CIA Tells Why U.S. Let Hussein Stay in Power

CIA Director Robert M. Gates has provided a new, detailed account of one of the most historically significant and controversial actions of the Bush Administration: the decision to leave Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in power at the end of the Persian Gulf War.

In an interview with The Times this week as he prepares to leave office, Gates--deputy national security adviser at the White House before and during the war against Iraq--acknowledged that Administration officials talked extensively about the possibility of making the capture of Hussein one of America’s war aims.

In the end, Gates said, Administration officials rejected the idea, largely because they feared that the Iraqi leader would go into hiding, as Panamanian strongman Manuel A. Noriega had done during the 1989 U.S. military intervention in Panama, and that U.S. troops would be unable to find him.

In the nearly two years since the end of hostilities in Operation Desert Storm, President Bush, who once branded Hussein as “worse than Hitler,” has had to live with some of the unhappy consequences--politically and for American foreign policy--of Hussein’s continued hold on power.

During last year’s presidential campaign, President-elect Bill Clinton and Ross Perot cited Hussein’s continuing presence in Baghdad to diminish the luster of Bush’s victory in the Gulf War.

Even now, in the final days of his presidency, Bush finds himself grappling with some of the continuing challenges and gestures of defiance by the Iraqi leader, whose forces now are challenging American planes in the “no-fly zone” over southern Iraq.

At the time of the war, Gates said, most top-level U.S. officials involved in discussions about Hussein remembered the frustration in Panama.

“You were dealing with some people (Administration officials) who had some experience in trying to find the leader of a country where the U.S. military had taken action, in Panama,” Gates said. “And I don’t know how long it would have been before we found Noriega, if he hadn’t turned himself in to the Papal Legate.”

After the invasion of Panama on Dec. 20, 1989, Noriega vanished, prompting American officials to offer a $1-million reward for information leading to his capture. Four days later, Noriega sought asylum in the Vatican Embassy in Panama City, and after another 10 days, he surrendered to U.S. authorities.

“We were all a little shaped by that experience, and Iraq’s a hell of a lot bigger country than Panama and we knew a lot less about it than we did Panama,” said Gates. “I think there was a general feeling that it would not be difficult for Saddam to flee Baghdad and it would be very difficult for us to try and find him. So you’d end up potentially occupying much of Iraq and then having to deal with the consequences of that.”

In the past, American military leaders such as Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the Gulf War commander, have said it would have been difficult for U.S. troops to catch Hussein, if he had fled Baghdad and gone into hiding. But those difficulties have not been cited as a critical element in the decision not to pursue the Iraqi leader.

Instead, the official explanations have focused largely on three other factors:

* That American troops would take more casualties in an extended drive on Baghdad.

* The Bush Administration’s mistaken belief that Hussein would soon be overthrown in a postwar coup.

* That the U.N. coalition support for the Gulf War had been put together strictly to reverse the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, not for installing a new Iraqi government.

Gates maintained in the interview that “there was always uncertainty” in the Bush Administration as to whether Iraqi military officials and other leaders would overthrow Hussein after the war. And he said that American uncertainty about losing the support of the international coalition against Hussein was “less of a factor” in deciding to leave Hussein in power than “our own internal deliberations about what our war aims should be.”

Hussein’s ultimate fate was a major issue in the Deputies’ Committee, a group of sub-Cabinet officials who meet regularly to iron out foreign-policy disputes among the State Department, the Pentagon and other agencies, Gates said.

Gates often ran the meetings before and during the Gulf War and was among the eight top U.S. officials, including Bush, who made the key decisions during this period.

The possibility of capturing Hussein or overthrowing his government “was discussed at length by the Deputies’ Committee and by all of us during the period leading up to the war,” Gates said. “We specifically decided not to make it a war aim so that we would not set ourselves objectives that we were not confident we could accomplish.”

A few months after the Gulf War ended, Bush appointed Gates to replace William H. Webster as CIA director, touching off a long, bruising confirmation battle. Gates survived--but because of Bush’s election defeat, he will have had little more than a year at the helm of the CIA when he steps down and gives way to Clinton’s appointee, R. James Woolsey.

“I think it certainly was worth it,” Gates said of his short tenure as CIA director. He said he believes he succeeded in launching the CIA on much-needed reforms, shifting its focus from the Soviet Union, reorganizing the intelligence agencies to make them more cost-effective and opening the way for quicker declassification of CIA documents.

His only disappointment was the congressional decision last year to cut back sharply on the budget for the U.S. intelligence community, he said. Gates has been denouncing the cutbacks in speeches around the country and is advising Woolsey and the new Clinton team to go slow.

Gates, 49, began working as a low-level analyst in 1966 and has served in a series of government jobs at the CIA and the National Security Council in Washington ever since.

What will he do after leaving CIA? “The first thing I’m going to do is, as my kids would put it, get a life,” he quipped. Gates plans to spend the next year or so writing, giving speeches and consulting, then hopes to move to the Puget Sound area, where wife Becky’s family lives.

“I don’t see government again in my future,” Gates said.