A team of International Atomic Energy Agency experts is scheduled to return to Iraq today to determine the extent of looting of radioactive materials from the Tuwaitha complex, the main site in Iraq’s former nuclear program (see GSN, June 3).
“Their job will be to do an inventory to see what’s missing and, if possible, to re-collect and reseal the material,” agency spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said.
The United States, however, has set a number of conditions on the IAEA team’s visit, according to the Los Angeles Times. For example, the team is limited to only seven members and may only visit the Tuwaitha complex — they are barred from visiting six other looted Iraqi nuclear sites. The team was also originally required to sleep in tents at the complex, but now will be able to stay in a hotel in Baghdad (Bob Drogin, Los Angeles Times, June 6).
The IAEA team will also be accompanied at all times by U.S. troops during the visit to the Tuwaitha complex, U.S. Defense Department officials said. Fleming said, however, that the team would operate independently.
“We’re not going to conduct any activities with the military,” she said (Dafna Linzer, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, June 6).
The IAEA team’s visit is a one-time event to help enforce the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Pentagon officials said, adding that the visit should not be seen as a type of weapons inspection (Betsy Pisik, Washington Times, June 6).
U.S. military commanders this week said they are unequipped to sufficiently monitor the Tuwaitha complex.
“I know that the Tuwaitha facility is larger than the assets we have now in country to deal with it,” said Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, commander of U.S. ground troops in Iraq (Linzer, Associated Press).
Pentagon officials have also said they have found more radioactive material at the Tuwaitha complex than originally expected (Matt Kelley, Associated Press/London Guardian, June 6).
U.S. officials have so far recovered more than 100 containers believed to have been taken from the complex, according to the Washington Times. None of the people who returned the containers, and were paid $3 per container, have shown elevated levels of radiation, officials said (Pisik, Washington Times).
U.N. Security Council Members Call for Return of Inspectors
Meanwhile, U.N. Security Council members yesterday called for the United States to allow experts from the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission to return to Iraq to certify whether it possessed biological or chemical weapons.
The calls for the return of U.N. inspectors to Iraq appear to reflect a growing belief within the Security Council that inspectors should be allowed to test the U.S. and British claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction prior to the war, according to the Washington Post.
“The disarmament of Iraq must be verified and confirmed by UNMOVIC and the International Atomic Energy Agency on the ground and in conjunction with the (U.S.-led military) coalition,” French U.N. Ambassador Jean-Marc de la Sabliere told the Security Council, according to a copy of his speaking notes.
John Negroponte, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said the Iraq Survey Group, a Pentagon-established group of weapons experts, is capable of searching for evidence of Iraq’s WMD programs by itself, and that the United States is unlikely to permit U.N. inspectors to return anytime soon (Lynch/Graham, Washington Post, June 6).
“What we’ve said all along is that since March 17 or 18, the coalition has taken on responsibility for inspections and the search for the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” Negroponte said. “But for the time being, we have undertaken this mission of searching for WMD and I would expect that situation to continue for the foreseeable future,” he added (Evelyn Leopold, Reuters, June 6).
DIA Reported Last Year No Evidence of Chemical Weapons
The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency reported in September — at the same time the Bush administration was building the case for war — that there was no reliable evidence that Iraq had chemical weapons, officials said today.
In its report, the DIA said there was no evidence that Iraq had deployable chemical weapons. There was evidence, however, that Iraq had stockpiles of banned chemical agents, the agency said.
Two Pentagon officials who had read a summary of the report released yesterday by Bloomberg News said today that the report said the DIA had no solid evidence that Iraq possessed useable chemical weapons (Robert Burns, Associated Press/Boston Globe, June 6).
British Intelligence
British intelligence officers have said that the MI6 intelligence service inadequately evaluated information on Iraqi WMD efforts that was passed on to the British government, according to the London Independent (see GSN, June 5).
Most of the Iraq-related intelligence given to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office was from “raw” MI6 intelligence, according to senior government sources. Other information came from U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, according to security sources.
Officers in the British intelligence services said that MI6 wanted to please the prime minister’s office over Iraq to the point where “short cuts” were taken. For example, MI6 officers are believed to have approached the prime minister’s office directly with information, without having first passed it through the Joint Intelligence Committee, the Independent reported. While MI6 was allowed to do so, such actions resulted in a lack of filtering for the information (Kim Sengupta, London Independent, June 6).
A source described by the BBC as being “close to British intelligence” has said the prime minister’s office asked intelligence services at least six times to rewrite a dossier released last year on Iraq’s WMD efforts, according to the Press Association. Blair was personally involved at one point in the decision to have the dossier rewritten, the source said (Press Association, London Guardian, June 6).
Niger Claim Defended
British claims that Iraq attempted to purchase uranium from Niger prior to the war were not based on falsified information, according to the Financial Times.
The United States provided the IAEA with documents purporting to illustrate the attempted sale, but those documents were later revealed to have been forgeries. The British government, however, never possessed those documents and did not base its claims about the attempted uranium purchase on them, the Times reported (Huband/Turner, Financial Times, June 6).
Iraqi Officials — Dead or Alive?
Pentagon officials have said that ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is probably alive and behind a recent series of attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, according to ITAR-Tass. The attacks, which have so far killed nine U.S. soldiers over the past month, may have been coordinated by former senior Iraqi officials, according to intelligence reports (ITAR-Tass, June 6).
In addition, Rumsfeld said yesterday that Ali Hassan al-Majid — known as “Chemical Ali” for ordering a 1998 chemical weapons attack on Kurdish rebels in Northern Iraq — may still be alive (see GSN, April 24).
U.S. officials had previously believed that al-Majid was killed during a U.S. airstrike on the southern Iraqi city of Basra in April.
“There was some speculation afterwards that they thought that he had been killed. Now there’s some speculation that he may be alive,” Rumsfeld said. “But I just don’t know,” he added (New York Times, June 6).
By Peter H. Stone
National Journal
WASHINGTON — You cannot call it “WMDgate” yet, but the chorus of criticism aimed at the Bush administration for overselling, or misleading, the public and lawmakers about the existence and threat of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction is climbing rapidly up the decibel meter.
Six weeks after the war, the search for biological and chemical weapons in Iraq is still fruitless. Members of Congress, foreign governments, the media, and, perhaps most ominously, a growing number of intelligence insiders are questioning the accuracy of prewar intelligence on Iraq’s weapons and whether it was hyped to build support for going to war.
The adjectives used to describe key parts of the administration’s intelligence-some of them uttered on the record and some of them without attribution-are getting stronger and stronger with each passing day. They range from “spurious” and “intellectually dishonest,” to “fraudulent” and “completely unscrupulous.”
Vince Cannistraro, a 27-year veteran of the CIA who left in 1991, is one of several former agency officials who say that the administration’s intelligence on Iraq’s unconventional weapons capabilities now looks way off base. “It was at least incorrect and at the worst fraudulent,” says Cannistraro. “The real story is the politicization of intelligence.”
Other agency alumni hold similar views. “I don’t like the fact that the U.S. government exaggerated that Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction were an imminent threat against U.S. forces or allies in the region,” says Robert Baer, a 21-year CIA operative in the Middle East who retired in 1997. “People died. As an American, I’m mad, and I want to know why we’re there.”
Members of Congress, too, are asking, “Where are the WMD?” The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence this week began examining the issue at its weekly briefings on intelligence. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, says he’s “still inclined to believe that some weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq,” but he has “grave misgivings” about the administration’s prewar claims. “We’ll continue to press and probe and try to get people who know the information,” Rockefeller added. In addition, the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services panels are expected to work together on reviews of CIA documents relating to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and could launch a broader joint investigation later this year.
Meanwhile, in a May 22 letter, Representatives Porter Goss (R-Fla.) and Jane Harman (D-Calif.), the chairman and ranking Democrat respectively on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, asked CIA Director George Tenet some tough questions. The House committee, the letter said, is “interested in learning, in detail, how the intelligence picture regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was developed,” and it asked for answers by July 1. The letter also pressed Tenet to explain “how the CIA’s analysis of Iraq’s linkages to terrorist groups, such as al-Qaeda, was derived.”
Now some Republicans are accusing the Democrats of making partisan hay out of the situation. Goss, for instance, told National Journal, “There’s no question that partisan politics has crept into the debate.... This is largely a media event so far.” But Goss, a former CIA official himself, said the administration’s intelligence product warranted a committee review, which will likely lead to hearings later this year.
The administration is starting to mount a defense, albeit with conflicting messages and some backtracking from its broader prewar claims. On his recent European trip, President Bush went on Polish television and declared that two mobile trailers found in Iraq, which contained fermenters capable of making biological weapons, proved the administration’s case. “We found the weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “We found biological laboratories.”
Moreover, in a highly unusual move, Tenet in a written statement defended intelligence on Iraq, saying that the “integrity of our process was maintained throughout, and any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong.” The CIA had earlier announced that it had started a review to analyze how its prewar assessments of the Iraqi threat measured up against what was being discovered after the war.
Tenet’s statement came in response to a memo written to Bush, and posted on some Internet sites, by a group of retired CIA and State analysts known as Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. The memo declared that there was “growing mistrust and cynicism” among professionals about the intelligence that the administration’s top officials, including Bush, cited to justify the war against Iraq.
These concerns certainly weren’t allayed when Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, told Vanity Fair last month that although there were three fundamental worries about Iraq’s regime — its support for terrorism, criminal treatment of its own citizens, and weapons of mass destruction — “the truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction, as the core reason” for the war.
Indeed, senior administration officials hammered that theme home constantly in the months preceding the war. Last Aug. 26, for instance, Vice President Dick Cheney, addressing a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, flatly declared, “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” Further, Secretary of State Colin Powell in his Feb. 5 presentation to the United Nations stated, “We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, he’s determined to make more.” And last October, Wolfowitz said that Hussein “will not easily give up those horrible weapons that he has worked so hard and paid such a high price to develop and retain.”
For many critics, the primary problem with the prewar assessments of the Iraqi threat was that the administration slighted more-conservative and more-nuanced intelligence reports on Iraq from the CIA, while relying too heavily on more-aggressive and more-pessimistic intelligence provided by a small and secretive unit that the Pentagon set up in late 2001 called the Office of Special Plans. The real mission of OSP, critics allege, was to amass intelligence to help administration hard-liners make their case that the threat posed by Iraq was imminent.
Cannistraro, along with other former CIA officials, charges that the OSP “incorporated a lot of debatable intelligence, and it was not coordinated with the intelligence community.” Other intelligence veterans also point out that the Pentagon unit relied a great deal on the Iraqi National Congress and its leader Ahmed Chalabi, who were far from impeccable sources. “Chalabi never provided the CIA anything that could be corroborated,” Baer says. “Chalabi had an agenda — he wanted to go back. You can take his information, but you need to caveat it.”
Other former intelligence hands say that the caveats didn’t happen because of pressures to reach certain conclusions. Larry Johnson, who did stints in counterterrorism at both the CIA and the State Department, says he’s been told by people still in intelligence that what “they’re experiencing now is the worst political pressure” they’ve ever faced. “Anyone who attempted to challenge or rebut OSP was accused of rocking the boat.” Johnson adds that the OSP analysts “came in with an agenda that they were predisposed to believe.”
Ken Pollack, a former CIA analyst who is research director at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy, says, “One of the lessons to take away from the Iraq experience is that defectors are often biased and willing to tell the United States what they think we want to hear.” The Pentagon and its special unit, he continues, “Fought constantly with the CIA. They beat the crap out of the agency and their own analysis. It was a war of attrition, and they ground the agency down.”
The real issue, Pollack concludes, “isn’t overreliance on defectors or opposition groups, but that some officials in the administration seem to have run with defector reports and opposition-group claims that other intelligence analysts believe were spurious or of dubious accuracy.”
In developing good intelligence, intelligence veterans and others say that competition among agencies can be useful, but poses risks. “Competition is good, up to a point,” Rep. Goss says. But “I’m very much opposed to competition going to the point of obfuscation. This is a race that has to be run freely; you can’t trip your opponent in the next lane.”
That’s what some CIA veterans now say happened in the Bush administration’s effort to build its case against Iraq. Particularly troubling to former analysts are the British intelligence reports cited by Bush in this year’s State of the Union speech on Iraq’s supposed efforts to buy uranium from the Republic of Niger for a nuclear weapons program. The documents, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, are now considered forgeries, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has asked inspectors general at the CIA and the State Department to investigate.
Looking back, weapons experts are skeptical of America’s prewar intelligence on Iraq. “I think it’s increasingly unlikely that Iraq was the imminent threat which was at the heart of the administration’s case for pre-emptive action,” says Jonathan Tucker, a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and the author of Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox. “The administration gave the impression that those weapons were deployed and ready to use,” he said.
Veteran intelligence operatives fear that the growing doubts about the administrations prewar intelligence will harm U.S. credibility, especially in the conflict that everyone acknowledges is a direct threat to Americans — the war against terrorism.
“How good other countries believe our intelligence was about Iraq will color how they view our intelligence on other issues,” Pollack warns. “If they believe our intelligence on Iraq was greatly exaggerated, either intentionally or unintentionally, then they’re likely to be even harder to persuade next time around.”
By Mike Nartker
Global Security Newswire
WASHINGTON — The White House announced earlier this week the addition of five new countries to an effort by the Group of Eight to help address WMD prolferation concerns in the former Soviet Union (see GSN, June 2).
Finland, Norway, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland have chosen to join the G-8 Global Partnership to Prevent the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction, according to a White House fact sheet. The partnership calls for G-8 members — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States — to pledge $20 billion over 10 years to help fund nonproliferation projects, primarily in Russia. The effort was launched at the 2002 G-8 summit in Kananaskis, Canada.
G-8 members are also set to begin new projects in Russia through the partnership, the White House said. For example, France is expected later this year to launch three projects to help dispose of nuclear fuel and solid waste recovered from dismantled Russian submarines. In addition, Germany is expected to begin this month new projects to help improve physical protection at 17 Russian sites housing fissile materials.
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