October 24, 2002: Rumsfeld Announces Existence of Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group

Concurrent with the New York Times’s revelation of the existence of the Office of Special Plans (OSP—see October 24, 2002), Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announces the existence of a similar operation, the Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group (CTEG—see Shortly After September 11, 2001). CTEG has been absorbed into the OSP by this point. The Washington Post will call CTEG “a small team of defense officials outside regular intelligence channels to focus on unearthing details about Iraqi ties with al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks.” The unveiling of CTEG coincides with Rumsfeld’s move to take over the financing and management of an outside project, the “Information Collection Project,” sponsored by the Iraqi National Congress and one of CTEG’s primary sources of information. Before now, the State Department had financed and overseen the INC project, and had grown increasingly reluctant to maintain what Defense Intelligence Agency official Patrick Lang later calls an “off the reservation” intelligence operation (see September 15, 2001). Rumsfeld tells reporters, “Any suggestion that [CTEG is] an intelligence-gathering activity or an intelligence unit of some sort, I think would be a misunderstanding of it.” Rumsfeld’s assertion is contradicted by former CIA case officer, enthusiastic neoconservative, and CTEG consultant Reuel Marc Gerecht, who describes the intelligence-gathering mission of CTEG: “The Pentagon is setting up the capability to assess information on Iraq in areas that in the past might have been the realm of the agency (CIA). They don’t think the product they receive from the agency is always what it should be.” [Middle East Policy Council, 6/2004]