Nearly sixty years later, the United Nations was still a key target for American eavedroppers and code breakers. Among those high on NSA’s list was Hans Blix, the chief of the Iraq weapons inspectors. He had previously served at the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1981 to 1997. Discovering the bugging operation during the run-up to war, he labeled it “disgusting.” Blix said: “You are cooperating with the people who sit across the desk one day and if the next they are listening to you, it is an unpleasant feeling.” Asked if it was morally questionable, he replied: “Well, I don’t know what morals they have. Questionable, yes.”
Blix became convinced that the United States was spying on him when, two weeks before the start of the war, John Wolf, the Assistant Secretary of State for Nonproliferation, showed him two photographs of Iraqi weapons that could only have come from the UN weapons office. “He should not have had them,” said Blix. “I asked him how he got them and he would not tell me, and I said I resented that.” Blix suspected that the NSA was monitoring his secure fax and had deciphered his encryption algorithm.
Blix’s mobile phone was also monitored, as was the headquarters for his UN inspection team in Baghdad’s Canal Hotel. Transcripts of his conversations were shared with senior British officials. “The only saving grace is that neither Dr. Blix or anyone else among us would speak about sensitive matters on mobile telephones,” said one UN official. “So they would not have heard anything earth-shattering just by that. But I suspect there were other, more widespread interceptions. There were plenty of attempts to undermine us.”
At the time, the United States was angry with Blix because he and Dr. Mohamed El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, had asked for more time to finish their weapons inspection in Iraq. The Bush administration, hell-bent to launch its war, opposed any extension and would do almost anything to frustrate Blix.
“I think they had a set mind,” said Blix. “They wanted to come to the conclusion that there were weapons. Like the former days of the witch hunt, they are convinced that they exist, and if you see a black cat, well, that’s evidence of the witch. . . . You could say that Iraq was perhaps as much punitive as it was preemptive. It was a reaction to 9/11 that we have to strike some theoretical, hypothetical links between Saddam Hussein and the terrorists. That was wrong. There wasn’t anything. The Americans and British created facts where there were no facts at all. The Americans needed [Iraq to have] WMD to justify the Iraq war.”
A clear indication that WMD was simply a pretext for the Bush administration’s long-planned war was the fact that no revised National Intelligence Estimate was produced prior to the push for the war resolution. By then, in February 2003, the newly returned inspectors had spent three nonstop months checking out virtually all of the questionable locations listed in the CIA’s NIE. And despite taking thousands of samples, they found no indications of hidden quantities of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons—anywhere.
While the U.S. intelligence community was studying pictures of suspect buildings from space, the UN inspectors were swabbing the insides of those same locations with cotton balls. They would later be put through sophisticated tests designed to detect even the most minute trace of germs or banned chemicals. On November 28 they inspected al-Dawrah, on December 9 they tested the suspected buildings in Fallujah, two days later they went to Ibn Sina and Tarmiyya, and on and on. They were all locations identified in the highly secret NIE.
“By the time the inspectors left the plant today, after four hours,” wrote one reporter who accompanied inspectors through the suspected location at al-Dawrah, “they had concluded that the plant was no longer operational—not for the production of toxins, and not for animal vaccines either. Reporters who were allowed to wander through the plant after the inspectors left found the place largely in ruins. Apparently, it had been abandoned by the Iraqis after 1996, when the weapons inspectors took heavy cutting equipment to the fermenters, containers and pressurized tubing and valves used in the toxin production.”
As more inspectors poured in, permission was granted for U-2s to begin crisscrossing the country. Never before had there been such an opportunity to collect so much close-up humint, Sigint, and photint on a target country. But the Bush administration simply ignored it all, demanded the inspectors leave and make way for the bombs and the tanks.
Richard Butler, Blix’s predecessor, was also angry over the UN bugging operation during the run-up to war. “What if Kofi Annan had been bringing people together last February in a genuine attempt to prevent the invasion of Iraq, and the people bugging him did not want that to happen, what do you think they would do with that information?”
Butler also had a great deal of personal experience as a frequent bugging target. “I was utterly confident that in my attempts to have private conversations, trying to solve the problem of disarmament of Iraq, I was being listened to by the Americans, British, the French, and the Russians,” he said. “They also had people on my staff reporting what I was trying to do privately. Do you think that was paranoia? Absolutely not. There was abundant evidence that we were being constantly monitored.”
A key target of the NSA was Secretary General Kofi Annan. According to his predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, “From the first day I entered my office they said, ‘Beware, your office is bugged, your residence is bugged, and it is a tradition that the member states who have the technical capacity to bug will do it without any hesitation.’ That would involve members of the Security Council. The perception is that you must know in advance that your office, your residence, your car, your phone is bugged.”
In February 2004 British Member of Parliament Claire Short, a former member of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s cabinet, set off a storm when she admitted that in the weeks prior to the launch of the Iraq war she had read secret transcripts of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan confidential conversations. The transcripts were likely made by NSA and shared with its sister British eavesdropping agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which passed them on to the prime minister’s office.
“The U.K. in this time was also getting, spying on Kofi Annan’s office and getting reports from him about what was going on,” said Short. She added, “These things are done. And in the case of Kofi’s office, it’s been done for some time. . . . I have seen transcripts of Kofi Annan’s conversations. In fact, I have had conversations with Kofi in the run-up to war, thinking, ‘Oh dear, there will be a transcript of this and people will see what he and I are saying.’”
By January 2003, NSA was turning its giant ears toward the undecided members of the UN Security Council. Three months earlier, largely as a result of its avalanche of phony intelligence, the Bush administration won the support of both houses of Congress for a war with Iraq. With the country largely convinced, Bush reluctantly went along with Colin Powell’s recommendation to convince the rest of the world through a United Nations resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq.
On November 8, the Security Council passed Resolution 1441, warning of “serious consequences” if Iraq did not take a “final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations.” To Washington, that translated into an authorization to launch its war against Iraq if they failed to comply fully, but London disagreed. With a population far less supportive of military action against Iraq, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government suggested that a second resolution, specifically authorizing war, would be required before the launch of an all-out UN-backed invasion. Reluctantly, primarily as a favor to his friend Blair, Bush agreed to the recommendation.
By late January the Bush and Blair administrations had determined that Iraq had failed to fully disarm and as a result they were putting tremendous pressure on the uncommitted members of the Security Council to vote in favor of its tough go-to-war resolution. On the other side, arguing against the war, were France, Germany and Russia. Thus the “Middle Six,” as they became known—Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea, and Pakistan—suddenly became top candidates for America’s friendship, and key targets for NSA’s eavesdropping.
They were like cheats at a poker game; knowing what cards were in other players’ hands would give the United States a critical advantage. By listening in as the delegates communicated back to their home countries, the NSA would be able to discover which way they might vote, which positions they favored or opposed, and what their negotiating positions would be.
They also could pick up indications of what they needed, such as a highway, a dam, or a favorable trade deal, and, in a subtle form of bribery, provide the country with a generous “aid package” to help pay for the construction.
Among the things NSA tapped into was a secret meeting of the Middle Six, who were seeking, in a last-ditch effort, to come up with a compromise resolution to avert the war in Iraq by giving the weapons inspectors more time to finish their work. According to former Mexican ambassador to the UN Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, the Americans somehow learned of the meeting and intervened. They could only have learned of the plan, said Zinser, as a result of electronic surveillance. As soon as the Americans found out about the meeting, Zinser claimed, “They said, ‘You should know that we don’t like the idea and we don’t like you to promote it.”
Having already won over the U.S. Congress and the American public, the Bush administration was not about to let a half-dozen Third World countries get between them and their war. Thus, on January 31, the NSA ratcheted up its targeting on the Middle Six. Frank Koza, the Sigint Department’s deputy chief of staff for Regional Targets, sent a Top Secret/Codeword memo to the NSA’s partners in Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand asking for help:
“As you’ve likely heard by now, the Agency is mounting a surge particularly directed at the UN Security Council (UNSC) members (minus US and GBR [Great Britain] of course) for insights as to how membership is reacting to the on-going debate RE: Iraq, plans to vote on any related resolutions, what related policies/negotiating positions they may be considering, alliances/dependencies, etc.—the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to US goals or to head off surprises.”
Koza added, “I suspect that you’ll be hearing more along these lines in formal channels—especially as this effort will probably peak (at least for this specific focus) in the middle of next week, following the SecState’s [Secretary of State Colin Powell’s] presentation to the UNSC.”
It was during that address by Powell that the Bush administration would make their last major argument before launching the war—and their most persuasive because of the respect accorded Powell.
CHAPTER 14
SECURITY COUNCIL
Like Hollywood producers, the White House Iraq Group was looking for a media spectacular to sell not just the American public but the rest of the skeptical world on the need to go to war with Iraq. The answer was to replay the scene from the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when Kennedy administration UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson confronted his Soviet counterpart in the Security Council over ballistic missiles in Cuba. While the whole world watched, Stevenson proved the Russians were hiding weapons of mass destruction on Castro’s island.
Four decades later, the role of Stevenson would be played by Secretary of State Colin Powell, backed up by a twenty-first-century sound and light show. As probably the most trusted member of the Bush administration, Powell would be the perfect choice and the Security Council the ideal venue to sell the WHIG’s spurious claims against Iraq.
Powell compared the assignment to when he received his marching orders a decade earlier during the Gulf War. Then, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was watching CNN when President George H. W. Bush addressed the nation from the Oval Office. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait “will not stand,” said the President. “I think I just got my orders,” Powell told those around him, according to a knowledgeable source.
Now, as President George W. Bush, during his State of the Union address, told the nation that he would send his Secretary of State to the United Nations to make his case for war, Powell had the same reaction. “I just got my orders,” he later told his associates.
With little time to prepare for the February 5, 2003, Security Council address, Powell assembled a small task force of trusted aides to go over the intelligence and put together his presentation. And right from the start, the WHIG handed Powell the “script” he was supposed to follow. “Here’s the document prepared over at the White House for my script,” he told an associate.
Early the next morning, the small group of aides arrived at CIA Headquarters, where they planned to assemble Powell’s presentation with the help of an assortment of intelligence professionals. They were given space in the seventh-floor corner offices of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), just down the hall from George Tenet’s suite. It was the NIC that had produced the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction three months earlier, so many of the experts were close at hand.
But according to a 2004 interview with a senior official closely associated with the event, the Powell aides saw problems the minute they began reading the fifty-page White House “script.” “We went through that for about six hours—item by item, page by page,” said the official, “and about halfway through the day I realized this is idiocy, we cannot possibly do this, because it was all bullshit—it was unsourced, a lot of it was just out of newspapers, it was—and I look back in retrospect—it was a [Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas] Feith product, it was a Scooter Libby [Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff] product, it was a Vice President’s office product. It was a product of collusion between that group. And it had no way of standing up, anywhere. I mean it was nuts.”