Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender [Hardcover]

Kenneth R. Timmerman (Author)

Book Description

Release date: November 6, 2007

“An alarming but necessary book that reads like a thriller. By raising uncomfortable questions, Ken Timmerman has performed a significant public service.”
–Michael Medved, nationally syndicated talk radio host

Some have called it the CIA’s greatest covert operation of all time.

It is an intelligence war conducted behind the scenes, aimed at confusing, misleading, and ultimately defeating the enemy. The goal is nothing less than toppling the regime in power. A network of agents has been planted at key crossroads of power, stealing secrets, planting disinformation, and cooking intelligence. The plan involves sophisticated political sabotage operations that bring in opposition forces who can challenge the regime openly, in a way the CIA cannot. The scope is breathtaking.

Who is the target of this vast, sophisticated CIA operation? Not the mullahs in Tehran or North Korea’s power-mad Kim Jong Il; the target is America’s president, George W. Bush.

Drawing on exclusive information from senior government officials, intelligence operatives, and many others, investigative reporter Kenneth Timmerman provides the full, untold story of the sabotage that occurs behind the scenes at key government agencies like the CIA and State Department–and the profound effect it has on America’s ability to confront its most dangerous enemies. In Shadow Warriors, Timmerman brings to light the vast underground working to undercut our nation’s efforts to win the war on terror–revealing the when, where, how, and who for the first time. He also exposes the Democratic politicians who have sold out America’s national security for political gain.

In Shadow Warriors you’ll learn:

•How the CIA and State Department sabotaged the administration’s Iraq war plans from the start–sparking the insurgency in the process
•How a high-level State Department official gathered aides after Bush’s reelection to insist they owed no allegiance to the president or his policies
•How pre-war intelligence on Iraq was cooked–not by the Bush administration, but by its opponents
•How and why the shadow warriors have leaked details of virtually every covert U.S. intelligence tool used in the war on terror
•How the leaks have devastated our efforts to fight terrorism–such as when a key U.S. ally rebuffed the CIA director’s request for assistance by saying, “You Americans can’t keep secrets”
•Why U.S. intelligence refused to examine important documents detailing the secret Iraqi networks that became the heart of the insurgency
•How newly discovered Iraqi government documents reveal the extent of Saddam Hussein’s ties to international terrorists and the truth about his WMD arsenal

Shadow Warriors shows that George W. Bush never got the first rule of Washington: People are policy. He allowed his political enemies to run roughshod over his administration. This insider’s look at secret White House meetings, political backstabbing, and war-room summits is an eye-opening account of the mind-set that is crippling our effectiveness in Iraq and around the world.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

KENNETH R. TIMMERMAN is the New York Times bestselling author of Countdown to Crisis, The French Betrayal of America, Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America, and Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq. In 2006 he was nominated of the Nobel Peace Prize for his groundbreaking reporting on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. He lives near Washington, D.C., with his family.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter ONE A Battle Royal

Frank Ricciardone was a career diplomat, but he had no illusions to whom he owed his allegiance. Two years earlier, in 1999, he had been appointed as the secretary of state’s special coordinator for the transition of Iraq. It was a new position, with no real precedent in U.S. history. Although Ricciardone owed his title to the Iraq Liberation Act (ILA), an overwhelmingly bipartisan piece of legislation passed by Congress in 1998, he owed his job to President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright.

Now, in January 2001, he began to ingratiate himself with his new political masters at the Bush White House and the State Department over long lunches and private meetings. An Arabist by training (I first met Ricciardone in Jordan, where he was posted in the early 1990s), he overwhelmed them with his detailed knowledge of Iraq and the Iraqi opposition. “I was sitting at the Turkish border counting refugees,” he said, referring to a period the Republicans called “the debacle.” This was August 1996, when Clinton abandoned the Iraqi opposition and allowed Saddam Hussein to smash their safe haven in northern Iraq, murdering hundreds of fighters and forcing tens of thousands more to flee across the border.

Because he had seen the sufferings of Iraqis up close, he told Bush administration officials, “this is a mission I believe in.”

But in fact, Ricciardone’s mission from the very start had been something quite different. He ensured that no viable Iraqi opposition would emerge to lay claim on U.S. government support, because that is what Secretary Albright and President Clinton secretly wanted.

In other words, his job was to make sure the Clinton administration could break the law, with no one the wiser.

Clinton and Albright believed they could keep Saddam Hussein “in his box” through United Nations sanctions, which they saw as a cost-free policy. As long as U.S. forces in the region encircled Iraq, and the U.S. Air Force enforced “no-fly zones” in the north and the south of Iraq, Saddam Hussein posed no strategic threat to the United States, they argued. He might massacre his own people, send $25,000 checks to encourage suicide bombings by Palestinians, and dabble with al Qaeda operatives, but those were mere “nuisances” the U.S. could handle.

The real threat to the United States, they felt, was Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi political genius who chaired the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a coalition of opposition groups based in northern Iraq. Chalabi and the INC were seeking to enlist U.S. help in overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

Dr. Chalabi was many things. He came from a family of prominent Iraqi politicians who had held office in democratically elected governments before the takeover by Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party in 1958. He had a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, but early on went into business and made a fortune introducing Visa card services to the Middle East in the 1970s.

Yet Chalabi was also a master lobbyist, who understood the American political system better than most American politicians. Almost single-handedly, he convinced an overwhelming majority of the House and Senate to approve the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which authorized the U.S. government to spend $97 million per year to train and equip an Iraqi Liberation Army, and to spend additional funds to support the INC and other opponents of Saddam.

Frank Ricciardone’s mission was to stop Ahmad Chalabi at all costs, because he could drag the United States into a war.

With the change of administrations, Ricciardone knew that his new political masters were divided. Some, such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of State John Bolton, were strong Chalabi supporters. They believed that the military plan Chalabi had developed with the help of the former commander of U.S. Special Forces, Lieutenant General Wayne Downing, was sound. (The Down- ing Plan called for training and equipping two heavy brigades of Iraqi fighters—10,000 men—and helping them to establish beachheads in the Kurdish-controlled north and the Shia-dominated southern parts of Iraq, backed by U.S. airpower, then gradually moving on Baghdad as Iraqi units loyal to Saddam began to defect.)

But Ricciardone knew that the Joint Chiefs of Staff hated the plan (they favored a more robust use of American forces that would head directly for Baghdad, the “center of gravity” of Saddam’s regime), and that both the State Department and the CIA hated Chalabi—with a passion. Differences over how to deal with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and what role the U.S. should give Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress became a battle royal within the national security establishment well before President Bush took office in 2001. Positions had been staked out, allies gathered, and elaborate strategies mapped out by both sides. The new administration never fully grasped the deep, visceral opposition to their plans within the entrenched bureaucracy.

Ricciardone could be beguiling. He told his new political masters, “I really want to see these programs go forward. But the INC has got to be business-like.”

It was a ploy that Ricciardone and a small group of career State Department officers—Rebecca J. King, Kathy Allegrone, and Filo Dibble—already had used with success to make sure that no significant amount of the $97 million initially authorized by the Iraq Liberation Act ever got spent.

In 1999, for example, Congress appropriated $8 million in Economic Support Funds to help the INC expand its operations in Iraq, Europe, and the United States. But the INC only received $267,000 of that money—and it was used not to recruit fighters for the Iraq Liberation Army but to hire American consultants imposed on the INC by Ricciardone and his staff to rewrite INC grant proposals. In 2000, an additional $8 million was left unspent, with only $850,000 going to the INC. By the time the Bush administration came in, $3.2 million had been paid to a Landover, Maryland, company called Quality Support, Inc., for the sole purpose of organizing conferences, setting up a luxurious office the consultants could use in London (the INC already an office there), and so-called “administrative services.”1

In one boondoggle organized at Ricciardone’s behest, Quality Support brought 300 Iraqi exiles to New York for a “national assembly” in October 1999 that cost U.S. taxpayers $2.1 million, or $7,000 per head.

Why did it cost so much? For one thing, in a move reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s Travelgate fiasco, Quality Support insisted on buying all the tickets through their own travel agent at well above the going rates.

One INC member offered to buy his own ticket from Los Angeles to New York for the conference for $344. Quality Support refused, and insisted on overnighting him a full-fare ticket that cost U.S. taxpayers $1,800. INC members in London offered to buy tickets for under $500, but Quality Support turned them down, giving the business to their own travel agent, who charged an average of $2,000 per ticket. “Those payments went through the State Department audit without a hitch,” INC executive board member Sherif Ali bin Hussein al Hashimi told me. “But when it came to our budget, Kathy Allegrone,” the State Department officer who was managing the INC account, “argued day and night with us over an eight-dollar rounding error,” he said.

That was how the shadow warriors worked. They knew all the ins and outs of the bureaucratic process. Like the lawyers in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, they knew that if they could delay things long enough their opponents would probably forget what the fight was all about.

“The INC had problems with their bookkeeping,” another Ricciardone deputy told me in February 2001, in response to my question about why the congressionally appropriated funds were never spent on their intended purpose against Saddam. “Until just recently, they had no legal standing. We had to get them incorporated before they could receive funds under the program. That’s why the money had to be paid out through consultants.”

Put simply, it was a crock.

“Quality Support’s mandate was to pile up money on the street and burn it,” INC advisor Francis Brooke told me. But if you only read the version of these events that has appeared in the Washington Post or the New York Times, you would be convinced that the INC was wasting vast amounts of U.S. taxpayer money.

Ricciardone was unhappy when I called him to inquire about Quality Support and why more money was not getting to the Iraqi opposition.

“Rather than looking at Quality Support, I’d like to see someone investigate all that money that’s been going to John Rendon,” he said. Wink wink, nod nod. “And you know where that’s coming from!”

Of course I did. The Rendon Group’s contract with the CIA was one of Washington’s worst-kept secrets. But because it was still secret, people could characterize it any way they wanted.

And they did.

Chalabi

But wait a minute, I can hear Bill O’Reilly saying. This Chalabi character is a crook!

Wasn’t he arrested by U.S. agents in Baghdad in 2004 and accused of selling intelligence to Iran?

Wasn’t he the one who fabricated the evidence on Saddam’s WMD to suck us into a war we didn’t need?

Jane Mayer called him “The Manipulator,” in a feature story that appeared in The New Yorker. Newsweek even put him on the cover, calling him a “convicted felon,” “one of the great con men of history,” and “Bush’s Mr. Wrong.”2

Left-wing blogger Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation s...

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Crown Forum; 1 edition (November 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307352099
• ISBN-13: 978-0307352095
• Product Dimensions: 1.3 x 6.4 x 9.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (58 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #969,891 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

160 of 181 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Know Your Government. Read This Book. November 7, 2007

By Sharkman

Format:Hardcover

Just when you thought George W. Bush and his political appointees where the ones creating havoc, enter the career bureaucrats of the State Department and the CIA, who, no matter who's residing in the White House, have their own agendas in mind.

This book will hopefully enlighten Americans as to who really holds the power within the federal bureaucracy. It's not political appointees - it's the unelected staffers who populate the buildings up and down Pennsylvania Avenue and show up to work just enough to earn their step increases in the GS pay scale. The rest of the time, well - Mr. Timmerman discusses how partisan staff members within the CIA and State Department waged a war of their own on the Administration to discredit it in the public's eye. For those of you who loathe Bush over Iraq, you may have been had by one of the greatest disinformation campaigns of all time.

At least be open-minded and give this well-written book a chance. If you don't believe it, or want to believe, at worst you've got a gripping story in your hands as good as "Seven Days In May" or any of the better Clancy novels.

76 of 84 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars I began as a skeptic November 18, 2007

By Michael T Kennedy VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I am not one to take conspiracy theories seriously. I began this book as a skeptic. After about 100 pages, I was a believer. I have read a lot about Iraq and Afghanistan. I read Bob Baer's first book (See No Evil) and Gary Berntsen's book (Jawbreaker), both about Afghanistan. Bob Baer was there when Chalabi's planned revolt against Saddam was cancelled by Clinton NSC chief Anthony Lake. Timmerman's book agrees with other books on similar topics. His thesis is that the permanent bureaucracy is anti-Bush and has used its influence to thwart his policies at every chance. Some of us were puzzled about the fanatical pursuit of the alleged leaker of Valerie Plame's identity while Sandy Berger committed theft and violated multiple laws about secrecy and got a slap on the wrist. Timmerman explains that the two Justice Department staffers responsible are Clinton holdovers with an agenda.

This is not a new phenomenon. Ronald Reagan faced the same resistence within the bureaucracy to his initiatives. The difference is that Reagan was a better communicator and could go over the heads of his opponents to the people. Bush has lacked this ablity and has been strangely passive at times as his policies are reversed by mid-level bureaucrats. The story of the Iraq occupation is still incomplete. General Jay Garner had a good record as an administrator with the Kurds during the time we protected them from Saddam. When he entered Baghdad to take over the transition team, he seemed the perfect choice. A few months later, he was gone and I have yet to hear an adequate explanation of what happened. Timmerman may have the answer. The State Department thought the idea of Iraqi democracy was foolish and Paul Bremer arrived with a few CIA candidate dictators in his pocket.... The Iraqi National Congress that had been led by Ahmed Chalabi during the Clinton years, was summarily dismissed and Bremer began his role as Viceroy. The insurgency soon followed. Cause and effect ? I'm not sure but Timmerman makes a reasonable case it is.

I'm not sure this book is the last word but it should be on every reading list of those who want to know what happened. Read more ›

45 of 48 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Shortly and Simply November 21, 2007

By Julian Tepper

Format:Hardcover

I will keep this short and simple.

First, a disclaimer: I have reviewed a Timmerman book (Honor Killing), he has appeared many times on my radio talk show and he is a friend.

Now, as to Timmerman and Shadow Warriors:

Timmerman, I have found, knows more and has more and better sources than just about anyone in certain areas that include how our government really works, especially our foreign policy, and how Iran really works.

Buy and read Shadow Warriors. You will learn how what has happened in our country over the recent years came about. You will be astounded while you are being educated. You will gain an insight on how your news sources really don't work for you.

Finally, buy everything Timmerman writes or has written, and subscribe to his internet reporting. If you do these things, you will, if you take the time, thank me for putting you onto this track, and you will, more importantly, feel profound gratitude toward Kenneth Timmerman.

This is all the truth, and nothing but.

Julian Tepper

87 of 99 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Betrayal of our CIA "Elites" November 8, 2007

By David Thomson

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Kenneth Timmerman is one of our era's greatest journalists. Radio talk show host Michael Medved warned that his new Shadow Warriors may get one's blood boiling. He was not even slightly exaggerating. This somewhat frightening book goes into great detail to reveal the betrayal of "elites" who attended our so-called best universities. They are snobs who believe they have the self appointed right to defy our democratic institutions if these entities fail to perform to their expectations. Most are members of the Democratic Party and a small handful are left-wing Republicans. The author cites former Senator Zell Miller's warning "that the CIA was becoming a `domestic dirty tricks shop' that allowed its own operatives to conduct a covert operation `to destabilize a U.S. president.'" This leftist cabal of CIA officers is literally endangering our lives with their traitorous behavior. These saboteurs must be stopped.

One should also not ignore the not so subtle anti-Semitism of these CIA traitors. Timmerman exposes the stabbing in the back of Larry Franklin. When everything is said and done, these scoundrels believe that Israel is the central reason behind the rage of the Islamic nihilists. They haven't the foggiest notion of what truly motivates our deadly foes. The scholarly writings of Bernard Lewis (ie. What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East), sadly, are not held in high esteem within their cultural milieu. Shadows Warriors is a book you must read as quickly as possible. The time is getting late. The damage already done has been extensive. We cannot allow it to continue.