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POLITICS-US: How Tenet Betrayed the CIA on WMD in Iraq
Analysis by Gareth Porter*
WASHINGTON, Aug 8 (IPS) - Journalist Ron Suskind’s revelation that Saddam Hussein’s intelligence chief was
a prewar intelligence source reporting to the British that Saddam had no
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) adds yet another dimension to the
systematic effort by then Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director George
Tenet to quash any evidence - no matter how credible - that conflicted with
the George W. Bush administration’s propaganda line that Saddam was actively
pursuing a nuclear weapons programme.
According to Suskind’s new book, ‘The Way of the World’, Iraqi Director of
Intelligence Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti had been passing on sensitive
intelligence to the UK’s MI6 intelligence service for more than a year before
the U.S invasion. In early 2003, Suskind writes, Habbush told MI6 official
Michael Shipster in Jordan that Saddam had ended his nuclear programme in
1991 and his biological weapons programme in 1996. Habbush explained to
the British official that Saddam tried to maintain the impression that he did
have such weapons in order to impress Iran.
Suskind writes that the head of MI6, Richard Dearlove, flew to Washington to
present details of the Habbush report to Tenet, who then briefed National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. Soon after that, the CIA informed the
British that the Bush administration was not interested in keeping the
Habbush channel open, according to Suskind’s account.
Tenet has called the story of the Habbush prewar intelligence a "complete
fabrication", claiming Habbush had "failed to persuade" the British that he had
"anything new to offer by way of intelligence". His statement actually
reinforces Suskind’s account, however, by indicating that he had simply
chosen not to believe Habbush. "There were many Iraqi officials who said both
publicly and privately that Iraq had no WMD," said the statement, "but our
foreign intelligence colleagues and we assessed that these individuals were
parroting the Baath party line and trying to delay any coalition attack."
Contradicting Tenet’s claim that the British did not take the Habbush report
seriously, MI6 director Dearlove told Suskind he had asked Prime Minister
Tony Blair why he had not acted on the intelligence from Habbush.
Another high-level U.S. source in the last months of the Saddam regime was
Saddam’s foreign minister Naji Sabri. Tyler Drumheller, the CIA’s chief of
clandestine operations for Europe from 2001 until 2005, recounts in his book
‘On the Brink’ that Sadri was passing on information to an official of a
European government in early autumn 2002 indicating that hints of a WMD
programme were essentially a "Potemkin village" used to impress foreign
enemies.
Sidney Blumenthal wrote in Sep. 2007 that two former CIA officers who had
worked on the Sabri case identified the foreign intermediary as being France
and said he had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the CIA and
French intelligence to provide documents on Saddam’s WMDs.
Drumheller told ‘60 Minutes’ that Sabri "told us that they had no active
weapons of mass destruction program."
On Sep. 17, 2002, the CIA officer who had debriefed Sabri in New York,
briefed CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin, according to Blumenthal’s
account. McLaughlin responded that Sabri’s information was at odds with
"our best source". That was a reference to ‘Curveball’, the Iraqi who claimed
knowledge of an Iraqi mobile bio-weapons lab programme but was later
found to be a professional liar.
The next day, Tenet briefed Bush on Sabri’s intelligence, but Bush rejected it
out of hand as "what Saddam wanted him to think".
French intelligence agents later tapped Sabri’s telephone conversations and
determined that he was telling the truth. But it was too late. One of Tenet’s
deputies told the CIA officers, "This isn’t about intelligence. It’s about regime
change."
Yet another highly credible U.S. source on the WMD issue in Sep. 2002 was
Saad Tawfik, an electrical engineer who had been identified by the CIA as a
"key figure in Saddam Hussein’s clandestine nuclear weapons programme".
The story of the CIA’s handling of his testimony is told in James Risen’s ‘State
of War’.
In early Sep. 2002, Tawfik’s sister, who lived in Cleveland, flew to Baghdad
with a mission from the CIA to obtain details about Saddam’s nuclear
weapons from her brother. But when she returned in mid-September, the CIA
didn’t like the report from her conversations with the source.
Tawfik told his sister that Saddam’s nuclear programme had been abandoned
in 1991. When she told him the CIA wanted her to ask such questions as
"how advanced is the centrifuge" and "where are the weapons factories",
Tawfik was incredulous that the CIA didn’t understand that there was no such
programme.
Tawfik’s was only one of thirty cases of former Iraqi WMD experts who
reported through relatives that Saddam had long since abandoned his dreams
of WMD, according to Risen.
Both the Sabri evidence and the evidence from Tawfik and other former Iraqi
experts was available to the CIA during the work on the Oct. 2002 National
Intelligence Estimates (NIE). But the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence kept all
of that evidence out of the NIE process.
No report based on any of that evidence was ever circulated to State, Defence
or the White House, according to Risen and Blumenthal.
The disappearance of all that credible evidence reflected a deliberate decision
by Tenet. The White House Iraq Group had just rolled out its new campaign to
create a political climate supporting war in early September, and Tenet knew
what was expected of him. As an analyst who worked on the NIE told Bob
Drogin of the Los Angeles Times, "The going-in assumption was that we
were going to war, so this NIE was to be written with that in mind." That
means Tenet’s account of the CIA’s role in the WMD issue in his 2007
memoirs completely ignored the credible evidence from Habbush, Sabri and
the former Iraqi specialists that there was no active program, as well as his
own role in suppressing it.
Tenet even brazenly claimed that a "very sensitive, highly placed source in
Iraq" about whom "little has been publicly said" had "reported that production
of chemical and biological weapons was taking place". The reporting from the
source, continuing through the NIE and beyond, "gave those of us at the most
senior level further confidence that our information about Saddam’s WMD
programmes was correct."
Tenet was clearly referring to the reporting coming from the Sabri
debriefings, but his description of them was a prevarication. As Blumenthal
reported, they had written a report on Sabri’s intelligence spelling out his
view that there was no active WMD programme, but they later discovered that
it had been rewritten and given an entirely new preamble asserting that
Saddam already possessed chemical and biological weapons and was
"aggressively and covertly developing" nuclear weapons.
Tenet - who was a political operator rather than an intelligence professional
- had betrayed the CIA’s mission of providing objective analysis, instead
choosing to serve the interests of the Bush administration in preparing the
way for war. It is not difficult to imagine how he would have meekly carried
out whatever was asked of him by the White House - even forging a
document and leaking it to the media, to buttress the administration’s case
for war.
*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist. The paperback
edition of his latest book, ‘Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the
Road to War in Vietnam’ was published in 2006.
(END/2008)
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