BUSHIES STUNNED BY WMD LIES: NEW YORK, June 1 /PRNewswire/ -- The story of how U.S. intelligence tracked Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capability, pieced together by Newsweek reporters from interviews with top administration and intelligence officials, is not encouraging. A recently retired State Department intelligence analyst directly involved in assessing the Iraqi threat, Greg Thielmann, tells Newsweek that inside the government, "there is a lot of sorrow and anger at the way intelligence was misused. You get a strong impression that the administration didn't think the public would be enthusiastic about the idea of war if you attached all those qualifiers." Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas, Senior Diplomatic Correspondent Richard Wolffe and Investigative Correspondent Michael Isikoff go inside the administration's civil war over intel in the June 9 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, June 2).
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They report how George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence was frustrated last winter, as some of the most astute U.S. intelligence analysts were trying to prove that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to America. But the evidence was thin-sketchy and speculative, or uncorroborated, or just not credible. Finally, according to a government official who was there, Tenet leaned back in his chair and said, "Everyone thinks we're Tom Cruise. We're not. We can't look into every bedroom and listen to every conversation. Hell, we can't even listen to the new cell phones some of the terrorists are using."
Thomas, Wolffe and Isikoff report that the prospect of a serious inquiry hung uneasily over a small dinner party of top intelligence officials, including Tenet, in Washington last week. The guests "were stressed and grumpy," reports a former CIA official who was present. "There was a lot of rolling of eyes and groans" about a coming wave of investigations. Tenet tried to reassure his dinner partners that the second-guessing was premature. "We'll be fine," he said. In an unusual move, the DCI two days later put out a public statement defending the CIA's "integrity and objectivity." The job of the CIA director is, as the former agency official puts it, "to speak truth to power."
They report that the case that Saddam possessed WMD was based, in large part, on assumptions, not hard evidence. One persistent theme: that Saddam was intent on building a nuke. The evidence sometimes cited to support Saddam's nuclear program was shaky, however. On the morning after Bush's State of the Union address in January, Thielmann, who had recently resigned from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR)-whose duties included tracking Iraq's WMD program-read that Bush had cited British intelligence reports that Saddam was trying to purchase "significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Thielmann was floored. "When I saw that, it really blew me away," Thielmann tells Newsweek. Thielmann knew about the source of that allegation. The CIA had come up with some documents purporting to show Saddam had attempted to buy up to 500 tons of uranium oxide from the African country of Niger. The documents were a forgery, and a crude one at that, peddled to the Italians by an entrepreneurial African diplomat. The Niger minister of Foreign Affairs whose name was on the letterhead had been out of office for more than 10 years. The most cursory checks would have exposed the fraud. As Thielmann read that the President had relied on these documents to report to the nation, he thought, "Not that stupid piece of garbage. My thought was, how did that get into the speech?"
In two reports to Secretary of State Colin Powell, INR concluded there was no reliable evidence that Iraq had restarted a nuclear program at all. "These were not weaselly worded," says Thielmann. "They were as definitive as these things go." These dissents were duly recorded in a classified intelligence estimate. But they were largely dropped from the declassified version made available to the public. U.N. inspectors say they have found solid proof that Iraq bought tubes to build small rockets, not nukes.
They report that the real test of the government's case against Saddam came in the testimony by Powell delivered to the United Nations on Feb. 5. Presented with a "script" by the White House national-security staff, Powell suspected that the hawks had been "cherry-picking," looking for any intel that supported their position and ignoring anything to the contrary. For four days and nights, Powell and Tenet, top aides and top analysts and, from time to time, national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice, pored over the evidence-and discarded much of it. Out went suggestions linking Saddam to 9-11. The bogus Niger documents were dumped. Powell did keep a hedged endorsement of the aluminum tubes and contended that Saddam "harbored" Al Qaeda operatives. His most compelling offering to the United Nations was tape recordings (picked up by spy satellites) of Iraqi officials who appeared intent on hiding something from the U.N. arms inspectors. Just what they were hiding was never quite clear.
Powell's presentation did not persuade the U.N. Security Council, but it did help convince many Americans that Saddam was a real threat. As the military began to gear up for an invasion, top planners at Central Command tried to get a fix from the CIA on WMD sites they could take out with bombs and missiles. After much badgering, says an informed military source, the CIA allowed the CENTCOM planners to see what the agency had on WMD sites. "It was crap," said the CENTCOM planner. The sites were "mostly old friends," buildings bombed by the military back in the 1991 gulf war. The CIA had satellite photos of the buildings. "What was inside the structures was another matter," says the source. "We asked, 'Well, what agents are in these buildings? Because we need to know,' And the answer was, 'We don't know,'" the CENTCOM planner recalled. |
