NB This issue of Lobster went to the printer in late May. At that stage no Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destruction’ had been found by the ‘coalition’ forces.
Before the furore over the British government’s ‘dodgy dossier’ in February, in truth I hadn’t been really paying much too attention to the then impending assault on Iraq. (1) It seemed obvious that the US, with its faithful British sidekick, was going to attack Iraq whatever the UN inspectors did or didn’t find. In any case, there seemed to be hundreds of people, better-informed than I, producing detailed analyses of the events which poured in on e-mail. I took notice when it turned out that the British government’s ‘intelligence-based dossier’ on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction had been assembled (2) from open sources by Alistair Campbell’s psy-ops unit at the Coalition Information Centre (CIC) in London. Good grief, I thought, Campbell is trying to treat the world’s media as if they are supine British journalists! (3) That New Labour’s chief spin-doctor had dropped his bosses in the shit was just too delicious.
Secretary of State Colin Powell was at the Security Council of the UN in February to sell the US case for war. Before his presentation Powell said that the dossier of evidence against Iraq that he would present to the Security Council would be ‘a straightforward, sober and compelling demonstration’ that Baghdad was deceiving UN weapons inspectors and failing to disarm. In the event it was nothing like that: some ambiguous pictures whose interpretation was disputed immediately; fragments of telephone intercepts which, it turned out, had been partly faked (this is discussed below); and a British report which Powell held up to the world’s cameras, saying: ‘I would call my colleagues’ attention to the fine paper that the United Kingdom distributed…… which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities.’ This was the now famous ‘plagiarised report’, ‘Iraq, its infrastructure of concealment, deception and intimidation’, comprised of material taken from the Middle East Review of International Affairs and Jane’s Intelligence Review, without acknowledgement, reproduced with their original errors but rewritten in places to make it seem more impressive.(4)
This was business as usual for the Campbell unit. As I reported in Lobster 43, the CIC’s attempts to spin the invasion of Afghanistan came unstuck. On 24 March 2002, in ‘Story of find in Afghan cave “was made up” to justify sending marines’, Peter Beaumont and Ed Vulliamy reported in The Observer:
‘Britain was accused last night of falsely claiming that al-Qaeda terrorists had built a “biological and chemical weapons” laboratory in Afghanistan to justify the deployment of 1,700 Royal Marines to fight there. The allegation follows a Downing Street briefing by a senior official to newspapers on Friday which claimed US forces had discovered a biological weapons laboratory in a cave in eastern Afghanistan after fighting near the city of Gardez this month…. The claim, carried by a number of newspapers yesterday, was denied emphatically last night by Pentagon and State Department sources.’
Two days later, in The Independent 26 March 2002, Kim Sengupta and Nigel Morris reported:
‘Downing Street was facing an embarrassing rift last night after its claims of a “marriage” of evil between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were contradicted by senior military officers. They disputed an assertion by Tony Blair’s spokesman that the Baghdad regime was supplying Osama bin Laden’s terrorists with chemical and biological weapons…….’
#
Before February’s ‘dodgy dossier’ Campbell’s CIC had issued another, ‘Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, The Assessment of the British Government’, on 24 September 2002.(5) Although this had been widely rubbished,(6) without the plagiarism angle to make it ‘sexy’ to the major media, it had not caused much embarrassment. These documents were written by a group ‘led by Tony Blair’s director of communications Alastair Campbell, head of homeland security David Omand, Downing Street foreign policy adviser Sir David Manning, and representatives of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ’.(7) The process of compiling the first dossier:
‘……resulted in fairly serious rows between Campbell, Omand and Stephen Lander, then head of M15. The essence of the disagreement is said to have been that intelligence material should be presented “straight”, rather than spiced up to make a political argument. The publication of the previous dossier, focusing on Saddam’s human rights record and making the case that the dictator was a threat to the West, had led to several stand-up rows between Omand and Campbell, with the former accusing the latter of sprinkling too much “magic dust” over the facts to spice it up for public consumption. ‘ (8)
The infamous ‘dodgy dossier’ apparently had to rely on public sources because British intelligence agencies refused to give them their data. (9) In the Washington Post Charles Heyman, editor of Jane’s World Armies, was quoted as saying, ‘The intelligence services were not involved – I’ve had two people phoning me today to say, “Look, we had nothing to with it”.’ (10)
Weapons? Which weapons?
The British ‘plagiarised’ text of February 2002 was prepared to bolster the notion that the Iraqis had hidden weapons of mass destruction. This had been asserted ad nauseam but not proved. Why hadn’t it been demonstrated? On 24 February the American magazine Newsday reported that it had been given access to the transcript of the 1995 debriefing by officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and UNSCOM of Iraqi General, and son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, Hussein Kamel. Kamel had told IAEA, reported Newsday, that
‘after the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them.’
All that remained were hidden blueprints, computer disks, microfiches and production moulds. The CIA and MI6 were told the same story; and ‘a military aide who defected with Kamel………backed Kamel’s assertions about the destruction of WMD stocks.’ Although a Whitehouse spokesman denied the Newsday story, the entire transcript of the Kamel debriefing was posted on the Net by Dr. Glen Rangwala, the Cambridge University analyst who had revealed the nature of the ‘dodgy dossier’.(11) In short, the US and UK had failed to demonstrate Iraq’s possession of WMDs because the Iraqi government did not possess any – something known by certain sections of the governments.(12) As the intelligence analyst and author Richard Bennett noted in February:
‘It has to be remembered that US and British Government officials were openly claiming less than two years ago that UN sanctions had worked well and that Iraq no longer posed a threat to its neighbours. ‘ (13)
Turbulence
Powell’s embarrassment at the hands of Alistair Campbell and his colleagues came at the end of a period when it had been made clear that the war lobby did not have the support of large sections of the Anglo-American military, intelligence and diplomatic services.(14) This disagreement had been rumbling in the background for most of 2002 (15) but emerged in full bloom into the media in October. On 7 October President Bush made a speech full of lies and half-truths. On the day of the speech the Washington Post published this:
‘While President Bush marshals congressional and international support for invading Iraq, a growing number of military officers, intelligence profess-ionals and diplomats in his own government privately have deep misgivings about the administration’s double-time march toward war. These officials charge that administration hawks have exaggerated evidence of the threat that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein poses – including distorting his links to the al Qaeda terrorist network – have overstated the extent of international support for attacking Iraq and have downplayed the potential repercussions of a new war in the Middle East…. intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House’s argument that Hussein poses such an immediate threat to the United States that preemptive military action is necessary. “Analysts at the working level in the intelligence community are feeling very strong pressure from the Pentagon to cook the intelligence books,” said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity.’ (16)
The refusal of the CIA to produce/invent the evidence required by the politicians in the war lobby led to the formation within the Pentagon of a unit to do just that.(17) Robert Baer, a former CIA officer, said of this development:
‘It isn’t new – they did it to Gadafy. Cooking the intelligence is a tried and true way to get your will in Washington.'(18)
We might add: and leaking information against your bureaucratic opponents is the tried and true response.
On 31 January 2003 The New York Times carried an Op Ed piece by Stephen C. Pelletiere, who, in his words,
‘…as the Central Intelligence Agency’s senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf.’
Pelletiere challenged one of the central planks – perhaps the central plank – of the war lobby: the gassing of the Kurds at Halabja. Both sides in the Iran-Iraq war, he told us, were using chemical weapons and it remains unclear which side had gassed Halabja. He concluded:
‘Until Washington gives us proof of Saddam Hussein’s supposed atrocities, why are we picking on Iraq on human rights grounds, particularly when there are so many other repressive regimes Washington supports?'(19)
John Brady Kiesling, Political Counsellor in U.S. Embassy in Athens, resigned at the end of February, writing:
‘….twenty years with the State Department…. we have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of American opinion, since the war in Vietnam.'(20)
On 14 March in ‘Ex-CIA Officers Questioning Iraq Data’, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern was quoted as saying:
‘It’s been cooked to a recipe, and the recipe is high policy. That’s why a lot of my former colleagues are holding their noses these days.’ (21)
In the UK
In Britain the same thing was happening; and, from the timing of it, happening as a result of the friction between the intelligence personnel and Alistair Campbell and his people in the CIC preparing the second ‘intelligence-based dossier’ which was endorsed by Colin Powell at the UN.
On 5 February 2003 Andrew Gilligan, BBC Defence Correspondent, and formerly at the Sunday Telegraph, announced that he had received a leaked document from Defence Intelligence staff – i.e. the military – which rejected the claims of the politicians in the war lobby that the Iraqi regime was linked with al-Qaeda. Gilligan said:
‘….in recent days intelligence sources have told the BBC there is growing disquiet at the way their work is being politicised to support the case for war on Iraq…..This almost unprecedented leak may be a shot across the politicians’ bows.'(22)
On 7 February former Permanent Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Defence 1988-92, Sir Michael Quinlan, chipped in with a page of doubts and anxieties about the forthcoming war, ‘War can still be avoided’, in the Evening Standard. Even that Ministry of Defence mouthpiece, Professor Paul Wilkinson, was against the war.(23)
On 8 February, citing the Gulf of Tonkin incident which provided the pretext for the stepping-up of US involvement in Vietnam, and the bombing of the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum as examples of ‘faulty intelligence,’ Lt. Cdr. Martin Packard (rtd), former NATO intelligence adviser, commented:
‘Scepticism over US-UK spin on Iraq is validated by the number of senior military officers and former intelligence analysts who remain unconvinced that war at this stage is justified’. (24)
On 9 February Paul Lashmar and Raymond Whitaker reported:
‘Britain and America’s spies believe that they are being politicised: that the intelligence they provide is being selectively applied to lead to the opposite conclusion from the one they have drawn, which is that Iraq is much less of a threat than their political masters claim. Worse, when the intelligence agencies fail to do the job, the politicians will not stop at plagiarism to make their case, even “tweaking” the plagiarised material to ensure a better fit. “You cannot just cherry-pick evidence that suits your case and ignore the rest. It is a cardinal rule of intelligence,” said one aggrieved officer. “Yet that is what the PM is doing.” Not since Harold Wilson has a Prime Minister been so unpopular with his top spies. The mounting tension is mirrored in Washington. “We’ve gone from a zero position, where presidents refused to cite detailed intel as a source, to the point now where partisan material is being officially attributed to these agencies,” said one US intelligence source.’ (25)
On 17 February Liberal-Democrat Foreign Affairs spokesman, Menzies Campbell MP said:
‘There’s no doubt that the intelligence services have been very, very concerned about what they see as the misuse of information, in the sense that they believe the Government is inclined to use what supports the Government’s political case without taking full account of the qualifications attached to such information, which is a necessary part of intelligence assessment,” he says.’ (26)
In ‘Blair hasn’t even convinced his own security establishment’ in The Guardian of 24 February, Richard Norton-Taylor cited the leaked DIS document and quoted former Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd in the then current issue of the journal of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI):
‘Do we help or hinder the essential struggle against terrorism by attacking Iraq? Would we thus turn the Middle East into a set of friendly democratic capitalist societies ready to make peace with Israel, or into a region of sullen humiliation, a fertile and almost inexhaustible recruiting ground for further terrorists for whom Britain is a main target?'(27)
This campaign of dissent from the British security and intelligence establishment climaxed with the leaking of a request from the NSA for UK (GCHQ) help in bugging and surveilling the homes and offices of UN delegations to the Security Council. The leak, said Peter Beaumont and Gaby Hinchliff of The Observer, the newspaper which received it, was an expression of
‘….a wider conflict between the intelligence community on both sides of the Atlantic and their political masters. This tension has been visible beneath the surface for months, as intelligence officials have briefed against the more outrageous claims made by the Government…… “There is a feeling that there is something reckless about some of the people around Tony Blair – that they are dangerous.”‘(28)
Not just cooking intelligence, fabricating it
In September 2002 the US government claimed there was an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report which showed that Iraq in 1998 was six months away from developing a nuclear weapon. The IAEA duly pointed out the such a report did not exist. (29) The British version of the nuclear claims had also been made in September in the original ‘intelligence-based dossier’ issued by Alistair Campbell’s psy-ops unit in London, the London office of the CIC.(30) A false attribution from the US and a phoney document launched in public from the UK end, both trying to paint Iraq as a nuclear power – ‘co-ordination’ indeed!
In February 2003, as part of Hans Blix’s last report to the UN before the US/UK attack on Iraq, the chief nuclear inspector for Iraq, Mohammed El Barabdei, stated that the documents which the British and American governments claimed to show that the Iraq regime had been trying to import uranium for a nuclear bomb from the African country Niger were forgeries – ‘not authentic’, was the diplomatic way he put it. ‘They were fabricated’, said another unidentified IAEA official. (31)
On the day the British government had announced that they had evidence of Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Niger, a group of senior intelligence officials, including George Tenet, the Director of the CIA, briefed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Iraq’s weapons capability. This was an important meeting because at that stage the Bush regime had not been given congressional endorsement of their policy towards Iraq and some Democrats were considering opposing it. The Committee was told of the Iraqi attempt to purchase uranium. Two days later Secretary of State Colin Powell briefed the committee again, reiterating the claims about uranium.
‘The testimony from Tenet and Powell helped to mollify the Democrats, and two weeks later the resolution passed overwhelmingly, giving the President a congressional mandate for a military assault on Iraq.'(32)
The fake documents helped secure bipartisan support for the Bush policy. (33)
Who’s setting-up whom?
The fiction about Niger selling uranium to Iraq made its way into a State Department December 2002 fact sheet, issued to point out omissions in a declaration which Iraq said accounted for all of its prohibited weapons. That declaration, said the State Department, ‘ignores efforts to procure uranium from Niger’. Asked in March to comment on the fact sheet, a CIA spokesman referred questions on the matter to the State Department, where a spokesman tossed the ball back over the fence saying: ‘Everything we wrote in the fact sheet was cleared with the agency.'(34)
Seymour Hersh:
‘[A] former high-level intelligence official told me that some senior CIA officials were aware that the [Niger] documents weren’t trustworthy…. They knew it was a fraud – it was useless. Everybody bit their tongue and said, “Wouldn’t it be great if the Secretary of State said this?” The Secretary of State never saw the documents.’ He added, “He’s absolutely apoplectic about it…… Somebody deliberately let something false get in there,” the former high-level intelligence official added. “It could not have gotten into the system without the agency being involved. Therefore it was an internal intention. Someone set someone up.” (The White House declined to comment.)'(35)
In some ways the furore about the plagiarised dossier was a distraction from the fact that Powell’s own text to the UN was partly fiction.(36) To take just one example, in ‘Powell’s U.N. report apparently contains false information’, Gilbert Cranberg, former editorial page editor of the Des Moines Register, and George H. Gallup, Professor Emeritus at the University of Iowa, commented:
‘He [Powell] also played the tapes, in Arabic, of two intercepted conversations, which the State Department translated. Powell referenced the conversations and commented on them. In the first cited conversation, between two Iraqi military officers discussing how to conceal from U.N. inspectors a certain “modified vehicle”, Powell’s account of the conversation squared with the State Department’s translation. Powell’s version of the second conversation, however, departed significantly from it This conversation, about possibly forbidden ammunition, was reported by Powell to be between Republican Guard headquarters and an officer in the field. When Powell referred to this conversation, he quoted one of the parties as ostensibly saying, “And we sent you a message yesterday to clean out all of the areas, the scrap areas, the abandoned areas. Make sure there is nothing there.”
The State Department’s transcript of the actual conversation makes it evident that Powell had embellished the quote to make it appear much more incriminating. Instead of being a directive to “clean out all of the areas, the scrap areas and the abandoned areas”, as Powell claimed, the transcript shows the message from headquarters was merely “to inspect [emphasis in the original] the scrap areas and the abandoned areas.” The damaging admonition that Powell said he quoted, “Make sure there is nothing there”, is not in the transcript and appears to be an invention.'(37)
The CIA undermined the UN inspectors?
None of this is precisely clear yet. But the US (with its UK chums tagging along) may not have just been lying to the world through the UN. On 20 February cbsnews.com reported:
‘U.N. arms inspectors are privately complaining about the quality of U.S. intelligence and accusing the United States of sending them on wild-goose chases ……The inspectors have become so frustrated trying to chase down unspecific or ambiguous U.S. leads that they’ve begun to express that anger privately in no uncertain terms. U.N. sources have told CBS News that American tips have lead to one dead end after another.
- Example: satellite photographs purporting to show new research buildings at Iraqi nuclear sites. When the U.N. went into the new buildings they found “nothing”.
- Example: Saddam’s presidential palaces, where the inspectors went with specific co-ordinates supplied by the U.S. on where to look for incriminating evidence. Again, they found “nothing”.
- Example: Interviews with scientists about the aluminum tubes the U.S. says Iraq has imported for enriching uranium, but which the Iraqis say are for making rockets. Given the size and specification of the tubes, the U.N. calls the “Iraqi alibi air tight”.
…….So frustrated have the inspectors become that one source has referred to the U.S. intelligence they’ve been getting as “garbage after garbage after garbage”. In fact, Phillips says, the source used another cruder word.'(38)
One interpretation of this has been made by some of the Democrats. On the day of Powell’s appearance before the UN Security Council, Andrew Buncombe reported in The Independent:
‘Senior democrats have accused the CIA of sabotaging weapons inspections in Iraq by refusing to co-operate fully with the UN and withholding crucial information about Saddam Hussein’s arsenal. Led by Senator Carl Levin, the Democrats accused the CIA of making an assessment that the inspections were unlikely to be a success and then ensuring they would not be…….Mr Levin said later he believed the CIA had, in effect, taken the decision to undermine the inspections. “When they’ve taken the position that inspections are useless, they are bound to fail,” he told The Washington Post. “We have undermined the inspectors.”‘(39)
We may eventually find out that Levin was correct; but another explanation is possible: the leads given to the inspectors by the CIA were useless because there were no weapons of mass destruction to be found but this could not be admitted as it would stymie the planned war and the agency was unwilling to openly oppose the government.
‘Cooking’ intelligence
‘Cooking’, i.e. falsifying intelligence is not something new. Robert Baer, quoted above, referred to the Reagan administration’s campaign against Libya’s Colonel Gadafy. It goes back further than that. The intelligence on the strength of the Vietcong was faked to make the case for war more plausible. CIA analyst Sam Adams published a piece in Harper’s, in May 1975, describing the way the military had ignored his estimates of the strength of the Vietcong; (40) and in one of his pieces on the recent intelligence struggle, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern wrote of this:
‘In early 1967, CIA analysts, led by a young analyst named Sam Adams demonstrated that there were more than twice as many Vietnamese Communist forces as the US military listed on its books. General William Westmoreland’s staff had reduced the numbers for political reasons. The general was adamant, so CIA Director Helms caved. In November 1967 Helms signed and gave to President Johnson a formal National Intelligence Estimate enshrining the Army’s count of between 188,000 and 208,000 for enemy strength. My CIA analyst colleagues were aghast; their best estimate was 500,000…..I have a vivid memory of Sam Adams telling me at the time about a comment made to him by one of the most senior CIA officials. “Have we gone beyond the bounds of reasonable dishonesty?” the official asked. “We” had indeed. The question speaks volumes regarding the willingness of senior agency officials to politicize intelligence analysis at a time when it is critically necessary to speak truth to power — a time like now. Déjà vu.'(41)
The American writer, Chalmers Johnson, then working as ‘a consultant to the CIA’s Office of Estimates’, wrote recently that when the history of the Vietnam War, the Pentagon Papers, leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, began to appear in the newspapers:
‘….a collective sigh of relief went through the Agency: the truth was finally coming out. CIA analysts ……would no longer have to pretend that victory was in sight.’ (42)
Nixon-Kissinger
In the early 1970s Henry Kissinger was trying to create a parallel intelligence system and state department under his control at the National Security Council to by-pass both State and the CIA. If the Watergate affair was, as some believe, an anti-Nixon conspiracy by the CIA, in my view this is a good candidate for the reason behind it; it was aimed at undermining Kissinger by undermining Nixon. One of the Watergate ‘plumbers’, former senior CIA officer James McCord, told the Senate Watergate Committee how in 1972:
‘It appeared to me that the White House had for some time been trying to get political control over the CIA assessments and estimates in order to make them conform to “White House policy.”‘(43)
That ‘White House policy’ was the pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union. The increasing politicisation of the intelligence estimating process in the 1970s was a response by the military-industrial complex to the threat to them posed by US-Soviet détente. Those in the intelligence community who opposed Kissinger’s attempt to take over the intelligence estimation process were alarmed by what they saw as the manipulation of the Soviet ‘threat’ downwards, in the pursuit of détente. This struggle over the scale of the Soviet ‘threat’ climaxed with the Team B episode in 1976/7 in which ‘the hawks’, those who claimed that the CIA was biased towards a liberal, detente-oriented view and was unable to adequately depict the Soviet ‘threat’, were given access to the CIA’s own data and asked to prepare another, competing estimate of the Soviet ‘threat’. They duly used – and misused – the data to support their thesis that the CIA had underestimated the Soviet ‘threat’.(44 )
With the arrival of the Reagan administration in 1980 the alliance of right-wing spooks, cold war intellectuals, neo-conservatives and lobbyists for the military-industrial complex which took office began searching for and creating ‘threats’ and enemies to justify the 50% plus share of the American federal tax take devoted to ‘defence’.(45) The Reagan administration actually declared a National Emergency in 1985 because of the ‘threat’ to the security of the United States posed by the government of Nicaragua.
The favourite theme of the period was the Soviet Union as the sponsor of international terrorism. On the day after Reagan’s inauguration, Secretary of State Alexander Haig made a speech linking the Soviet Union with international terrorism. This theme had been developed in the 1970s, notably by the Israelis, who could see the value of being able to label the Palestinians as part of ‘terrorism sponsored by the KGB’. The first conference of the Mossad-sponsored Jonathan Institute, in 1979, centred round this theme.(46)
Four months after Reagan’s inauguration, in May 1981, Ali Agca shot the Pope.(47)
The claim that the Bulgarians (and thus the KGB) were running Agca was formulated by Italian intelligence officers and then run into the English-speaking media by the late Claire Sterling and Paul Henze. Sterling was a CIA asset, and had attended the 1979 Jonathan Institute conference; Henze was a former CIA station chief. As disinformation projects went, this wasn’t subtle and it began to unravel as soon as people like Edward Herman began picking at it.(48)
At which point reality and fantasy began to merge. Secretary of State Alexander Haig and CIA Director William Casey wanted the CIA to produce evidence that the Soviet Union was behind international terrorism. This the CIA refused to do: the evidence didn’t exist. Casey then cited Claire Sterling’s book as showing that the KGB was behind international terrorism. To no avail the CIA’s analysts pointed out that Sterling’s book was the product of a CIA disinformation operation in Europe. The ‘Soviet terrorism’ lobby then used Sterling’s second book, The Time of the Assassins – also the product of a disinformation operation – as evidence that the KGB had run Agca. The CIA gave in to the political pressure and produced a report tentatively supporting the KGB-Agca connection. (49) Some CIA analysts dissented from this view and the dispute rumbled on internally, emerging into the Senate hearings on the confirmation of Robert Gates as Director of the CIA in 1990.(50) Gates had been the CIA bureaucrat (Deputy Director) who had seen that it would be a good career move to go along with the Reagan administration’s desire for ‘evidence’.(51)
And so?
This extraordinary campaign of barely concealed deceit may all be forgotten as the economic crisis which is brewing deepens. On the other hand, as Noam Chomsky noted in February, there has been no precedent for the range and depth of the public opposition from the Anglo-American foreign policy and intelligence elites to the war on Iraq; and there must be a chance that they will seek revenge. The Nixon-Kissinger attempt to by-pass that establishment probably led to Watergate. It seems likely to me that the Washington political and intelligence system is not going to let this bunch of yahoos have their way much longer, and that something similar will befall George Bush.
Notes
1 I noted in Lobster 44, ‘Tell me lies about Iraq’, some of the more ridiculous stories about Saddam Hussein planted in the British media in 2002.
2 ‘Assembled’ is the operative word as errors in the original texts were found to have been included. A minutely detailed demolition of this ‘dossier’ is at < http://cooperativeresearch.org/wotiraq/british dossier2.html >.
3 CIC had been set up in October 2001 in the wake of 9-11 ‘to coordinate the way in which the allies in the “war against terrorism” communicated their aims to the world’. See ‘US steps up global PR drive’, Julia Day, The Guardian, 30 July 2002, < http: //media. guardian.co.uk/attack/ story/ 0,1301,765637,00.html >
4 The critique by Dr Glen Rangwalla is at < http://www.fas.org /irp/news/2003/02/uk020603.html >
5 According to ‘Blair’s road to war’, Patrick Wintour and Martin Kettle, The Guardian, 26 April 2003, the dossier had been prepared in March 2002.
6 For example by Chris Williams at < http://www.casi.org. uk/discuss/2003/msg 00447.html > site of the Campaign Against Sanctions in Iraq (CASI).
7 However, in ‘Favourite five who really have PM’s ear’ in the Evening Standard 13 March 2003, Joe Murphy stated that former MI6 officer John Scarlett, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, ‘masterminded the first dossier on Saddam’s arms last September’. Whether or not these ‘dossiers’ were run past the JIC is one of the interesting unanswered questions.
8 Gaby Hinsliff, Martin Bright, Peter Beaumont and Ed Vulliamy, ‘First casualties in the propaganda firefight’, The Observer, 9 February 2003.
9 ‘It was the refusal of Britain’s spies to disclose what they knew about their Iraqi counterparts that led to the fiasco surrounding the latest British dossier.’ Michael Smith, ‘Secret service stand on sources led to blunder’, Daily Telegraph, 8 February, < http://www. telegraph.co.uk/news/main jhtml?xml=/news/2003/02/08/ndoss 108.xml/ > .
10 ‘Blair Acknowledges Flaws in Iraq Dossier’ < http://www. washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node =&contentId=A42276-2003Feb7 ¬Found=true >.
11 This section has been adapted from a briefing posted by FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) < http://www.fair.org > on 27 February 2003. The Kamel debriefing document is at < http://casi. org.uk/info/unscom950822.pdf >.
12 This is not to argue that the Iraqi regime had decided to abandon chemical and biological weaponry. Kamel said that they had been destroyed secretly, in order to hide their existence from inspectors, in the hopes of someday resuming production after inspections had finished. Hence their interest in remotely-controlled ‘drone’ aircraft with spraying capacity. On which see James Bone and Roland Watson, ‘Secret drone “part of Iraqi chemical warfare plans” ‘ at < http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,170-605538,00.html > 10 March 2003.
13 AFI Research Intell. Briefing, e-mailed from Richard M. Bennett, 25 February 2003.
14 In early February Noam Chomsky commented on the depth of opposition to the war among the US establishment (his word): ‘There are no precedents for anything like this.’ ‘Terror War’, < http:// www.zmag.org/ ZNET htm > One of the articles to which Chomsky cited as evidence of this, ‘An Unnecessary War’ by John J. Mear-sheimer and Stephen M. Walt, was on the Web site of Foreign Policy, in March 2003.
15 See for example Kim Sengupta and Nigel Morris, ‘Top officers deny Downing Street claims over Iraq’, The Independent, 26 March 2002, quoted above. Downing Street was then claiming a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
16 Reproduced by The Miami Herald on 8 October 2002, ‘Dissent over going to war grows among U.S. government officials’ < http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/4234768.htm > .
17 In ‘Bush’s no war scenario’ the Egyptian weekly, Al Ahram, for 31 October- 6 November, Mohamed Sid-Ahmed commented: ‘Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has set up a small intelligence unit in the Pentagon whose task has been defined by Pentagon officials as “searching for information on Iraq’s hostile intentions or links to terrorists that the nation’s spy agencies may have overlooked”. ‘
< http: //weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/ 610/op3.htm > .
Essentially the same information is in Oliver Burkeman, ‘Rumsfeld picks team of experts to find Iraqi terror link’, The Guardian, 25 October, < http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,818884,00.html > .
18 Oliver Burkeman, note 17.
19 An account of the suppressed history of US-Iraqi relations is in Robert Parry’s ‘Missing US-Iraq history’ < at http://www.consortium news.com /2003/022703a.html >.
20 ‘U.S. Diplomat’s Letter of Resignation’, New York Times 27 February 2003. I don’t want you to get too misty-eyed about this: the man was in the State Department during the American-financed and directed atrocities in Central America in the 1980s which killed far more people than the invasion of Iraq did. Even so.
21 < http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap20030314_1025.html >
22 < http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2727471.stm > This may be over-reading these comments but ‘intelligence sources’ does not seem to me to refer to Defence Intelligence.
23 See the interview with him on 6 March at < http://www. csmonitor.com/2003/ 0306/p17s01-wogi.html >.
24 ‘Unreliable evidence’, The Guardian, 8 February 2003.
25 ‘MI6 and CIA: the new enemy within’, The Independent on Sunday < http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story. jsp? story= 376732 >. Whittaker returned to this theme in ‘How the road to war was paved with lies’, The Independent on Sunday, 27 April 2003.
26 Marie Woolf, ‘Menzies Campbell: The former champion athlete, determined to slow the sprint towards war in Iraq’, The Independent 17 February 2003.
27 In the RUSI journal for February, on-line at
< http://www.rusi.org/cgi-bin/public/view.cgi?object=obj116&uniqueid=JA00269 >. Hurd had another go at in The Evening Standard, 14 March 2003 in ‘I’m no pacifist but this war is not the answer’. Richard Norton-Taylor returned to this theme in ‘Ministers doctored secret service briefings to get their way over Iraq’, The Guardian 30 April 2003.
28 Peter Beaumont Gaby Hinsliff, ‘The Spies and the Spinner’, The Observer, 9 March 2003. Jeevan Vasagar and Richard Norton-Taylor, in ‘GCHQ worker held after leak’, The Guardian, 10 March 2003 commented that ‘The leak of the memo reflects deep unease throughout Whitehall, including the security and intelligence services, about the Bush administration’s conduct in the growing Iraq crisis.’
29 Joseph Curl, ‘Agency disavows report on Iraq arms’, The Washington Times 27 September 2002 : ‘The International Atomic Energy Agency says that a report cited by President Bush as evidence that Iraq in 1998 was “six months away” from developing a nuclear weapon does not exist. “There’s never been a report like that issued from this agency,” Mark Gwozdecky, the IAEA’s chief spokesman, said yesterday in a telephone interview from the agency’s headquarters in Vienna, Austria.’
< http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020927-500715.htm >
30 Who faked the documents? Jack Schaefer in ‘Follow That Story: The Nuclear Whodunit, Part 3: CIA analysts do a CYA, telling the press, Don’t blame the phoney nuke docs on us!’, tells us that ‘A Nigerien diplomat gave the documents to Italian intelligence, which sent summaries of the them to the United States and Britain.’
<http:// slate.msn.com/id/2080583 > 23 March 23, 2003. Seymour Hersh: ‘What is generally agreed upon, a congressional intelligence-committee staff member told me, is that the Niger documents were initially circulated by the British.’ Hersh suggests but doesn’t demonstrate that they were forged by MI6 as part of an Information Operation which began in 1997. ‘Who lied to whom?’
< http://www.new yorker.com/printable/?fact/030331fa_fact1 > 24 March 2003.
31 ‘UK nuclear evidence a fake’, Ian Traynor, The Guardian, 8 March, 2003.
32 ‘Who lied to whom?’ Seymour Hersh, see note 30.
33 This point is made in a long, detailed letter to President Bush about all this by Representative Henry Waxman (Democrat) which is at
< http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2003/03/waxman.pdf >. Having been unwilling to challenge the Republicans’ theft of the Presidential election, I doubt that the Democrats would have had the courage to resist the call to war, with or without dodgy briefings.
34 Jack Shafer, see note 28.
35 Seymour Hersh, see note 30.
36 Readers interested in a dissection of each of Powell’s 44 claims will find one at
< http://middleeastreference.org.uk/powell030205 .html > by Dr. Glen Rangwala of Cambridge University. A more general detailed analysis of the Bush administration’s lies about Iraq is in two excellent articles by Dennis Hans which are at
< http://www.liberalslant.com. > ‘Lying Us Into War Dissecting Bush’s “Techniques of Deceit” ‘ and ‘The Disinformation Age: How George W. Bush and Saint Colin of Powell are lying America into an unnecessary war – and what honest journalists can do about it’.
37 < http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?Date= 20030224 &Category=COLUMNIST13&ArtNo=302240368& SectionCat=&Template=printart > The authors are being hard on Powell. The fabrication must have been done lower down the chain.
38 ‘Inspectors Call U.S. Tips “Garbage”‘ < http://www.cbsnews. com/ stories/ 2003/01/18/iraq/main537096.shtml >
39 ‘CIA “sabotaged inspections and hid weapons details”‘ The Independent 14 February 2003. See also ‘Senator says best intelligence data not given to U.N.’ at
< http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20030307/4927257s.htm > T
40 Adams’ book on this is reviewed at
< http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/bookauth/adams/adamsint.htm >
41 < http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0213-02.htm >
42 ‘Who’s in charge?’, London Review of Books, 6 February 2003
43 Lawrence Freedman, US Intelligence and the Soviet Strategic Threat, (London: Macmillan, 1986) p. 60.
44 This is discussed in detail in Anne Hessing Cahn’s Killing Detente, which is reviewed in this issue.
45 Remember the movie Red Dawn, depicting the ‘threat’ posed to the US by the armed forces of Nicaragua? Just a day’s drive from the border with Mexico……
46 Participants included Richard Pipes from ‘Team B’, Norman Podhoretz and his wife Midge Decter from the neo-con Israeli lobby, Claire Sterling, Brian Crozier, George Bush and Ray Cline.
47 In the 1980s I was corresponding with the late Ace Hayes, the erstwhile editor of the Portland Free Press. Hayes had served in the military and knew about guns and was familiar with the gun used by Agca. He refused to believe Agca had done the shooting because, he said, it was impossible to aim the gun or control its recoil held overhead as Agca did.
48 See Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection (New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1986). A short summary of Reagan-era disinformation campaigns by Herman is at
< http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/hermanmay 98.htm > .
49 This was ‘blow back’ on a grand scale.
50 See James Der Derian, ‘Anti-Diplomacy, Intelligence Theory and Surveillance Practice’ in Espionage Past, Present, Future? edited by Wesley K. Wark (London: Frank Cass, 1994) pp. 37-8.
Der Derian is a post-modernist trying to apply his theories to this field – ‘intertextuality’ and all that. John Burnes told me the following apposite joke. What do you get if you cross a post-modernist with a member of the mafia? You get a man who makes you an offer you cannot understand.
51 An essay discussing many other examples of intelligence fakery by the Republicans in the 1980s and 90s, ‘Weapons of Mass Distraction: Where? Find? Plant?’ by former CIA analyst Ray McGovern and David McMichael, formerly of the State Department, was published by CommonDreams.org on 25 April 2003.