154. The Road to Iraq: Saddam Hussein's Fatal Error (Ep 2)

16:07David:It's on the nose. And I mean, it's interesting because it does make it sound like this kind of Bond villainess trained in Britain to develop biological weapons. I mean, I spoke to inspectors who met her, who sat down with her and said she was not some evil character. She was basically a scientist under huge pressure by the regime to do stuff for them, you know, because your life depended on it and your family's life depended on it. But she meets the inspectors at this point. And again, it's stunning because she and others are going to reveal that Iraq had built facilities to produce botulinum toxin, which is a deadly agent, and anthrax, another deadly agent, that Iraq had loaded these agents onto bombs and missile warheads on the eve of the 1991 war.

16:53David:there'd even been a secret mobile fermentation project to develop weapons and again the inspectors in the west are astonished by this and rolf acaus of unscombe complaints well where are the documents so a few days later they take the inspectors to a chicken farm and hidden in the chicken farm are a hundred and seventy boxes of documents about this secret program which again Then they say Hussein Carmel had ordered all of these weapons destroyed way back, but without keeping the records of the destruction from years back.

17:32Gordon:If you're going to destroy a CW or BW program and you hope to get credit with the inspectors, you probably want to retain some records of the destruction.

17:42David:That is our bit of advice for anyone currently running a CW or BW program. That's our little tip.

17:49Gordon:Keep the receipts. That's all we're saying. Keep the receipts. And then Hussein Kamal decides to take the very logical step of going back to Iraq, re-defecting, which always turns out really well for re-defectors.

18:04David:Yeah. I mean, it is bizarre, isn't it? I mean, I think he's not very smart, Hussein Kamal. I mean, he's obviously not because he's going back to Iraq. I think he realizes no one is backing him to be the next leader of Iraq. Everyone's not rallying around him. Not even the Syrians want to give him shelter.

18:22Gordon:Is that a swipe at Syrians, Gordon, who are just willing to accept anyone?

18:25David:I think he thought they'd help him. But this Jordanian official, I met a Jordanian official and asked him about this period. And this Jordanian official said to me, I told him not to go. And I told him he'd be executed in seven days on returning to Iraq. I was wrong. He was executed in two days. so i mean i mean he lost two days and first saddam's daughter has to divorce him so it's like divorce death i mean utterly predictable with saddam isn't it but there you go there's

18:56Gordon:some murkiness about how the brothers are killed and the circumstances of these executions aren't

19:03David:there yeah it's how far they were was it saddam's orders where they kind of shot up was it the sons who did it. I think there's a little bit of murkiness.

19:13Gordon:Well, in any case, I guess what this admittedly very bizarre incident does confirm is that Saddam Hussein had WMD programs prior to the 91 war. He had lied about them. Those programs were maybe further along in some cases than Western intelligence had thought. They'd been covered up. And now, even if he's being forced to own up to them, it doesn't cover up the fact that he had been trying to hide them for many, many years. And so Western intelligence has been totally deceived. It's actually, I mean, it's a pretty significant intelligence failure on the part of most Western intelligence services to have missed this.

19:53Gordon:It also, I guess, confirms the idea that the Iraqis are really good at deceiving Western intelligence services about these WMD programs and the capabilities that they have. So there are a lot of different assumptions, strategic assumptions that start to filter into the binds of Western analysts about Iraqi WMD programs as a result of the way Saddam handles this.

20:21David:Yeah, but he's cunning. He's deceitful. Saddam is a master of deception. He's always He's hiding his programs. Every time, even when you revealed something like the chicken farm documents, it just makes them more convinced that there's more to be found. So I think with that, you have this sense of mistrust of Saddam. And equally, Saddam's mistrust of the Americans is going to grow because he's going to realize the CIA is plotting to remove him.

20:53Gordon:Oh, that's good cliffhanger. Let's take a break and when we come back, we'll see what those clever people at the CIA have gotten up to.

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21:18Gordon:Ooh, with that, you know this is going to be full of twists and turns.

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21:33Gordon:survive. Now in our world, we know that institutions are not always what they seem, don't we?

21:39David:That's right, David, and in this series, it's built around the things we find most compelling. Which are of course conspiracy, institutional corruption, and moral ambiguity. That's us. These are the grey areas where the right call isn't always clear.

21:55Gordon:This is a fast-paced, edge-of-your-seat story where you never quite know who to trust or what happens next. That's right.

22:02David:So it's the next great thing to binge and you can watch all episodes now on Sky. Well, welcome back. The tensions between Iraq and particularly the US are growing as the 90s continue. April 1993, an interesting little side note, which is going to be an important part of our story when we get to the war years later. Kuwait's security services announced the arrest of 17 people, they say, for plotting to assassinate the former president, George H.W. Bush, now just left office, during a visit to Kuwait earlier that month, April 1993, with a car bomb. Now, this was allegedly organized by Iraqi intelligence, they say, the Kuwaitis.

22:50David:Not totally clear if it's for real or how serious it was. I mean, Steve Cole in his book, The Achilles Trap, says some wonder if it might have been a Kuwaiti setup. up. But it adds to this sense that there's a feud, a grudge between the two sides. And President Clinton now in office fires some missiles at Iraqi Intelligence HQ to make a point in response. He orders it at night though when no one's there, a little bit performative. One of the missiles goes astray and kills a famous Iraqi painter. So the tension's growing, isn't it?

23:25Gordon:It is. And underneath all of this, of course, it has become really official US government policy to clandestinely remove Saddam from power, because there's a finding that had been signed by the George H.W. Bush administration right after the Persian Gulf War to authorize the CIA to create the conditions for the removal of Saddam. Now, Bill Clinton is in office after George H.W. Bush. And Clinton likes the idea of a coup. He likes the idea of using the CIA, using covert action to try to get rid of Saddam.

24:04David:Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? Because it's something we see again and again, and we talked about this right from the 50s, which is presidents like the idea of getting rid of their opponents. They don't really want to go through the risks, the efforts of war to do it. So if someone says, well, we might be able to do it with the CIA, covertly, then they're going to go, oh yeah, go have a look at that. And so you get that desire to do it. But I have to say, it's part of the urge to do something and the temptation to think you can do it easily with covert action. I don't think it's a very serious commitment, though, at this point.

24:41David:It's more of a kind of minor temptation.

24:43Gordon:No. Although I will say foreshadowing the intelligence failure that is to come in 2003, I think one of the crucial implications of so much of the operations work done by CIA in the 1990s being focused on the covert action program in Iraq is that there isn't a tremendous focus on actually penetrating Saddam's regime or getting sources close to Saddam to collect on his plans and intentions.

25:13David:Or on what WMD. Yeah.

25:15Gordon:Or on what WMD he has or doesn't have. So I think that there is a kind of unintended consequence of leaning on this COVID action program to create a kind of a collection bias toward stuff that feeds that program and not toward, you know, sort of the typically bread and butter, you know, collection on plans and intentions and big, you know, military programs and capabilities.

25:38David:Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point. So the CIA put in a high-flying CIA officer called Bob Bear. I don't know if you've ever met him. I have. He's a really interesting guy. He's going to be made number two in the Iraq operations group to see if he can push forward these covert plans. And Bob was quite an experienced Middle East, Central Asia officer, reputation as a risk taker. I think that's one of the things about him.

26:04Gordon:He was the kind of guy who liked to be out in the field. Also wrote the book that became, or that was adapted as Syriana, the film starring, I think, Matt Damon and George Clooney. And Bear had some colorful language to describe the Iraq operations group in those years. He said someone warned him that he would need to be kind of a risk taker because, quote, you're going to have your hands full. IOG, the Iraq operations group is swarming with drunkards and whores. That is not, sounds like a pirate ship, maybe, not so much. A CIA team. A CIA component. But as Bear recalls one officer, been caught having sex in the infirmary.

26:51Gordon:What do they mean by infirmary here?

26:53David:Is there not a CIA infirmary? Is there not? I don't know.

26:56Gordon:I guess the Office of Medical Service. I think of a field hospital when I hear infirmary. another person who had apparently gotten quite drunk and passed out behind the steering wheel of their car in the Langley parking lot. Which, you know, I mean, who hasn't been there, Gordon?

27:13David:CIA in the 90s. CIA in the 90s. This is before your time, we should say, David. That's true. I was not there yet. It was a completely different ship later. But that is the kind of picture Bob paints of the of the Iraq operations group and the kryptonim we love a good kryptonim don't we of the we do of a plot he's going to come up with is db achilles salad one of the problems um as you said is they don't have great sources close to saddam and so they end up working with exiles and here we get to uh one of the important figures in our story of the build-up to the war an exile named Ahmed Chalabi.

27:53David:And Chalabi is a really interesting and important character. And I do think he's your classic kind of exile plotter, isn't he? I mean, he comes from a wealthy Iraqi family which had fled after the revolution in the 50s. He's eloquent. He's politically astute. He's a schemer. He's smart. He attends MIT. So he's got the American education because he's got a maths doctorate from University of Chicago, runs a bank, but that bank he's running out of Jordan collapses amid allegations of fraud at the end of the 80s. So it's a little bit shady. But by the 90s, he's running something called the Iraqi National Congress, the INC.

28:34David:And he basically wants to be the next leader of Iraq. And he's also got, in the early 90s, a relationship with the CIA.

28:41Gordon:And he's not really a recruited agent or asset like we often discuss in this program. He's he's really, it seems like he's more of a kind of paid agent of influence, probably as part of this covert action campaign against Saddam, because Chalabi is, of course, looking for, looking to position himself as a future leader in Iraq after Saddam is gone. Interestingly, Chalabi also has clandestine relationships with Iranian intelligence, who he's talking to as well. So he's scheming, he's playing all sides, hoping to see where his chips might land.

29:21David:Yeah, so he's working with Baer on this plot. He's working with a guy called Wafiq al-Samurai, who's a former head of Iraqi military intelligence, who says he can all help organize a coup. And it's interesting because Chalabi is hoping that he can spark something through a small uprising, a small military maneuver, which will either start a coup or pull the US or the Iranians to come in and finish the job and get rid of Saddam. So that's his kind of ambition and his plan. But he's playing all these games. I mean, Chalabi tells the Iranians that Bob Bear, the CIA man, is planning to assassinate Saddam.

30:06David:And he tells the Iranians this in order to kind of make the Iranians think that this is a serious plot that he's engaged with and that they should support it because it's going to happen because Saddam's going to go on. So you might as well come in. But it's not true. But the NSA, so America's Signals Intelligence Agency, intercepts details of the Iranians discussing this plan, apparently of Bob Bear of the CIA, to assassinate Saddam. And of course, Washington then absolutely freaks out because, believe it or not, the CIA is not supposed to go around assassinating foreign heads of state without permission.

30:43David:And so suddenly they're like, what is going on? What is going on? and they are like they freak out at Bob Bear and they're like you blindsided us about this the national security advisor fears this whole plot is going to go wrong it's going to turn into another bay of pigs and you know the exiles are going to get moaned down and they're going to get drawn in and fail to do things and so they pull the plug on the plot there's Chalabi's people there's a brief battle but you know no insurrection Bob Bear feels and he writes about this in a memoir that he's then hung out to dry and it's part of the kind of dark mess that is the CIA plots.

31:24David:There's another plot in 1996, we should say, inside Iraq, which also goes badly wrong and where the plotters are executed. And Saddam has penetrated all of these. So it's a kind of mess that's going on with these plans to try and get rid of Saddam.

31:38Gordon:One of the data mix that I find really interesting is that even though, I mean, seen from the CIA side, the American side, you'd say, none of this stuff gets even remotely close to actually orchestrating a successful coup. And yet Saddam can read all of this as the Americans being intensely involved in Iraqi politics, being kind of all seeing, all knowing, able to pull strings all over the place. So it reinforces in Saddam's mind, this idea that the Americans know exactly what's going on and are out to get him. And yet, this was a shocking fact, and it came out of the Cole book, The Achilles Strap.

32:21Gordon:Steve Cole wasn't able to find any official contact between the US and Iraqi governments, direct contact between 1990 and the beginning of the war in 2003. And so there's this massive chasm between the two sides as they circle each other. The extent of misunderstanding is remarkable here on both the American and Iraqi side.

32:47David:Yeah. And what it does is give an outsized role to people like Chalabi and these exiles, yeah, as being the people who claim to be speaking for the people of Iraq and the truth about what's going on in Iraq. And it's interesting because after these plots kind of fall apart, the CIA cuts ties with Chalabi. They consider him so untrustworthy. And what does he do? He moves to London, comes to Mayfair, opens up an office. I think it was more a Knightsbridge at one point, but I kind of remember visiting it. But he also plays Washington really well, Chalabi. I mean, he's very good at building support in Congress, in think tanks, and I have to say amongst a lot of journalists in Washington particularly, to try and build support for his case that Saddam's a bad man, Saddam should be getting rid of, the Clinton administration has been too soft on him, we need to take a harder line.

33:46David:He's always telling people, you know, the Iraqi people will welcome you Americans as liberators. And he's also doing this other thing, which we're definitely going to come back to, which is that he's not just becoming the conduit for defectors from the regime who are making claims about what the regime's up to. He's actively seeking out defectors. He's running offices in places like Jordan, looking for people coming out of Iraq who he can use to make his case that Saddam's a bad man and should be gotten rid of because of his WMD or because of his brutality.

34:22Gordon:And I suppose that the existence of people like Chalabi and their ability to kind of sit at the middle of these Iraqi networks and Western networks means that there's not an incentive for anybody to defect from Iraq and, for example, to say, we shut down all of the WMD programs. you're creating a market for defectors to come out and say, maybe things that were historically accurate about what Saddam had done with WMD or the brutality of the regime, but things that may not be accurate anymore, because that is exactly what Chalabi wants to hear so he can sell his product, which is regime change to London and to Washington.

35:02David:Yeah, Robert Draper's very good book, To Start a War, mentions one case of a general who claims to have fled Iraq. And he says he's got evidence of Saddam Hussein training terrorists. But he says he fled after Saddam's son, Uday, smashed his testicles apart. And so what happens is, of course, the Americans, they check his testicles, which is one way of checking. And there's no damage. They're fine. And he'd been basically coached or, you know, been in contact with Chalabi, who told him to tell this story. I mean, it's a fairly basic thing. I mean, if you're going to sound convincing, you need to take a hammer to your testicles if you're going to try that line, because otherwise someone's going to check.

35:44Gordon:Maybe his testicles just healed quickly. Anyhow, the 1990s, we're in the 1990s. Tension is growing over the inspections that are ongoing, the UNSCOM inspections that are ongoing inside Iraq. Now, the main worry at the time is CW and BW, chemical weapons and biological weapons, not as much nuclear, but there's also, isn't there a deliberate policy of the US to use the inspections to try to provoke Saddam?

36:16David:Yeah, this is where it gets really interesting, I think, because the inspectors are technically UN inspectors, but a lot of them do come from the US and the UK. And there's some very aggressive ones, famous one called Scott Ritter, who are working quite closely with Washington. And one of the things that, for instance, they're doing is targeting something called the Special Security Organization, which is Saddam's elite group of bodyguards is the wrong word, but it's the group designed to protect him, his palaces and key institutions. Now, the inspectors are saying that they think this group is being used to hide the WMD, particularly hide it in Saddam's presidential palaces.

37:01David:And they are trying to use aggressive inspections to put it off balance. But of course, from the Iraqi side, they are very resistant to let inspectors into Saddam's presidential palaces because their job is to protect Saddam. And they view the inspectors as spies who are gathering intelligence about Saddam's palaces and his whereabouts and his security, which they can then use to target him as part of their plots. So you see this tension and to some extent misunderstanding. And to be fair to the Iraqis, they're kind of right because the UN inspectors are packed. It's packed full of spies. I've heard stories about UNSCOM being used as cover to hide comms gear for spying and tracking equipment, all these things.

37:54David:And the US, CIA and others are using the inspectors to collect military targeting information. So it's kind of true that the inspectors are more than just inspectors because they're being supplied by countries who have their own agenda.

38:09Gordon:And going back to the logic for Saddam to let these inspectors in and to have destroyed his stockpiles in the first place, I mean, Saddam's idea was that if he plays ball, he'll get the sanctions relief that he wants to get Iraq's economy and cash flow out from under Iraq, essentially, and use that to raise money, right? But this isn't working for him, is it? By the time we get to 97, 98, it's becoming clear to him and to the regime that he's not getting any of the relief that he thought he would get. Yeah.

38:49David:So the tension is growing. He knows the CIA is plotting to overthrow him. He sees these inspectors coming around his palaces. And his attitude is, well, why help with inspections if the sanctions are not being lifted and there's no sign of them being lifted anyway? And Jafar, the nuclear scientist, says Saddam basically decides at this point that the idea of getting the sanctions lifted through cooperating with inspections isn't working. So why bother cooperating with inspectors? Why have them in rooting around your palaces if you're not going to get a clean bill of health anyway and they're just causing trouble?

39:27David:So he basically decides, well, I'll screw you to the inspectors. So October 1998, Saddam suspends cooperation with the inspectors. They're withdrawn. And then the US and UK carry out airstrikes called Operation Desert Fox, where they bomb and hit some targets.

39:43Gordon:And this is another big moment on the road to the eventual WMD intelligence failure in 2002-2003, because through the 1990s, there hadn't been much need for independent intelligence gathering by the US and the UK, or at least it's a bit diminished because of the presence of the inspectors. But now, with the inspectors gone, you've actually lost a collection platform. And you don't have an embassy in the case of either the US or the UK inside Iraq at this time. So you were blinded. I mean, you were already not in a great spot from a collection standpoint. And now you've been even more blinded by the ejection of these inspectors.

40:27Gordon:So from a collection standpoint in this period, it's also getting a bit grim.

40:33David:The inspectors were the closest thing they had to eyes and ears, particularly when it came to WMD. Now they've lost them after 1998. And you're right, the source base in Iraq is surprisingly thin. I mean, the CIA had just two sources reporting from inside Iraq. One could only communicate by mailing letters to an address in Yemen. So the information would sometimes be like months out of date. And the other could only communicate when he comes out of the country every six months. I mean, it's not a deep source base, is it?

41:07Gordon:There were probably more sources attached to the covert action program, I would think. But my guess is that this is referring to sources in Baghdad who were able to report on military capabilities, plans and intentions of the regime, that kind of thing.

41:21David:But it is.

41:22Gordon:That is very thin. Yeah. That's not many. it was a little bit better on the UK side. We'll come back to that angle later. But still, Iraq is a bit of a backwater, isn't it?

41:37David:That's right. I think backwater is the right word. The head of MI6 from 1999 is a guy called Sir Richard Dearlove. And we're going to talk a lot more about him. And we're going to be hearing from him in a bonus episode for members. So do join up at therestisclassifier.com if you want to hear that. But he says, The intelligence picture on Iraq was, I would say, neglected. That's his verdict on that period through the 1990s, because it's way down the list of priorities for the Joint Intelligence Committee, which is the august body which sets Britain's priorities for its spies of what to collect.

42:11David:By some accounts, it's like 20th on the list of priorities for the Joint Intelligence Committee at that period in the late 90s. So it's low down the requirements. You've got a thin intelligence base. Britain does have a couple of sources, a little bit more maybe than the Americans. We'll come back to that as well. And so what you have, and I think this is important, is if you haven't got any new information, what you're left with is basically history and assumptions of what you knew to be the case

42:41Gordon:in the past. This is a really important distinction for this entire story, which is when do assumptions drift, kind of creep into becoming actual analytic judgments? And it can happen in a case like this where you have historical information, you have a sort of political, cultural, historical context for this country, this leader, and yet you don't actually have recent intelligence on what they're planning to do, what their capabilities might be. And in that kind of situation, it's quite easy for an analytic cadre, it could be in the US, it could be in the UK, it could be anywhere, to fall into this trap.

43:29Gordon:Because, for example, the CIA has put out a kind of tradecraft primer after Iraq WMD. And one of the things they looked at was to write out in some interesting historical cases, strategic assumptions that were not challenged. So for example, in 1941, there was an assumption that more or less went like this with respect to Japan. Japan would avoid all out war because it recognized US military superiority. But using the same set of information, you could have made the case, given that U.S. superiority would only increase, Japan might view a first strike as the only way to knock America out of the war.

44:13And in the Iraq WMD case, the assumption was that Saddam failed to cooperate with UN inspectors.

44:22Gordon:He tosses them out because he's continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction. And yet, consistent with the same body of information would be, if Iraqi authorities had destroyed their WMD stocks and abandoned their programs, they might refuse to fully acknowledge this to the UN to maintain Iraq's regional status, deterrence, and internal regime stability. That claim would be consistent with all of the information, but the strategic assumption that has held for years at this point goes unchallenged and actually becomes the analytic line. And then it becomes very hard to change because it gets all of the analysts, the collectors, the policymakers get locked into that mindset.

45:04Gordon:That assumption underlies their mindset about that country, and it becomes very hard in the absence of a whole bunch of new and compelling information to change it.

45:13David:Yeah, I think that's exactly right, that the assumptions get hardened. And so as we get to this point, the late 90s, Iraq is still under sanctions. The population is suffering. Saddam is using this as propaganda to blame the West. There is this thing called the Oil for Food program through the UN to try and get food to people, but that's subject to massive corruption. In the US and UK, the secret policy is regime change. But in practice, the diplomatic policy is containment. but there's a growing sense it's not working and it might not be sustainable in the long run but no one's really got an alternative they're not really kind of going for regime chain all out so Saddam is thinking well you know the most that will happen now I've got rid of inspections maybe occasionally I'll get some airstrikes but in the long term I'm going to be okay because the appetite to keep this regime of sanctions and the suffering of the people going is going to eventually crumble and then I'll be free

46:08Gordon:And it's not unreasonable to presume that that gamble may have paid off. But in 2001, two very, very big things happen. We have a new administration taking power in Washington that is led by George W. Bush, the son of George H.W. Bush, who first went to war with Saddam back in 91. that administration, the new George W. Bush administration, is of course full of people who have an agenda with respect to Iraq and who are out to get Saddam. And then of course, on September 11th, 2001, the US is attacked in a way that will change everything in the way the US conducts foreign and national security policy.

46:53David:Yes. And even though Saddam Hussein was not behind that attack there will be some in washington who want to claim he was and will want to immediately put iraq in washington's sights for regime change so that will be next time on the rest is classified but a reminder you don't have to wait you can join the declassified club at the rest is classified dot com where you get early access to the series and some really really exclusive and very interesting guests who will be speaking to us on those bonus episodes of club members, won't they, David?

47:30Gordon:That's right. We've set up three incredible interviews for club members that are tied to this series that I think will give listeners a really inside view of how this entire story in the run-up to the war went down. We have an interview with Alistair Campbell, who was the head of Tony Blair's communications shop in the run-up to the war with Sir Richard Dearlove, who was the chief of MI6 in the run-up to the war, and Michael Morell, who was one of the top three analysts at the CIA at the time and intimately involved in the intelligence picture and the relationship between the White House and CIA in the run-up to the war.

48:11Gordon:So members of the Declassified Club will get access to all of that and can get access to all of that right now. We also, reminder, have a live show on September 4th and 5th in London. You can get tickets for that at therestisclassified.com. Look forward to seeing you next time.

48:30David:See you next time.