Secret weapon in US war against Iraq: the CIA

Still, the status of Hussein and his leadership is not known. Monday, a videotape was released showing Hussein. He mentioned ground troops - but in an opaque enough way that the tape could have been made prior to the attacks, based on leaked war plans, as intelligence officials have asserted. "In these decisive days, the enemy tried not using missiles and fighter jets as they did before," Hussein said. "This time, they sent their infantry troops. This time, they have come to invade and occupy your land."

Some experts - including Pentagon and senior government officials - say the government's efforts to separate the leadership from the rest of the military and government is going according to plan. They say that Iraqi military units are acting separately, and are not being issued direct orders from Baghdad.

Moreover, they say, US military leaders and intelligence operatives are in direct contact with both Iraqi generals and unit leaders about potential plans to surrender. "We are in contact with a number of Iraqi unit leaders as we speak," Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of the operation, said in a briefing Monday.

Nor have WMD been used or located, as of this writing. "We are continuing to look for weapons of mass destruction," Lt. Gen. John Abizaid, a deputy to General Franks, said on Sunday. "We have received reports from various prisoners that have given us leads. Suffice it to say that we continue to look.... We are confident that we will find it."

Small numbers of CIA paramilitary teams have reportedly been inside Iraq since June 2002. They are said to have broken into the highly secretive phone lines leading into Hussein's headquarters. Moreover, they've collected the e-mail addresses and personal phone numbers for Iraq's top military generals. And last Wednesday afternoon, two hours prior to Tenet's meeting at the White House, Special Forces teams were dropped into Iraq to join the CIA paramilitary teams already there.

This would repeat a pattern set in Afghanistan a year before. They would help fighter pilots with ground targets, search out and disable WMD, and secure the oil fields.

Shortly after Sept. 11, when the president pulled what became known as his "war council" together, the only one with a viable strategy for confronting Al Qaeda and the Taliban was Tenet, say two senior government officials.

The CIA already had assets on the ground, Tenet said, and he had a plan for removing Osama bin Laden's support network and disrupting Al Qaeda activity.

"When President George Bush decided to strip both Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda of their Afghan sanctuary - a decision that moved the war on terror to an entirely different level - the contribution of intelligence was very plain to see," according to a January speech by James Pavitt, the CIA's deputy director for operations. "The first American team on the ground out there was CIA - for a reason."

"As we saw in Afghanistan, there is a growing and unprecedented relationship between the CIA and Pentagon," says a senior White House official.

• Staff writer Linda Feldmann contributed to this report.

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