WASHINGTON — Just four months after the Sept. 11 attacks, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz dashed off a memo to a senior Pentagon colleague, demanding action to identify connections between Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda.
"We don't seem to be making much progress pulling together intelligence on links between Iraq and Al Qaeda," Wolfowitz wrote in the Jan. 22, 2002, memo to Douglas J. Feith, the department's No. 3 official.
Using Pentagon jargon for the secretary of Defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, he added: "We owe SecDef some analysis of this subject. Please give me a recommendation on how best to proceed. Appreciate the short turn-around."
Wolfowitz's memo, released Thursday, is included in a recently declassified report by the Pentagon's inspector general. The memo marked the beginnings of what would become a controversial yearlong Pentagon project supervised by Feith to convince the most senior members of the Bush administration that Hussein and Al Qaeda were linked -- a conclusion that was hotly disputed by U.S. intelligence agencies at the time and has been discredited in the years since.
In excerpts released in February, Thomas F. Gimble, the acting inspector general of the Pentagon, criticized the project as an alternative intelligence assessment that was improper. However, Gimble said, the operation was not illegal or unauthorized, because Pentagon directives allowed Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz to assign the work.
Many of the activities of the intelligence unit Feith headed are now well-known. But the release of the full inspector general's report provides more detail about how a group of Pentagon officials and on-loan intelligence analysts were able to shunt aside contradictory reports and convince top administration officials that they had powerful evidence of connections between Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda. The 121-page report was released by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and is posted on the senator's website, levin.senate.gov/.
Feith has said his project was an appropriate, rigorous effort to question assumptions made by U.S. intelligence agencies. On a website Feith set up in response to the inspector general's report, www.dougfeith.com/, he states: "This IG report controversy is, in essence, a debate over whether the CIA should be protected against criticism by policy officials." (Emphasis is his.)
