157. The Road to Iraq: What the Spies Got Wrong (Ep 5)

14:18Gordon:So many podcasts. As we have discussed, you are the rest of classified science explainer, capital S, capital E. So you take it away.

14:26David:Okay. All it is, is raw uranium that you mine from the ground. But the whole point is, it is not much use for a bomb. And that what you then have to do is enrich it, normally in a centrifuge, although there are other ways like electromagnetic isotope separation, which you can use to enrich it.

14:44Gordon:That is where you separate isotopes electromagnetically.

14:49David:Yes. Correct. You have learned something.

14:50Gordon:I'm auditioning for Vsauce's chair, as we've discussed, or Hannah Fries, one of the two.

14:57David:So this is the raw stuff you get from the ground, which you need to do a lot of work on to make it usable in a weapon.

15:04Gordon:The point is that once you have a whole bunch of yellow cake, you are a very long ways from having a nuclear weapon.

15:10David:You are a long way from a bomb. Yeah, and that is important. So the first idea that the Iraqis might have been looking for some in Niger seems to come into the CIA in an eight-page report that arrives from Italian liaison. Someone gives it to the CIA Rome Station, and it comes in October 2001, more than comes in February 2002. And it is true, Niger is a big miner of raw uranium. It's got a French consortium there, which mines large amounts. The documents that are passed talk about a sale of 500 tons. Now, this immediately should have set up alarm bells, because that's a lot. That is one-sixth of the annual production of Niger, which is not very covert.

15:55Gordon:No wonder it was so frightening. It must be for a bomb.

15:59David:So they look into it and already it starts to fall apart very quickly, these documents, because it came from a shadowy Italian intelligence consultant who claims to have contacts at the Niger embassy in Rome. But it's clear that these documents are a forgery. So they're based on stationery stolen from the embassy in Rome and it's pretty shoddy. I mean, like one letter, supposedly from the year 2000, has the signature of a foreign minister who'd left office in Niger in 1989. I mean, that's amateur hour. I mean, I could do better than that if I was forging intelligence documents, I think.

16:40Gordon:Well, I think you should try, you know? It could be a new career for you. Have you ever come across fakes like that? Have you ever seen?

16:49David:I have, as a journalist, if you have.

16:51Gordon:By the time it got to the analysts, you would hope that they had been weeded out. But this intelligence consultant is peddling information, made up information for cash, essentially.

17:03David:Which happens, doesn't it? I mean, it happens all the time. You know that the CIA is after stuff on Iraq WMD. So you create some stuff and you give it to them. I mean, I was once given a load of documents claiming Iran was trying to get some uranium from Africa. And it was like, it's the same thing. It wasn't quite, but it was like a bundle of documents. Like it was like, and I met this guy in a hotel bar in London. He said, I've got this from a kind of contact in Africa. I think it was the Congo. And it was like a pack of documents, right? And it was like loads of stuff, like sales, invoices.

17:39David:And he was like, this all shows there's a secret deal to sell stuff to Iran. This is like years after the Iran war. Luckily, I had a contact who I knew really well at the IAEA. And I sent it to him. I said, like, does this stuff check out? And he was like, nope, forgery. And what it was, was this person not trying to get cash from me, because believe it or not, I don't have lots of cash to give for fake documents. But they were trying to implicate one bit of the Congolese government, I think, in selling this stuff in order to discredit them on behalf of another politician. It was like 20 pages and it had passport pictures of people.

18:07David:So this stuff does go around. But at this point, it gets dismissed, the idea that this material is true. But there is a defense intelligence agency, a DIA report, which comes out about it. And I think this is the problem because then Dick Cheney, the vice president and his team, are aware of this report and are suddenly like going to the CIA. Can you check this out? What else can you find?

18:33Gordon:We talked about this last time, these sessions that the agency analysts would have with members of the office of the vice president and Cheney's office, where they would come over with these binders of information and it would have intelligence reports in it like this. And in some cases, it would be information that the CIA analysts hadn't even seen or they'd have to go back and forth about what it was. And in this case, I held my tongue, Gordon. This was a DIA report. This is a -

18:57David:Yeah, you're friends at the DIA.

18:59Gordon:The kind of intelligence report that I would look askance at. And I wouldn't be the only one. The State Department's intelligence agency, INR, which got a lot of things right, that also pains me to say throughout this whole period, is dismissive of this. But the CIA, this is a huge policy issue, of course. And so the CIA's counterproliferation division decides to carry out an investigation to get to the bottom of this. This is a bizarre story within the story here, isn't it, Gordon? Because they use a retired American ambassador named Joe Wilson, who popped up in an earlier episode in the series.

19:41David:He did. So he was the guy, the number two in Baghdad in 1991, who met Saddam. and he's now left government service. I knew Joe, sadly, also now no longer with us. But he kind of gets asked. And the reason he gets asked to look into this is for two reasons. One is by the early 2000s, he's now married to a CIA officer and not just any CIA officer, and this will be important, but what's called a NOC. Maybe you should explain what that is. A woman called Valerie Plain.

20:13Gordon:NOC is what NOC stands for, an officer under non-official cover. So you think about most case officers traditionally have been under diplomatic cover. They work out of an embassy. They could be a consular officer. They could be a political officer, econ officer. An officer under non-official cover would be under, for example, commercial cover, working as a businesswoman, a businessman in a particular part of the world for a company, but in actuality working as a CIA officer. Yeah.

20:44David:So Joe Wilson's wife, Valerie, is working under deep cover and I think on weapons proliferation. And so she hears about this and she says, well, you know, my husband could go and check out this claim of about uranium from Niger because he'd actually been a diplomat early in his career in Niger, which is a kind of, you know, just a bizarre coincidence. So he knows people there. so he goes out to dj he goes out for eight days late february early march 2002 kind of a good year before the state of the union nearly you know he sees the caramel caravans moving across the bridges his plane lands at this small airport he goes to see senior people in government and he talks to people who run the mine where the uranium is alleged to come from and there's nothing there's no documentation there's no evidence of a deal it's not even possible he thinks.

21:29David:So he comes back. Within hours of coming back, a CIA reports officer comes around his house and over Chinese takeout. Joe Wilson tells this officer he found nothing to support any idea of the deal. And he thinks, well, that's it. It's over. And it's interesting because what feels a little odd is, so the CIA now know they've checked it out. There's no evidence of it. Cheney's team doesn't seem to be directly told about this trip, though. And that feels a little bit odd. And I don't know whether people don't want to tell him the bad news, or maybe they just didn't think it was worth it because it didn't back up the claim.

22:07David:So at this point, Joe Wilson thinks, well, it's done. No one's going to take this seriously.

22:13Gordon:I wonder how the debriefing with Wilson was disseminated.

22:17David:Yeah.

22:18Gordon:Because that's another piece of this. Did that get written up as a report from, for example, the agency will often interview an American business person who's gone overseas and who might have some interesting information. They come back. It might be in the oil business, for example. They come back and the agency might debrief them. That can get written up and disseminated as an actual raw intelligence report, which then can be used in analysis and could be briefed downtown. I wonder how this was put into the system. That could explain some of But you're right. It may also be a case where no one wanted to risk the ire of Cheney's staff by going back and saying,

22:58David:We looked into it. We found nothing.

22:59Gordon:We think that this report doesn't hold water.

23:03David:Not to step out the chronology too much, but there is this, I think, outrageous story about what happens to Joe Wilson after the war. Because after the war, when the whole case for WMD falls apart, he's going to write an opinion piece for the New York Times saying he went to Africa, checked out this claim about uranium and that it's not true. And then in revenge, someone from inside the Bush administration will leak the fact that his wife was an undercover CIA knock to the press to try and discredit and hurt him. I mean, a really outrageous thing to do. And Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, will eventually be convicted of obstruction of justice, making false statements, two counts of perjury relating to an investigation into that leaking of her name, because that's actually a criminal offence.

23:57David:I mean, that's all further down the line. But at this point, what's clear is that the CIA and George Tenet have doubts about this idea, and they get it taken out of a speech by President Bush in October. But then the thing is, the Brits have put it in the dossier. It's the Brits.

24:15Gordon:The British dossier. What good did a dossier ever do anybody? Anytime you say dossier, it's bad news.

24:22David:I think in this case, it's very bad news. Now, it is interesting, because I've spoken to people who are deep in this intelligence, and they still claim in Britain, right? Or they were claiming for many years afterwards. I'm not sure if they still do now. But for many years, they claimed that separate from the forged documents from Italy, they had other material, including intercepted communications, maybe a human source, suggesting that a deal was discussed, though not necessarily concluded. But, I mean, no one has ever seen bad evidence, and it's kind of not really talked about anymore. But what it does mean is the Brits are claiming it and the Brits are still saying it.

25:07David:And I think this is what's so interesting. This goes to the kind of transatlantic point. Even though the CIA is skeptical, the claim turns up in the State of the Union. And what do they do? They attribute it to the British. George Bush isn't saying, we believe that Saddam sought uranium from Africa. He says, the British say. It's interesting, isn't it?

25:30Gordon:It's also absurd because Iraq has 600 tons of yellow cake and 200 tons of pure uranium dioxide in Iraq. And there's this great quote from Jafar, who's one of the Iraqi nuclear scientists. We talked about him on an earlier episode, where he says, we had tons of yellow cake in Baghdad at the time, so why should we go and buy another tons from Niger? air. It made no sense. It's wild. Yeah, it doesn't make sense.

26:01David:Jafar says there was no need to do it. There was no point in doing it. And of course, as we said at the start with our science lesson, even if it was true, it's not the same as having a bomb. I mean, you still then need enrichment facilities in order to turn it into something useful and weaponization and all these things. And so what you've got is this statement in the State of the Union that the British say Saddam is looking for uranium from Africa, which is technically true because the British are saying it. But it ignores the fact his own intelligence community, the CIA, don't really buy it.

26:39David:And it's not nearly as scary in reality as it sounds when you say it in that way.

26:46Gordon:Well, it is sad to say that this whole case of uranium in Africa is not going to be even the worst case of dodgy liaison material making it into a big speech. After the break, we'll get to the case of the now infamous source known as Curveball. And we'll also talk about one of Gordon Carrera's face-to-face encounters with an intelligence source making the case for war. We'll see you after the break.

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29:55Gordon:Welcome back. It is February of 2003, and President George W. Bush has given his State of the Union address, making the case for war. And up next, it is going to be Secretary of State Colin Powell's turn, because he has the perhaps unenviable job of appearing before the UN to make the same case that Iraq has WMD.

30:21David:And I always love the fact he makes the CIA director, George Tenet, sit behind him as he gives the speech to the Security Council. And it's very deliberate, isn't it? Because he's relying on CIA intelligence. And I think he wants Tenet there to be associated with it, for better or for worse, tying him to what happens. Now, I mean, the speech, we're not going to go through the whole speech. It does things like using intercepts of Iraqi security officers to try and make the case they were hiding things. But let's focus, I think, on one area. We talked about nuclear before, biological weapons. Powell says, one of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq's biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities.

31:09David:So this is the idea that Iraq had mobile labs which could effectively hide their work from inspectors as they drive around the country, as they develop these nasty toxins which are going to kill us all.

31:24Gordon:But where is the intelligence for that coming from? I'm going to guess, just using context clues from this series, that as we scrape beneath the surface of this thick intelligence file, we might be disappointed with what we are going to find.

31:39David:Yes, I'm afraid so. Poor Powell cites four sources, which sounds good. You've got four sources on biological weapons. Now, here is the wild thing, which we slightly teased before the break, is that literally a couple of weeks before he gives the speech, I'd sat in a room in the Middle East with one of those four sources, who was an Iraqi major who defected from Saddam's regime. So just a bit of context. January 2003, I'd been in Amman, Jordan making a documentary about Saddam. And I'd been talking to the INC, which is this exile group run by Ahmed Chalabi. And I'd been asking them, have they got anyone who could talk about Saddam's regime for the documentary?

32:21David:But also, did they have anyone who could talk about the WMD? And everyone knew they had these sources. They were feeding into the US government. Some of their stories were kind of coming out anonymously. I had to push them quite hard to put someone up to talk to me. And they were a bit reluctant, which is interesting. And I think that was partly because they'd been told by the US government not to, you know, put their sources in front of journalists. But eventually, they agree I could meet one. So I ended up sat in a room at the Intercontinental Hotel in Amman, Jordan, with an INC contact and this guy.

32:54David:Very memorable meeting. He was quite gaunt, olive skin, maybe late 30s. The main thing I remember is he just chain smoked continually. You know, we spoke for hours and the ashtray was just overflowing. Those are the days when you could sit in a smoky hotel room. He says he's a defector from the Mughabarat, which is Saddam's intelligence service. They've been a major in it. Now I have to say, a lot of the things he said seemed quite credible. Like he talked about how his work in the Mughabarat and how the regime used fear to keep its grip.

33:28Gordon:Things that he had experience on because he had been in the Mughabarat. He had been an officer of the security services. So he was probably credible on the security services.

33:37David:Yeah. And this is the thing is that I think he had been a major in the McCabber Act. And this is what's interesting. He wasn't like a complete fabricator who was just some guy off the street. He had been. And on that stuff, he was pretty credible. But then when the subject came to WMD, and it's just this interesting thing when you sit in a room with a source, you can just feel the body language change. Because suddenly, you know, his answers became less fluent. The eye contact wasn't there. And he starts telling me about the existence of biological weapons facilities on mobile trailers. And he even claims he'd come up with the idea of using these mobile trailers to kind of hide biological weapons.

34:20David:I mean, I'm the guy. There was just something about it which just didn't feel right.

34:25Gordon:So in the moment, you sensed that he was fabricating that information or exaggerating his role. Or something was off.

34:35David:Yeah, something was off. And it's interesting because I returned to London and we used some of the interview with him in the documentary about Saddam. And I was trying to think, can I do a news story with his claims about mobile labs? But you don't have anything else other than one guy you've sat in a room with who has been supplied to you by an Iraqi exile group and whose body language made me unsure about it. And I'm going to be honest, I was kind of trying to work out what to do with it. You know, I was sitting on it, as you do with stories sometimes. And then February the 5th comes and Colin Powell turns up and he starts talking about biological weapons.

35:16David:And he describes one of his four sources as an Iraqi major who defected and confirmed that Iraq has mobile biological research laboratories. And I have to be honest, David, I felt like a bit of an idiot at that moment, because I was like, if Colin Powell is siding this guy, I can't believe I didn't do a story.

35:35Gordon:Yeah, you're sticking up your nose at this information. And here we are. The CIA has vetted it. Colin Powell's talking about it in front of the UN Security Council. So what stopped you, Gordon?

35:44David:Yeah, I'd miss my scoop. But here's what's wild about him specifically is, and I think this again gets to understanding the problems with the intelligence was both CIA and DIA had debriefed him and eventually issued what's called a fabricator notice, basically saying he'd been coached by the INC, this exile group. I mean, that's a big deal, isn't it?

36:11Gordon:I mean, that should mean his stuff shouldn't be used. It is a big deal. And Michael Morell, who was one of the top analysts at the time at the agency, wrote in his memoir that he considered this whole kind of sequence to be an example of analytic malpractice because what had happened was that even after this major had been labeled a fabricator, the intelligence is never recalled by the Defense Intelligence Agency from their own system, which would prevent it from getting to policymakers and prevent it from being used in the speech. So you had this report that everybody knew was false or at least so full of holes that it should be recalled, and it wasn't.

36:55Gordon:And related to that, you also have this issue of exiles like Abid Chalabi, like the Iraqi National Congress and exile group. They know there's a demand signal for information on WMD, and they want Saddam gone. They want military action against Saddam, and they kind of don't care how exactly it comes about. And so they are trying to feed this kind of material to governments, to journalists like you, to push that agenda. So you have, I guess, a marketplace where there's a lot of demand for this material, and a lot of people who are willing to fabricate it or exaggerate their access or exaggerate what they've heard or seen to satisfy that demand.

37:40David:I do still find it extraordinary that even though he's deemed a fabricator, the reports aren't withdrawn from the system. The old reports from the DIA still sit in the system. So I mean, that's one of the sources. But actually, the most famous, and I think the most interesting, is the one known as Curveball. And he is really interesting because both the US and UK will rely on him for their assessment of Iraq's

38:05Gordon:biological weapons program. So I would imagine most listeners have at some point heard the name Curveball, but who actually was Curveball?

38:15David:So he's an Iraqi called Rafid Ahmed Alwan Al-Janabi who arrives in Germany as a refugee, November 1999, requests asylum, ends up in a holding camp. And the word goes around the holding camp that one of the ways of getting out of the holding camp and getting asylum was convincing German intelligence you had something they wanted. And he says, and he tells German officials in a very calm voice, that he has the details about Saddam Hussein manufacturing biological weapons on these grey mobile metal trailers, and that it's been done with German equipment, which obviously spices it up for them, and that he'd been recruited because he was an engineer to work on this program.

39:02David:This is 1999, 2000, so pre-911, pre the kind of big push. But the Germans seem to quite clumsily debrief him. They ask him some leading questions, but they give him asylum. And then they pass it to their allies. So they get in touch with MI6. Interestingly enough, they get in touch with DIA, Defense Intelligence, again, rather than CIA, which I find interesting and surprising. I don't know if that makes sense to you, why the Germans would have a better relationship with them. Maybe it's a kind of individual thing.

39:33Gordon:Probably. Also, my spidey senses are coming off, Gordon, at just how many DIA reports are at the heart of this intelligence failure.

39:40David:Oh, suddenly the CIA didn't do so badly over Iraq.

39:43Gordon:It's all those guys at the DIA. I'll be very clear. The CIA did quite poorly on the WMD judgments. But DIA's fingerprints are all over this, is my only point.

39:55David:And they file, DIA, about 100 reports, 100 reports from him in two years. Now, he gets this codename, curveball. Maybe you should explain what a curveball is, because I had to look it up.

40:08Gordon:A curveball is a baseball pitch that is given topspin and break by the pitcher. There's different types of curveballs you can throw, Gordon. It's not as simple as this, but it basically can spin away, depending on whether the batter is right-handed or left-handed, it can spin away from them, break away from them, or toward them. And that movement is what makes the pitch difficult to hit. So being thrown a curveball would be an American expression for being thrown off or having your expectations changed by circumstances. Interesting choice of code name. Something which deceives. Is there a cricket version of a curveball, dare I ask?

41:00David:So supposedly a Brit said if we had named him, we'd have called him Googly. Is that real? Is that a thing? A Googly is a cricket delivery bowled by a leg spinner that looks like a normal leg break, but turns in the opposite direction towards the leg stump rather than the off stump upon pitching. Did you get that?

41:20Gordon:What an impenetrable game. I can't, I, cricket, it's too much for me. I can't handle it. I actually think that you might be punking me and this might just be gibberish that you've spun out.

41:32David:That is for real. We're going to go to a cricket game. When you're here next time, we're going to go to a cricket game and we're going to look for a googly. We can show you that. But anyway, googly or curveball. He gets curveball rather than googly, which I think tells you that the Americans name him. But what's interesting is this guy, he is an engineer. So the stuff is kind of vaguely technically credible, which isn't the same as saying it's true. And that's the kind of distinction. I think some people in the DIA seem to suggest that all you do is you file a report and you let analysts, someone else, the Mini McCloskeys of this world who are working as analysts, it's their job to decide whether it's true or not.

42:15David:You're just finding the report.

42:16Gordon:I'll say that as false. I will take the opposite side from my DA brethren there. Because one of the major questions you would have about a source like Curveball, which is, where did you get the information from? What is the chain of custody of the information? How do you know this? And if you're just reporting what the person is saying, you're not doing that due diligence. And that due diligence is not really in the U.S. system the role of the analysts. It's the role of the collectors, the collection management officers, the reports officers, the case officers on the operations side. So this is sometimes why we would look askance at DIA human reports, because they hadn't gone through the same level of vetting.

42:59Gordon:Not always, but sometimes.

43:01David:But it's interesting. From 2000, it becomes very influential, the curveball reporting. But the Germans don't give direct access to the Brits or the Americans. they claim he doesn't speak English maybe they're a bit unsure about how good he is we'll come back to that MI6 try and find out more and by 2002 supposedly there's a good book by Bob Drogan about Curveball some MI6 officers are having doubts about it saying they were not convinced he was a wholly reliable source and that elements of his behaviour strike us as typical of individuals we would normally assess as fabricators. I mean, these are warning signs.

43:43David:There's rumours about drinking. There's talk about inconsistencies in his report. But still, on the British side as well, they never reject him, and they continue to use the reports. And they're going to be important for the dossier in Britain. I think it's interesting, because on the American side, there's a clash, isn't there, between different parts of CIA about how much credibility to give to curveball.

44:08Gordon:Yeah, there's a spat between WinPAC, the Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center at the CIA, and others in the agency who thought WinPAC might have been too willing to accept pieces of intelligence and material from DIA, Curbball, or elsewhere to support their judgments on WMD. and I think Tim Weiner in his book The Mission has talked about this, that some of these windpack analysts, it seems, might have been over-invested in Curveball because his intelligence is so critical to the overall judgments on biological weapons in particular.

44:51David:That's right. I mean, without him, suddenly the case for biological weapons looks pretty thin. One CIA officer, I think, challenges a Wimpack analyst who said Curveball's explanation of how the mobile labs worked was correct as they'd been able to corroborate it on the internet. And the other CIA officer says, well, maybe that's where he got it from. You know, you can see how the problem steps up. This is one of the contentious issues, which is, were there warnings to senior CIA officers that Curveball was bad? autumn fall 2002 cia division chief for europe tyler drumheller meets his german liaison officer at a restaurant in washington drumheller the cia officer asks if he can meet curveball face to face or if the cia could and the german says don't ask he hates americans you know you don't want to see him because he's crazy the german says and then he goes on to say this is according to drumheller's account I personally think the guy may be a fabricator.

45:48David:Now, you get into a big he said, she said, because Drumheller will say he passed on these concerns to senior officials at the CIA. George Tenet, CIA director and others are adamant that they were never told about these concerns and that there's no written record of them. So you get into a kind of real he said, she said. But once you get to early February, Colin Powell is in CIA headquarters in Langley, preparing the details of his speech to the UN and sweating over what to put in. And Curveball is still in there, in the mix.

46:22Gordon:Powell coming out to the agency to actually write the speech is really unprecedented, at least it was at the time, because he and his staff spent multiple days basically locked in a conference room with a revolving door of CIA analysts coming through to make sure that the speech was vetted. And that was done for Langley, which is a wild story. I mean, Michael Morell in his memoir said he'd never seen anything like that happen. There were actually some concerns in the building that the agency, which typically will fact check speeches or determine if there's anything classified in them, was maybe veering too close to actually helping a policymaker craft what is in effect a policy speech.

47:03Gordon:But in any case, the first copy of the speech apparently came with a cover that had a picture of a mushroom cloud on it, which is quite on the nose. And one of the guys involved in drafting the speech says, where did this piece of garbage come from? And the answer was Dick Cheney's team. And every wild assertion that you could imagine, many of which that come from these reports from Grubal and others, but also from Abed Chalabi and his exile group, had been worked into the speech. And again, Morel in his book says that the CIA had fed, as the speech is getting ready to be prepared, the CIA had fed papers on WMD, Iraq's connections are like they're up to Al-Qaeda, Iraq's human rights record.

48:01Gordon:They'd fed these papers in to the speech writing process. And essentially, all of that had been set by the wayside. And a lot of the initial inputs to these early drafts were coming from Cheney's office.

48:15David:Yeah. And it's interesting, isn't it? Because then Powell's team are going through it and going like, no, no, no. What about this? And they kind of strike out, I think, 28 items from the speech pieces of intelligence because they're not happy about it. And Mike Murrell, who we're speaking to in a bonus episode, I think recalls this process as being really kind of quite tough because some of the claims are falling apart as Powell does to some extent what you should do, which is rigorously push them. And I think Murrell suggests, it'd be interesting to talk to him about this, that he privately is starting to have doubts as he's kind of going through the case.

48:50David:But certainly publicly, the view is still that the case is good.

48:55Gordon:similar to the way the British assessments fell apart as the public dossier was being compiled. The assessments from the National Intelligence Estimate seemed to fall apart as the speech to the UN is being compiled. Which is kind of worrying, isn't it? Which is very worrisome because the NIE is supposed to be your gold standard product with all of your key judgments in it. And as that is being tested over the course of the speech writing process, it's falling apart. And of course, Powell wants to use some of this new material that's been collected by the Brits. And so Tenet has to get the Brits on the horn to figure out what can be used and how.

49:37David:And it's so interesting. The night before the speech, Tenet is calling Tyler Drumheller, the CIA European division chief, to get Richard Dearlove's home number because they want to discuss, can we use some of this British intelligence? Now, Drumheller will say again at that point he raises curveball and says it's a problem. Tenet says he does not remember this and that no one raised these concerns. And Tenet even says that before they leave for New York to give the speech from Langley, they check with the Germans about using curveball and the Germans say it's fine. So curveball ends up in the speech and being a kind of key part in the speech as Colin Powell stands up and gives this amazing presentation in the Security Council chamber.

50:21David:And I just love this fact. The German intelligence official who'd been worried about it goes, Mein Gott, as he hears Colin Powell give the speech and he's watching it on TV. And he calls up Tyler Drumheller, according to Drumheller, and said, I thought you said it wasn't going to be used. I told you this guy is dodgy, but it's in there.

50:43Gordon:Do we know how it wound up in there? Was it the vice president's office who slid it back in?

50:47David:No, it was never taken out. I just think it was never taken out. And so the fact that there were doubts about it do not seem to have got to the right people. Whether that's a process problem or whether it's people are not telling people at the top because they don't want to hear, this is also where you get cover your back syndrome afterwards. Because of course, that's why you have disputes about, well, were we told or was it minuted? And people say, yeah, I told them. And other people say, no, I never heard it. You get a lot of that. And it's interesting. I mean, on Curveball, his motivation, he will later say, is he'll admit he made it all up.

51:20David:He admits it after the war. He just says, I hated Saddam. I wanted to get rid of him. This was my chance to fabricate something, get rid of a regime I hated. I'm proud of that. He is a classic exile fabricator. I mean, he wasn't, he actually wasn't through the INC. He was doing it himself. But, you know, that's exactly what you're supposed to weed out, aren't you, if you're an intelligence agency?

51:44Gordon:There's a report called the Rob Silverman Report that came out after the war. Their judgment on curveball, I think, is spot on. They read, at bottom, it's a story of Defense Department collectors who abdicated their responsibility to vet a critical source, of CIA analysts who placed undue emphasis on the source's reporting because the tales he told were consistent with what they already believed. Again, it's that sense of -

52:09David:Confirmation bias.

52:10Gordon:It's confirmation bias. And ultimately, of intelligence community leaders who failed to tell policymakers about Curveball's flaws in the weeks before war. So it's a multi-layered disaster with Curveball. And Colin Powell, of course, has deep regrets about that speech. And he is perhaps, although this is debatable, he's perhaps the only person who could have actually stopped the march to war if he had resigned, if Colin Powell had said, the case for this war is really thin and it's based on fabricators and circumstantial information and I won't be part of it. It's an interesting counterfactual what would have happened if he had stood up and said that instead.

52:59David:I interviewed his deputy, Richard Armitage, a couple of years ago. And Armitage told me about a conversation he had with Colin Powell. And Armitage says, I went to Powell one day and I said to him, we're being used. We are like enablers of an alcoholic and we should consider resigning. And he said it really shook Colin Powell. And the next day he talked to Powell about it and he said, it's just not my way. And I think this is the interesting thing about Colin Powell, of course. He was a good soldier. He'd been a military man. He saw himself as doing his duty for the president. And it just wasn't in his nature not to do that for him, not to go, I disagree, I'm going to resign.

53:42David:I think that's why it's a kind of tragedy. I mean, Powell himself always said he knew it would be the first line in his obituary when he died, was the guy who gave the speech to the UN claiming there were WMD when there weren't any. I think you have to feel some sympathy for him as well, because he was let down. He was let down by the system.

53:59Gordon:Well, I think there with that iconic speech to the UN, based off of really some pretty thin and faulty intelligence, let's end this episode. And when we come back, we will have inspectors on the ground in Iraq, Gordon, who, of course, if the intelligence agencies have at this point not been able to really get a handle on Sadab's WMD, maybe inspectors on the ground in the rut up to the war will find that WMD and Sadab will be cornered. So let's end there. And when we come back, we'll see, of course, how that pans out. But you don't need to wait. You don't need to wait. You can get early access to that episode and to all of our series by going and joining our Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com.

54:50Gordon:We also, for this series on WMD, have some really fantastic bonus episodes for club members with real live participants in this story. with Alistair Campbell, with Richard Deerlove, Michael Burrell, that will all be available to members.

55:06David:And David, of course, we've got a live show coming up September the 4th and 5th at the South Bank in London. So do get your tickets for that. And remember, you can get our weekly newsletter if you sign up at therestisclassified.com, as well as details for the club there. But we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.

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