The Pentagon’s inspector
general is investigating allegations that military officials have skewed
intelligence assessments about the United States-led campaign in Iraq against
the Islamic State to provide a more optimistic account of progress, according
to several officials familiar with the inquiry.
The investigation
began after at least one civilian Defense Intelligence Agency analyst told the
authorities that he had evidence that officials at United States Central
Command — the military headquarters overseeing the American bombing campaign
and other efforts against the Islamic State — were improperly reworking the
conclusions of intelligence assessments prepared for policy makers, including
President Obama, the government officials said.
Fuller details of
the claims were not clear, including when the assessments were said to have
been altered and who at Central Command, or Centcom, the analyst said was
responsible. The officials, speaking only on condition of anonymity about
classified matters, said that the recently opened investigation focused on
whether military officials had changed the conclusions of draft intelligence
assessments during a review process and then passed them on.
The prospect of
skewed intelligence raises new questions about the direction of the government’s
war with the Islamic State, and could help explain why pronouncements about the
progress of the campaign have varied widely.
Legitimate
differences of opinion are common and encouraged among national security
officials, so the inspector general’s investigation is an unusual move and
suggests that the allegations go beyond typical intelligence disputes.
Government rules state that intelligence assessments “must not be distorted” by
agency agendas or policy views. Analysts are required to cite the sources that
back up their conclusions and to acknowledge differing viewpoints.
Under federal
law, intelligence officials can bring claims of wrongdoing to the intelligence
community’s inspector general, a position created in 2011. If officials find
the claims credible, they are required to advise the House and Senate
Intelligence Committees. That occurred in the past several weeks, the officials
said, and the Pentagon’s inspector general decided to open an investigation
into the matter.
Spokeswomen for both
inspectors general declined to comment for this article. The Defense
Intelligence Agency and the White House also declined to comment.
Col. Patrick
Ryder, a Centcom spokesman, said he could not comment on an ongoing inspector
general investigation but said “the I.G. has a responsibility to investigate
all allegations made, and we welcome and support their independent oversight.”
Numerous agencies
produce intelligence assessments related to the Iraq war, including the Defense
Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and others. Colonel Ryder
said it was customary for them to make suggestions on one another’s drafts. But
he said each agency had the final say on whether to incorporate those
suggestions. “Further, the multisource nature of our assessment process
purposely guards against any single report or opinion unduly influencing
leaders and decision makers,” he said.
It is not clear
how that review process changes when Defense Intelligence Agency analysts are
assigned to work at Centcom — which has headquarters both in Tampa, Florida and
Qatar — as was the case of at least one of the analysts who have spoken to the
inspector general. In the years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Pentagon
has relocated more Defense Intelligence Agency analysts from the agency’s
Washington headquarters to military commands around the globe, so they can work
more closely with the generals and admirals in charge of the military
campaigns.
Mr. Obama last
summer authorized a bombing campaign against the Islamic State, and
approximately 3,400 American troops are currently in Iraq advising and training
Iraqi forces. The White House has been reluctant, though, to recommit large
numbers of ground troops to Iraq after announcing an “end” to the Iraq war in
2009.
The bombing
campaign over the past year has had some success in allowing Iraqi forces to
reclaim parts of the country formerly under the group’s control, but important
cities like Mosul and Ramadi remain under Islamic State’s control. There has
been very little progress in wresting the group’s hold over large parts of
Syria, where the United States has done limited bombing.
Some senior
American officials in recent weeks have provided largely positive public
assessments about the progress of the military campaign against the Islamic
State, a Sunni terrorist organization that began as an offshoot of Al Qaeda but
has since severed ties and claimed governance of a huge stretch of land across Iraq
and Syria. The group is also called ISIS or ISIL.
In late July,
retired Gen. John Allen — who is Mr. Obama’s top envoy working with other
nations to fight the Islamic State — told the Aspen Security Forum that the
terror group’s momentum had been “checked strategically, operationally, and by
and large, tactically.”
“ISIS is losing,”
he said, even as he acknowledged that the campaign faced numerous challenges —
from blunting ISIS’s message to improving the quality of Iraqi forces.
During a news
briefing last week, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter was more measured. He
called the war “difficult” and said “it’s going to take some time.” But, he
added, “I’m confident that we will succeed in defeating ISIL and that we have
the right strategy.”
But recent
intelligence assessments, including some by Defense Intelligence Agency, paint
a sober picture about how little the Islamic State has been weakened over the
past year, according to officials with access to the classified assessments.
They said the documents conclude that the yearlong campaign has done little to
diminish the ranks of the Islamic State’s committed fighters, and that the
group over the last year has expanded its reach into North Africa and Central
Asia.
Critics of the
Obama administration’s strategy have argued that a bombing campaign alone
—without a significant infusion of American ground troops — is unlikely to ever
significantly weaken the terror group. But it is not clear whether Defense
Intelligence Agency analysts concluded that more American troops would make an
appreciable difference.
In testimony on
Capitol Hill this year, Lt. Gen. Vincent R. Stewart, the agency’s director,
said sending ground troops back into Iraq risked transforming the conflict into
one between the West and ISIS, which would be “the best propaganda victory that
we could give.”
“It’s both
expected and helpful if there are dissenting viewpoints about conflicts in
foreign countries,” said Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations and author of a forthcoming book, “Red Team,” that includes an
examination of alternative analysis within American intelligence agencies.
What’s problematic, he said, “is when a dissenting opinion is not given to
policy makers.”
The Defense
Intelligence Agency was created in 1961, in part to avoid what Robert McNamara,
the Secretary of Defense at the time, called “service bias.” During the 1950s,
the United States grossly overestimated the size of the Soviet missile arsenal,
a miscalculation that was fueled in part by the Air Force, which wanted more
money for its own missile systems.
During the
Vietnam War, the Defense Intelligence Agency repeatedly warned that even a
sustained military campaign was unlikely to defeat the North Vietnamese forces.
But according to an internal history of the agency, its conclusions were
repeatedly overruled by commanders who were certain that the United States was
winning, and that victory was just a matter of applying more force.
“There’s a
built-in tension for the people who work at D.I.A., between dispassionate
analysis and what command wants,” said Paul R. Pillar, a retired senior Central
Intelligence Agency analyst who years ago accused the Bush administration of
distorting intelligence assessments about Iraq’s weapons programs before the beginning
of the Iraq war in 2003.
“You’re part of a
large structure that does have a vested interest in portraying the overall
mission as going well,” he said.
