Five years after the invasion of Iraq, what do we know about those weapons of mass destruction whose shadowy existence played such a large role in the justification for war and such a controversial role in its aftermath? It is a story that remains significant largely because the reconstruction of Iraq has been so much bloodier, more chaotic and politically damaging—both in the middle east and the west—than was dreamt of in 2003. "There were no WMDs" seems likely to be the enduring epitaph of both a two-term president and a three-term prime minister. Their absence is, for many, emblematic of the gulf between the realities of the middle east and the ill-planned optimism with which western powers entered Iraq in March 2003. Yet the story of the search for WMD is more than simply a catalogue of intelligence errors and political manipulation; it has also become a story of competing narratives about middle eastern power politics, and the deepest global security concerns we face today.
On 20th March 2003, Iraq was invaded by a US-led coalition of forces, which included British, Australian, Polish and Danish troops. "Operation Iraqi Freedom" intended, in the words of President George W Bush, "to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people." In Britain, particular emphasis was put on the first of these aims. The British government's infamous Iraq dossier was published on 24th September 2002, and opened with a personal statement by Tony Blair which claimed that "Saddam Hussein attaches great importance to possessing weapons of mass destruction, which he regards as the basis for Iraq's regional power… He is ready to use them, including against his own population, and is determined to retain them, in breach of UN security council resolutions… As a result of the intelligence, we judge that Iraq has: continued to produce chemical and biological agents; military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, including against its own Shia population. Some of these weapons are deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them." These claims lie at the heart of one of the greatest continuing intelligence controversies in modern history.
Official investigations
In the five years since the invasion, over a billion dollars and millions of man-hours have been spent searching for evidence of WMD and WMD-related programmes in Iraq. The 1,400-man US-led Iraq Survey Group (ISG) was set up in May 2003, picking up where Hans Blix's United Nations monitoring, verification and inspection commission (Unmovic) had left off just before the invasion. On 30th September 2004, the ISG released what has become known as the Duelfer report (after Charles Duelfer, its head at the time of completion). The report concluded that Iraq had no stockpiles of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons at the time of the 2003 invasion; that Iraq's nuclear capability had decayed since 1991; and that although Saddam intended to resume his WMD programme when UN sanctions were lifted, he had largely failed to co-ordinate any strategy for this.
Even before the Duelfer report's publication, a backlash against the original WMD-related intelligence had begun. In January 2004, the then head of the ISG, David Kay, resigned, and stated in a briefing to the US Senate armed services committee that the pre-war WMD intelligence and the agencies that produced it "were all wrong"—although he also noted in an interview with the Telegraph shortly after his resignation that "we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD programme." It was partly in response to Kay's resignation and statements that, on 6th February 2004, George Bush convened what is commonly known as the Iraq Intelligence Commission (IIC)—an independent inquiry into the intelligence used to justify the Iraq war. This commission delivered its report on 31st March 2005, and starkly concluded that the intelligence community had been "dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," and that analytical, collection and dissemination flaws had led to erroneous assessments and a general exaggeration of the status of all Iraq's WMD programmes. Specifically, it noted, "intelligence analysts were too wedded to their assumptions about Saddam's intentions"; that the spies at the CIA and the Defence Intelligence Agency, along with the National Security Agency's eavesdroppers and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's imagery experts, "collected precious little intelligence for the analysts to analyse, and much of what they did collect was either worthless or misleading"; and that "the intelligence community didn't adequately explain just how little good intelligence it had—or how much its assessments were driven by assumptions and inferences rather than concrete evidence." Sources were a particular problem. In two cases, for example, "virtually all of the intelligence community's information on Iraq's alleged mobile biological weapons facilities was supplied by a source, codenamed 'Curveball,' who was a fabricator," and, "even more indefensibly, information from a [different] source who was already known to be a fabricator found its way into finished pre-war intelligence products." Nonetheless, the commissioners added, there was no indication of any deliberate intention to mislead: "they were simply wrong."
In a near-parallel process in Britain, Tony Blair announced on 3rd February 2004 a review of British intelligence-gathering prior to the invasion of Iraq, to be headed by Lord Butler. This review was published on 14th July 2004, and concluded that much of the key British intelligence justifying the invasion had been unreliable, third-hand, and—in the case of the infamous 45-minute claim—"unsubstantiated," as well as relying too uncritically on Iraqi dissident sources. Yet there was, again, "no evidence of deliberate distortion or of culpable negligence." And, it added, "even now it would be premature to reach conclusions about Iraq's prohibited weapons."
Finally, in March 2005, Duelfer released an addendum to his report, noting that "it was unlikely that an official transfer of WMD material from Iraq to Syria took place" before the invasion, that "Iraq's remaining chemical and biological physical infrastructure does not pose a proliferation concern," and that "the WMD investigation has gone as far as feasible." The official searching process had come to an end: nothing had been found, and it seemed likely that little had existed in 2003 beyond the intention to restart a WMD programme after the lifting of sanctions. In fact, the Iraq Survey Group's findings were essentially the same as the account provided by Saddam Hussein during his interrogations after his arrest in December 2003. He had played the double game of disclaiming weapons to inspectors while attempting to convince rival powers in the middle east—not to mention the Shia majority in his own country—that he retained significant non-conventional weapons expertise, and that he would be prepared to use it if needed. Saddam believed that he would be able to withstand a limited aerial attack similar to those mounted in 1998 by the US and Britain. All-out invasion, however, exposed the limitations of his strategy.
There are some, however, who still believe that evidence dismissed by, or unavailable to, the official investigations shows both that weapons of mass destruction did exist in Iraq in 2003, and where they have gone. Three individuals in particular recur in these accounts: John Loftus, a Florida-based attorney, former justice department prosecutor and Pulitzer-nominated author who in 2006 founded an annual event known as the "Intelligence Summit," which has proved a magnet for Iraq and WMD-related dissenters; David Gaubatz, a civilian investigator who worked for the US air force in southern Iraq between April and July 2003; and John Shaw, an ex-US deputy undersecretary of defence, who was based in Iraq with responsibility for tracking Saddam's weapons programmes after the invasion. Since September 2007, I have been in contact with all three. The results of this correspondence, coupled with their public claims, offer a provocative—if sometimes baffling—insight into theses that have barely been aired in Britain.
According to Loftus—whose research most recently appeared in November 2007 in the online magazine FrontPage—one quarter of Saddam's WMD were destroyed under UN pressure during the early to mid-1990s; one quarter sold to Arab neighbours during the mid to late 1990s; another quarter removed, mostly to Syria, in the last few months before the invasion; and the final quarter—including the contents of Saddam's nuclear weapons lab—still inside Iraq on the day the invasion began. Central to Loftus's arguments are the "Iraqi freedom documents"—around 50,000 files, video and audio tapes discovered in Iraq during 2003, largely consisting of Baath government records dating from the 1980s to the time of the 2003 invasion. These began to be declassified in early 2006 when, at the request of Loftus's Intelligence Summit, the US government posted online a number of the documents to harness the abilities of Arabic-speakers worldwide as part of a mass translation effort. By November that year, however, it was decided that all the documents should be taken down after a story in the New York Times pointed out that several "constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb."
The evidence culled by Loftus from these materials has made headlines on several occasions in the US. An undated series of audio recordings, verified by the National Security Agency, were featured on ABC's daily news programme Nightline in February 2006. The tapes include discussions between Saddam and senior officials boasting that Iraq has both the intent and the technical knowhow to reconstitute its illegal weapons programmes. Other documents cited by Loftus apparently record the intent to purchase or develop chemical precursors for weapons including Tabun nerve gas, VX nerve gas and Zyklon B, and date from as late as October 2002; others discuss the training of a "chemical platoon" and the provision of "mobile shower vehicles" for decontamination. Loftus has also drawn my attention to a tape from 2002 or 2003 in which Saddam is apparently briefed on "a laser enrichment process for uranium" never known by UN inspectors even to exist in Iraq.
This evidence, of course, is far from a smoking gun—while the sheer quantity of documents and the lack of quality control mean cherry-picking and mistranslation are impossible to rule out. Perhaps most strikingly, however, there is little in them that directly contradicts the picture built up by Duelfer's report of a nation keen to resume WMD production, lacking a co-ordinated programme or significant stockpiles, but persistent in its desire to deceive. Duelfer himself noted that the Saddam audio tapes confirm that "the regime had the intention of building and rebuilding WMD, when circumstances permitted." Similarly, John Negroponte, then director of national intelligence, commented after the Nightline broadcast that "Intelligence community analysts… reviewed the translations and found that, while fascinating, from a historical perspective the tapes do not reveal anything that changes their postwar analysis." And it does seem unlikely that the US government would not have seized upon evidence of Iraqi WMD activity from the documents, had it come to light.
Loftus, however, argues that his research, coupled with the testimonies of Shaw and Gaubatz, constitutes a compelling "mosaic" of evidence. David Gaubatz was one of the star turns at the Intelligence Summit's most recent meeting, in March 2007. An Arabic-speaking air force civilian investigator, Gaubatz arrived in Iraq in April 2003. Through the local contacts that he soon established, he claims to have been led to four vast WMD "warehouses"—sunken concrete chambers close to and, in three cases, beneath the Euphrates river, which his informants believed contained WMD materials. His detailed reports on these were submitted to the US military but were apparently lost in mysterious circumstances, while the four sites themselves turned out to have been looted by the time they were officially investigated. Gaubatz, however, claims that his medical records indicate he was exposed to strong radiation during his investigations (although the only such records he was able to show me were of a post-deployment medical questionnaire in which he claimed to have been exposed to WMD materials). No copies of his military reports survive, but he has provided me with scans of the detailed notes he took at the time, as well as of his commendations for distinguished performance. Gaubatz's claims have attracted some press attention—including the New York Times and Melanie Phillips in the Spectator—but seem impossible to verify, as he never actually went inside the chambers.
The claims of John Shaw, meanwhile, were presented at the first Intelligence Summit, in 2006. Shaw was based in Iraq from shortly after the 2003 invasion as US deputy undersecretary of defence for international technology security, a role which centred on tracking the illegal sales of conventional weapons. His account—first made public in October 2004—alleges that Ukranian intelligence officers serving in Iraq documented Russian "Spetznaz" special forces smuggling weapons materials across the border into Syria on the eve of the 2003 invasion under the supervision of former Russian intelligence chief Yevgeni Primakov. Shaw says he saw, but was not allowed to keep, the crucial Ukranian documents—but has told me they came directly from Ihor Smeshko, then head of Ukranian intelligence, and his senior staff, and that they provided specific details of Russian units, numbers and dates. Although these sources did not claim chemical and biological weapons were being moved, Shaw himself has no doubt that both were present.
Corroboration of the operation itself comes, Shaw argues, from both local witnesses and US satellite photographs, which show trucks and tankers being driven in convoy along the Euphrates highway and across the Syrian border. The satellite photographs—which I have seen—do appear to show trucks entering and then returning from Syria. Shaw further claims to have discussed this transfer with senior British members of MI6 in London, in early 2004, and to have been told in person that MI6 sources supported his version of events. He has also indicated, in our correspondence, that Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, met privately with Ihor Smeshko, while Dearlove's "key people" were at the London meetings and "had their own sources which echoed what I was getting from my people on the Syrian border." In December 2007, such a meeting was confirmed to have taken place by the Times, but no mention was made of weapons transfers to Syria, while MI6 have never commented on Shaw's claims.
In addition to Shaw's Ukranian and local witnesses, there is, Loftus notes, circumstantial evidence that someone had commandeered every Iraqi tanker they could get their hands on for moving hazardous liquids at around the time of the invasion. A humanitarian agency claimed it was unable to obtain any clean tankers for transport, and an Iraqi trucker claims to have been told that a cargo he was paid to transport into Syria was WMD material. Then there is the late Nizar Nayyouf, a Syrian journalist who found himself at the centre of a brief media storm in 2004 after his defection to Paris when he claimed to have detailed reports from Syrian military intelligence on where Iraqi WMD were hidden. Nayyouf's maps—which remain freely available on the internet—were widely reported at the time but, without corroboration or the ability to explore in Syria, have been generally dismissed.
The Russian operation, according to Shaw, was known as "Sarindar"—the same name the Soviet Union had used to describe the closing down of operations in third world client states. Former Israeli chief of staff Moshe Yaalon, also a speaker at the 2006 Intelligence Summit, has said his government agreed with the Shaw thesis. The Russians, however, dismiss every detail as a fabrication. The US intelligence services, similarly, argue that Shaw's claims were derived from "Israeli disinformation"—although the Duelfer report addenda do caution that the "ISG was unable to rule out unofficial movement of limited WMD-related materials" to Syria. Shortly after making his accusations public, in October 2004, Shaw was forced to leave his position, apparently for "exceeding his authority."
The future of WMD intelligence
The Intelligence Summit has received some press coverage, but has largely been treated as an eccentric sideshow. The media have reached an overwhelming consensus in line with Duelfer: that the pre-war intelligence was inaccurate, and WMD were simply not in Iraq to be found. It is a position that, coupled with outrage over the ongoing turmoil in Iraq, is highly damaging to US and western prestige, not to mention to the very feasibility and validity of intelligence-led attempts at WMD control. Yet the way the careful words of the official reports have been interpreted and emphasised has, over time, become a narrative with its own partialities and omissions.
On 1st February 2008, for example, the Wall Street Journal reported a "buried scoop" in statements made at the end of an interview given on 60 Minutes by George Piro, the FBI agent who debriefed Saddam Hussein following his capture in December 2003. Saddam, Piro confirmed, "wanted to pursue all of WMD… he wanted to reconstitute his entire WMD programme." "Chemical, biological, even nuclear?" his interviewer asked. "Yes," Piro confirmed. The Journal trumpets this as startling new evidence "that an Iraqi WMD program remained a threat so long as Saddam remained in power." Yet this is almost exactly what the Duelfer report itself said in 2004: that "Saddam wanted to recreate Iraq's WMD capability… after sanctions were removed and Iraq's economy stabilised" and that "Saddam aspired to develop a nuclear capability—in an incremental fashion, irrespective of international pressure and the resulting economic risks—but he intended to focus on ballistic missile and tactical chemical warfare capabilities."
So shocking has the aftermath of the invasion been, and so roundly have the intelligence failures of the US and Britain been condemned, that the absence of a smoking gun seems for many to indicate something quite different and incorrect: the belief that Saddam had given up on his ambitions to acquire WMD by 2003, and that he lacked all ability to recommence those weapons programmes that war, inspections and sanctions had so disabled. And, although Duelfer's report is rightly cited by critics of the Iraq war as proof of US errors and self-deceptions, something identical to it could in theory have been used to support the case for some form of intervention in 2003. After all, the report cites ample breaches of UN resolutions along with proofs that Saddam had managed to circumvent many sanctions—something regularly pointed out by those who continue to support the original decision to invade. Moreover, while theories like Loftus's are easy to dismiss, their insistence on the international aspects of the WMD story does highlight crucial facts absent from most of the current postmortems on Iraq: that many avenues remained open to Iraq up to 2003 for the acquisition of prohibited materials, with a dauntingly long list of contacts ranging from France to North Korea; and that Saddam attached huge long-term strategic importance both to the reality and appearance of possessing WMD.
Today, it is nuclear weapons that wield both the most threat and appeal. If Iran succeeds in joining Israel as a nuclear weapons power within the next decade—as it may still do, despite the recent US national intelligence estimate which claimed that Iran had ceased pursuing nuclear weapons in 2003—then proliferation could well spread to Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Iran, Pakistan and North Korea show how nuclear programmes can be run in secret by a small number of dedicated individuals with international contacts. The nuclear plans handed to the west by Libya's ruler Colonel Gaddafi in 2003 were, for instance, written in Chinese, while the design of the Syrian nuclear site allegedly destroyed by Israel in a mysterious air attack last year was said to be North Korean. Pakistan most likely continues to sell its nuclear secrets, and the global network of nuclear contacts centred on AQ Khan, father of the country's nuclear programme, has proved far more widespread and better informed than was imagined five years ago—only a handful of the more than 50 individuals now known to be key members are in custody or facing charges. And this is only state-sponsored nuclear proliferation: the possibility of terrorist groups using nuclear materials presents a still more intricate spectrum of horrors. As Joseph Cirincione recently pointed out in the New York Review of Books, 50 countries now "have stockpiles of materials that could be used for nuclear weapons," and with expertise supplied by anyone from former Soviet to Pakistani scientists, "terrorists would need only 25 to 50 kilograms of highly enriched uranium to fashion a 'gun-assembly' bomb similar to the one dropped on Hiroshima."
Those who try to challenge the mainstream story on Iraq's WMD certainly leave too many big questions unanswered, or unsatisfactorily answered. Why, if Saddam had WMD, were they not used to defend his country? Why would the Russians have had any particular interest in removing weapons to Syria? Why, if the removal of WMD from Iraq was covered up, have so few people come forward to provide evidence for this? And why would the US and British governments not have seized upon good evidence of WMDs in Iraq as a crucial endorsement of their statements prior to the invasion? Any new theory needs to answer these questions and to explain events better than the official reports—and in this, the pro-WMD camp does not pass muster.
Yet public complacency about the wider existence of and the desire to obtain WMD, in the middle east and elsewhere, would be the worst of all possible outcomes from the Iraq debacle. While it may be justified, the cynicism about the competence of western intelligence-gathering services that has followed the failure to find WMD presents governments and citizens with a problematic precedent. The White House has fully endorsed 70 of the 74 recommendations the IIC made to the president—including the central point that "the counterterrorism and counterintelligence resources of the [FBI]… become a single national security service"—but it will be years before deep public suspicion is overcome, and these are years in which a lack of trust between governments and electorates could prove as damaging as misguided confidence. As Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's chief of staff throughout his premiership, observed in a recent interview with the Guardian, the WMD intelligence controversy "has made it almost impossible for a government in a similar crisis in future to tell the public what it knows," because the "toxic mix" of disillusion and distrust means it would not be believed.
The post-invasion chaos and horrors of Iraq have demonstrated the inadequacies of pre-invasion intelligence and planning many times over. But they also reveal the seething instabilities suppressed by a brutal regime intent on presenting itself as in imminent possession of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. These are weapons that many nations, regional factions and extremist groups are still keen to obtain—a continuing truth that has been lost from view in much of the reporting of the last five years. The search for WMD may be over in Iraq, but in global terms it has only just begun. And without a rigorous global intelligence strategy able to command both national and international support, the west may remain condemned to repeat all the follies of Iraq: a chasing after whispers in the desert.
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