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It is not known why the President would reject one program to intervene in the election and initiate another, more covert one. According to Pentagon consultants and former senior intelligence officials, there was a growing realization within the White House that most Sunnis would indeed boycott the election. Getting accurate polls in a country under occupation, with an active insurgency, was, of course, difficult. But the available polls showed Allawi's ratings at around three or four per cent through most of 2004, and also showed the pro-Iranian Shiite slate at more than fifty per cent. The Administration had optimistically assumed that the political and security situation would improve, despite warnings from the intelligence community that it would not.
A former senior intelligence official told me, "The election clock was running down, and people were panicking. The polls showed that the Shiites were going to run off with the store. The Administration had to do something. How?"
By then, the men in charge of the C.I.A. were "dying to help out, and make sure the election went the right way," the recently retired C.I.A. official recalled. It was known inside the intelligence community, he added, that the Iranians and others were providing under-the-table assistance to various factions. The concern, he said, was that "the bad guys would win."
Under federal law, a finding must be submitted to the House and Senate intelligence committees or, in exceptional cases, only to the intelligence committee chairs and ranking members and the Republican and Democratic leaders of Congress. At least one Democrat, Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader, strongly protested any interference in the Iraqi election. (An account of the dispute was published in Time last October.) The recently retired C.I.A. official recounted angrily, "She threatened to blow the whole thing up in the press by going public. The White House folded to Pelosi." And, for a time, "she brought it to a halt." Pelosi would not confirm or deny this account, except, in an e-mail from her spokesman, to "vigorously" deny that she had threatened to go public. She added, "I have never threatened to make any classified information public. That's against the law." (The White House did not respond to requests for comment.)
The essence of Pelosi's objection, the recently retired high-level C.I.A. official said, was: "Did we have eleven hundred Americans die" -- the number of U.S. combat deaths as of last September -- "so they could have a rigged election?"
Sometime after last November's Presidential election, I was told by past and present intelligence and military officials, the Bush Administration decided to override Pelosi's objections and covertly intervene in the Iraqi election. A former national-security official told me that he had learned of the effort from "people who worked the beat" -- those involved in the operation. It was necessary, he added, "because they couldn't afford to have a disaster."
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