," Casey had said bluntly, "we are not playing for a tie."

Asked later about Casey's perceptions, Bush insisted in an interview that he understood the nature of the war, whatever Casey might have thought. "I mean, of all people to understand that, it's me," he said. But several of his on-the-record comments lend credence to Casey's concern that the president was overly focused on the number of enemy killed.

"I asked that on occasion to find out whether or not we were fighting back," he said during the May interview. "Because the perception is, is that our guys are dying and they're not. Because we don't put out numbers. We don't have a tally." He said his overall question to his military commanders was, "Are we making progress in defeating them?"

"What frustrated me is that from my perspective," he said at another point, "it looked like we were taking casualties without fighting back because our commanders are loath to talk about our battlefield victories."

Casey also found himself at odds with others in the administration. Once, when he had called the number of civilian personnel who had volunteered to serve in Iraq "paltry," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had chided him. General, she had said, you're out of line.

On another occasion, in late 2005, he butted heads with Rice after her testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which she offered a succinct description of the U.S. military strategy in Iraq -- "clear, hold and build: to clear areas from insurgent control, to hold them securely and then build durable Iraqi institutions."

"What the hell is that?" Casey asked his boss at U.S. Central Command, Gen. John P. Abizaid.

"I don't know," Abizaid said.

"Did you agree to that?"

"No, I didn't agree to that."

When Rice next came to Iraq, Casey asked for a private meeting with her and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad.

"Excuse me, ma'am, what's 'clear, hold, build'?"

Rice looked a little surprised. "George, that's your strategy."

"Ma'am, if it's my strategy, don't you think someone should have had the courtesy to talk to me about it before you went public with it?"

"Oh," she said. "Well, we told Gen. [Raymond] Odierno," who served as the liaison between the military and the State Department.

"Look, ma'am," Casey said, "as hard as I've worked to support the State Department in this thing, the fact that that went forward without anybody talking to me, I consider a foul."

Rice later apologized to Casey.

O'Sullivan and Hadley tried for months in the summer of 2006 to get an Iraq strategy review underway. But they encountered resistance, as well as the inevitable crush of daily presidential obligations.

They realized that conducting a review was risky, even under the greatest secrecy. A leak that the White House was questioning its strategy could be devastating. The midterm congressional elections were barely four months away. Iraq was likely to be the main issue, and the Republicans' thin margins in both the Senate and the House were in jeopardy.

In mid-July 2006, Hadley told the president that he wanted to plant the seed for a full strategy review by asking Rumsfeld, Casey and Khalilzad a series of tough, detailed questions. Because Casey and Khalilzad were in Baghdad, they would have the session in a secure video conference. O'Sullivan hoped that in answering the questions, the three men would wake up and realize, "Hey, this picture has changed."

Bush gave his blessing, and Hadley scheduled the session for Saturday, July 22, which happened to be Casey's 58th birthday.

The general was flabbergasted. Just two weeks earlier, the president had been effusive in praising Casey during an exchange with reporters in Chicago. Now Casey had 14 major questions from Hadley, each with a series of sub-questions. Casey counted a total of 50. It didn't take much to see the list was a direct assault on the current strategy. One question was simply: "What is the strategy for Baghdad?" Casey found it demeaning.

When the video conference was convened, Casey and Khalilzad hoped to put off the questions by giving a routine update. But Hadley was not to be deterred.

"Is sectarian violence now self-sustaining and thus beyond the capacity of the political process meaningfully to influence?" Hadley asked.

What the f---? Casey thought. If the answer was yes, then they might as well give up. "No," he said, and wrote "No" on his page of questions.

Afterward, Rumsfeld made it clear he was not happy with the session, but Hadley and O'Sullivan believed they had at least sparked a strategy debate. Still, it would be almost a month before the president would be fully engaged in a strategy review again, as usual carefully shielded from the public.

Hadley had kept Rice informed of his efforts to get an internal strategy review going, and she was familiar with the 50-question grilling that Hadley had meted out to Khalilzad and Casey. Rice also favored a reevaluation of the strategy but didn't want "to do anything that would be above the radar screen in the heavy political breathing of the November elections." The administration did not need what she called "a hothouse story" that acknowledged Iraq had gotten so bad that they were considering a new approach. That would play into the hands of critics and antiwar Democrats.

On Thursday, Aug. 17, 2006, the president gathered his war council in the windowless Roosevelt Room of the White House to address the Iraq problem head-on. The temperature outside was headed toward 90 degrees, humid and muggy -- vacation time for most anyone who could escape the summer doldrums of the nation's capital.

Two weeks earlier, during a visit to the president's ranch, Rice had warned him that the very fabric of Iraqi society was "rending." Picking up on that theme, the president said, "The situation seems to be deteriorating," acknowledging to his closest advisers a rebuttal of his public optimism. He said he was searching for a way to go. "I want to be able to say that I have a plan to punch back," he said. "We need a clear way forward coming out of Labor Day." They had nothing close to a clear way forward that day, with less than three weeks to go. "We have to fight off the impression that this is not winnable," the president said. Support for the war had plummeted. In a recent Gallup poll, 56 percent of Americans said the war was a mistake. Bush's latest approval ratings hovered around 37 percent.

"Can America succeed?" he asked, one of the few times he seemed to entertain the possibility that it might not. "If so, how? How do our commanders answer that?"

Abizaid and Casey had joined the meeting through a secure video link. Before they could answer, the president recounted his conversation with a widow of a soldier. The woman had said, according to the president: "Look, I trust you. But can you win?"

Bush then recited his goals: a free society that could defend, sustain and govern itself while becoming a reliable ally in the global war on terrorism. He added a dreary assessment, saying, "It seems Iraq is incapable of achieving that."

For two years, Casey's strategy had rested on the premise that he was preparing the Iraqis to take control. In June 2006, he told Bush, "To win, we have to draw down." Rumsfeld was fond of using a bicycle seat analogy to describe the goal: Train the Iraqi forces to assume responsibility for security, and then "take the hand off the Iraqi bicycle seat," to let them get the hang of riding solo.

The problem during the Vietnam War, Bush told me in 2002, was that "the government micromanaged the war" -- both the White House and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. Micromanaging the Iraq war from the White House had been a red line for Bush. The generals' words almost always were unchallenged gospel. He did not want to second-guess them.

That was about to change.

"We must succeed," Bush said. "We will commit the resources to succeed. If they" -- the Iraqis -- "can't do it, we will."

In a direct challenge to Rumsfeld, the president declared: "If the bicycle teeters, we're going to put the hand back on. We have to make damn sure we cannot fail. If they stumble, we have to have enough manpower to cope with that."

"I've got it," Casey said. "I understand your intent."

What he didn't quite understand was just how much his world was about to change.

Bush later told me that he was intentionally sending a message to Rumsfeld and Casey: "If it's not working, let's do something different. . . . I presume they took it as a message."

But the drumbeat of optimism continued from Casey.

Hadley told Rice and others that he had come to disdain Rumsfeld's bicycle metaphor, in part because it triggered an unpleasant but relevant personal memory. In Hadley's telling, during the early 1950s, when he was in kindergarten in Toledo, Ohio, his father decided to teach him to ride a bike. Dutifully holding the bicycle seat, the father got his son going down the street at a fast clip.

"Great job!" his father yelled, and the young Hadley, wearing shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, pumped away at the pedals. But as his father's voice grew more distant, the boy realized he was on his own. He turned to look back and spilled right over, tearing up his knees and elbows. It would be 2 1/2 years before he got back on a bicycle again.

Now, when Rumsfeld said it was time to take the hand off the Iraqi bicycle seat, Hadley thought, "Well, there are costs and consequences of taking the hand off the bicycle if the lad falls over."

Despite the 50 questions from Hadley that zeroed in on the essence of the strategy, the tough session with the president and the increasing violence on the ground in Iraq, Casey held firmly to his leave-to-win strategy. He continued to report that within the next 12 to 18 months, Iraqi forces could take over the security responsibilities for the country with very little coalition support.

Casey saw his mandate as accelerating a transfer to the Iraqis. But the president and others had begun to head in the opposite direction.

"We've got to pull this together now," Hadley told Rice in October 2006. "We've got to do it under the radar screen because the electoral season is so hot, but we've got to pull this together now and start to give the president some options." Rice agreed both that a more coherent review was warranted and that secrecy was key.

In mid-October, after months of inaction, Hadley told the president, "I want to start an informal internal review."

A small group of NSC staff members and Rice's Iraq coordinator, David Satterfield, would operate under the radar. They could decide later to formalize it.

"Do it," Bush said.

On Oct. 17, Hadley summoned O'Sullivan to his office. He asked her to start the review quietly. Rumsfeld, Abizaid and Casey -- the man the president said he trusted on strategy -- wouldn't be involved. Soon, the review was underway in O'Sullivan's office. No one from the Defense Department and no one from the military was included.

Brady Dennis and Evelyn Duffy contributed to this report.