Art of Betrayal (65 page)

A few months later the same CIA division chief received a late-night phone call from George Tenet. It was early February 2003 and Colin Powell was preparing to address the UN on the case for war. The Secretary of State and his aides had spent days and nights sweating over the files at CIA headquarters in Langley with officials scurrying around them trying to tie down loose ends. Twenty-eight items had been removed from his speech because they were too weak.
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Powell wanted it to be accurate but he also saw this as his ‘Adlai Stevenson' moment, a reference to the Secretary of State during the Cuban Missile Crisis who had brandished conclusive proof of Soviet actions inside the UN Security Council. Among the intelligence Powell wanted to use was some of the new material collected by MI6. An exhausted Tenet called the CIA officer who had met the German contact to get Dearlove's home number to negotiate clearance. That officer says he told Tenet personally that there were problems with Curveball. Tenet says he does not remember being told this. The next afternoon, Curveball's intelligence was in the Security Council chamber. ‘Mein Gott,' a German intelligence official exclaimed as he watched Powell speak on TV. ‘I thought you said it wasn't going to be used,' the German officer in Washington said to the division chief the next day.
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On 28 January President Bush had walked up to the dais in
Congress for his annual State of the Union message. A year before, he had warned of an ‘axis of evil'. This time he outlined the case as to why Iraq needed to be dealt with first. Among the charges was one that he leant on the British to substantiate. ‘The British government has learnt that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,' the President stated. This became the American equivalent of the British forty-five-minutes claim – the lightning rod for all the arguments over mistaken intelligence and how it had been used by politicians (the Americans always made more of the nuclear case, the British made more of the chemical/biological). The CIA had already carried out a quick investigation of the claim using a retired American ambassador, Joe Wilson, who was married to a CIA officer. He said he thought there was nothing to it. The British held the faith though, arguing that their own sources, separate from fabricated documents later found in Italy and including intercepted communications, suggested that on a trip to Niger an Iraqi ambassador had at least discussed uranium sales (even if no deal was actually done). The CIA never agreed and pushed the White House to keep the issue out of presidential speeches. They were none too pleased to hear it turn up in the State of the Union address, even if cleverly attributed not to them but to the British. MI6 officers were also surprised to hear what had been done with what they thought was a relatively innocuous piece of intelligence. As with Curveball, doubts had been buried and doubters sidelined.

On 27 November 2002, the UN inspectors strode through the doors of one of Saddam's presidential palaces on the Tigris River. They had arrived in Iraq clutching valuable intelligence, much of it supplied by Britain, indicating potential sites housing the weapons programmes. The demand for their entry had been part of a British strategy. If Saddam refused to allow them in, the case for war, especially at the UN, would be stronger. If he did let them in, they would either disarm him or find something which could be used to justify regime change. Hawks in Washington, such as Dick Cheney, thought inspections might be a trap to divert them away from war, but the British plan, backed by Colin Powell, won out. Then came the problem. The inspectors were not finding anything. They scoured the presidential palace for stores of suspicious items and documents.
They found only marmalade in the refrigerators.
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And so it went on as they went to site after site. No one in London seemed worried at first. That cunning Saddam is good at deception, they all agreed. It was his typical cat-and-mouse game. ‘When the inspectors started to report that they weren't finding what we all thought was going to be found, the response, for example, in SIS, was simply to turn up the volume control to say, “That just proves how devious and duplicitous Saddam Hussein is, and how incompetent the inspectors are,” recalled Sir David Omand.
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Nothing significant came of the British leads.
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‘We inspected a lot of chicken farms,' one former inspector said later of the whole process. On closer examination they were, indeed, chicken farms.
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The inspectors began to harbour doubts. Iraq was in a state of near collapse and it seemed unlikely that it could sustain and hide the necessary infrastructure. Hans Blix, the head of the UN inspecting body, told Blair he was grateful for the intelligence that had been provided, but ‘it had not been all that compelling'.
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At another meeting between the two men over crumpets at Chequers, Blair told Blix that without ‘honest co-operation' from Iraq there would be a decision to act by the start of March. Blix sensed that the brutal nature of Saddam's regime weighed heavily on Blair's thinking.
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The US had begun to spy on Blix as they were convinced he was not aggressive enough. Even though he believed there were weapons and generally agreed with the conclusions of the British dossier, there were concerns that he was avoiding strong conclusions in order to prevent his reports being used as a justification for war. The distrust of the UN and its intentions meant that Washington saw no point in letting inspections run their course, even though this might have encouraged other allies to join the coalition.
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By February 2003, the inspectors had conducted 400 inspections at 300 sites and found nothing. In London, they moaned that the inspectors were naive and were botching the process. Jokes started to go around British intelligence about how the inspectors had forgotten their spades. But as time went on a shade of fear began to attach itself to the humour. There was particular anger that the inspectors had failed to take the proper equipment, including ground penetrating radar, when they visited a bunker beside a military hospital based on a British tip-off. ‘There were some quite breathless moments when
intelligence was rushed in saying “We found it”,' a Downing Street official recalled, yet nothing materialised, despite the intense interest of a prime minister who was ‘desperate' to see whatever there was.
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‘The Prime Minister was interested in a silver bullet,' recalled the Arabist MI6 director. ‘If there was a gleam of a silver bullet anywhere, he would want to know about it, and he would want to see the product.'
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Meanwhile, the three to four weeks in which the new source on trial had promised to deliver intelligence on WMD sites came and went. Tony Blair and Jack Straw kept pressing MI6. What was holding it up? they asked.
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But nothing more was heard. The MI6 director, who believed any WMD would be no larger than something that could fit on a petrol truck, was now becoming increasingly pessimistic about the chances of finding anything. He knew it was now too late to change the argument for going to war. ‘We were on the flypaper of WMD, whether we liked it or not.'
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Moving each day, sleeping in a different place every night, Saddam Hussein was in a bind. Like Khrushchev with his missiles in 1961, the secret Saddam was keeping from the world was that he was weaker than he appeared. He was conscious of Iran next door developing its own weapons and of the danger of seeming frail. Viewed from his isolated bunker deep underground, Iran always felt a more immediate threat than the US.
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But at the same time Saddam was not quite bluffing about his ability since he was also telling the US and UK privately and publicly that he had no weapons (consistency is not necessarily required if you are a dictator). The problem was that he did not know how to convince them. After the 1991 Gulf War, the nuclear facilities had been damaged and Saddam had decided the country did not have the resources to continue while under sanctions. Orders had come down to Jaffar Dhia Jaffar, the erudite British-trained leader of the nuclear programme, to hand over everything to the Republican Guards so they could destroy it all. ‘Saddam decided to terminate the programmes in July of 1991, hoping that sanctions would be lifted soon because it was just far more important to lift sanctions than to continue with these programmes,' Jaffar later explained.

The Iraqi leader had not given up all ambitions. Getting rid of weapons, he believed, would end inspections and lead to the lifting of the sanctions. Then he might be able to restart his programmes.
There was an unexpected flaw to his master plan though. He could not convince people he really had got rid of the weapons. He would reflect that his crucial mistake had been to destroy the weapons unilaterally after 1991 without UN supervision.
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In order to maintain the illusion of power, only a handful of Iraqis had known of the destruction in 1991 – a decision which would ultimately cost Saddam. There was a push by Iraq to try and close the file with the UN in 1997 and 1998, according to Jaffar. But when it failed, Saddam concluded that whatever he told the US they would not lift sanctions so he might as well remove the humiliating burden of inspections. ‘Why have both sanctions and the inspectors? We'd rather have the sanctions and not the inspectors.'
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He also never believed, right to the end, that the US would actually invade; air strikes were the most he expected. Had it not been for the 11 September attacks his gamble might have paid off, as the appetite for sanctions had begun to crumble.

Saddam's regime was characterised, like many dictatorships, by a mixture of fear and incompetence. It was so chaotic that no one really knew what anyone else knew, including Saddam himself, which was why he called a Revolutionary Command Council meeting after the British dossier. Every general knew he did not have the special weapons but thought his counterpart down the road did. This has led to the Byzantine argument that intelligence agencies could never have known that Iraq did not have weapons. ‘There was clearly a great deal of confusion among the Iraqi leadership about what their own capability was,' Richard Dearlove reflected later. ‘I am certainly of the view that there were probably no human sources in Iraq who could have told us authoritatively that they did not have WMD.'
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In other words, no source telling the truth could have been believed.

Saddam summoned his Revolutionary Command Council and top military aides again in December. This time he told them that there were no WMD. Some of his generals were stunned by the news. Up until then he had always implied he had something up his sleeve. Morale plummeted (although he later dropped hints that led some commanders to believe there was still some kind of capability).
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The Iraqi leader was now trying his best to convey to the outside world what had happened, though he never offered total co-operation, fearing it could be used to undermine his grip on power. That month
he offered a vast declaration of what had happened to the weapons, as had been demanded. It was dismissed in Washington and London as offering nothing new, the critics not realising that this was because there was not a lot new to offer. ‘I don't think that anyone would have been satisfied unless they had come up with a report that said “Here are the weapons,”' noted Hans Blix. Blix's approach, on chemical weapons particularly, was to focus on the so-called ‘unaccounted for' materials, items which Iraq could not prove had been destroyed.
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‘There were the reasons for that,' explains Jaffar. Books were not kept properly and production and procurement were exaggerated to secure one's position. ‘So when you come to these reports later you find that there's a difference between what was said was produced and what actually exists. That was called material unaccounted for. That doesn't mean it actually exists. It exists on paper perhaps. But it doesn't exist in practice.'
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Jaffar himself grew so angry with the failure of the UN to give Iraq a clean bill of health over its nuclear programme that when he met Hans Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei, the official in charge of nuclear inspections, in May 2002 in New York, the Iraqi had to be calmed down by another of Saddam's close aides who had accompanied him. Blix would wonder if rumours that US intelligence agencies had approached Jaffar as he arrived to try and persuade him to defect might have contributed to his irritation.
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There were explanations for everything, but no one was listening. The aluminium tubes the US (and for a while the UK) said were for centrifuges to make a nuclear bomb were for rockets. The trip to Niger was not for uranium – ‘We had 500 tons of Yellow Cake in Baghdad at the time, so why should we go and buy another 500 tons from Niger?' explains Jaffar.
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Part of the problem, former inspectors argue, was the past behaviour of officials including Jaffar. ‘The failure to give Iraq a clean bill of health really relates to Jaffar's own behaviour,' argues David Kay who led inspections of the nuclear programme in the early 1990s. ‘They did not come forward with the evidence of their programme. We had to discover it, they lied, cheated and tried to deceive us, they tried to cover up and they tried to retain portions of that programme … So you can never be sure that you'd gotten everything because the Iraqis failed to be honest about it. They started out lying, they continued lying and so consequently the
attitude among the inspectors developed: they never tell the truth, and so there must be something more there.'
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Iraq was saying the same thing secretly as it was saying publicly. One of MI6's tasks is to conduct back-channel contacts when the British government does not want it known openly that it is talking to someone. This was the case with the first contacts with the Provisional IRA when the British government maintained a public policy of not talking to terrorists. The same kind of back-channel contacts also took place with Saddam's regime (with British ministerial knowledge). The Controller for the Middle East met a senior Iraqi intelligence official secretly a number of times as war approached (it remained unclear to MI6 whether this was with or without Saddam's agreement). The Iraqi official told him there were no weapons and there was nothing more to say. This was not the lost opportunity to avoid war, as some would later claim. The official was saying in private exactly what Saddam was saying in public. At the time everyone considered this statement, like those of Saddam in public, to be simply rhetoric and ‘just what he was expected to say' and therefore deception.
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‘[He] failed to persuade his British interlocutors that he had anything new to offer … and the British – on their own – elected to break off contact,' George Tenet later said.
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The bar for intelligence that suggested there were no weapons was far higher than for any evidence of their existence.