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- [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. Why did George W. Bush and Tony Blair decide to go to war with Iraq? And why did the 911 attacks turn the Bush administration's sights toward removing Saddam Hussein? Well, welcome to the Rest Is classified. I'm David McCloskey and I'm Gordon Carrera and we are in our third episode of our six part series exploring this incredibly fascinating and tragic topic of Iraq, WMD and the role that that intelligence played in the case for invading Iraq in 2003. Last time we had looked at this period of the 1990s when Iraq is under this inspections regime and yet it has destroyed all of its chemical weapons and biological weapons, its stockpiles, its programs, it has halted its nuclear program and Saddam Hussein has made the very interesting, shall we say decision to essentially get rid of all of his wmd and yet to keep that secret, not tell the UN inspectors, not tell the Americans so that he can preserve deterrence in the region and make himself appear stronger in the Middle East. And so we have this kind of fateful clash that is coming here with a new US administration in power. The 911 attacks having happened and we're going to be looking at in this episode at the proximate run up to why the US decides to attack Iraq and importantly why the UK follows.
- [02:09]
Gordon Carrera
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David McCloskey
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Gordon Carrera
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David McCloskey
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Gordon Carrera
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David McCloskey
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- [03:17]
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- [03:45]
Gordon Carrera
that's right, we left in 2001. And it is tempting to root that decision to attack Iraq simply in the attacks of 9 11. But actually I do think you need to go back a little bit earlier to the start of that Bush administration because regime change actually had been the official policy of the US back to the 1990s. So you had that covert action finding right after the first Gulf war. But in 1998, there's a very public thing called the Iraq Liberation act, which is pushed by exiles like Ahmed Chalabi we talked about last time passed by
- [04:19]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
Congress to say this is our policy
- [04:21]
Gordon Carrera
and there'd been ill fated covert actions. But when that new Bush administration starts in January 2001, it is already keen to push harder than before for regime change. And I think one of the reasons is the people. And let's go through the cast list because this cast list is fascinating and important. First of all, the man himself, George W. Bush arrives in office, former governor of the great state of Texas. I've got to say that, haven't I?
- [04:51]
David McCloskey
You do. You're contractually obligated to say that. That's right.
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Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
Contractually obligated to say that or you or else you'd object. But I guess the important things about
- [04:59]
Gordon Carrera
him is his father had been president first Gulf War and had been very experienced in foreign policy. The younger George W. Bush less so, elected on a domestic agenda, very close election. Of course, you know, I remember this, the Florida recount.
- [05:13]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
You remember you hanging chad, which sounds like something else, but was hanging chad to a type of ballot paper where
- [05:19]
Gordon Carrera
the, the chad, the dimple hadn't been quite pushed through.
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Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
And the question was, was that a
- [05:24]
Gordon Carrera
legitimate vote or not? And it got down to that in Florida as to whether he would or Al Gore would win the presidency. And it's a kind of one of the great what ifs, if 600 votes difference in Florida, Al Gore's president, you know, do we have Iraq and everything else.
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Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
But anyway, he is certainly a very
- [05:41]
Gordon Carrera
important figure in our story.
- [05:43]
David McCloskey
Next up in this, this roster is the vice president, Dick Cheney, who had been the defense secretary in the first Gulf War. Fair to say, I think he is at this point in Republican circles of foreign policy, heavyweight. He has very strong views, tends to have hawkish views, which would probably be no surprise to any of our listeners. Cheney had been a bigwig in the oil Services firm Halliburton while out of government in the 1990s and during those years had taken kind of absorbed a darker view of the world. The threats America faced, the need to confront them. People who listened to our Black Hawk down series and in particular the bonus episode we actually talked about the film will recall that. I mean, Cheney using events like Mogadishu and the US's retreat from Somalia to paint a picture of a really dark and scary world where US power is necessary, US influence is necessary to kind of stave off these sorts of threats.
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Gordon Carrera
And an ally, I suppose, of Cheney is Donald Rumsfeld, who's the Defense Secretary, had been Defense Secretary before and had once actually been Dick Cheney's boss. He's wily, he's a brilliant bureaucratic operator. He's a former wrestler at Princeton. Now, another one of my weird facts. As well as meeting the man who ironed Saddam's shirts in Cairo, I also once met someone who, who wrestled against Donald Rumsfeld. And it was very interesting because this guy said to me, I went once to a Thanksgiving dinner in New England with this guy and he said to
- [07:19]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
me, Donald Rumsfeld, when you wrestled against
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Gordon Carrera
him, was incredibly aggressive, but he also only had one move.
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Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
And I thought that's like a kind of great, great, great picture of what Rumsfeld was like. Aggressive, but basically one move.
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Gordon Carrera
Once you worked it out, you also
- [07:36]
David McCloskey
had Colin Powell as the Secretary of State. He had been Chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the first Gulf War. And the so called Powell Doctrine had been developed after Vietnam. Fair to say it has now been ditched by 2026 over the Iran war, Operation Epic Fury. The Powell Doctrine was you only go in, only use military force when you have clear objectives and then you use overwhelming force. Colin Powell is popular, but he's, he's less hawkish than Shady or Rumsfeld.
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Gordon Carrera
Yeah, and then you have George Tenet, don't you? A CIA director. Maybe you should talk about him because Tenet is an interesting character because he's a holdover from the Clinton administration, isn't he? He's a bureaucratic officer. He'd risen up as a staffer on the National Security Council to become CIA director and is perhaps surprised when he's held over from Clinton to Bush.
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David McCloskey
It is kind of amazing to think of an era where you would have senior national security officials who could serve both Republican and Democrat administrations. I think maybe similar to a Leon Panetta type character was seen as the sort of person who was able to, who generated a lot of political top cover for the agency was a bureaucratic knife fighter because he was essentially a creature of, you know, sort of Washington committees and the National Security Council and knew how the business ran and was very fond of walking around with an unlit cigar in his mouth or in his. In his pocket. And, you know, he's. He was and is a very highly respected former director of the CIA. But of course, the accusation in this period will be that, you know, he gets too close to the customer. Yeah, you have this tension. We've talked about this in some of the interviews we've done with former CIA directors where you have this tension of you are representing the CIA and the view of the CIA. You're trying to speak truth to power, but at the same time, you're a political appointee who is serving at the pleasure of the president. And there is a tension, I think, between the kind of, you know, objective intelligence that you're supposed to be bringing and the policy that the President might be thinking, favoring or pushing. Those can come in conflict with one another.
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Gordon Carrera
Yeah, I think he had a saying, don't lose the customer, the customer being the President of the United States. And then you've also got national security advisors. Condi Rice, super smart Stanford professor, expert on Russian. And her job is to kind of corral all these really significant big beasts in.
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David McCloskey
It's a rough job in foreign policy,
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Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
but that is a rough job.
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Gordon Carrera
And I think the feeling was she was struggling with that.
- [10:18]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
And then also within the bureaucracy, inside
- [10:21]
Gordon Carrera
the system, but also some outside, you have what are called the neocons, who are, I guess they're hawks who support using military force to reshape the world. They have this view that America has the ability and almost the duty to do things like reshape the Middle east to spread democracy and freedom. Most importantly, I think, is Paul Wolfowitz, who was deputy Secretary of Defense, so deputy to Rumsfeld. And I think one of the things that's interesting if you go through that list, is that lots of them already have reasons to have kind of beef
- [10:50]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
with Saddam Hussein already, don't they?
- [10:52]
Gordon Carrera
Because, you know, Powell, Cheney, Rumsfeld, you know, these are all people who've dealt with Saddam Hussein, dealt with the first Gulf War, and have strong views. And you have George W. Bush, whose dad did the first Gulf War. So you already have, I think, this really interesting collection of people. Summer of 2001, so before 9 11, a guy called Luis Rueda was made head of the Iraq Operations Group at the CIA. So that is the Group tasked with doing, if you like, the regime change bit of things. And he's again, a really interesting character. His father had been part of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Wow. So Cuban exile and the family had then settled in the US after the failure of Bay of Pigs. He was no expert on Iraq when he's given this job in the summer of 2001. So why is he put there? And the answer is he's got experience in running covert action programs in Latin America, so arming and training exiles and running coups.
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Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
And so the aim already then in
- [11:51]
Gordon Carrera
the summer of 2001 is use exiles aisles, use this covert action to basically cause what one person described as mayhem to destabilize the regime in Iraq. That's the plan.
- [12:02]
David McCloskey
And then, of course, with this new administration having been in office not even a year, 911 happens. Seismic event. It's maybe hard for younger listeners to appreciate just how much American society and politics changed in the immediate aftermath of 9 11. It completely reshapes the way that the administration thinks about how it might use military force and where kind of how much risk are you willing to tolerate after 9 11? It goes way down. Right. And so you have a totally reshaped worldview and mindset on the part of the Bush administration officials that we've just talked about, even though immediately after the attack it's clear that it's. It's Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. That is not ambiguous. Within just a few days of 9 11. And yet I. This is. It's striking, isn't it, Gordon, that within days you have very senior people in the Bush administration who raised the idea of attacking Iraq.
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Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
Yeah, it's kind of crazy looking back.
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Gordon Carrera
I mean, September 15th, top national security officials meet at Camp David, the President's retreat, to discuss how to respond to 9 11. And Paul Wolfowitz, this neocon deputy secretary of Defense, says there is at least 10, maybe 50% chance that Iraq was involved in 9 11. I mean, what's that mean?
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Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
10 to 15?
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David McCloskey
It's a wide.
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Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
It's a wide margin.
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Gordon Carrera
Even though everyone knows it's Al Qaeda. Everyone knows it's Al Qaeda. But I think what I attribute it to is a group of people who have long wanted to get rid of Saddam, who see this as the opportunity to do it. Wolfowitz says we've got to make sure we go ahead and get Saddam out at the same time. It's a perfect opportunity. And it's interesting because at that meeting, you know, President Bush gets angry and he. And he Says, how many times do I have to tell you we're not going after Iraq right at this minute. He says that to Wolfowitz. And I think the key phrase in that is at this minute, Bush is not saying he doesn't want to do it. He's just saying, just not yet.
- [14:12]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
You know, we've got to kind of
- [14:13]
Gordon Carrera
deal with the immediate threat first. Even on September 26, he asked Rumsfeld Defense Secretary speak with him alone in the Oval Office. And Rumsfeld will say the President leaned back in the black leather chair behind his desk and asked that I take a look at the shape of our military plans on Iran. I mean, it's fascinating, isn't it, that quickly. I remember picking this up at the time I was in Washington. People were talking about the need to go after Iraq.
- [14:40]
David McCloskey
The Brits are here, Amos, and of course would rather focus on Afghanistan because Bin Laden, Al Qaeda had been in Afghanistan prior to 9 11, offered sanctuary by the Taliban. And so the, the very obvious military target after 911 is to go and eliminate Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and its sanctuary and take the Taliban out. But in October, our top CI officers over in London for memorial service for a former MI6 chief. And it seems like MI6 is really pushing for the Afghanistan focus, not Iraq. Probably some concern on the part of MI6 and the Brits about these little rumbles about going after Iraq. And an MI6 officer tells a CIA counterpart, if you go into Iraq, it's really going to complicate things. Well, it'll turn out to be a major understatement of what happens. And Bush tells Blair that when we've dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq. So there really is this obsessive focus inside the Bush administration with, with Saddam Hussein.
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Gordon Carrera
Yeah. And by November, the Taliban is on the run in Afghanistan and Afghanistan is nearly done. And so immediately Iraq is back at the top of the agenda. You know, that quickly by November, it's like, okay, what next? And the answer is Iraq.
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David McCloskey
But why? I think for. Forgive the, forgive the stupid question, but I.
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Gordon Carrera
It really.
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David McCloskey
This really is important.
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Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
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David McCloskey
Why Iraq?
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Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
I think it's worth running through some
- [16:12]
Gordon Carrera
of the different theories. And I think the truth is there are lots of reasons for different people which all coincide. So I think one which we've touched on is this sense of unfinished business that some of the key players were involved in Gulf War One. They regret not finishing the job in Gulf War One and leaving Saddam Hussein in place, and they want to finish it. And I think for President George W. Bush. There is also a slight psychodrama. I think people are perhaps right in thinking this, that, you know, it's hard
- [16:46]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
to speak for someone's own mind, but.
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David McCloskey
But do it anyway, Gordon. Do it anyway.
- [16:49]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
Let's do it anyway. The son finishing the job his father didn't do.
- [16:53]
Gordon Carrera
It's to some extent I'm going to complete what my father didn't do, which is get rid of this bad man. So it's showing I'm my own man and I can even do something he didn't do.
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David McCloskey
There's also mixed in with this but distinct the neocon worldview.
- [17:07]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
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David McCloskey
And the idea here is let's transform the Middle east, starting with Iraq. Iraq are the. They're the big boys on the block. The Iraqis are antagonistic toward our friends in the region. So let's take Saddam out and use it as an almost domino effect to spread more open societies, democracy and freedom and protect our friends in the Middle East.
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Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
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David McCloskey
That's kind of the Wolfowitz view of the world and Iraq, which is a
- [17:38]
Gordon Carrera
kind of weird mix of idealistic. The idea you really can spread democracy and everyone will welcome you, you know, and you can create democracy and freedom, which at the time people believed. And it's harder to understand that now. But that was a view along with a very hawkish view, which is you
- [17:58]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
do this at the barrel of a gun.
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Gordon Carrera
You do it through force. So I think that's definitely another view. Then you get another one, which I think is maybe one which Cheney and Rumsfeld are less, if you like neocons, but they are more people who want to restore American deterrence post 9 11. I think there is this sense which America has been hit really badly on 911 and they just want to hit back to some extent. It sounds weird, but I think Afghanistan wasn't big enough to do, to show that America was back and capable of taking on its enemies. It was almost too small. Whereas I think taking down Iraq, that is a message which is don't mess with us because we're going to go after our enemies.
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David McCloskey
There's also this other idea which Iraq was linked to Al Qaeda.
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Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
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David McCloskey
Which didn't turn out so well in retrospect that we should say is total nonsense. But there was a lot of pressure on the CIA to find a link. And I think. I think this gets back to. And maybe this is a bit of a mix of a number of these different theories. It seems like there was a reflection inside the administration that we had been hit by this terrorist group. And terrorism was a scourge. Terrorism was a going to be a constant threat and risk we're going to keep getting hit by terrorist groups. All of this is emanating in the Middle East. We have to rework the Middle east so that we don't get hit by these groups. And the way to rework the Middle east is to take the biggest, baddest guy down and put something new in his place. And it's great if you're trying to justify a conflict with Saddam. It would be ideal if there actually were direct links between Saddam and the people who had just attacked America on 9 11.
- [19:42]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah. In fact, most of the hijackers, the majority are Saudi citizens, but of course Saudi is US ally, so no one wants to point to that. So they are looking for some way of linking Iraq to the attack. And there was this claim that maybe the leader of the hijackers, Muhammad Atta, had met an Iraqi official in Prague. But there's nothing to it. The Brits push back on this. I mean, Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 at the time, who we're going to be talking to, as on a bonus episode, you know, is reported to have called it bollocks, which is a British phrase for thank you.
- [20:13]
David McCloskey
I didn't know it sounded like gibberish to me or not.
- [20:16]
Gordon Carrera
True.
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Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
I mean, my favorite story is that
- [20:19]
Gordon Carrera
a Greek woman turns up claiming to have been Saddam's lover and that in the 80s she said she'd seen a tall bearded man at one of the palaces and when she'd asked Saddam's son, the son had said, that's Osama bin Laden.
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Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
And it turns out she was being pushed around by Ahmed Chalabi's exile group. The inc. Classic example of trying to, you know, find someone who can support a theory. But we can dismiss the Al Qaeda link pretty quickly.
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Gordon Carrera
But the WMD issue is going to be the one, isn't it? Because I think that's what's so interesting. You haven't got a direct link to 911 as in to Al Qaeda and the attacks. And so what you get is this idea that it's the fear of weapons of mass destruction getting into the hands of terrorists like Al Qaeda. That is one way of justifying going after Iraq because it's presumed to be developing these weapons of mass destruction and is a nasty regime. So it's a way of linking, isn't it, 911 terrorists and Iraq through this nexus of WMD.
- [21:31]
David McCloskey
And there's an appetite among many in the administration in particular Someone like Cheney for dealing with really high impact risks that also might be low probability. Yeah, there's a willingness and a desire to use military force to in their view eliminate these risks. Because even if they're not likely to happen, even if it's not likely that Saddam would peddle WMD to terrorist groups, if there's a 1% chance of doing it, well then you gotta, you gotta go solve the problem. That's, that's the post 9 11.
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Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
That's the new mindset. Yeah, exactly.
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Gordon Carrera
That's the new mindset. And you do get things like you get anthrax appearing in, in the US after 9 11. It doesn't turn out to be Iraq even though people for a few days
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Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
think well maybe it's the Iraqis, maybe
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Gordon Carrera
they posted this anthrax to senators and media folk.
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Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
But it's part of that kind of
- [22:23]
Gordon Carrera
wild fear post 911 about what could happen. And as Kabul falls in Afghanistan, this intelligence that Bin Laden might have met with former members of Pakistan's nuclear program, you've got intelligence about A. Q. Khan coming in selling nuclear technology to other states. So it's part of this mix of fears about WND at the time. The issue is not that Saddam is more of a threat in a sense, but the tolerance as you put it. You know, that tolerance for any risk has changed in Washington.
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David McCloskey
You're right. And Saddam's weapons programs were in reality no more of a threat after 911 than they had been before.
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Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
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David McCloskey
And in fact, spoiler alert, Saddam had not reconstituted these programs. But the world has entirely changed and really importantly, Saddam doesn't appreciate this in the least. We should say.
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Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
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David McCloskey
Now Mike Morell, President Bush's PDB President's Daily Brief Briefer on 911 and was with Bush on 911 by the time we get into 2002, 2003 has become one of the top three analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence at CIA. Morella is quoted by Steve Cole in his book the Achilles Trap as saying, quote, the President's thinking on Iraq was motivated by the soul crushing impact of 911 and the legitimate fear that as bad as 911 had been, things could be much worse. If Saddam got it into his head to either use his weapons of mass destruction as a terrorist tool against the west or provide those weapons to an international terrorist group. These dire scenarios were unlikely, US Intelligence analysts believed, yet Bush concluded that they were risks he could not ignore.
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Gordon Carrera
There is a logical fallacy to this, which is why would Saddam, even if he had the WMD Give them to Al Qaeda. And in reality, Saddam, like lots of Arab leaders, hated Al Qaeda.
- [24:23]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
He fears the Islamists. They're not his friends, are they? I mean they are actually enemies because
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Gordon Carrera
Al Qaeda, Bin Laden hates these regimes which are secular, which are Arab nationalist. You know, he wants a different type
- [24:38]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
of regime, doesn't he? So there is a bit of this
- [24:41]
Gordon Carrera
which just doesn't make, actually make sense.
- [24:44]
David McCloskey
It's hard to put yourself back in the mindset of the American government in the immediate period after 9 11. It was really a paranoid panicked time and it was very, very difficult to separate real threats from stuff that was just totally, totally blown up. But what about Saddam? What is Saddam doing during this period?
- [25:08]
Gordon Carrera
He doesn't seem to be that worried. And it goes back to something we've talked about before which he doesn't really understand America. He doesn't know that much about it.
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David McCloskey
I suppose he didn't have anything to do with 9 11. So he probably thinks so what? They know that and I'm good, I didn't do it.
- [25:25]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
Yeah, the all powerful CIA knows I didn't do it. So what's the problem?
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Gordon Carrera
He doesn't get, I think the fact that 911 has changed America. His main focus, David, and you'll appreciate this, his main focus is changing career to some extent to being a novelist.
- [25:40]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
Something you and Saddam have in common, which is that's you know, a desire to tell your tell stories.
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David McCloskey
And by the way, we should say for people who don't aren't familiar with Saddam Hussein. Gordon is not joking. Saddam Hussein has become a novelist in this period and it is, you're right, I didn't appreciate until we started digging into the series how similar my life experience is to Saddam Hussein because we both left government service to become novelists. So he and I share that bond.
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Gordon Carrera
He doesn't leave government service.
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David McCloskey
I mean that's, I exaggerated it, you exaggerate.
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Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
But he actually, people do say he
- [26:21]
Gordon Carrera
was devoting more of his time like he was stepping away from running the country day to day because he wants to write his novelist. I mean we talked a lot about poets because we've had a lot of poets, haven't we? Like bin Laden was a poet, but for Saddam it was novels. And his romance novel, which I'm sure has been a big influence on you. Zabiba and the King had just been published in 2000, all about a common girl who falls for a lonely king in medieval Tikrit.
- [26:48]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
I think it's supposed to be some kind of allegory.
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Gordon Carrera
For Iraq, isn't it? I kind of think. I'm not quite sure it is.
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David McCloskey
It's set in ancient Babylon.
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Gordon Carrera
Okay.
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David McCloskey
It is about a married king who falls in love with a young, beautiful and wise woman named Zabiba. I would describe it as a polemical allegory in which Zabiba is a rock and the king is Saddam. I would. It is also not a very well hidden or subtle allegory. This is. It's very clear that the king of Saddam and Zabiba is the nation of Iraq. And through this story. It is ostensibly a love story. But I would describe the romance in this novel as being rather dull. It's certainly no 50 shades of gray. And throughout this story, the king learns how to be a better ruler. And so there are a lot of lessons that Zabiba imparts on the king about how to run the country in a wise fashion. Zabiba has a brutal husband who is quite obviously a stand in for the United States of America in the story. And Zabiba and the King is published anonymously, but everybody in Iraq knows exactly who the writer was. I think the CIA believed that it was ghostwritten, but it's not.
- [28:08]
Gordon Carrera
He really wrote it.
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David McCloskey
He meticulously wrote it by hand. And then he would deliver a few pages at a time to his press secretary for copy editing. A task that if I were the press secretary, I would have been. I would have done with extreme trepidation.
- [28:24]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
Yeah, I think so. It sells a million copies, which, you know, I mean, it maybe helps if you're president, but I think that's like. That's McCloskey level sales. That was pretty good. And being turned into a play around this time of 9, 11 and 20 part TV series.
- [28:37]
David McCloskey
20 part TV series.
- [28:41]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
So that's Saddam. So he's like only kind of half
- [28:44]
Gordon Carrera
paying attention to this stuff.
- [28:46]
David McCloskey
My view of Saddam Hussein at the time.
- [28:49]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [28:49]
David McCloskey
Was that you had this madman military dictator who was totally in control of the country and spending all of his time basically cooking WMD and, you know, plotting vicious, you know, vicious political intrigue. Just to emphasize the reality of Saddam Hussein's life at the same time as 9 11, is that he is spending most of his days writing novels. He's obviously still very paranoid, clearly deeply afraid of assassination plots. And he is still in control of Iraq. He is spending most of his time writing novels. Yeah. In the running world.
- [29:28]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
It's crazy.
- [29:29]
David McCloskey
It's nuts.
- [29:30]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah. It is not. But I guess the question is you've got all these different motives, but how Are you going to justify it? Because it's no good saying to the public, oh, we just, you know, unfinished business, you know, all these things you need.
- [29:43]
David McCloskey
It's not 2026. You can't go to country with.
- [29:45]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
Yeah, imagine there was a time, there
- [29:49]
David McCloskey
was a time when you needed a reason. Unbelievable.
- [29:51]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
And you needed one reason and to stick to it, rather than like five different reasons which you put out every day. And so the answer, I guess, is
- [29:58]
Gordon Carrera
that they settle on is weapons of mass destruction. I think this is also really interesting because just after the war, Paul Wolfowitz does an interview with Vanity Fair and he says for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, weapons of mass destruction. I just think it's such an interesting insight. If we're going to pick one to make the case for to the public about why to get rid of Saddam, we're going to pick weapons of mass destruction.
- [30:30]
David McCloskey
I suppose that makes sense, given the different personalities we talked about, the different reasons to potentially take down Saddam. You'd have people who wanted to do it purely based off of ideology, around the use of military force and the promotion of democracy and freedom. And then you have other people who maybe do think that Saddam's connected to 9, 11, and you have others who see Saddam is kind of a stain because he was left in power after the 91 war. So you have a bunch of different competing reasons for it. But they could probably all agree that Saddam still has weapons of mass destruction and therefore represents a significant threat to, you know, the US and to our partners in the region. And there you go, lowest common denominator.
- [31:14]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah. And also, if you're making it to the public, I think you can link it to terrorism. You can link it to this idea, WMD might get into the hands of the terrorists and threaten another, worse 9, 11, which is a kind of powerful argument. Even though, as we said, it's kind of. There's a fallacy to it, you've got the advantage that you think you've got evidence for it. Think. Come back to that, obviously. And also, and I think this is important, it's what your allies want, particularly the uk, because for them, focusing on weapons of mass destruction has a real advantage because you can say this is all about enforcing UN resolutions to say he must disarm.
- [31:57]
David McCloskey
Well, I think that's a good spot to take a break. And we come back, we'll see how the UK and Prime Minister Tony Blair in particular become not just partners in the war, but play an outsized role in the intelligence justification for the conflict.
- [32:18]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
This episode is brought to you by
- [32:20]
Gordon Carrera
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.
- [32:30]
David McCloskey
Oh, with that you know this is going to be full of twists and turns.
- [32:35]
Gordon Carrera
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.
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David McCloskey
Now in our world we know that institutions are not always what they seem, don't we?
- [32:51]
Gordon Carrera
That's right, David. And in this series it's built around the things we find most compelling, which
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David McCloskey
are of course, conspiracy, institutional corruption and moral ambiguity.
- [33:02]
Gordon Carrera
That's us. These are the gray areas where the right call isn't always clear.
- [33:07]
David McCloskey
This is a fast paced edge of your seat story where you never quite know who to trust or what happens next.
- [33:13]
Gordon Carrera
That's right. So it's the next great thing to binge. And you can watch all episodes now on Sky.
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Gordon Carrera
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- [34:21]
David McCloskey
Well, welcome back. Gordon Carrera has succeeded in taking us down a UK detour in this otherwise apple pie Americana story about a failed war in Iraq.
- [34:34]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
Well I'm afraid in this story the
- [34:37]
Gordon Carrera
two countries are bound tightly together. Unlike in the current epic fury of Iran.
- [34:43]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
This were different times and I think that's what's so interesting about this story as well is Tony Blair and British
- [34:49]
Gordon Carrera
intelligence play such an important role in this conflict and in the justification for the conflict and this question of wmd.
- [34:57]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
So let's do Tony Blair has been
- [34:59]
Gordon Carrera
first elected in 1997 re elected June 2001 so just before 911 and he's arguably at the peak of his powers abroad. It's the era of liberal interventionism. Blair has been quite successful in this and notably he pushed Bill Clinton to intervene in the Balkans over Kosovo, and that ends up being a successful intervention. And Blair, I think Fields, he guided the Americans and this is his model. So you've got this new president, George W. Bush, who's less experienced, and he was also desperate to do something after 9 11. So you can see for Tony Blair, post 9 11, this is his moment on the world stage. He enjoyed being, in his words, a big player. And he tells his foreign secretary, Jack Straw, my job is to steer them, the US in a sensible path. I think it's a really interesting phrase, isn't it? He sees his role as guiding this new administration.
- [35:54]
David McCloskey
Are they overselling UK influence here? I mean, we talked about this in the last episode where Maggie Thatcher is bucking up H.W. bush and enforcing.
- [36:03]
Gordon Carrera
It's a good question.
- [36:04]
David McCloskey
I mean, the first Gulf War.
- [36:06]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, yeah.
- [36:07]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
And I think this period is one
- [36:10]
Gordon Carrera
of the peaks of British influence. Now, I still agree with you. It's still maybe oversold at certain points, but I think Blair really does have some influence in Washington at this point. We talked about the cast list in Washington of, you know, Powell, Cheney, Rumsfeld.
- [36:25]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
You could almost put Blair in the
- [36:27]
Gordon Carrera
mix there as one of those players in Washington who has influence in his own way.
- [36:32]
David McCloskey
Yeah.
- [36:33]
Gordon Carrera
It's also, I mean, Blair does have some of the same nightmares as those in Washington about terrorists and weapons of mass destruction joining with catastrophic consequences. And he also, his critics say he becomes more messianic over time. But he does have these big ideas that there is a big struggle in the world between different forces and there's a need to modernize the Middle East. And he is coming from a liberal interventionist world. But in an interesting way, it does overlap, you can see, with the neocon WorldView. By late 2001, it is becoming clear to him, everyone in London, that the US is talking about Iraq. Now, another big character in our story here is the chief of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, who worth setting him up briefly. He's a veteran operational officer, so he's not like a kind of secure crat or a staffer. He's been a spy, also a deep Atlanticist. He'd done some schooling in the us he'd been head of station in Washington. Special relationship is important to him. Like Blair, 1999, he's head of the Secret Service, so he's C chief of MI6, which is also important because I think maybe like the CIA, they hadn't had the easiest decade in the 90s. There's a bit of insecurity, isn't there, in the spy world in that post Cold war period.
- [37:49]
David McCloskey
The CIA in the 90s lost just about 25% of its workforce. They just stopped hiring. And so a bunch of people had tritted out and then roughly a similar amount of budget. So you had security services that I think were casting around for a new raison d' etre after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
- [38:12]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah. I mean the famous joke, wasn't it, that when a plane crashed into the, like a small plane near the White House, the joke was that it was the CIA director James Woolsey trying to get a meeting with President Clinton because
- [38:24]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
it was so he couldn't, you know, it was the only way he could try and get to see him. And I think there was a bit where like I think that is part
- [38:29]
Gordon Carrera
of our story, that the intelligence agencies in the 90s had struggled to make themselves appear relevant to their customers, the Prime Minister and the President. And now suddenly after 9, 11, they're important.
- [38:43]
David McCloskey
And Blair and Bush are, are close, aren't they? And speak.
- [38:48]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [38:48]
David McCloskey
Regularly in this period. There's a phone call between the two on December 3rd of 2001 in which Blair says that he's open to regime change in Iraq, but that it would require, quote, an extremely clever plan. That sounds about right. He will have to be clever to
- [39:07]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
get rid of Saddam, the novelist, to justify it.
- [39:09]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [39:10]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
And Blair is saying if we're going
- [39:12]
Gordon Carrera
to do it, we need to build support domestic, domestically and internationally. And interesting on that call, he says to Bush, Richard DearLove, head of MI6 is coming over. Two days later, dear Love is in the White House for talks with Bush's top team. And Dearlove is kind of acting, Even though he's MI6 chief, as almost a kind of back channel envoy from the Prime Minister to Washington communicating, but also I think reporting back to London, here's what's really going on in Washington. Here's what the White House are thinking. And Dearlove said to me years later, he said, I was probably the first to say to the Prime Minister, whether you like it or not, get your ducks in a row because it looks like as though they're building up to an invasion. Keep close if you want any influence. You can see the direction of travel. And it's interesting because d' Love cultivates his relationship with CIA officers, including George Tenet.
- [40:04]
David McCloskey
It's an interesting case study in how the intelligence relationship becomes a conduit to influence policy on both sides of the Atlantic. And I think it's not something that either intelligence agency would say out loud or directly, but I think both countries see that relationship because it's so intimate and there's so much shared trust between the two sides that it's actually a really effective way if you get the personalities right and there's connection between, you know, the chief or, I mean, it goes way down to pretty, you know, mid levels of the organizations where you can have really close relationships. If you get that right. It's a way to influence how the other side thinks about the world and the kind of the choices that they make.
- [40:48]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, and there was a. I think there was a joke in Washington, which
- [40:51]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
is Tenet was Dear Love's best recruitment. One CIA officer said, so the UK
- [40:56]
Gordon Carrera
is trying to work out what's going on. At one point, they think a big meeting in the summer is canceled because the Americans are so busy and the
- [41:02]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
Brits are like, no, no, we really
- [41:04]
Gordon Carrera
want to come out. So they agree that a kind of quick meeting takes place, you know, in Washington over the weekend. Dear Love travels over in July, Dear Love approaches Tenet and asked to speak offline. And they talk for close to two hours. The two intelligence chief. Now, this is according to Tenet's memoir, George Tenet's memoir. Dear Love comes away with a clear perception that the US Administration was determined to transform the Middle east, starting with Iraq. Yeah. Tenet says that Dlove spoke to Cheney's team and believe that the crowd around the Vice President was playing fast and loose with the evidence. So that's Tenet's recollection of what Dear Love is. Dearlove comes back straight from that meeting to Downing street because there's a big meeting of Britain's top national security team July 23rd. Very interesting because it's a very secret meeting, but we know about it because what's called the Downing street memo is later leaked, which is a draft memoir of this meeting. So we have this really fascinating moment where you can see what's going on in London. And the meeting starts with the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee laying out the state of Saddam's regime. Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. Also a character in our story. John Scarlet, former MI6 officer, later to be MI6 chief. Scarlet. This meeting says Saddam's regime is tough based on fear. Doesn't mention he's mainly writing novels.
- [42:30]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
Says the only way of overthrowing it
- [42:32]
Gordon Carrera
would be through massive military action. Dear Love stands up next and reports back on his trip in Washington. Now, in the draft minutes of the meeting, he's quoted as saying that there had been a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. Very interesting statement, which I should say d' Alov will later dispute that that's what he meant and he will have those minutes corrected. But that's what goes in the draft minutes.
- [43:12]
David McCloskey
And in any case, I don't think it's accurate, as we'll see later. In any case, the Brits, I think it's fair to say Gordon, dislike the idea of a massive war being fought by the Americans without being involved at this point in time. Yeah.
- [43:29]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
Again, contrast to today.
- [43:31]
David McCloskey
Contrast to today. And the. The chief of the defense staff tells Blair later that there's. There would be a real problem with this army if they were not properly involved in. In the American war.
- [43:43]
Gordon Carrera
Then the military did not like the idea that the US could do a big land invasion and us not being alongside them. It's kind of like that is what we are there for and that's what we do. We plug in alongside them. So it's interesting. The military, and this is often overlooked, were really keen on not having the Americans do this alone. The most kind of cautious voice was the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, who says the case was thin against Saddam. He says Saddam's WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. It's really interesting, isn't it? I mean, he's right, you know, he's right, he's right.
- [44:22]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
But the problem is that those are
- [44:23]
Gordon Carrera
not the countries that the US have decided to go for first.
- [44:26]
David McCloskey
Which is so fascinating because in 2000, this is 2002. So I mean, essentially concurrently with this, this is the first glimmers that the world has gotten of the enrichment facility at Natanz in Iran.
- [44:41]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [44:41]
David McCloskey
And obviously the us no friend of Iran at this time. So it does beg this interesting question of why not focus. Why not focus on Iran? Because where you actually have very recent hard evidence of.
- [44:55]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
Of a secret centrifuge plant has just been secret centrifuge plan which you don't have with Iraq.
- [45:00]
Gordon Carrera
But this exactly goes, I think, to the key point which is the reasons were not fundamentally wmd because the reasons were they want to get rid of
- [45:10]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
Saddam for all the other reasons grudges, history.
- [45:14]
Gordon Carrera
They think it's maybe A bit easier than Iran. And so they picked Iraq as the place and then they've decided on WMD as the justification for it. And it is interesting because even in this meeting you sense in Downing street the UK needs that legal rationale of why to be involved in regime change. And the advantage with Iraq is you can use non compliance with the UN resolutions from the 1990s and as a rationale for war. And this is why the Brits are also quite keen on pushing the argument, let's make this about regime change. Regime change in itself is not a legal or a political justification for the war which works for the uk. Whereas saying that Iraq is in defiance of UN resolutions is something you can build a case around legally, internationally and domestically. While there are voices in the UK and some in the US who say we can make a moral case for getting rid of Saddam, we should focus on the moral case which is he's a murderous tyrant who's used chemical weapons against his own people in Halabjah. That doesn't get you over the line in terms of making a case again for the uk, WMD is the most useful justification. Let's assume we're taking part, but you know, there's a lot more work that needs to be done and let's focus on this as the reason. It's interesting the Cabinet Secretary at the time is surprised at how forward leaning Blair and says there's a gleam in his eye which worries me.
- [46:46]
David McCloskey
And five days after the Downing street meeting, presumably with that mad gleam still in his eye, Tony Blair sends a personal note to Bush. Never designed to be public and in fact the UK government will fight for years to stop it being made public. But it gives I think a really full sense of his thinking and his strategy and actually shows Blair shows the notes to some of his closest advisors who tell him the language is too open ended and he should change it. But I guess like all good writers, when someone tells you to edit something down, you just ignore it. You know, like Saddam would have done with his copy editor who dared touch his novels. And so Blair doesn't change any of the language and, and he, he pens this note. The opening line is quite, quite famous now.
- [47:33]
Gordon Carrera
It says from Tony Blair, I will be with you, whatever. I mean, it's so interesting. That is the opening line of this note. Now Blair, we should say, is quite defensive about this note. Now I've interviewed Tony Blair and I've asked him specifically about that language and talked to him about it and he is quite defensive about it. He says People are over interpreting it. You have to see it in the context of this being a personal note about the personal relationship. And he says, look at the rest of the note. Because the rest of the note, and he's right about this is all the things that need to be done. You know, it goes, here are all the difficulties. We need planning. This isn't going to be as easy as Kosovo, it's not going to be as easy as Afghanistan. You know, it's the right thing to do, but we need to do this, we need to do that. Here are all the, Basically, he's saying, I'll be with you, whatever. But here are all the potential problems in regime change, including post war planning that we need to think about if we're going to do it.
- [48:28]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
And so Blair is kind of making
- [48:31]
Gordon Carrera
the case that we need a coalition, we need to go through the United nations, we need deadlines, we need inspectors. But he is fundamentally saying, I'll be with you, whatever.
- [48:43]
David McCloskey
Well, he's not linking UK support for the war to Bush, taking seriously or taking steps on any of the other things he's listing out. He's saying, we will be with you. Here's some things you need to think about. Not we will be with you if you do these things.
- [49:01]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [49:01]
David McCloskey
Was there a world where the UK wouldn't have gone with the US into Iraq at this time? Like, is that an actual counterfactual or. It is.
- [49:12]
Gordon Carrera
And there are historical parallels. For instance, when Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the 60s decides not to go into Vietnam with the Americans despite massive pressure. And today Keir Starmer, despite pressure, did not, you know, even let UK bases be used for offensive operations in Iran. But I guess you're back here to this post 911 era.
- [49:36]
David McCloskey
Yeah, it's 2002. It's a very different time and America has been hit.
- [49:41]
Gordon Carrera
Blair is at the peak of his powers and thinks he's got influence and his strategy is, you know, I can influence the us, they're going to do this anyway. I can influence them onto a better path. He is making the case that we need to go through an international process. And it's interesting in this note he also says we need to make the case. If we recapitulate all the WMD evidence, add his attempts to secure nuclear capability and as seems possible, add on an Al Qaeda link, I think it will be hugely persuasive over here. Plus of course, the abhorrent nature of the regime. It's relevant because there's actually a big debate going on in Washington over the summer about how to go about regime change.
- [50:20]
David McCloskey
Yeah, this is the summer of 2002, and there are a lot of different voices in the administration who have different views on Iraq and why it should be done and even how it should be done. I mean, you have hawks like Cheney who absolutely do not want to go down the UN Route. They don't see a need for it. The US can just act unilaterally. And let's get on with the war. Secretary of State Colin Powell wants to go down the UN routed. He and the UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, are meeting and working together to try and persuade their leadership to go through the un. So we have this jockeying over how the case for war is made that's continuing throughout the summer of 2002.
- [51:01]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah. And Blair is going out to meet Bush in Camp David in early September for a final decision about how the plan is going to unfold. And it's interesting. Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's director of communications at the time, keeps a diary. September 1, 2002, he writes, obviously the best thing to do would be to avoid war, get the UN inspectors in and the weapons out. But it was obvious that the US had to be managed into a better position. So it's interesting, you get a sense there that they're trying to manage the US So it's that thing about Blair. It's about influence. So Blair goes out to see President Bush at Camp David early September. Lots of people think Blair is already committed to war earlier in the year. But I think this is the real moment because President Bush looks Tony Blair in the eye. They have a talk. Bush says, we have to deal with Saddam. Bush recalls he was probing and pushing Blair, making clear this would. This process may well end up in war. And Blair says, I'm with you, looking him in the eye. And it's. But Bush then sees Alastair Campbell, who, as I said, we have on a bonus episode afterwards, and President Bush says to Alastair Campbell, your man has got cojones. Have I said that right?
- [52:23]
David McCloskey
You've largely pronounced it correctly. That's right.
- [52:26]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
We should say what those are.
- [52:28]
David McCloskey
Balls in Spanish or in Texan. In Texas, rancher. In Texan, rancher. It also translates as as balls. And Bush will call it the cojones meeting afterward. And Bush has also agreed, though, to go to the UN and in so doing, has. Has helped make it easier for Tony Blair to back him.
- [52:52]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
Yeah. So this is effectively what they've agreed. Blair has said, I'm with you.
- [52:56]
Gordon Carrera
And Bush has agreed on, okay, I
- [52:58]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
will go through the UN to get
- [53:00]
Gordon Carrera
new inspections on Iraq and to get a new resolution putting pressure on Saddam. And that's the agreement they've come to, which for Tony Blair, for those around him, this is an example of UK Influence because Cheney did not want this. You know, the vice president was, was just like, we don't need to get bogged down in inspections in the UN we just need to get on with this war. War and show American power. And if the Brits are with us, fine. And if they're not, you know, whatever. But Blair, along with Colin Powell as a kind of ally, I think has succeeded in this policy of going through the United nations, getting inspections. But also part of the plan is to make the public case now for regime change. And there's this fascinating comment from Andrew Card, who was the White House chief of staff. And in September, he does a New York Times interview and he talks about how that month, so September 2002, just after this meeting between Bush and Blair, they're going to start making the case to the public and also Congress, remember when Congress mattered. And he says, from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.
- [54:18]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
In other words, they decided you don't start the case in August.
- [54:23]
Gordon Carrera
In September, we come back from a marketing point of view, that's when you introduce your new product.
- [54:29]
David McCloskey
And the product, of course, here is a war. The marketing strategy is going to be to use the justification of wmd. And the means by which that marketing strategy is going to be sold is the intelligence picture. And that is going to be a place where things go very badly wrong.
- [54:50]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
That's right. So let's stop there and we'll start
- [54:54]
Gordon Carrera
looking really in detail about how crazily the intelligence goes wrong and some of those specific claims about 45 minutes. About nuclear weapons, about exiles in the next episodes. And a reminder, of course, you can hear those straight away.
- [55:09]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
If you're a.
- [55:09]
Gordon Carrera
A declassified club member, join@therealstisclassified.com and people will get access to these really interesting interviews for club members with people who
- [55:20]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
were in the room.
- [55:22]
Gordon Carrera
So we're going to be asking Alistair Campbell about his cojones or about Tony Blair's cojones, I guess.
- [55:29]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
I don't know is that. I don't know whether he's going to answer, but we could ask him as well as to Richard, dear love, whatever we want.
- [55:37]
David McCloskey
It's our show.
- [55:38]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
I don't think we can ask whatever we want. Are you going to ask Richard Dlove and Mike Morell of the to the CIA about their cohoes?
- [55:45]
Gordon Carrera
I think not.
- [55:46]
Additional Male Speaker (possibly a guest or co-host)
But, but they've got a lot to say because they were in the room as well where it happened. So. So do sign up to hear those interviews.
- [55:52]
Gordon Carrera
That's right.
- [55:52]
David McCloskey
And also a reminder, we have live shows coming up on the 4th and 5th of September in London. Do get your tickets for that also at the restis classified.com and we will see you next time.
- [56:03]
Gordon Carrera
See you next time.