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The Office of Special Plans (OSP) was a short-lived outfit in the Pentagon's Policy office that provided the White House with inaccurate, skewed intelligence linking Iraq and al-Qaida that was used to justify the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. In 2007, an investigation conducted by the Inspector General of the Department of Defense concluded about the OSP: "We believe the [OSP's] actions were inappropriate because a policy office was producing intelligence products and was not clearly conveying to senior decision-makers the variance with the consensus of the Intelligence Community" (see "Review of Pre-Iraqi War Activities of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy"). The report on the investigation also characterized the work of the OSP, which was under Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith's purview, as "inappropriate conduct of intelligence activities outside of intelligence channels." Feith called this conclusion "bizarre" (AP, February 8, 2007).

The day after the 9/11 attacks, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz authorized the creation of an informal team focused on ferreting out damaging intelligence about Iraq. This loosely organized team soon became the OSP, directed by Abram Shulsky, formerly of RAND and the National Strategy Information Center, and overseen by Undersecretary of Defense William Luti.

According to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, OSP "was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to al-Qaida, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States" (New Yorker, May 13, 2003). Based on his interviews with former and current intelligence officials, Hersh concluded that the OSP "rivaled both the CIA and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA, as President Bush's main source of intelligence."

To bolster the justification for war against Iraq, the administration needed intelligence that would persuade the U.S. public and policymakers that Saddam Hussein's regime should be one of the first targets of the war on terrorism. Convinced that the CIA, DIA, and the State Department would not provide them with threat assessments necessary to justify a preventive war, Wolfowitz and Feith created their own tightly controlled intelligence operation at the top levels of the Pentagon bureaucracy.

A stream of consultants and collaborators flowed in and out of the OSP, bypassing normal intelligence procedures and protocol. Operating independently of the established intelligence apparatus, OSP dispensed with the normal guidelines for vetting information. Instead, in the rush to make the case for preventive war, the OSP routinely "stovepiped" its strategic intelligence directly to the top administration officials, who then took this unfiltered information straight to the president. As Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq and author of The Threatening Storm, told Seymour Hersh: "What the Bush people did was 'dismantle the existing filtering process that for 50 years had been preventing the policy makers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership'" (Hersh, New Yorker, October 27, 2003).

The result was that faulty intelligence became the foundation for the Bush administration's flawed arguments for war. The most obvious evidence of this was the total lack of WMD found in Iraq. Perhaps a more hyped inaccuracy, however, was President George W. Bush's assertion in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger.

Another serious ramification of the OSP was the disastrous post-war planning (or lack of planning) the intel led to: "According to current and former U.S. intelligence analysts and government officials, the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans funneled information, unchallenged, from Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC) to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who in turn passed it on to the White House, suggesting that Iraqis would welcome the American invaders" (Nation, July 2003).

Reported the Nation: "'The same unit [the Office of Special Plans] that fed Chalabi's intelligence on WMD to Rumsfeld was also feeding him Chalabi's stuff on the prospects for postwar Iraq,' said a leading U.S. government expert on the Middle East. Says a former U.S. ambassador with strong links to the CIA: 'There was certainly information coming from the Iraqi exile community, including Chalabi—who was detested by the CIA and by the State Department—saying, "They will welcome you with open arms." Rumsfeld's willingness to accept that view led him to contradict the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, who predicted that it would take hundreds of thousands of troops to control Iraq after the fall of Baghdad, a view that seems prescient today.'"

Douglas Feith, a vocal proponent of attacking Iraq even before the election of President Bush and the 9/11 attacks, oversaw this "strategic intelligence" initiative. As the Pentagon's top policy official in Middle East affairs, Feith had oversight authority of the DOD's Near East and South Asia bureau (NESA). That office came under the direct supervision of Luti, a retired Navy officer who is a Newt Gingrich protégé and who had long advocated a U.S. military invasion of Iraq. OSP was the embodiment of the right's notion of "strategic intelligence"—intelligence analysis that was policy-driven, flexible, and decentralized rather than being overly constrained by verifiable data. Starting from neoconservative assumptions about the "intentions" of the Iraqi regime, the OSP fashioned intelligence about Iraq's capabilities to support a preventive war. With Shulsky, a Straussian political philosopher, as their director, the OSP staff took to calling themselves the "Cabal" (Hersh, New Yorker, May 12, 2003).

This cabal did not operate in complete isolation from other government agencies. However, it worked almost exclusively with like-minded neoconservative political appointees in the National Security Council, the State Department, and the office of the vice president. NESA and its subproject OSP maintained close relations with the Defense Policy Board (DPB), whose members were picked by Feith and approved by Rumsfeld. Initially chaired by Richard Perle of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the DPB was a nest of neoconservatives and other hardliners, including Eliot Cohen, Gingrich, David Jeremiah, Kenneth Adelman, and James Woolsey. Perle, who stepped down as DPB chairman after reports of potential conflicts of interest emerged regarding his business dealings (but remained on the board for some time), had served as Feith's mentor during the Reagan administration.

Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a former desk officer at NESA, revealed much about the workings of the OSP in a 2004 Salon.com article: "From May 2002 until February 2003, I observed firsthand the formation of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and watched the latter stages of the neoconservative capture of the policy-intelligence nexus in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. ... I saw a narrow and deeply flawed policy favored by some executive appointees in the Pentagon used to manipulate and pressurize the traditional relationship between policymakers in the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies.

"I witnessed neoconservative agenda bearers within OSP usurp measured and carefully considered assessments, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the president.

"While this commandeering of a narrow segment of both intelligence production and American foreign policy matched closely with the well-published desires of the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party, many of us in the Pentagon, conservatives and liberals alike, felt that this agenda, whatever its flaws or merits, had never been openly presented to the American people. Instead, the public story line was a fear-peddling and confusing set of messages, designed to take Congress and the country into a war of executive choice, a war based on false pretenses, and a war one year later Americans do not really understand. ...

"After August 2002, the Office of Special Plans established its own rhythm and cadence separate from the non-politically minded professionals covering the rest of the region. While often accused of creating intelligence, I saw only two apparent products of this office: war planning guidance for Rumsfeld, presumably impacting Central Command, and talking points on Iraq, WMD, and terrorism. These internal talking points seemed to be a mélange crafted from obvious past observation and intelligence bits and pieces of dubious origin. They were propagandistic in style, and all desk officers were ordered to use them verbatim in the preparation of any material prepared for higher-ups and people outside the Pentagon. ...

"I suspected, from reading Charles Krauthammer, a neoconservative columnist for the Washington Post, and the Weekly Standard, and hearing a [Dick] Cheney speech or two, that these talking points left the building on occasion. Both OSP functions duplicated other parts of the Pentagon. The facts we should have used to base our papers on were already being produced by the intelligence agencies, and the war planning was already done by the combatant command staff with some help from the Joint Staff. Instead of developing defense policy alternatives and advice, OSP was used to manufacture propaganda for internal and external use, and pseudo war planning" (Salon.com, March 10, 2004).

W. Patrick Lang, former DIA chief of Middle East intelligence, explained to Hersh in the lead-up to the invasion: "The Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government's foreign policy, and they've pulled it off. They're running Chalabi. The DIA has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there's no guts at all in the CIA" (New Yorker, May 12, 2003).

By late 2003 the OSP was closed down, having accomplished its mission of providing the strategic intelligence cited by the administration in the build-up to the Iraq invasion. OSP's staff and operations were folded back into the normal operations of the NESA and into its Office of Northern Gulf Affairs. However, in July 2003, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), then the ranking minority member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, spearheaded an inquiry into the OSP because "Senator Levin believes that the professional objectivity and independence required in the assessment of the Iraq-al-Qaida relationship were compromised to support the policy goal of removing Saddam Hussein" (Sen. Carl Levin, October 21, 2004). Levin's report "shows that in the case Iraq's relationship with al-Qaida, intelligence was exaggerated to support administration policy aims primarily by the Feith policy office [OSP], which was determined to find a strong connection between Iraq and al-Qaida, rather than by the IC [intelligence community], which was consistently dubious of such a connection" ("Report of an Inquiry into the Alternative Analysis," October 21, 2004).

In fall 2006, the OSP again emerged into public commentary when it became known that the Pentagon had created a new desk to focus on Iran policy, a so-called Iranian Directorate, which also was connected by some commentators to a counterpart office in the State Department called the Office of Iranian Affairs.

"To understand the Pentagon Iran desk and its ability to rile people here in Washington, you do have to go back a few years to the Office of Special Plans at its height," reported Mary Louise Kelly for National Public Radio. "It, too, was a small office—18 people at its largest—but many believe the OSP wielded disproportionate clout, and that it did so by shooting flawed intelligence from Iraqi exiles straight up to the White House, bypassing the CIA. The Pentagon has consistently denied that, but suspicions have persisted about a secret back channel of intelligence flowing from the Pentagon. Thus, the uneasiness that's greeted this Iran team—a new team, but with several familiar faces. One former CIA official with extensive experience in the Middle East says, they've taken the OSP and made them the Iran desk," (National Public Radio, September 20, 2006).