The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented
either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to
several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.
The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since
the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government.
Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts
that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.
An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the
Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.
The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem
worse,” said one American intelligence official.
More than a dozen United States government officials and outside experts were interviewed
for this article, and all spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified intelligence document.
The officials included employees of several government agencies, and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration.
All of those interviewed had either seen the final version of the document or participated in the creation of earlier drafts.
These officials discussed some of the document’s general conclusions but not details, which remain highly classified.
Officials with knowledge of the intelligence estimate said it avoided specific judgments about the likelihood that
terrorists would once again strike on United States soil. The relationship between the Iraq war and terrorism, and
the question of whether the United States is safer, have been subjects of persistent debate
since the war began in 2003.
National Intelligence Estimates are the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a
specific national security issue, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence. Their conclusions are based on analysis of raw intelligence collected by all of the spy
agencies.
Analysts began working on the estimate in 2004, but it was not finalized until this year. Part of the reason was that
some government officials were unhappy with the structure and focus of earlier versions of the document, according to officials
involved in the discussion.
Previous drafts described actions by the United States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement,
like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, and some policy makers
argued that the intelligence estimate should be more focused on specific steps to mitigate the terror threat. It is unclear
whether the final draft of the intelligence estimate criticizes individual policies of the United States, but intelligence officials
involved in preparing the document said its conclusions were not softened or massaged for political purposes.
Frederick Jones, a White House spokesman, said the White House “played no role in drafting or reviewing the judgments
expressed in the National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism.” The estimate’s judgments confirm some predictions
of a National Intelligence Council report completed in January 2003, two months before the Iraq invasion. That report stated
that the approaching war had the potential to increase support for political Islam worldwide and could increase support for
some terrorist objectives.
Documents released by the White House timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks emphasized
the successes that the United States had made in dismantling the top tier of Al Qaeda.
“Since the Sept. 11 attacks, America and its allies are safer, but we are not yet safe,” concludes one,
a report titled “9/11 Five Years Later: Success and Challenges.” “We have done much to degrade Al Qaeda
and its affiliates and to undercut the perceived legitimacy of terrorism.”
That document makes only passing mention of the impact the Iraq war has had on the global
jihad movement. “The ongoing fight for freedom in Iraq has been twisted by terrorist
propaganda as a rallying cry,” it states.
The report mentions the possibility that Islamic militants who fought in Iraq could return to their home
countries, “exacerbating domestic conflicts or fomenting radical ideologies.”
On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled House
Intelligence Committee released a more ominous report about the terrorist threat. That assessment, based entirely on unclassified
documents, details a growing jihad movement and says, “Al Qaeda leaders wait patiently for the right opportunity to
attack.”
The new National Intelligence Estimate was overseen by David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for
transnational threats, who commissioned it in 2004 after he took up his post at the National Intelligence Council. Mr. Low
declined to be interviewed for this article.
The estimate concludes that the radical Islamic movement has expanded from a core of Qaeda operatives and affiliated
groups to include a new class of “self-generating” cells inspired by Al Qaeda’s leadership but without any
direct connection to Osama bin Laden or his top lieutenants.
It also examines how the Internet has helped spread jihadist ideology, and how cyberspace has become a haven
for terrorist operatives who no longer have geographical refuges in countries like Afghanistan.
In early 2005, the National Intelligence Council released a study concluding that Iraq had
become the primary training ground for the next generation of terrorists, and that veterans of the Iraq war
might ultimately overtake Al Qaeda’s current leadership in the constellation of the global jihad leadership.
But the new intelligence estimate is the first report since the war began to present a comprehensive picture
about the trends in global terrorism.
In recent months, some senior American intelligence officials have offered glimpses into the estimate’s
conclusions in public speeches.
“New jihadist networks and cells, sometimes united by little more than their anti-Western agendas, are
increasingly likely to emerge,” said Gen. Michael V. Hayden, during a speech in San Antonio in April, the month that the new estimate
was completed. “If this trend continues, threats to the U.S. at home
and abroad will become more diverse and that could lead to increasing attacks worldwide,” said the general, who was
then Mr. Negroponte’s top deputy and is now director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
For more than two years, there has been tension between the Bush administration and American spy agencies over
the violence in Iraq and the prospects for a stable democracy
in the country. Some intelligence officials have said the White House has consistently presented a more optimistic picture
of the situation in Iraq than justified by intelligence reports from
the field.
Spy agencies usually produce several national intelligence estimates each year on a variety of subjects. The
most controversial of these in recent years was an October 2002 document assessing Iraq’s
illicit weapons programs. Several government investigations have discredited that report, and the intelligence community is
overhauling how it analyzes data, largely as a result of those investigations.
The broad judgments of the new intelligence estimate are consistent with assessments of global terrorist threats
by American allies and independent terrorism experts.
The panel investigating the London terrorist bombings of
July 2005 reported in May that the leaders of Britain’s
domestic and international intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, “emphasized to the committee the growing scale of the
Islamist terrorist threat.”
More recently, the Council on Global Terrorism, an independent research group of respected terrorism experts,
assigned a grade of “D+” to United States efforts
over the past five years to combat Islamic extremism. The council concluded that “there is every sign that radicalization
in the Muslim world is spreading rather than shrinking.”