Loading summary
Transcript95 lines
- [00:04]
David McCloskey
For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter and discounted books. Join the declassified club@therealisclassified.com your next chapter
- [00:19]
Carrington College Announcer
in healthcare starts at Carrington College's School of Nursing in Portland. Join us for our open house on Tuesday, January 13th from 4 to 7pm you'll tour our campus, see live demos, meet instructors, and learn about our Associate Degree in Nursing program that prepares you to become a registered nurse. Take the first step toward your nursing career. Save your spot now@carrington.edu events. For information on program outcomes, visit carrington.edu sci.
- [00:49]
Bloomberg Announcer
Some follow the Noise Bloomberg follows the money because behind every headline is a bottom line. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to and when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com.
- [01:23]
David McCloskey
What has happened to Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction? As inspectors hunt for them on the ground, the CIA plots regime change and the confrontation builds well, welcome to the Rest Is classified. I'm David McCloskey.
- [01:38]
Gordon Corera
And I'm Gordon Carrera.
- [01:39]
David McCloskey
And we are in the wake of the first Gulf War, the 1991 war that ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. And Saddam Hussein has made a very fateful decision. I would also argue a very surprising decision that is going to set in motion an incredible misunderstanding between Saddam Hussein and the United States of America. And it is a decision that no one really knows about or understands at the time.
- [02:18]
Gordon Corera
This episode is brought to you by hp.
- [02:21]
David McCloskey
In intelligence work, it's rarely the obvious problem that causes failure. It's the overlooked detail or the flaw. Nobody quite solved the kind of vulnerability intelligence services look for, and running a
- [02:33]
Gordon Corera
business is the same, especially when you're building or growing a team. It's the risks you can't see or don't understand. HP designs technology so devices, collaboration tools and security work together as a single system, helping teams keep everything running smoothly at home, in the office, and out in the field.
- [02:52]
David McCloskey
The protection is built in hardware level security, working quietly in the background, helping reduce risk without creating more work.
- [03:01]
Gordon Corera
With a team of business advisors, HP helps businesses of all sizes find technology that fits their needs and budget.
- [03:09]
David McCloskey
To see how HP helps businesses work securely and productively, visit hp.com classified the rest is classified. Listeners also benefit from 10% off HP business technology with code TRIC10.
- [03:26]
Gordon Corera
So on 3 April 1991, the UN Security Council adopts Resolution 687, which says Iraq will remain under strict economic sanctions until it acknowledges and destroys all of its nuclear, chemical and biological, its WMD programs. And so the idea will be for UN inspectors to go in and confirm they'd be destroyed. And they'll be part of a new body called the UN Special Commission, or unscom. But, and this is Saddam's strange, odd, fateful decision. In June and July, before they arrive, before the inspectors come in, Saddam issues orders to secretly destroy the WMD facilities before the UN could confirm their true purpose. What all communicated through Hussein Karmal, an important character. He's Saddam's cousin. He's married to one of Saddam's daughters. A lot of intermarriage here. And he's vying to be Saddam's successor. And so the orders come through, and in July, a team led by an Iraqi scientist destroy about a thousand chemical bombs, 20 chemical warheads built for missiles. Other teams destroy VX precursor chemicals, mustard gas precursors, some VX agent. It's a really odd, interesting, strange, important move, and it's quite hard to understand, isn't it?
- [04:52]
David McCloskey
To state it plainly, Saddam has decided to do exactly what the US and the UN want him to do, but he has decided to do it secretly and thus get no credit with the US or the UN for what he has done.
- [05:10]
Gordon Corera
Yeah, I mean, that sums it up. So the question is why? I do think the crucial thing is he wants to get the sanctions lifted that have been imposed by the UN and he wants to get them lifted as fast as possible. So he may well have feared that if he'd admitted to everything that he'd done and he knew he'd done more than the west knew, then the west would be shocked and the sanctions might not be lifted. Whereas if you just destroyed everything secretly, they wouldn't find anything and the sanctions would be lifted.
- [05:47]
David McCloskey
There's a missing piece of the logic there, though, isn't there? Yeah, there's a step, a really important step, which is that the US also doesn't think that I'm hiding it.
- [05:58]
Gordon Corera
Yeah, it's a problem. And I mean, it is. It's just hard to grasp. But Saddam clearly, you know, Jafar, dear Jafar, his nuclear scientist, who I spoke to, to me, Saddam decided to terminate the programs that July, hoping the sanctions would be lifted soon. That's the priority. Get the sanctions lifted and then potentially you could rebuild the programs. So he's just taken this odd move, and I think also back to our psychology, our pop psychology of Saddam I think he doesn't want to look weak and like he's giving something up and being forced to give up material. Far better to kind of make out you never had anything in the first place rather than kind of be seen to hand over a load of wmd. Because I think he still views having weapons of mass destruction as important as a deterrent, as the kind of survivors of his regime, doesn't he?
- [06:57]
David McCloskey
He does, we should say. I mean, in 1991 he is just a few years removed from an absolutely devastating war with Iran in which he used mustard gas, used chemical munitions against the Iranians. And so he probably sees the, the possession of those weapons or the, the Iranian belief that he possesses those weapons as an important deterrent against the Iranians. Probably also sees those weapons and the delivery mechanisms, the missiles, as being a deterrent against the Israelis. So he doesn't, he doesn't want to tell the region that he doesn't have this stuff. And I suppose underlying a lot of Saddam's thinking about the Americans and the CIA in particular is the belief that the CIA has penetrated his regime and knows everything. And so I guess from, if you have that as an underlying assumption about the US then his plan makes some sense because he doesn't have to publicly come out and tell all of his regional rivals that he's neutered himself and the Americans. He also doesn't need to overtly tell us because we'll already have collected the information to indicate that he's destroyed it in secret. So in his mind, this plan makes a lot of sense. With those assumptions in place, this plan makes some sense.
- [08:20]
Gordon Corera
The crucial mistake, and this is the crucial mistake of Saddam is, is to destroy the weapon secretly and unilaterally without any UN supervision, without actually even any documentation of what he was doing. What it means is there's no way of proving you've done this in the future. It's done without record keeping, without photography. It's a mistake which actually in the end will doom him because when he says to people, I haven't got any weapons, he can't prove he's not lying. He can't prove that he's got rid of them. And that is going to be the crucial problem for Saddam because of this slightly weird decision in the wake of the first Gulf War.
- [09:07]
David McCloskey
There's also another big problem, which is the nuclear program, because we've been talking about the chem and the bio, the CW and the BW programs, but Hussein Kamal, who remember is Saddam's son in law, had tried to, to race for a kind of quick, simple, single bomb after the invasion of Kuwait to deter the Americans hadn't gotten close. But Hussein Kamal tells Jafar, the top nuclear scientist, the guy who you interviewed in Paris, not to voluntarily confess to anything. Yeah, and so you. You have. The Iraqis can't prove that they've destroyed their, their CW and BW stocks, which they have. And nor are they willing to admit how far away from a nuclear bomb they are.
- [09:55]
Gordon Corera
Yeah. And then the inspectors arrive in 1991, and they're thinking from the UN, thinking, oh, this might take more than a year to sort everything out. Two teams of inspectors. So you've got UNSCOM, which is under Rolf aka, and then the nuclear agency, the IAEA, under Hans Blix, who was there in the 90s. And Henry will return in the early 2000s. Important figure when it comes to nuclear weapons program. And of course, immortalized. What else but Team America? Anyone who's not seen Team America World Police should shame on you for not having seen it. But it is.
- [10:28]
David McCloskey
That's right.
- [10:29]
Gordon Corera
I mean, it is one of the great films about American foreign policy. And it is also puppets, isn't it?
- [10:34]
David McCloskey
It is puppets. It features a very graphic scene of. Of puppet sex, I should say. So if you're a listener, if you're a listener to this podcast and are thinking of, you know, some family friendly entertainment, I would not direct you toward Team America World Police. But Hans Blix, who probably the real Hans Blix probably never thought as an IAEA bureaucrat that he would be featured in, In a major motion picture as a puppet. But he. Of course he is. And he visits Kim Jong Il's palace in order to inspect it for nuclear weapons. And it doesn't. It doesn't go well.
- [11:12]
Gordon Corera
Doesn't go well for Hans Blix. But it's that great bit where he. Which. Which is kind of relevant, which is where he goes, and he says, let me into your palace and show me your weapons. And the North Korean leader goes, or what? Or what? And Hans Blitz goes, or we'll write you a very angry letter.
- [11:27]
David McCloskey
We will be angry with you. And we will write you a letter telling you how angry we are with you.
- [11:33]
Gordon Corera
That is the perception of the, of the UN at the time.
- [11:36]
David McCloskey
But then Kim Seong Gil has him. Has him sucked into his shark tank, where the puppet Hans Blix is consumed by nurse sharks and torn apart by them and torn apart by nurse sharks.
- [11:47]
Gordon Corera
We should say that the real Hans Blix actually jokes about his being featured in the film and finds it quite amusing. But anyway, back to Iraq. Back to Iraq. The inspectors arrive, and Hans Blix's nuclear inspector are actually shocked by what they find because as we discussed last time, Iraq had engaged on this clandestine enrichment program and they've got much further than anyone thought. You know, they've made progress on electromagnetic isotope separation and even on centrifuges, thanks to some engineers, even some work on weaponization. And, you know, they're not close to a bomb. It's still taken them years to get to a bomb. But it's a total shock, a total shock to the CIA and Western intelligence because they'd missed this program and its progress. And so the question is, if you've missed that, what else have you missed?
- [12:40]
David McCloskey
They had missed the nuclear program. There was knowledge of the CW and BW programs, but not, not the nuclear program. And I guess the lesson for the CIA and for analysts and the UK would be that despite all of their advanced technology that had destroyed Saddam's military in no time in Kuwait and all of the intelligence they had, they had failed to spot the secret nuclear program and had dramatically underestimated what the Iraqis would be able to do on their own, in secret. And so there is a, almost a collective resolution in Western intelligence not to repeat that mistake again.
- [13:23]
Gordon Corera
Yeah, that's right. And what they don't know, but Jafar inside the nuclear program does, is that, yes, they may progress, but now Saddam has given orders to destroy it all effectively and to destroy all the equipment. Jafar has actually moved to work on, you know, civilian electricity programs in the 90s. But of course, the US and the UK think, oh no, there's going to be another secret nuclear program going on. So the inspectors start building this picture up as the 90s progress of what Iraq had really been up to. And of course, you get this tension with the Iraqis who thought they were just going to get a clean bill of health. After all, they've destroyed everything. And then the sanctions are going to be lifted. And instead the inspectors keep finding these little fragments of information about things and not much yet on the biological weapons program, but that, and this is important, is then going to be revealed as well, to have made more progress than they thought, because August 1995, you get a really bizarre moment for the regime which shatters, I think, some of the unity around Saddam's regime because Hussein Carmel, who's this important figure, Saddam's son in law, his cousin, potentially his successor, suddenly pitches up in Amman, Jordan, in a fleet of black Mercedes. With him is his wife, who is Saddam's daughter, another of Saddam's daughters and her husband. And they say they've come to defect from Saddam's regime. I mean, it's crazy, isn't it? It's a moment which suggests the regime is fracturing because there's been this internal feud with Saddam's sons, Uday and Koussay. And Uday is like totally crazy. Shooting people at parties. He shoots up Hussein Carmel's house after one argument. And Hussein Carmel fears, I think, that Saddam's sons are beating him in the race for succession.
- [15:17]
David McCloskey
Uday was the. Was the son who I think famously ran or oversaw the Iraqi Olympic Committee and the Iraqi Football association and oversaw personally the torture of underperforming players and athletes. I mean, the regime is a very twisted thing by this point. Yeah, you could see why he would want to get out of there.
- [15:43]
Gordon Corera
So Hussein Carmel flees because he thinks he's losing out, flees to Jordan. Western intelligence pumps him for information. He's Saddam's son in law and he's overseen the WMD programs.
- [15:55]
David McCloskey
This is a terrific defector to have seated in front of you if you're a CIA officer. And St. Kamal reveals that there's even more that Western intelligence didn't know, in particular about advances in the biological weapons program.
- [16:14]
Gordon Corera
Yeah, that's right. So he reveals the secrets of this BW biological weapons program, and in turn Saddam, of course, knows that Hussein Carmel has these secrets and he's going to share them. And so Saddam in turn is. Is worried by this and decides he better come clean about aspects of this program to preempt him and to not look like he's been hiding stuff so much. So the Iraqis send to the inspectors a female scientist called Rehab Taha, who I'm afraid, another Iraqi WMD scientist trained in Britain, proud to say British trained, University of East Anglia in her case. And she, I mean, she inevitably becomes known as Dr. Germ by the British.
- [17:02]
David McCloskey
That's not very clever. It's kind of on the nose, isn't it?
- [17:06]
Gordon Corera
It's on the nose. And I mean, it's interesting because it does make her 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 at anthrax. Another deadly agent, that Iraq had loaded these agents onto bombs and missile warheads on the eve of the 1991 war. 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 Achaius of UNSCOM complains, 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 170 boxes of documents about this secret program, which again, they say. They say Hussein Carmel had ordered all of these weapons destroyed way back. But without keeping the records of the destruction from years back.
- [18:30]
David McCloskey
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.
- [18:40]
Gordon Corera
Is that is our bit of advice for anyone currently running a CW or BW program. That's our. Our little tip.
- [18:48]
David McCloskey
Keep the receipts. That's all we're saying.
- [18:50]
Gordon Corera
Keep the receipts.
- [18:51]
David McCloskey
And then Hussein Kamal decides to take the very logical step of going back to Iraq, redefecting, which always turns out really well for redefectors.
- [19:03]
Gordon Corera
Yeah, I mean, it is bizarre, isn't it? I mean, he. I think he's not very smart, Hussein Kemal. 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.
- [19:20]
David McCloskey
Is that a swipe at Syrian scorn who are just willing to accept anyone.
- [19:24]
Gordon Corera
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 lasts 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.
- [19:54]
David McCloskey
There's some murkiness about how the brothers are killed and the circumstances of these executions, aren't there?
- [20:02]
Gordon Corera
Yeah, it's how far they were. Was it Saddam's orders? Were they kind of shot up? Was it the sons who did it? I think there's a. Yeah, there's a Little bit of murkiness.
- [20:11]
David McCloskey
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 tried to hide them for many, many years. And so Western intelligence has been totally deceived. It's actually, I mean, it's a, it's a pretty significant intelligence failure on the part of most Western intelligence services to have missed this. 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, into the minds of Western analysts about Iraqi WMD programs as a result of the way Saddam handles this.
- [21:20]
Gordon Corera
Yeah, but he's cunning, he's deceitful. Saddam is a master of deception. He's always 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.
- [21:51]
David McCloskey
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.
- [22:04]
Gordon Corera
This episode is brought to you by sky from the writer of Bridge of Spies and the BAFTA winning director of Peaky Blinders. Here comes the new sky original action thriller, Prisoner. Ooh.
- [22:17]
David McCloskey
With that, you know this is gonna be full of twists and turns.
- [22:21]
Gordon Corera
That's right. A prison transport officer and a professional killer are handcuffed together and forced to go on the run. And they must make impossible moral choices in order to survive.
- [22:32]
David McCloskey
Now, in our world, we know that institutions are not always what they seem, don't we?
- [22:37]
Gordon Corera
That's right, David. And in this series, it's built around the things we find most compelling, which
- [22:43]
David McCloskey
are, of course, conspiracy, institutional corruption, and moral ambiguity.
- [22:48]
Gordon Corera
That's us. These are the grey areas where the right call isn't always clear.
- [22:53]
David McCloskey
This is a fast paced edge of your seat story where you never quite know who to trust or what happens next.
- [22:59]
Gordon Corera
That's right. 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 not totally clear if it's for real or how serious it was. I mean, Steve Collins book the Achilles Trap says some wonder wonder if it might have been a Kuwaiti setup. But it adds to this sense that there's a 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?
- [24:23]
David McCloskey
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.
- [25:02]
Gordon Corera
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, you know, 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 COVID action. I don't think it's a very serious commitment, though, at this point. It's more of a kind of minor temptation.
- [25:42]
David McCloskey
No. Although I will say foreshadowing the intelligence failure that is to come in 2003, I think one of the, one of the crucial implications of so much of the operations work done by CIA in the 1990s being focused on the COVID 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.
- [26:12]
Gordon Corera
Or on what wmd. Yeah.
- [26:13]
David McCloskey
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 covert 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.
- [26:37]
Gordon Corera
Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point. So the CIA put in a high flying CIA officer called Bob Baer. 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. He was the kind of guy who liked to be out in the field.
- [27:05]
David McCloskey
Also wrote the book that became or that was adapted as Syriana, the film Staring. 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, 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, a pirate ship. Maybe not so much a CIA team, a CIA component. But as Bear recalls, one officer been caught having. Having sex in the. In. In the infirmary. What, what do they mean by infirmary
- [27:51]
Gordon Corera
here is they're not a CIA infirmary. Is that not.
- [27:54]
David McCloskey
I don't know, I guess the Office of Medical Service. I think. Yeah. Maybe field hospital. When I hear infirmity. Another person who had apparently gotten quite drunk had passed out behind the steering wheel of, of their car in the Langley parking lot. Which, you know, I mean who hasn't been there? Gordon?
- [28:10]
Gordon Corera
Let's, let's CIA in the 90s.
- [28:13]
David McCloskey
The CIA in the 90s.
- [28:15]
Gordon Corera
This is before your time we should say David.
- [28:17]
David McCloskey
That's true. I was not there.
- [28:18]
Gordon Corera
Completely different ship later. But that, but that is the kind of picture Bob paints of the, of the Iraq Operations Group and the KRYPTONYM we love a good kryptonym, don't we do of. Of a plot he's going to come up with. Is DB Achilles solid? One of the problems, 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 one of the important figures in our story of the build up to the war, an exile named Ahmed Chalabi. And Chalabi is a really interesting and important character. And I do think he is. 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 schema, 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 he's a little bit shady, but by the 90s, he's running something called the Iraqi National Congress, the INC, 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.
- [29:40]
David McCloskey
And he's not really a recruited agent or asset like we often discuss in this program. 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, 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, where his chips might land.
- [30:19]
Gordon Corera
Yeah, so he's working with Bair on this plot. He's working with a guy called Wafikar 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, you know, 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 fight, 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, 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 to 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 Baer 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. And so suddenly they're like, what is going on? What is going on? And they are like, they freak out a 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 mown 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. 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. 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.
- [32:37]
David McCloskey
One of the dynamics 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 Trap. Steve Cole wasn't able to find any official contact between the U.S. and Iraqi governments between 19 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.
- [33:46]
Gordon Corera
Yeah. And what it does is give an outsize role to people like Chalabi and these exiles. Yeah. As being the. You know, the people who. 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. 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. Chalaby. 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 look line. 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 is becoming. 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.
- [35:21]
David McCloskey
And I suppose that the existence of. 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. There's not an incentive for anybody to defect from Iraq. And, for example, to say we shut down all of the WMD programs.
- [35:41]
Gordon Corera
Yeah.
- [35:41]
David McCloskey
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. His product, which is regime change, to London and to Washington.
- [36:01]
Gordon Corera
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. 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, if you're going to sound convincing, you need to take a hammer to your testicles. If you, if you're going to try that line, because otherwise someone's going to check.
- [36:43]
David McCloskey
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, 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?
- [37:15]
Gordon Corera
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. 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. 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. And I mean, I've heard stories about UNSCOM being used as cover to hide, you know, comms gear for spying and tracking equipment, all these things. And that the. The U.S. you know, and 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.
- [39:08]
David McCloskey
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, to raise money. Right. So, but this isn't working for him, is it? I mean, by the, 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.
- [39:47]
Gordon Corera
Yeah. 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. So he basically decides, well, I screw you to the inspector. 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.
- [40:42]
David McCloskey
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, you were already not in a great spot from a collection standpoint. And, and now you've been even more blinded by the, the ejection of these inspectors. So from a collection standpoint in this period, it's also getting a bit grim.
- [41:31]
Gordon Corera
The inspectors were the kind of 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?
- [42:05]
David McCloskey
There were probably more sources attached to the COVID action program, I would think, but my guess is that this is referring to sources in Baghdad who were able to report, report on military capabilities, plans and intentions of the regime, that kind of thing. But it is. That is very thin. Yeah, that is, that's. That's not. It was a little bit better on the UK side. And I know we'll come. We'll come back to that angle later, but. But still, Iraq is. It's a bit of a backwater, isn't it?
- [42:35]
Gordon Corera
That's right. I think backwater is the right word. The head of MI6 from 1999 is a guy called Sir Richard Dealer, and we're going to talk a lot more about him and we're going to be hearing from him in the bonus episode for members. So do join up the restisclassified.com if you want to hear that. But he says, you know, the intelligence picture on Iraq was, I would say, neglected. You know, 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. 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 in the past.
- [43:40]
David McCloskey
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, you know, sort of political, cultural, historical context for this country, this, 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, 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 because, like, 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, 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 US superiority would only increase, Japan might view a first strike as the only way to knock America out of the war. And in, in the Iraq WMD case, the assumption was that Saddam failed to cooperate with UN inspectors. He tosses him 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. 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.
- [46:11]
Gordon Corera
Yeah, I think that's exactly right, that the assumptions get hardened. And so as we get to this point in the late 90s, Iraq is still under sanctions. The population, 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 is 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.
- [47:06]
David McCloskey
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 11, 2001, the US is attacked in a way that will change everything in the way the US Conducts foreign and national security policy.
- [47:52]
Gordon Corera
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@the restisclassified.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?
- [48:28]
David McCloskey
DAVID 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, really 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 communication 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 the 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. 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 attherestisclassified.com. look forward to seeing you next time.
- [49:28]
Gordon Corera
See you next time.