On 14 June 2001, WINPAC conceded that the tubes might, indeed, be bound for an artillery rocket programme. This, however, it deemed ‘less likely’ than the CIA’s previous assessment. The next month, all was explained: ‘The specifications for the tubes,’ according to a 2 July report, ‘far exceed any known conventional weapons application, including rocket casings for 81 mm multiple rocket launchers.’
In the year following this document, WINPAC issued a further nine reports, each arguing that the tubes were destined for a centrifuge programme. Other than that the tubes appeared to match the Zippe and Beams centrifuges and that they were manufactured to exacting standards, however, no one presented any further proof.
Convinced the tubes were intended for centrifuges, Joe T now started flying around the world briefing foreign intelligence services about the coup. In July, he visited Vienna, where he set about persuading officers of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that the tubes shipment proved that Iraq was reviving its nuclear programme.
From the outset, IAEA officers were underwhelmed by Joe’s presentation. To them, there was nothing new or exciting about the tubes at all. Inspectors had seen identical tubes numerous times in Iraq.
‘At the Nassr facility at Taji, north of Baghdad, we had observed something of the order of 50,000 of these tubes,’ says Bob Kelley one of the agency’s nuclear experts. ‘Most of them were sitting in wooden boxes. The sides of the boxes had broken; they were spilling out like jackstraws.’ At the time, IAEA staff had briefly considered whether they might be used for centrifuge rotors, then immediately ruled out the possibility. ‘The assessment was made that, yes, they have 50,000 tubes; no, they’re not for centrifuges. Nobody considered them again.’
George Healey another IAEA veteran familiar with the tubes, concurred. ‘We were aware of all these tubes. They weren’t anything near the diameter that the Iraqis had based their centrifuge programme on,’ he says. ‘It was a non-issue.’
Patiently, Joe explained his theory to the sceptical IAEA men. Iraq had a history of clandestine centrifuge procurement, he reminded them. The tube specifications almost matched those of two gas centrifuges – the Zippe and Beams models; the tolerances of the tubes matched; the material matched; the tubes had been procured, in secret, via a known Iraqi front company. All the pieces fitted together.
Once again, the IAEA officers interrupted. Previously, they said, Iraq had relied on different centrifuge models, whose rotors were made out of maraging steel or carbon fibre. Aluminium rotors would represent a considerable step backwards in technology. Previous rotors were also a different size to the current shipment. If Iraq really planned to use these tubes in a gas centrifuge, it would have to start its enrichment programme from scratch and rebuild the centrifuges around the tubes. This task was completely beyond them, and there would be no outside assistance, since no one in the world was currently using 81 mm tubes as centrifuge rotors in a production environment.
IAEA officials were especially surprised to hear Joe’s argument, bearing in mind the fact that a pair of the agency’s scientists had been to Jordan and examined the tubes immediately after their seizure. The two officers had carried a couple of tubes back to their hotel room, cut them open with a hacksaw and taken some measurements.
‘[The tubes’] walls were way too thick and there was a coating on them that shouldn’t have been there,’ says an IAEA man. ‘It wasn’t hard for them to see that there was no way that they were directly useful.’ The initial judgement had taken the two officers ‘about half an hour’. It was that obvious.
But Joe T remained utterly persuaded by his own argument. ‘You would talk to him and he would look at you and smile and sort of say, “Well, if you knew what I know, you would know I’m right,”’ recalls one officer present at the briefing.
Over the course of the next two years, officials were visited a number of times by the WINPAC analyst or his colleagues. Each time they were subjected to another tirade about how the aluminium tubes could be used in a gas centrifuge; each time, they countered that the evidence just wasn’t there. The more they met Joe, the surer they became that he was wrong. About the only thing the CIA man managed to convince the IAEA experts of was that, actually, he didn’t have the first clue what he was talking about.
‘A so-called expert,’ recalls one senior officer present at the briefings, ‘practically a layman . . . No matter what good technical argument was put in front of him, he just always worked his way through it to the same answer.’5
Another officer was so struck by Joe’s initial briefing that he wondered whether the CIA man was trying to start a war.
Like most intelligence debates, the issue of the Iraqi tubes might have simmered quietly behind closed doors for years to no great effect. It didn’t.
Two months after Joe T visited the IAEA, nineteen men hijacked four commercial airliners and crashed them into buildings in the United States. By 12 September 2001, everything had changed. Joe T’s theory about the tubes was about to be taken seriously.
Perhaps the most corrosive of all 9/11’s by-products was uncertainty. A handful of disgruntled individuals had blindsided the most powerful nation on earth. How could this have happened? What if it happened again? Were we safe?
The result was a seismic shift in the way Western leaders perceived risk. Faced with an ‘existential’ threat, immediate, decisive action was required.
‘If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long,’ George W. Bush warned cadets at West Point in 2002. ‘We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best.’
Tony Blair felt the same way, famously explaining that the risk of the ‘new global terrorism’ was one that he simply was not prepared to run, particularly when it came to the nexus of weapons of mass destruction and radical Islam. In a world where inaction was no longer an option, we had to prepare for the worst, and act accordingly.
‘This is not the time to err on the side of caution,’ Blair warned his constituents in Sedgefield.
This collision of uncertainty (‘Are we safe?’) and certainty (‘We must act’) was to have all sorts of unforeseen consequences.
‘It’s hard to overstate how differently the US policy community and intelligence community saw things after 9/11,’ explains one senior US intelligence official. ‘For the very first time in our history, we were attacked on our homeland. It was a huge strategic issue and had a huge strategic impact on the ways policymakers and Congress and the intelligence community dealt with many of these issues.’
A senior officer from the CIA’s Counter Proliferation Division agrees entirely. ‘That sense – worldwide – of vulnerability, was palpable,’ he says. ‘It was a cold hard slap in the face of what we were all about.’
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, officers in the Agency’s Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) refused point-blank to leave the office.
‘People were working twenty-four hours a day, everybody was working twenty-four hours a day,’ recalls a CTC officer. ‘I balled up my jacket and used it as a pillow and slept under my desk.’
Almost overnight, CTC ballooned from 300 officers to 1,200. Inside the Center, officers showed up with suitcases full of clothes and stayed for days on end. When they got hungry, they broke into the Agency cafeteria and stole all the food.
‘It was unlike anything I had ever seen,’ the CTC officer continues. ‘I thought, “Wow, this must be what Pearl Harbor felt like.”’ The US intelligence community had failed to detect – or to stop – the 9/11 attacks. It was not going to be caught napping again.
As we now know from numerous accounts by White House insiders, the Bush administration’s thoughts turned to Iraq almost immediately after 9/11. In the language of risk, it now became unacceptable to wait and see what abominations the rogue nation might get up to in the future. The discovery that Saddam Hussein – who might have had some sort of link with al-Qaeda, who might have been developing weapons of mass destruction
(WMDs), and who was certainly a menace to the Middle East – was now apparently building a nuclear weapon led to extreme concern. Those aluminium tubes – of little real interest prior to 9/11 – jumped to the head of the queue. Joe T’s certainty, infectious to begin with, now spread like a virus.
Three months after 11 September, Houston Wood, the University of Virginia professor, was contacted again by the US Department of Energy. The Department’s position on the tubes was unchanged, but it appears that more ammunition was required to pacify the increasingly agitated WINPAC analysts.
Wood was surprised to hear back about the tubes. ‘I thought that we had put the issue to rest,’ he says, but again he offered his reassurance. There was no way they could be used for a centrifuge programme.
At the request of the Department, the Professor even contacted Gernot Zippe, the grandfather of centrifuge research. Zippe, then eighty-four years old, had produced uranium for the first Soviet nuclear bomb and had designed some of the earliest functioning gas centrifuges. What did the old man make of Joe T’s claim that the Iraqi tubes would work in one of his designs?
‘The tubes were purported by the CIA to be like the so-called Zippe centrifuge,’ recalls Wood. ‘We wanted to give him the specific information . . . and get his opinion.’
Zippe’s analysis didn’t take long. The day after he received the specifications of the Australian tubes, he e-mailed Wood, agreeing that there was no way the tubes would work. They were the wrong size. They were the wrong thickness. They were anodized. But still the argument went on.
‘That’s when I began to get angry,’ says Wood.
In the meantime, Joe T flew to Australia, where he addressed officers at the headquarters of the Australian Secret Intelligence Organization (ASIO). He received a warmer reception here than he had in Vienna. His evidence was, apparently, ‘compelling’. But the Australian intelligence services had a vested interest in the tubes issue being significant: they had, after all, provided the intelligence in the first place.
Alexander Downer, Australia’s Foreign Minister – still no doubt elated, following John Howard’s surprise victory in November’s general election – would later brag to ABC television of the ‘little gem’ of intelligence that Australia had passed to the CIA regarding Saddam Hussein’s nuclear programme. The little gem was, of course, news of the aluminium tubes order.
Australia was right to be pleased about its input on the tubes issue. Despite the fact that its Defence, Science and Technology Organization had now concluded – twice – that the tubes were probably not destined for use in a uranium enrichment programme, a lot of good work had gone into researching the initial tip-off from the United States. Geoff Wainwright certainly had something to be proud of.
‘I wasn’t aware of the disagreements on the international level,’ he says. ‘But at these meetings I was getting told that the information I had gathered and collected from Garry Cordukes and the samples and stuff were going across the White House desk, were crossing George Bush’s desk . . . This was a really big deal at the time.’
At the annual intelligence community conference on proliferation at the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS)’s training centre in the winter of 2001 the tubes were discussed during the formal sessions. A great deal of back-slapping was involved.
‘There was a mood of great accomplishment and excitement that we had achieved this amazing thing,’ recalls one officer present. ‘[It] was a very, very rare and significant victory.’ The Australian intelligence officers were heady with success. ‘They were very proud of themselves that they’d played a key role in a big event. Almost juvenile in their excitement about it.’
Over the course of 2002, as the issue of Iraq’s WMD capability began to take centre stage, battle lines were being drawn inside the US intelligence community over the aluminium tubes. The State Department’s in-house intelligence shop, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), became embroiled early on. Although INR was small (around 150 analysts), it had the reputation of being professional, impartial and, on occasion, outspoken. As the clock started ticking towards war, it became clear to the Bureau’s officers that the aluminium tubes comprised an important – probably the most important – issue.
‘There were all kinds of reasons you might want to put together to make the argument [for invading Iraq],’ says the Head of INR at the time, Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research, Carl Ford, ‘but, from my perspective, the one that really made the difference was WMD. And of WMD, the only one that really was a significant change in our position – and that was the trigger – was the nuclear question.’
Not only did the ‘nuclear question’ have the most serious implications, but it was also the only one where there was any real concrete evidence: the aluminium tubes.
As the argument heated up, Ford was contacted by one of his analysts in INR’s Department of Strategic, Proliferation and Military Affairs. The analyst (who does not wish to be named) was having trouble with his opposite numbers in the intelligence community, all of whom were refusing to admit that the tubes might have applications other than in a reconstituted centrifuge programme. Having liaised with both the Department of Energy and the IAEA, however, he had been assured with near 100 per cent certainty that Joe T’s arguments were worthless. Again and again he argued the case that the majority view on the tubes was wrong; again and again he was ignored.
Admittedly, some headway had been made. After a series of fierce battles, Joe T and his cohorts seemed to have accepted that the tubes in their current form were unsuitable for use as centrifuge rotors. But now they seized on a caveat in both the IAEA and Department of Energy reports. Each organization, while stating that the tubes were the wrong dimensions for rotors, had admitted that it might be possible to modify them to make them the right size. The tubes could be chopped in half. The walls could be shaved down. The chromate coating could be removed. It was possible.
It was also highly unlikely. Wayne White, Head of INR’s Iraq Team, recalls the nuclear analyst trudging wearily into his office and slumping on to the sofa.
‘Oh, Wayne!’ he told his boss. ‘You wouldn’t believe it!’
He told White the gist of the new argument. ‘Even though these tubes were not up to spec for use in a centrifuge,’ White says today, ‘that didn’t mean they couldn’t be industrially upgraded up to specification. We thought the argument was ludicrous.’
WINPAC’s new argument was highly implausible. Iraq didn’t have the ability or the equipment necessary to perform that kind of high-precision work (if it did, it might have been able to manufacture the tubes itself). The argument also undercut the organization’s main thesis: that the high tolerances and specifications of the tubes indicated they were bound for an enrichment programme. If the tubes were going to be chopped up and shaved once they arrived, why would Iraq have cared about ensuring the wall thicknesses were accurate to within 0.1 mm? On top of these arguments came a common-sense retort: if Iraq had been looking for centrifuge rotors, why hadn’t it ordered the right-sized tubes in the first place?
Once again, WINPAC had an answer: the Iraqis were engaged in a deception operation. Assuming western intelligence would be monitoring the sale of dual-use technology, they had deliberately ordered the wrong-sized tubes to confuse the CIA.
‘Maddening!’ reports Wayne White of the argument. ‘This was the kind of logic – or illogic – that was accepted by other members of the intelligence community. Which we found astonishing.’
‘I blame that on 9/11,’ says Carl Ford. ‘What had been very high standards for making judgements on analytical questions – the bar was lowered dramatically. The amount of evidence you had to make a judgement was lowered.’
Ford wasn’t the only one to notice the change. From time to time in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the INR boss would fly around the world to liaise with foreign intelligence services. ‘I travelled to London, and I had people come up to me and say, “Car
l, what are you guys doing?” I think there were a lot of people in British intelligence who really didn’t understand where we were coming from.’
Traditionally, British intelligence officers like to have at least three sources for everything. The Americans appeared to be relying on single sources, and sometimes highly questionable single sources.
‘Basically,’ says one British intelligence officer, ‘they had all disappeared up their own arses.’
On 8 September 2002, fifteen months after their seizure, the aluminium tubes finally broke into the public consciousness.
‘US SAYS HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS,’ ran the New York Times headline.
Joe T’s theory featured prominently: according to the piece, the tubes’ ‘diameter, thickness and other technical specifications’ indicated they were intended for centrifuges. The views of the IAEA, Department of Energy and INR – that the tubes had nothing whatsoever to do with a centrifuge programme – did not feature at all.
The story contained a rather graphic image designed to highlight the risk of inaction when it came to Iraq: ‘The first sign of a “smoking gun”,’ administration officials told reporters Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, ‘may be a mushroom cloud.’
Having leaked the information to the New York Times, the Bush administration capitalized on it. That same day, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld all appeared on mainstream TV, citing the article as evidence they had been right about Iraq’s intentions all along.
‘There’s a story in the New York Times this morning . . . ,’ Dick Cheney told NBC, before assuring viewers the administration knew ‘with absolute certainty’ that Iraq was procuring the apparatus it needed for a nuclear weapon.
‘There have been shipments of high-quality aluminium tubes,’ Rice explained to CNN, ‘that are only really suited for nuclear weapons programmes.’ She then parroted the New York Times’ image almost word-for-word: ‘We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.’
A History of the World Since 9/11 Page 15