How the U.S. Government Operated on ‘The Dark Side’ After 9/11

In the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney offered the American public a glimpse into how the George W. Bush administration would respond.

The U.S. government, he warned, would have to operate on the “dark side.”

“A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies,” Cheney said on NBC’s Meet the Press at the time.

What took place inside the administration in the following days, months and years — and the implications for the U.S. and across the Middle East — unfolds in The Dark Side, a seminal 2005 FRONTLINE documentary that is now available to stream on YouTube for the first time.

From veteran FRONTLINE filmmaker Michael Kirk and his team, the documentary chronicled Cheney’s role as the chief architect of what would come to be called the “war on terror,” and his battle with George Tenet, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, for control of the “dark side.”

“I think the vice president felt he kind of looked death in the eye on 9/11,” Richard Clarke, a former member of the White House National Security Council, told FRONTLINE in the documentary. “Three thousand Americans died. The building that the vice president used to work in blew up, and people died there. This was a cold slap in the face. This is a different world you’re living in now. And the enemy’s still out there, and the enemy could come after you. That does cause you to think things differently.”

In the initial stages of the “war on terror,” Tenet’s CIA was rising to prominence as the lead agency in the Afghanistan war. Tenet was focused on non-state actors, like Al Qaeda. But Cheney and his primary ally, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, pushed to bring the war to Iraq, viewing the country as an important part of a broader plan to remake the Middle East and project American power worldwide.

When Tenet insisted in his personal meetings with President Bush that there was no connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq, Cheney and Rumsfeld initiated a secret program to re-examine the evidence and marginalize the CIA and Tenet, The Dark Side reported.

Through interviews with Defense Department staffers who sifted through mountains of raw intelligence, FRONTLINE detailed how questionable intelligence was “stovepiped” to the vice president and presented to the public. From stories of Iraq buying yellowcake uranium from Niger, to claims that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met with an Iraqi agent in Prague, the assertions that led the U.S. to war were dissected in The Dark Side.

The program also recounted the vice president’s unprecedented visits to the CIA, where he questioned mid-level analysts on their conclusions. CIA officers who were there at the time said the message was clear: Cheney wanted evidence that Iraq was a threat.

And ultimately, the documentary reported, Tenet backed a now-infamous national intelligence estimate that summarized evidence of an Iraqi weapons of mass destruction program.

One of the estimate’s principal authors, Paul Pillar, admitted to FRONTLINE that it was written quickly in a highly politicized environment, one in which the decision to go to war had already been made.

Weapons of mass destruction were never found in Iraq.

Watch the Full Documentary | The Dark Side