IRAQ
al-Qaida operative confessed under torture by Egyptian officials that “he had heard from an unnamed associate” of such a link. The coerced, third-hand and uncorroborated claim was enough for the White House, even though it was later deemed false.
The White House also embraced a single-source report from an unnamed informant who told Czech intelligence that he was “70% sure” that Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, had met with an Iraqi diplomat in Prague in April 2001.
FBI records showed that Atta was stateside during the alleged meeting, and the Iraqi diplomat was not in Prague. But White House demands for details on Atta’s whereabouts led one exhausted CIA analyst to respond tersely, “He’s still dead.”
Intelligence collection is a vast maw, and as one former CIA official told Draper, “You can always find what you want somewhere” amid the conflicting statements, unverified sightings, ambiguous imagery and likely falsehoods. That was especially true of the ultimate justification for the war: Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. Warnings were dismissed, supportive evidence barely examined, careful analysis cast aside.
A Pentagon memo to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in mid-2002 warned that U.S. intelligence on Iraq’s WMD programs was perhaps 90% “incomplete,” for example. He shelved the memo. Administration claims that Iraq sought to buy yellowcake uranium from the African nation of Niger were laughably easy to disprove: A quick check on Google showed that the supposed letter of agreement was a fraud. But the White House was not deterred.
Most famously, the CIA championed an Iraqi engineer code-named Curveball who told German intelligence that Saddam could churn out anthrax, smallpox and other deadly biological agents on trucks. No wonder spies couldn’t find them!
The Germans warned that Curveball was unreliable and that no evidence backed up his claim; the CIA wasn’t allowed to interview him. But his imaginary mobile germ factories became a linchpin of the tissue-thin U.S. case for war. A year after the invasion, the CIA determined that Curveball was a fabricator, just as the Germans had claimed since 2001. (Full disclosure: Draper interviewed me and cites my book on the Curveball case.)
And on it went. The errors and deceit multiplied, as did rosy predictions of being greeted by the Iraqis as liberators. U.S. intelligence agents flooded into Iraq after the invasion to hunt for WMD — and found nothing.
It got worse. The Pentagon pushed the State Department aside in planning for the postwar period and then stood back as Iraq erupted in violence. A U.S. order to disband the Iraqi army planted the seeds of the insurgency and civil war that followed.
Bush ultimately bears the blame. He relied on a national security team who believed they should support his judgments, not question them. Congress embraced the faith-based intelligence, and so did a cheerleading media.
Draper has written the most comprehensive account yet of that smoldering wreck of foreign policy, one that haunts us today.
Bob Drogin, the Washington deputy bureau chief for The Los Angeles Times, is the author of “Curveball: Spies, Lies and the Con Man Who Caused a War.”