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A History of the World Since 9/11

Page 16

by Dominic Streatfeild


  Rumsfeld took the image a step further. ‘Imagine,’ he told CBS, ‘a September 11th with weapons of mass destruction.’

  When Houston Wood read the New York Times piece, he called the national laboratories at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. ‘I said, “Is this something new?” Because I’d been aware of it for over a year and all of a sudden that came out.’ The Professor was informed that no, these were the same tubes. ‘I was just shocked. I thought we’d put that horse in the barn.’

  Even members of the CIA’s Counter Proliferation Division were surprised by the way the story had come out. ‘There’s Dick Cheney on Meet the Press saying, “Wow! The New York Times says there’s these tubes!”’ recalls one officer. ‘It was circular reporting!’

  Having shouted an accusation, the White House appeared to be using its own echo as an independent validation.

  ‘It was very skilfully done,’ says Greg Thielmann, INR’s director of Strategic Proliferation and Military Affairs at the time. ‘Classic manipulation of the public: the administration was exercising its right at the highest levels to declassify whatever it wanted, for cherry-picking the evidence and making its policy case.’

  A fortnight after the New York Times piece, BBC’s Panorama reported on the tubes, too. ‘Now there’s new information that Saddam is seeking centrifuges,’ reporter Jane Corbin explained. ‘In the last fourteen months several shipments, a total of 1,000 aluminium centrifuge tubes, have been intercepted.’

  Former chief UN weapons inspector David Kay was wheeled in to comment. ‘I’ve seen one of them,’ he said, before speculating that the tubes’ specifications were indicative of a ‘German-derived’ centrifuge design. That so many tubes had been seized suggested to Kay that Iraq’s prospective enrichment programme was likely to consist of a cascade of more than a thousand centrifuges: a ‘large-scale programme’.

  INR’s analysts were under no illusions regarding the reasons for the government leaks. ‘There’s nothing that frightens the general public more than “nuclear”,’ says Wayne White. ‘At the time we were trying to fathom why the pressure was being applied [regarding the tubes]. It was because they had to have the mushroom-cloud image.’

  Greg Thielmann agrees. ‘The way the information was presented was to achieve the maximum fright level and the minimum public education level,’ he concludes. ‘You say this country has “WMD”, then you scare the bejesus out of the population by painting pictures of mushroom clouds. It was horrible sophistry, but it was very effective.’

  Partly in response to such popular coverage, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence now demanded an official account of Iraq’s purported WMD programmes. This account, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), would become the base assessment underpinning Congress’ decision to authorize war. On the issue of the tubes, all of the old arguments fell out: Iraq was hiding its procurement activities (clear evidence that it was up to no good); the tubes were too expensive and too highly specified to be used as rocket casings; their dimensions were similar to those of the Zippe and Beams centrifuges; and, if they weren’t, they could be modified.

  The NIE also cited the opinion of the Department of Defense’s experts on conventional military systems, the National Ground Intelligence Centre (NGIC). In a separate box, NGIC assessed that the tubes were ‘highly unlikely to be intended for rocket-motor cases’. They had apparently compared the tubes with a US rocket that also used 7075-T6 aluminium and discovered that the Iraqi tubes were manufactured more precisely than the US system, or any known Russian system for that matter. According to NGIC, the rocket programme was ‘a cover-story . . . to disguise the true nuclear end use’.

  The result was a foregone conclusion. After three weeks of deliberations, the NIE concluded that ‘most agencies assess that Iraq’s aggressive pursuit of high-strength aluminium tubes provides compelling evidence that Saddam is attempting to reconstitute a uranium-enrichment effort for Baghdad’s nuclear-weapons programme’.

  Not willing to endorse the views of ‘most agencies’, both the Department of Energy and the INR dissented. The tubes weren’t suitable for centrifuges, they noted, and there wasn’t sufficient evidence to enable clear conclusions to be drawn regarding Iraq’s uranium-enrichment programme.

  ‘Only if you believed it before you looked at the evidence did it make sense,’ says Ford. ‘But if you did it honestly, you had to admit that there was nothing there.’

  The Iraqi gas centrifuge programme was a mirage.

  To the credit of the NIE’s drafters, these disagreements appeared in their own boxes in the Estimate’s text. To their eternal discredit, however, they were omitted from the one part of the report that most policymakers actually read: the Executive Summary. The result was a document that appeared unambiguous. Saddam Hussein was working on a nuclear bomb. The caveats were missing.

  Another game of wordplay was going on at the United Nations. In November 2002, the Security Council passed Resolution 1441, stating that Iraq was in breach of its obligations to disarm, and offering ‘a final chance to comply’. Weapons inspectors were to be readmitted and Iraq was to produce a full declaration of its WMD programmes. Any false statements would be considered a further breach and would be reported to the Security Council, which would then meet to ‘consider the situation’. The resolution made it clear that a breach would lead to ‘serious consequences’, but failed to specify what they might be. Pointedly, 1441 did not use the phrase ‘all necessary means’ – the internationally understood phrase for ‘war’.

  Effectively for Iraq, Resolution 1441 was a trap. If Saddam Hussein suddenly saw the light and admitted he had WMD, he would be in breach of the resolution and subject to further action. If, on the other hand, he denied he had WMD, he would also be in breach – because we knew he was lying. Saddam Hussein ‘will be forced either to demonstrate that he is a liar’, gloated British Defence Minister Geoff Hoon, ‘or expose himself as a threat’. Both outcomes could end in war.

  Resolution 1441 was also a trap for its signatories. It did not specifically authorize war against Iraq, because if it had it would never have been passed at the Security Council. The resolution, as was made clear a number of times,6 contained no ‘automaticity’. By signing it, Security Council members thought they were guaranteeing that a further UN resolution would be necessary before war. But 1441 was a rather slippery document. While it didn’t contain ‘automaticity’, it apparently left the door for military action ajar. Four months later, when it became clear that the United Nations would not pass a second resolution authorising ‘all necessary means’, that door would be opened.

  Three weeks after the resolution was passed, UN weapons inspectors re-entered Iraq. IAEA officers, already convinced the tubes were not destined for a centrifuge programme, now faced the task of proving it. George Healey began the investigation into the aluminium tubes. ‘OK,’ he told the Iraqi scientists. ‘What was it that you were doing with these things?’

  The Press portrayed inspections as a painstaking business, like pulling teeth: Iraqi intransigence meant that the inspectors were constantly fighting for accurate information. If that was the case with some programmes, the Nasser 81 rocket project was not one of them.

  ‘They literally stood on their heads to provide us with every document, every drawing, every piece of paper and every piece of tube that anybody had used in relation to the 81 mm rockets,’ says Healey. ‘It was almost overwhelming cooperation.’ Iraqi scientists at the National Monitoring Directorate worked around the clock to provide evidence the tubes were for artillery rockets. ‘Bent over backwards is probably an understatement,’ Healey recalls. ‘Nothing was held back. They provided everything that there was.’

  For the Iraqis, part of the process involved showing the inspectors all of their old aluminium tubes. Following the advice of Sami Ibrahim, scientists involved in the Nasser programme had been instructed to bury the most damaged tubes to prevent the corrosion from spreading. This order was abruptly rescinded.


  ‘They said, “Stop burying them!”’ says an Iraqi scientist involved. ‘They said, “The ones that you’ve already buried have to be dug out, and they should go to the Almutasim Factory again.” They started counting them.’

  IAEA inspectors were shortly inundated with aluminium tubes: buried tubes, stored tubes, old tubes – every week someone would show up with more.

  ‘Tubes guys had standing in the corner of their office – we got them!’ recalls Healey. ‘I don’t think in the end any of us could imagine what else there might be. There was just information overload.’

  The tubes team started off with Healey and one other inspector. Within months it had expanded to fifteen people.

  ‘We went through the manufacturing process for rockets in more detail than you can imagine,’ recalls another inspector involved with the process. ‘We learned how rockets were made, we learned how they were painted, we watched them put in the propellant, we watched them make the propellant, we watched them make the tailfins, we looked at where they were fired on the range.’

  One key interviewee was Mahdi Obeidi, the scientist behind Iraq’s gas centrifuge project in the 1990s. Obeidi had managed to procure and operate gas centrifuges in the past; if there was a nuclear programme in Iraq, he would have been behind it. Questioned by the IAEA in Baghdad’s Hyatt Hotel, he pointed out that Iraq’s successful centrifuges had used rotors made of carbon fibre, not aluminium. The rotors had also been nearly twice the diameter of the Australian tubes.

  ‘Look,’ the Iraqi told a British inspector, ‘you know our [old] centrifuge programme quite well. We never designed centrifuges: we were provided with foreign drawings. How does anybody think that we could start from scratch with an 81 mm tube and design a centrifuge now?’ Obeidi glared at the inspector. ‘It’s ridiculous.’

  George Healey, present during this exchange, agreed. ‘He was absolutely right,’ he says. ‘If Saddam himself had come along and ordered them on pain of being shot to start making centrifuges out of these tubes, they couldn’t have done it. They didn’t have the know-how’

  Gradually, the inspectors pieced together the story of the Nasser rocket programme. They learned about the problems with the rockets, the dates the programme had stopped and restarted, and the reasons why. They collected the various blueprints and subsequent alterations. They then combined this information with western intelligence about Iraq’s procurement efforts. The pair matched perfectly.

  ‘We got the whole story from start to finish,’ recalls Healey. All the drawings: the original drawings [of the rockets], the unaltered drawings. And if you examined the progression of dimensions it was quite clear what they were doing. There was no question about it.’

  Inside IAEA, the verdict was unanimous. ‘When we got done,’ recalls Bob Kelley ‘it was just an absolute certainty that [the tubes] were being used for rockets.’

  But absolute certainty in Iraq was one thing; in the United States it was something rather different. After all, WINPAC was absolutely certain the tubes were for centrifuges. The US administration concluded that, if the IAEA wasn’t finding evidence of a centrifuge programme, it was because the programme had been hidden. And, if the Iraqis were hiding the programme, it proved they had something to hide.

  The result was a reversal of the burden of proof: it wasn’t for the intelligence community to establish that Iraq had a nuclear programme, it was for others to prove that it didn’t.

  ‘With the Iraqi record,’ stated Don Rumsfeld in January 2003, ‘there is a presumption of guilt and not innocence.’

  Saddam Hussein’s possession ofWMDs became an unfalsifiable assertion: the more the weapons inspectors didn’t find, the scarier the programme had to be.

  Not all CIA officers were convinced that this formulation was correct. ‘I remember very spirited debate about those tubes,’ recalls one CTC officer. ‘The only other person who they could get to say that it was part of a centrifuge programme was some low-level scientist from the Department of Energy. But inside the Agency it was only the one person, and everybody else said, “No, it’s just not true.”’

  The CIA was now under considerable pressure to vindicate its initial judgements on the tubes, and policymakers were making it clear what kind of results they were after. Following the invasion, Dick Cheney in particular would come under fire for his repeated visits to Langley for briefings on the nuclear situation. The Vice-President may have thought there was nothing wrong with asking questions about aluminium tubes, but intelligence officers saw his constant interest differently.

  ‘Believe me, when the Vice-President shows up and has questions and is in the face of analysts at the working level, he is applying pressure,’ says Wayne White of INR. ‘His mere presence asking questions which call into doubt the conclusions of the analysts and demanding more thorough answers is perhaps the most intense form of political pressure.’

  Cheney might not have meant to push the Agency’s analysts, but that was what he was doing.

  According to former officers, WINPAC wasn’t instructed actively to doctor its conclusions, but pressure was implicitly brought to bear, so that doubts concerning the end-use of the tubes were not raised too loudly.

  ‘From March 2002, I don’t think there was any question that they needed any intelligence,’ says Michael Scheuer, former Head of the Agency’s Bin Laden Unit. ‘They were going to go to war. I think perhaps what they didn’t want was a paper trail of analysis that said they were wrong.’

  To seasoned intelligence officers, there was nothing especially unusual about this: whenever politicians were invested in particular policies they tended to view intelligence through rose-tinted glasses to ensure it fitted in with their policy views.

  ‘When intelligence does not provide the backdrop that they would like, they then put pressure on analysts to be – quote – team players”,’ says Larry Johnson, a former analyst. ‘This was not new. What happened in Iraq was not new’

  What was new was where all this was leading.

  In the minds of the administration’s craftier operators, there was one further possible reason why the UN’s inspectors weren’t coming up with the goods on Iraq: they weren’t trying hard enough. Lacking the necessary mettle to provide evidence that might lead to a real shooting war, the toothless inspection agencies were prevaricating. When it became clear the inspections did not support its circular logic, the United States decided, once again, to err on the side of caution. Rod Barton, a senior Australian weapons inspector with the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), experienced the effects.

  An intelligence operator for more than thirty years, and now special adviser to UNMOVIC’s Executive Chairman Hans Blix, Barton was halfway through drafting a document on Iraq’s anthrax programme in October 2002, when he decided to call it a day. Before going home, he printed off a hard copy, stapled the pages together and locked them in the steel filing box above his desk at the United Nations. The next morning, when he retrieved the document, he noticed something strange.

  ‘There was another staple in it, and there were holes where the first staple had been removed.’ Barton flicked through the document and discovered that one of the pages didn’t match the others. ‘Someone had photocopied it,’ he says. ‘One of the original pages had finished up in their copy, and one of the photocopied pages had ended up in mine.’ UNMOVIC’s photocopier was somewhat decrepit and left a black streak down every page. Barton’s phantom page had a streak; the rest were clear.

  Shortly after this incident, information from Barton’s draft document appeared in the Washington Times. It was obvious someone had stolen it and leaked selected portions to the Press.

  Burglary at the United Nations appears to have been a constant threat. ‘You couldn’t be sure that because something was in the safe it was secure,’ says one British inspector at the time. ‘I don’t think we ever made that assumption. It just got worse at that point.’

  Hans Blix himself wa
s targeted a number of times. At one point, he was taken aside by a US official and shown a series of photographs that could only have come from his own files.

  Bugging was also rife. The IAEA was bugged. UNMOVIC was bugged. The UN Secretary-General was bugged. Non-permanent members of the Security Council who might influence a vote on the war were bugged. So dire was the situation that the heads of both IAEA and UNMOVIC refused to discuss sensitive issues in their own offices. Weapons inspectors took to holding meetings in the Vienna Café in the basement of the UN building, or outside on the streets of New York. To the United States, it seemed, the United Nations had become part of the problem, a target itself.

  With some justification, UNMOVIC and IAEA officers viewed the bugging, the burglary and the selective leaking of sensitive material as part of a concerted effort to undermine their work. It was quite obvious the United States viewed inspections as a waste of time and the inspectors themselves as suspect. America was on its way to Baghdad: the last thing it needed was a bunch of liberal-types placing obstacles in its way and bleating about lack of evidence.

  ‘We knew absolutely, directly, that [Paul] Wolfowitz was trying to undermine Blix. And Blix knew it, too,’ recalls a British weapons inspector. ‘The impression I had, rightly or wrongly, was that these people were willing to go to any lengths – it didn’t really matter who got hurt or what principles got trampled on – to advance their particular theories.’ The inspector shrugs. ‘It was obvious that we were an impediment that had to be got over in order to get to war.’

  In public, IAEA judgements that the tubes were not for a uranium-enrichment programme were aggressively countered by American officials with allegations that the Agency had proved itself pretty useless historically. When IAEA Director-General Mohammed ElBaradei specifically warned that the organization had found no evidence of a nuclear programme and that the tubes were most likely bound for a rocket programme, US Vice-President Dick Cheney leapt into the fray. ‘I think Mr ElBaradei, frankly, is wrong,’ he told Meet the Press. ‘I don’t have any reason to believe [the IAEA] any more valid this time than they’ve been in the past.’

 

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