A History of the World Since 9/11

by Dominic Streatfeild

  Weapons inspectors were convinced that the United States had a specific motive for its selective leaking of WM D-based intelligence. ‘The not-so-good intelligence was very often shared with the Press first,’ recalls another senior officer. ‘After being upset at the beginning that we were not getting the information directly, we had some understanding that, if the information had been provided to us, we would have laughed at it’

  George Healey, who was busy interviewing Iraqi scientists to prove the 81 mm rocket case, was livid. ‘Some of us found what they were doing quite untruthful and disgusting. They were obviously selling an attack to the public. And they were doing it based on lies.’

  Part of the problem was that the inspectors weren’t finding evidence ofWMDsin Iraq.

  ‘[The Americans] gave us something like 48 [weapons] sites. We found nothing at any of them,’ says UNMOVIC’s Rod Barton. ‘You don’t just need a plant to make chemical and biological weapons – you need all the other infrastructure. You need the steel factory, the fabrication plant to make the bombs. You need a whole range of things. [Iraq] had nothing like that. Everything was in a worse state of repair than when our inspectors had last been into Iraq in 1998.’

  Iraq’s ‘Currently Accurate, Full and Complete Disclosure’, as demanded by Resolution 1441, didn’t help. In December 2002, 12,000 pages of WMD-related material were handed over. WINPAC analysts swooped on the documents and pounced on the omissions, immediately noting that there was no mention of the gas centrifuge programme for which the tubes had been ordered. The possibility that there was no gas centrifuge programme doesn’t appear to have occurred to them: the case regarding Iraq’s WMDs, as Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet told the President later that month, was a ‘slam dunk’.

  In January 2003, after a White House request for stronger evidence on the nuclear issue, WINPAC decided to prove that it was a slam dunk. A pair of private contractors was hired to put the tubes on to a lathe and spin them, to demonstrate they were capable of withstanding the necessary speeds.7 Five tests were performed. Four were prematurely halted, but one tube was apparently spun for two hours at a speed of 90,000 rpm. This, it seemed, proved their case.

  Intrigued by the WINPAC report, INR analysts decided to investigate. ‘[My analysts] went directly to the contractor themselves,’ recalls Carl Ford, ‘only to find out that, yeah, the spin tests worked, but then, when we tried to do it for any extended period of time, they broke down and they could not be reliably used for centrifuges.’

  WINPAC eventually admitted that all had not quite been as it seemed. Actually, the total number of tests had been thirty-one (not five), of which thirty (not four) had failed. One tube was indeed spun at 90,000 rpm, but this was done for sixty-five minutes, not two hours. What the agency still failed to mention was that when three tubes were tested to destruction (a more standard procedure for assaying centrifuge rotors) all failed just slightly above 90,000 rpm: a good sign that they would have failed if spun at that speed for any significant period. When the Department of Energy discovered the truth about the spin tests, analysts filed a Technical Intelligence Note asserting that WINPAC’s conclusions were wrong: far from indicating that the tubes would make good centrifuge rotors, the tests showed the exact opposite.

  This was not the first time WINPAC’s certainty had got the better of it. There had been a string of such incidents. Some of the information the organization cited was just plain wrong. Its specifications for the Zippe centrifuge, for example, were incorrect. According to WINPAC, Zippe rotors were 2.8 mm thick, a fact which almost matched the Iraqi tubes’ 3.3 mm. Actually the wall thickness was less than 1 mm. This might well have been a simple typographical error, but the fact that Department of Energy experts pointed it out to the CIA repeatedly throughout 2001 and 2002 makes this unlikely.

  WINPAC had also highlighted the fact that the tubes had been procured in secret through a Jordanian front company as evidence they were bound for a clandestine nuclear programme. This was rubbish. Hussein Kamel had advertised on the Internet for aluminium suppliers; he had openly haggled over prices with Garry Cordukes, and samples of the tubes had been dispatched to Jordan by DHL: hardly the courier of choice for clandestine nuclear technology.

  WINPAC had also pointed to the tubes’ high cost as an indicator they were destined for something more significant than an artillery rocket programme. According to the organization, 7075-T6 was ‘considerably more expensive than other, more readily available materials’, and thus a ‘poor choice’ for artillery rockets. This was also incorrect. Actually, 7075-T6 was the material of choice for low-cost rocket systems. The United States, Russia and thirteen other countries used it for precisely that purpose.

  ‘Cheap as chips,’ comments Garry Cordukes, who made the tubes. ‘7075 is an engineering alloy, so it’s more high tensile, but it’s not uncommon whatsoever. Nothing unusual about it . . . Total bullshit.’

  In addition to these inaccuracies, information that might have undermined WINPAC’s arguments was sometimes omitted. For instance, WINPAC had presented the NIE’s drafters with a table to highlight the similarities between the Zippe and Beams centrifuges and the Australian tubes. As it stood, the table showed there were indeed similarities between the sizes of the Australian tubes and known centrifuge rotors. But the table did not include the sizes of Iraq’s 81 mm rocket tubes, which matched the size of the Australian tubes exactly. This fact was not presented to policymakers or to those drafting the Intelligence Estimate.

  When it came to rocket production, the NIE committee was presented with another table designed to show how the tolerances of the Iraqi tubes exceeded those of comparable US rocket systems. Once again, background material was missing. In reality, US rocket-tube specifications ran to another twenty-five pages, none of which was included. Had they been, it would have been clear that the United States demanded higher standards of its rocket tubes than Iraq. Department of Energy experts also noted that the tolerances of the Iraqi tubes – supposedly so high they precluded any use other than in centrifuge systems – were, in fact, lower than those of numerous standard industrial items, such as bicycle-seat posts and aluminium cans.

  WINPAC also omitted to tell policymakers that the two centrifuges it thought Iraq was making, the Beams and Zippe machines, had never been used commercially before. Gernot Zippe himself had noted that the yield from his machine was so low it would preclude industrial use.

  On top of this selective amnesia came a more direct form of misrepresentation. At various points, WINPAC reported that its spin tests had proved the suitability of the tubes for centrifuge rotors (although they strongly suggested the exact opposite)8 and that it didn’t have the specifications for the Italian Medusa 81 rocket (when it did). Then there was the issue of the tubes’ weight. In July 2001, convinced the tubes were bound for a Zippe centrifuge, Joe T had tried to persuade the IAEA that the tubes’ weight matched those of a Zippe machine.

  ‘[We] explained to him that Zippe’s rotors included the end caps and the baffles and the bearings,’ recalls one IAEA officer, ‘and he had only looked at the tubes.’ If the end caps and baffle were added, they told the CIA man, the weights most definitely did not match. ‘He just went back and recalculated it as if the tubes were thinner – that is to say had been machined – and then added in the weight that he had forgotten on the first round.’

  As if this weren’t enough, when the WINPAC analyst returned to Washington after the meeting, he apparently informed his colleagues that the IAEA had bought his theory. After he returned from his visit to Vienna where people told him, “No, we think you’re wrong,” he said, “I went to Vienna and they agreed with me.”’

  On 5 February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations. ‘Saddam Hussein is determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb,’ he assured the Assembly. ‘He is so determined that he has made repeated covert attempts to acquire high-specification aluminium tubes.’

  While Powel
l admitted he was no expert on centrifuges, he pointed out that it was strange that the Iraqis had procured such highly specified tubes if they were destined for an artillery rocket programme. ‘Maybe the Iraqis just manufacture their conventional weapons to a higher standard than we do,’ the Secretary conceded, ‘but I don’t think so.’

  Powell told the United Nations that ‘most US experts’ believed the tubes were to be used as centrifuge rotors; ‘other experts and the Iraqis themselves’ argued they were for rockets.

  Professor Houston Wood was mortified. ‘That speech!’ he says. ‘He put the US people who disagreed with him, or his report, in the same camp with the Iraqis. I was just astounded.’

  Wood wasn’t the only one connected with the tubes shocked by the presentation. Garry Cordukes was also incredulous. The Australian aluminium trader knew nothing about gas centrifuges, but he knew a botch-up when he saw one.

  ‘If anyone had tested [the tubes] they would have seen straight away, well, this anodizing isn’t what it should be.’ Cordukes had been surprised that Hussein Kamel hadn’t noticed the coating had not been correctly applied, but for the US intelligence community not to notice, too, was mystifying. ‘It didn’t gel,’ he says. ‘It just didn’t make sense.’

  Around the world, experts in the weapons-intelligence community were glued to Powell’s presentation. At UNMOVIC headquarters in New York, analysts crammed into ‘the bunker’ to watch it on the UN’s CCTV system. Despite occasional hoots of derision when the inspectors thought something was awry, mostly the room was silent.

  ‘I thought that they had the goods,’ admits Rod Barton. ‘I didn’t believe Powell would say what he did say unless they had fairly strong evidence. I thought they’ve obviously got something that we haven’t seen – and quite a lot of it.’

  In Iraq, weapons analysts were watching, too. Mahdi Obeidi, the man behind the country’s 1990 centrifuge programme, was also tempted to believe: was there, perhaps, a nuclear programme in Iraq that he didn’t know about?

  The notion that there was another, super-secret source behind Powell’s assertions seems to have been common among both weapons inspectors and intelligence analysts. Even inside the CIA, certain officers believed it.

  ‘What he was saying was not matching up with my intelligence,’ admits an officer in the Counter Proliferation Division. ‘I’m hearing and reading everything, but I’m just going, “Well, maybe someone is talking to someone in Saddam’s inner circle.”’

  Everyone assumed that someone else had the proof.

  No amount of super-secret informants, however, could persuade anyone who had really studied the tubes that they were suitable for centrifuge use. To them, a physical impossibility was being used to justify war; people were about to start dying.

  Wayne White was appalled by the Powell presentation. ‘I had a serious problem with the nuclear portion of the speech,’ he says. ‘It just turned my stomach.’

  Geoff Wainwright, the Australian intelligence officer whose work had provided the first tubes and details of the order itself agreed. ‘The biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard anyone get up and say,’ he recalls. ‘It made me sick.’

  At the IAEA, George Healey was equally dumbfounded. ‘I just couldn’t believe it, that somebody would know that little about what was going on, to stand up at the UN and say something like that.’

  Bob Kelley figured it clearer. ‘Somebody’ he says, ‘mis-briefed Powell.’

  Kelley was correct. Somebody did mis-brief Powell. In the run-up to his UN presentation, the Secretary of State had been extremely sceptical about the CIA’s claims regarding the aluminium tubes. Not only had he been informed in private by Mohammed ElBaradei that they were not destined for a centrifuge programme, but his own Bureau of Intelligence and Research was lobbying hard to remove the issue from the presentation altogether. Carl Ford, INR’s Head, had specifically warned Powell that a number of assertions in the intelligence picture contained ‘egregious errors’ and were ‘highly misleading’. With less than a week to go till his date at the United Nations, the Secretary, on the verge of excising all references to the aluminium tubes from his presentation (an act that would have undermined the entire case for war), demanded a briefing from the CIA at Langley

  Sensing they were about to lose the Secretary of State on the aluminium tubes issue, CIA bosses George Tenet and John McLaughlin produced one of the tubes and rolled it across the table to him. As the Secretary examined it, the pair explained that there was no doubt it had been destined for a centrifuge programme. Behind them, WINPAC’s experts nodded sagely.

  ‘It was all very convincing,’ recalls Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell’s Chief of Staff and right-hand man at the briefing. The problem was, it wasn’t convincing enough: Powell still wasn’t buying it.

  At this point, the CIA men pulled a rabbit out of the hat. At the last minute, Tenet shared a sensational piece of intelligence with the Secretary of State.

  ‘A counterpart in an allied country,’ says Wilkerson, ‘had just done a test on the aluminium tubes and had got them to go to 98,000 rpm over an hour period of time. No visible deterioration in the walls, metal or anything else.’

  The implication was clear: these were no rocket tubes.

  More persuasive to the Secretary than the speed of the spin test, however, was the identity of this ‘allied country’: France. If the French, at that time resolutely against the war, agreed the tubes were suitable for centrifuge use, that was the kind of information Powell would believe.

  ‘Powell had heard that a very respected intelligence service in another nation that incidentally was a major ally of the United States had said that they believed these aluminium tubes were for centrifuges,’ recalls Wilkerson. ‘The damage was done.’

  Somewhat grudgingly, Powell put the aluminium-tubes issue back into his presentation.

  No details of these French spin tests have ever emerged. When Powell asked if he could cite them at the United Nations as evidence, he was turned down. Privately, weapons inspectors wonder if they ever took place at all. IAEA officials, normally the first to be informed about breaking news on the tubes, were never even informed that tests had taken place. They certainly were not informed about the results.

  Jacques Baute, at the head of the Iraq inspection team at the time, is openly sceptical. A French nuclear weapons expert with excellent access inside his own country’s weapons-intelligence community, he was never told about the tests. He is convinced that, even if they had taken place, they would have been worthless.

  ‘The issue of having the tubes spun physically is completely secondary,’ he says. ‘It would only confirm what the material was – but we already knew that it was high-strength aluminium.’ Even had the tests ever taken place, and there is no proof that they did, they were worthless. Except, perhaps, in persuading a non-nuclear expert such as Colin Powell of the veracity of the WINPAC claims.

  ‘The Secretary got led down the Primrose Path,’ says Carl Ford, Powell’s senior adviser at INR.

  Lawrence Wilkerson agrees. ‘On the aluminium tubes and the nuclear programme in general,’ he says, ‘he was lied to.’

  To INR staff, it was apparent the US administration had formulated a conclusion, then set about proving it. So certain were key figures in the White House that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear-weapons programme that all evidence pointing in the opposite direction was simply disregarded. Intelligence officers, swept up in the epidemic of certainty engulfing the White House, abandoned their neutrality and became advocates, telling policymakers what they wanted to hear – which was, of course, what they had secretly believed all along. And, all the while, the prevailing wind blew in one direction: towards Baghdad.

  ‘It’s hard to think of a more odious and disreputable use by a government of intelligence information than in the case of Iraq,’ says Greg Thielmann.

  Carl Ford, his boss, concurs. ‘I could not believe,’ he says today, ‘that [the intelligence community]
had sunk so low that we would turn out such crap at such an important, vital time.’

  The ultimate irony was that Iraqi officials had not really wanted the aluminium tubes in the first place. The military already had two artillery rocket systems that worked perfectly well. It didn’t need another. Even before they sanctioned the order for 60,000 aluminium tubes from Australia, members of the 2000 Rocket Committee had agreed that the Nasser 81 programme was probably a lost cause.

  However, in the topsy-turvy world of Iraqi weapons procurement, things appeared to work in reverse. In 1997, the military had received a shipment of 81 mm launchers. By 2000, the pressure was on to make rockets that fitted them. Unable to make the rockets work, the MIC’s scientists had drawn a blank: they didn’t really know why the things were inaccurate.

  Unfortunately, the Committee’s political masters would not have tolerated the conclusion ‘We don’t know.’ Something had to be done. There was no time to find the perfect solution. They just needed a solution. So the 2000 Committee seized on the first reasonable suggestion it came across: tightening the tolerances of the aluminium tube casings. If the tubes were better made, it reasoned, the rockets might work better.

  The piling of questionable assumptions one on top of another; the knee-jerk response of grabbing the nearest available solution; the rejection of inconvenient truths; the tunnel vision; the political pressure; the threat of getting it wrong – it wasn’t so much that the rockets were broken, it was more that each link in the procurement process was corroded: the entire system was unstable. The result was a bureaucratic momentum that made it impossible to abandon the project. The tubes order went through.

  Had they been aware of the convoluted process by which the Iraqis had come to order 60,000 aluminium tubes from Australia, America’s CIA officers might have sympathized. They had a term for this kind of thing. They called it ‘groupthink’.