BASIC SPECIAL REPORT
BASIC Special Report 2004.1
· January 2004
Unravelling the Known Unknowns:
Why no Weapons of Mass Destruction have been found in Iraq
By David Isenberg and Ian Davis
Back to the Contents
Part II: The Ambiguities and Flaws in US and British Pre-War
Intelligence Analysis on Iraq's WMD Capability
... You act off intelligence. Intelligence doesn't
necessarily mean something is true. It's just -- it's intelligence.
You know, it's your best estimate of the situation. It doesn't mean
it's a fact.
General Richard Myers at a Department of Defense
Briefing on June 24, 2003.
Intelligence analysis has been described as an art as well as a
science. Formulation of judgments can be a delicate and complex
process, especially when it comes to science and technology issues.
Again, consider the comments of Dr. Inch:
I think you have to take the information in the dossier
very much with a pinch of salt. The intelligence behind the dossier
may be quite good, but I think that my interpretation of what is
written raises more questions than answers. In many general terms
that reflects some of the problems of making good technical
assessments of the bits and pieces of intelligence information that
comes your way. Sometimes the scientific community is in agreement
with the intelligence community; and sometimes the scientific
community disagrees strongly with the intelligence community's
assessments.
Perhaps I can give two historical examples as it is
important to understand this. In the early 1970s the US
intelligence community reported that there had been an accident in
Sverdlovsk in Russia and that there had been an accidental release
of anthrax from which many people had died. At that time in the US
the chief scientific adviser was not convinced by the intelligence
information; he did not think that it all held together. The signs
and the symptoms did not fit the intelligence report. After the
Iron Curtain came down that same person went to Sverdlovsk and was
able to make a thorough interpretation. The scientific community
had missed one or two important facts and the intelligence
community was absolutely right. The total picture that emerged
post-event was very convincing. That is one plus to the
intelligence community.
Rolling on to the early 1980s, the US intelligence
community claimed that a new form of toxic material - T2 toxin -
was being used in Laos in Cambodia which was subsequently dubbed
"yellow rain". The American intelligence community went public at
that time, and the information reached the Secretary of State and
the President of the United States who went public on that
information. Subsequently there was enormous pressure on our
intelligence community to support the arguments. In this country
our scientific community was never convinced; nothing really held
together; the materials in question were insufficiently toxic; and
there was a whole raft of other information that just did not fit.
Eventually it was proven to our satisfaction that yellow rain was
simply the droppings from flocks of bees.
That is a big negative for the US intelligence
community who, in my view, made in their interpretation a whole
range of fundamental errors in not carrying out the proper checks
and studies.71
However, there are numerous examples discussed above and below,
in which the intelligence collection process inexplicably ignored,
downplayed or exaggerated pre-war information on Iraq's WMD
capability. Indeed, such intelligence failings continued into the
post-war environment. Former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter, for
example, has noted that US forces failed to secure the records of
the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate, the Iraqi government
agency responsible for coordinating all aspects of the UN
inspection teams' missions. It was the repository for every Iraqi
government record relating to its weapons programs, as well as to
the activities at dozens of industrial sites in Iraq that were
"dual-use".71
US Pre-War Intelligence
The Washington Post reported in July 2003 that a review
of speeches and reports, plus interviews with present and former
administration officials and intelligence analysts, suggested that
between October 7, 2002, when President Bush made a speech laying
out the case for military action against Hussein, and January 28,
2003, when he gave his State of the Union address, almost all the
evidence had either been undercut or disproved by UN inspectors in
Iraq.73
Even David Kay, head of the ISG, charged with searching for
Iraq's proscribed weapons, has implicitly acknowledged the
ambiguities of intelligence when he presented his interim report to
the US Congress in October 2003. He said, "The result was that our
understanding of the status of Iraq's WMD program was always
bounded by large uncertainties and had to be heavily
caveated."74 And, though he tried to avoid saying it
outright, he did concede in an interview that pre-war intelligence
might have been completely off:
Jim Lehrer: But it doesn't surprise you that the... in
other words, you're saying get ready for the intelligence to be
proved wrong? In other words the pre-war intelligence may very well
have been wrong and don't be surprised if you finally conclude
that?
David Kay: Don't be surprised if there are differences
between what you thought before and what turns out to be reality.
Every war, the fall of the Soviet Union, the Second World War, has
always had surprises to intelligence. I would be surprised if this
one didn't show differences.75
But some of the technical analysis provided by the intelligence
agencies was simply wrong. For example, President Bush suggested in
February 2003 that the NIE said that Iraq could launch drones with
germ weapons from ships at sea and use them to attack the US. While
much of the American intelligence community supported that
assessment, there was one notable exception: the intelligence arm
of the US Air Force, which has a real claim to expertise in this
area as the Air Force has experience in designing and operating
advanced drones, also called unmanned aerial vehicles.
The Air Force was never convinced that Baghdad had developed
drones capable of effectively distributing chemical and biological
weapons as the White House claimed. But the Air Force dissent,
attached to a classified report in October 2002 on the Iraqi
threat, was kept secret even as the President publicly made the
opposite case in the fall before a congressional vote on the war
resolution.
"The Director, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance,
U.S. Air Force, does not agree that Iraq is developing U.A.V.'s
primarily intended to be delivery platforms for chemical and
biological warfare (C.B.W.) agents," the declassified version of
the estimate notes. "The small size of Iraq's new U.A.V. strongly
suggests a primary role for reconnaissance, although C.B.W.
delivery is an inherent capability."76
The NIE was flawed in other respects as well. Not only did it
exaggerate Iraq's nuclear program (as described earlier), but it
concluded that Iraq was still producing such deadly chemical agents
as mustard, sarin and VX and had hundreds of tons of chemical
weapons stockpiled.
In fact it appears that the NIE was rushed into production only
after requests from Democratic senators who were being asked to
give President Bush authorization to go to war." The NIE was
hastily done in three weeks," one senior intelligence expert said.
"It was a cut-and-paste job, with agencies and officials given only
one day to review the draft final product when they usually take
months. . . . Today they still disagree on the meaning of what came
out."77
In retrospect, a careful reading of the NIE shows that its key
judgments were inconclusive. In the section entitled Confidence
Levels for Selected Key Judgments in this Estimate, three
judgments are listed for which the NIE claims to have the lowest
confidence, i.e., when Saddam would use WMD; whether Saddam would
clandestinely attack the US mainland; and whether Saddam might
share WMD with Al-Qaeda.
We note that all three judgments concern plans and
intentions, two subjects on which only human spies can
effectively report. And, by the time the NIE was prepared, Saddam
Hussein's regime had successfully killed off almost all of the
human intelligence (HUMINT) assets that the US and other
intelligence services had in Iraq.78
Furthermore, neither the released portions of the NIE nor the
full report substantiate the administration's view that Iraq
represented an immediate threat to the US or the region. It
contained no photographs of weapons sites, no substantiation of
many allegations, no "proof" that would be of use to inspectors or
targeters.70 Why was the NIE so inaccurate, and so
selectively quoted by the Bush administration?
Jay Taylor, former State Department director of analysis for
East Asia and the Pacific, and later Deputy Assistant Secretary of
State for intelligence and Research under President Ronald Reagan,
wrote:
George Tenet, the current director of central
intelligence, came into office in 1997 giving high priority to
maintaining the integrity of the CIA. But over the past year, it
appears that he has not served Congress and the American people
well on the question of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and
alleged Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda. He seems to have engaged in over-
and under-statement; highly selective release of facts and
assessments, including the clever use of "key judgments" and
executive summaries; failure to correct exaggerated statements by
the president and others; and failure to stop a maverick Pentagon
operation producing intelligence as art.
It may not have been necessary to pressure individual
analysts to distort public and congressional perceptions of what
the administration knew and did not know. Analysts, like their
chiefs, are human and to varying degrees are inclined to go along
if the spin on the top of a report is done subtly. Nevertheless,
during the build-up to the war, a number of CIA and Defense
Intelligence Agency analysts risked their jobs by complaining to
journalists about misperceptions that the administration was
creating on major issues regarding Iraq. Throughout this period,
the CIA director probably - and this is a subjective judgment -
understood that the evidence of the Iraqi threat overall was
flimsy, but he went along with this exercise or at least did
nothing to stem the tide of
misrepresentations.80
It is also worth noting that by the end of May 2003 three
complaints had been filed with the CIA ombudsman about the
administration's possible politicization of intelligence on
Iraq.81
For example, in June 2003, the Washington Post reported
that Vice President Cheney and his most senior aide, Chief of Staff
I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, had made multiple visits to the CIA over
the past year to question analysts studying Iraq's weapons programs
and alleged links to Al Qaeda, creating an environment in which
some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their
assessments fit with the Bush administration's policy
objectives.82 Cheney's defenders insist that his visits
merely showed the importance of the issue and that an honest
analyst wouldn't feel pressure to twist
intelligence.83
However, Christian Westermann, an analyst in the State
Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and a top State
Department expert on chemical and biological weapons, told
Congressional committees in closed-door hearings that he had been
pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform
to the Bush administration's views.84 Although
manipulation of intelligence is hardly a new
phenomenon,85 an article in Newsweek sets out
damning case against Cheney:
...it appears that Cheney has been susceptible to
"cherry-picking," embracing those snippets of intelligence that
support his dark prognosis while discarding others that don't. He
is widely regarded in the intelligence community as an outlier, as
a man who always goes for the worst-case scenario and sometimes
overlooks less alarming or at least ambiguous
signs.86
In fairness it should be noted that the misuse of intelligence
does not fall solely within the realm of the executive branch.
There were accomplices in the legislative branch who chose to look
the other way and not ask tough questions. Writing in the New
York Review of Books, Thomas Powers, a veteran journalist and
author who has followed the intelligence community for decades,
wrote:
...for the bigger part I blame the insistence of the
President that Iraq threatened America, the willingness of the CIA
to create a strong case for war out of weak evidence, and the
readiness of Congress to ignore its own doubts and go
along.
Their faith in the case for war confirms that something
has been going on deep in the American psyche since the beginning
of the cold war, a progressive withering of the sceptical faculty
when "secret intelligence" is called in to buttress a president's
case for whatever he wants. The vote for war on Iraq was not
unprecedented; forty years ago Congress voted for war in Vietnam in
the Tonkin Gulf resolution, too timid to insist on time to weigh
reports of an attack on American ships at sea - reports that were
either plain wrong or misleading. Again and again throughout the
cold war Congress voted billions for new weapons systems to meet
hypothetical, exaggerated, or even imaginary threats - routinely
backed up by evidence too secret to reveal.
Years of talk about sources and methods, spies and
defectors, classified documents and code-word clearances, spy
satellites and intercepted communications, have generated a
mystique of secret intelligence that chills doubt and freezes
debate. The result is a tiptoeing deference which treats classified
information as not only requiring special handling, but deserving
special respect. "As always," George Tenet told the Senate
Intelligence Committee during the war resolution debate last fall,
"our declassification efforts seek a balance between your need for
unfettered debate and our need to protect sources and methods." The
committee might have balked and asked for a closer look, but did
not. When Congress voted last October it seemed to have lost some
fundamental equilibrium - as if caution itself were aid to an
enemy. A Congress so easily manipulated has in effect surrendered
its role, allowing presidents to do as they
will.87
That being said, the Bush administration clearly ignored
evidence that conflicted with its view that Iraq had NBC weaponry.
One tactic was to bypass the government's customary procedures for
vetting intelligence. In an article in The New Yorker,
Seymour Hersh described how this was done:
A retired C.I.A. officer described for me some of the
questions that would normally arise in vetting: "Does dramatic
information turned up by an overseas spy square with his access, or
does it exceed his plausible reach? How does the agent behave? Is
he on time for meetings?" The vetting process is especially
important when one is dealing with foreign-agent reports -
sensitive intelligence that can trigger profound policy
decisions.
In theory, no request for action should be taken
directly to higher authorities - a process known as "stovepiping" -
without the information on which it is based having been subjected
to rigorous scrutiny.
The point is not that the President and his senior
aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more
systematic - and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack,
a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book "The
Threatening Storm" generally supported the use of force to remove
Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was
"dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had
been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They
created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to
the top leadership. Their position is that the professional
bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information
from them. "They always had information to back up their public
claims, but it was often very bad information," Pollack continued.
"They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good
information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence
analysts didn't have the time or the energy to go after the bad
information."
The Administration eventually got its way, a former
C.I.A. official said. "The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down
defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet" - the
C.I.A. director - "for not protecting them. I've never seen a
government like this."88
Another article by Hersh described how the Pentagon set up an
"Office of Special Plans (OSP)," conceived by Paul Wolfowitz,
Deputy Secretary of Defense. The purpose of the OSP was to find
evidence of what Wolfowitz and Secretary Rumsfeld believed true -
that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda and that Iraq had an
arsenal of chemical and biological, and possibly even nuclear
weapons.89
Vince Cannistraro, former CIA chief of counter-terrorism, said
of the OSP: "The politicisation of intelligence is pandemic, and
deliberate disinformation is being promoted. They choose the
worst-case scenario on everything and so much of the information is
fallacious."90
Actually, the OSP was not the only Pentagon unit set up to
contradict official intelligence estimates. As recently reported by
Mother Jones magazine, a separate, unnamed Pentagon
intelligence unit operated out of the office of Douglas J. Feith,
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and a former aide to Richard
Perle at the Pentagon in the 1980s. Just after September 11, 2001,
Feith recruited David Wurmser, the director of Middle East studies
for American Enterprise Institute (AEI), to serve as a Pentagon
consultant and founding participant of the unnamed, secret
intelligence unit.91
The purpose of the unit was to scour reports from the CIA, the
Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and
other agencies to find nuggets of information linking Iraq, Al
Qaeda, terrorism, and the existence of Iraqi WMD.92
The House Intelligence Committee has initiated an inquiry into the performance
of US intelligence analysis in Iraq. On June 25, 2003, during the
House debate on the intelligence authorization bill, Representative
Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the committee, delivered an
informal progress report on the inquiry:
On Bush's prewar assertions about Iraq's weapons of
mass destruction: "When discussing Iraq's WMD, administration
officials rarely included the caveats and qualifiers attached to
the intelligence committee's judgments. For many Americans, the
administration's certainty gave the impression that there was even
stronger intelligence about Iraq's possession of and intention to
use WMD."
On the evidence upon which the WMD assertions were
based: "The committee is now investigating whether the
intelligence case on Iraq's WMD was based on circumstantial
evidence rather than hard facts and whether the intelligence
community made clear to the policy-makers and Congress that most of
its analytic judgments were based on things like aerial photographs
and Iraqi defector interviews, not hard facts."
On the supposed Hussein-Al Qaeda connection:
"[T]he investigation suggests that the intelligence linking Al
Qaeda to Iraq, a prominent theme in the administration's statements
prior to the war, [was] contrary to what was claimed by the
administration."93
The Senate Select Intelligence Committee is due to present its
report in February this year. In the meantime, the CIA has
reassigned two senior officials who oversaw its analysis on Iraq's
alleged banned weapons, a move that one commentator portrayed as an
"exile." The two officials served in senior positions in which they
were deeply involved in assembling and assessing the intelligence
on Iraq's alleged stocks of chemical and biological arms. One of
the officials was reassigned to the CIA's personnel department
after spending the past several months heading the Iraq Task Force,
a special unit set up to provide 24-hour support to military
commanders during the war. The other, a longtime analyst who had
led the agency's Iraq Issue Group, was dispatched on an extended
mission to Iraq.94
On balance, therefore, Greg Thielmann, who served as director of
the office of Strategic, Proliferation, and Military Affairs in the
State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research until
September 2002, seems to have it about right when he says, "I
believe the Bush administration did not provide an accurate picture
to the American people of the military threat posed by Iraq. Some
of the fault lies with the performance of the intelligence
community, but most of it lies with the way senior officials
misused the information they were provided."95
British Pre-War Intelligence
Similar flaws can be found in the British intelligence
assessment process. For example, allegations persist that Downing
Street scrapped a dossier on Iraq drawn up by intelligence
officials because it failed to establish that Saddam Hussein posed
a growing threat. The six-page document was allegedly produced in
March 2002 by staff working for the joint intelligence committee
using material supplied by MI6 and the Ministry of Defence. It was
said to have been written six months before the release of the
government's controversial 50-page dossier, but was never
published.96
However, it is in relation to the dossier on Iraq released on
September 24, 2002, that most attention has focused.97
For example, the British government changed the title of the
dossier at the last minute, to portray a situation in Iraq that
some of its most senior experts did not accept as valid. As
Cambridge academic Glen Rangwala noted:
A member of the defence intelligence staff, who
identified himself as "probably the most senior and experienced
intelligence community official working on WMD", wrote just before
the dossier's release to Tony Cragg, then the deputy chief of
defence intelligence, to express formal reservations about the
dossier. According to Martin Howard, Mr. Cragg's successor, the
reservation was partly that "the language was too strong on the
continued production of chemical and biological
agents".
Neither the senior intelligence official nor Dr Kelly
accepted that Iraq had continued to produce prohibited weapons. The
ongoing production of weapons was a crucial element of the case for
a threat from Iraq, because most of its chemical or biological
agents produced before 1991 would have become useless.
Mr. Howard advised the Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon,
to acknowledge to the parliamentary Intelligence and Security
Committee, which meets behind closed doors and reports only to the
Prime Minister, that the intelligence official and one other member
of the defence intelligence staff had expressed
reservations.
But Mr. Howard told the inquiry that these individuals
had not seen "sensitive" new information, and so were not able to
appreciate the stronger new claim.
It is hard to see why the most senior defence
intelligence official on WMD would be denied access to information
on the subject. Nor did this explanation by Mr. Howard appear in
any of the correspondence between himself and the sceptical
official that was released by the inquiry.
The suspicion that the intelligence community focused
on Iraq's WMD potential rather than existing weapons is increased
by the changes to the text visible in the limited excerpts released
so far during the Hutton inquiry from earlier drafts of the
September dossier.
The draft of the dossier from 10 September, two weeks
before its release, concludes: "Intelligence confirms that Iraq has
covert chemical and biological weapons programmes, in breach of UN
Security Council Resolution 687." This is changed in the final
version of the dossier to: "Intelligence shows that Iraq has covert
chemical and biological weapons programmes, in breach of UN
Security Council Resolution 687 and has continued to produce
chemical and biological agents."
On the same page is the only allegation that Iraq
actually has such weapons: "Iraq has chemical and biological agents
and weapons available, either from pre-Gulf War stocks or more
recent production."
In the final version of the dossier, this is
strengthened to: "Iraq has chemical and biological agents and
weapons available, both from pre-Gulf War stocks and more recent
production."
Similarly, the claim that weapons could be used within
45 minutes was strengthened between the draft of the dossier dated
16 September and that published eight days later. The earlier
version raised a possibility: "The Iraqi military may be able to
deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order
to do so."
The version released to the public lost the element of
uncertainty: "Military planning allows for some of the WMD to be
ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them."
Even in the published version of the dossier, as BBC
correspondent Andrew Gilligan pointed out at the inquiry, the
description of Iraq's potential to produce chemical and biological
weapons is provided in detail, while the claim about continuing
production is merely asserted.
"The most immediate threat" from Iraq is identified as
"Iraqi former chemical and biological warfare facilities", while
"their limited reconstruction and civil production pointed to a
continuing research and development programme".
But the dossier goes on to claim that there is actual
production of warfare agents, a claim highlighted in the Prime
Minister's foreword and in his subsequent speech to the House of
Commons.98
Even though the British government has been cleared of the
charge of "sexing up the dossier" by a Parliamentary
committee,99 the more challenging Hutton inquiry may yet
reach a different conclusion. Public evidence to the inquiry has
already revealed a number of discrepancies in the role of the
intelligence agencies.
For example, when Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6,
officially known only as "C," emerged from secrecy to give
evidence, he insisted that the compilation of the September dossier
had been perfectly proper, but also revealed some damning
information. When asked whether the dossier had given undue
prominence to the 45 minutes claim, Dearlove replied:
Dearlove: Well, I think given the misinterpretation
that was placed on the 45 minutes intelligence, with the benefit of
hindsight you can say that is a valid criticism. But I am confident
that the intelligence was accurate and that the use made of it was
entirely consistent with the original report.
Lord Hutton: Would you just elaborate what you mean by
the misinterpretation placed on the 45 minutes claim?
Dearlove: Well, I think the original report referred to
chemical and biological munitions, and that was taken to refer to
battlefield weapons. I think what subsequently happened in the
reporting was that it was taken that the 45 minutes applied, let us
say, to weapons of a longer range.
This exchange surely validates Andrew Gilligan's claim that the
dossier had been "sexed up". Iraqi battlefield weapons with
chemical and biological warheads, even if they did exist, presented
no threat to the stability of the Middle East, still less to
Britain and the US.
Documentary evidence provided to the inquiry has also
demonstrated that senior figures inside Downing Street knew the
evidence about Iraqi WMD was weak. An e-mail sent to John Scarlett,
chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, from Jonathan Powell,
Blair's chief of staff, shortly before the dossier was published,
said, "The document does nothing to demonstrate a threat, let alone
an imminent threat, from Saddam. . . . We will need to make it
clear in launching the document that we do not claim that we have
evidence that he is an imminent threat." But this is exactly what
the final version of the dossier claimed.
As Clare Short, the international development secretary who
resigned from Blair's cabinet in May 2003, says, "...as a result of
the Hutton inquiry, we now know that two defence intelligence
officials wrote to their boss to put on record their disquiet at
the exaggeration in the dossier. Moreover, one official asked his
boss for advice as to whether he should approach the foreign
affairs select committee after the foreign secretary had said that
he was not aware of any unhappiness among intelligence officials
about the claims made in the dossier".100
Aside from the misuse of intelligence, it appears that the
British government also resorted to outright propaganda. In late
December 2003 the British government confirmed that the Secret
Intelligence Service, MI6, had run an operation to gain public
support for sanctions and the use of military force in Iraq. It had
organised Operation Mass Appeal, a campaign to plant stories in the
media about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass
destruction.101
And finally there is the case of the second "dodgy dossier"
published by Downing Street in February 2003. In its Annual Report
published on June 10, 2003, the Intelligence and Security Committee
(ISC) was heavily critical of the February dossier:
In September 2002 some intelligence was declassified
and used to produce a dossier on the Iraqi WMD programme. The
Agencies were fully consulted in the production of the dossier,
which was assembled by the Assessments Staff, endorsed by the JIC
and issued by the Prime Minister. The Committee supports the
responsible use of intelligence and material collected by the
Agencies to inform the public on matters such as
these.
We believe that material produced by the Agencies can
be used in publications and attributed appropriately, but it is
imperative that the Agencies are consulted before any of their
material is published. This process was not followed when a second
document was produced in February 2003. Although the document did
contain some intelligence derived material it was not clearly
attributed or highlighted amongst the other material, nor was it
checked with the Agency providing the intelligence or cleared by
the JIC prior to publication. We have been assured that systems
have now been put in place to ensure that this cannot happen again,
in that the JIC Chairman endorses any material on behalf of the
intelligence community prior to
publication.102
Downing Street has apologised for failing to admit that much of
the dossier came from published academic sources, including an
article by a California PhD student. But the question remains, who
authorised its release in this format, and why?
Iraqi defectors and other misleading
indigenous human intelligence
It also turns out that information from Iraqi defectors was, at
best, of dubious value. Officials in Washington have confirmed that
former Iraqi officials who had defected and were handed over to the
CIA by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the exile opposition
group, provided them with information on Iraq's WMD program, which
the Bush administration relied on to press its case for war.
According to one DIA agent. "The statements on WMD that the INC
guys brought in matched conclusions they [Bush cabinet members]
already had. We looked at the info and said:'You can't be serious,
you have got to be kidding'."104
Nonetheless, apparently senior administration officials relied
on defectors' information. Newsweek obtained a memo
suggesting that the INC in 2002 was directly feeding intelligence
reports about Iraqi weapons and purported ties to one of Vice
President Cheney's top foreign-policy aides. Cheney staffers later
pushed INC information, including defectors' claims, to bolster the
case that Iraq posed a direct threat to America.105
However, Ambassador Rolf Ekeus, the first executive chairman of
UNSCOM, has noted that defectors were frequently unreliable, and
their information was difficult, if not impossible, to verify
without utilizing "unappetizing methods."106 A case in
point concerns an interview in the December 7, 2003, Sunday
Telegraph of a man purporting to be an Iraqi colonel who said
he was the source of the UK Government's claim that Saddam Hussein
could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes and that
they had been deployed to the frontline.
It should be noted that this claim was first put forward by an
Iraqi exile group known for its close relationship with the CIA and
Britain's MI6.107
But such claims seem extremely unlikely. As a subsequent article
in The Independent pointed out,
...question-marks were gathering around the story, not
least over the man's claims that the Iraqi-made WMD warheads were
to be fired on the battlefield by hand-held rocket-propelled
grenade launchers, a weapon of very limited range.
The interviewee was identified only as Lt-Col
al-Dabbagh, 40, who was the "head of an Iraqi air defence unit in
the western desert". He was also interviewed by the American
network channel, NBC. The channel reported that the colonel said
Iraqi troops were under orders from Saddam to use "primitive
short-range biological and chemical warheads fired from
rocket-propelled grenade launchers, tactical weapons of mass
destruction transported at the dead of night and handled only by
Saddam's secret service." In the end, these orders were ignored
because they chose not to fight.
However, sections of the transcript of the NBC
interview that the network did not broadcast were aired on the ITV
News Channel, which has a partnership with NBC. In one, the colonel
was asked by NBC's Baghdad correspondent why he was so sure that
these were chemical or biological weapons. His reply suggests that
he was not, in fact, sure at all.
"We cannot determine exactly, but the procedures taken
show that these were indeed WMD," he said. "It might have been
chemical or biological but it was definitely unconventional
weapons."
In another section, broadcast by ITV, the colonel says:
"The instructions from Saddam were clear. When you get to a
critical point where the survival of the country is at stake then
you can use these weapons. All weapons starting from the common
knife all the way up to nuclear weapons can be used. That was the
instruction."
As it has long been known that Iraq's armed forces did
not possess nuclear weapons, this raises further doubts about the
unnamed "colonel's" credibility.108
Furthermore, even if one accepts the story, RPGs, even with CBW
warheads, hardly sound like the "WMD" which the world was warned
about before the invasion.
It should also be noted that the 45 minutes claim was used by
the US government as well. The claim was made twice by President
Bush, in a September 2002 Rose Garden appearance after meeting with
lawmakers and in a radio address the same week.109 On
those two occasions, Bush attributed the claim to the British
government, but in a "Global Message" issued on September 26, 2002,
and still on the White House Web site,110 the White
House claimed, without attribution, that Iraq "could launch a
biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given."
The White House did not seek CIA approval before making the
charge.111
Establishing spies within a regime as closed as Saddam's takes
time. And by late 2002 US intelligence had not managed to develop a
network that could find banned weapons or production facilities
that US officials were sure existed. While the CIA disclosed its
difficulties to congressional overseers, it did not make the
problem public before the war.112 Instead, information
appears to have been extracted from Iraqi exiles with very limited
current knowledge of, or access to state secrets. For example,
during his presentation to the UN on February 5, Secretary of State
Colin Powell disclosed that "an Iraqi chemical engineer" had
provided US intelligence with detailed information on a secret
Iraqi program to develop mobile biological weapons production
plants. But the engineer was not an active spy within the regime.
He provided information to US intelligence only after he had left
Iraq.113
More disturbingly, other intercepted intelligence appears to
have been manipulated to exaggerate the case against the Iraqi
regime. One such example was noted by a National Public Radio
reporter:
...Secretary Powell played a tape of an intercepted
conversation between two Republican Guard officers, and it appeared
from what he played, or from the translation that Secretary Powell
provided, that they were talking about the arrival of some weapons
inspectors, and Secretary Powell quoted them in this intercepted
tape as one officer saying, "They are inspecting the ammunition you
have, yes?" And the other officer says, "Yes, for the possibility
there are forbidden ammo." "For the possibility there is, by
chance, forbidden ammo." "Yes." "And we sent you a message
yesterday to clean out all the areas, the scrap areas, the
abandoned areas. Make sure there is nothing there." That's the part
that Secretary Powell read. Yet when the State Department finally
produced the actual transcript of this, it came out differently.
The last line was, "And we sent you a message to inspect the scrap
areas and the abandoned areas." Apparently he didn't actually say,
'Clean out the areas,' and there's no evidence he said 'Make sure
there is nothing there.114
After the fall of Baghdad, it was expected that captured Iraqi
scientists would lead coalition forces to hidden caches of
unconventional weapons. However, Iraqi scientists and technicians
who have been detained say that Iraq destroyed all of its banned
munitions years ago, and nothing more was produced. The scientists
have been threatened, coaxed, offered all kinds of incentives,
including safe haven outside Iraq for their families. Nothing
changes their stories.115
For example, Gen. Amir Saadi, the main Iraqi liaison to the UN
inspection teams, insisted after surrendering to US forces that
Iraq had destroyed all illicit weapons in the years after the 1991
Persian Gulf War. So did another senior scientist, Emad Ani, who
directed Iraqi's program to produce VX nerve gas in the
1980s.116
Finally, a three-month Time magazine investigation found
that:
Saddam's henchmen all make essentially the same claim:
that Iraq's once massive unconventional-weapons program was
destroyed or dismantled in the 1990s and never rebuilt; that
officials destroyed or never kept the documents that would prove
it; that the shell games Saddam played with U.N. inspectors were
designed to conceal his progress on conventional weapons
systems-missiles, air defenses, radar - not biological or chemical
programs; and that even Saddam, a sucker for a new gadget or
invention or toxin, may not have known what he actually had or,
more to the point, didn't have. It would be an irony almost too
much to bear to consider that he doomed his country to war because
he was intent on protecting weapons systems that didn't exist in
the first place.117
The intelligence and political discrepancies described above are
matters of great consequence, not only in retrospect regarding the
decision to go to war, but as regards the handling of current and
future proliferation crises, especially in Iran and North Korea.
Although the complete picture has yet to emerge, enough is now
known to present some partial conclusions and recommendations for
future US and UK non-proliferation policies and practices.
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