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

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Rest Is Classified

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

Hosts: David McCloskey & Gordon Corera
Date: May 17, 2026

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Overview

In this meticulously detailed episode, David McCloskey and Gordon Corera dive deep into the intelligence failures that shaped the public case for the 2003 Iraq War. Focusing on the weeks and months leading up to the invasion, they examine how US and UK intelligence services relied on flawed reports and questionable sources—most notoriously a source codenamed "Curveball." The episode critically explores bureaucratic failures, confirmation bias, and the transatlantic flow of unsound intelligence. Through insider anecdotes and expert analysis, McCloskey and Corera piece together how the orchestration of speeches, reports, and dossiers misled leaders and the public, shaping a tragic global event.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Transatlantic Intelligence Failures

Timestamps: [04:05], [05:55]

• US Reliance on UK Sources:

  • The US, particularly post-9/11, had very few human intelligence sources on Iraq, leading to heavy reliance on British intelligence.
  • As Gordon puts it:
    “One US intelligence officer at the time said he could count the number of sources they had on one hand and still pick his nose on Iraq.” ([04:16], Gordon Corera)
  • A culture existed within British intelligence of wanting to impress the Americans, with notable pride when UK material made it into the President’s Daily Brief.

    "There is this desire to do it and it's going to make a difference in this case." ([04:55], Gordon Corera)

• Passing Bad Information Back and Forth:

  • Both MI6 and the CIA contributed to a cycle of reinforcing weak intelligence, with each side eager to offer material in the lead-up to war.

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2. The State of the Union & Weaponization of Intelligence

Timestamps: [06:44], [09:35], [12:24]

• Preparation for Bush’s 2003 State of the Union:

  • The CIA’s technical (WINPAC) and political branches operated in silos, contributing to analysis blind spots and context loss.
  • Intelligence vetting focused more on safeguarding sources and methods than on fundamental factual accuracy.

    “They're vetting it to make sure it doesn't give away anything sensitive rather than necessarily to absolutely check whether it's correct.” ([08:52], Gordon Corera)

  • Tension as some claimed analysts simply searched for intelligence to fit the President’s desired narrative.

    “If the President wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so.” ([08:52], as quoted by Gordon Corera)

• Flawed Evidence for the Nuclear Program:

  • The narrative hinged on two points:
    1. Iraq's import of high-strength aluminum tubes—erroneously thought to be for nuclear centrifuges.
       • Based on assumptions about Iraqi procurement, not hard intelligence.
       • "It was relying on an assumption that the Iraqis wouldn't procure military equipment in the same way that we procure military equipment. That's not right." ([10:22], David McCloskey)
    2. Alleged attempts to buy uranium from Africa, a claim we’ll return to below.

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3. The Yellowcake Uranium Forgery

Timestamps: [11:32], [13:03], [14:39], [16:09]

• Origin of the Claim:

  • Based on forged documents from an Italian “intelligence consultant.”
  • Fundamental errors, such as a letter signed by an official who’d left office over a decade prior, exposed the forgeries.

    “That's amateur hour. I mean, I could do better than that if I was forging intelligence documents, I think.” ([16:09], Gordon Corera)

• Joe Wilson’s Niger Mission:

  • Retired diplomat sent by the CIA (at his wife, Valerie Plame’s suggestion) to investigate the uranium claim.
  • Wilson found nothing substantiating the reporting.
    • “He found nothing to support any idea of the deal. And he thinks, well, that's it, it's over.” ([21:23], Gordon Corera)

• Suppression & Fallout:

  • Despite Wilson's debunking, the claim ended up in the State of the Union—attributed to British sources to sidestep CIA doubts.

    “George Bush isn't saying we believe that Saddam sought uranium from Africa. He says the British say, it's interesting, isn't it?” ([24:59], Gordon Corera)

  • Wilson’s wife was later outed as a CIA officer in a retaliatory leak by Bush administration officials.

• Confirmation Bias and Policy Demand:

  • Exiles and fabricators understood the demand for such intelligence, fueling a cycle where eager policymakers consumed dubious material.

    “There's a marketplace where there's a lot of demand for this material and a lot of people who are willing to fabricate it or exaggerate their access or exaggerate what they've heard or seen to satisfy that demand.” ([37:05], David McCloskey)

• Memorable Quote:

  • When challenged on why Saddam would need more uranium:

    “We had tons of yellow cake in Baghdad at the time, so why should we go and buy another tons from Niger? It made no sense.” ([24:59], David McCloskey, quoting Iraqi scientist Jafar)

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4. Colin Powell’s UN Speech and the Bioweapons Debacle

Timestamps: [30:22], [31:25], [33:36]

• Powell’s Ordeal:

  • Powell, relying on CIA intelligence, made the case at the UN for mobile bioweapons labs—sources for which were deeply compromised.
  • Gordon vividly recounts meeting one of these sources—an Iraqi defector supplied by exile groups—in a smoky hotel room, describing the unease he felt as body language shifted when talking about WMDs.

    “You can just feel the body language change, because suddenly his answers became less fluent. The eye contact wasn't there. … I was kind of trying to work out what to do with it.” ([33:36], Gordon Corera)

• Analytic Malpractice:

  • Despite being labeled a fabricator and coached by exile groups, DIA failed to withdraw these reports from circulation.

    “Even after this major had been labelled a fabricator, the intelligence is never recalled... So you had this report that everybody knew was false, or at least so full of holes that it should be recalled, and it wasn't.” ([36:14], David McCloskey)

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5. "Curveball" and Fabricated Mobile Labs

Timestamps: [38:07], [39:33], [42:18]

• Who Was Curveball?

  • Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, an Iraqi asylum-seeker in Germany who claimed inside knowledge of mobile bioweapons labs.
  • Germans clumsily debriefed him, passed reports on to US and UK.

    “He says… he has the details about Saddam Hussein manufacturing biological weapons on these grey mobile metal trailers, and that it's been done with German equipment, which obviously spices it up for them.” ([38:15], Gordon Corera)

  • His “technical” details were just credible enough to be dangerous.

• Warnings Ignored:

  • MI6 and even German handlers had serious doubts ("not convinced he was a wholly reliable source" and “typical of individuals ... fabricators”).
  • Internal debates within CIA over the reliability of Curveball reports, with some in WINPAC considered over-invested simply because his stories fit expectations.

• Quote:

  "One CIA officer, I think, challenges a WIMPAC analyst who said Curveball's explanation ... was correct as they'd been able to corroborate it on the Internet. And the other CIA officer says, well, maybe that's where he got it from." ([44:51], Gordon Corera)

• Process Failures:

  • Despite multiple flagged concerns, Curveball’s claims made it into both UK and US key assessments and Powell's speech.
  • Afterward, Curveball admitted fabricating his story to oust Saddam.

    “He admits it. After the war, he just says, I hated Saddam. I wanted to get rid of him. This was my chance to fabricate something, get rid of a regime I hated. I'm proud of that.” ([50:47], Gordon Corera)

• Post-War Reckoning:

  • The Robb-Silberman Report called it—a case where:

    “Defense Department collectors ... abdicated their responsibility to vet... CIA analysts ... placed undue emphasis ... because the tales he told were consistent with what they already believed.... Confirmation bias and ultimately ... intelligence community leaders who failed to tell policymakers.” ([51:44], David McCloskey)

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6. Could the March to War Have Been Stopped?

Timestamps: [52:59]

• Colin Powell’s Regrets & Legacy:
  • Powell regretted his role and felt “let down by the system.”
  • His deputy, Richard Armitage, even suggested resigning in protest, to which Powell responded that it was “not my way.”

    “He was a good soldier. He'd been a military man. He saw himself as doing his duty for the president. And it just wasn't in his nature not to do that” ([52:59], Gordon Corera)

  • The episode ponders the counterfactual: if Powell had refused to endorse the intelligence, could war have been averted?

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• US Source Limitations:

  “I could count the number of sources they had on one hand and still pick his nose on Iraq.” ([04:16], Gordon Corera)

• Yellowcake Forgeries:

  “A letter supposedly from the year 2000 has the signature of a foreign minister who'd left office in Niger in 1989. I mean, that's amateur hour.” ([16:09], Gordon Corera)

• Curveball & Code Names:

  “A curveball is a baseball pitch ... Being thrown a curveball would be an American expression for being, you know, thrown off or having your expectations changed by circumstances.” ([40:08], David McCloskey) “Supposedly a Brit said if we had named him, we'd have called him Googly.” ([41:00], Gordon Corera)

• Confirmation Bias:

  “It’s confirmation bias and ultimately of intelligence community leaders who failed to tell policymakers about curveball's flaws in the weeks before war.” ([51:44], David McCloskey)

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Timeline of Key Events

• [04:05] US reliance on British intelligence sources
• [09:35] Aluminum tubes and uranium claims surface in NIE, State of the Union
• [13:03 - 21:23] The "yellowcake" forged documents; Joe Wilson’s Niger mission and debrief
• [30:22] Powell’s UN speech, use of unreliable sources
• [33:36] Gordon’s personal interview with an Iraqi defector; doubts about veracity
• [38:07 - 50:47] Rise and consequences of Curveball’s fabrications
• [51:44] Robb-Silberman Report dissects multi-layered failures
• [52:59] Could Powell have stopped the war?

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Thematic Takeaways

• Systemic Failures: A blend of bureaucratic compartmentalization, policy bias, and poor source vetting led to the acceptance and sharing of faulty intelligence.
• Confirmation Bias: Intelligence outcomes were shaped less by data than by what analysts and policymakers wanted, or expected, to find.
• Personal Responsibility: The episode leaves open the haunting question—if key individuals had broken ranks, could the outcome have been changed?

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What’s Next?

The hosts tease the next episode, focusing on the role of weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq in the final march toward war.

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For those fascinated by the shadowy inner workings of intelligence, this episode is a masterclass in how confirmation bias, source management, and geopolitical pressure can intersect—with catastrophic consequences.

Transcript

[A]

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@the restisclassified.com. Why were MI6 and the CIA so quick to believe an unreliable source? And could anyone back in 2003 have stopped the march toward war? Well, welcome to the Rest Is classified. I'm David McCloskey.

[B]

And I'm Gordon Carrera.

[A]

And Gordon, we are on the fifth episode of this journey into the story around IraqWMD. Last time we we spoke a lot about how both governments in Washington and London set about making the public case for war, and in particular how the UK government put out this dossier to as sort of a compendium of its best possible information on Iraq's WMD programs. How internally there was a tremendous amount of consternation at the working levels of British intelligence around the quality of that information. But how when that dossier came out, Prime Minister Blair's judgments about WMD were very clear is beyond doubt that Saddam had wmd. And we left off last time with the US starting a very similar process to make the public case for war on the basis of intelligence. And last time we talked a lot about the source that was alleging that there could be a launch of WMD for Iraq within 45. And we're going to go deeper into some other dodgy sources in this episode.

[B]

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[B]

I think one of the interesting bits about this story is how much shock, horror, the US was actually reliant on British sources.

[A]

It's not right.

[B]

Well, it didn't turn out to be right. That's the issue. I mean one US intelligence officer at the time said he could count the number of sources they had on one hand and still pick his nose on Iraq. Which basically means four sources I think. Unless he.

[A]

It's a two figured nose picker.

[B]

Exactly. It could be, but they said they've not got many sources when they start, you know, this kind of post nine, 11 drive to war. And these aren't within the WMD program. Although of course that's partly because there isn't really a WMD program. The CIA Iraq Operations Group is focused on building up those sources to prepare for war. So they're going to end up relying on other people's sources on liaison. And it's interesting because, I don't know, maybe you can, you can sympathize with this, but the Brits love giving sources to the US because it's the smaller service. You want to make yourself look useful. You want to kind of keep the flow of the big US intelligence machine coming. So there's always been, I think in British intelligence a desire to kind of show off to the Americans and give stuff to them that they use. I mean, I've heard, you know, that Brits would be specifically told if their stuff, for instance, made it into the President's daily brief. And this would be considered like, you know, well done. We got something into the PDB today. So there is this desire to do it and it's going to make a difference in this case. I mean, one of my favorite quotes from George Tenet, CIA Director, is he says to someone, how come all the good reporting I get is from SIS, meaning MI6? I mean it's like you could imagine him saying this to his team and they're like damn Brits, they've got all the good stuff.

[A]

And in this case, it's a very tragic piece of the story is that both services essentially pass bad information back and forth to one another in this, in this period. But the British reporting is going to be important in the run up to one of the big speeches that is going to make the case for the war, which is the annual State of the Union address which is delivered in the states In January, on 2003, it's January 28th and President Bush famously is going to stand up and he's going to make the case for why he is planning to go to war with Iraq specifically. And to make that case, as we discussed, he's going to need the best possible intelligence in order to convince the American people that this is a logical next step.

[B]

Yeah, and the nuclear program was always the way they wanted to sell it and as the best step. And so they're going back and forth over the draft of this speech and looking for evidence to support it. Now the day before the speech, you know, George Tenetcio, Director, gets handed a copy of it. He gives the draft to one of his assistants and doesn't give it any more thought. It's interesting, it goes through to this group called winpac, the Weapons Intelligence Non Proliferation Arms Control center, which is I think one bit of the CIA which was looking at proliferation and to do these judgments. And that is going to be part of our story because that's where some of the tensions come over the accuracy of this information. Because they are the ones who are supposedly the kind of experts on this, aren't they?

[A]

Yeah, the, the bureaucratic bifurcation inside the CIA over the different types of Iraq judgments is a, it's not an excuse for what happened, but it's probably one of what, of the reasons is that a lot of the, I would say political, cultural assessments, stuff on post Saddam Iraq on Saddam's relationship with terrorist groups or lack thereof, were done by either terrorism analysts inside the Counterterrorism center. They have something called the Office of Terrorism Analysis or done inside the kind of the regional shop. But the WMD analysis, it was led by the National Intelligence Council. But in the bureaucracy of the Agency, the people that are going to write the stuff that feed those assessments are in this group called WinPac. And so you have this split between the technical and the political cultural that I think does contribute to the. It's not the only reason, certainly it's probably not even the most important, but it is a contributor to why you have information that comes out of the Agency that's sort of, I think on the WMD side maybe lacking context and is being looked at purely by the technical people.

[B]

Yeah. And Tim Weiner's book, the Mission, we had him on a bonus recently, but in his book he talks about how senior analysts in the run up to the State of Union are told by their boss, if the President wants to go to war, our job is to find the intention intelligence to allow him to do so. When they're vetting things like the State of the Union, they're vetting it to make sure it doesn't give away anything sensitive rather than necessarily to absolutely check whether it's correct.

[A]

We should ask Michael Burrell about this. We talk to him for the bonus because I think he's going to disagree with, with that and, and say, and say that the, the speeches were vetted not, not just, not just for sources and methods, but also to make sure that there were not factual inaccuracies about the intelligence.

[B]

Because in this State of the Union speech, when it comes to the nuclear program, there's only really two bits of evidence they can cite for this idea that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear program. One is that it's been importing high strength aluminium, or aluminum, as I think some people in America call them.

[A]

Well, it doesn't have an I at the end. That's why we don't mispronounce it tomato, tomato. Because you say aluminium doesn't make any sense. That's okay.

[B]

Um, but the idea is that these could be used for centrifuges to enrich uranium. And that will be one of the claims that they're suitable for nuclear weapons production. The truth is actually, as we'll later discover, that it's wrong because they're actually for rockets. But there is another bit of intelligence there which is also very important just

[A]

to land a point on the aluminum tubes. So I think this is a, this is a fascinating little insight into the complexities of intelligence analysis and, and how biases can lead to dramatically wrong conclusions in the analysis. Because the CIA, when they looked at those tubes, said, yeah, they, they could work for a rocket launcher. Saddam had, you know, MRls, multiple rocket launchers, and yet the tubes were so machined and expensive that there was an assumption that the Iraqis wouldn't buy those kind of tubes for their rocket launchers, because why would you. You don't need. You don't need something so, so expensive and so machined. And yet that's exactly what the Iraqis had done. But the judgment that they were almost certainly for the nuclear program, it wasn't relying on a piece of intelligence to say that these tubes were actually for a nuclear program. It was relying on an assumption that the Iraqis wouldn't procure military equipment in the same way that we procure military equipment. That's not right.

[B]

Yeah, that was one of the two bits of evidence, and it's the other one that I think it's really worth focusing on, because the other bit of evidence for a nuclear program is the claim that Iraq had sought to buy uranium. Now, it's phrased in the State of the Union in a very interesting way. The way it's phrased is the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. That's what the President says. And this is going to become, I think, to some extent, the equivalent of the British 45 minutes claim, the kind of lightning rod for all the arguments about how did this piece of intelligence get into a speech by the President. Because here's the thing, the CIA actually has doubts about this. British reporting, analysts thought it was weak, and yet it is going to be in the President's speech. It's amazing, isn't it?

[A]

It is amazing. And in Michael Morell's memoir, he. He says that the analysts didn't believe it. And laying out the chronology is important here because this NIE came out, the National Intelligence Assessment came out of the fall. It is now January, and the State of the Union is being proposed, prepared. And in the interim, what has happened is that report on Saddam seeking uranium from Africa was in the nie. The CIA analysts didn't believe it. And it will also end up in a State of the Union speech.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So those three things are kind of like, this should have been done better.

[B]

How does that happen?

[A]

How does that happen?

[B]

And I think it's such an interesting case because I think it's worth just drilling down on it for a few minutes because the claim is based on intelligence that an Iraqi diplomat had visited Africa in 1999 on a diplomatic tour and had tried to negotiate the purchase of raw uranium from Niger during that trip. This is yellowcake should we do a trip nuclear lesson on yellowcake?

[A]

Well, let me try. So basically what you do is you take a bunch of yellow cake and you pack it into a missile and then you close the top, you close the top of the missile and then you have a nuclear bomb. How did I do? Is that right?

[B]

David? David? Have I taught you nothing? Have I taught you nothing about how to build a nuclear bomb?

[A]

So many podcasts, so many podcasts, as we have discussed, you are. The rest is classified science explainer, capital S, capital E. So you take it away.

[B]

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

[A]

That is where you separate isotopes electromagnetically. Yes, correct.

[B]

You have learned something.

[A]

I'm auditioning to become. I'm auditioning for Vsauce's chair, as we've discussed, or Hannah Fries, one of the two.

[B]

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

[A]

The point is that once you have a whole bunch of yellowcake, you are a very long ways from having a nuclear weapon.

[B]

You are a long way from a bomb. Yeah. And that is important. So the first idea that the Iraqis might have been looking for some in Niger seems to come into the CIA in, in an eight page report that arrives from Italian liaison. Someone gives it to the CIA Rome station and it comes in October 2001 more than comes in February 2002. And it is true, Niger is a big, you know, miner of raw uranium. It's got a, it's got a French consortium there which mines large amounts. The documents that are passed talk about a sale of 500 tons. Now this immediately should have set off alarm bells because. Because that's a lot. That is 1/6 of the annual production of Niger, which is not very covert.

[A]

No wonder it was so frightening.

[B]

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

[A]

Well, I think you should try, you know, could be a new. A new career for you.

[B]

Have you ever come across fakes like that? Have you ever seen. I have. As a journalist.

[A]

If you have, I mean, by the time it got to the analysts, you would hope that they had been weeded out. But this intelligence consultant is peddling information, made up information for cash, essentially, which happens, doesn't it?

[B]

I mean, it happens all the time. You know that the CIA is after stuff on Iraq wmd. So you create some stuff and you give it to them. I mean, I was once given a load of documents claiming Iran was trying to get some uranium from Africa. And it was like, it's the same thing. It was the same thing. It wasn't quite. But it was like a bundle of documents. Like, it was like. And I met this guy in a hotel bar in London. He said, I've got this from a kind of contact in Africa. I think it was the Congo. And it was like a pack of documents, right? And it was like loads of stuff, like sales invoices. And he was like, this all shows there's a secret deal to sell stuff to Iran. This is like years after the Iraq war. Luckily, I had a contact who I knew really well at the iaea, and I sent it to him. I said, like, does this stuff check out? And he was like, nope, forgery. And what it was was this person not trying to get cash from me, because I believe it or not, I don't have lots of cash to give for fake documents. But they were trying to implicate, like, one bit of the Congolese government, I think, in selling this stuff in order to discredit them on behalf of another politician. It was like 20 pages. And it was like, had, you know, passport pictures of people. So this stuff does go around, but at this point, it gets dismissed. The idea that this material is true. But there is a Defense Intelligence Agency, a DIA report, which comes out about it. And I think this is the problem, because then Dick Cheney, the Vice President, his team are aware of this report and are suddenly, like, going to the CIA. Can you. Yeah, can you check this out? You know, what else can you find?

[A]

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

[B]

This is a. Yeah, your friends at the dia.

[A]

The kind of intelligence report that I would look, I would look askance at.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I wouldn't be the only one. The State Department's intelligence agency, inr, which got a lot of things right that also pains me to say throughout this whole, whole period is dismissive of this. But, but the CIA, this is a huge policy issue, of course. And so the CIA's Counter Proliferation Division decides to carry out an investigation to get to the bottom of this. This is a bizarre story within the story. Here is an important. Because they use a retired American ambassador named Joe Wilson who popped up in an earlier episode in the series.

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah, so. So Joe Wilson's wife Valerie is working under deep cover and I think on weapons proliferation. And so she hears about this and she says, well, you know, my husband could go and check out this claim of. About uranium from Niger because he'd actually been a diplomat early in his career in Niger, which is a kind of, you know, just a bizarre coincidence. So he knows people there. So he goes out to Niger. He goes out for eight days, late February, early March 2002, kind of a good year before the State of the Union nearly, you know, he sees the caramel caravans moving across the bridges as plane lands at this small airport. He goes to see senior people in government. And he talks to people who run the mine where the uranium is alleged to come from. And there's nothing, there's no documentation, there's no evidence of a deal. It's not even possible, he thinks. So he comes back. Within hours of coming back, a CIA reports officer comes around his house and over Chinese takeout, Joe Wilson tells this officer he found nothing to support any idea of the deal. And he thinks, well, that's it, it's over. And it's interesting because what feels a little odd is so the CIA now know they've checked it out, there's no evidence of it. Cheney's team doesn't seem to be directly told about this trip though. And that feels a little bit odd. And I don't know whether they, you know, people don't want to tell him the bad news or maybe they just didn't think it was worth it because it didn't, it didn't back up the claim. So at this point, you know, Joe Wilson thinks, well, it's, it's done. No one's going to take this seriously.

[A]

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

[B]

it, we found nothing.

[A]

We think that this report doesn't hold water.

[B]

Not to step out the chronology too much, but there is this, I think outrageous story about what happens to Joe Wilson after the war because after the war, when the whole case for WMD falls apart, he's going to write an opinion piece for the New York Times saying he went to Africa, checked out this claim about uranium and that it's not true. And then in revenge, someone from inside the Bush administration will leak the fact that his wife was an undercover CIA knock to the press to try and discredit and hurt him. I mean, a really outrageous, I think, thing to do. And Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, will eventually be convicted of obstruction of justice, making false statements, two counts of perjury relating to an investigation into. Into that leaking of her name, because that's actually a criminal offence. I mean, that's all further down the line. But at this point, what's clear is that the CIA and George Tenet have doubts about this idea and they get it taken out of a speech by President Bush in October. But then the thing is, the Brits have put it in the dossier. It's the Brit, you know, it's the

[A]

Brits, the Brits, the dossier, the British dossier. What good did a dossier ever do anybody? Anytime you say dossier, it's bad news.

[B]

I think in this case, it's very bad news. Now, it is interesting because I've spoken to people who are deep in this intelligence and they still claim in Britain, right? Or they were claiming for many years afterwards. I'm not sure if they still do now, but for many years they claimed that separate from the forged documents from Italy, they had other material, including intercepted communications, maybe a human source, suggesting that a deal was discussed, though not necessarily concluded. But I mean, no one has ever seen that evidence and it's kind of not really talked about anymore. But what it does mean is the Brits are claiming it and the Brits are still saying it. And I think this is what's so interesting. And this goes to the kind of transatlantic point, even though the CIA is skeptical, the claim turns up in the State of the Union. And what do they do they attribute it to the British? George Bush isn't saying we believe that Saddam sought uranium from Africa. He says the British say, it's interesting, isn't it?

[A]

It's also absurd because The Iraq has 600 tons of yellow cake and 200 tons of pure uranium dioxide in Iraq. And there's this great quote from Jafar, who's one of the Iraqi nuclear scientists. We talked about him about an earlier episode where he says, we had tons of yellow cake in Baghdad at the time, so why should we go and buy another tons from Niger? It made no sense. It just. It's wild.

[B]

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

[A]

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

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[A]

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

[B]

And I always love the fact he makes the CIA Director George Tenet sit behind him as he gives the speech to the Security Council. And it's very deliberate, isn't it? Because he's relying on CIA intelligence and I think he wants Tenet there to be associated with it for better or for worse, you know, tying him to what happens now. I mean, the speech, we're not going to go through the whole speech. He does things like using intercepts of Iraqi security officers to try and make the case they were hiding things. But let's focus, I think, on one area we talked about nuclear before biological weapons. Powell says one of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq's biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities. So this is the idea that Iraq had mobile labs which could effectively hide their work from inspectors as they drive around the country as they develop these nasty toxins which are going to kill us all.

[A]

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

[B]

Yes, I'm afraid so. Poor pal sites, four sources, you know, which sounds good. You've Got four sources on biological weapons. Now, here is the wild thing, which we slightly teased before the break, is that literally a couple of weeks before he gives the speech, I'd sat in a room in the Middle east with one of those four sources who was an Iraqi major who defected from Saddam's regime. So just a bit of context. January 2003, I'd been in Amman, Jordan, making a documentary about Saddam. And I'd been talking to the inc, which is this exile group run by Ahmed Chalabi. And I'd been asking them, have they got anyone who could talk about Saddam's regime for the documentary, but also, did they have anyone who could talk about the wmd? And everyone knew they had these sources they were feeding into the US government. Some of their stories were kind of coming out anonymously. I had to push them quite hard to put someone up to talk to me. And they were a bit reluctant, which is interesting. And I think that was partly because they'd been told by the US government not to, you know, put their sources in front of journalists. But eventually they agree I could meet one. So I end up sat in a room at the Intercontinental Hotel in Oman, Jordan, with an INC contact. And this guy, very memorable meeting. He was quite gaunt, olive skin, maybe late 30s. Main thing I remember is he just chain smoked continually. You know, we spoke for hours and the ashtray was just overflowing. Those are the days when you could sit in a smoky hotel room. He says he's a defector from the Mukhabarat, which is, you know, Saddam's intelligence service. They've been a major in it. Now, I have to say, a lot of the things he said seem quite credible. Like he talked about how his work in the Muhabharat and how the regime used fear to keep its grip.

[A]

Things that he had experience on because he had been in the Bukhabarat, he had been an officer of the security services. So he was probably credible on the security services.

[B]

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

[A]

So in the moment, you sensed that he was fabricating that information or exaggerating his role. Yeah, something was off.

[B]

Yeah, something was off. And it's interesting because I returned to London and we used some of the interview with him in the documentary about Saddam. And I was trying to think, can I do a news story with his claims about mobile labs? You know, but you don't have anything else other than one guy you've sat in a room with who has been supplied to you by an Iraqi exile group and who. Whose body language made me unsure about it. And I was. I'm going to be honest, I was kind of trying to work out what to do with it. You know, I was sitting on it, as you do with stories sometimes. And then February 5th comes, and Colin Powell turns up and he starts talking about biological weapons. And he describes one of his four sources as an Iraqi major who defected and confirmed that Iraq has mobile biological research laboratories. And I have to be honest, David, I felt like a bit of an idiot at that moment because I was like, if Colin Powell is citing this guy, I can't believe I didn't do a story.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah, I'd missed my scoop, but here's what's wild about him specifically is. And I think this again, gets to understanding the problems with the intelligence was both CIA and DIA had debriefed him and eventually issued what's called a fabricator notice, basically saying he'd been coached by the inc, this exile group. I mean, that's a big deal, isn't it? I mean, that should mean he's stuck. Stuff shouldn't be used.

[A]

It is a big deal. And Michael Morell, who was one of the top analysts at the time at the agency, wrote in his memoir that he considered this whole kind of sequence to be an example of analytic malpractice. Because what had happened was that even after this major had been labeled a fabricator, the intelligence is never recalled by the Defense Intelligence Agency from their own system, which would prevent it from getting to policymakers and prevent it from being used in the speech. So you had this report that everybody knew was false, or at least so full of holes that it should be recalled and it wasn't. And related to that, you also have this issue of exiles like Abd Chalabi, like the Iraqi National Congress and Exile Group. They know there's a demand signal for information on wmd, and they want Saddam gone, they want military action against Saddam, and they kind of don't care how exactly it comes about. And so they are trying to feed this kind of material to governments, to journalists like you, to push that agenda. So you have, I guess, a marketplace where there's a lot of demand for this material and a lot of people who are willing to fabricate it or exaggerate their access or exaggerate what they've heard or seen to satisfy that demand.

[B]

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

[A]

So I would imagine most listeners have at some point heard the name Curveball. But who actually was Curveball?

[B]

So he's an Iraqi called Rafid Ahmed Alwan Al Janabi, who arrives in Germany as a refugee, November 1999, requests asylum, ends up in a holding camp. And the word goes around the holding camp that one of the ways of getting out of the holding camp and getting asylum was convincing German intelligence you had something they wanted. And he says, and he tells German officials in a very calm voice that he has the details about Saddam Hussein manufacturing biological weapons on these grey mobile metal trailers, and that it's been done with German equipment, which obviously spices it up for them, and that he'd been recruited because he was an engineer to work on this program. This is 1999, 2000. So pre 9, 11, pre the kind of big push. But the Germans seem to quite clumsily debrief him. They ask him some leading questions, but they give him asylum and then they pass it to their allies. So they get in touch with MI6, interestingly enough, they get in touch with DIA Defense Intelligence again rather than CIA, which I find interesting and surprising. I don't know if that makes sense to you, why the Germans would have a better relationship with them. Maybe it's a kind of individual thing.

[A]

Probably. Also my spidey senses are Going off, Gordon, at just how many DIA reports are at the heart of this intelligence failure?

[B]

Oh, suddenly the CIA didn't do so badly over Iraq. It's all those guys at the diagnosis.

[A]

I'll be, I'll be very, I'll be very clear. The CIA did quite poorly on the WMD judgments. But, but, but dia's fingerprints are all over. This is my only point.

[B]

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

[A]

A. A curveball is a baseball pitch that is given top spin and break by the pitcher and that will. There's different types of curveballs you can throw, Gordon. It's not as simple as this, but basically spins a. It can spin away depending on whether the batter is right handed or left handed, it can spin away from them, break away from them, or toward them. And that movement is what makes the pitch difficult to hit. So being thrown a curveball would be an American expression for being, you know, thrown off or having your expectations changed by circumstances.

[B]

Interesting choice of code name. Something which deceives.

[A]

Is there a cricket version of a curveball? Dare I ask?

[B]

So supposedly a Brit said if we had named him, we'd have called him Googly.

[A]

Is that real? Is that a thing?

[B]

A googly is a cricket delivery bowled by a leg spinner that looks like a normal leg break but turns in the opposite direction towards the leg stump rather than the off stump upon pitching. Did you get that?

[A]

What an impenetrable game. I can't. I. Cricket. It's too much for me. I can't handle it. I actually think that you might be punking me and this might just be gibberish that you've. You've spun. You've spun out.

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

But it's interesting, from 2000 it becomes very influential, the Curveball reporting. But the Germans don't give direct access to the Brits or the Americans. They claim he doesn't speak English. Maybe they're a bit unsure about how good he is. We'll come back to that MI6 try and find out more. And by 2002, supposedly there's a good book by Bob Drogan about curveball. Some MI6 officers are having doubts about it, saying they were not convinced he was a wholly reliable source and that elements of his behavior strike us as typical of individuals we would normally assess as fabricators. I mean, these are warning signs. You know, there's rumours about drinking, there's talk about inconsistencies in his report. But still on the British side as well, they never reject him and they continue to use the reports and they're going to be important for the dossier in Britain. I think it's interesting because on the American side there's a clash, isn't there, between different parts of CIA about how much credibility to give to Curveball.

[A]

Yeah, there's a spat between WinPac, the weapons intelligence Non Proliferation and Arms Control center at the CIA and others in the agency who thought WINPAC might have been too willing to accept pieces of intelligence and material from dia, Curveball or elsewhere to support their judgments on wmd. And I think Tib Weiner in his book the Mission has talked about this, that some of these Windpack analysts it seems might have been over invested in Curveball because his, his intelligence is so critical. To the overall judgments on biological weapons in particular.

[B]

That's right. I mean, without him, suddenly the case for biological weapons looks pretty thin. One CIA officer, I think, challenges a WIMPAC analyst who said Curveball's explanation of how the mobile labs worked was correct as they'd been able to corroborate it on the Internet. And the other CIA officer says, well, maybe that's where he got it from. You know, you can see how the problem steps up. This is one of the contentious issues, which is, were there warnings to senior CIA officers that curveball was bad? Autumn, fall, 2002. CIA division chief for Europe Tyler Drumheller meets his German liaison officer at a restaurant in Washington. Drumheller, the CIA officer, asks if he can meet Curveball face to face or if the CIA could. And the German says, don't ask. He hates Americans. You know, you don't want to see him because he's crazy, the German says. And then he goes on to say, this is according to Drumheller's account. I personally think the guy may be a fabricator. Now you get into a big he said, she said, because Drumheller will say he passed on these concerns to senior officials. Officials at the CIA, George Tenet, CIA director, and others are adamant that they were never told about these concerns and that there's no written record of them. So you get into a kind of real he said, she said. But once you get to early February, Colin Powell is in CIA headquarters in Langley preparing the details of his speech to the UN and sweating over what to put in. And Curveball is still in there in the mix.

[A]

Powell coming out to the agency to actually write the speech is really unprecedented, at least it was at the time because he and his staff spent multiple days basically locked in a conference room with a revolving door of CIA analysts coming through to make sure that the speech was vetted. And that was done from Langley, which is. It's a. It's a wild story. I mean, Michael Morell, in his memoir, said he'd never, never seen anything like that happened. There were actually some concerns in the building that the agency, which typically will fact check, you know, speeches or determine if there's anything classified in them, was maybe veering too close to actually helping a policymaker craft what is, in effect, a policy speech. But in any case, the first copy of. Of the speech apparently came with a cover that had a picture of a mushroom cloud on it, which is quite on. Quite on the nose. And one of the guys involved in drafting the speech says, where did this piece of garbage come from. And the answer was Dick Cheney's team. And every wild assertion that you could imagine, many of which come from these reports from Kurbal and others, but also from Abbott Chalabi and his exile group had been, had been worked into the speech. And, and again, Morell in his, in his book, says that the CIA had fed before, as the speech is being, getting ready to be prepared. The CIA had fed papers on wmd. Iraq's connections are like they're up to Al Qaeda, Iraq's human rights record. They'd fed these papers in to the, to the, you know, speechwriting process. And essentially all of that had been, had been set by the wayside. And a lot of the initial inputs to these early drafts were coming from Cheney's office.

[B]

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

[A]

the way the British assessments fell apart as the dossier, public dossier, was being compiled. The assessments from the National Intelligence Estimate seem to fall apart as the speech to the UN is being compiled, which

[B]

is kind of worrying, isn't it?

[A]

Which is very worrisome because the NIE is supposed to be your gold standard product with all of your key judgments in it. And as that is being tested over the course of the speechwriting process, yeah, it's falling apart. And of course, I mean, Powell wants to use some of this new material that's been collected by the Brits. And so Tenet has to get the Brits on the horn to figure out what can be used and how.

[B]

And it's so interesting. The night before the speech, Tenet is calling Tyler Drumheller, the CIA European Division chief, to get Richard Deerlove's home number because they want to discuss, can we use some of this British intelligence Now Drumheller will say again, at that point, he raises curveball and Says it's a problem. Tenet says he does not remember this and that no one, you know, raised these concerns. And Tenet even says that before they leave for New York to give the speech from Langley, they check with the Germans about using curveball, and the Germans say it's fine. So curveball ends up in the speech and being a kind of key part in the speech as Colin Powell stands up and gives this amazing presentation in the Security Council chamber. And I just love this fact. The German intelligence official who'd been worried about it goes, mein Gott. As he hears Colin Powell give the speech, and he's watching it on tv, and he calls up Tyler Drumheller, according to Drumheller, and says, I thought you said it wasn't going to be used. I told you, this guy is. Is. Is dodgy. But it's in there.

[A]

Do we know how it wound up in there? Was it the Vice President's office who slid it back in?

[B]

No, I don't. It was never taken out. I just think it was never taken out. And so the fact that there were doubts about it do not seem to have got to the right people. Whether that's a process problem or whether it's. People are not telling people at the top because they don't want to hear. This is also where you get cover your back syndrome afterwards. Because, of course, that's why you have disputes about, well, were we told or did? Was it minuted? And people saying, yeah, I told them. And other people saying, oh, I never heard it. You get a lot of that. And it's interesting. I mean, on Kerbal, his motivation, he will later say is he will admit he made it all up. He admits it. After the war, he just says, I hated Saddam. I wanted to get rid of him. This was my chance to fabricate something, get rid of a regime I hated. I'm proud of that. He is a classic exile fabricator. I mean, he actually wasn't through the inc. He was doing it himself. But that's exactly what you're supposed to weed out, aren't you, if you're a intelligence agency?

[A]

There's a report called the Rob Silverman Report that came out after the. After the war. And their judgment on Curveball, I think, is. Is spot on. They read at bottom, it's a story of Defense Department collectors who abdicated their responsibility to vet a critical source of CIA analysts who placed undue emphasis on the sources reporting because the tales he told were consistent with what they already believed. Again, it's that sense of Confirmation bias. It's confirmation bias and ultimately of intelligence community leaders who failed to tell policymakers about curveball's flaws in the weeks before war. So it's a multi layered disaster with, with curveball. And Colin Powell, of course, has deep regrets about that speech and he is perhaps, although this is debatable, he's perhaps the only person who could have actually stopped the march to war if he had resigned, if Colin Powell had said, the case for this war is really thin and it's based on fabricators and circumstantial information and I won't be part of it. It's, it's an interesting counterfactual. What would have happened if, if he had stood up and said that instead?

[B]

I interviewed his deputy, Ray Richard Armitage a couple of years ago and Armitage told me about a conversation he had with Colin Powell. And Armitage says, I went to Powell one day and I said to him, we're being used. We are like enablers of an alcoholic and we should consider resigning. And he said it really shook Conan Powell. And the next day he talked to Powell about it and he said, it's just not my way. And I think this is, you know, the interesting thing about Colin Powell, of course, you know, he, he was a good soldier. He'd been a military man. He saw himself as doing his duty for the president. And it just wasn't in his nature not to do that for him not to go. I disagree. I'm going to resign. I think that's why it's a kind of tragedy. I mean, Powell himself always said he knew it would be. The first line in his obituary when he died was the guy who gave the speech to the UN claiming there were WMD when there weren't any. And I think you have to feel some sympathy for him, him as well, because I think he was let down. He was let down by the system.

[A]

Well, I think there with that iconic speech to the UN based off of really some pretty thin and faulty intelligence. Let's end this episode and when we come back, we will have inspectors on the ground in Iraq. Gordon, who of course, if the intelligence agencies have at this point not been able to really get a handle on Sadab's wmd, maybe inspectors, they'll find it. Maybe inspectors on the ground, they're bound to find it in the run up to the war will find that WMD and Sadab will be cornered. So let's end there and when we come back, we'll, we'll see, of course, how that pans out. But. But you don't need to wait. You don't need to wait. You can get early access to that episode and to all of our series by going and joining our Declassified club@the restisclassified.com we also, for this series on WMD, have some really fantastic bonus episodes for club members with real live participants at this Story with Alistair Campbell with Richard Dearlove with Michael Burrell that will all be available to members.

[B]

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

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A Goal Hanger partnership can extend across YouTube and social where audiences already watch, listen to and follow the shows.

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So to find out more, email partnershipsoldhanger.com

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Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full [e-mail] 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.

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There's a money side to every story.

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And when you see the money side. You understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe [e-mail].