The Secretary of Defense then was Donald H. Rumsfeld, who resigned under pressure after the 2006 elections.
Lawrence Di Rita, Rumsfeld's former spokesman, said he wasn't familiar with the "specific example" Faddis cited, "but DoD and CIA were leaning forward on going after Al Qaeda in Iraq before a lot of people even knew or believed there was Al Qaeda in Iraq."
"The U.S. has killed and captured a lot of Al Qaeda," he added by e-mail. "I doubt Al Qaeda in Iraq thinks they've gotten off easy or that they have gotten a lot of breaks."
Faddis, who joined the CIA in 1988, said his team was supposed to guide members of the U.S. Army's
10th Special Forces Group into an area of northern Iraq where a local Kurdish extremist group,
Ansar al Islam, was giving shelter to al Qaeda leaders who had fled across Iran from the U.S. bombing in Afghanistan.
The CIA team easily slipped into northern Iraq. "They didn't even know we were there," Faddis said of the terrorists.
But then there were Pentagon delays, which eventually lasted months and prevented a concerted attack on the al Qaeda camp.
"When we went in, we could not bring any 10th Group guys with us, because DoD would not make them available," he said.
The CIA team asked for "Delta, SEALs, somebody," Faddis said, "then when this was not forthcoming we asked for just air support, and then when this was not forthcoming, we asked simply for supplies for our Kurdish allies and told them we would do it ourselves."
When the Green Berets were finally allowed to mobilize, their attack had been "telegraphed" to al Qaeda.
"By that time, every target of significance had walked back into Iran," said Faddis, who joined the CIA in1988 and spent the 20 years working under cover in the Middle East and South and Southwest Asia
"Eventually, all of them came back and were instrumental in the insurgency" against U.S. troops in Iraq, he said.
There was no link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, a charge frequently made by the Bush administration, "that I am aware of," Faddis said. Al Qaeda operatives "showed up in Iraq after our invasion of Afghanistan."
Before the U.S. invasion, "you had al Qaeda operatives in the north spying (on Iraq) -- the same as us," he said.
Faddis also blasted the American decision to disband Saddam Hussein's army after the invasion.
Only the "reconstitution of the Sunni army," by paying Sunni clan leaders to stop killing U.S. troops and turn on al Qaeda in Iraq in 2007, made the dramatic drop in violence possible, Faddis said, not
the "surge."
He said a CIA team had arranged for the defection of Hussein's entire Fifth Army Corps in Mosul right after the invasion, but "arrogant, insulting" U.S. military commanders "threw it away."
But the CIA itself, says Faddis, who left the agency in May, has been hampered by inept and overly cautious bureaucrats, who came up in the organization when agency spies scoured diplomatic cocktail parties looking for Russians to recruit.
"They're certainly averse to risk," he said of CIA operations officials, voicing a persistent theme of internal as well as outside critics of the agency.
Just as persistently, the agency has maintained that a newly energized, post-9/11 CIA is aggressively conducting operations against terrorists, citing the capture or killing of several senior al Qaeda operatives as proof.
Faddis concedes that the CIA became "more aggressive after 9/11, but he insists "we're not running the right kind of operations (to destroy terrorists)."
And that's because CIA bureaucrats are scared of taking casualties under their watch, he says.
An army veteran, and a Washington State prosecutor before he joined the CIA, Faddis says he's been reading a lot lately about the OSS, the CIA's World War Two forerunner, which parachuted agents behind enemy lines, some of whom were captured, tortured and shot.
"If you 're going to run intelligence operations into the heart of a terrorist organization, things will go wrong, people are going to die, people get hurt," he said.
"If you don't have an organization that will stand behind you one hundred per cent, then who's going to climb out on that limb?"
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Comments
al Qaeda was spying on Saddam...that is hilarious. Does he really think we believe that?
If spying means taking money, weapons and safehaven then ya, they were "spying" on Saddam.
Posted by: ikez78
| October 10, 2008 12:43 PM
I did not mean to disparage Farris in the post above. I do not know the entire extent of his comments based on what was allowed into this story but SOME of al Qaeda's agents likely were "spying" in Iraq. Spying on Kurds, "spying" to look for other places to go after having their camps in Afghanistan destroyed, "spying" on Saddam's government by feeling out their intel services and asking if it was ok for them to hide in Sunni areas (which was later admitted and later done) are all possible scenarios as al Qaeda saw Iraq as possibly both a place to confront Americans if they went there and hide in the lands of another American enemy if America didn't invade there.
More on this in an upcoming post at www.regimeofterror.com
Posted by: ikez78
| October 10, 2008 3:41 PM
Greetings. I am the author of OPERATION HOTEL CALIFORNIA: The Clandestine War Inside Iraq. My name is Mike Tucker and Sam Faddis was my main source for the book; without Sam Faddis, this book would never have been written, as he was the CIA clandestine officer/counterterrorist officer who helmed the team, which entered Kurdistan on July 10, 2002, returned to America on August 29, 2002, and re-entered Kurdistan on October 2, 2002. Their mission was two-fold: take down Al Qaeda and Al Ansar Islam terrorists in Northern Iraq, and lay the groundwork for the US-led Coalition invasion of Iraq, to take down Saddam. Sam selected me to write the book in May 2007; it was recently published.
Sam's point about Al Qaeda in Iraq is fleshed out entirely in the book; he is making the point, now, that the much-heralded link between Al Qaeda and Saddam, trumpeted by Tenet, Cheney, Bush, and others inside the Beltway in 2002 and 2003, was in no way consistent with what he and his team--the only clandestine officers (not agents, as they are incorrectly referred to by some on this site) discovered in the field in Iraq. Nothing in the field indicated that Al Qaeda was linked up with Saddam. Now, if people inside the Beltway at that time, or since, want to suggest that Al Qaeda was in some way linked up with Saddam, it's a free country, but to quote Sam, "Never pass off Chinese whispers and bulljive as the truth."
Sam never had a mission that stated, "Ensure that your field intelligence reinforces what US policymakers, including the President, are stating or implying, vice Saddam and Al Qaeda." Sam had a mission to take down Al Qaeda and Ansar Al Islam, he carried out that mission, and when his team did exactly what their op order called for, the Bush White House refused to give the green light to kill Al Qaeda. Sam states clearly and directly in OPERATION HOTEL CALIFORNIA that he and his team never had one source give them anything that remotely suggested that Saddam was in bed with Osama Bin Laden.
What is being missed in all this dialogue between Rumsfeld's lackeys and Sam, is that Sam's ground truth, vice Bush's failure in command in Iraq, remains invaluable in helping America and our allies combat and defeat the most brutal and diabolical enemy the US has ever faced: Al Qaeda and all Islamist terrorists. Less than one year after September 11th, Sam and his fellow counterterrorists and case officers had 200 Al Qaeda terrorists--all of whom had escaped from Tora Bora, due to Bush's failure of command in Nov/Dec. 2001--and over 700 Ansar Al Islam terrorists, including the entire senior leadership of Ansar Al Islam. Clearly, we need a radical change in the command structure of the US: for example, the British allow their top clandestine officers and special operations commanders, such as MI6 and SAS, communicate directly with the Prime Minister.
But we needed a President after September 11th, moreover, who had the backbone of Lincoln, the resolve of T.R., and the guile and decisiveness of F.D.R. We needed, and we still need, a President who will not compromise on killing Al Qaeda. Bush was not that president, at all.
The Bush White House failed to order Sam and his team to strike and kill Al Qaeda and to strike and kill Ansar Al Islam, in significant numbers, on an operation where Bush had ordered them in country, behind enemy lines, to kill Al Qaeda and Al Ansar Islam, in the first place.
FDR never ordered anyone in the OSS or in the US military, "Do not kill Yamamoto. Do not strike and kill senior Japanese military leadership. Let them walk." That is because FDR, unlike Bush, understood one of the principle truths of war: once an enemy draws first blood on you, you strike and kill them without hesitation.
What is true in October 2008 is that the same people who covered Bush and Cheney and the Neo Cons backsides and made damn sure that CYA and Play the Game dominated the inner circles of decision-making on US national security at a time of war will now try to find excuses for Bush's failure of command in the Near East and Central Asia in 2001 and 2002 and 2003 and each year since. We have a saying in Marine infantry: Excuses never pass for reasons. Don't give me an excuse, give me a reason.
There is no excuse for Bush's failure in command in the summer of 2002 in Iraq--Bush had America's finest staring Al Qaeda and Ansar Al Islam down, straight up in their gunsights, and Bush let Al Qaeda and Al Ansar Islam walk--but there is a reason: Bush is and was the most incompetent, lame, gutless and witless president and commander-in-chief in the history of the United States. Bush failed to strike and kill Osama Bin Laden and the core leadership of Al Qaeda when the CIA had Bin Laden ripe for the plucking in Tora Bora, and then less than a year later in Northern Iraq, Bush did it again.
Under FDR, we took down Yamamoto in less than 18 months, after Pearl Harbor.
Seven years after our generation's Pearl Harbor, Bush has failed to take down Osama Bin Laden and failed to defeat and destroy Al Qaeda, the Taliban and their allies, and given back to Al Qaeda and the Taliban over one-third of Afghanistan. Bush will go down in history as the president who failed to kill Bin Laden and who succeeded at giving Al Qaeda and the Taliban exactly what they want: operational bases, recruiting bases, and armories in Al Qaeda's crown jewel: Afghanistan.
Mike Tucker
Counterterrorism Specialist, Poet and Author
Author of
OPERATION HOTEL CALIFORNIA: The Clandestine War Inside Iraq
By Mike Tucker with Charles Faddis
Posted by: MikeTuckerAuthor
| October 13, 2008 6:46 AM
Mr. Tucker, I appreciate your work and Sam's but you do know that literally hundreds of Baath detainees and those on the loose, as well as al Qaeda in custody on the loose have admitted the two cooperated pre invasion, right?
This topic needs anything BUT people in the Beltway determining what is fact.
Posted by: ikez78
| October 13, 2008 9:05 PM
And Mr. Tucker, while it was fun and popular to lambaste this war and sanitize Saddam Hussein's record I was interviewing and researching on Baath and al Qaeda sites and reading media stories on the extensiveness of the two sides cooperation post invasion at www.regimeofterror.com.
Posted by: ikez78
| October 13, 2008 9:07 PM
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