White House spied on Iraq leaders, says Bob Woodward book

By Haroon Siddique  | The Bush administration has spied on the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, and other senior figures in his government, the Washington Post reported today.

The claim is one of many in a new book by the paper’s associate editor Bob Woodward, who with Carl Bernstein uncovered the Watergate scandal that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation.

The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008 is based on more than 150 interviews with key figures in the Iraq war as well two interviews with the president himself. The books paints a picture of Bush often at loggerheads with his military advisers and other officials.

Woodward says groundbreaking surveillance techniques – and not the much-trumpeted surge by 30,000 additional troops – were the main reason for the reduction in violence in Iraq over the past 16 months.

In 2006, Bush maintained publicly that US forces were winning, while privately believing the strategy of training Iraq security forces and transferring responsibility to the new government was failing, according to the Post.

Woodward says the president lost confidence in General George Casey, then the commander of coalition forces in Iraq, and General John Abizaid, who was the head of US central command.

In October 2006 Bush asked his national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, to carry out a review of the Iraq war. But the report ignored the military and was kept secret for fear of jeopardising the Republican party’s popularity in the mid-term congressional elections, the book says.

The Pentagon reluctantly agreed to a troop surge of two brigades, but the White House decided on five. Asked how this decision was reached, Bush told Woodward: “Okay, I don’t know this. I’m not in these meetings, you’ll be happy to hear, because I got other things to do.”

Woodward says Casey described the 2007 surge as a “troop sump”. Abizaid and the then defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, also opposed the scale of the operation, and the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, had reservations.

Casey told a colleague that Bush reflected the “radical wing of the Republican party that kept saying, ‘Kill the bastards! Kill the bastards! And you’ll succeed’”, writes Woodward.

The book says joint chiefs of staff were in near revolt in late 2006, with Admiral Michael Mullen, then serving as chief of naval operations, fearing the military would “take the fall” for failure in Iraq.

Woodward does credit the influx of troops with contributing to the fall in violence. But he cites as important factors the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s reining-in of his powerful Mahdi army, the so-called Anbar Awakening – in which Sunni fighters allied with US forces to fight against al-Qaida – and covert operations targeting key individuals in extremist groups.

While Bush developed a close relationship with Maliki, US officials feared the impact the surveillance of the prime minister would have, according to Woodward. “We know everything he says,” a source told Woodward.

The book is Woodward’s fourth on the Bush administration and its actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.