The Office of Special Plans (OSP) was a short-lived outfit in the Pentagon's Policy office that provided
the White House with inaccurate, skewed intelligence linking Iraq and al-Qaida that was used to justify
the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. In 2007, an investigation conducted by the Inspector General of
the Department of Defense concluded about the OSP: "We believe the [OSP's] actions were inappropriate
because a policy office was producing intelligence products and was not clearly conveying to senior decision-makers
the variance with the consensus of the Intelligence Community" (see "Review of Pre-Iraqi War
Activities of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy"). The report on the investigation
also characterized the work of the OSP, which was under Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas
Feith's purview, as "inappropriate conduct of intelligence activities outside of intelligence
channels." Feith called this conclusion "bizarre" (AP, February 8, 2007).
The day after the 9/11 attacks, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz authorized the creation of an informal team focused on ferreting out damaging intelligence
about Iraq. This loosely organized team soon became the OSP, directed by Abram
Shulsky, formerly of RAND and the National
Strategy Information Center, and overseen by Undersecretary of Defense William
Luti.
According to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, OSP "was created in order to find evidence
of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to al-Qaida, and that Iraq had
an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region
and, potentially, the United States" (New Yorker, May 13, 2003). Based on his interviews
with former and current intelligence officials, Hersh concluded that the OSP "rivaled both the CIA
and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA, as President Bush's main source of intelligence."
To bolster the justification for war against Iraq, the administration needed intelligence that would
persuade the U.S. public and policymakers that Saddam Hussein's regime should be one of the first targets
of the war on terrorism. Convinced that the CIA, DIA, and the State Department would not provide them
with threat assessments necessary to justify a preventive war, Wolfowitz and Feith created their own
tightly controlled intelligence operation at the top levels of the Pentagon bureaucracy.
A stream of consultants and collaborators flowed in and out of the OSP, bypassing normal intelligence
procedures and protocol. Operating independently of the established intelligence apparatus, OSP dispensed
with the normal guidelines for vetting information. Instead, in the rush to make the case for preventive
war, the OSP routinely "stovepiped" its strategic intelligence directly to the top administration
officials, who then took this unfiltered information straight to the president. As Kenneth Pollack, a
former National Security Council expert on Iraq and author of The Threatening Storm, told Seymour
Hersh: "What the Bush people did was 'dismantle the existing filtering process that for 50 years
had been preventing the policy makers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the
information they wanted directly to the top leadership'" (Hersh, New Yorker, October 27,
2003).
The result was that faulty intelligence became the foundation for the Bush administration's flawed
arguments for war. The most obvious evidence of this was the total lack of WMD found in Iraq. Perhaps
a more hyped inaccuracy, however, was President George W. Bush's assertion in his 2003 State of the Union
address that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger.
Another serious ramification of the OSP was the disastrous post-war planning (or lack of planning)
the intel led to: "According to current and former U.S. intelligence analysts and government officials,
the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans funneled information, unchallenged, from Ahmed
Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC) to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who in turn passed it on
to the White House, suggesting that Iraqis would welcome the American invaders" (Nation,
July 2003).
Reported the Nation: "'The same unit [the Office of Special Plans] that fed Chalabi's
intelligence on WMD to Rumsfeld was also feeding him Chalabi's stuff on the prospects for postwar Iraq,'
said a leading U.S. government expert on the Middle East. Says a former U.S. ambassador with strong links
to the CIA: 'There was certainly information coming from the Iraqi exile community, including Chalabi—who
was detested by the CIA and by the State Department—saying, "They will welcome you with open arms." Rumsfeld's
willingness to accept that view led him to contradict the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, who predicted
that it would take hundreds of thousands of troops to control Iraq after the fall of Baghdad, a view
that seems prescient today.'"
Douglas Feith, a vocal proponent of attacking Iraq even before the election of President Bush and
the 9/11 attacks, oversaw this "strategic intelligence" initiative. As the Pentagon's top policy
official in Middle East affairs, Feith had oversight authority of the DOD's Near East and South Asia
bureau (NESA). That office came under the direct supervision of Luti, a retired Navy officer who is a Newt
Gingrich protégé and who had long advocated a U.S. military invasion of Iraq. OSP
was the embodiment of the right's notion of "strategic intelligence"—intelligence analysis
that was policy-driven, flexible, and decentralized rather than being overly constrained by verifiable
data. Starting from neoconservative assumptions about the "intentions" of the Iraqi regime,
the OSP fashioned intelligence about Iraq's capabilities to support a preventive war. With Shulsky, a
Straussian political philosopher, as their director, the OSP staff took to calling themselves the "Cabal" (Hersh, New
Yorker, May 12, 2003).
This cabal did not operate in complete isolation from other government agencies. However, it worked
almost exclusively with like-minded neoconservative political appointees in the National Security Council,
the State Department, and the office of the vice president. NESA and its subproject OSP maintained close
relations with the Defense Policy Board (DPB), whose members were picked by Feith and approved by Rumsfeld.
Initially chaired by Richard Perle of the American
Enterprise Institute (AEI), the DPB was a nest of neoconservatives and other hardliners, including Eliot
Cohen, Gingrich, David Jeremiah, Kenneth
Adelman, and James Woolsey. Perle, who
stepped down as DPB chairman after reports of potential conflicts of interest emerged regarding his business
dealings (but remained on the board for some time), had served as Feith's mentor during the Reagan administration.
Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a former desk officer at NESA, revealed much about the
workings of the OSP in a 2004 Salon.com article: "From May 2002 until February 2003, I observed
firsthand the formation of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and watched the latter stages of the
neoconservative capture of the policy-intelligence nexus in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. ... I saw
a narrow and deeply flawed policy favored by some executive appointees in the Pentagon used to manipulate
and pressurize the traditional relationship between policymakers in the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence
agencies.
"I witnessed neoconservative agenda bearers within OSP usurp measured and carefully considered
assessments, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in
fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the president.
"While this commandeering of a narrow segment of both intelligence production and American foreign
policy matched closely with the well-published desires of the neoconservative wing of the Republican
Party, many of us in the Pentagon, conservatives and liberals alike, felt that this agenda, whatever
its flaws or merits, had never been openly presented to the American people. Instead, the public story
line was a fear-peddling and confusing set of messages, designed to take Congress and the country into
a war of executive choice, a war based on false pretenses, and a war one year later Americans do not
really understand. ...
"After August 2002, the Office of Special Plans established its own rhythm and cadence separate
from the non-politically minded professionals covering the rest of the region. While often accused of
creating intelligence, I saw only two apparent products of this office: war planning guidance for Rumsfeld,
presumably impacting Central Command, and talking points on Iraq, WMD, and terrorism. These internal
talking points seemed to be a mélange crafted from obvious past observation and intelligence bits
and pieces of dubious origin. They were propagandistic in style, and all desk officers were ordered to
use them verbatim in the preparation of any material prepared for higher-ups and people outside the Pentagon. ...
"I suspected, from reading Charles Krauthammer,
a neoconservative columnist for the Washington Post, and the Weekly
Standard, and hearing a [Dick] Cheney speech
or two, that these talking points left the building on occasion. Both OSP functions duplicated other
parts of the Pentagon. The facts we should have used to base our papers on were already being produced
by the intelligence agencies, and the war planning was already done by the combatant command staff with
some help from the Joint Staff. Instead of developing defense policy alternatives and advice, OSP was
used to manufacture propaganda for internal and external use, and pseudo war planning" (Salon.com,
March 10, 2004).
W. Patrick Lang, former DIA chief of Middle East intelligence, explained to Hersh in the lead-up to
the invasion: "The Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government's foreign policy, and
they've pulled it off. They're running Chalabi. The DIA has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And
there's no guts at all in the CIA" (New Yorker, May 12, 2003).
By late 2003 the OSP was closed down, having accomplished its mission of providing the strategic intelligence
cited by the administration in the build-up to the Iraq invasion. OSP's staff and operations were folded
back into the normal operations of the NESA and into its Office of Northern Gulf Affairs. However, in
July 2003, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), then the ranking minority member of the Senate Armed Services Committee,
spearheaded an inquiry into the OSP because "Senator Levin believes that the professional objectivity
and independence required in the assessment of the Iraq-al-Qaida relationship were compromised to support
the policy goal of removing Saddam Hussein" (Sen. Carl Levin, October 21, 2004). Levin's report "shows
that in the case Iraq's relationship with al-Qaida, intelligence was exaggerated to support administration
policy aims primarily by the Feith policy office [OSP], which was determined to find a strong connection
between Iraq and al-Qaida, rather than by the IC [intelligence community], which was consistently dubious
of such a connection" ("Report of an Inquiry into the Alternative Analysis," October 21,
2004).
In fall 2006, the OSP again emerged into public commentary when it became known that the Pentagon
had created a new desk to focus on Iran policy, a so-called Iranian Directorate, which also was connected
by some commentators to a counterpart office in the State Department called the Office
of Iranian Affairs.
"To understand the Pentagon Iran desk and its ability to rile people here in Washington, you
do have to go back a few years to the Office of Special Plans at its height," reported Mary Louise
Kelly for National Public Radio. "It, too, was a small office—18 people at its largest—but many
believe the OSP wielded disproportionate clout, and that it did so by shooting flawed intelligence from
Iraqi exiles straight up to the White House, bypassing the CIA. The Pentagon has consistently denied
that, but suspicions have persisted about a secret back channel of intelligence flowing from the Pentagon.
Thus, the uneasiness that's greeted this Iran team—a new team, but with several familiar faces. One former
CIA official with extensive experience in the Middle East says, they've taken the OSP and made them the
Iran desk," (National Public Radio, September 20, 2006).
