Charles Peters — April 2006

“By the fall of 2003, the [Baghdad CIA] station had just four officers who could speak Arabic.” This was two years after 9/11, 10 years after the first attack on the World Trade Center by terrorists whose plans wre revealed in documents possessed by the FBI since well before the attack, but which the FBI did not have the language competence to translate, and after frequent criticism by this magazine and others of the linguistic inadequacies of both the FBI and the CIA.  Furthermore, “many [of the staff] were rookies, often on their first overseas assignment .”

These facts come from James Risen's new book, State of War, which also reveals that, for the first nine monthes after we took Baghdad, instead of concentrating on intelligence, the CIA station was pressed by Washington to search for those non-existent weapons of mass destruction.  As late as January 2004, the CIA's Washington headquarters was worried about David Kay's allegations that there were no WMD in Iraq and about how George Tenet could answer McCain when Tenet testified before Congress.  This message went our from Langley to Baghdad:  “The Director is on the Hill in seven days, let's refocus on finding the WMD.”

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