By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 28 December 2019

In a long article last week, I looked at why the U.S. ran a formal occupation of Iraq for fourteen months after the fall of Saddam Husayn in April 2003, given that there had been an explicit pre-invasion decision not to have an occupation government. The short answer is that the occupation was installed through deception by the State Department, supported by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). State and CIA had argued for a protracted occupation in the Situation Room debates in 2002, but President George W. Bush had sided with the Pentagon, which advocated a rapid transfer of power to Iraqis. Having lost in the formal inter-agency process, the State Department succeeded by subversion in getting its way on the ground in Iraq. The disaster this caused in the mismanagement of post-Saddam Iraq was, as the article explained in detail, only the most serious impact of the toxic schism between State/CIA and the Pentagon, a factor whose import is difficult to overstate when examining how the Bush administration functioned. (This feud also at times drew in the Vice President’s Office, which tended to support the Pentagon.)

In the inter-agency process, the State Department often backed up its policy positions by citing CIA findings. As discussed last week, the CIA had woefully little penetration of Saddam’s Iraq, but to admit this would have undermined its bureaucratic weight, so the CIA pretended to know more than it did. Sometimes this involved the CIA wilfully slanting intelligence analysis—hiding reports from policymakers or arbitrarily disparaging reports included in finished products that went against preconceived ideas—to push for policy positions, which the CIA is not supposed to have as a matter of principle and in practice it is notable that the CIA’s policy preferences near-universally led to catastrophe. This was especially true on the occupation issue, probably the single biggest mistake the U.S. made in Iraq, where the guiding objective of State and CIA in advocating for an occupation was to exclude Ahmad Chalabi, one of the leaders of the exiled Iraqi opposition, from having an important role in the “New” Iraq. To that end, the CIA produced “analysis” claiming to show Iraqis would reject “externals” as leaders even of an interim government that prepared the way for elections. Fourteen months was wasted, the goodwill of what many Iraqis (despite the conventional wisdom now) perceived as a liberation was squandered, and the regime’s pre-prepared insurgency was needlessly augmented. At least in that case, the CIA was misrepresenting reality on purpose. In other cases, such as the CIA’s assessment that the Iraqi police were regarded as professional public servants by the majority of the Iraqi population or that the Iraqi Army would hold together—assessments that contributed to the deployment of insufficient troops to keep order after the regime came down—the CIA’s ignorance was in good-faith, even if its presentation of the basis for its assessments was not.

In the aftermath of the invasion, the CIA was put under the spotlight for the most infamous of its mistaken pre-war assessments, that Saddam had an active nuclear-weapons program and vast stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The substantive findings about Saddam’s WMDs were not quite what most people believe, as I documented, but nor were they what the CIA said they would be. Rather than admit any error, however, the State/CIA faction responded by turning the tactics of bureaucratic insurrection they had used in the inter-agency process on the public, waging a ferocious media war against the Bush administration, claiming that intelligence was misused to justify an invasion the President and the “neoconservatives” at the Pentagon were hell-bent on. The CIA took the lead in this, not simply because it involved using intelligence information, but because the Agency has the aura of being an apolitical body with secret sources of information to buttress what it says. This posture gave the CIA “leaks” greater credibility with journalists and the reading public, and the State Department could—as it had in the inter-agency process—claim that it was simply agreeing with the available facts.

As documented in the previous post, this CIA information operation basically collapsed the Bush administration’s messaging over Iraq, with dire strategic consequences for America that last to this day. By late 2003, the whole routine of administration statements being undermined by CIA “leaks” that then either had to be allowed to stand or fought over was judged to be more damaging to administration credibility than saying nothing. The administration gave up trying to defend the security-focused case it had made for the invasion, switching to a focus on the potential and promise of the future for Iraq and the region—and in so doing, damaged itself even further. It increased the sense that the administration was dishonest by appearing to shift the rationale for the invasion, pushed the definition of “success” further out of reach (eliminating the security threat of Saddam was replaced by measuring the quality of Iraqi democracy), and intensified the critics’ focus on the past, which was now undefended terrain, thereby sacrificing any chance of gaining credit for positive developments in Iraq, because they were presented as the products of an illegitimate enterprise.

In this post, I wanted to pick up on the CIA’s media war and to look at it through the prism of the other most controversial pre-invasion intelligence assessment, about Saddam’s connections with Al-Qaeda. The CIA’s denial of any substantial Saddam-Qaeda relationship—its fanatical adherence to an in-house theory that “secular” Ba’thists and jihadists could not cooperate—was an important part of the pre-invasion internal disputes in the Bush administration: it ended up, for contingent reasons, becoming the focal point of the criticism of policymakers about the manipulation of intelligence from the intelligence side, and the sheer bad work of the CIA. In the aftermath of the invasion, the accusation that the Bush administration had pressured the CIA into giving the pre-invasion classified assessments and public statements saying there was a Saddam-Qaeda relationship, ended up being an even larger component of the CIA’s media war than the WMDs. It is significantly due to the CIA’s post-invasion publicity campaign to exculpate itself and deflect blame that the myth that there was no connection between Saddam and Al-Qaeda is now so widespread.

THE QUESTION OF IRAQ

First, to deal with another myth. To judge by much of the highly politicised punditry and historiography of the War on Terror, it is a mystery why the Bush administration turned to Saddam’s Iraq after the Taliban-Qaeda regime had been overthrown in late 2001. It is the fact that these accounts present Saddam as being no problem at all in 2001-02 that has led to the conspiracy theories—after all, there must be an explanation for the administration’s vendetta against Saddam. Oil is a common explanation, though why the U.S. chose to invade to obtain Iraq’s oil when they could simply have bought it from Saddam as France and Russia did is never explained. Another favourite is that Saddam was the victim of a “neocon cabal” manipulating the U.S. government, either because of their own wild-eyed idealism or possibly on Israel’s behalf to give Israel time to finish the colonisation of the West Bank and/or to get rid of a powerful Arab state that “supported the Palestinians”. Setting aside the antisemitism implicit—and sometimes explicit—in this view, the Palestinians Saddam openly supported were the suicide bombers of HAMAS and other Islamist groups (a data point to keep in mind, as we shall see). Saddam’s (and Clerical Iran’s) involvement in former Mandate Palestine, before and during the Second Intifada, had little to do with the Palestinians per se, and everything to do with a genocidal program to purge the area of Jews. The political effect this had in nearly derailing a War on Terror that had put Baghdad and Tehran on notice was a bonus.

The reality is that Saddam had been a running security problem since no later than August 1990 when he annexed Kuwait. Here at the very beginning the CIA comes into play: while the Agency’s failures relating to the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq are notorious, it is often forgotten that the CIA was convinced to the last that the invasion by Iraq of Kuwait would not happen and the CIA’s assessment of Saddam’s WMD capabilities was also wrong in 1990-91, just in the other direction, underestimating how far the Ba’thi regime had gotten towards a nuclear weapon.[1] The U.S. attempts to court Saddam after 1979 as a bulwark against the Iranian Revolution, which were partly responsible for Saddam’s miscalculation that he would not encounter American opposition to his takeover of Kuwait, came to an abrupt end. A U.S.-led Coalition was mobilised to contain Saddam, to prevent him extending his aggression into Saudi Arabia, and on 16 January 1991 the Coalition initiated Operation DESERT STORM to forcibly evict Saddam from Kuwait. The aerial phase lasted until 24 February: in the early hours of that morning, the ground phase began, and by 27 February Saddam’s army had been more or less expelled from Kuwait. A decision was made at this point to implement a ceasefire that called off the troops at the border of Iraq. The ceasefire went into effect at 08:00 local time on 28 February 1991 (midnight 27/28 February U.S. time).

United Nations Security Council Resolution 678 had authorised force to restore Kuwait’s sovereignty and President George H.W. Bush chose to be legalistic about it. The formal policy was expressed by the U.S. General who led the operation, Norman Schwarzkopf: “We were 150 miles from Baghdad, and there was nothing between us and Baghdad. If it had been our intention to … overrun the country, we could have done it unopposed … But … our intention was purely to eject the Iraqis out of Kuwait”.

There was a complication to this neat story the administration told, however. In a speech on 15 February 1991, President Bush Senior had called for Iraqis to rebel against Saddam, “There’s another way for the bloodshed to stop, and that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Husayn, the dictator, to step aside”. The Iraqis had taken Bush at his word. The day after the ceasefire, the Shi’a of southern Iraq, the bedraggled conscripts returning from Kuwait and the broader population, erupted in rebellion. Within days, the Kurds in the north were also in revolt. At the height of these rebellions—what the Saddam regime would call “the Page of Treason and Treachery” (Safhat al-Khiyana wal-Ghadr)—fourteen of Iraq’s eighteen provinces had fallen to insurgents. But Saddam was left free to launch a ferocious counter-attack. The U.S. watched from the sidelines as this massacre played out against people who had risen at U.S. incitement and in the belief the U.S. supported them. Worse than that, the primary weapon Saddam used to retake control was helicopter gunships, which the regime had been allowed to keep, initially on the premise the helicopters were needed for officials to travel—to the ceasefire talks apart from anything else—and to withdraw Iraqi troops from Kuwait because other infrastructure had been destroyed. When it became clear what was happening, many rank-and-file U.S. and Coalition soldiers, some members of the Bush administration, and any number of external observers demanded that the U.S. ground these helicopters; the U.S. pointedly refused. Tens of thousands of people had been killed by the time Saddam’s regime announced “the complete crushing of acts of sedition” on 5 April 1991.

The moral horror at what was happening led Kanan Makiya, author under a pseudonym of The Republic of Fear, which had become a major best-seller during the Gulf crisis, to abandon his anonymity on 7 March 1991 and publicly call for the Coalition to “work with the Iraqi insurgents … and march into Baghdad”. The strategic concerns were expressed when the Saudis pressed the Americans to arm the Shi’a rebels to ensure Saddam’s downfall, which Riyadh had assumed was an intrinsic part of the mission when they invited the Americans in days after Saddam’s army crossed into Kuwait. Secretary of State James Baker rejected the Saudi proposal. This decision cast a long shadow. When it was decided to end the Gulf War in 2003, the memory of perceived betrayal increased the suspicions about American intentions from the terrorised Iraqi population. The failure to get rid of Saddam that the refusal to help the rebels symbolised also created problems in getting Arab states—except Kuwait—to publicly align themselves with the anti-Saddam Coalition in 2002-03: they had done that once on the understanding that the U.S. and its allies would finish the job, and then been left to deal with an embittered Saddam.[2]

The internal split in the Bush Senior administration is worth noting. The Bush 41 Cabinet met in the afternoon of 27 February 1991 and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell told the President that, with the military objectives of reconstituting Kuwait’s sovereignty essentially achieved, there was no purpose to extending the war for another day. This view was supported by Defence Secretary Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Baker. Apart from the legalism, President H.W. Bush had a more cynical reason for being attracted to a swift termination of the operation: the media presentation. Bush Senior and particularly Baker liked the propaganda victory of a “100-hour war” after there had been so much concern in the run-up to DESERT STORM that large numbers of Coalition troops would be killed and a “quagmire” would ensue.[3] Powell also had optics reasons for pushing to rapidly end to U.S. combat actions, namely his feeling that the coverage of “the Highway of Death” had become negative.[4] The “Highway of Death” was in every sense a distraction: the main issue was that Saddam’s Republican Guards had been allowed to survive. The main voice arguing for keeping DESERT STORM going until Saddam’s primary military instruments had been destroyed, with at least the hope this would collapse the Ba’thist edifice, was Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz. Powell dismissed such concerns, being of the view that Saddam would soon fall of his own weight and “all this interesting second-guessing will seem quite irrelevant”. Powell was equally unmoved when Saddam began using the elite units that had been spared against the post-ceasefire rebellions. Wolfowitz was the most forceful in pressing the administration to stop the massacres.[5] Cheney did later concede that errors had been made in the way DESERT STORM was concluded, the only person from the Bush 41 administration to do so.[6] By then, of course, it was too late. How different things might have been if British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had not been toppled in a party coup in November 1990.[7]

Thus, allowing Saddam to survive in 1991 was a highly controversial decision at the time and only got more so afterwards. Bernard Lewis, the great historian of the Middle East who sadly left us last year, quipped that DESERT STORM should have been codenamed “KUWAITUS INTERRUPTUS”, and within a few years of the 1991 ceasefire this was a widespread, if not dominant, view among Western foreign policy elites and public opinion more broadly.

The repression of the Kurds in northern Iraq led to an exodus of nearly the entire Kurdish population into Turkey, a horrendous humanitarian calamity and politically destabilising event that could only be reversed by implementing a no-fly zone over northern Iraq. Operation PROVIDE COMFORT began in April 1991 and under its cover, in the one-tenth of Iraq’s territory removed from Saddam’s control, a Kurdish government took hold—after a civil war and with much corruption and other abuses, but night and day more humane and decent that what was happening in Arab Iraq. In August 1992, Operation SOUTHERN WATCH began, a belated protection from aerial bombardment for the Iraqi Shi’is in the south. The American, British, and (until 1998) French planes that patrolled these no-fly zones—with no U.N. mandate, incidentally—were fired on nearly daily by Saddam’s regime right up to 2003,[8] and regularly retaliated. In the most physical, literal sense the war Saddam began in 1990 never ended.

In a legal sense, too, the 1990 war continued. UNSCR 687 implemented a ceasefire that prevented the Coalition entering Iraq on condition that Saddam inter alia: cease threatening Kuwait’s independence and formally recognise its independence; return the Kuwaiti hostages (or at least their bodies); disarm of WMD by surrendering the known stockpiles of chemical and biological agents, terminating the nuclear-weapons program, signing the conventions banning these weapons, and permitting ongoing inspections to verify compliance; submit to limitations on the range of missiles in the Iraqi arsenal to prevent a repeat of the attacks on Saudi Arabia and Israel, and the attempted attacks on Bahrain and Qatar, during DESERT STORM; and end the use and threats of terrorism as had been seen during the war. The sanctions, a full-scale embargo that was economic warfare under any definition, were to remain in place until Saddam fulfilled these conditions, and, theoretically, there remained the implicit threat of force if Saddam refused (though this threat rapidly diminished as U.S. troops left the area[9]).

In October 2002, when the U.S. Congress overwhelmingly passed the Authorisation for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that sanctioned the invasion, it cited the fact that Saddam had defied all these ceasefire terms as justification, and even in the nebulous terms of “international law” they were not wrong. Saddam’s breach of the armistice conditions meant there was no legal argument against putting the Coalition back online and finishing what had been interrupted in 1991.

Before it got to that, Saddam welcomed Abdul Rahman Yasin, the man who mixed the chemicals for the first Al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Centre in February 1993, sheltering him alongside other wanted international terrorists like Sabri al-Banna (Abu Nidal) and Muhammad Zaydan (Abu Abbas). Saddam tried to assassinate President H.W. Bush on his visit to Kuwait in April 1993, an act of terrorism so reckless that Saddam cannot have known the response would be so feeble. In October 1994, Saddam mobilised for another invasion of Kuwait, and was only stopped by the U.S. moving military resources into place. And throughout it all, the oil-for-food scheme put in place to allow Iraqi oil to be traded for humanitarian supplies was grossly corrupted: officials in the U.N., including the son of Secretary General Kofi Annan, and senior officials in the governments of particularly France and Russia, were given a cut of the OFF profits in exchange for allowing the revenues to be diverted from their purpose of alleviating the suffering of the Iraqi population to outfitting the police state structures of Saddam’s regime, funding his mosque-building program, and lining the pockets of the regime’s oligarchs.

In June 1991, Saddam’s security forces fired on U.N. inspectors to prevent them accessing a WMD site, merely the beginning of a twelve-year game of cat-and-mouse that involved obstruction at every stage, with extraordinary efforts taken to cover-up sites,[10] bribe inspectors, intimidate Iraqi scientists, and regularly throw the inspectors out altogether. By late 1997, President Bill Clinton’s patience appeared exhausted and it seemed he was going to make an end of Saddam. Annan stepped in to rescue Saddam in February 1998, but by December the inspectors were out again and an Anglo-American airstrike campaign, Operation DESERT FOX, tried to fulfil the disarmament work the U.N. was so patently incapable of. Saddam ultimately prevailed, though, as was discovered after the invasion: the WMD programs had been kept together and two scientists independently revealed centrifuge technology and designs for the nuclear program they had kept hidden for Saddam, just waiting for the day when the crumbling sanctions regime was lifted. How many other officials with similar stories kept quiet or were silenced in the assassination campaign after the fall of the regime, we will never know.

This, then, was the situation the Bush administration inherited when it came into office in January 2001. Saddam had used WMD and not only refused all opportunities to verifiably disarm. Saddam was running an information operation to foster the idea he did have WMD because he was so divorced from reality he saw Iran as a greater threat than the United States. Saddam’s sponsorship of terrorism around the region continued, as did his harbouring of international terrorists, including soon some of the Al-Qaeda operatives who had fled from Afghanistan, the founder of the Islamic State, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, among them. The threat to Iraq’s neighbours was ongoing, and patrolling the no-fly zones meant the U.S. was already engaged, while waiting for Saddam to make his next move. There had been no compliance even with the “smaller” aspects of the ceasefire resolution like accounting for the 600 “missing” Kuwaitis. Inspectors had been out of Iraq for four years, and no evidence of a crash course in unilateral disarmament had emerged. Meanwhile, the “containment” regime was visibly fraying: Saddam’s (well-paid) allies on the U.N. Security Council, Russia and France, were leading the charge to weaken the sanctions, and even the U.S.’s closest allies were joining in the pressure campaign.[11] The U.S.’s ability to resist was collapsing.

There was no “status quo” to preserve: doing nothing would itself have been a choice, one that accepted a trajectory where the sanctions continued eroding, granting Saddam access to greater resources—with the oil price rise that was just about to begin, much greater resources—that Saddam had made it known within the regime would be used to revitalise his WMD programs and his ambitions to dominate the region,[12] ambitions pursued for twenty-five years with terrorism and outright aggression as staples of state policy. In the shadow of 9/11, the risk-tolerance in Washington was radically reduced.[13] Leaving Iraq under the rule of a man with this record, a man so reckless and so consumed by his desire for revenge against the United States, and waiting to react to whatever he did next, was deemed unacceptable.

From this brief sketch, it is hopefully evident that Saddam’s connections with Al-Qaeda, while interesting as a historical and empirical matter, were merely one component of one part of a broad threat picture that would not have been altered even if it were true, as many people wrongly believe, that there was no connection at all. Saddam’s relationship with Al-Qaeda was not central to the justification for the invasion that deposed him, was not seen as such by its architects,[14] and has only a marginal place in the argument about whether the risk posed by leaving Saddam in place in 2003 was tolerable, about which reasonable people can disagree.

IDEOLOGY AND INTELLIGENCE

As the Bush administration began trying to gather information on the Saddam regime to assess, among other things, the dangers American forces would face in the case that it came to a confrontation, they found that the CIA was operating on an a priori theory that religious militants of the Al-Qaeda type and “secular” Ba’thists could not cooperate. This was not a tentative inclination in CIA analysis, to be found in caveated footnotes of finished intelligence products: it was the central premise governing the CIA’s entire analysis of how the international jihadist network related to the Saddam state apparatus, appearing constantly in oral briefings and in prominent places in finished intelligence products.[15]

On its face, this CIA theory was strange. After all, the Hitler-Stalin Pact had been signed between two ideological movements, Nazism and Communism, that were not only incompatible, but regarded each other as their ultimate nemesis; a common enemy, however, in the form of the liberal democracies, had provided enough glue to keep the alliance together long enough to start the Second World War and cooperate in the conquest of half-a-dozen countries each. So, even had it been true that Saddam’s regime was sternly secular, it should not have taken any great imaginative leap to see that anti-Americanism could have acted as a binding agent to induce some degree of cooperation with Usama bin Laden. But the premise of the CIA’s theory was weaker than that: whatever Saddam’s personal beliefs, the secularism of the Ba’thi state that had come to power in 1968 had been very seriously eroded, beginning in the late 1980s, and this was not a covert policy. Saddam had publicly announced the turn to Islam by proclaiming a “Faith Campaign” in 1993 and this change was reflected in regime messaging and the state media. As early as 1995, when Saddam’s son-in-law Husayn Kamel defected to Jordan, it was clear that this religiosity was not just for public show, and, as mentioned above, during the very time-period when this was being discussed most intensely in 2002, Saddam was publicly boasting of his support for the Islamist suicide-murderers in former Mandate Palestine.

In March 2002, media reporting documented that the Iraqi Kurds had captured Al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadists from Ansar al-Islam and found evidence Ansar had support from Saddam’s regime. If the CIA was, as it is supposed to be, a straight fact-finding body, committed to supplying the best information available to policymakers, there would never have been an in-house theory about how to interpret events, but certainly when this Ba’thist-jihadist non-cooperation theory was challenged by new evidence, the CIA would have enthusiastically investigated and where necessary adjusted the theory in line with the facts. That is not what happened. Instead, the Agency tried to protect the theory by simply refusing to investigate. When people talk about “cherry-picking” intelligence, they usually mean that policymakers are selectively reading intelligence or pressuring intelligence analysts. In the real world, the incentives and barriers against this—not least the CIA’s well-developed capacity to feed its perspective to the media—are quite high. Distortions from the intelligence side, by hiding or neglecting evidence and shading analysis, are much more common because they are more difficult to detect: intelligence agencies operate behind a wall of classification that prevents independent verification of their findings, they can (and the CIA did: see the Plame case below) make it a legal issue if anyone tries to look behind the classification curtain to examine how it got to its conclusions, and they have the aura of authority that comes with the claim to be an apolitical body and the tacit assumption that they have secret and well-placed sources of information (none of which was actually true of the CIA). After months of stonewalling, including the CIA raising weird procedural objections to its intelligence officers doing routine work, in July 2002 the Agency relented and sent officers to Kurdistan, duly finding evidence of “cooperation between Iraq and Ansar … that were assessed as credible and important by the CIA’s own analysts”.[16]

The Ansar issue is an example of the CIA preserving its Saddam-Qaeda non-cooperation theory by neglecting—indeed, actively refusing to collect—the evidence that would contradict it. An example where the CIA shaded analysis to conceal evidence that contradicted its theory occurred about a year later, when the CIA circulated a report on the activities of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) inside Saddam’s Iraq, including establishing safe houses in Baghdad. When Vice President Cheney received the report, he asked the briefer the obvious question: Since EIJ—which had long been functionally indistinguishable from Al-Qaeda, with the EIJ leader Ayman al-Zawahiri acting as Bin Laden’s roving ambassador in the 1990s—had been formally absorbed into Al-Qaeda and Al-Zawahiri appointed Bin Laden’s deputy in June 2001, would it not be more accurate to say that the “EIJ” activities in Iraq were those of “Al-Qaeda”. The CIA resisted giving an answer for weeks, before grudgingly admitting that yes it would. The CIA Director, in his public Senate testimony about a month before the report was delivered to Cheney, referred to EIJ and Al-Qaeda as “indistinguishable”. And yet, even after this admission in public and in private, finished CIA products continued to refer to EIJ as if it was a separate entity to Al-Qaeda.[17]

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Shortly after the CIA had finally done its job on the Ansar issue, the Defense Department initiated an interdepartmental interface to critique the CIA’s work on the Saddam-Qaeda issue. Note: this was not an attempt by the Pentagon to substantively propose anything; the Pentagon neither offered its own conclusions on the matter, nor tried to press the CIA in any specific direction. The Pentagon’s criticism was procedural: the CIA had been slanting its analysis by either omitting entirely or labelling as “unconfirmed” intelligence reports that went against the Saddam-Qaeda non-cooperation theory, and including reports with no more evidentiary basis, so long as they supported the theory, and labelling them “credible”. In a nutshell, the Pentagon was asking the CIA to stop doing this, and to adopt a more scholarly or scientific approach that included all relevant information and used terms like “unconfirmed” and “credible” in an impartial manner that could be—and should be, in finished intelligence products—explained by reference to the standard of the evidence, rather than being arbitrarily applied by analysts according to whether the report in question was or was not favourable to the CIA’s pet theory.[18] This rather bland bureaucratic exercise took on an extraordinary life of its own, becoming, in the hands of some of the CIA officials involved and their sympathetic chroniclers, a “key to all mythologies” that explained how the Bush administration had “fabricated” links between Saddam and Al-Qaeda to “lie America into war”.

Before getting into the controversy from the summer of 2002, there is another episode, around the Policy Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group (PCTEG), which nobody at the time thought was significant but which has metastasised in the various conspiracy theories based on serial distortions that have emerged since. In the weeks after 9/11, Douglas Feith, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, undertook to look through the masses of intelligence material produced over the years on terrorists threatening the U.S. to sift it for strategic insights into the enemy—mapping out how the networks operated, their relationships with each other and with states, for example—and to see if there was anything actionable so he could formulate policy options. As bland and routine a bureaucratic exercise as there is. Two people from within Feith’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy or OUSD(P), an organisation of about 1,500 people, David Wurmser, a Middle East scholar, and Mike Maloof, an intelligence officer in the Naval Reserve, were assigned the task. In December 2001, the duo produced a 150-slide PowerPoint presentation in which nine slides mentioned possible contacts between Saddam’s Iraq and Al-Qaeda. Note: this was all done using CIA material. The later presentation of what Feith did as setting up a “covert intelligence cell” in the Pentagon as an alternative to the CIA is flat wrong: it was not covert, nobody in Feith’s organisation collected intelligence, and none of the group’s outputs were represented as “intelligence analysis”. Maloof left in December 2001 and Wurmser left in January 2002. Feith borrowed two new analysts from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the project was given a label, PCTEG, in February 2002. After April 2002, PCTEG had a single member, Chris Carney, a Naval Reserve intelligence officer whose day job was as a university professor. The project was disbanded in January 2003 and Carney, after a brief return to academia and a stint at the Pentagon, became a Congressman (for the Democratic Party, incidentally).[19]

Policy officials digesting intelligence to come up with policy options, it should go without saying, is what they are meant to do: the theory is the intelligence side provides just the facts, and the policy side decides what to do about it. The problem arose when it was discovered the intelligence side was not sticking to its side of the bargain—and the discovery came by happenstance. Christina Shelton, an intelligence official with two decades experience as an analyst and a decade in counter-intelligence, had been lent by DIA to Feith’s organisation as a policy official, working on the military-technological Special Access Programs. In the early months of 2002, as Shelton was reviewing the intelligence material, she found a finished product from 1998 about the support terrorist groups received from the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS), often called the Mukhabarat, the KGB-like agency in Saddam’s Iraq whose branches included the domestic secret police and the foreign intelligence apparatus. The finished 1998 CIA report “mentioned that Usama Bin Laden had requested and received certain training from” the IIS.[20] On her own initiative, Shelton did some digging, asking for the material underlying the 1998 document, and found well-attested reports of connections between the Saddam regime and Al-Qaeda dating back to at least 1996. Shelton wondered why such material was at that time either being dismissed in, or more usually excluded from, intelligence outputs. Shelton was concerned that intelligence assessments on the Saddam-Qaeda relationship, including some already given to policymakers and all future ones, “would be incomplete and inaccurate” if this material was not included. Shelton’s superiors at DIA bluntly told her that the decision on exclusion was political: “putting it out there would be playing into the hands of people like Wolfowitz”,[21] meaning the Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who had taken an interest in the Saddam-Qaeda question and amassed a degree of knowledge that is unusual on any subject for senior officials (as people ascend in government institutions, their handle on detail tends to slip as their time is diverted across a wider array of issues and into administrative matters).[22]

Shelton thought this conduct was improper and, as she developed her critique, she joined up with others at the Pentagon who felt similarly, including Wolfowitz (more precisely, his special assistant, James Thomas) and Carney. Feith was introduced to Shelton in June 2002 by her boss, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Kenneth deGraffenreid. Without having a substantive view of the underlying material, Feith found the critique of CIA practices developed by Shelton, Thomas, and Carney “well organized and logically argued”, in his words, and recommended—as did Wolfowitz—that it be presented to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, which it was, on 8 August 2002. Rumsfeld, again without a view about the substance, thought the criticisms of the way the CIA was handling the issue of Saddam and Al-Qaeda were valid and persuasive, and thought it would be constructive for the CIA to hear the briefing.[23] And here began the trouble.

Shelton and Carney, accompanied by Feith, DeGraffenreid, and DIA chief Admiral Lowell Jacoby, delivered their critique of the CIA’s work on the Saddam-Qaeda issue at Langley to Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) George Tenet and about two-dozen CIA officials on 15 August 2002.

The Pentagon staffers, of course, understood that the CIA could react badly to the briefing: anger at the quality of the Agency’s work being challenged would be natural, a sense of bureaucratic turf being invaded entirely plausible, and worst of all they could perceive an attempt by the policy side to pressure intelligence analysts. Feith says to try to head this off, he “introduced the briefing with decidedly nonthreatening remarks”, saying the intelligence could be read in many ways, that the purpose of the briefing was “to raise questions and provoke thought, not dictate any conclusions”, and stressed that the Pentagon policymakers were there to give the feedback from intelligence “customers” that is proper, with no intent to influence intelligence conclusions to serve policy ends. According to Feith, Shelton and Carney were delicate in delivering their criticism and while there was little feedback from the room when it was over, “Tenet took me [i.e. Feith] back to his office and complimented the briefing as useful, adding that he had ‘issues’ on this subject with some of his people”. A follow-up session on 20 August was reported to Feith as having “went well”, with “the atmosphere … described as reasonably collegial”.[24]

Tenet in his memoirs gives a very different picture of the meeting, claiming that Shelton gave a presentation entitled, “Iraq and Al-Qa’ida—Making the Case,” where she “started out by saying that there should be ‘no more debate’ on the Iraq–al-Qa’ida relationship. ‘It is an open-and-shut case,’ she said. ‘No further analysis is required’’.” Having been polite to Shelton, Tenet says, “What I was really thinking was, This is complete crap, and I want this to end right now”.[25] Tenet might be telling the truth about his thoughts at that moment, but he is lying about the contents of the briefing. (Tenet’s memoir in general is full of checkable falsehoods. The most high-profile such case when the memoir came out was an anecdote Tenet constructed about meeting Richard Perle, the Chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, at the White House on 12 September 2001, designed to show the pervasive, nefarious influence of the Pentagon “neoconservatives”. Perle was in France that day.[26]) Tenet misstates Shelton’s credentials and gets the name of the presentation wrong (it was the perfectly neutral, “Assessing the Relationship Between Iraq and Al-Qa’ida”). As we shall see, the post-war Senate investigations and a bipartisan Commission showed that Tenet was dishonest about the tone and purpose of the briefing, too: Shelton and co. were trying to eliminate political bias from intelligence assessments, not inject it.

What the CIA became particularly agitated about was that the briefing was shared around the administration, specifically the 16 September 2002 briefing given—at his request—to Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley. Also present at this meeting was the Chief of Staff of the Office of the Vice President, Lewis “Scooter” Libby.[27] The annoyance of the CIA is understandable: the quality of their work was being challenged, and more people were hearing about it. Bureaucracies do not like their authority being dented this way. Later, as people searched for evidence of how the U.S. was “lied” into war, all of this would be—abetted by “anonymous CIA officials” seeking to deflect blame for the intelligence failures—blown way out of proportion, but Pentagon officials giving briefings at the White House is quite routine. Likewise, the fact that one slide, “Fundamental Problems with How Intelligence Community is Assessing Information”, was included in the Rumsfeld and Hadley presentations but omitted from the DCI briefing, would be taken as evidence of a shady campaign by the Pentagon to run its own intelligence agency and sideline the CIA. The truth was essentially the reverse: the OUSD(P) briefers had wanted to avoid any appearance they were seeking to challenge and/or shape CIA analysis on the matter of Saddam’s relations with Al-Qaeda.[28]

THE ROLE OF CIA DIRECTOR GEORGE TENET

The proof that Shelton was on to something comes from the most unimpeachable source of all: George Tenet. In Tenet’s memoir, released in 2007, he has reframed events to present the CIA as free of blemish, eternally warning against the Bush administration’s relentless drive to war and its abuse of intelligence to get them there. As Tenet self-pityingly puts it, “From the fall of 2003 onward, … the administration’s message was: Don’t blame us. George Tenet and the CIA got us into this mess”.[29] The very mendaciousness of Tenet’s memoir, however, in trying to manipulate the facts to suit this narrative—ironically, the very thing the OUSD(P) presentation he so decries had asked Tenet’s Agency to stop doing while he was in office—makes it valuable for the unintentional revelations it contains.

One such unintentional revelation in Tenet’s memoir is about a September 2002 briefing Tenet gave to Libby and Vice President Dick Cheney about Saddam’s relationship with Al-Qaeda. Cheney, as someone well-versed in intelligence matters from his time as Defence Secretary and in the Congress, “often” asked for supplementary information when given CIA products,[30] and this was part of that routine process. As Tenet tells us:

The briefing was a disaster. Libby and the vice president arrived with such detailed knowledge on people, sources, and timelines that the senior CIA analytic manager doing the briefing that day simply could not compete. We weren’t ready for this discussion.[31]

This is a humiliating admission of incompetence from Tenet. As Feith later noted, this was not some surprise “gotcha” encounter; “it was a scheduled visit by the vice president”. Moreover, it was a year after 9/11, a month after the OUSD(P) briefing had made the CIA incontrovertibly aware that its work on the Saddam-Qaeda subject was under a microscope, and in the same month President Bush took the Iraq question before the United Nations in a major address to try to get that body to enforce its own resolutions. Some might be tempted to defend the CIA by saying this meeting was in some way improper, but Tenet pulls the rug out from under any such apologists by admitting that “most” of his own analysts accepted that “if a country is about to go to war, policy makers are going to ask tough questions to under­stand all the elements of the issue”.[32]

Another crucial piece of evidence that Shelton and OUSD(P) had a point, also from Tenet, is the unclassified letter the DCI sent to the Senate on 7 October 2002. Tenet’s letter disclosed [emphasis added]:

We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and Al-Qaeda going back a decade.

Credible information indicates that Iraq and Al-Qaeda have discussed safe haven and reciprocal non-aggression.

Since Operation Enduring Freedom [the invasion of Afghanistan], we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al-Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad.

We have credible reporting that Al-Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to Al-Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.

Iraq’s increasing support to extremist Palestinians, coupled with growing indications of a relationship with Al-Qaeda, suggest that Baghdad’s links to terrorists will increase, even absent US military action.

This public statement from Tenet would be the primary guidance for administration messaging when discussing the Saddam-Qaeda issue ever-afterwards. One cannot help noticing that this section of the letter does not appear in Tenet’s memoir,[33] a glaring omission, especially since he does quote the WMD section of the letter,[34] which can only be explained by how devastating it is to his narrative that administration officials misrepresented CIA intelligence on Saddam’s links with Al-Qaeda in its public presentations. Notable, too, is the significant shift in emphasis in the letter from what had been appearing in classified CIA reports even a few months earlier.

Tenet added to his public statements, testifying to Congress on 11 February 2003 [emphasis added]:

Iraq is harbouring senior members of a terrorist network led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a close associate of Usama bin Laden. We know Zarqawi’s network was behind the poison plots in Europe that I discussed earlier as well as the assassination of a U.S. State Department employee in Jordan [Laurence Foley].

Iraq has, in the past, provided training in document forgery and bomb making to Al-Qaeda. It has also provided training in poisons and gases to two Al-Qaeda associates. One of these associates characterised the relationship he forged with Iraqi officials as successful. Mr. Chairman, this information is based on a solid foundation of intelligence. It comes to us from credible and reliable sources. Much of it is corroborated by multiple sources and it is consistent with the pattern of denial and deception exhibited by Saddam Husayn over the past twelve years.

In sum, it will not do for Tenet to pretend he was not a central participant in the deliberations that led to the Iraq invasion or that he opposed it. It is also interesting to note what Tenet’s actual conclusion was on the Saddam-Qaeda issue in his memoir years later. It is another of those unintentional revelations, a shaft of light that dispels much of the smokescreen Tenet throws up in trying to claim that the administration overstated what the CIA was telling them on the subject. “There was more than enough evidence to give us real con­cern about Iraq and al-Qa’ida”, writes Tenet.[35]

PRE-INVASION CIA REPORTS ON SADDAM AND TERRORISM

That Tenet’s conclusion years later about Saddam’s relationship with Al-Qaeda aligns more with the CIA output after the OUSD(P) critique is notable, especially because of the spin he puts on it. For Tenet to adhere to work produced after the CIA’s methods had been criticised, even as he makes dark insinuations about the motives of the Pentagon critics, is the compliment vice pays to virtue—another of the unintentional, evidence-against-interest revelations Tenet makes in his memoir. To track this, we can look at the two major CIA products on the Saddam-Qaeda relationship in 2002.

The CIA had produced an assessment on 21 June 2002, Iraq and Al-Qa’ida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship, which by its own Scope Note was “purposefully aggressive” in drawing connections between Saddam’s Iraq and Al-Qaeda.[36] The document certainly found plenty of scope for concern, but it remained plagued by the habits the Shelton critique identified two months later—of non-rigorous standards being used to describe intelligence reports included within the report as credible or not, and, as suspected by many at the time but only confirmed later, the arbitrary exclusion of evidence the CIA found unwelcome that pointed to a longer-standing and deeper relationship between Al-Qaeda and Saddam.

One factor hampering the CIA’s work was a methodological dispute that had taken on political overtones within the Agency—one of the “issues” Tenet alluded to when he spoke to Feith after the August 2002 briefing—between, as Tenet explains it, the “regional analysts”, who were the most insistent that Saddam was a secularist incapable of cooperating with Islamists, and “terrorism analysts”, whose experience examining the operational end of terrorism meant they put much less stock in the idea that ideology was a barrier to cooperation.[37]

Vice President Cheney has written that he has “long suspected” it was this intra-CIA dispute that led to the Agency coming up with the phrase “no authority, direction, or control” to describe Saddam’s relationship with Al-Qaeda, basically as a compromise between the factions.[38] The idea behind the phrase was to say that none of Al-Qaeda’s past attacks had been at the behest of Saddam. This was unhelpful in at least three ways. First, it was an answer to a question nobody was asking. As Shelton later wrote, “I don’t recall anyone inside or outside the intelligence community ever making that claim [about Saddam’s level of control over Al-Qaeda]”. Second and related, in terms of public understanding, inserting this arbitrary threshold into the discussion—as with that in the 9/11 Commission Report (“collaborative operational relationship”[39])—too easily confused things, leading, in the simplistic and polemical media coverage and political debate, to assertions which last to this day that there was no relationship between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. Third, and most importantly, the question that was being asked after 9/11 was about the next attack, which it was the administration’s strategy to prevent. As such, saying that Saddam had not to this point orchestrated an act of terrorism through Al-Qaeda was irrelevant. What mattered was whether Saddam had a relationship with Al-Qaeda: as the CIA made clear, he did. Whether this was a tolerable threat—whether the relationship should be left to develop, or not—was a question ultimately for the policy side anyway, and the CIA was unable to provide any useful guidance on this question of intent because it had no sources, neither in Saddam’s Iraq nor in Al-Qaeda, who were in a position to provide information on the subject.[40]

Three months later, on 19 September 2002, the CIA issued its last pre-invasion finished product covering the issue of Saddam’s relationship with Al-Qaeda, Iraqi Support for Terrorism. This document, initially “shared with only a small number of senior officials”, was updated soon afterwards as “new intel­ligence came in suggesting that there might have been greater contact regarding training between Iraq and Al-Qaeda”, and a final version of the document was published on 28 January 2003.[41]

Iraqi Support for Terrorism covers not only Saddam’s links with Al-Qaeda but other terrorist groups and reads in part [emphasis added]:

Iraq continues to be a safehaven, transit point, or operational node for groups and individuals who direct violence against the United States, Israel, and other allies. Iraq has a long history of supporting terrorism. During the last four decades, it has altered its targets to reflect changing priorities and goals. It continues to harbor and sustain a number of smaller anti-Israel terrorist groups and to actively encourage violence against Israel. Regarding the Iraq-al-Qaida relationship, reporting from sources of varying reliability points to a number of contacts, incidents of training, and discussions of Iraqi safehaven for Usama bin Ladin and his organization dating from the early 1990s.[42]

The section of Iraqi Support for Terrorism on Al-Qaeda is hedged about with numerous caveats because of what a post-invasion Senate investigation referred to as the CIA’s “poor intelligence collection on both the Iraqi regime and al-Qaida leadership”.[43] There was, for instance, no direct evidence of what Saddam’s personal view was of the ties his government maintained with Al-Qaeda. The Agency also somewhat misunderstood Saddam continuing to execute those he called “Wahhabists” as indicating an opposition to Islamism. In the terminology of the Ba’thist state’s internal documents and media output, “Wahhabists” referred to those from within the non-governmental “pure” Salafi Trend—which was nurtured alongside the regime-sponsored Ba’thi-Salafists by the Faith Campaign—who challenged Saddam’s regime. The hostility to “Wahhabists”, therefore, signified a political approach that continued to refuse to tolerate any dissent, not a hostility to Islamists per se. Despite this error, the CIA concluded there was something like a non-aggression pact in place between the Saddam regime and Al-Qaeda, “impelled by mutual antipathy toward the United States and the Saudi royal family and by Bin Ladin’s interest in unconventional weapons and relocation sites”. Unlike “the patron-client pattern between Iraq and its Palestinian surrogates”, Saddam’s relations with Al-Qaeda was a meeting of “two independent actors” working on a common goal and trying to benefit from one-another.[44]

The high-level contacts between Saddam’s regime and Al-Qaeda “from the early 1990s to the present” that were later summarised in the “Feith Memo” were given in the Iraqi Support for Terrorism document, with a slight difference in the September 2002 and January 2003 versions: the earlier version included notes of some reports handed to the U.S. by foreign governments, which were regarded with scepticism by the CIA because one government in particular was hostile to Saddam. Even if some reports were false, the pattern was very clear.[45]

The pattern was also consistent: the more information there was, the more connections it showed between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. For instance, the DIA, from separate intelligence streams, detected a 1995 meeting between the IIS external operations chief Faruq Hijazi and Bin Laden in Sudan that led to an agreement to broadcast anti-monarchy propaganda into Saudi Arabia, specifically the sermons of Salman al-Awda, one of the Sahwa al-Islamiyya radicals. Post-invasion findings showed that Mahfouz Ould al-Walid (Abu Hafs al-Mauritani), one of the most senior religious officials in Al-Qaeda, a member of Bin Laden’s Shura Council, had been in Iraq at least twice, in June 1998 and 2002, and might well have visited in March 1998, as well. In captivity, Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, one of the most powerful officials in the Saddam regime,[46] admitted that Al-Walid was received by senior officials in Baghdad in 1998 to discuss funding ($10 million was, apparently, the request) so Al-Qaeda could continue attacks on the West. Entertainingly, Mahmud claimed Al-Walid entered Iraq illegally in 2002 and upon discovery of this Saddam was most upset, “direct[ing] that Abu Hafs should leave Iraq as soon as possible”.[47] People in actual defiance of the “law” in Saddam’s Iraq were not politely asked if they could find time to come into compliance.

The CIA avoided characterising the outcome of these meetings, individually or cumulatively. Given the outcome of the 1995 meeting on anti-Saudi broadcasts and the credible evidence documented in Iraqi Support for Terrorism itself of Saddam and Qaeda working together on training and the use of poisons—activities that can only be described as “cooperation”—it could be regarded as the Agency once again playing politics in refusing to draw any conclusions about this pattern of behaviour. That was surely a factor, but even if the CIA was analysing in good faith, due to the lack of resources devoted to a question it had made up its mind about, it simply did not know enough about what had happened or why to draw meaningful conclusions.[48]

In terms of terrorist training, the Iraqi opposition made much of the camp run by the Fedayeen Saddam at Salman Pak, where non-Iraqi Arab terrorists had been trained. The CIA overstated what the defectors told the Agency about Salman Pak, reporting claims that Al-Qaeda had trained there. They might well have—as Iraqi Support for Terrorism noted, proving the negative that among the thousands of foreign Islamists who passed through this camp there were none affiliated with Al-Qaeda is very difficult—but the CIA could find no direct evidence that this had happened.[49]

The CIA had better intelligence on the safe-haven issue: it had assessed in the past that since April 1999, Bin Laden had a “standing invitation” to move to Iraq if relations ruptured with the Taliban; Saddam certainly made no serious move against the Ansar al-Islam jihadist statelet in northern Iraq and there were indications that IIS had some kind of liaison relationship with the group; and then, of course, there was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi was in Baghdad in May 2002, soon joined by other Al-Qaeda operatives, and was able to travel in and out of Iraq in the summer and autumn of 2002, after Jordan had told Saddam where Zarqawi was. Even the CIA could not avoid the conclusion that Saddam knew Zarqawi was in his country and had chosen to do nothing to hinder him.[50]

As an aside, after the invasion, a narrative would take hold—much of it driven by the testimony of Saddamist officials—that Zarqawi had not been apprehended in 2002 because the regime could not find him. A 2006 Senate investigation, which was distinctly slanted in its analysis against seeing any consequential Saddam-Qaeda relationship, tried to prop up this argument by describing captured Iraqi documents showing a written instruction given in the spring of 2002 within IIS to arrest Zarqawi and the formation of a “special committee” to track down the rest of his network. The Committee was honest enough, however, to include the evidence of what happened when one of Zarqawi’s acolytes, Abu Yasim Sayyem, was actually caught in early 2003 [emphasis added]:

Although Sayyem denied any affiliation with al-Qa’ida or Zarqawi, the IIS officer [who had arrested Sayyem] believed the evidence of criminal activity provided by the foreign intelligence service [i.e., Jordan, which had requested Baghdad locate five individuals it suspected were involved in the murder of U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley in October 2002] … was compelling. For this reason, the IIS officer was shocked when the Director of his division ordered Sayyem to be released. According to the Iraqi official, the Director of his division told him that Saddam Hussein ordered Sayyem’s release.[51]

Another captured IIS officer corroborated this story of Saddam ordering Sayyem’s release, suggesting it was an incident commonly known about within sections of the service.[52] Nor was this a one-off. Months earlier, another of the Zarqawi network, Samir Hijazi (Abu Hammam al-Shami or Faruq al-Suri), had been arrested by the IIS after spending four months in Iraq and let go quickly, though he was deported to Syria—where, doubtless quite by coincidence, Hijazi was just about to move anyway, as he had been given orders by Zarqawi to help set up the “ratlines” that brought the foreign fighters and homicide bombers into Iraq after the collapse of the regime. What the documentary and circumstantial evidence shows, in other words, is a high-level decision taken in the Saddam regime to abet the activities of Zarqawi and the other Al-Qaeda operatives on its territory, and that this—like all other sensitive decisions—was concealed from lower officials.

Al-Qaeda operative Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn (Abu Zubaydah) was captured in March 2002 and while he said that he did not know about Al-Qaeda’s relationship with Saddam’s Iraq, nor did he expect to—such a thing would be highly compartmentalised and above his paygrade. Abu Zubaydah did say that it was his understanding Zarqawi and some others in Al-Qaeda had “good contacts” with Saddam’s regime. Khaled Shaykh Muhammad (KSM), the operational planner of 9/11, likewise did not know at first-hand of Al-Qaeda’s connections to Saddam, but KSM had not even been a formal Al-Qaeda member and had a very limited role in the administration of the organisation: it would have been more surprising if KSM did know anything on this subject.[53]

The Iraqi Support for Terrorism document noted that the Saddam government was “in late 1990 [during the occupation of Kuwait] … training [more than 1,000] Iraqis at camps southeast of Baghdad to conduct terrorist attacks on the U.S. and other Coalition targets”. In January 1991, an IIS operative died when his explosive device detonated prematurely during an attempt to bomb the Thomas Jefferson Cultural Center in Manila, the Philippines, an episode remembered as “Operation DOGMEAT”. The same month, a bomb planted by the IIS at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, was discovered before it exploded. Saddam’s terrorist operations throughout the 1990s included numerous assassinations of dissidents: Mu’ayyid al-Janabi, an Iraqi nuclear scientist who had fled to Jordan, was struck down in Amman in 1992; Iraqi dissident Shaykh Talib al-Suhayl, was murdered in Lebanon in April 1994; and several Iraqi dissidents, some of them in London, are poisoned with thallium in 1995, and two of them die. These assassinations continued up to 2003. The IIS surveilled the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty station in Prague beginning in 1998, with plans to blow it up. Especially in late 2002, the Saddam regime was detected engaging in plans to attack U.S. diplomatic facilities across Europe and the Middle East, specifically Turkey and Azerbaijan; such operations were carried out in Bahrain and another state during Operation DESERT STORM.[54]

Iraqi Support for Terrorism showed that Saddam’s support for Palestinian terrorist groups was extensive, though he was slightly disappointed in Muhammad Zaydan (Abu Abbas), the murderer of the wheelchair-bound elderly American Jew Leon Klinghoffer aboard the Achille Lauro who had been an honoured guest in Ba’thi Iraq since 1985, and Zaydan’s Palestinian Liberation Front (PLF), which failed to carry out any successful attacks against the U.S. during the 1990-91 round of the Gulf War. This did not stop the funding to the PLF. Sabri al-Banna (Abu Nidal) continued to live on Iraqi state largesse, until he shot himself three times on 16 August 2002. Saddam maintained his own Palestinian faction, the Arab Liberation Front (ALF), which was a member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). Saddam had good relations with HAMAS. Saddam provided funding for HAMAS’ suicide bombers and HAMAS returned the favour by offering to put those suicide bombers at Saddam’s disposal during the invasion.[55] But Saddam’s effort to unite HAMAS with the Syrian-controlled Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command (PFLP-GC) and the Iranian-controlled Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), as well as Hizballah, the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) unit in Lebanon, largely failed, albeit the Iranians on their own initiative (using Hizballah and PIJ) coordinated closely with PLO chief Yasser Arafat in the “Second Intifada”. Saddam’s state media relentlessly supported the “martyrdom” operations and other terrorism by Islamists against Israel.[56]

Hizballah, i.e. Iran, was likely reticent about cooperating with Saddam in terrorist activities not only because of the history of animosity, but because, as Iraqi Support for Terrorism explains, “by far the most active of Iraq’s terrorist partners” was the Mojahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), a Marxist-Islamist cult that had been trained by the PLO (and Libya’s Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi) to act as the terrorist wing of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution against the Shah in 1978-79, and subsequently fell afoul of the Imam in the post-revolutionary power struggles. MEK had fought on Saddam’s side of the Iran-Iraq War and throughout the 1990s launched periodic attacks into Iran.[57] (MEK was effectively the Iraqi mirror image of the Badr Corps. Badr was a unit constructed by Iran from Iraqis who went over to the Iranian side during the war and then waged a shadow war against Saddam in the 1990s. The difference was that the Iranians were more effective: with their proper revolutionary template to indoctrinate and integrate, Badr became the IRGC, just as happened with Hizballah.)

The CIA had assessed that in the event of a U.S. invasion, Saddam was likely to initiate terrorism against the U.S., using his own intelligence apparatus and possibly in collusion with Al-Qaeda. The one consensual exception to the CIA’s non-cooperation theory was that Saddam might turn to Al-Qaeda if faced with an existential threat. One of the IIS officers who said Saddam had ordered the release of Sayyem claimed this was indirect cooperation with Al-Qaeda. Saddam released Sayyem because he “would participate in striking U.S. forces when they entered Iraq”, the IIS officer said.[58] This was around the time Bin Laden had publicly let it be known: “There is no harm … if the Muslims’ [i.e., jihadists’] interests coincide with those of the socialists [i.e., Ba’thists] in fighting the Crusaders”.[59] On 22 March 2003, two IIS officers or agents (it’s unclear) placed an incendiary device in a bin outside the Hyatt Hotel in Amman, which they had been told to burn down, and on 24 March an IIS officer detonated an IED in a bin outside the U.S. Naval Support Activity in Bahrain. These DOGMEAT-level attempts were either the last desperate flailings of determined loyalists, or IIS officers hedging their bets, by formally obeying the orders that had been issued from Baghdad for terrorism against the U.S. and their allies, but not doing anything so serious it would make them unforgiveables to the Americans. Most of the IIS stations knew which way things would go and disobeyed the orders outright.[60]

For our purposes, the main issue at hand is how these two documents—Iraq and Al-Qa’ida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship and Iraqi Support for Terrorism—were put together, particularly whether their contents resulted from inappropriate pressure on the CIA from policy officials in the Bush administrations. As an incidental takeaway, however, looking at this mere summary of the intelligence on Saddam’s relationship to international terrorist groups, including Al-Qaeda, will hopefully eliminate any lingering illusions anyone has that the only “evidence” ever adduced for a Saddam-Qaeda connection was the false testimony tortured out of Ali al-Fakheri (Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi).[61]

THE CIA AND COLIN POWELL’S UNITED NATIONS SPEECH

On 5 February 2003, a week before Tenet’s Congressional testimony that touched on the Saddam-Qaeda issue, the Bush administration staged its most prominent pre-invasion messaging event: Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations, modelled on the speech by President John F. Kennedy’s United Nations ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, on 25 October 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, when he demonstrated incontrovertibly that the Soviet Union was trying to station nuclear weapons on the island. What is important for our purposes is that Powell’s speech underlines Tenet’s centrality over Iraq, to the decision-making process and the administration’s messaging.[62] Powell created the speech personally, working in closed-door conference with Tenet, who sat visibly behind Powell during the speech to emphasise that this presentation was approved by the CIA. Powell’s specific intent was to exclude the “neoconservatives”—at the Pentagon and in the Vice President’s office—from the process.

___________________________________________

The road to Powell’s speech began in August 2002. Early in that month, the refinement of the Pentagon’s war plan for an invasion of Iraq intensified. The revision process had begun in December 2001 when the on-file war plan, dubbed “Desert Storm on Steroids”, was deemed unsatisfactory: inter alia, it had been created when precision-guided missiles barely existed.[63] In a meeting at this time, Tenet was asked how Iraqis would react, and answered unequivocally: “Most Iraqis will rejoice when Saddam is gone”,[64] one of his better predictions. In the middle of the month—on the very day OUSD(P) went to Langley—Bush Senior’s National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal arguing against Saddam’s forcible deposition, partly, it might be noted, because Saddam would use WMD against U.S. and Allied troops during an invasion. (This was a common “anti-war” talking point.) Scowcroft’s piece was an important moment in the administration’s internal and public deliberations.[65] At the end of the month, President Bush decided to utilise the United Nations as the diplomatic vehicle for dealing with the Saddam threat.[66]

The U.N. track for dealing with Iraq was begun by President Bush taking the issue before the General Assembly in his 12 September 2002 speech. To give the U.N. track even a chance of working this time, the U.S. and Allied states began a military build-up in the Gulf, a visible threat of the alternative if Saddam rejected diplomatic options again.[67] A demonstration of the futility of an inspection process not backed by a credible threat of force was soon furnished by North Korea. In December 2002, soon after a North Korean ship carrying Scud missiles likely bound for Saddam’s Iraq was intercepted of the coast of Yemen, Kim Jong-Il—under no military threat from the U.S., having benefited greatly, in economic and political terms, from the easing of sanctions and other methods of isolation as part of the “Sunshine Policy” of South Korean President Kim Dae-jung—expelled the U.N. inspectors and restarted Pyongyang’s plutonium reactors. It is likely North Korea’s regime had one or two nuclear weapons by mid-2001, if not before,[68] and by late 2003 nobody was in any doubt Pyongyang possessed this capacity. The Kim regime announced it possessed nuclear weapons in February 2005 and conducted its first test in October 2006.

There had been great wariness in the administration about making the United Nations the “main diplomatic arena” over Iraq. The political problems were self-evident. The U.N. had been hostile territory for the West, the U.S. above all, for decades. Among the reasons for this was an in-built majority of lawless governments. This was important in the Iraq case since it made the U.N. unwilling to deal seriously with state-sponsored terrorism and grave human rights abuses: establishing a precedent that such activities carry severe costs was a direct threat to many U.N. member states. The only aspect of Saddam’s criminality the U.N. would touch was the WMDs, which would have a predictable distorting effect on the public messaging by concentrating it on one issue in a far broader threat picture that concerned the United States. This was not just a messaging issue of reducing the entire catalogue of strategic threats Saddam posed in the public mind down to technicalities about inspections. The U.N.’s only answer to the problem of Saddam’s defiance on WMDs was to restart an inspection process that had proven flagrantly ineffective. The worry—and on Saddam’s record it was a valid one—was that Saddam would manipulate any U.N.-led process to appear cooperative enough over inspections that it made U.S.-led action to actually disarm him politically impossible.[69]

Returning to the U.N. was also unnecessary in legal terms. Domestically, there was the then-recent precedent of President Bill Clinton intervening in Bosnia (1995) and Kosovo (1999) without even a Congressional AUMF, never mind any approval from the U.N., bringing down Slobodan Milošević’s regime in Serbia by the latter action. The Iraq Liberation Act (1998) had already made it official U.S. policy to remove Saddam and the kinetic war had continued every day since 1991 by enforcing the no-fly zones, interspersed with escalations like the June 1993 airstrikes after Saddam tried to murder Bush Senior and Operation DESERT FOX in December 1998 after Saddam threw out the inspectors. The addition of the bipartisan AUMF in October 2002 was much more about getting Congress politically on-the-record in its support of the invasion, not a legal necessity. In “international law” terms, Saddam’s defiance of the ceasefire resolution (UNSCR 687) was all that was needed.[70]

For these reasons, many U.S. officials, the Vice President and Rumsfeld representing the Pentagon most prominently, were sceptical of the value of re-engaging with the United Nations.[71] The State Department under Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, took a different view, and it was their political arguments that carried the day. Though Powell seemed at times to essentially accept the U.N. position that getting the inspectors back into Iraq was the sum total of U.S. policy, there were more serious argument put forth for getting the U.N. involved.[72] Probably the single most persuasive argument Powell had for going the U.N. route was that it was necessary for the sake of public opinion in allied states. Australian Prime Minister John Howard and British Prime Minister Tony Blair—leaders of countries prepared to commit troops to the invasion itself—both told President Bush going to the U.N. was vital for their domestic positions. But Powell did not merely support the position of U.S. allies. Powell was “more passionate” and animated in favour of returning to the U.N. than on any other pre-invasion subject, according to the President. Powell began using his “Pottery Barn Rule” (“you break it, you own it”) and encouraged the President to seek as much support as possible from the rest of the world to get their buy-in for the reconstruction of Iraq.[73]

The U.S. and Britain were able to secure U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 on 8 November 2002, offering Saddam’s Iraq a “final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations” or face “serious consequences”. The inspectors returned to Iraq on 27 November and “Saddam continued to hinder the inspectors and sow confusion about Iraq’s WMD programs”.[74] The inevitable confirmation of Saddam’s refusal to comply soon arrived, on 7 December 2002, when Saddam handed over the inventory of his WMD, as requested by 1441. Not even Saddam’s attempt to bury the inspectors in 12,000 pages could disguise that the declaration was blatantly non-compliant, a rehashing of previous declarations that had been demonstrated to be incomplete and fabricated.[75] The whole purpose of requesting the declaration was to provide an “early test” of whether Saddam was willing to comply with the U.N. disarmament resolutions, precisely to avoid being sucked into another endless diplomatic circus.

The U.S. hope was that using the U.N. to demonstrate, one more time, Iraq could not be certified as disarmed while Saddam remained in power, would get more European states on-board for the task of removing him. Those hopes were to be bitterly disappointed. The states of “Old Europe”, as they so resented being called, were quite willing to extend a game that had already lasted twelve years.[76] France and Germany ceased their dissimulation in January 2003 and said openly that Saddam’s “material breach” of 1441 (the seventeenth UNSCR on WMD that Saddam had flouted) was a matter of indifference to them: under no conditions would they join in, or even assent to, the use of force to disarm Saddam. The French veto—bought and paid for from Baghdad—would be used to give Saddam an unlimited lease on life. Nonetheless, a debacle ensued, driven by Blair and supported by Powell, over trying to get a “second resolution” explicitly authorising force to secure Iraq’s disarmament.

It is likely that Saddam’s defiance of UNSCR 1441, with the false declaration, was what convinced President Bush there was no alternative to the invasion, a conclusion reached around 18 December 2002, though the actual decision was taken later.[77] This is crucial context for the presentation given at the White House by Tenet’s deputy John McLaughlin on the CIA’s evidence about Saddam’s WMD on 21 December 2002. The President was beginning to focus on the need to explain to the American (and global) public why the invasion was necessary. It is easy to sneer at this as “selling” the war and to be conspiratorial about a “propaganda campaign” to “deceive” people, but the fact is, as the late Fouad Ajami noted, “Wars can’t be waged in stealth, and making the moral case for them is an obligation incumbent on the leaders who launch them.” Democratic governments cannot take their countries to war without explanation and some measure of popular consent.[78]

Notably, too, even at this late stage President Bush—so far from being willing to say anything to “get his war”, as later critics would have it—wanted assurances about the substance of the CIA presentation.[79] The President asked Tenet directly, “Just how good is our case on Iraq WMD?” Tenet replied: “It’s a slam dunk, Mr. President. It’s a slam dunk.”[80] Tenet, who later took such umbrage at this remark becoming public, nonetheless documents the caution and scepticism of the President’s senior advisers during this process in December 2002 and January 2003. As with all of the valuable information in Tenet’s memoir, this is given unintentionally. Tenet is trying to construct a narrative that shows White House officials as both clueless imbeciles (such as National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice asking how the CIA determines the difference between a “high confidence” and “low confidence” assessment) and determined warmongers (Hadley browbeating the Agency to come up with better information on WMDs), but what Tenet succeeds in showing is officials cognisant of the weight of the responsibility in taking a country to war who are acting as diligent intelligence “customers” by asking probing questions.[81]

Regardless, all sides agree that nobody was very impressed with McLaughlin’s presentation stylistically—described as “dry” and “academic” by the Vice President—and the President wanted a better presentation, having in mind something like a closing argument at a trial, thus he asked lawyers used to working with juries to shape the CIA material into something more intelligible to the average member of the public.[82] The task was given to Hadley and Libby, who coordinated with a CIA officer seconded to the National Security Council (NSC) to produce a briefing document that was in due course forwarded to Powell, whom it was decided shortly after Christmas would make the presentation.[83]

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Hadley and Libby gathered material covering all aspects of the Saddam threat. The “neoconservatives”—in this context meaning essentially the Pentagon policy officials and the Vice President’s staff—thought it was always important to communicate the totality of the Saddam danger, and especially so in Powell’s speech, which they knew was a major communications event, not only to Americans but the whole world. These dangers were summarised by Feith as “WMD and the three T’s”—terrorism, threats to neighbouring states, and tyranny—and the “neocons” argued for being even-handed as between them.[84] The reason was simple: the administration had come to its conclusion after 9/11 that continued coexistence with Saddam was impossible because of a risk-assessment based on this whole threat-picture. It was, therefore, the most honest option in explaining U.S. government policy to keep the entire range of threats Saddam posed before the American people.

It goes without saying that there were public-relations considerations in this: in any modern democracy, messaging considerations are of strategic importance, and this is infinitely truer in the lone superpower that underpins the world order. The Pentagon’s “Parade of Horribles” memo, finalised on 15 October 2002, anticipated what might go wrong with an invasion of Iraq to think through strategies of prevention or mitigation. The document, a far stronger statement of the risks of an invasion—and therefore ammunition for those who opposed it—than anything produced by the State Department, contained a list of twenty or so possible disasters, from sectarian violence to regional destabilisation, and the possibility that WMD stockpiles would not be found.[85] The Pentagon officials did not view such an eventuality as materially altering the risk-assessment about Saddam, but they understood the political cost of such an eventuality. The way to mitigate this, they believed, was, again, essentially to be honest: to ensure that the WMD threat from Saddam was kept in context. In practical terms, this meant Saddam’s WMD stockpiles—much less important than the programs anyway—should be spoken of as one part of one of the dangers on an extensive list that Saddam posed.[86]

The constant advice of the “neoconservatives” not to emphasise one part of the indictment against Saddam (i.e., the WMDs) to the exclusion of others, and not to rely on specific intelligence about which there was uncertainty, was relayed directly to Powell in January 2003.[87] The “neocons” thought there was no need to rely on classified intelligence reports to explain the Saddam menace. The open historical record sufficed to explain the administration’s conclusion that Saddam was too grave a threat to leave in place in a post-9/11 world. The case on the WMDs could simply have rested on what was public: Saddam’s demonstrated willingness to use WMD, his record of concealment (it had taken the Kamel defection four years after 1991 to wring an admission just about the biological WMDs from Saddam, for example), and his blatant defiance of all attempts to get him to come clean and give them up. The record of Saddam’s support for terrorism, threats to Iraq’s neighbours, and the hideous mistreatment of the Iraqi population was, likewise, not dependent on information that could be falsified by conditions on the ground after an invasion.

As was later reported in a Vanity Fair article that Powell clearly closely coordinated in the production of, Powell rejected the broader “neocon” perspective. Handed the Hadley-Libby briefing notes, running to nearly fifty pages, on 29 January 2003, Powell promptly threw them in the bin. As the article explains—channelling Powell’s views—the Secretary of State mistrusted the White House dossier because Powell suspected Iraqi opposition leader Ahmad Chalabi had been involved in its production, and if there was any one guiding principle to the policy preferences of the State/CIA faction it was the pursuit of their vendetta against Chalabi. Powell was also suspicious that Cheney had been too involved, and that material had been fed to the Vice President by the non-existent “separate intelligence unit” in the Pentagon. As Vanity Fair tells it—and other administration officials back up the account[88]—Powell “started from scratch”. Cutting out the Defense Department and the White House, except for some communication with Condoleezza Rice, Powell isolated himself for several days and nights at Langley, working with Tenet to ensure, as Powell’s Vanity Fair stenographers put it, his speech included “only solid information that could be verified”. Interestingly, the authors report that Tenet had a last-minute worry that Powell had “cut too much” about Saddam’s involvement with international terrorism.

Amusingly, the Vanity Fair article, after documenting how the U.N. address was put together, then tries to return to blaming the “neoconservatives” for the mistakes in Powell’s presentation. The reality is that the process leading to Powell’s U.N. speech is the single most devastating fact to narrative that a “neocon cabal” was responsible for the invasion of Iraq.[89] It was precisely the hated “neoconservatives”, people like Wolfowitz and Feith from the Pentagon and Libby from the Vice President’s office, whom Powell ensured had no input whatsoever to his speech. The U.N. presentation was exclusively the work of Powell and CIA Director Tenet,[90] who, as one observer put it, sat directly behind Powell, in shot of the cameras, “beaming like an overfed cat”.[91]

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Powell’s U.N. speech, comprising 10,500 words and lasting seventy-five minutes, overwhelmingly focused on the WMD issue. The first quarter-hour focused on the continued deception of the inspectors. Powell then spent over-twenty minutes on biological WMD, eleven minutes on chemical WMD, and six-and-a-half minutes on the nuclear-weapons program. Five minutes was given to missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones, the potential delivery mechanisms for WMD. Only in the last fifth of the speech—the last fifteen minutes—did Powell talk about the non-WMD threats from Saddam. Just over thirteen minutes and about 1,800 words (17%) was devoted to Saddam’s support for terrorism, including a decade of connections with Al-Qaeda, harbouring Zarqawi and his Al-Qaeda associates in Baghdad even as Powell spoke, and sponsoring the suicide bombers against Israel. A perfunctory section of under-300 words (2.5%), lasting barely two minutes, was given to Saddam’s gross abuses of human rights and menacing his neighbours. Powell then gave a two-minute summing up.

The problems with the method Powell had chosen for the speech—flashy and reliant on intelligence sources, rather than incontestable public information—began right away. That Saddam was continuing to defy the inspectors was hardly debateable; had the tyrant had any other intention, the December declaration would not have been the overt tissue of lies that it was. (As there was no way of knowing without the invasion, Saddam was determined that he not be seen as stripped of his WMD in order to deter Iran. Saddam was so delusional by the end, he did not see an existential danger coming from the U.S., which is why he was unconcerned that his information operation promoting the idea he did have WMD had also convinced Washington.) Powell said the deception effort was run by Saddam himself through a body called “the Higher Committee for Monitoring the Inspections Teams”, and who is to doubt it: decisions of such sensitivity were not left to anyone else. Where the problem came in was Powell’s attempt to short-cut the need for explanation by playing intercepted Iraqi regime communications, and announcing that they showed officials talking about hiding banned material from the inspectors. Except it seems they did not, or not quite. Powell had stretched even the loosest translation beyond what was accurate.

In microcosm, this opening volley displayed the trouble with the whole speech. It was quite correct to make the worst assumptions of Saddam Husayn’s regime—who could do anything else by 2003? Powell could have stuck with concrete facts in the public domain and explained the way the administration had weighed the risks in the areas of uncertainty, given Saddam’s record and his behaviour down to the present, to arrive at its verdict that Saddam was too great a threat in a post-9/11 world to be allowed to remain in power. After all, those trying to save Saddam—France, Russia, Germany, China—also believed he had WMDs,[92] and the uncertainty was itself a threat; whatever else an invasion would do, it would put an end to that. To put it simply, in his speech Powell was broadly correct and specifically wrong. He succumbed to what one might call “the slam dunk temptation”: trying to circumvent the need to make the argument for regime-change by using dramatic intelligence displays that made claims with a certainty not warranted by the actual evidence. It was this approach that led Powell astray in the WMD section of the speech.

Powell did say that Saddam had “never accounted” for the biological and chemical weapons he had been forced to admit he once possessed, which was entirely true. Powell emphasised that the U.N. Security Council had firmly put the burden of proof on Saddam to disclose where these weapons had gone: “Inspectors are inspectors; they are not detectives.” Powell did not leave it there, however: he went further, making a series of specific claims—about biological WMD being weaponised on missiles, the presence of “decontamination vehicle[s]” that proved chemical WMD stores at certain sites, and so on—that the State Department’s own intelligence agency, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), had told him ahead of time were dubious.

On the nuclear issue, Powell was correct to say that Saddam had been “busy trying to maintain” the “key parts of his nuclear program” [emphasis added] and “possesses two out of the three key components needed to build a nuclear bomb”, the “cadre of nuclear scientists with the expertise”—celebrated regularly in state media as “nuclear mujahideen”—and “a bomb design”. Powell was correct again in saying that since 1998 Saddam had engaged in “elicit procurement efforts” to acquire “the third and last component, sufficient fissile material”, so he could “reconstitute his nuclear program” [emphasis added]. Powell muddied this presentation, though, by arguing that the nuclear program was in a more active condition than the evidence bore out, bringing up the infamous three-feet-long aluminium tubes, a favourite prop of Tenet’s when arguing within the administration that he was sure Saddam was engaged in enriching uranium.[93]

The reality of what would be discovered about Saddam’s WMDs after the invasion was alarming enough. Saddam had kept the biological and chemical WMD programs fully functional, with the network of research facilities operational, the scientific staff maintained in their specialised teams, and the “dual-use” production facilities able to rapidly create vast quantities of these weapons. The cultures and evidence of testing for BWMD were found, even after the regime’s final sweep to strip sensitive sites. Since CWMD, in particular, are not produced at scale except when they are going to be used—i.e., in a war situation—because they are volatile, difficult to store, and degrade quickly, to say that Saddam kept himself perpetually within weeks or at most months of mass-producing CWMD is as much as to say he had such weapons. (The Pentagon’s focus on rapidity in the war plan paid off in this respect, as it did in preventing the destruction of the oil wells.) Saddam evidently also maintained some of his stockpile of CWMD: sulphur mustard and other agents kept showing up in the hands of terrorist-insurgents, including the Islamic State movement, after the regime fell. The nuclear program was in a kind of stasis: again, the bureaucratic structure of the program, the teams of scientists, and facilities all remained, and the technological components and designs for centrifuges to enrich uranium—the “crown jewels” of a nuclear-weapons program—had been hidden in the private homes of at least two scientists, where the inspectors would never have found them. Since several scientists were murdered in a systematic campaign in the summer and autumn of 2003, intimidating those who remained alive to either keep quiet or flee the country, the full extent of what was held by whom will never be known. Powell had essentially said all of these things that were proven true in his presentation—but he had gone further with his specific claims, which did not hold up so well, and in doing so participated in disseminating the two major pre-war intelligence mistakes by the CIA (unsurprisingly, since he relied exclusively on the Agency): that Saddam had vast stockpiles of biological and chemical WMD, and an active nuclear-weapons program.

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It is tragic that Powell decided on the weighting for the U.N. presentation that he did—giving only “a little bit of time”, as he put it—to the terrorism issue because the fifteen-minute terrorism section of Powell’s speech holds up quite well.[94] The problems were that it was far briefer and last, indicating the lesser importance Powell assigned to it, and it was framed as part of the WMD threat. (“Our concern is not just about these elicit weapons. It’s the way that these elicit weapons can be connected to terrorists”, Powell said in opening the terrorism section). The result was that the terrorism section is essentially the opposite of the WMD section: the big-picture framing of the argument—around the possibility that Saddam might hand off WMD to terrorists—was less well-founded (at least at that moment and, of course, this was one of the things the invasion was to prevent), but the details were mostly accurate.

Powell began by saying, “Iraq today harbours a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi”, which was true, and his first data point on the danger this posed was: “When our coalition ousted the Taliban, the Zarqawi network helped establish another poison and explosive training centre camp, and this camp is located in north-eastern Iraq. … The network is teaching its operatives how to produce ricin and other poisons,” such as cyanide. Powell showed a satellite picture of the camp and (in)famously held up a test tube demonstrating the tiny amount of ricing that is lethal to humans.

To the extent that there are any doubts about what was happening at the camp that Powell referred to, the fault is entirely Powell’s. The facility, known to the CIA as the “Kurmal camp”—it was in the village of Sargat in Iraqi Kurdistan, near the town of Kurmal—had been detected by U.S. intelligence in early 2002, and soon Agency reporting began on the chemical weapons experiments underway there. Months before Powell’s speech, the Pentagon had developed options to eliminate the Sargat camp, including a ground raid by CIA operatives, U.S. Special Forces, and the Kurdish Peshmerga, which would have had heavier casualties but would have maximised the intelligence captured, or a barrage of cruise missiles, which would mean there was less intelligence gained but would at least put the camp out of commission and might have taken out some of Ansar al-Islam’s top leaders, who were believed to be present there. The Joint Chiefs, Rumsfeld, and—notably—Tenet had advocated this to the President several times throughout 2002 and each time the President had been persuaded by Powell and Condoleezza Rice that it was too risky: Saddam could react by attacking the Kurdish area, essentially forcing the U.S. into action early, and collapsing the diplomatic effort to build a coalition.[95] This was not unreasonable.

In February 2003, however, when Rumsfeld again raised the issue of a military strike on the Kurmal camp at the NSC meeting about Powell’s speech, the objection from Powell that it would “wipe out my briefing” and “We’re going to get Kurmal in a few weeks anyway”, was much less defensible. Rumsfeld’s ideal scenario at that point was to hit the camp just before Powell’s speech, since this would have meant either that Powell could take before the world cast-iron proof that Al-Qaeda operatives, with a network whose leadership was headquartered in Saddam’s capital, were testing chemical weapons on Iraqi territory, or it would have shown the CIA that something was seriously wrong with its intelligence streams, which would have given Powell the chance to redesign his speech so he was not so reliant on faulty information. Rumsfeld’s fallback option was to hit the camp during Powell’s speech, given that any activity at the camp was not going to continue once it was announced to the world that the U.S. was watching them.[96] It defies all logic to this day that Powell objected even to that.

In the course of events, the Sargat camp was struck with tomahawk cruise missiles on 30 March 2003: while Zarqawi was not present, as had initially been hoped, and much of the camp was demolished, the traces of deadly toxins were found there—the ricin and cyanide Powell had itemised, as well as botulinum. The CIA had probably relied too heavily in its pre-invasion assessments of Saddam-Qaeda cooperation on chemical and biological weapons on the interrogations of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi,[97] who did not even claim to have first-hand knowledge and whose testimony in toto was subsequently called into question, but even Tenet in his later memoir, which otherwise disclaims Saddam-Qaeda assessments as resulting from political pressure, acknowledges the reality at the Kurmal camp: “We had intelligence telling us that Zarqawi’s men had tested these poisons on animals and, in at least one case, on one of their own associates. They laughed about how well it worked. … There were solid reports from senior al-Qa’ida members that raised concerns about al-Qa’ida’s enduring interest in acquiring chemical and biological expertise from Iraq”.^[98] In-line with the administration’s catastrophic strategic messaging decision in the months after Saddam’s fall to avoid rehashing the argument about the invasion and to instead focus on the future (i.e., the development of Iraqi democracy), there was no attempt to publicise the fact that the U.S. discovered “an active WMD production facility run by terrorists in Iraq”.[99]

Powell ran through the strong suggestion that Saddam had “an agent in the most senior levels of … Ansar al-Islam”; the fact Zarqawi had been in Baghdad since May 2002 and been “operating freely in the capital for more than eight months”, able to move “people, money, and supplies into and throughout Iraq”; that “nearly two dozen extremists converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there” soon afterwards, despite “a friendly security service” (Jordan) having twice told Saddam where Zarqawi was; Zarqawi’s role in the Foley assassination; and the tentacles of the Zarqawi network that had spread into Europe, Russia, and Britain, bringing their plots for chemical attacks with them. Powell went on to say that nobody should be surprised about this because it “builds on … long experience with respect to ties between Iraq and Al-Qaeda”, to an understanding worked out between them when Bin Laden was in Sudan, which created “secret, high-level [Iraqi] intelligence service contacts with Al-Qaeda”. Powell then laid out some of the data points in the CIA’s Iraqi Support for Terrorism document, and added a few lines on Saddam’s backing for Palestinian terrorist groups, concluding: “Terrorism has been a tool used by Saddam for decades.”

Two things are notable from this.

First, a detail. In closing out the terrorism section, Powell took direct aim at the CIA’s non-cooperation theory, the reasoning behind it, and the related argument that the Saddam-Qaeda connections were insignificant: “Some believe, some claim these contacts do not amount to much. They say Saddam Husayn’s secular tyranny and Al-Qaeda’s religious tyranny do not mix. I am not comforted by this thought. Ambition and hatred are enough to bring Iraq and Al-Qaeda together”.

Second, a broader point. Minimised as the terrorism section was by Powell, in scope and placement in the speech, its contents were a radical change in tone for the Secretary of State. Six days after 9/11, Powell was asked about Wolfowitz’s statement that the U.S. response to the atrocity would not be limited to dealing with “a few criminals” but would be “a broad and sustained campaign against the terrorist networks and the states that support those terrorist networks”. Powell replied that “ending terrorism” was the mission and he hoped to “persuade” state sponsors of terrorism to cease such activities, brusquely adding he would “let Mr. Wolfowitz speak for himself”. It clearly was not Wolfowitz or the “neoconservatives” who had won Powell around to the Wolfowitz view eighteen months later. Powell had been impressed by the intelligence adduced by CIA and the open defiance of Saddam—the same evidence everybody else, in the Bush administration and in foreign governments, was working from.[100]

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Powell, then, was—excepting obviously the President, with whom ultimate responsibility rests[101]—the U.S. official most individually responsible for narrowing the public messaging before the invasion to focus so heavily on the WMD issue, initially by so strongly advocating for the U.S. to make the U.N. its primary diplomatic vehicle in dealing with Saddam’s Iraq, and then with his February 2003 speech, personally constructed in collaboration with the CIA.

The later attempt to blame the “neoconservatives” in the White House and the Pentagon for “misleading” Powell simply cannot be sustained by the historical record. The White House staffers had given Powell an extensive brief, based on CIA intelligence, that laid out the full scope of the threat, and Powell boasts of having thrown it away. The civilian officials at the Pentagon consistently and persistently, in general and specifically to Powell, argued for: (1) communicating at all times the whole range of threats that Saddam posed; and (2) not to base the public case on particulars of intelligence. The administration’s risk-assessment that Saddam was an intolerable threat rested on a publicly available history of dealing with the regime; there was no reason to try to spice this up with intelligence reports that were, by definition, speculative to one degree or another. The Pentagon had even directly raised the possibility that no WMD stockpiles would be found in the aftermath of the invasion: this did not substantively change their assessment of the Saddam threat, but it did argue against an exclusionary messaging focus on this aspect of the threat. In choosing to go with the dramatic and the particular, Powell ensured that his presentation was memorable—and that it was hostage to future discoveries.

Powell’s choice to stake the administration’s major messaging set-piece almost entirely on the WMD issue, relying on the CIA (which had basically no visibility within Iraq), did tremendous damage to the administration’s credibility, and Powell’s State Department and Tenet’s CIA were then embarrassed and determined to recover their bureaucratic turf by deflecting blame onto the Pentagon and the White House—doing further damage to an administration that had already suffered grievously from this inter-departmental warfare.

THE CIA’S MEDIA WAR

Part of the reason all these years later that the myth there was no connection between Saddam Husayn and Al-Qaeda persists is that the CIA never did truly surrender its theory that “secular Ba’thists” would not cooperate with jihadists, and continued to disseminate it through the media long after the Agency’s leadership had publicly admitted to being in error. It might be thought that the CIA publicly saying from the very top that the non-cooperation theory was nonsense would damage an information operation that relied on CIA authority to say the opposite. It might even be thought that the theory being disproven in full public view would complicate the task: during the invasion, virtually the only forces that resisted the Coalition were the Fedayeen Saddam and the foreign jihadists, and afterwards the regime remnants combined with the Zarqawists to form the insurgency. But it was not so.

On the contrary. By simply ignoring the facts on the ground in Iraq, the pre-war statements by Tenet and his deputies were used to add to the indictment against the Bush administration for misusing intelligence. The twin pillars of the CIA’s bureaucratic warfare on the terrorism aspect over Iraq were: (1) relentlessly promoting the discredited non-cooperation theory, and (2) accusing the administration, specifically the White House and the Pentagon, of improperly pressuring the Agency into producing pre-war finished products and public statements admitting there was substantial intelligence showing a relationship between Saddam and Al-Qaeda back to the early 1990s. In dealing with what was essentially a conspiracy theory put about by the CIA, designed to exculpate itself of responsibility for the pre-invasion threat assessments, the American media was largely credulous because this narrative was (and is) politically convenient to the anti-war cause that most journalists were (and are) wedded to.

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A caveat. Though the CIA did engage in leaks as part of its bureaucratic warfare—for example, of NSC deliberations over Afghanistan in late 2001, when the CIA was arguing against allying with the Northern Alliance[102]—much of what the CIA did cannot be described as “leaks”. “Leaks” suggests the disclosure of true (secret) information. What the Agency generally passed to the news media were anonymous quotes, which were more opinion or conjecture—the continuation of policy disputes by other means—and they frequently contained fabrications or distortions of reality so extreme that it came to the same thing.

The anonymous CIA “sources” and occasional named “former” officials, acting on instructions from the “Seventh Floor” (the Director), were able to be taken seriously in spreading this misinformation by journalists partly because, as mentioned, the unwary assume that intelligence officials have access to information denied to everyone else to back up what they say, and above all because the stories spun by the CIA were politically congenial to the reporters and the Left-leaning reading public.

When told stories about intelligence or the internal workings of the administration that cast the Iraq invasion in a negative light, most journalists simply printed the story. The fact that the main purpose of these stories was not the content but to be exculpatory to the Agency and/or damaging to its bureaucratic rivals did not matter to many journalists: they got what they wanted (an “exposé” and the appearance of deep “access”) and the CIA (and often the State Department) got what it wanted; it was (and remains) a profitable symbiosis.

Those genuinely seeking the truth would try to get the perspective of the other individuals and departments involved in the CIA’s tall tales, yet such perspectives rarely appeared in print because in the real world righteousness does not guarantee success. The problem was less that journalists did not offer the targets of the CIA’s disinformation a chance to respond, though that was an issue, but when the targets were at the Pentagon, particularly, officials were hamstrung by the fact they generally played by the rules and refused to discuss, even “on background”, deliberations and documents that were classified. As Feith lamented later, “Our failure—as targets—to heed the attack, to protest it, and to fight back, was a form of unilateral disarmament that did not serve the interests of the President, the country, or truth”.[103]

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This “leaks” problem had plagued the administration from early on, not just from the CIA and not just between departments:

In February 2002, the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), a Pentagon initiative to develop strategies to counter jihadist ideology and coordinate information-related work within the Pentagon, was closed down, having only been created four months earlier. The cause was a fabricated “leak” saying that the OSI was going to spread what we would now call “fake news” within America. This was at a moment when the OSI’s charter was still being drafted. The source of this attack on the OSI was the public affairs team at the Pentagon, which was displeased that the OSI—whose mission included information operations against the enemy, as well as (for example) providing laptops to children in Pakistan so they had access to information outside the madrassas—was going to provide not only policy advice to military officials for essentially battlefield deception operations, but would have some role in giving guidance to public affairs officers. The public-relations staff had a reasonable concern about damage to the credibility of their office if it was even perceived as having connections to the “psyops” team, but, instead of setting this internally, bureaucratic warfare was waged by passing a completely false story to the newspapers that caused tremendous damage to the credibility of the entire U.S. government.

The lessons of the OSI experience—the impact a single “leak” could have—were to be long-lasting.

To give a flavour of the form the CIA’s post-invasion media war took, here are some stories, chosen more or less at random, quoting usually anonymous CIA (and some State Department) officials:

The New York Times, 22 May 2003: “The Central Intelligence Agency has begun a review to try to determine whether the American intelligence community erred in its prewar assessments of Saddam Hussein’s government … The director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, has named a team of retired C.I.A. officers to scour the classified intelligence … on a range of issues related to Iraq, including those concerning Baghdad’s links to terrorism and unconventional weapons, officials said. The team plans to compare those reports with what has actually been discovered in Iraq since the war ended. The previously undisclosed C.I.A. review was initially prompted by a request last October from Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld to Mr. Tenet, a senior intelligence official said Monday. … One intelligence official said Mr. Rumsfeld had become irritated by disagreements within the intelligence community over the possible links between Iraq and the Qaeda network. Before the war, some Pentagon officials expressed frustration over what they perceived to be excessive caution on the part of C.I.A. analysts who found scant Qaeda-Iraqi connections, according to several intelligence officials. … [T]he review comes at a time of increasing tension between the Pentagon and C.I.A. over the handling of intelligence. Intelligence officials said that several C.I.A. analysts had quietly complained that senior Defense Department officials and other Bush administration officials sought to press them to produce reports that supported the administration’s positions on Iraq. In addition, several current and former C.I.A. officers who have been upset about what they believe has been the politicization of intelligence concerning Iraq were the first to disclose the existence of the new C.I.A. review. … Despite the friction over Iraq-related intelligence, officials said Monday that a special ombudsman inside the C.I.A.’s Directorate of Intelligence had received only one complaint from a C.I.A. analyst about the way in which specific intelligence on Iraq was handled. The ombudsman determined that the analyst’s complaint that the problem stemmed from the politicization of the intelligence on Iraq was unfounded. ‘I really think that the press reports of friction between the C.I.A. and Pentagon are overdrawn,’ said one senior intelligence official. ‘I can tell you that Tenet and Rumsfeld have a very good relationship.’ But other intelligence officials have said they believe that one source of the feuding between the C.I.A. and Pentagon was the creation last year of a special Pentagon unit that reviewed intelligence reports concerning Iraq. … In some cases, Pentagon officials came to believe that the C.I.A. was too dismissive of information provided by Iraqi exiles and other sources warning of the threat posed by reported Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda and by suspected efforts to develop illegal weapons.”

The Washington Post, 5 June 2003: “Vice President Cheney and his most senior aide made multiple trips 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, according to senior intelligence officials. … [T]he visits [in August 2002] by the vice president and his chief of staff, I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, ‘sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here,’ one senior agency official said yesterday. Other agency officials said they were not influenced by the visits from the vice president’s office, and some said they welcomed them. … While visits to CIA headquarters by a vice president are not unprecedented, they are unusual, according to intelligence officials. … A spokeswoman for Cheney would not discuss the matter yesterday. … In a signal of administration concern over the controversy, two senior Pentagon officials yesterday held a news conference to challenge allegations that they pressured the CIA or other agencies to slant intelligence for political reasons. ‘I know of no pressure,’ said Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary for policy. ‘I know of nobody who pressured anybody.’ … Former and current intelligence officials said they felt a continual drumbeat, not only from Cheney and Libby, but also from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Feith, and less so from CIA Director George J. Tenet, to find information or write reports in a way that would help the administration make the case that going into Iraq was urgent. ‘They were the browbeaters,’ said a former defense intelligence official who attended some of the meetings in which Wolfowitz and others pressed for a different approach to the assessments they were receiving. ‘In interagency meetings,’ he said, ‘Wolfowitz treated the analysts’ work with contempt’.”

The New York Times, 9 June 2003: “Several officials said [Abu] Zubaydah’s debriefing report was circulated by the C.I.A. within the American intelligence community last year, but his statements were not included in public discussions by administration officials about the evidence concerning Iraq-Qaeda ties. Those officials said the statements by Mr. Zubaydah and [KSM] were examples of the type of intelligence reports that ran counter to the administration’s public case. ‘I remember reading the Abu Zubaydah debriefing last year, while the administration was talking about all of these other reports, and thinking that they were only putting out what they wanted,’ one official said. … ‘This gets to the serious question of to what extent did they try to align the facts with the conclusions that they wanted,’ an intelligence official said. ‘Things pointing in one direction were given a lot of weight, and other things were discounted’.”

The Associated Press, 13 July 2003: “ … another of [President Bush’s] prewar assertions is coming under fire: the alleged link between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaeda. … Critics attacked those assertions from the beginning for being counter to the ideologies of Saddam and al-Qaeda and short on corroborating evidence. Now, two former Bush administration intelligence officials say the evidence linking Saddam to the group responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was never more than sketchy at best. ‘There was no significant pattern of cooperation between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist operation,’ former State Department intelligence official Greg Thielmann said this week. Intelligence agencies agreed on the ‘lack of a meaningful connection to al-Qaeda’ and said so to the White House and Congress, said Thielmann, who left State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research last September. Another former Bush administration intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, agreed there was no clear link between Saddam and al-Qaeda. ‘The relationships that were plotted were episodic, not continuous,’ the former official said.”

The Boston Globe, 3 August 2003: “The link between Hussein and Al Qaeda was a component of Bush’s larger assertion that Hussein was an imminent threat to the United States—that ‘secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists.’ But a review of the White House’s statements and interviews with current and former intelligence officials indicate that the assertion was extrapolated from nuggets of intelligence, some tantalizing but unproven, some subsequently disproved, and some considered suspect even at the time the administration was making its case for war. … A former intelligence official in the Bush administration told the Globe the CIA obtained evidence soon after the Czech report [about Mohamed Atta’s alleged meeting with an IIS officer] that the Iraqi agent was elsewhere at the time of the purported meeting. ‘The CIA had proof that Iraqi guy was not in Prague at the time,’ said the official, who asked not to be named. ‘The mystery here is why did the CIA allow that story to live when it could disprove it with hard information.’ … [T]wo senior intelligence officials who asked that their names not be used said they were never convinced that Hussein knew Zarqawi’s whereabouts, noting that some stretches of Iraq’s borders are notoriously porous. And they said other countries’ intelligence agencies have questioned the extent of the link between Zarqawi and Al Qaeda, suggesting he is an Al Qaeda associate but not a member.”

McClatchy, 2 March 2004: “Senior U.S. officials now say there never was any evidence that Saddam’s secular police state and Osama bin Laden’s Islamic terrorism network were in league. At most, there were occasional meetings. Moreover, the U.S. intelligence community never concluded that those meetings produced an operational relationship, American officials said. That verdict was in a secret report by the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence that was updated in January 2003, on the eve of the war. ‘We could find no provable connection between Saddam and al-Qaida,’ a senior U.S. official acknowledged. He and others spoke on condition of anonymity because the information involved is classified and could prove embarrassing to the White House. … U.S. officials say the evidence that Zarqawi had close operational ties to al-Qaida appears increasingly doubtful. … U.S. officials say the Zarqawi letter contained a plea for help that al-Qaida rebuffed. … ‘Were there meetings [between Al-Qaeda and Saddam regime officials]? Yes, of course there were meetings. But what resulted? Nothing,’ said one senior U.S. official. … The charges that Saddam was in league with bin Laden, and carefully worded hints that he might even have played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks, may have done more to marshal public and political support for a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq than the claims that Iraq still had chemical and biological weapons and was working to get nuclear ones. … Concluded the senior U.S. official: ‘Did Saddam tolerate terrorists? Yes. Was there any evidence Saddam was involved with 9/11? No’.”

The New York Times, 28 April 2004: “Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, a two-man intelligence team set up shop in a windowless, cipher-locked room at the Pentagon, searching for evidence of links between terrorist groups and host countries. … Their conclusions, delivered to senior Bush administration officials, connected Iraq and Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. … [T]here was little proof that Mr. Hussein was working on terror plots with Mr. bin Laden, a religious extremist who viewed the Baghdad regime as a corrupt, secular enemy. ‘The divides do matter,’ a senior C.I.A. official said. ‘But if you work hard enough in this nasty world, you can link just about anybody to anybody else.’ Another agency official summed up the Feith team’s work by saying, ‘Leave no dot unconnected’.”

The Washington Post, 10 February 2006: “The former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year has accused the Bush administration of ‘cherry-picking’ intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war … Paul R. Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, acknowledges the U.S. intelligence agencies’ mistakes in concluding that Hussein’s government possessed weapons of mass destruction. But he said those misjudgments did not drive the administration’s decision to invade. ‘Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war,’ Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Instead, he asserted, the administration ‘went to war without requesting—and evidently without being influenced by—any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq.’ ‘It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community’s own work was politicized,’ Pillar wrote. … It is … the first time that such a senior intelligence officer has so directly and publicly condemned the administration’s handling of intelligence.”

As you can see, most of the stories were based on the CIA “leaks”—that is, anonymous claims about intelligence and the interagency process designed to influence policy. This practice was identified by the bipartisan post-invasion Silberman-Robb Commission as one of the most damaging from the “intelligence community” to the public interest.[104] Indeed, the Commission found that “unauthorized leaks … are now beginning to rival espionage in frequency, scope, and cumulative damage”.[105] There can be no doubt these stories had the approval of the Seventh Floor, and where the quotes are attributed to “senior” intelligence officials this should be assumed to refer to Tenet’s deputy McLaughlin and others in Tenet’s office, if not Tenet himself.

The narrative points here, such as Vice President Cheney pressuring the CIA, will be familiar from the foregoing. Likewise, it will be noticed that some of these things relied on classification to misrepresent material we can now see, such as the January 2003 version of Iraqi Support for Terrorism. There are falsehoods that were blatant at the time, especially about Zarqawi’s relationship with Al-Qaeda and the letter Zarqawi sent to Bin Laden, and falsehoods that would have taken diligent work to untangle, notably about the PCTEG being portrayed as an intelligence cell at the Pentagon. Paul Pillar was one of the most fanatical devotees of the CIA’s Saddam-Qaeda non-cooperation theology and one of the most ardent practitioners of political warfare at the CIA, having engaged in it long before 2006: he tried to intervene against President Bush in the 2004 election, leading what had become by then a highly public and grossly unprofessional CIA insurrection, albeit one that had been underway for at least a year.[106] These things were all standard in the CIA’s (dis)information operation.

There is one issue that is a little more unusual: the claim the Bush administration tried to tie Saddam to 9/11. This showed up in Tenet’s memoir, where he says the administration “sought to create a connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks”.[107] This is among the falsehoods in the book. The only evidence Tenet offers is that people in the administration, immediately after 9/11, pushed for the CIA to chase down the report from the Czech Republic that Mohamed Atta, the lead death pilot, had met on 9 April 2001 in a Prague café with Ahmad Samir al-Ani, an IIS officer at the Iraqi Consulate who was expelled on 22 April after his abuse of his diplomatic cover became too flagrant. As Tenet documents, however, this was not a factional interest: “The White House, Department of Defense, and CIA were all intensely interested in the allegation”.[108] As well they might have been. Public mentions of the allegation were cautious and rare, and as the intelligence stacked up discrediting the initial report, administration messaging ceased mentioning it altogether. The reality is that the administration was always careful to draw a distinction between the Saddam threat and 9/11 itself.[109] The New York Times—not exactly a friend of the administration or the Iraq invasion—put it plainly: “The White House has never said Mr. Hussein was part of the Sept. 11 plot”. The Guardian echoed the point, when reporting in late 2003 on an apparent majority of Americans believing Saddam had a role in 9/11: “the Bush administration … say they have no evidence of this”.

The administration’s argument was that 9/11 had changed the threat calculus about Saddam, not that Saddam was responsible for 9/11. On 18 September 2003, President Bush personally made an unambiguous public statement—after an appearance by Vice President Cheney on “Meet the Press” where he had been somewhat clumsy on the point—that “we have had no evidence that Saddam Husayn was involved with September the 11th”. As Bush went on to explain: “What the Vice President said was that [Saddam] has been involved with Al-Qaeda and Al-Zarqawi, an Al-Qaeda operative, [who] was in Baghdad [before the invasion]. He’s the guy that ordered the killing of a U.S. diplomat,” referring to Laurence Foley, murdered in Amman in October 2002. The President added that Zarqawi was “still running loose, involved with the poisons network”. (On this point about Zarqawi and chemical weapons, the President has Tenet’s backing for once, as noted above.) President Bush concluded, “There’s no question that Saddam Husayn had Al-Qaeda ties” (which, if you have read this far, I hope you will agree is quite correct—no matter the argument about their extent and meaning). The difference the administration made between the Saddam-Qaeda relationship and the perpetrators of 9/11 was firm enough that in real-time few of the CIA’s information warriors tried to claim otherwise. The attempt in Tenet’s memoir is due to the throw-everything-at-the-wall nature of the enterprise.

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Probably the most damaging government leak in the anti-Bush information operation did not come directly from the CIA, though it was about the Agency and was thoroughly exploited by Langley in its scorched earth campaign against the White House, and it was a disclosure true information. The origin of the episode was the “sixteen words” in President Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union address: “The British government has learned that Saddam Husayn recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” The African country in question was Niger. In July 2003, in an op-ed in The New York Times, Joseph Wilson, a former State Department official, revealed that he had been sent to Niger to investigate the issue in February 2002 and found there was no “there” there. Days later, it was reported in The Washington Post that Wilson had been sent to Niger by his wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA analyst (something the couple later lied about: “She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip”, Wilson wrote in a memoir). It was claimed that Plame had been operating “under cover” and had been “outed” as retaliation by the Bush administration for exposing one of their “lies” that led to the Iraq invasion. Shortly thereafter, a Special Prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, was appointed, to investigate whether there had been a breach of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA), a 1982 law passed after Philip Agee—the first CIA defector to Moscow, essentially a pre-internet version of Edward Snowden—published lists of covert CIA officers operating around the world, leading to the murder of the CIA station chief in Greece, Richard Welch. Pandemonium ensued.

Thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars—in the middle of a war—were wasted on investigating a non-crime (Plame’s employment by the CIA was technically classified but she was not a covert operative, meaning the IIPA could not have been broken by definition); two journalists, Judith Miller (The New York Times) and Matthew Cooper (Time Magazine) were imprisoned for contempt when they would not reveal sources; and an absolutely demented attempt was made to prosecute Scooter Libby for obstruction of justice, false statements to the FBI, and perjury. What made the whole thing so crazy was that the leaker, Richard Armitage, Powell’s deputy and one of the most venomous political opponents of the President’s Iraq policy, was known to Powell before Fitzgerald was appointed, but because the Bush administration was “playing the case by the book” this was kept hidden from the White House, and the whole machinery of the Special Counsel was allowed to grind into action. Armitage had obviously not leaked Plame’s name to damage her on behalf of the White House. What’s more, the premise that anybody had should have been self-evident nonsense from the get-go: the Post column that began the Plame affair was written by Robert Novak, whose antagonism to the Iraq invasion and the “neoconservatives” was, like Armitage’s, a byword in Washington. This mutual hatred is what they had been speaking about, and Novak had mentioned Plame in passing in his column while lauding Wilson.

The Plame imbroglio, from the referral to check for a violation of the IIPA through the Libby prosecution, was extraordinarily strange and confusing—there was a radical disjuncture in the basics of what was even happening and why from participants and observers on the various sides—and this was because, though it took the form of a legal issue, the Plame affair was, in truth, a continuation of the political-bureaucratic feud within the administration continued by other means.[110] For one thing, a leak prosecution being pursued is extremely rare. In the decade before 2003, there had been literally countless leaks of classified intelligence and hundreds of referrals “to the Justice Department by the Intelligence Community … not a single indictment or prosecution resulted”.[111] Not one indictment! The plain reason for this is that most leaks of classified CIA intelligence are carried out on the instructions of the Seventh Floor.

What had happened in the Plame case was that, just for once, the public had been able to glimpse behind the classification wall that shields the CIA’s methods in arriving at its “findings”—and what was exposed was highly embarrassing. Two crucial, interrelated pillars of the CIA’s power are its ability to claim to be a neutral, apolitical body and to give the impression that it has solid but secret sources for the claims it makes—and the political positions it surreptitiously advances. The Agency’s handling of the Niger issue took an axe to the root of this self-presentation, demonstrating a quite bewildering level of incompetence in deputising for a mission of national importance a husband-and-wife duo who could be described as many things, but not neutral or apolitical.[112] The sense of danger to the CIA’s bureaucratic position, and the public prestige that assists same, was what motivated the rage in the Agency’s response, underlining the asymmetric advantages the CIA has in the Beltway conflict: the CIA’s anonymous “leaks” have to be responded to on the record, which is always far less effective,[113] and if anyone tries—or, as in this case, is even perceived as trying—to leak back at the Agency, it can have them prosecuted.

The public-legal farce of the Plame fiasco helped cover up the original matter: whether Saddam sought “yellowcake” uranium in Niger.

Wilson’s conduct in Niger did not even really rise to the level of incompetence: by his own account, he spent “eight days drinking sweet mint tea” and meeting with old contacts in Niger, who told him Saddam had never approached them about buying “yellowcake”, and as far as Wilson was concerned that closed the case.[114] Wilson had, among other things, missed a visit by Saddam’s top nuclear diplomat, Wissam al-Zahawie, to Niger in February 1999, immediately after the inspectors had been expelled from Iraq, and a “second contact between Iraq and Niger”, this one in the other direction, when “a Nigerien minister visited Baghdad around 2001”.[115] Niamey’s official position is that these meetings were about oil-rich Iraq trying to buy petroleum; there must even be people who believe this.

Added to Wilson’s duplicity about being sent on the mission at his wife’s recommendation, Wilson was found by a post-invasion Senate investigation to have lied when he told journalists he knew as fact that the CIA had sent his report to Vice President Cheney, thus the administration “knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie”, and Wilson lied about knowing the documents purportedly showing a Saddam-Niger sales agreement were flagrantly forged because “the dates were wrong and the names were wrong”.[116] There were forged documents produced about the Saddam-Niger connection, but they were only passed to the British and American governments eight months after Wilson’s involvement and might well have been part of a disinformation operation designed to discredit the initial reporting (or by somebody, probably at the Nigerien Embassy in Italy, on the make as the story gained traction in Western intelligence circles, or conceivably some mix of the two).

The British “Butler Review” (2004) was not light in its criticism of the Blair government’s handling of Iraq, but it nonetheless made plain that the British intelligence passed to the U.S. “indicating that [Al-Zahawie’s 1999] visit [to Niger] was for the purpose of acquiring uranium” had come from “several different sources” and “the intelligence was credible”.[117] While “the evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as opposed to having sought, uranium”, the Butler Review went on, this was irrelevant since “the British Government did not claim this” and “the forged documents [claiming an actual purchase] were not available to the British Government at the time its assessment was made, … so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it”.[118] In the same vein, the Senate concluded that having received the reports before the forgeries were produced, and based on the “other available intelligence”, “it was reasonable for [CIA] analysts to assess that Iraq may have been seeking uranium from Africa”.[119]

As on the Saddam-Qaeda question, most people now believe the “sixteen words” about Saddam seeking uranium in Niger were at best a mistake and probably a deliberate lie told by the Bush administration, over CIA objections, to justify the Iraq invasion. To that extent, the CIA—with a helping hand from some forgers in Italy and the Bush White House’s disastrous strategic messaging[120]—recorded another resounding success in its media war, even as it racked up yet another dismal failure in its nominal purpose as an intelligence agency.

THE FINDINGS OF THE POST-INVASION INVESTIGATIONS

While the substantive question of the Saddam-Qaeda relationship is a very interesting historical matter, and one I have written about before, that was not the purpose of this article. What has been examined here is the CIA’s performance as a foreign intelligence agency, and its political role, over Iraq. For our purposes, then, the reality of the Saddam-Qaeda relationship is significant insofar as it provides a window onto the practices of the CIA, and the distance between the “findings” that result from those practices and the truth. More central for us is the use the Agency made of the Saddam-Qaeda question as a political weapon in its campaign to exculpate itself for its failures as an intelligence agency and to deflect blame onto other parts of the government.

What was said in the CIA’s two major pre-invasion finished products about Saddam’s Al-Qaeda connections, Iraq and Al-Qa’ida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship and Iraqi Support for Terrorism, can be seen above. The most interesting thing for the purposes of this article is that one of these products was from before and one from after the Pentagon’s criticism of the CIA’s analytical methods: the legitimacy of that critique process is dealt with below.

There is a point where the substantive question matters for us. Take the SSCI in 2004: it examined “78 reports, from multiple sources”, documenting the Saddam regime’s training of terrorist operatives or actually dispatching them to carry out attacks, concluding that these reports were “accurately reflected in Iraqi Support for Terrorism” and “reasonably” assessed,[121] but contended this did not amount to “an established formal relationship”.[122] In 2006, the SSCI, while agreeing with the earlier findings that there had been contact between senior Saddam regime officials and Al-Qaeda,[123] even quoting Saddam as admitting in custody—when faced with “clear evidence”—that “the Iraqi government had previously met with bin Laden”, rather surprisingly takes Saddam at his word when he followed this up by significantly downplaying what these contacts meant in terms of a relationship. This in the same interview where Saddam said, “the United States was not Iraq’s enemy” and he “only opposed U.S. policies”, so would not harm its people.[124]

The takeaway here is that the question of a Saddam-Qaeda relationship, strictly speaking, is settled: there was one. It is a devastating blow to the guiding premise of much pre-invasion CIA analysis, which contended there could not be a relationship because “secular” Ba’thists and jihadists do not cooperate. The secondary arguments about how far the relationship went and where the participants wanted it to go are, in themselves, irrelevant to us, but it is highly instructive that the answers are murkier than they might be because the CIA’s tradecraft was so poor it never managed to infiltrate either side at a level that would give us clarity.[125]

Further confusion on these secondary questions—and even on the primary issue of whether there was a relationship—has been created, for analysts and the public, by the SSCI (and the CIA and the 9/11 Commission) introducing arbitrary qualifiers and thresholds for what constitutes “a relationship”. And the whole argument about the extent and intent of the Saddam-Qaeda relationship is polluted by political considerations over what people believe should have been done about it; many who oppose the invasion will minimise the danger posed by Saddam’s Al-Qaeda ties, and vice versa. This is needless, given how small a role the Saddam-Qaeda issue played in the decision to invade Iraq—it was one component of one part of the indictment against Saddam—and it played an even more minimal role in the messaging (for better or worse).

The most that can be hoped is for agreement on two points. First, as a historical matter, the claim that there were no connections between Saddam and Al-Qaeda cannot be sustained by the evidence. Second, the policy question of the proper response to the relationship is one with a range of answers—though a distinction should be made between individuals making a retrospective judgment, with the benefit of all we know now, and those writing the history of what happened and why, who need to take an imaginative leap to get back to the world as it appeared to policymakers in the shadow of 9/11.

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Laid out above are the public statements of CIA Director George Tenet on Saddam’s relationship with Al-Qaeda: his letter to the Senate in October 2002 and his in-person testimony in February 2003. Tenet and the CIA, in effect, sought to take these statements back, beginning in the latter months of 2003, claiming to have been pressured by senior policy officials to produce them. Tenet’s deputy, John McLaughlin, for instance, said in 2006: “We said at some point in the timeframe that we had no evidence linking Iraq to Al-Qaeda and to those attacks [9/11]” [emphasis added].

While no consensus resolution on the issue of the Saddam-Qaeda relationship per se might be possible, the issue of whether the CIA was improperly pressured by the White House, the Pentagon, or anyone else in the Bush administration over its analysis of the Saddam-Qaeda connection might be the most exhaustively examined issue surrounding the Iraq invasion, and the unanimous conclusion is that the Agency was not put under any such pressures. It is a testament to the CIA’s immense skill in Beltway warfare and media management that most people on the planet believe the opposite is true, given that the evidence on this matter is completely public and has been for fifteen years.

Let us begin on the allegations that policy officials in the Bush administration “politicised” intelligence and pressured the CIA into producing assessments on Saddam’s relationship with Al-Qaeda that would justify war by examining the process begun by Christina Shelton that led to the Pentagon presenting a critique of the CIA’s practices in the summer of 2002.

One of the Senate Select Committee of Investigation (SSCI) reports noted [emphasis added]:

Each of the analysts interviewed by Committee staff specified that they were aware of the OSD staffers’ presence at the August 20 meeting [with the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC), National Electronic Security Authority (NESA), National Security Agency (NSA), and DIA] … Each analyst, as well as the meeting’s chairman, indicated the OUSDP staffer “played by IC rules” in terms of their participation. In other words, each point that was raised was discussed, debated, and incorporated only if there was agreement around the table.[126]

More from the SSCI [emphasis added]:

Several of the allegations of pressure on Intelligence Community (IC) analysts involved repeated questioning. The Committee believes that IC analysts should expect difficult and repeated questions regarding threat information. …

A number of individuals … stated that Administration officials questioned analysts repeatedly on the potential for cooperation between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaida. Though these allegations appeared repeatedly in the press and in other public reporting on the lead-up to the war, no analyst questioned by the Committee stated that the questions were unreasonable, or that they were encouraged by the questioning to alter their conclusions regarding Iraq’s links to al-Qaida.

In some cases, those interviewed stated that the questions had forced them to go back and review the intelligence reporting, and that during this exercise they came across information they had overlooked in initial readings. The Committee found that this process—the policymakers probing questions—actually improved the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) products.[127]

A verbal complaint was made to the CIA’s Ombudsman for Politicization five days after Iraq and Al-Qa’ida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship was published in June 2002, which claimed that the Office of Terrorism Analysis (OTA) product was misleading because it did not make clear that its findings ran contrary to the views of the Office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia (NESA). SSCI looked into this and found that this was an inappropriate attempt to make an analytical dispute at the CIA into a legal matter:

Following the investigation, the Ombudsman concluded that the OTA analysis was not incorrect or flawed, and that it “did not compromise, politicize, and/or alter intelligence reporting”. The NESA has since stated that it agrees with the Ombudsman’s assessment … that complaints about the document reflected differences inherent in the operational exploitation of intelligence information versus traditional analysis employed by regional intelligence analysts.[128]

What the Ombudsman found during the investigation, however, was that while some CIA analysts did, indeed, resent the “constant questions” from the policy side on Saddam’s support for terrorism and felt this “was unreasonable and took away from their valuable analytic time”, he could find no evidence of misconduct from the policy side and the resentment on the intelligence side was far from universal:

Several of the policy support staff [who deliver CIA analysis to policymakers] … indicated that they thought the questioning was reasonable, and said that the CIA’s initial answers to the questions on Iraq’s links to al-Qaida seemed “reflexive, pat, and inadequate, with little sense of serious digging to examine all aspects of the issue”.

The Ombudsman … ask[ed] everyone he interviewed whether they felt pressured to take their analysis to a place they were not comfortable with, and that in every case the answer was an emphatic negative.[129]

The Committee gave as a specific example of a CIA product that had been improved by the process of tough questions from the policy side, Iraqi Support for Terrorism, a report that “made careful, measured assessments which did not overstate or mischaracterize the intelligence reporting upon which it was based”.[130]

In short, the Pentagon exercise—for which Shelton, Feith, and others have been vilified for nearly twenty years—worked precisely as it was supposed to, combing some of the CIA’s ideological and political biases out of the analytical process so the work the Agency produced was better.

Having reviewed the evidence on the interaction of policy and intelligence officials, the SSCI recorded on the WMD file [emphasis added]:

The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities.[131]

And on the terrorism file [emphasis added]:

The Committee found that none of the analysts or other people interviewed by the Committee said that they were pressured to change their conclusions related to Iraq’s links to terrorism. … All of the participants in the August 2002 coordination meeting on the September 2002 version of ‘Iraqi Support for Terrorism’ interviewed by the Committee agreed that while some changes were made to the paper as a result of the participations of two Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy staffers, their presence did not result in changes to their analytical judgments. [132]

The SSCI was emphatic on this point [emphasis added]:

The Committee was not presented with any evidence that intelligence analysts changed their judgments as a result of political pressure, altered or produced intelligence products to conform with Administration policy, or that anyone even attempted to coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to do so. When asked whether analysts were pressured in any way to alter their assessments or make their judgments conform with Administration policies, not a single analyst answered yes. Most analysts simply answered, “no” or “never”[.][133]

A senior DIA officer, who did believe that “some” people in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) had “a preconceived notion” about Saddam’s relationship with Al-Qaeda and even about a Saddamist hand in the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, had this to say:

[Y]ou certainly had to make sure your analysis was on target and that you were very precise in the words that you used. So, in many ways, they forced us to be better analysts because you couldn’t walk in and say something that was not well-grounded. That might be interpreted as pressure, but in some ways I thought they actually made us do our jobs better. I had many discussions with some of these folks in OSD about this issue and they thought I was wrong … but they never said, “Change your position”, or, “Don’t say this”. [134]

In February 2004, President Bush created an independent inquiry to look into the pre-invasion WMD intelligence co-chaired by Charles Robb, a Democratic Senator from Virginia, and Laurence Silberman, a conservative Circuit Court Judge. The “Silberman-Robb Commission”, in its final report in March 2005, took up the issue of intelligence “politicisation” and had this to say [emphasis added]:

The Commission has found no evidence of “politicization” of the Intelligence Community’s assessments concerning Iraq’s reported WMD programs. No analytical judgments were changed in response to political pressure to reach a particular conclusion. …

These analysts universally assert that in no instance did political pressure cause them to change any of their analytical judgments. Indeed, these analysts reiterated their strong belief in the validity and soundness of their prewar judgments at the time they were made. As a former Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research put it, “policymakers never once applied any pressure on coming up with the ‘right’ answer on Iraq.” Moreover, the CIA’s Ombudsman for Politicization conducted a formal inquiry in November 2003 into the possibility of “politicization” with respect to assessments of Iraqi WMD. That inquiry involved the (perceived) delay in CIA’s reassessment of its position on WMD in Iraq. The Ombudsman also found no evidence, based on numerous confidential interviews with the analysts involved, that political pressure had caused any analyst to change any judgments.

The Commission also found no evidence of “politicization” even under the broader definition used by the CIA’s Ombudsman for Politicization, which is not limited solely to the case in which a policymaker applies overt pressure on an analyst to change an assessment. The definition adopted by the CIA is broader, and includes any “unprofessional manipulation of information and judgments” by intelligence officers to please what those officers perceive to be policymakers’ preferences. … The Ombudsman noted that in his view, analysts on Iraq worked under more “pressure” than any other analysts in CIA’s history, in terms of their being required to produce so much, for so long, for such senior decisionmakers. But that circumstantial pressure did not cause analysts to alter or skew their judgments. We have found no evidence to dispute that conclusion.

There is also the issue of interaction between policymakers and other customers on the one hand and analysts on the other. According to some analysts, senior decisionmakers continually probed to assess the strength of the Intelligence Community’s analysis, but did not press for changes in the Intelligence Community’s analytical judgments. We conclude that good-faith efforts by intelligence consumers to understand the bases for analytic judgments, far from constituting “politicization,” are entirely legitimate. This is the case even if policymakers raise questions because they do not like the conclusions or are seeking evidence to support policy preferences. Those who must use intelligence are entitled to insist that they be fully informed as to both the evidence and the analysis. …

Furthermore, all of the Iraqi WMD analysts interviewed by the Commission staff stated that they reached their conclusions about Iraq’s pursuit of WMD independently of policymaker pressure, based on the evidence at hand. In fact, given the body of evidence available, many analysts have said that they could not see how they could have reached any other conclusions about Iraq’s WMD programs.[135]

The only place where pressure was placed on U.S. intelligence that might be called “political” was the time pressure to produce the October 2002 NIE. The request for this document was made on 9 September 2002, with instructions to have it ready in three weeks. Even here, however, while the quality of the document was surely affected—there were some editing issues that surely would not have happened if there had been more time—the “short time frame probably did not affect the overall judgments in the NIE”.[136]

These conclusions—that the policy side did not politicise intelligence, that there was not one example of improper pressure on an intelligence analyst over Iraq—should not really be surprising. As noted above, real-world “politicisation” of intelligence almost always comes from the intelligence side.

Take, for example, the issue of the Soviet global terrorism apparatus during the Cold War. This was one of the most closely guarded Soviet secrets, but it was visible in outline to any common-sense analyst who could read a newspaper and there was even extensive documentary evidence about how it worked available after Israel captured troves of Soviet documents in Lebanon in 1982. Yet the CIA persisted in denying any significant KGB hand behind international terrorism, shaping a lot of media and academic output right down to the end of the Soviet Empire, which treated the notion of Soviet support for terrorism as akin to a “conspiracy theory”. Once the Mitrokhin Archive was transferred to the West in 1992, the matter was settled: it was all the Soviets all the time. Why did the CIA behave this way on what was not really a very difficult call? Well, as Robert Gates, a former CIA Director (r. 1991-93), explained in 1987, while he was serving as Deputy Director at the Agency, the CIA did not like some of the senior officials in the Reagan administration who had made Soviet terrorism into a public issue:

The CIA’s capabilities have improved much in recent years, but they are still uneven in quality. And no matter how good CIA intelligence is, there will still be surprises or gaps. It is no surprise that few policymakers welcome CIA information or analysis that challenges the adequacy of their chosen policies or the accuracy of their pronouncements. … On the other hand, I concede that on more than a few occasions, policymakers have analyzed or forecast developments better than intelligence analysts.

And, truth be known, analysts have sometimes gone overboard to prove a policymaker wrong. When Secretary of State Alexander Haig asserted that the Soviets were behind international terrorism, intelligence analysts initially set out, not to address the issue in all its aspects, but rather to prove the secretary wrong—to prove simply that the Soviets do not orchestrate all international terrorism. But in so doing they went too far themselves and failed in early drafts to describe extensive and well-documented indirect Soviet support for terrorist groups and their sponsors.

Far from kowtowing to policymakers, there is sometimes a strong impulse on the part of intelligence officers to show that a policy or decision is misguided or wrong, to poke an analytical finger in the policy eye. Policymakers know this and understandably resent it.

Thus, the United States and the whole Free Bloc was prevented from a proper public debate and a chance to formulate policies to deal with a crucial security issue because the CIA was more interested in waging bureaucratic warfare than being an intelligence agency. And, again, this is far from being a one-off. This is the more usual pattern. Perhaps we are still too close to the Iraq invasion—emotions are still too raw and passions too inflamed—for a dispassionate assessment: historians and other scholars are human, too. Whatever the reason, when we eventually get to a time where the Iraq episode can be objectively written about, the headline conclusion will not be that Iraq was an outlier, but that the handling of intelligence over Iraq fits squarely within a trendline that stretches back decades.

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The CIA’s conduct in its pre-invasion assessments over the WMDs and the Saddam-Qaeda relationship were mirrored in the Agency’s analytical work about post-Saddam Iraq. The CIA made bold assertions about the conditions the U.S.-led Coalition would encounter in Iraq once Saddam was ousted, and was wrong with a breathtaking consistency. Guesswork would have produced a better batting average. The CIA said the Iraqi population would be hostile to “externals” (the Iraqis who had been forced into exile and now returned), and even more incredible was the CIA’s contention that Saddam’s military and police force would hold together, and that the police were well-trained professionals and regarded as such by the Iraqi population.[137] The CIA predicted that the Ba’th regime would play no further role in Iraq once Saddam was gone: “we expect the Ba’th party to collapse with the regime … [as it] lacks ideological coherence or organizational autonomy”.[138] And, of course, all along the way the CIA had maintained that mutual animosity between “secular” Ba’thists and the Bin Ladenists prevented cooperation.

The CIA’s “findings” to support its war against the “externals” had an obvious political point: to prevent Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress (INC) becoming major players in the New Iraq.[139] But many of the CIA’s other predictions were just rank incompetence, with catastrophic consequences: the reduced U.S. troop numbers deployed for the invasion were based partly on the expectation there would be Iraqi soldiers and policemen to assist post-war stabilisation, and there was not supposed to be a Ba’th Party left to run an insurgency, let alone a Ba’th Party that would combine with imported jihadists. The good-faith blindness of the Agency about the “new country” that had developed in Iraq as a result of Saddam’s Islamization policies, and the reason why there was insufficient hard data for anyone who suspected the truth to counter the CIA’s bad-faith analytical “findings”, were rooted in the same overarching fact: the CIA had almost no sources of intelligence inside Saddam’s Iraq, which, in fairness, was also true of DIA and even the NSA.[140]

From the SSCI [emphasis added]:

From 1991 to 1998, the IC relied too heavily on United Nations (UN) inspectors to collect information about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs and did not develop a sufficient unilateral HUMINT [human intelligence] collection effort targeting Iraq to supplement UN-collected information and to take its place upon the departure of the UN inspectors. …

Because the United States lacked an official presence inside Iraq, the Intelligence Community depended too heavily on defectors and foreign government services to obtain HUMINT information on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction activities. … Moreover, because the Intelligence Community did not have direct access to many of these sources, their credibility was difficult to assess and was often left to the foreign government service to judge. Intelligence Community HUMINT efforts against a closed society like Iraq prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom were hobbled by the Intelligence Community’s dependence on having an official U.S. presence in-country to mount clandestine HUMINT collection efforts.

When UN inspectors departed Iraq, the placement of HUMINT agents and the development of unilateral sources inside Iraq were not top priorities for the Intelligence Community. The Intelligence Community did not have a single HUMINT source collecting against Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs in Iraq after 1998. The Intelligence Community appears to have decided that the difficulty and risks inherent in developing sources or inserting operations officers into Iraq outweighed the potential benefits. The Committee found no evidence that a lack of resources significantly prevented the Intelligence Community from developing sources or inserting operations officers into Iraq.[141]

It was not just on the WMD issue that the CIA had no visibility [emphasis added]:

[T]here was no robust HUMINT collection capability targeting Iraq’s links to terrorism until the Fall of 2002. Prior to 2002, HUMINT collection was heavily dependent on a few foreign government services and there was no [REDACTED] sources inside Iraq reporting on strictly terrorism issues. … When asked if the IC had any unilateral sources that could provide information on the Iraq/al-Qaida relationship, the CTC [CIA Counterterrorism] analysts stated that they were entirely dependent on foreign government services for that information. …

Despite four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there was little useful intelligence collected that helped analysts determine the Iraqi regime’s possible links to al-Qaida.[142]

The Silberman-Robb Commission adds [emphasis added]:

Iraq’s decision to abandon its unconventional weapons programs while simultaneously hiding this decision was, at the very least, a counterintuitive one. … Saddam’s fellow Arabs (including, evidently, his senior military leadership as well as many of the rest of the world’s intelligence agencies and most inspectors) also thought he had retained his weapons programs, thus responding to charges that the Community was projecting Western thinking onto a product of a foreign culture.

What the Intelligence Community can be blamed for, however, is not considering whether Saddam might have taken this counterintuitive route. … [S]uch imaginative analysis would not necessarily or even likely have ultimately led analysts to the right conclusion, [but] serious discussion of it in finished intelligence would have at least warned policymakers of the range of possibilities, a function that is critically important in the inherently uncertain arena of political analysis. …

While the Intelligence Community did accurately assess certain aspects of Iraq’s programs, the Community’s central pre-war assessments—that Iraq had biological and chemical weapons and was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program—were shown by the post-war findings to be wrong. The discrepancies between the pre-war assessments and the post-war findings can be, in part, attributed to the inherent difficulties in obtaining information in denied areas such as Iraq. But the Intelligence Community’s inaccurate assessments were also the result of systemic weaknesses in the way the Community collects, analyzes, and disseminates intelligence.

The task of collecting meaningful intelligence on Iraq’s weapons programs was extraordinarily difficult. Iraq’s highly effective denial and deception program (which was employed against all methods of U.S. collection), the absence of United Nations inspectors after 1998, and the lack of a U.S. diplomatic presence in-country all contributed to difficulties in gathering data on the Iraqi regime’s purported nuclear, biological, and chemical programs. And these difficulties were compounded by the challenge of discerning regime intentions.

Nonetheless, we believe the Intelligence Community could have done better. We had precious little human intelligence, and virtually no useful signals intelligence, on a target that was one of the United States’ top intelligence priorities. The preceding sections, which have focused on the Intelligence Community’s assessments on particular aspects of Iraq’s weapons programs, have tended to reflect shortcomings in what is commonly referred to as “tradecraft”; the focus has been on questions such as whether a critical human source was properly validated, or whether analysts drew unduly sweeping inferences from limited or dubious intelligence. But it should not be forgotten why these tradecraft failures took on such extraordinary importance. They were important because of how little additional information our collection agencies managed to provide on Iraq’s weapons programs.

This was a problem the Intelligence Community saw coming. As early as September 1998, the Community recognized its limited collection on Iraq. The National Intelligence Council noted these limits in 1998, the specifics of which cannot be discussed in an unclassified forum. Yet the Intelligence Community was still unwilling—or unable—to take steps necessary to improve its capabilities after late 1998. In short, as one senior policy maker described it, the Intelligence Community after 1998 “was running on fumes,” depending on “inference and assumptions rather than hard data.” …

Human intelligence collection in Iraq suffered from two major flaws: too few human sources, and the questionable reliability of those few sources the Intelligence Community had. After 1998, the CIA had no dedicated unilateral sources in Iraq reporting on Iraq’s nuclear, biological, and chemical programs; indeed, the CIA had only a handful of Iraqi assets in total as of 2001. Furthermore, several of the liaison and defector sources relied upon by the Intelligence Community, most prominently Curveball, proved to be fabricators.[143]

It is at least arguable that the Silberman-Robb Commission is too harsh on the CIA in suggesting that the Agency should have imagined what Saddam was doing. It is very unlikely that any intelligence service in the world would have been believed, before the regime was demolished and the documents were available, if they had suggested Saddam had—as turned out to be the case—paused the WMD programs and had not retained vast WMD stockpiles, but was pretending otherwise because he feared Iran, not America, and it was the signals from this Iranian-focused deception operation that Western intelligence agencies were detecting. It would have seemed laughable, not to say irresponsible, to even conceive such a thing in 2002. As the Commission notes, the post-invasion evidence confirmed that Saddam managed to convince his own military leadership right up to the eve of the invasion that he had WMD,[144] which explains the signals intercepts that showed Iraqi Generals talking amongst themselves as if Saddam had WMD.[145] The Commission is nearer the mark when it speaks of “the highly compartmented nature of Saddam Hussein’s regime”, which makes it “unclear whether even a source at the highest levels of the Iraqi government would have been able to provide true insight into Saddam’s decision-making”, and the “inherent limitations of human intelligence collection”.[146]

That said, what the SSCI and Silberman-Robb Commission disclose about the paucity of CIA sources in Saddam’s Iraq is scandalous: not one single unilateral human source on either the WMD or terrorism issues—after twelve years! And a “handful” of Iraqi assets total. This during the period when Iraq was one of the primary national security questions on the U.S. docket. What is also clear is that the CIA did little to try to rectify this situation: it knew before 1998 how heavily reliant it was on the inspectors for the WMD file, did basically nothing to prepare for Saddam throwing the inspectors out nor to find alternative intelligence streams once he had, and the Agency did not even start a program to collect HUMINT on the terrorism issue until late 2002. Iraq was a “hard” target, and recruiting spies from inside the country or infiltrating intelligence officers was, therefore, very risky: this riskiness seems to have terminated the CIA’s thought process on how to gather reliable human intelligence from within the Ba’thi state—it simply would not. Which begs the question of what the CIA is for.

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Bad as it was for the CIA to be so blind in Saddam’s realm after Iraq was such a U.S. security priority for so long, it was made worse by the CIA being dishonest about it. The Agency never made clear in its pre-invasion products how thin its basis for its conclusions truly was.[147]

The Silberman-Robb Commission put it mildly in one of its conclusions:

While finished intelligence needs to offer a bottom line to be useful to the policymaker, it should also clearly spell out how and from what its conclusions were derived. … For example, the fact that the evidence for Iraq’s biological weapons program relied largely on reporting from a single source, and that the evidence for Iraq’s chemical weapons program derived largely from limited signature- based evidence of “transshipment” activity, should have been more transparent. … [W]hen the evidence is equivocal, the conclusion must be as well.[148]

The reason that the CIA never made clear how shaky the evidence for its assessments was is self-evident: it would have damaged the CIA’s bureaucratic standing and made the CIA less able to steer policy in directions it preferred.

The inability of the CIA to function in states where there is no Embassy and the reliance on liaison relationships with foreign intelligence services have long been obvious problems with how the CIA does business. The “rendition” program is where the liaison issue became most public, specifically the focus was on the U.S. being morally and politically responsible for putting men into the hands of secret services in countries like Egypt and Jordan that routinely torture captives. Moral issues aside, the practical problems with “rendition” were the familiar ones with liaison relationships: contrary to the comforting myth, it is not that torture does not work; the CIA just had no way to know what had actually been done to draw information from captives, thus no way to assess the information’s credibility.

The most notorious instance where a liaison relationship caused trouble was, as the Commission mentions, CURVEBALL, handled by Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND). CURVEBALL was an Iraqi named Rafid Alwan al-Janabi. Alwan arrived in Germany in November 1999, claiming to be a chemical engineer who had worked on Saddam’s biological WMD program and wanted to defect. A significant part of the BWMD section of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Powell’s U.N. speech—specifically the “existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents”, described as “one of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq’s biological weapons”—were based on CURVEBALL’s testimony.[149] The Germans kept CURVEBALL under their tight control, and it was the DIA, not the CIA, who directly interfaced with the BND over CURVEBALL.

The U.S. got one chance to observe Alwan, when a German-speaking American doctor evaluated him, and found indications that CURVEBALL had an alcohol problem. As Tenet wrote later—completely correctly—this is hardly unusual in the espionage game, and most of the meaning attributed to this evaluation is retrospective. What gave CURVEBALL credibility as a defector before the invasion was that he had such detailed knowledge of the science behind a lethal-germ lab,[150] and it did not end there. In May 2003, after the regime came down and a trailer was discovered in Iraq that closely matched CURVEBALL’s pre-invasion description, the CIA sent a series of pictures to the Germans—the real trailer and a number of others—and asked them to show CURVEBALL, to see if he could pick out the real one. He did.[151] It was, then, a shock when CURVEBALL turned out to be a fabricator.

The later claims from Tyler Drumheller, the then-head of CIA’s European Division, that he warned Tenet about CURVEBALL ahead of time do not ring true. Drumheller was asked by James Pavitt, the then-Deputy Director of Operations and head of the Clandestine Service, to secure from the Germans a face-to-face meeting with CURVEBALL for a CIA officer in late September or early October 2002. Drumheller would claim in media interviews that he did meet with a BND counterpart and was told that the Germans thought CURVEBALL was (medically) “crazy” and a “fabricator”. Drumheller says he relayed this up the chain of command, causing a kerfuffle at Langley. No paper trail for this has ever been found, and Tenet’s relaying of events in his memoir—the lack of a “burn notice”, the odd way documents sent to Drumheller never seemed to get where they were supposed to go, Drumheller’s twenty-two visits to Tenet’s office, Drumheller signing the memo advising Tenet on talking points for his meeting with the head of the BND in May 2003—suggests very strongly that, at a minimum, there is something wrong with Drumheller’s public account of the CURVEBALL story.[152]

This is not to exonerate Tenet or the CIA. In his memoir, Tenet refers to “the importance being placed on Curve Ball’s information”; writes “the Agency was depending heavily on Curve Ball’s information”; and “[CURVEBALL’s intelligence was] a central pillar in the case against Saddam”. As this was a single source, putting so much weight on it was reckless, especially given what we now know about how little information the CIA had from inside Iraq: CURVEBALL’s information could not even be assessed for atmospheric accuracy, never mind specifics. Tenet also makes mention of a division between the analytical side (which thought CURVEBALL’s information was too voluminous and accurate to be fake) and the Directorate of Operations (which “felt” off about CURVEBALL but had nothing solid) that Tenet only learned about later. What this does suggest is that Tenet is guilty of gross mismanagement and incompetence, not wilful deception. It might be added that in either event, the problem was at the CIA, not in the White House. “We allowed flawed information to be presented to Congress, the president, the United Nations, and the world”, Tenet wrote [emphasis added].[153]

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Faced with this dreadful embarrassment, the CIA tried, in the aftermath of Saddam’s fall, to shift the blame to one of its favourite targets: Ahmad Chalabi. It turned out that CURVEBALL was the brother of one of Chalabi’s bodyguards and what could be more sinister than that? The Los Angeles Times was fed a story from CIA “sources” that Chalabi had coached CURVEBALL in what to say to the BND. The DIA and CIA claimed to the L.A. Times in a follow-up story that they had verified CURVEBALL’s information against testimony from three other sources, two of whom had ties to the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the umbrella group for anti-Saddam oppositionists headed by Chalabi, and these two transpired to be Chalabi-directed liars as well.[154] In the spring of 2004, as it was dawning on the CIA that CURVEBALL was a fabricator,[155] the CIA thought it had finally bested Chalabi by getting into circulation a narrative that he had got the U.S. to invade Iraq on Iran’s behalf, leading to a raid of his home and issuance of an arrest warrant later in the year against Chalabi on corruption charges. It was at this time that the CIA went all-out to throw the whole CURVEBALL fiasco onto Chalabi, with “former” CIA officers telling credulous journalists: “[Chalabi] arranged for Curveball to be presented to the Germans. The CIA is positive of it.” (Curiously, it was also at this time, when the CIA—and State Department—thought Chalabi was finished, that the earlier analysis on “externals” being unacceptable as leaders to the Iraqi population was abruptly reversed, and the CIA’s favourite “external”, Iyad Allawi, was handed the reins of the post-occupation interim government, which he then used inter alia to launch a witch-hunt against Chalabi that was so absurd even the nascent Iraqi courts threw it out.)

The CIA claims spread in the media about Chalabi being responsible for CURVEBALL—even the claims Chalabi was connected to CURVEBALL—were a tissue of lies from start to finish, according to the Agency’s own information. As a Senate investigation later found  [emphasis added]:

CURVE BALL’s close relative [brother] stated that he had contacted CURVE BALL in 2001 on behalf of the INC to ascertain whether CURVE BALL, in the course of his employment with Iraq’s Organization of Military Industry, had any information on secret or sensitive projects that would help boost the case against Iraq at the UN. CURVE BALL told his close relative that he did not. The close relative also said that he had minimal contact with CURVE BALL since CURVE BALL defected to a European country [Germany] …

The CIA believes that CURVE BALL’s close relative’s connection to the INC is coincidental, and is not an explanation for his fabrications. The CIA told Committee staff … that CURVE BALL’s defection did not fit the pattern of the typical INC-influenced defection in that the INC did not broker his introduction to the Intelligence Community and did not put him in front of the media. … [Germany] noticed that [CURVE BALL] was an Iraqi chemical engineer, and approached him to be interviewed. The [CIA] analyst said CURVE BALL did not come forward with information himself. … [The CIA analyst] said that the INC would “shop their good sources around town, but they weren’t known for sneaking people out of countries into some asylum system. … It would have been more blatant if the INC … had been putting him forward.”[156]

The Silberman-Robb Commission came to the same conclusion, that CURVEBALL was not an INC source, and with the Commission’s broader remit it was also able to conclude that the INC’s overall impact on U.S. intelligence assessments before 2003 was insignificant. That the CIA did not rely heavily on the INC should have been self-evident, given the Agency’s undisguised hatred for Chalabi since 1996, when Chalabi told the CIA that its attempt to instigate a military coup against Saddam was grievously compromised and so it duly proved: Chalabi being right, and going public about it, was never forgiven at the Agency.[157]

From the Commission Report [emphasis added]:

Despite speculation that Curveball was encouraged to lie by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the CIA’s post-war investigations were unable to uncover any evidence that the INC or any other organization was directing Curveball to feed misleading information to the Intelligence Community. Instead, the post-war investigations concluded that Curveball’s reporting was not influenced by, controlled by, or connected to, the INC.

In fact, over all, CIA’s post-war investigations revealed that INC-related sources had a minimal impact on pre-war assessments. The October 2002 NIE relied on reporting from two INC sources, both of whom were later deemed to be fabricators. One source—the INC source—provided fabricated reporting on the existence of mobile BW facilities in Iraq. The other source, whose information was provided in a text box in the NIE and sourced to a “defector,” reported on the possible construction of a new nuclear facility in Iraq. The CIA concluded that this source was being “directed” by the INC to provide information to the U.S. Intelligence Community. Reporting from these two INC sources had a “negligible” impact on the overall assessments, however.[158]

Once again, this conclusion should not have been a bolt from the blue. Put aside the evidence of the INC’s useful intelligence. Try this the other way around: run the thought experiment where every INC-related source sent to the CIA was a conscious, coached fabricator. The INC had a few-dozen staffers and a budget of under-$4 million per year. The CIA alone had over-20,000 employees and the U.S. intelligence apparatus working on this included DIA and NSA, plus the State Department’s in-house intelligence shop and a host of other military agencies, together comprising hundreds of thousands of officers and analysts, and an operating budget of $44 billion. If this system—and its counterparts in Germany, France, Russia, and China—can be bamboozled by a couple of INC operatives spinning yarns, the fault is not with the INC.

As it happens, there is no evidence that the INC tried to deceive U.S. intelligence [emphasis added]:

Much like the reporting from 45 other HUMINT sources cited in the October 2002 NIE, information from some INC-affiliated defectors proved to be wrong. The Committee has no indication, however, that the INC-affiliated sources intentionally provided false information.[159]

Rather than the INC misleading the CIA, the Senate found that the real problem was the CIA under-exploiting what the INC could offer in intelligence terms because of the Agency’s dislike for the organisation [emphasis added]:

[HUMINT sources] all have agendas; they all raise counterintelligence concerns. … [T]he Committee rejects the idea that opposition sources are inherently more unreliable than other HUMINT sources. … HUMINT sources take great risks when they cooperate with U.S. intelligence officers. They are motivated to do this for a reason, whether to make money, be relocated, or undermine a government. It is the responsibility of intelligence officers to determine and understand that motivation, exploit it if possible, and accurately report what the source says with appropriate warnings or caveats about the source’s agenda. It is the responsibility of analysts to assess the information, take account of the warnings, and convey the information and their judgments to policymakers accordingly. The CIA’s resistance to dealing with the INC because of the group’s agenda may have caused the Agency to miss potential collection opportunities.[160]

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One could go on, but it seems unlikely there is much demand for that. Suffice it to say, the evidence from the post-invasion investigations shreds the central tenet of the CIA’s media operation to deflect blame for its pre-invasion intelligence failings: there is no hint of political pressure being applied against the Agency from the policy side of the Bush administration to shape its findings or assessments on the Saddam-Qaeda relationship. And the gaps in our knowledge about the exact nature of that relationship are due to the CIA’s own poor tradecraft and analytic capacities—faults by no means limited to the Saddam-Qaeda issue. If the CIA had been able to show half the skill as a foreign intelligence agency in Iraq that it showed in managing the domestic American media and public opinion over Iraq, history would have been very different.

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REFERENCES

[1] Ken Pollack was a junior analyst at the CIA in the summer of 1990. Pollack had been warning for months about Saddam’s increasing WMD capacities and ambitions to dominate the region. When the satellite images came in of Saddam’s army building up on the border of Kuwait, Pollack wrote a memo arguing this was preparation for an invasion. The higher-ups at the CIA rejected this, believing Saddam was bluffing as part of his diplomatic squabble with Kuwait over ownership of the Rumayla oil fields. Once Pollack had fought through the Agency bureaucracy to get his memo to the policy people, it was too late to do much about it, not that they would have been especially receptive had it got through earlier—administration policy was to bring Saddam into the tent and a premise of this policy was that Saddam was a rational actor, not the last time that error would be made. See: Kenneth Pollack (2002), The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, pp. xi-xiii, 29-39.

[2] Donald Rumsfeld (2011), Known and Unknown: A Memoir, p. 449; and, Richard Cheney (2011), In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir, pp. 396-97.

[3] Saddam himself raised the spectre of a “quagmire” in a television interview a few weeks after he had abolished Kuwait, claiming that Israel and then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were trying to “push [President George H.W.] Bush into that dangerous and grave quagmire”. Saddam’s understanding of Israel and Jews in general was drawn straight from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but he was right about Mrs. Thatcher being more determined that Bush Senior to ensure that what transpired to be the first round of the Gulf War would end definitively, with Saddam’s downfall.

[4] Saddam had ordered a retreat a day earlier and Iraqi troops, as well as the Iraqi colonists sent into Kuwait to populate the “nineteenth province”, had gotten trapped on the main highway out of Kuwait with their loot and Kuwaiti captives. The U.S. had blitzed the front and back of this convoy, then begun airstrikes on the rest of the column in what many called a “turkey shoot”. About 2,000 vehicles were destroyed or abandoned, and between 500 and 1,000 people killed on Highway 80 in the final hours of Operation DESERT STORM.

[5] Known and Unknown, p. 414.

[6] In My Time, pp. 224-26.

[7] Soon after Saddam’s troops had crossed into Kuwait in August 1990, sensing some hesitancy from the H.W. Bush administration—which was in the midst of a reorientation after its “outreach” to Saddam had gone so badly wrong—Mrs. Thatcher spoke by telephone with President Bush 41 and famously told him, “This was no time to go wobbly.” In a 1995 interview for a PBS Frontline show that aired in January 1996, Mrs. Thatcher said: “It’s not enough just to reverse the invasion. If you leave them with an army strong enough to come back and do it again. You’ve got, as we knew, you’ve got to destroy their army. … I don’t know that it was necessary to go onto Baghdad … [but] when you’re dealing with a dictator, he has got not only to be defeated, well and truly, but he has got to be seen to be defeated. Half measures never work … [The Coalition] couldn’t bring down Saddam Husayn directly. You could only bring him down by humiliating him. It was not done.” Mrs. Thatcher concluded by noting that she and President Bush Senior were out of office, but Saddam was still there: “I wonder who won.”

[8] The Saddam regime fired on the Anglo-American planes securing the no-fly zones 2,000-plus times from January 2000 to September 2002, an average of sixty times per month. No other state in the world was engaged in daily kinetic attacks on the U.S. military. It seemed very likely that at some point a U.S. pilot would be shot down and either captured or killed. See: Known and Unknown, p. 417-18.

[9] As Ken Pollack outlines in The Threatening Storm (pp. 236-39), the only time Saddam ever complied in any sense with the weapons inspectors was immediately after DESERT STORM when the enormous number of American and Coalition forces remained at his border—and, for a time indeed, occupied part of his country (where the Coalition had swung through for the famous “left hook”). And even then, Saddam’s compliance was far from total and as soon as the troops started to draw down, compliance tapered off even further: in June 1991, the Saddam regime brazenly shot at inspectors who tried to access a nuclear-weapons site, and a similar incident occurred three months later.

Pollack, though he wrote his book before the November 2002 “inspections” tied to UNSCR 1441 began, had pre-empted (so to speak) the problems with that process: the idea that “more time” would have allowed the inspectors to certify Iraq as disarmed is ludicrous. The 2002 process was only possible because of the Coalition deployment in the region, but that build-up could neither be sustained long enough, nor replicated, to ensure Saddam’s disarmament. “The key problem is that we cannot hold the gun to Saddam’s head for as long as it would take to actually disarm Iraq”, Pollack writes. Pollack was quite correct to assess that Saddam “usually does not wake up to threats until it is much too late” (Saddam did not believe the U.S. meant to make an end of him even after the March 2003 invasion began), which makes it doubtful Saddam would ever have gotten to a place where he believed he had to comply fully to save himself.

Suppose he had, though, Saddam would have done enough to appear compliant so that the political justification for an invasion was derailed and then waited the U.S. out. The U.S. could sustained a build-up in the Gulf on high alert for six, or at the absolute most twelve, months. Six to twelve months is “laughably inadequate to disarm Iraq”, as Pollack notes: “it would require twelve to eighteen months just to establish a baseline, let alone actually conduct inspections”; and, after however many months of inspections, there would have to be long-term monitoring to stop Saddam doing what the North Koreans did and restarting the centrifuges. Before it ever got to that, the troops would have been drawn down and Saddam would have reverted to the “cheat and retreat” game with the inspectors.

It would probably be impossible, in a practical sense, for the U.S. to stage even one more build-up—and it is politically doubtful such a thing would have worked to reinduce compliance if everyone had seen the U.S. sail away once. The U.S. military leadership itself would resist carrying out these bluffs because of the mess they would make of training cycles and the vulnerabilities they opened up elsewhere; the domestic cost, economically and politically, would be very high for the U.S., as military leave and all the rest of it was cancelled; and the regional price would be devastating if Arab states had to watch the U.S. walk up to the brink with Saddam and blink a second time. The Gulf states were already beginning forms of rapprochement with Saddam by the turn of the millennium; that would have intensified and cooperation with the U.S. on military build-ups to threaten Saddam would have ceased—as would the inspections, without any U.S. force present or capable of returning.

[10] Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, one of Saddam’s most senior nuclear physicists who had been responsible for illicitly acquiring the designs and equipment for the crash nuclear-weapons program at the end of the 1980s, describes a scene in his memoir that illustrates the elaborate methods of concealment the Ba’thi regime operated on the WMD issue.

In December 1991, U.N. inspectors turned up at the Rashdiya enrichment facility, which had already been “completely transformed” for the first visit by the inspectors five months earlier. The Saddam regime’s official story was that the Rashdiya complex was for water treatment and industrial projects, and had never been involved in any nuclear-related work. Obeidi knew that the only reason for a re-inspection was that intelligence had been given to the U.N. about the facility’s true history—and that the main evidence at that moment was the presence of him and another scientist. Obeidi made a getaway while the inspectors were stalled, but once the inspectors got inside they “took samples from the walls of several buildings and the soil outside them”.

Obeidi, fully aware those samples would show levels of radioactive uranium that had no innocent explanation, “ordered the former centrifuge laboratory stripped of its walls and roof, right down to its frame, as well as the excavation of a foot and a half of topsoil from underneath and around the building, extending a hundred feet on the downwind side where traces of uranium might have blown. ‘Within a week,’ I said … ‘we will fill in the hole with fresh soil and build an exact replica facility out of new materials.’ … [T]he order seemed impossible. But [the other staff] quickly realized the only other option would be to take responsibility for breaching the concealment plan. The consequences for our lives and those of our families didn’t bear thinking about.”

When the U.N. inspectors returned a fortnight later, with a “triumphant and slightly accusatory attitude”, they took dozens more samples from “the walls, floor, insulation, and ground soil, and then left to send them to Vienna for confirmation.” Of course, those results tested negative for abnormal uranium levels, leading the U.N. to conclude its first tests had been in error: even if the U.N. officials had the imagination to figure out what had really happened, they would have sounded insane to voice it and would never have found the evidence to substantiate it. The upshot was that Saddam was never asked for an accounting of the WMD work that what had gone on at Rashdiya. God alone knows how many other sites were “disappeared” in similar ways.

See: Mahdi Obeidi (2004), The Bomb in My Garden: The Secrets of Saddam’s Nuclear Mastermind, pp. 148-50.

[11] Rumsfeld bluntly states that when President Bush 43 took office, “the Iraqi ‘containment’ policy was in tatters”. See: Known and Unknown, p. 418. Secretary of State Colin Powell had borrowed from his Clintonian predecessor, Madeleine Albright, who liked to say Saddam was “in a box”. Skipping over what else was in this “box”—including North Korean arms dealers with off-the-shelf missile-production lines—Powell had come into office explicitly planning to loosen the lid on this box and immediately set about doing so, with his “smart sanctions” idea, which he was still talking about as late as mid-2002.

[12]  ‘Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence on Iraq WMD’ (“The Duelfer Report”), Volume I, 6 October 2004, p. 59. Available here.

[13] It is difficult to remember now the atmosphere in late 2001, but it seemed wildly improbable at that moment that there would not be another 9/11. The most that seemed reasonable was avoiding it being a chemical or biological or nuclear 9/11. Surveying likely spots where the nexus of WMDs and terrorism met put the U.S. on a highway to Baghdad, and any chance of a turn in the road was prevented by Saddam Husayn himself, beginning in the hours after 9/11 when Saddam’s became the only government in the world to publicly celebrate the attacks—an act of such lunacy that even Colonel Qaddafi knew better.

Former President Bill Clinton gave an interview to TIME Magazine in June 2004, where he rather decently (mostly) avoided partisanship and explained: “At the moment the U.N. inspectors were kicked out [of Iraq] in 1998, … there were substantial quantities of botulinum and aflatoxin, as I recall, some bioagents, … and VX and ricin, chemical agents, unaccounted for. … We also thought there were a few missiles, some warheads, and maybe a very limited amount of nuclear laboratory capacity. After 9/11, let’s be fair here, if you had been President, you’d think, Well, this fellow bin Laden just turned these three airplanes full of fuel into weapons of mass destruction, right? … So, you’re sitting there as President, you’re reeling in the aftermath of this, so, yeah, you want to go get bin Laden and do Afghanistan and all that. But you also have to say, Well, my first responsibility now is to try everything possible to make sure that this terrorist network and other terrorist networks cannot reach chemical and biological weapons or small amounts of fissile material. I’ve got to do that. That’s why I supported the Iraq thing. There was a lot of stuff unaccounted for. So, I thought the President had an absolute responsibility to go to the U.N. and say, ‘Look, guys, after 9/11, you have got to demand that Saddam Hussein lets us finish the inspection process’. You couldn’t responsibly ignore [the possibility that] a tyrant had these stocks. I never really thought he’d [use them]. What I was far more worried about was that he’d sell this stuff or give it away. … So that’s why I thought Bush did the right thing to go back. When you’re the President, and your country has just been through what we had, you want everything to be accounted for” [emphasis added].

[14] Douglas Feith (2008), War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, p. 262.

[15] War and Decision, pp. 260, 262-63; Known and Unknown, pp. 520-21.

[16] War and Decision, pp. 261-63.

[17] In My Time, pp. 414-15.

[18] War and Decision, p. 265.

[19] War and Decision, pp. 116-19.

[20] ‘Comments by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense on A Draft of A Proposed Report by the DoD Office of Inspector General’, (“Under Secretary of Defense Comments for the DoD OIG Report”) submitted for inclusion in the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General (OIG) Report, ‘Review of Pre-Iraqi War Activities of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy’ 16 January 2007, p.16. Available here.

[21] Under Secretary of Defense Comments for the DoD OIG Report (2007), p.17.

[22] War and Decision, pp. 264-65.

[23] War and Decision, pp. 265-66.

[24] War and Decision, pp. 266-67.

[25] George Tenet (2007), At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, pp. 347-48.

[26] In At the Center of the Storm, on page xv, the very first page of the preface, Tenet writes: “Wednesday, September 12, 2001, dawned as the first full day of a world gone mad. Nothing would ever be the same. Early that morning, operating on only a few hours’ sleep, I headed out my front door to the armored Ford Expedition that was waiting to carry me to see the president of the United States. … Thousands perished in New York City, at the Pentagon, and in a field in Pennsylvania. At CIA, we had good reason to believe that more attacks might be coming in the hours or days ahead and that 9/11 was just the opening salvo … All this weighed heavily on my mind as I walked beneath the awning that leads to the West Wing and saw Richard Perle exiting the building just as I was about to enter. Perle is one of the godfathers of the neoconservative movement … As the doors closed behind him, we made eye contact and nodded. I had just reached the door myself when Perle turned to me and said, ‘Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility.’ I was stunned but said nothing. Eighteen hours earlier, I had scanned passenger manifests from the four hijacked airplanes that showed beyond a doubt that al-Qa’ida was behind the attacks. … At the Secret Service security checkpoint, I looked back at Perle and thought: What the hell is he talking about? Moments later, a second thought came to me: Who has Richard Perle been meeting with in the White House so early in the morning on today of all days? I never learned the answer to that question.”

When confronted with the fact that Perle was in Paris that day, “Tenet says maybe he got the date wrong, but insists the conversation took place.” But this is simply another lie. The whole point of this fabricated anecdote is the date, intended to show the pervasive, tentacular influence of the neoconservatives: “yesterday” is put in the quotation Tenet purports to record from Perle, and Tenet repeatedly underlines the timing—references to 9/11 being “eighteen hours earlier”, “today of all days”. Tenet even reiterates the claim, with the date, later in the book, as part of the same anti-neocon paranoia (p. 306): “My odd encounter with Richard Perle in front of the West Wing on the morning of September 12 was just the first hint of things to come. It was not an isolated incident.”

[27] War and Decision, p. 268.

[28] ‘Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on Postwar Findings About Iraq’s WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism and How They Compare With Prewar Assessments’ (“SSCI Report on WMD and Terrorism Findings”), 8 September 2006, p. 458. Available here.

[29] At the Center of the Storm, p. 365.

[30] In My Time, p. 402.

[31] At the Center of the Storm, p. 343.

[32] At the Center of the Storm, p. 344.

[33] Tenet does, however, borrow some of the language from the letter in his own account of Saddam’s relationship with Al-Qaeda, albeit he shades it. For example, Tenet writes: “We could go as far as outlin­ing contacts between Iraq and al-Qa’ida going back a decade”, omitting the fact these were “senior level contacts”, as he had disclosed in the letter to the Senate [italics added]. See: At the Center of the Storm, p. 341.

[34] At the Center of the Storm, p. 335.

[35] At the Center of the Storm, p. 354.

[36] ‘Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq’ (“SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence”), 9 July 2004, p. 363. Available here.

[37] At the Center of the Storm, pp. 344-45. The Deputy Director of the Office of Terrorism Analysis at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC), for instance, reasoned unassailably on the question of whether Saddam would supply WMD to terrorists: despite little direct reporting on this, the “backdrop” was that “Saddam is willing to deal with bad guys and has been doing it for a long time”, his intelligence service has “targeted us in the past” using terrorism, and, while there is a “debate to have on the ideology of Saddam”, he had “relationship[s] with groups we would identify as Islamist”. See: SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), p. 344.

[38] In My Time, p. 402.

[39] 9/11 Commission Report (2004), p. 66. Available here. On the very page this phrase appears, the Commission documents multiple meetings between senior Al-Qaeda members and Saddam’s officials, including trips to Baghdad by Al-Qaeda jihadists organised by Bin Laden’s then-deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is described as having “ties of his own to the Iraqis”.

[40] SSCI Report on WMD and Terrorism Findings (2006), pp. 64-65

[41] At the Center of the Storm, p. 349.

[42] This quote from the Iraqi Support for Terrorism document can be found in: SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), p. 314.

[43] SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), p. 322.

[44] SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), pp. 320-23.

[45] SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), pp. 323-32.

[46] Mahmud was Saddam’s personal secretary and a distant cousin within the Tikriti clan that dominated the Ba’th Party. Mahmud oversaw the Jihaz al-Amn al-Khas, usually translated as “Special Security Organisation”, the most powerful security agency in Saddam’s Iraq, responsible for Saddam’s personal security, for surveillance of the other Iraqi intelligence agencies, the military, and government ministries, for acquiring sensitive technology from abroad, and for concealing the WMD programs. It was the SSO that carried out the operation, run directly from Saddam’s office, to confuse and thwart the U.N. inspectors. As with the overlapping structure of responsibilities between the various intelligence agencies, to make them compete horizontally rather than uniting to challenge the power vertical, the responsibilities within agencies overlapped. In the case of the SSO, this meant Mahmud shared duties with Qusay Husayn.

[47] SSCI Report on WMD and Terrorism Findings (2006), pp. 73-74.

[48] SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), pp. 322-23.

[49] In terms of the way the political debate has played out in the years since the Iraq invasion, where it is widely believed Saddam had no connection to Islamist terrorism or even to terrorism, full stop, the dispute about whether Al-Qaeda operatives were trained at Salman Pak reminds one of a passage from James Baldwin’s last book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, about the Atlanta murders of 1979-81: “Some years ago, after the disappearance of civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwirner in Mississippi, some friends of mine were dragging the river for their bodies. This one wasn’t Schwirner. This one wasn’t Goodman. This one wasn’t Chaney. Then, as Dave Dennis tells it: ‘It suddenly struck us—what difference did it make that it wasn’t them? What are these bodies doing in the river?’” Likewise, whether any Al-Qaeda operatives snuck into Saddam’s terrorist training camp for foreign Islamists is somewhat beside the point: Saddam maintained a camp that trained thousands of foreign Islamist terrorists, a fact that on its own is not only unknown but rejected as a conspiracy theory by enormous numbers of people—in the general public and perhaps at a greater proportion among journalists and academics in the West.

[50] SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), pp. 332-38.

[51] SSCI Report on WMD and Terrorism Findings (2006), p. 91.

[52] SSCI Report on WMD and Terrorism Findings (2006), p. 92.

[53] SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), pp. 324-25.

[54] SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), pp. 314-17.

[55] Kevin Woods et al. (2006), Iraqi Perspectives Project: A View of Operation Iraqi Freedom from Saddam’s Senior Leadership,p. 132. Available here.

[56] SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), pp. 317-20.

[57] SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), p. 321.

[58] SSCI Report on WMD and Terrorism Findings (2006), p. 92.

[59] Bruce Lawrence [ed.] (2005), Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden, p. 184.

[60] SSCI Report on WMD and Terrorism Findings (2006), pp. 101-04.

[61] Al-Fakheri was a senior trainer at Al-Qaeda’s Khaldan training camp, located in the group’s heartland in eastern Afghanistan, near the (now famous) Tora Bora. Al-Fakheri’s camp produced, among others, Zacarias Moussaoui, the would-be “twentieth hijacker” on 9/11, and Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian caught by sheer chance as he tried to cross into the U.S. from Canada in December 1999 to blow up the Los Angles International Airport (LAX) as part of the “Millennium Plot”. Al-Fakheri was captured in November 2001 as the Taliban-Qaeda regime went down and was then “rendered” to Egypt in January 2002.

It is entirely possible Al-Fakheri was mistreated in Cairo. As former CIA officer Reuel Marc Gerecht has written, “One must assume that any Muslim the CIA deposits into the hands of the Egyptian or Jordanian security and intelligence services will be tortured.” However, Al-Fakheri’s testimony about Saddam’s cooperation with Al-Qaeda, specifically on biological and chemical weapons, was not, in context, very shocking: as is laid out above, there was an extensive, long-standing interaction between Saddam and Al-Qaeda, there was (and is) every reason to believe Ansar al-Islam constituted a component of that relationship, and in the Ansar camps in Kurdistan Al-Qaeda jihadists did engage in experiments with bio-weapons and poisons.

Some of Al-Fakheri’s material made it into Iraqi Support for Terrorism and into Powell’s U.N. speech. Al-Fakheri was taken from Egypt to a CIA “black site” in Afghanistan on 9 February 2003 and then to Guantanamo Bay in September 2003. In March or April 2004, Al-Fakheri was transferred back to CIA custody, and, it seems, taken to Morocco. All CIA prisoners had been moved out of Morocco by February 2005: where Al-Fakheri was from that point until he was sent back to Libya in April 2006 is unclear.

It was while at GTMO that Al-Fakheri recanted, in January 2004, claiming he had fabricated everything because he was telling his captors what he thought they wanted to hear in hopes of getting better prison conditions. This is as standard a trope as jihadists claiming to have been tortured into their confessions, even when they have not been subjected to any treatment that could come close to the definition of torture. (Incidentally, this is among the strong prudential reasons against “rendition”: whatever view one takes of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” debate, the EITs are at least applied by American intelligence officers who can judge the whole situation for themselves, including the crucial x-factors like demeanour, body language, and tone. When confessions are being handed on by Egypt’s or Jordan’s secret services, there is no knowing what was done to obtain them or if they were obtained at all.)

Al-Fakheri’s repudiation of his earlier testimony split the CIA. Jihadists run information operations even behind the wire, sometimes with dramatic consequences, and Agency personnel were convinced that was what Al-Fakheri was up to. The question was in which direction. As Tenet later summarised: “[Al-Fakheri] clearly lied. We just don’t know when. … The fact is, we don’t know which story is true, and since we don’t know, we can assume nothing.” See: At the Center of the Storm, pp. 353-54.

[62] Rumsfeld says that nobody—not Tenet, not Powell, not Armitage—“stated or hinted that they were opposed to, or even hesitant, about the President’s decision” on Iraq. See: Known and Unknown, p. 457. Feith says the same thing. Feith also digs through the Powell-Armitage public record—their statements, to the media and to book authors, notably Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack and Michael Gordon’s and Bernard Trainor’s Cobra II. Armitage is quoted saying he thought Saddam had WMDs of all kinds and was a threat that should have been eliminated through invasion, but Armitage said this should have been done after the 2004 election—which Bush might have lost, and his Democratic opponent might have left Saddam in place. As Feith remarks, “I wondered whether he was devious or merely confused.” Feith is similarly incisive about Powell, who had acquired his “reluctant warrior” moniker as a criticism from the Washington Post journalist Rick Atkinson, whose book on DESERT STORM documented the way Powell hedged his bets, neither giving the first President Bush his full support nor completely dissociating himself from the administration. As Feith notes, Powell did the same again during the second round with Saddam Husayn: “Whether on purpose or not, Powell put himself in a position where, if the war went well, he could say he supported it, and if not, he could point to his warnings as proof that he was a prescient dove.” Which is exactly what Powell did, despite having never said a word in the interagency process to even suggest he opposed the invasion. See: War and Decision, pp. 245-50.

[63] Known and Unknown, pp. 427-30.

[64] In My Times, p. 386.

[65] George W. Bush (2010), Decision Points, p. 238; and, In My Time, p. 388.

[66] War and Decision, p. 303.

[67] As it happens, Saddam never took seriously the U.S. threat to unseat him: partly because of the feeble U.S. responses to his provocations throughout the 1990s, partly because he believed his hired friends in France and Russia could block any U.S. action against him—they did try, even after hostilities began—and partly because Saddam had retreated even further into a world of his own as his religious devotion deepened, the Iraqi ruler’s belief was that Iran was his main threat, not the U.S., and this view does not seem to have been dispelled even after the invasion got underway. Saddam thought the infliction of sufficient casualties on the U.S. would force them to halt the operation.

[68] One of the Bush administration’s uncontested non-proliferation successes was the shutdown of the illicit network for WMD technology and expertise run by Pakistan and fronted by Abdul Qadeer Khan. The A.Q. Khan network was discovered by examining the WMD materials surrendered by Libya’s Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi in December 2003, a decision not unconnected to Saddam’s deposition and arrest a few days earlier. A.Q. Khan—i.e., Pakistan—had been key to the nuclear-weapons programs of Libya, Iran, and North Korea. In April 2004, two months after Khan had admitted his activities and been placed under “house arrest” (protective custody) by Pakistan’s military-intelligence establishment, Khan claimed that he had seen nuclear devices in North Korea in 1999. The Kim regime, in its inimitable style, denied this allegation as “nothing but a whopping lie”. At that time, in early 2004, Kim was believed to posses (at least enough fissile material for) six nuclear weapons.

[69] War and Decision, pp. 209-301.

[70] The U.N. Security Council was not even conceived as a legal entity; it is “a political body”. Morally speaking, one might look with suspicion on any policy that can get through the UNSC, given that this means Russia and China withheld their veto. An argument can be made for a baseline operating assumption in Western policy against anything that meets with approval from Moscow and Peking.

[71] In My Time, pp. 389-91.

[72] War and Decision, p. 300-03.

[73] Decision Points, pp. 237-38.

[74] ‘The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction’ (“Iraq Intelligence Commission” or “Silberman-Robb Commission”), 31 March 2005, p. 174. Available here.

[75] France and Russia had vetoed the appointment of Rolf Ekeus as head of the inspection commission on Iraq in 2000. Ekeus had a record of some success in dealing with Iraq’s WMDs, albeit his best work had been done in the immediate aftermath of Saddam’s eviction from Kuwait when Coalition forces remained on the Iraqi border, able to resume hostilities if the ceasefire terms on WMD were too openly defied.

France and Russia were Saddam’s primary allies and the largest economic beneficiaries from the debauching of the oil-for-food program that was supposed to alleviate the suffering of the Iraqi population living under the sanctions Saddam had brought upon them.

Just to take the French case, which was so obscene. The French President in the run-up to the invasion, Jacques Chirac, was personally on the take from Saddam Husayn, and had been for decades. Both of Chirac’s Presidential runs, in 1995 and when he had to run again in 2002 to stay out of jail on corruption charges, were bankrolled by Saddam. In 1979, when Chirac was Mayor of Paris, he built Saddam a nuclear reactor knowing what he wanted it for. The Israelis had to undertake a risky aerial raid to demolish the Osirak reactor, as the French called it, located at the Tuwaytha Centre, in June 1981, right before the fissile material was inputted. (Christopher Hitchens used to quote a line about Chirac, “so corrupt he would willingly have paid for the pleasure of selling himself”, which is to say the least of it.)

For the French and Russian governments, then, a man like Ekeus who might disrupt their lucrative racket was most unwelcome: they ensured the appointment of Hans Blix, who was just back from overseeing an inspection process in North Korea that finished with the regime acquiring nuclear weapons. Given the pressures exerted on Blix by his backers, and his own considerable anti-talent in detecting dishonesty from totalitarian regimes, it is all the more impressive that Blix was able to declare after a brief look at Saddam’s December 2002 declaration that it was “rich in volume but poor in information … and practically devoid of new evidence”, and more notable still that at the end of January 2003 Blix concluded: “Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament that was demanded of it”.

[76] War and Decision, p. 301.

[77] As set out in a previous post, Douglas Feith came to believe the President had decided that only invasion could disarm Saddam in December 2002 and President Bush in his memoirs gives some indication of this, though it is ambiguous and Bush can be read as saying the decision was not finally made until he gave the ultimatum on 17 March 2003. Rumsfeld in his memoir adds: “Up until the very minute the President authorized the first strike [into Iraq], there was no moment when I felt with razor-sharp certainty that Bush had fully decided [on the invasion].” See: Known and Unknown, p. 457.

[78] In time, the support of the overwhelming majority of Americans for the Iraq invasion when it commenced would be forgotten or attributed to the Bush administration’s deceptions, as would the Democratic votes in Congress authorising the invasion, but that’s another story.

[79] President Bush is often mocked as incurious, unintelligent, and the rest of it. So it is notable that Tenet’s deputy, John McLaughlin, like his boss no friend of the administration’s, especially once he was out of office, nonetheless said years later: “[President Bush] is an avid consumer of intelligence. He asks a lot of questions. He probes.”

[80] In My Time, p. 395. The first public revelation of this comment was in Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack (chapter 23), published in April 2004:

“When McLaughlin concluded, there was a look on the president’s face of, What’s this? And then a brief moment of silence. ‘Nice try,’ Bush said. ‘I don’t think this is quite—it’s not something that Joe Public would understand or would gain a lot of confidence from.’ [White House Chief of Staff Andrew] Card was also underwhelmed. The presentation was a flop. In terms of marketing, the examples didn’t work, the charts didn’t work, the photos were not gripping, the intercepts were less than compelling.

Bush turned to Tenet. ‘I’ve been told all this intelligence about having WMD and this is the best we’ve got?’ From the end of one of the couches in the Oval Office, Tenet rose up, threw his arms in the air. ‘It’s a slam dunk case!’ the DCI said. Bush pressed. ‘George, how confident are you?’ Tenet, a basketball fan who attended as many home games of his alma mater Georgetown as possible, leaned forward and threw his arms up again. ‘Don’t worry, it’s a slam dunk!’

It was unusual for Tenet to be so certain. From McLaughlin’s presentation, Card was worried that there might be no ‘there’ there, but Tenet’s double reassurance on the slam dunk was both memorable and comforting. Cheney could think of no reason to question Tenet’s assertion. He was, after all, the head of the CIA and would know the most. The president later recalled that McLaughlin’s presentation ‘wouldn’t have stood the test of time,’ but Tenet’s reassurance, ‘That was very important.’ ‘

Needs a lot more work,’ Bush told Card and [National Security Adviser Condoleezza] Rice. ‘Let’s get some people who’ve actually put together a case for a jury.’ He wanted some lawyers, prosecutors if need be. They were going to have to go public with something. The president told Tenet several times, ‘Make sure no one stretches to make our case’.”

It is important to understand that Woodward, whose whole career as an “investigative” reporter back to the “Deep Throat” (Mark Felt) business in the Nixon years, has been based on channelling “sources”, wrote his books in the “War on Terror” era as a stenographer for the CIA and State Department faction. To have Tenet quoted in this way by Woodward, therefore, provides good evidence-against-interest reason to think it is true.

It is also notable that Woodward agrees with Vice President Cheney’s recollection that the remark came in response to President Bush asking sceptical questions of the CIA’s information (In My Time, p. 385).

Tenet himself, in his memoir (At the Center of the Storm, pp. 361-62), essentially agrees with the Woodward account, even the quotes, including the “slam dunk” one (“I certainly don’t deny using the term ‘slam dunk’ or strongly believing that Saddam had WMD”). Where Tenet differs is in claiming that he said it in response to a question of whether the CIA had “better information” to present. As such, Tenet says his words have been “taken completely out of context” and “intentionally misused”. Tenet’s claim does not make a great deal of sense, simply as a linguistic matter—it is difficult to imagine how the conversation would run that elicited the use of the phrase in that way, and Tenet conspicuously does not even try to construct a transcript to explain himself. But the psychic impact on Tenet of having his words out there is clearly real enough: he says he has been “haunted” by them ever since Woodward’s book was published and probably would not have written his own book had he not uttered them.

[81] At the Center of the Storm, pp. 369-71.

[82] In My Time, p. 395; and, At the Center of the Storm, p. 361.

[83] In My Time, pp. 395-96.

[84] War and Decision, p. 283.

[85] War and Decision, pp. 332-34.

[86] War and Decision, pp. 474-75.

[87] War and Decision, pp. 351-52.

[88] In My Time, pp. 396; and, War and Decision, p. 351.

[89] The Senate later noted the “central role” the CIA played in crafting Powell’s U.N. speech and noted that “all” of the material in the terrorism section was “from intelligence that had previously been described in IC finished intelligence assessments”. Powell “only wanted to use solid intelligence in the speech”, and was given sixty-four intelligence reports to this end, the largest numbers from signals intelligence (obviously), foreign government services, and detainee debriefs, with the rest made up from DIA finished products, human intelligence sources, satellite images, Iraqi opposition sources, and press reports. Powell “wanted the language carefully reviewed by CIA analysts”, and he got it. See: SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), pp. 366-67.

[90] Tenet is clear that Powell wrote the U.N. presentation “free from interference” from the White House or the Pentagon, and in collaboration solely with the CIA. Tenet tells of the “senior intelligence professionals assigned to check the accuracy of what was being said” and the “CIA and State Department officials work[ing] side by side” to craft a speech that was rigorously accurate and supported by intelligence. In explaining how it was that “flawed information”—indeed, “a lot” of it—”made its way into the speech” (a notable use of the passive voice) despite the protection from the neoconservatives offered by “our barbed wire-encircled headquarters compound”, Tenet makes an amusing effort to divert blame onto the White House by claiming that the errors might not have happened if the Agency analysts had not “spent two days getting the garbage out of a White House draft”, referring to the briefing notes Hadley and Libby had given to Powell. The problem with Tenet’s claim that CIA officers were consumed with editing the Hadley-Libby document is that Powell himself acknowledges he threw the document in the trash before he ever went to Langley. See: At the Center of the Storm, pp. 372-74.

[91] Tenet claims that he sat behind Powell during the U.N. presentation specifically at Powell’s request, which came “late in the process”. Tenet adds: “That was about the last place I wanted to be … but Powell and his deputy, Rich Armitage, were two of my closest colleagues in the administration. If he wanted me there, I was going to be there, even if my presence was more than a little odd for a serving DCI.” A small but important underlining of the social dynamics of the Bush administration. See: At the Center of the Storm, p. 375.

[92] There was a lot of suspicion in the Bush administration—and abroad, on all sides of the argument about the invasion—in 2002-03 that the CIA was understating how close Saddam was to a nuclear weapon, as the Agency had in 1990-91. See: Decision Points, p. 242.

In February 2003, after French President Jacques Chirac had made clear his country would never sign-off on the use of force to disarm Saddam, Chirac nonetheless gave a media interview in which he referred to “the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq” and even added: “The international community is right to be disturbed by this situation, and it’s right in having decided Iraq should be disarmed.” Chirac’s proposal was to do this through inspections he knew full well could not work—were not designed to work and were publicly failing as he spoke—but the hypocrisy does not make Chirac’s admission that his government believed Saddam had WMD and that President Bush was right to bring the issue before the “international community” any less significant.

In March 2002, August Hanning, the head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, gave an on-the-record statement that his agency believed Saddam was developing chemical weapons at a plant in Samarra, with the assistance of components from German companies, and, “It is our estimate that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years”, which was a more “alarmist” assessment than any American intelligence agency. (The CIA’s October 2002 NIE said: “If left unchecked, [the Saddam regime] probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade”.)

Egypt’s ruler, Hosni Mubarak, who opposed the Iraq invasion, told Tommy Franks, the CENTCOM commander who oversaw the invasion, that American and Allied forces should expect to be attacked with biological WMD. Among the governments that supported the invasion and committed troops, it was not just Britain and Australia, members of the same Five Eyes intelligence system as the U.S., who believed Saddam had an active nuclear program: Italy, Poland, and Spain independently concluded the same thing. See: Known and Unknown, pp. 434-35.

[93] In My Time, p. 392.

[94] On this, I find myself in rare agreement with George Tenet, who wrote in his memoir: “Despite some problems, that piece of Powell’s remarks stands up much better today than does the larger portion on Iraq and WMD.” An interesting side-note: according to Tenet, despite it being “practically inappropriate” for the CIA to write a speech for policymakers, the terrorism section of Powell’s speech was directly written by the Agency, specifically by Phil Mudd, the then-Deputy Chief of the Counterterrorism Center, and Tenet personally refined it after that, working on it until 2 AM on 5 February 2003, the day Powell gave the speech. See: At the Center of the Storm, p. 374.

[95] Known and Unknown, pp. 446-48.

[96] Known and Unknown, pp. 446-48.

[97] SSCI Report on WMD and Terrorism Findings (2006), pp. 76-78.

[98] At the Center of the Storm, pp. 352-53.

[99] Known and Unknown, p. 448.

[100] “None of the portrayals of the intelligence reporting included in Secretary Powell’s speech differed in any significant way from earlier assessments published by the Central Intelligence Agency”. See: SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), p. 369.

[101] Possibly the largest problem with Powell’s speech was the concept, which was, of course, created by the President. UNSCR 1441 put the entire burden of proof on Saddam to demonstrate his disarmament, and contained the terms of its own enforcement in case of defiance. The U.S., in volunteering information in the Powell presentation, undermined the premise of 1441 and confused the public understanding of what it meant, by extension—especially in combination with the “second resolution” fiasco—damaging the perceived legitimacy of the invasion, which had a reasonable claim to be executing the letter and spirit of 1441.

[102] War and Decision, pp. 78-79. The CIA was heavily influenced in its hostility to the Northern Alliance by its relationship with Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) agency, an early warning of the Alice-in-wonderland strategic situation the U.S. was getting into in Afghanistan. The mission the U.S. was taking on in Afghanistan, led in the invasion phase by CIA paramilitary teams, was—though it was never phrased this way—to undo the Pakistani occupation of Afghanistan by removing from power the Taliban-Qaeda regime that was imposed and sustained by the ISI and the Pakistani Army. Simultaneoisly, the CIA was taking its cues about internal Afghan politics from the Pakistani ISI, the author of the problems in Afghanistan to begin with, which had—once it realised the Taliban-Qaeda regime was going to go—adopted as its fallback position a determination to empower as far as possible the Pashtuns in southern Afghanistan that formed the backbone of the Taliban. The contradiction—of the ISI being behind the jihadists that drew the Coalition into Afghanistan and their insurgency afterwards, while Pakistan was officially treated as a partner in the war—has never been resolved. See: Known and Unknown, p. 376.

[103] War and Decision, pp. 250-52.

[104] Silberman-Robb Commission (2005), pp. 381-82.

[105] Silberman-Robb Commission (2005), p. 545.

[106] Paul Pillar continues to be a nuisance at the present time, having become an ever-more confident advocate for the Asad regime and the Iranian Revolution, and an ever-more hysterical critic of Israel.

[107] At the Center of the Storm, p. 354.

[108] At the Center of the Storm, p. 355.

[109] If the Bush administration had been determined to foster the impression Saddam was behind 9/11, it would have spent more time publicising the case of Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, an Iraqi national working at the airport in Kuala Lumpur who facilitated the travel of two of the 9/11 death pilots when they attended the final planning meeting for the “Planes Operation” in Malaysia in January 2000. Whether Shakir attended the meeting is unknown.

Shakir had got his job because he had a contact at the Iraqi Embassy, Ra’ad al-Mudaris, who was assessed by some as an IIS officer working under official cover. Shakir left his job less-than-a-week after the 9/11 killers departed Malaysia. Shakir was arrested in Qatar six days after 9/11. The Saddam regime protested about this, according to some accounts vigorously. Shakir was turned over to the Americans, and the Jordanian GID was brought into the interrogation. Shakir resisted his interrogators—who used no “enhanced interrogation techniques”—very skilfully. The question arose of whether Shakir had been trained by a state intelligence service. The Jordanians were convinced Shakir was an IIS agent.

It was the Jordanians who proposed “flipping” Shakir and the CIA signed-off on it. Believing that Shakir had been recruited, he was sent to Baghdad to provide that rarest of things: human intelligence to the U.S. from within Saddam’s Iraq. Why it was ever believed Shakir could be kept under control once he was released is unclear. There was press reporting years later that Shakir was homosexual; perhaps it was felt this was the leverage that would keep him in line. At all events, Shakir was sent back into Iraq, and that is the last anyone has seen of him. It was a disastrous piece of tradecraft and it has left the question of whether Saddam had a spy at the final planning meeting for 9/11 open in perpetuity.

When the Senate looked at the Shakir case, they basically threw their hands up, noting that the CIA was reluctant to say much of anything about Shakir, and this was “reasonable based on the limited intelligence available and the analysts’ familiarity with the IIS”. See: SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), p. 340.

To reiterate: if the Bush administration was hell-bent on suggesting a direct line between Saddam and 9/11, it could have harped on the Shakir case and allowed people’s intuition that there is no smoke without fire to take over.

[110] David Ignatius, whose column at The Washington Post functions as a sort of second press office for the CIA, wrote in October 2005 about the Libby prosecution. Ignatius gives an Agency-line rendition of events: the Bush administration tried to make the CIA “the fall guy” for the mistakes over Iraq; Ahmad Chalabi was the neoconservatives’ “pet Iraqi exile” whom they tried to install in power in Baghdad; Vice President Cheney was obsessed with the alleged Atta meeting with the IIS in Prague and pushed the Agency improperly over its work on the Saddam-Qaeda connection; Tenet “loyally” (an amazing word to use about that man) resigned to protect the Agency; and it was the White House that “treated the CIA as the enemy”. It is thus noteworthy that Ignatius agrees that the attempt to prosecute Libby is a “strange story”, with the strangeness explained by the fact that the prosecution is an attempt to outfit the politics of the inter-agency dispute in a legal guise.

[111] Silberman-Robb Commission (2005), p. 381.

[112] In 2017, while launching a political career, Plame revealed herself as an antisemite—a rather consistent theme, as noted at the beginning of this article, among the more hysterical opponents of the Iraq invasion. Earlier this year, Plame sought to dig herself out of this by discovering Jewish ancestry.

[113] War and Decision, p. 173.

[114] Interestingly, Wilson’s report itself split U.S. intelligence: the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) thought Wilson’s findings “supported their assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq”, while for “most analysts” at the CIA the Wilson “report lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal” [emphasis added]. See: SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), p. 73.

[115] ‘Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence on Iraq WMD’ (“The Duelfer Report”), Volume II, 6 October 2004, p. 9. Available here.

[116] SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), p. 45.

[117] Some of the information on Saddam seeking “yellowcake” in West Africa originates with France, which has good intelligence coverage of the area. The SIS/MI6 chief during the post-9/11 period, Sir Richard Dearlove, later explained that SIS and its French counterpart, the DGSE, had pooled their findings and agreed it showed Saddam trying to acquire uranium, only for a senior DGSE official to contact Dearlove weeks later, saying: “We do not want you to use the material [i.e., intelligence]”. Dearlove believes that the DGSE request to suppress evidence of Saddam’s illicit activities was due to political pressure from then-French President Jacques Chirac, who was being paid exorbitant amounts of money by Saddam to try to derail the Anglo-American effort to secure Iraq’s disarmament.

[118] ‘Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction’, or ‘Butler Review’ (2004), p. 125. Available here.

[119] SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), p. 72.

[120] The question so often asked when trying to present the evidence about what was actually found in Iraq on the WMD and Al-Qaeda questions is, How can this be true if the Bush administration itself did not even say this? And the answer is quite straightforward: the administration took a strategic decision not to defend itself on the pre-invasion issues in late 2003, trying to focus instead on the future—and thus, of course, focusing all of the criticism on the past, which was now undefended territory.

In the Niger case, it was even worse: Condoleezza Rice told the press in July 2003, “We wouldn’t have put [the Niger section] in the speech if we had known what we know now”, and days later Stephen Hadley, President Bush’s Deputy National Security Adviser, apologised again for the inclusion of the “sixteen words”.

This loss of nerve by the President, which was so evident in the second term, did not afflict the Vice President. Cheney opposed the apology—which was supposed to make the story go away—because (a) he knew it would have the opposite effect, and (b) the words spoken in the speech were true: the British had told the Americans what the President said they had. That the British continued—and continue—to stand by their initial reporting only made it doubly silly to apologise. In his memoir, Cheney has an accurate and concise write-up of the Niger-Plame-Libby imbroglio. See: In My Time, pp. 402-10.

[121] SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), p. 315.

[122] SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), p. 346.

[123] SSCI Report on WMD and Terrorism Findings (2006), pp. 68, 105-06.

[124] And if Saddam’s word is not enough, the report also uncritically reproduces the testimony of Tariq Aziz. See: SSCI Report on WMD and Terrorism Findings (2006), p. 67. The biggest tell of superficiality is that the report keeps referring to Saddam’s regime as “secular”.

[125] SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), p. 322.

[126] SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), p. 363.

[127] SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), p. 34.

[128] SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), p. 360.

[129] SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), pp. 360-61.

[130] SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), p. 34.

[131] SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), p. 284.

[132] SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), p. 363.

[133] SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), p. 358.

[134] SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), p. 359.

[135] Silberman-Robb Commission (2005), pp. 188-89.

[136] Silberman-Robb Commission (2005), pp. 184-85.

[137] War and Decision, p. 260; and, Known and Unknown, p. 476.

[138] Central Intelligence Agency Report, Iraq: The Day After, 18 October 2002, cited in ‘Report on Prewar Intelligence Assessments About Postwar Iraq’ (“SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence About Postwar Iraq”), 25 May 2007, p. 100. Available here.

[139] Ironically, one of the few pieces of “hard” evidence the CIA could offer for its thesis that the Iraqi population would resent “externals” like Chalabi and the INC attaining leadership positions in the aftermath of Saddam came from an INC source. (The CIA dropped this argument as soon as Chalabi seemed to be out of the picture in early 2004 and welcomed the transitional government appointed in June 2004 being headed up by one of the Agency’s favourite “externals”.)

“Source Six”, an Iraqi-born businessman, was brought to the attention of the DIA after the DIA started overseeing U.S. relations with the INC in October 2002. Source Six mostly discussed Saddam regime personalities, and his information seems to have generally checked out. For instance, in February 2003, Source Six spoke of Saddam’s “confidence in Faruq Hijazi for intelligence assessments. A source comment noted that if Saddam wanted to build a relationship with bin Ladin, ‘he would have picked Hijazi as his representative’.” We have no need for guesswork on this front: it was Hijazi who carried out much of the Saddamists’ high-level interactions with Al-Qaeda. “The only report from Source Six that did not discuss regime personalities, dated February 2003, said that some of the Iraqi population is excited about the idea of removing Saddam Hussein from power … The source said the Iraqi people will want a new government created from officials in Iraq, not from Iraqi exiles who may ‘be seen as spies that are not loyal to Iraq and are placed into a position by the USG as a puppet government’. The CIA included this report in a March 13, 2003, paper, Iraq: Diaspora Brings Tensions, Hope, as one of many sources used to support the judgment that Iraqis would be threatened by an exile-led transitional authority.”

See: ‘Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the Use by the Intelligence Community of Information Provided by the Iraqi National Congress’ (“SSCI Report on Chalabi’s INC”), 8 September 2006, pp. 96-97. Available here.

[140] “We conclude that it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments.” See: Silberman-Robb Commission (2005), p. 51.

[141] SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), pp. 24-25.

[142] SSCI Report on Prewar Intelligence (2004), pp. 351-53.

[143] Silberman-Robb Commission (2005), pp. 156-58.

[144] The Duelfer Report, Volume I (2004), pp. 65-66. 

[145] War and Decision, p. 329.

[146] Silberman-Robb Commission (2005), p. 158.

[147] The Silberman-Robb Commission (p. 93) criticised the CIA because it “gave the impression that the support for the BW assessments was more broadly based than was in fact the case. A more accurate presentation would have allowed senior officials to see just how narrow the evidentiary base for the judgments on Iraq’s BW programs actually was.” That this largely relied on a single source, CURVEBALL, was hidden from Powell when he was putting the U.N. presentation together. The Commission wrote: “In this instance, once again, the Intelligence Community failed to give policymakers a full understanding of the frailties of the intelligence on which they were relying” (p. 11). What was true on the biological WMD file was true more broadly.

[148] Silberman-Robb Commission (2005), p. 175.

[149] At the Center of the Storm, p. 328.

[150] At the Center of the Storm, p. 376.

[151] At the Center of the Storm, pp. 380-81.

[152] In At the Center of the Storm, Tenet argues (pp. 381-82)—quite correctly—that the records showing Drumheller had been in Tenet’s office twenty-two times between 2001 and 2004, and “had dozens of [other] opportunities” to “raise the alarm” about CURVEBALL, “yet he failed to do so”, casts doubt on Drumheller’s subsequent claims that he had in fact warned the Director. It is not credible that Drumheller had blown the whistle about CURVEBALL on paper, then never said anything in person to Tenet as the CIA pressed forward in producing intelligence outputs of such grave importance that relied so heavily on CURVEBALL.

Note the irony, however, that one of the central—and most publicised—claims in Tenet’s book is: “There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat” (p. 305). Put aside how plainly ludicrous this is: the documentation is all public on Tenet’s presence at dozens and dozens of national security meetings in the White House Situation Room between September 2001 and March 2003. Tenet might have had an anti-talent for intelligence work, but surely even he got to “know of” what was happening at all these meetings he was attending after a certain point. Still, assume for some reason Tenet was uncomfortable speaking at these meetings, or was actually prevented from doing so.

Tenet gave an intelligence briefing one-on-one to the President six days per week during that entire period. That is something in excess of four-hundred times Tenet was in President Bush’s office: if it is reasonable for Tenet to expect that Drumheller would raise doubts about CURVEBALL in one of less-than-two-dozen visits to Tenet’s office—and that is reasonable—then it beggars belief that Tenet would say nothing to the President given so many more opportunities if Tenet believed so strongly that something was so wrong with the course being taken over Iraq.

[153] At the Center of the Storm, pp. 375-83.

[154] There was an “INC source, handled by DIA’s Defense HUMINT Service, [who] provided information on Iraqi mobile BW facilities that was initially thought to corroborate Curveball’s reporting”, but “[t]he INC source was quickly deemed a fabricator in May 2002”. The problem here was that after DIA’s handlers “issued a fabrication notice [they] did not recall the reporting on mobile BW facilities in Iraq. Despite the fabrication notice, reporting from the INC source regarding Iraqi mobile BW facilities started to be used again several months later in finished intelligence—eventually ending up in the October 2002 NIE and in Secretary Powell’s February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council. This inability to prevent information known to be unreliable from making its way to policymakers was due to flawed processes at DIA’s Defense HUMINT Service.” See: Silberman-Robb Commission (2005), pp. 108-09.

[155] The CURVEBALL story began to unravel in September 2003 when Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) analysts in Iraq interviewed people CURVEBALL had supposedly worked with, none of whom knew him, and interviewed CURVEBALL’s family, who confirmed he had been outside Iraq for long stretches between 1995 and 1999, including at the time of an industrial accident CURVEBALL claimed to have witnessed in 1998. In late October 2003, some WINPAC analysts reported to the head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) that CURVEBALL’s reporting was “all false” and they believed he was a fabricator. Some WINPAC analysts still backed CURVEBALL, but the discovery of travel documentation in January 2004 made it clear CURVEBALL could not have witnessed many of the things he said he had. CIA Director George Tenet was briefed on 4 February 2004, though was understandably reluctant to admit the golden source on which he had hung so much was a fraud. What really did for CURVEBALL was when the CIA finally met him, in March 2004. CURVEBALL’s demeanour was enough of a “tell” and when questioned he was singularly incapable of explaining the discrepancies in what he had said and what had been found. The layout of the sites did not match what CURVEBALL had claimed. At Djerf al-Naddaf, there was a six-foot wall where CURVEBALL said bio-weapons trailers moved in and out of the facility. See: Silberman-Robb Commission (2005), pp. 106-07.

In late May 2004, after investigation on the ground in Iraq and debriefing CURVEBALL, the CIA wrote an assessment that all indications were “the key source” had “lied about his access to a mobile BW production project”. The CIA and DIA issued burn notices and notified Congress in June 2004. See: SSCI Report on Chalabi’s INC (2006), pp. 107-08.

[156] SSCI Report on Chalabi’s INC (2006), p. 108.

[157] Chalabi had helped instigate a coup attempt against Saddam in March 1995. (There was a brief revolt, more a military mutiny, against Saddam in June 1995, which seems to have been local and spontaneous, involving neither the INC nor the CIA.) The CIA would later claim Chalabi had undertaken his 1995 scheme without coordinating with the Agency; this was a lie, as later investigation disclosed.

A year later, the CIA tried to revive one of its vintage moves: a military coup. Chalabi warned the Agency that the plot was infiltrated; he was ignored, and the conspirators were rounded up and killed. The CIA never did forgive Chalabi for being right about this. Chalabi tried to warn the CIA in the aftermath that Barzani had invited Saddam’s army into the Kurdistan zone that was protected by the Anglo-American no-fly zone to help Barzani in his civil war against the other main Kurdish faction, Talabani’s PUK. Chalabi was again ignored, and Saddam invaded Kurdistan, among other things murdering one-hundred INC members.

Rather than trying to rebuild the Iraqi opposition, the CIA decided in December 1996 that the damage to the INC, and the eviction of the survivors from Iraqi territory, meant it was no longer useful as an umbrella structure. In February 1997, the CIA cut off the INC that it had been modestly funding to that point. Instead of lying down and admitting defeat, however, Chalabi went public about the fiasco in northern Iraq, and turned to Congress, where he helped lead the successful lobbying effort that passed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, making it official U.S. policy to terminate the regime of Saddam Husayn.

The CIA responded by making it an institutional mission to destroy Chalabi. As mentioned above, one way the CIA did this was to draw attention to Chalabi’s closeness to Iran, but the Agency had known about this when they were on good terms with Chalabi and tacitly encouraged Chalabi to seek Iranian support during the 1995 operation.

The U.S. government restored funding to the INC in March 2001, but this time it came from the State Department, which was never happy about the INC’s conduct inside Iraq—both the efforts against Saddam and the collection of intelligence—and ceased its relationship with the INC about six months later. The INC file was picked up in October 2002 by the DIA, which regarded the INC, partly due to CIA encouragement, with near-open suspicion, as an unreliable source of intelligence and as an entity penetrated by Iranian intelligence and possibly other hostile services. The DIA began looking for ways to sever its relationship with the INC in late 2003 and in May 2004 found the perfect pretext when the arrest warrant based on fabricated corruption charges was issued for Chalabi.

See: SSCI Report on Chalabi’s INC (2006), pp. 21-34.

[158] Silberman-Robb Commission (2005), p. 108.

[159] SSCI Report on Chalabi’s INC (2006), p. 143.

[160] SSCI Report on Chalabi’s INC (2006), pp. 149-50.