Dec. 7, 2004
New York Times
WASHINGTON - A classified cable sent by the CIA's station chief in Baghdad has warned that the situation in Iraq is deteriorating and may not rebound any time soon, according to government officials.
The cable, sent late last month as the officer ended a yearlong tour, presented a bleak assessment on matters of politics, economics and security, the officials said. They said its basic conclusions had been echoed in briefings presented by a senior CIA official who recently visited Iraq.
The officials described the two assessments as having been "mixed," saying that they did describe Iraq as having made important progress, particularly in terms of its political process, and credited Iraqis with being resilient.
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But overall, the officials described the station chief's cable in particular as an unvarnished assessment of the difficulties ahead in Iraq. They said it warned that the security situation is likely to get worse, bringing more violence and sectarian clashes, unless there are marked improvements soon in the ability of the Iraqi government to assert authority and build the economy.
Together, the appraisals, which follow several other such warnings from officials in Washington and in the field, were much more pessimistic than the public picture being offered by the Bush administration before the elections scheduled for Iraq next month, the officials said. The cable was sent to CIA headquarters after U.S. forces completed what military commanders have described as a significant victory, with the mid-November retaking of Fallujah, a principal base of the Iraqi insurgency.
The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, was said by the officials to have filed a written dissent, objecting to one finding as too harsh, on the ground that the United States had made more progress than was described in fighting the Iraqi insurgency. But the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey Jr., also reviewed the cable and did not dispute its conclusions, the officials said.
The station chief's cable has been widely disseminated outside the CIA and was initially described by a government official who read the document and who praised it as unusually candid. Other government officials who have read or been briefed on the document later described its contents. The officials refused to be identified by name or affiliation because of the delicacy of the issue. The station chief cannot be publicly identified because he continues to work undercover.
Asked about the cable, a White House spokesman, Sean McCormack, said he could not discuss intelligence matters
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