Israel began its anti-Saddam propaganda campaign in April 1994 when Aman’s deputy director, Brig. Gen. Yakov Amidror, flew secretly to New York for a meeting with top UN weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus. One of Ekeus’s senior inspectors, Scott Ritter, became the central conduit for the data. Despite its lack of good intelligence on Iraq, Israel had a great incentive to come up with threatening information on Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons programs. In return, Aman was secretly provided with tremendous access to classified high-resolution imagery shot by a U-2 spy plane, which was on loan to the UN inspectors from the United States.
Ritter would travel to Aman’s headquarters in Tel Aviv’s Kirya complex with canisters of the film, which Aman would then secretly copy. Such distribution was beyond the scope of the CIA’s original agreement with the UN team. The imagery was stamped with the caveat “REL UNSCOM/IAEA ONLY,” restricting the photography exclusively to the UN special commission and to the International Atomic Energy Agency. On occasion, Ritter and others within the inspection team would meet with Aman’s chief, Maj. Gen. Uri Saguy.
The strange arrangement began raising alarms within the U.S. intelligence community. Because of the great volume of Iraqi imagery being passed to Tel Aviv, many began worrying that the United States would ultimately be held responsible if Israel decided to use it as part of a future attack on Baghdad. It wouldn’t be the first time. In 1981, Israeli warplanes launched a preemptive strike against an Iraqi nuclear reactor under construction at Osirak.
Adding to the concerns was the fact that by July 1995, Israel had passed the United States and become the single most important intelligence source for the Iraqi weapons inspectors since its creation in April 1991.
While the imagery Israel received was real, much of the “intelligence” the UN was given in return was not. One of Israel’s first major contributions to the UN took place in September 1994 when liaison officers in Aman’s Foreign Relations Department passed on information that Iraq possessed mobile biological weapons labs. Baghdad, it said, was hiding poison factories in red-and-white painted “Tip Top Ice Cream” refrigerator trucks. At night, said Aman, the bio-weapons ingredients were transported in unmarked green Mercedes tractor-trailers belonging to Segada Transportation Co., named after Saddam Hussein’s wife.
But because it was found that neither company, in fact, existed in Iraq, some inspectors were skeptical from the start that mobile biological labs even existed. “They just didn’t make sense from a technical or a security viewpoint,” Raymond A. Zilinskas, a UN inspector at the time, told reporters Bob Drogin and Greg Miller of
The
Los Angeles Times.
Zilinskas helped inspect sixty-one biological facilities in Iraq in 1994.
Finding nothing in over three years, some inspectors were still not ready to give up on what Israel claimed was Hussein’s deadly germ labs on wheels. Thus, in December 1997 Ritter and his deputy flew to London, where they met with Ahmed Chalabi and his intelligence chief, Ahmed Allawi. “They told us they had the run of Iraq,” said Ritter. “We outlined the gaps in our understanding of the Iraqi program, including the mobile bio-weapons labs.” At the time, Chalabi was being vigorously promoted within the United States by Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and the neoconservative crowd as the man the United States should pick to replace Saddam Hussein, once “regime change” had occurred.
Some time following the meeting, a chemical engineer claiming to be an Iraqi defector showed up in a German refugee camp where he was given the prescient code name “Curveball” by the BND, German intelligence. The defector told of graduating from Baghdad University at the top of his class and then being recruited by Iraqi weapons engineers to design and build biological-warfare trucks for the Iraqi Army.
What Curveball never told anyone at the time, however, was that he was also the brother of one of Chalabi’s top aides. Intelligence officials now suspect that he had been coached by Chalabi’s INC to provide the false information. “They began feeding us information,” said Ritter. “But nothing panned out. Most of it just regurgitated what we’d given them. And the data that was new never checked out.” Thus, the phony tip from Israel now gained significantly greater credibility with the phony confirmation from Chalabi’s man.
Despite the importance of the information, U.S. intelligence officials were never allowed to interview Curveball or even learn his name. All details, possibly at the request of the defector himself, had to come from liaison officers with the BND, who provided the CIA with Curveball’s lengthy statements. But there was no way to interrogate or cross-examine a file.
The only other confirmation of the bio-weapons lab allegation came from two Iraqi defectors who had no direct evidence; they had simply heard reports of the program. A fourth defector, who claimed to be a major in Iraq’s intelligence service, said the bio-trucks had been built to test biological agents. But the Defense Intelligence Agency, to its credit, recognized that the Iraqi officer appeared to be lying and to have also been coached by Chalabi’s group. Thus in May 2002, a year before the war with Iraq, the agency posted a “fabricator notice” on him throughout the intelligence community. The CIA, however, never caught it.
But there were other warning signs that were also ignored. Among the documents in the BND file was an interview with another Iraqi defector, an engineer who had worked with Curveball, who completely contradicted his former associate, saying they had never worked on such a program. At other times the BND also tried to warn the CIA about the credibility of the Iraqi sources.
Thus, despite the lack of verification, the information was given enormous credibility in the fall of 2002 as the Bush administration stepped up their relentless pursuit of war. As a result, when the UN inspectors returned to the country in November 2002, checking out the information and locations became one of their highest priorities. But in the end, after more than seventy raids and an intensive investigation involving taking samples at every location, they came up with nothing. “We didn’t find anything,” said one of the weapons hunters.
Undeterred, the Bush administration continued to make the bogus claims a central pillar of their go-to-war strategy. “This is the one that’s damning,” said the CIA’s former chief weapons hunter, David Kay, who called Curveball an “out-and-out fabricator.” He added, “This is the one that has the potential for causing the largest havoc in the sense that it really looks like a lack of due diligence and care in going forward.”
Having absorbed Wurmser’s intelligence unit, one of the Office of Special Plans’ jobs was to use the selectively culled pieces of raw intelligence in a governmentwide PR campaign. “Talking points” containing the intelligence items and analysis were distributed to officials to ensure that they were all lined up behind the same “get-Saddam” message. Wurmser, in the meantime, transferred to a senior position at the State Department and then to Vice President Cheney’s office as his Middle East advisor. Cheney, along with his chief of staff, archneoconservative I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, had been one of the key people pushing the separate intelligence channel.
“They pushed an agenda on Iraq,” said Kwiatkowski, “and they developed pretty sophisticated propaganda lines which were fed throughout government, to the Congress, and even internally to the Pentagon—to try and make this case of immediacy, this case of severe threat to the United States. . . . They were political, politically manipulated. They did have, obviously, bits of intelligence in them, but they were created to propagandize.”
The group especially targeted the doubters and nonbelievers, from the CIA to the Secretary of State. “This was creatively produced propaganda spread not only through the Pentagon but across a network of policymakers,” said Kwiatkowski. OSP “needed to convince the remaining holdovers. Colin Powell, for example. There was a lot of frustration with Powell; they said a lot of bad things about him in the office. . . . That is not normal, that is a bypassing of normal processes.” She added that the OSP had a “very close relationship” with Vice President Cheney’s office.
Another thing that troubled Kwiatkowski was the sort of enemies list maintained by her office. In addition to Powell, another person targeted was former Marine General Anthony Zinni, the former Commander of Middle East Forces as the head of Central Command. Bush later named him a special envoy to the area. “He spoke out publicly as President Bush’s Middle East envoy about some of the things he saw,” said Kwiatkowski. “Before he was removed by Bush, I heard Zinni called a traitor in a staff meeting. They were very anti anybody who might provide information that affected their paradigm. They were the spin enforcers.”
In the end, said Kwiatkowski, the public heard what they were supposed to hear, what the OSP wanted them to hear. “They spent their energy gathering pieces of information and creating a propaganda story line,” she said, “which is the same story line we heard the president and Vice President Cheney tell the American people in the fall of 2002.
“The very phrases they used are coming back to haunt them,” she said, “because they are blatantly false and not based on any intelligence. The OSP and the Vice President’s office were critical in this propaganda effort—to convince Americans that there was some just requirement for preemptive war. . . . The Congress was misled, it was lied to. At a very minimum, that is a subversion of the Constitution. A preemptive war based on what we knew was not a pressing need is not what this country stands for.”
Once Feith’s intelligence unit had cherry-picked the most damning items from the streams of U.S. and Israeli reports, they were then sent to the OSP to be turned into “analysis” and “talking points.” Then the OSP would brief senior administration officials. These officials would then use the OSP’s false and exaggerated intelligence as ammunition when attempting to hard-sell the need for war to their reluctant colleagues, such as Colin Powell, and even to allies like British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
According to one former senior Pentagon official who worked closely with Feith’s offices, their goal was not just “how to fight Saddam Hussein but also how to fight the NSC, the State Department, and the intelligence community,” which were not convinced of Hussein’s involvement in terrorism.
For example, in late summer 2002 Feith’s small intelligence unit completed its “study” on the links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Feith then had the two analysts who worked on it—Christopher Carney, a naval reservist and associate professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania; and Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Christina Shelton—brief Rumsfeld.
Then, on August 15, Feith took the pair to the CIA to see if he could change any minds there. Among the officials present was Tenet. But most of the participants quickly saw the “study” for what it was and, according to one report, were “nonplussed.” “Much of it,” one participant jotted in his notes, “we had discounted already.” In the end, the briefing was largely ignored.
Nevertheless, without notifying the agency, Feith’s road show turned around and gave the same briefing at the White House for senior officials in the National Security Council and the Vice President’s office. Among those present were Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen J. Hadley and Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff. But this time they added a slide harshly critical of the CIA for disagreeing with them on the unproven links between Iraq, Al Qaeda, and the 9/11 attacks.
Despite the inaccuracy of the information contained in the high-level briefings, the top-down pressure worked and the CIA quickly reversed itself. On October 7, the agency’s deputy director, John E. McLaughlin, noted in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee, “We have solid evidence of senior level contacts between Iraq and al-Qa’ida going back a decade.” He added, “Growing indications of a relationship with al-Qa’ida, suggest that Baghdad’s link to terrorists will increase, even absent U.S. military action.” But despite the occasional contacts, there was no indication that the two groups had been involved in any operational activities.
Hadley and Libby were part of another secret office that had been set up within the White House. Known as the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), it was established in August 2002 by Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card, Jr., at the same time the OSP was established in Feith’s office. Made up of high-level administration officials, its job was to sell the war to the general public, largely through televised addresses and by selectively leaking the intelligence to the media.
In June 2002, a leaked computer disk containing a presentation by chief Bush strategist Karl Rove revealed a White House political plan to use the war as a way to “maintain a positive issue environment.” But the real pro-war media blitz was scheduled for the fall and the start of the election season “because from a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August,” said Card.
At least once a week they would gather around the blonde conference table downstairs in the Situation Room, the same place the war was born on January 30, 2001, ten days into the Bush presidency. Although real intelligence had improved very little in the intervening nineteen months, the manufacturing of it had increased tremendously. In addition to Hadley and Libby, those frequently attending the WHIG meetings included Karl Rove; Condoleezza Rice; communications gurus Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, and James R. Wilkinson; and legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio.
In addition to ties between Hussein and 9/11, among the most important products the group was looking to sell as Labor Day 2002 approached were frightening images of mushroom clouds, mobile biological weapons labs, and A-bomb plants, all in the hands of a certified “madman.” A key piece of evidence that Hussein was building a nuclear weapon turned out to be the discredited Italian documents purchased on a street corner from a con man.